Are You on the Level?

In the fall of 1975, I moved 25 miles north of Whistler B.C., to live and teach on a First Nations reservation. There was a shortage of homes, so teachers were moved into mobile homes that the band had bought from a logging company.

Two stairs led up to the door at the side of the trailer. If you entered, you'd see a kitchen to the right, a small living room in front of you, and a bathroom and bedroom down a short hall to the left. It was cosy, but it slanted quite steeply towards the bedroom.

I asked the band council to level it and went south to Vancouver for the weekend.

When I came back on Monday, it was level, but I couldn't open the doors.  

They had to come back and reslant it.

Tell All The Truth

Tell all the truth but tell it slant,
Success in circuit lies,
Too bright for our infirm delight
The truth's superb surprise;

As lightning to the children eased
With explanation kind,
The truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind.  

            Emily Dickinson

Should I Go to a Writing Workshop?

If you like to write and you like people and you enjoy new experiences and you can afford it, then, sure, check out a writing workshop.  They can be very good, awesomely good, in helping you get the stories out.  They can also be staggeringly bad.  A workshop that is awesomely good for one person can be staggeringly bad for another.  Humans are different and our learning needs and motivations vary widely.  If you find the right teacher for you, the experience is magical, moving, and transcendent.  Lights suddenly shine in dusty corners.

There are two kinds of workshops.

1. PRIMARILY READING  Bring enough copies of your more-or-less finished poem and submit it to the group.  You read your poem.  The group goes around making comments.  You listen to the feedback without responding.  After everyone has finished making their helpful suggestions, you can speak (if you haven't thrown yourself out a window).  Repeat the process for everyone present.
2. PRIMARILY WRITING  The leader introduces a theme or a lesson and gives everyone time to write.  After the time is up, you can share what you've written.

I've been to three writing workshops, all part of a major literary festival.  One of each of the two above, and third where the leader seemed predominantly interested in showing pictures of the new baby she was co-parenting with her female partner.
I learned that I'm more interested in the writing variety than the read-and-critique variety.  My first (and last) read-and-critique workshop was run by a former poet laureate of the USA whose poetry deals mostly with looking out his window or walking his dog.  The poem I read began like this: 

“Stop smashing glass!!”

“I’m angry."  He said,  "What do you want me to do?”

“When you’re angry,”  I said, “go dig a hole.”

So he began to dig          and dig          and dig.

Although I referred to the smasher in the poem as the husband of the speaker, the workshop leader seemed to miss that point and thought I was yelling at a child.  "Who else," he said, "would smash glass?"

That didn't go well.  While he was a very fine poet, he might not be my ideal reader.
I'm happy about one thing.  For the last class, we were asked to write an ekphrasis:  a poem based on a work of art.  I wrote this:

The Honeymoon

In Chagall's Bride and Groom of the Eiffel Tower,

they're carried away by sheer rooster power.

She wears a white gown and has a blue fan --

and holding her belly, the arms of her man.

Angels surround them and one plays a fiddle;

one hangs upside down, with his upside down candles,

and lodged in the tree, a goat is part-cello --

he waves a baton and carries a fellow.

Bride and groom number two are nestled in clouds

under the chupah reciting their vows

while an angel soars skyward holding her flowers
in Chagall's Bride and Groom of the Eiffel Tower

I was redeemed by the class's applause.  The poet added, "As soon as the audience realizes that your poem rhymes, they relax."

And they don't have to worry about the broken glass.

Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall?

In Obama's inaugural speech today, he said, "We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths – that all of us are created equal – is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall."  

The significance of this line in an American inaugural address cannot be underestimated.  First of all "the star that guides us" is a reference to the mythical star that supposedly guided three wise men to baby Jesus. That is the same star that is guiding the truth of equality of all of us: men and women, gay and straight, and people of all races.  For those who don't understand the significance of these three places, here they are:

Seneca Falls: 1848 - women made a declaration of "sentiments" and "resolutions."  In other words, grievances and demands.  It took well over 100 years, but all of the resolutions have been made into law.  It is important to realize that their work then, their writing and fighting, led to the current freedoms women enjoy here and now.

