https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/154658/fuck-your-lecture-on-craft-my-people-are-dying Noor Hindi, a Palestinian American poet, drops the gauntlet with “Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying”. Ah no, gauntlet is too genteel a word, a word with a history, a word that implies the rules of fair play. Hindi drops a big fat rock, cracking the bones of my feet, my […]
Poetry and privilege Read More »
Scarborough Golf Club Road had a one lane bridge over Highland Creek then. The road hairpinned into a retaining wall, down an icy hill, then up the other side. In between, one lane, bridge abutments, ice, darkness, the numberless possibilities of judgement impaired, reaction delayed, vision doubled, knuckles bloodless, breath held, prayers half formed. Up
in progress-the Scarborough Bluffs Read More »
In order to create a collage or assemblage or bricolage you first need to take things apart, take them out of context, let them speak to you, reimagine them. My old laptop, physically broken and unsuitable for re-use, became a mine for materials. Removing a few screws and yanking a few tiny wire harnesses renders
un-de-re-constructed Read More »
A year ago I reread Phoebe Wang’s poem Invasive Carp and was inexplicably taken with a word she used – stanchion. From the word and it’s etymology and associations grew eight pages of musings and stabs at scraps of verse. I’d also had in mind for many years a favourite old photograph of snow fencing
How can I write of anything but the visual on these perfect and perfectly benign autumn days? The soft sky and summer air, from who knows where, sooth the mind, distract me from the bone-dry ground, release my eyes from the page to drift among the sudden reds and unexpected umbers. The ivies, yes, even
The Trees Aflame (blog? prose poem? both?) Read More »
…you know the rest. The dry spell has been replaced by abundance, or at least the seeds. I am surrounded, big-windowed, by weather and its effects so why not tread the worn boards of this metaphor? The wet leaves applaud a day of rain, shake off summer’s dust, singing ‘school!’ Thinking ‘river’ I think too
In the beginning was the word….that a serious writer must spend 30% of her creative time on marketing! If the goal is to publish then the path – a rocky one – is to create a web presence. Et le voila. So where is the book? On the equally rocky path to completion, she said,
Most mornings I read Rumi, his verse as shimmery and expansive as a length of fine silk. But recently I read One Eye, Two Eyes, Three Eyes by Anne Sexton, a brutal poem about mutant children and their mothers from a book of retold fairy tales. Of course original fairy tales are all grotesques, so
Reading Anne Sexton Read More »
Scale can relate to relative size or to music. Curiously the two meanings converge in a poem from 2016 in Reading Room called Small World Tales, the start of an imagined, or hoped for, series. The Hadza are a nomadic people for whom time is not of the essence. I wanted to compare their pace
a question of scale Read More »
In the oppressive drought of an extended heat wave, everything is parched. The leaves in the stale breeze are as percussive as they’d be in late August. The return of the crows add a bluesy accompaniment. I wonder about my well, and if I should peer into it and risk having my worries validated. I
writing on parchment Read More »