For Martin

Martin Richard, killed waiting for his dad to finish the Boston Marathon



I know what it's like to finish the marathon and look for the cheering friend, wife, coach waiting at the side. Everything is in that expectant smile and hug. I've run the race many times and every finish would have been a little death to me save for the smile and hug, at the end.

How unspeakably cruel to kill precisely there.

This is for Martin and his dad.

Goodbye, Rita...



This has not been a good year for Canadian icons. Another great Easterner has left us, Rita MacNeil whose signature song, "Flying On Your Own", has been a personal favourite of mine since it was recorded in the 80s. Rita's, like Stompin' Tom's, was also artistry bred of great personal struggle and delivered with typical Easterner passion and resoluteness.

Goodbye, Rita: your song's gotten me through many personal darknesses.

It hasn't been a good year...



homeless jesus...rejected by the Church

 A sculpture of a homeless Jesus was rejected by two prominent Catholic churches, St. Michael’s Cathedral in Toronto and St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York...

Says it all, don't it?
________________

"Jeesuz to the red-breasted", said

Well, i know it's a no show--
  craphead mush, spit &
  rot eye
   from too much,
            too much
                   put me here

  & god! i can't pee on yr tree
                 (not under here)
               

Death of Deutsche

(for Hans Küng, my fave)

as foretold he'd have just the century for it,
with throngs and one's cool Jesuitical eye--

a Tree isn't made christliche just for thee,
                                                 
as Küng spreading to all the rich red rostra
(who has the brow for it!) will concur: and

it's Death that tears a Tree out of a sea
like brothers who cannot be conjoined:

like German preambles and holy signets say-
ing "every" & walking on hebdomadal feet

a Priest indeed, Küng's really a kid whose gut
hitches with christ & who's about to get sick--

conjoined to a sempiternal brow all he likes! --

my blue sea don't need a fetching jesus Tree!

 

 

 

April is Poetry Month: but again not here, folks

I'd like to reprint something I'd said exactly two years ago today about the senselessness (and indeed absurdity) of Poetry Month. I've only gotten angrier since then. Here's what I said and devil take the hindmost!
_________________________


Poetry is badly trivialized (and, in Donald Hall's way of talking, made into the "McPoem") when it's designated an April activity which poets everywhere are expected to celebrate through token acts of writing. The gesture is fake & insincere, designed to turn it into a spectator sport. It's just another way to institutionalize the poet's calling, another aspect of the "spectacle" it's become: writing class poetry, performance & publication are, in fact, all departments in Poetry Inc. to which poets pay their dues if they want to be recognized. In fact, it dishonours the lives of poets everywhere who've had to face imprisonment, death & real alienation through self-expression (Radnóti Miklós, Joseph Brodsky,Václav Havel, José Martí, Paul Celan, García Lorca, Forugh Farrokhzad, Liu Xiaobo etc.). I will celebrate a 'poetry month' only when poets in our part of the world have to face real persecution for their work.

April will always be to me only one thing: Cancer Awareness month. I've lost to cancer too many friends, relatives & acquaintances. I won't dare for a moment to share this month with anything that has the potential to divert people's attention away from the vital issues of cancer and cancer research. Compared to this poetry (certainly as it's practiced in North America) is a frivolous pastime for people who are little able to appreciate what commitment to art really means.