Selma: 1965 - freedom fighters marched from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, to protest white resistance to black voter registration.  The first marchers, 600 civil rights activists, were attacked by state and local police with billy clubs and tear gas. The second march, now 2500 strong, were turned around. The third march was protected by 2,000 soldiers of the U.S. Army, 1,900 members of the Alabama National Guard under Federal command, and many FBI agents and Federal Marshals.  They made it all the way to Montgomery.  That struggle then, and many others, made it possible for Obama to be president today.

Stonewall 1969 -  drag queens, gay men, and lesbians fought back against police harassment.  Their actions then began the slow and very much unfinished march towards equal treatment under the law regardless of who and how you love. 

According to Obama, if a star guided the three wise men to Jesus, the same star guided all these protesters.

My companions thought they heard booing during O's speech.  And there may well have been in some corners.  If it doesn't hurt somebody, then maybe it's not real change.

My personal highlights of the inauguration were Obama's speech and Richard Blanco's poem which included these stanzas:

All of us as vital as the one light we move through,
the same light on blackboards with lessons for the day:
equations to solve, history to question, or atoms imagined,
the "I have a dream" we keep dreaming,
or the impossible vocabulary of sorrow that won't explain
the empty desks of twenty children marked absent
today, and forever. Many prayers, but one light
breathing color into stained glass windows,
life into the faces of bronze statues, warmth
onto the steps of our museums and park benches
as mothers watch children slide into the day.
 ***
We head home: through the gloss of rain or weight
of snow, or the plum blush of dusk, but always—home,
always under one sky, our sky. And always one moon
like a silent drum tapping on every rooftop
and every window, of one country—all of us—
facing the stars
hope—a new constellation
waiting for us to map it,
waiting for us to name it—together.

Did You Hear What I Said?

I heard something and it was probably what you said, but I can't guarantee it was what you meant.  When you spoke to me just now, your words passed through my filter of personal associations, feelings, and experiences.   Not only do we all see things that other people don't see, but we also "hear" things that other people don't say.

In my first marital breakup, this conversation occurred:

Me:  "You said you'd take care of me."
Him:  "I thought you meant sexually."

If I'm speaking English as a second language, then your words also pass through the filters of understandable and expected phonemes and morphemes.  North Americans might be familiar with the expression "bus loop."  This is the area where a bus turns around, but is often an area where buses converge from different parts of the city.  A friend of mine, Gijs from Leiden, Holland, was in Vancouver visiting friends.  I was in North Burnaby and he was down near Kitsilano.  His English was quite good.  When he phoned, I told him to get on any bus and ask how to get to the Kootenay Loop.  I would meet him there.  I told him that all the bus drivers would know how he could transfer to the Kootenay Loop.

Yes fine, he said.  No problem.  I said Kootenay Loop, but that wasn't what he heard.  When he got on a bus, he asked to be taken to the Kookety Koo.  When the bus driver looked confused, he tried Koodely Doo, and Kootchety Koo, growing increasingly embarrassed and frustrated.  Luckily, he found a bus driver who figured out what he was saying.


In this wonderful poem, Troy Jollimore shines a little light on the fuzzy interface between perception and experience:

Lake Scugog

1.

Where what I see comes to rest,

at the edge of the lake,

against what I think I see

and, up on the bank, who I am

maintains an uneasy truce

with who I fear I am,

while in the cabin's shade the gap between

the words I said

and those I remember saying

is just wide enough to contain

the remains that remain

of what I assumed I knew.

2.

Out in the canoe, the person I thought you were

gingerly trades spots

with the person you are

and what I believe I believe

sits uncomfortably next to

what I believe.

When I promised I will always give you

what I want you to want,

you heard, or desired to hear,

something else.  As, over and in the lake,

the cormorant and its image

traced paths through the sky

                                  
             The New Yorker, July 27, 2009

What's With Dorothy?

The Wizard of Oz (1939) was on TV over the holidays - along with other sentimental favourites:   It's a Wonderful Life (1946), Miracle on 34th Street (1947), and White Christmas (1954).  The latter three display a world in which hardship can be overcome with hope, kindness, generosity, love, and some singing and dancing.  But what's with Dorothy?

