Could some meaningful response to the horrors, outrages, confusions, dismay and grief we witness be in poetry? For poetry is a place where silences build articulate and meaningful architectures; it is a place where even against all hope, a poet’s job is to open the blinds to the morning, and take stock of what flies in. Continue reading ‘No sanctuary in silence’: Thoughts about poetry and war
That’s DEFUND, not defend. Why do their actions so often suggest that arts, culture, education, parks and youth programming have no future, when if we will have a local future, these will be the places it is found? Here we go again. In my home province of Nova Scotia, where just under a million citizens live, the ruling provincial conservatives have racked up more than … Continue reading Why do politicians love to defund the arts?
If you are neither a poet nor think of yourself as a reader of poetry, why should poetry matter to you? First, perhaps, because it is everywhere—in story, in song, in odd chance assemblages or strange coincidences. This too may surprise you: not every poem is made of words. This is because, while poetry, like prayer, can be a medium of complacency or banality (think … Continue reading “I only wish they would take more poets into space”: Where poetry matters
I realize, perhaps not unlike my neighbours, the edges of my mind are afraid of the quiet, like the way my body jangles just before a plunge into cold water. As if to enter into that silence will be a shock, a jolt from which any reasonable skin would recoil. If I let myself enter the silence–the way that sometimes, last night for example, I just let myself go to sleep when I lie down, instead of trying to read or to write, to prolong the day, finish my tea, stay unconsciousness just a little bit longer–what will I find there? Continue reading On Losing Power: Reflections on Generational Sadness
In a time of war, this war, the one in which, with US and Canadian sanction, Israel is flattening Gaza and killing thousands of civilians, what is the distance between standing by and being a bystander?
I dream last night that I am in a conflict zone; it is a shattered urban space. A family huddles nearby–a panicked father and little children. A bomb comes zooming in and right beside me a small boy is hit by shrapnel or debris. I scoop him up and race to a nearby clinic, which is only a tent, calling loudly for help. Continue reading What is the distance between standing by and being a bystander?
This poem–really an exercise–was suggested by what seemed to me to be a found poem in Richard Louv’s Last Child in the Woods (2008). In explaining “why the young (and the rest of us) need nature,” and what he means by “coming to our senses,” Louv recounts a game played by Janet Fout, an environmental activist, with her daughter Julia. “As they wandered through the woods, they would listen for ‘the sounds they could not hear.'” Continue reading Sounds of things you cannot hear
Everything I know about the sea and sailing I have learned from and with Marike. She does not speak in this piece, but, as in Nightwatch #1, is everywhere implied. Beneath the sound of the waves and the wind in the sails and the hum of the engine I am listening for her breath, for the sound of her stirring. I move quietly in the dark hours, so as to let her rest, every hour logging our position on paper so that should something go wrong with the power systems on the boat, we know (more or less) where we are. She does likewise as I am sleeping, sailing sailing sailing into the light. Continue reading Nightwatch #2 (on boredom)
Night or day, when at sea we are always on watch, Marike and I.
She is the skipper, the one who oversees and takes charge of the whole vessel–without her there would be neither vessel nor voyage–and I navigator and cook, but we make all of the important decisions about what to do on a passage together, including how and when to spell each other off. Continue reading Nightwatch #1 (on demons and ghosts)
A rainy morning in Ohio.
I’ve not seen my brother for many months. Yet here he is,
on the porch, plucking out a tune.
Waiting for me to wake. Continue reading Brother poem
The day spoils we say meaning
the rain will soon come.
As if it, too, were not as essential as air. Continue reading The day spoils (exercising translation)
Visible Poetry 