While to speak of and into silence may recall a moment or a history of destruction, it serves, as well, to preserve the possibility of some kind of future. Continue reading Against all hope, still poetry, like light
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
One final note. As I am finishing this text, I open my copy of Breton’s L’Amour fou, a(nother) book in his trilogy of novels dedicated to the unfolding of unexpected encounters and coincidences. A ticket falls out on which is printed the following command: “Please read carefully.” I do. Or rather, I read that line several times, since I don’t have my reading glasses with me, and what follows it is printed in type so painfully small that it devolves into wavering black squiggles, a drawing perhaps, another block of excised text. Definitely not words. Continue reading Rereading or Practicing Surrealism? Method: short poems from novels
Pintails warble into the quiet air; then the sound of a rifle and its recoil. Hunting season again. I dress my doe-coloured dog in a rouge coat, pull on my gloves. Continue reading Kindred blood of all that breathes
Insomniac, I wake, open the envelope of the day and shove another act inside as if the day were expandable, made of pleats, an extraordinary accordion capable of melody every time I squeeze, not some exhausted drone, a whine or tumble of falling keys, of rain-soaked shoes, of numb-finger stitches, belated appointments and warmed-over meals, the bones of my spine dully aching, rain dashing at … Continue reading Fall Semester Sonnet
A sonnet that begins with words yanked, one from each line of “returning the books to their shelves” by Bernadette Mayer. city time 19 stream taxi it mulch then window nothing books cold phone shelves Feeling far from the city finally in Desolation. Time to walk and stretch and swim and think until 19 o’clock in the evening when I hope we will eat a … Continue reading Another kind of wildness
Paper wasps in the mailbox might seem a potent metaphor for a writer: you never do know what you will find when you go out to collect the daily mail. Often enough, alas, something that stings. But sometimes the wasps that arrive aren’t figures of speech; sometimes they really are industrious insects, just minding their business in a place where we don’t want them. One … Continue reading How to get paper wasps out of the mailbox amicably and other reflections–or, how to build a better wasp house
Visible Poetry 