Salman Rushdie, in his book The Wizard of Oz, published by the British Film Institute, says this:

The Wizard of Oz is a film whose driving force is the inadequacy of adults even of good adults, and how the weakness of grown-ups forces children to take control of their own destinies, and so, ironically, grow up themselves.

Sadly, "growing up" seems to mean accepting a bleak, dull life and making the most of it.  These thoughts and contemplations of the double life led me to write this poem:

DOROTHY’S DOUBLE LIFE

“If I ever go looking for my heart’s desire again,
I won’t look any further than my own backyard,
because if it isn’t there,
I never really lost it to begin with.”

You say there’s no place like home,
so three taps of the ruby slippers 
and you’re bumped back to 
the black & white world.

Oz is a place you visit
not dwell.

Home is bleak and oppressive:
gates slam, doors slam,
you’re shut in & shut out.

In Oz
you are braver, kinder & smarter.

At home
the adults betray you,
give away your dog, and
lock you out of the storm cellar.

In Oz
you risk all
to kill the witch
who set your friend on fire
In Oz, you are on fire!
You live through your fingertips.
You risk your life for love.

At home, no witches try to kill you 
and you are loved --
still it’s a black & white kind of love
and even if the law is bad, you must obey it.

At home, you only dream:  you say
– I’d bite you myself, you old witch! --

In Oz, you bite.

In Oz you seek only to go home...

★★★★

so you choose your own backyard over the world’s,
the bosses over the buddies,
the enemy you know over the one you do not

but at night your heart
still roams
beyond your backyard
beyond the black and white landscape
to flying monkeys, to ruby slippers, to Oz.

Can Poetry Change Lives? Part II

or Do I Dare to Eat a Peach?

Once, following a poetry class, I saw one of my college students stumbling through the hall, his eyes wide with amazement.  He told me that he had just realized that he was one of those "bland-blank faces" turning and turning around the edge of the whirlpool -- going nowhere.  We had been discussing Margaret Avison's poem, "The Swimmer's Moment," which deals with the rewards and dangers of taking risks in life.  Risk-taking is symbolized by jumping into a whirlpool.  Many people, Avison says, don't even notice the presence of the whirlpool, the possibility of growth and change:

And so their bland-blank
     faces turn and turn
Pale and forever on the rim
     of suction
They will not recognize.

My student realized that he had not been engaging fully in his life.  He had been delaying decisions, procrastinating, and letting fear rule him.  I could see a new urgency in his face.  He was bent on action.

English teacher, Brian Whitman, told me of encountering former students who said, "T. S. Eliot changed my life."  One student in particular started his own business, sold it, spent two years on a yacht in the Caribbean, and built a home in the bush because he read "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."  The poem gave the student determination to make decisions which would add meaning to his life, instead of wondering, "Do I dare to eat a peach?"

I once assigned my students to choose a poem from an anthology and write a short essay about it.  One student, a man in his 40s, was studying Business Administration as part of a Worker's Compensation arrangement.  He chose the poem "Bearhug" by Michael Ondaatje in which a boy calls his father for a kiss goodnight:

  I yell ok.  Finish something I'm doing,
      Then something else, walk slowly round
  the corner to my son's room.

He gives his son a hug, and says,

  The thin tough body under the pyjamas
  locks to me like a magnet of blood.

At the end of the poem, he wonders,

      How long was he standing there
  like that, before I came?

My student wrote, "When I read this poem, I began to think about my own eight-year-old son who was sleeping upstairs.  I realized I'd been so preoccupied with schoolwork, with my injury, and with my anger and frustration over having to write this stupid essay that I had not even said goodnight to him.  I began to weep for the first time since my accident  ... you can see the drops on the page.  I went upstairs to look at him and, even though it was 10 p.m., he was still awake, and we hugged for a long time."

As I sipped coffee in the Locke Street Bagel Bakery considering this blog, a man sat at the counter beside me and said, "Doin' homework?"  I told him my topic and asked, "Has poetry ever changed your life?"

"Of course it has," he said.  He began to quote "Tintern Abbey" by Wordsworth.  In this poem, Wordsworth shows the power of nature to lift "the heavy and the weary weight of the unintelligible world."  The poem says the best portion of a good man's life are

His little, nameless, unremembered, acts / Of kindness and of love.

