Happy Canada Day!

My favourite Canadian once said, "Our hopes are high. Our faith in the people is great. Our courage is strong. And our dreams for the beautiful country will never die." (Pierre Elliott Trudeau)

Happy Canada Day!


Canada--
bass in the deep end

A great day for America!

The US Supreme Court upholds Obama's health-care legislation.

Well done, President Obama!

"Too much to dream"*

(for 2 East Side poets and a friend who loved her the most)


Well, not dal sonno (i.e. dreaming as I sleep) but now that I feelingly
    see it, I see
    the conversations in each other's arms,
    hours til dawn--

In the Village neons say she's a poet (and I'd gone in search of it once,
 like a tourist, stupidly)
    and can also mean pilgrim on the curb,evicted
    daughter's small hand

Apt. rails rose thru pain to the South (for one) while she,
                                                                         at Basho's own pool,
  tossed green-blue pebbles
  (she who'd felt stir great ripplets in a friend's womb)

They were bones and nerves both, & despite the green-blue &  pain,
  went down 2 roads, one towards
                                             parks & stone sparkling like neon or sun,
  the other moving in great curves--

    At the end of their street,
    not far from water--
    hungry for talk
   

    2 East Side poets
    but that intensity of hers above all, not a dream--
    sandy hair

and always as I am about to start up, first over the rails,  always a tourist,
  she flies straight to her, among the holly
  swelling 'gainst her

*Title taken from a 60s song

Hortensia Anderson

.

American poet Hortensia Anderson, known for her devotion to Zen and an exquisitely pure Eastern style of work (particularly in haiku, haibun, renga) has recently died. She'd lived most of her life in New York's East Side where she'd been undergoing kidney dialysis treatment for many years. Tributes to her can be found here and here.

My own connection to her was slight and mostly through online Eastern writing groups. Hers was a strong and active presence I'd admired from a distance; her writing was of the highest quality. I was introduced to both the person and work by poet-editor Karina Klesko, who'd kept up a very active friendship and collaboration with Hortensia for many years.

To Hortensia's family and many friends I extend my own personal condolences.

"Out of all that death so much life has come" (Cid Corman)

"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.

My haibun for Frank

"Ah, touched in your bower of bone,
  Are you!"
                     (Gerard Manley Hopkins)


"the poet

the master of veils"
                     (Frank Samperi)

_____________


Looking out, and tasked beyond belief, it- it always seems I'm just not that
  much into returning or god, or the good!--

                  sparrows peck at hawks
                  or the outlandish mayfly

                                                                              and I find spirit to spirit
(Samperi-wise) is also too beyond me, tilting  always West, toward a lake
  that's contrarian and cold

Where's my Boston house, and friend, and the "sister mag" there to deflect
  some of the hate (even from poets!),
                                                                               whose bugling I heard, too?

And the child, hung on no one's arm and who won't leave any rimy stones
  unturned & run just for the joy

                  (the dread essence of eggs,
                   the mayfly's or sparrow's)

can certainly have been dearer to him than the three-numbered things along
  the parks and roads

Never unbruised did the poet give the same unum to the crowds trying to maim
  him who's (to them)

                   always seer and unclear
                   in Japan as well as here

and who'd walked alone over  the bridge from the eastside, each time a death-trap
  (and he knew it) & the waters a storm

What'er falls will rattle like Frank's Brooklyn trains, and trembling by a grave,
  always part of the tall viator--

                   the rain by upending pebbles
                   won't keep the seagulls away--

and loose souls like his who'd himself fathered and flowered (if nothing else)

I believe neither a home in the sun (with room of his own) nor the lightships
  of the page & music could've added a year

  Not Frank who'd tried (all his life) joining child to the sea.    

Permanent diaconate

          (for deacon Carm)


Read what you believe!  said he
  to pews soft, velvety as any stable,
  mute clerestory oped an inch
                                 to let in air--

Red's the colour of spirit, ah! and then
  they all lay prostrate,
  chin to his toe, still--
  formation done

Yr no ordinand or theologate or whatnot,
  and with a brief look at the wives
  who smile & fuss,
  put hands on the plough, too
                                 ( and why not!),

  he ends it there

A Cathedral sermon from May or June 2012,
                                   priestly & wide