Artword Artbar launch of James Deahl's In A Springtime Instant: Selected Poems of Milton Acorn

 

I was exceedingly happy to have been asked to be one of the reader's at yesterday's Artword book launch of James Deahl's Milton Acorn: In A Springtime Instant and Michael Mirolla's The House on 14th Avenue. The Artword Artbar in Hamilton, ON is (and always will be) the favourite venue for poetry happenings like this. James Deahl was a gracious host who introduced speakers, read from his edited Acorn work and provided us with many interesting poetico-biographical details of Canada's great People's Poet. Michael Mirolla, distinguished publisher of Guernica Press in Toronto, chose Hamilton as the first of three places to launch his new collection of verses.

 Readers were each asked to pick two poems of Acorn's and two of their own. Below are the pieces I chose, pairing Acorn's worship and moon poems (the first two below) with my own:

"What I Know of God"

What I know of God is this:
That He has hands, for He touches me.
I can testify to nothing else;
Living among many unseen beings
Like the whippoorwill I'm constantly hearing
But was pointed out to me just once.

Last of our hopes when all hope's past
God, never let me call on Thee
Distracting myself from a last chance
Which goes just as quick as it comes;
And I have doubts of Your omnipotence.
All I ask is... Keep on existing
Keeping Your hands. Continue to touch me.

"Live with Me on Earth under the Invisible Daylight Moon"

Live with me on Earth among red berries and the bluebirds

And leafy young twigs whispering

Within such little spaces, between such floors of green, such

     figures in the clouds

That two of us could fill our lives with delicate wanting:

Where stars past the spruce copse mingle with fireflies

Or the dayscape flings a thousand tones of light back at the

     sun—

Be any one of the colours of an Earth lover;

Walk with me and sometimes cover your shadow with mine.

____________________________

HYMN

 

Lord, rove with me through chancy days

Where’er You go the pampas waist-high rise,

and souls  kick hard as the tree-reft jays

Crocus God! forgive me what I’ve been,

seeming witless, tossed in fields of delice—

where hearts are bad, & the grounds green

But that’s why night’s a Dawn in disguise,

why You are praised, argent-bright,

seized spiraling  in autumn’s glaucous skies

LA LUNA NON È SIMPATICA

A shimmer in eel grass is

all you really are—
  September freak!

                                    See

the toothy eye

look back at me and
  how she snorts and trails
day
after wearying day: see
the long leggy drag
  of hers

She’s eye-bald and all that,

too,
  a dragon tower rising
a good long time over this, that—
  cold magical power

Thanks to the shiny clasps

  loosed on
a full and formless night,
  anyone can see right
   thru her!

She’s a cool moon!

   Notable’s her work

(she’s the sail to my lone ship
  on a two-thirds sea!):

she’s a triple crown worn low,

  a heart-gusher, as well
as a kind of pale sun spun round &
                                          round!

 Like the steam-breathing roes,

  lying numb struck,
without quinoa, without passion,
  

I love her & run myself hard with it,

  from dale to brook
  east and west
 

By the hands I need to feel with,

  I feel my jacinth queen!
 

So lives the heart, at times

  seeing the edges
of a rotund eel-grass moon ,
 & two cruel hooks
 

 for hacking at quinoa & at me 

Picture taken by Wilma Seville

 

 

"Bridget bird" book launch: reflections on Cid and Milt and what matters in poetry

Pre-launch chat with guests

                (for Katherine L. Gordon)


When I told a small (but appreciative) group of poets at my Bridget bird poetry launch that in poetry nothing matters more than the "work" and always the faithful readership of a few, I saw suddenly how indebted I was to Cid Corman (whose correspondences I've been reading rather intently over the past several months). Now that I think on it (a day later),  the event may have turned out to be a silent tribute to a communitarian ideal of poetry whose greatest American exponent was Corman himself. And since the poets with whom I'd been privileged to share my day are each uniquely a people's poet the event was also every bit as much a tribute to Milt Acorn, a literary figure James Deahl calls in his recently published Milton Acorn: In A Springtime Instant (Mosaic Press, 2012) our greatest national poet. James read at my Puddicombe launch and seemed, in his usually gracious way, to give the pro-American ship of poetry I seemed to be steering at times the ballast only the great poet from Charlottetown could give it. As one of the founders of the 'people's poetry movement', he has every right to. For every Cid there's also a Milt to be found in Canada.

The people's poet in Canada, as real poets everywhere in the world, get usually squeezed between academic verse and popular mainstream gunk (both taking their impetus these days from the language experimentalists of the Kootenay school variety). The problem is that we seem to know what the poem is and how it's usually written and to whom it's addressed-- all deriving undeniably from Canada's own rich literary history and its cultural legacies-- but the poem, now that it's been equated in our day with Canada Council and writing school regimens long grown accustomed to the instant attention & notoriety of the seminar room: the poem (and poet) is no longer valorized over the means of production, no longer the palpably real difference between the world and the word. Everywhere there are spurious substitutes for the lyrical anguishing of Milt's pure heart, with the only differences between world & word that matter suffering a near liquidation. It seems rather (as perhaps James and Milt both attest) that we've lost our collective memories, rendered unconscious by the repeated blows.

The true poem dispersed among its fake copies has been all but forgotten, and it's the mandate of a people's poetry (of which my own annual summer solstice readings are a small part) to bring to prominence the gathering voice of a few who still believe in poetry community and the intrinsic value of the "work". The traditional commonplaces or even commonalities of poetry--voice, lyrical tradition, cultural influences--cannot but help look remarkably uncommon and exceptional in the face of a bland, heavily bureaucratized Canadian milieu. We each gave yesterday our own alternatives to the specious and fake "meanings" of contemporary verse (or so it seemed to me). My first will most likely be the most stylized (probably the most accessible) of the books of poetry I hope to publish in future because each poem's been consciously modeled after a tradition and distinctive poetical influence, because each is uniquely beholden to a learned form, rhythm & sensibility. And for that I will never apologize to anyone.

Poet with publisher, Stella Mazur-Preda

 To the people's poet the world suffices still, always the repository of imagery and meanings, poets will always mean what they say and the act of writing can still hold up "as 't were" the mirror to a beautiful escarpment scenery of vineyards, ponds and local churchyards. As I've often said, it's a privilege to have been published under the Serengeti imprint, Canada's version of Corman's Origin, and Stella's and Serengeti's ties to the prestigious Tower Poetry Society magazine (Canada's oldest literary magazine) place my first book of verse among some pretty distinguished company. To the people's poet it's good to feel perennially young, always bested (maybe even co-opted) by the 'makers' who've come before (the Crawfords, Acorns, Purdys). No one is bigger than the community to which s/he belongs (certainly no poet) and no poetry, of the kind nurtured and published here, will ever fail to be the bearer of a distinctively Canadian place and of the bard's loving devotion to it. In poetry it's good to feel small.