"This helped me to see that every little thing we do affects the universe in some way; and as Wordsworth says, we learn to "see into the life of things."  The stranger, who by now had introduced himself as John Unsworth, told me that he took a 19th Century poetry course years ago at University of Western Ontario.  He said, "The course awakened my spirit and changed how I see things.  It showed me that life has moral import."

What poem changed your life?

What Do (Heterosexual) Women Want?

Freud's biographer quotes Freud as saying, "The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is 'What does a woman want?'"

Here's my response to Freud, in a poem:

EVERY GIRL

Every girl needs two things:  

Security Man and Adventure Boy - 

with Security Man she’s round and achy

with Adventure Boy she’s lithe and cheeky

she can wrap him up between her thighs

and squeeze.

Security Man works hard for her

and loves her almost as much as his work

maybe more

because what’s the point of work without her

at home

waiting

waiting

for Adventure Boy

to visit.

Security Man buys her a house

Adventure Boy buys her nothing

who does she love?

Every girl needs two things:

security man insecurity man

adventure boy misadventure boy

With Security Man she sleeps all night

needs to sleep and work and write

With Adventure Boy she’s up till dawn

laughing and talking until he’s gone

Security Man is funny and smart

and warm and loving and in her heart

Adventure Boy jokes and rants

is warm and loving and in her pants

Every girl needs two things:

Security Man and Adventure Boy

They are never wrapped in the same package.

The family loves Security Man

they’ve been waiting all her life

hoping she would meet him.

She doesn’t introduce Adventure Boy.

Security Man is distracted

Adventure Boy is engaged

With Security Man she plans - 

vacations, season’s tickets

Security Man marinates

Adventure Boy gyrates

Adventure Boy is all here & now

No future

not even tomorrow really for sure

Every girl needs two things.

but what does Adventure Boy need?

he doesn’t want to be on call

and shows up late or not at all.

Are You Nursing a Grudge?

My friend, Dabuoy, has a blog called "What the F**K Is He Talking About?" (http://dabuoy.blogspot.ca).  He recently posted this poem which I find just a little scary.

I held a grudge today...

I held it gentle

as a baby

cooing

all the while

I held a grudge today...

I traced my love

upon its furrowed 

brow

and giggled

I held a grudge today...

I nursed it

I burped it

I changed it

I learnt from it

I held a grudge today...

I taught it to hunt

I taught it to protect

I taught it respect

I taught it to love

I held a grudge today...

It called me 'MOM'

Can Poetry Change Lives?

Yes, of course poetry changes lives - or maybe puts into words the changes that we are experiencing.  Or both.  Here's a poem I first read as I was turning 20 in 1972.  It's worth revisiting at any age:


Revolutionary Letter #1
                                               by Diane di Prima


I have just realized that the stakes are myself
I have no other
ransom money, nothing to break or barter but my life
my spirit measured out, in bits, spread over
the roulette table, I recoup what I can
nothing else to shove under the nose of the maître de jeu
nothing to thrust out the window, no white flag
this flesh all I have to offer, to make the play with
this immediate head, what it comes up with, my move
as we slither over this go board, stepping always
(we hope) between the lines


This is the first poem in the book, Revolutionary Letters, by Diane di Prima, published in the Pocket Poets series by Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights Books.

Di Prima’s letters deal with what to do if attacked by teargas and how to dress for a demonstration. Letter #9, for example, begins, "advocating/the overthrow of government is a crime/overthrowing it is something else/altogether."

Letter #1 sets the tone for the letters that follow. It begins with a sudden realization that "the stakes are myself." All we have is our selves, our bodies, our lives. If this is all I have, the poem tells me, I had better be careful how I play and what I risk.

In the last few lines of the poem, we are taken from the spinning roulette wheel to a GO board, and it is "my move."  GO is a meditative game where you win by slowly and patiently surrounding the opponent.  Each player places a stone on a point where the lines intersect, gradually enclosing territory.

In the GO board of the poem, however, we move stealthily, "stepping always (we hope) between the lines."  In other words, we may be on a GO board where all moves are made ON the lines – but we will live by our own rules, looking always from different perspectives, and slithering -- unobtrusively, smoothly, gliding and sliding -- across the landscape of our lives.

Why Should We Read Poetry?

There's a million reasons to read poetry.  Here's just one by Tom Wayman.  This poem makes me laugh, even though it's sad. 

OFFICIAL ERRATA            by Tom Wayman

Where it says welfare read suffering

"The seasonally-adjusted rate of suffering

 fell one per cent last month."

Where it says defense read suffering

"The Department of Suffering confirmed Friday

the shipment of $1 billion in new tanks and helicopters

to friendly governments in Latin America."

Where it says productivity read suffering

"Canadian industry must increase the suffering of its employees at least 12 per cent this year."

Where it says co-operation read suffering

"The administration requires the suffering of every citizen to see us through these difficult times."

 Where it says efficiency read suffering

 Where it says management read suffering

Where it says suffering read defeat

Tom Wayman is the writer of the wonderful poem, "Did I Miss Anything?"  - a poem read by teachers to their students at the beginning of every year.  It's available all over the web.  He gave me permission to post this poem which was first printed in a 1989 collection, In a Small House on the Outskirts of Heaven (Harbour), and is reprinted in a book of new and selected poems, called I'll Be Right Back, Ontario Review Press (1997).

Note:  regardless of my feelings about optimism (see previous posts), I can occasionally appreciate a bit of ironic bitterness.

What Are the Most Wrist-Slittingest Lines of Verse Ever Written?

I'm sure there are many contenders.  My first runner-up is Macbeth's monologue from Act V, Scene V:

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

There could be nothing more empty and hollow than the petty pace of life that will go on and on until ** the ** last ** syllable ** of ** recorded ** time.

But the MOST wrist-slittingest, where's-the-nearest-bridge poem ever written has to be Susan Musgrave's poem "Here It Comes - Grief's Beautiful Blow-Job" (the title taken from William Matthews).  The poem begins

"Last night for the first time
you told me you loved me less"

and goes from there.  The whole poem can be found in The Embalmer's Art (Exile Editions, 1991).  I will post it upon request.

UPDATE:  In December 2012, I had a request for this poem by Susan Musgrave, here it is:

"Here It Comes - Grief's Beautiful Blow-Job" 

Last night for the first time
you told me you loved me less.
I put on a child's dress, pinned
a half-moon to my breast and walked
uptown. The streetlamps kept on
whispering of you as I waited
for one who would love me anyway.

How little it takes to mend, how little
to break. The first man who gave me a ride
had a valentine the colour of blood
under his shirt. He took me for a drive
down the wrong side of the road playing
"Here Comes the Night" so loud I didn't
even hear the real night come crashing
in on me the way it did. Dress of gauze
over my right eye, two fist-shaped moons
under my left. He left me for dead
but it didn't even hurt

not the way it hurt to be
loved less.

Motif of passion-flowers at the
HooDoo Motel, the kitchen comes
fully-quipped, the bed has Magic
Fiters. Everything but my heart comes
equipped. The philosopher in the bomber
jacket who says, "'No' means bondage, bitch,"
he's equipped. He is a realist - he had
a real whip. He gave me everything
except a rag to wipe the blood up with.

He made me strip
then took his realistic jiggler out
and told me there was no one cause
for any human act of degradation.
I'd thought no one could match
the artfulness of self-abuse until he had me
licking my own blood off two cheap passion
flowers on the white lino

but nothing could have prepared me for this,
to be loved less.

When I was a child my father butchered
my first pet - a wild rabbit I'd tamed
and fed every day until she grew big
enough herself to eat. Then he killed her
with his long hands and dressed her
and made me eat; everyday of my life
he forced me to keep eating until
there was nothing left. It was a lesson
in sufficiency, he said.

But when you told me you loved me less,
I didn't know how to cure it.
The bed became smaller than cruelty
with just enough room for the two of us
and the night came over me
like a backhand over the mouth
like my father with steakblood
in the corner of his mouth
holding up a photograph of his
shy, wild daughter.

I wanted to give reasons why I tried to love you
more each day, but it all sounded
so ordinary, like taking a piece of bread
and cutting it. Even this simple act
brings a knife into play

so the moon packs her bags and moves
away. Not me, I'm here for the duration.
Grief's never had it so good.