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

 

 

A true north strong and free poetics: Simon Fraser or UBC?

At my recent Erland Lee poetry readings two poets, James Deahl and Michael Mirolla, each made a passing reference to the University of British Columbia, Creative Writing Program begun in the mid-1960s by poet Earl Birney, the one in reference to poet Michael Bullock, a founding poet-member, and the other in praise of its effect on his own artistic development. Poet and blogger Joseph Hutchison has also related to me the enormous influence of UBC teacher George McWhirter, to whom he's dedicated the "Thread of the Real" poem in his recently published book by the same name. It did strike me as interesting (and I hardly doubt I'm the first) that here was a relatively little-heard writing school, praised enthusiastically by its students still, that had been all but eclipsed by that other West Coast Canadian literary movement associated with the very popular Simon Fraser "Black Mountain" poets & poetics and the well-known 'Tish' magazine  by which the whole movement's mostly remembered.

It struck me, indeed, that the Simon Fraser and UBC presence served as a sort of symbolic representation of the state of Canadian letters in which we still find ourselves today. A 'Modernism' of the Layton, Birney, Souster and P.K.Page variety mindful of national tradition, attuned always to modernist realities and the music of the lyrical heart, still competes against the wildly 'Postmodernist' 'Tish' poetics fostered and nurtured by Black Mountain and its stable of Objectivist authors Creeley, Olson, Duncan, Levertov, et al. Simon Fraser is credited still with being the  putative breeding ground of Canada's own avant-gardist version in the form, among others, of Frank Davey's Open Letter and the once popular Toronto Research Group of bpNichol and Steve McCaffery.   An 80's offshoot of the American L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E school has also taken root in the Kootenay School of Writing in Vancouver Canada. The results of these heady experimentalist days are too numerous to mention (the writings of poets like Christian Bök and derek beaulieu come immediately to mind). To narrow the poetic practice of an entire nation to a field of two may be a unwarranted generalization--since there are bound to be intersections between competing literary credos--but I believe it's generally true. It's so typically Canadian.

I'm inclined to believe that Canadian poets seem condemned to stand somewhere in between, regarded as either wild-eyed imitators of their American literary masters (as Robin Mathews and Keith Richardson contend) or guardians still of a distinctively Confederation poetics suited to modernist times. UBC may have been intended as a check on the poststructuralist wildfires spreading from the south but in terms of its own influence on literary development and student following it's lagged far behind Simon Fraser. Tish is, for example, a far more recognizable name than Prism though both serve as archives of their best literary efforts. I can't (as I'm often prone to do) tie the popularity of Simon Fraser to any academic advantage either since the poet-professor was to be found in both places. In any event Canada has a pretty long tradition of the student- and academic-poet coupling movements with their own signature publications, such as the McGill group in the 20s of F.R.Scott, A.J.M. Smith and their pro-Modernist The McGill Fortnightly Review.

And so here we are, again: UBC (of high Modernism) or Simon Fraser (of the poststructuralist poesies of American invaders)? There have certainly been more offshoots of the latter than the former: again, Kootenay but also the Toronto New School of Writing. I'm not aware of any UBC-style writing programs springing up anywhere in the country. The idea of a Modernist (or Formalist) revival (pace Timothy Steele) almost seems silly in our day. So where do I belong exactly? Where do any of us in Canada? I can't rightly say since so much with me has been the result  of both happenstance and a case of following my own personal instincts. Yes, Birney's writing school paradigm--and even more so Simon Fraser-- was a novelty in its day and nothing like it came to the very conservative English faculties I attended in the 70s: McMaster University was once a Baptist college! But counteracting the horiible elitism of the Brits who taught me my English (and who always made me feel stupid!) were the wonderful poststructuralist theories of Derrida and Deleuze. The Net later provided both a technology and market share I could never have enjoyed in the old 'paper' regime.

So I trace my own poetical development to an early Modernist education (largely frustrating), growing allegiances to Continental language theory and an Internet forum for both discussion and publication. I guess it's regrettable that I can't seem to favour any one literary influence. I rather envy those (like Michael Mirolla and Joseph Hutchison) who can.

Mrs. Smith: as a runner reminisces

" Ed è bel modo rettorico, quando di fuori pare la cosa disabbellirsi, e dentro veramente s'abbellisce." (Dante)

________


Well, without the name how stunningly serene and sweet both Smiths can be
(such as I've met them, drawn to their bells and heat)  

Now there's Smith I see  grown to an infinitesimally cute orchard lot, hips and boots
tramped into mud & her quietly retracting vines,

who's dove-sweet in just that way: as I'd imagined it in one corner of eye. But lovely, too,
 is Smith the portrait and any of her poetical breeds, drawn from brow

to her elegant chin. Again, a lumbering sort of road ahead and she were mated, to me,
as the portrait of any sweetly doughty matron can certainly be--

I'd say, in fact, the Smith I see and that other's sweet doughty pic really can be the same
to the runner who dreams such disparities as these,

but primarily that between a Lady and some imagined mud on the road ahead
_____________________


*Poem inspired by a portrait of Mrs. E.D.Smith which hangs in the Red Carriage House at the Erland Lee estate but dedicated  to the elderly-elegant Mrs.Smith who still resides in her clapboard house beside an abandoned orchard. 

If only she knew..

A Spring verse by Rilke...devastatingly beautiful (to me)

(from "The Seventh Elegy")

No longer, voice. No longer let wooing send forth your cry:
you're past that. Even though your cry would be clear as a bird's
when first Spring bears him aloft, almost forgetting
that he's a cautious creature and not an unsheathed heart
being flung into brightness, in passionate skies.
Like him, with all his art, you'd also woo--: invisibly,
so that some silent mate might learn of you, and,
as she listened, a reply would slowly wake and grow warm--
the kindled complement of your own ardent feeling

Post-Erland Lee poetry (for Jeff Seffinga)

Poetry in the Carriage House

It's been another successful Erland Lee poetry reading. After a two-year change of venue it was good to meet old friends and read poetry again in the red Carriage House. I was particularly moved by the poetry of Jeff Seffinga, editor of Tower Poetry magazine: moved enough to write the following poem (for him)


"On Hearing Jeff say"

that the deer among wolves, quietly sore, a sweet
  Tempe in a savage place can be
   deadly

   But how exactly?

Well (I'd say) like a dirty crushing street-poet deadly
                                                        (poet of letters only!)

  but he'd say, no, like a hand's gentle absence, at dusk;
                                the cat's light wisdom ( dill on its lip):--
                                cat-heart getting lift from itself,
                                                   alone

           Of the poem in a savage place, Jeff'd say

       

Picture taken by Maria DiDiodato

"Morning prayers" (2): helen (of troy)

"good it is for man not to touch a woman"
                                                      (Tertullian)


       It's just like the greying
to execrate filth
  in light,  a woman's walk:

          small mouth and wisps
  trotting forward--

  "Some temple!"

who will try to be reintegrated
  to him under the tree

--"Adulterers won't ever attain"--

unshakeable column
     of
     grey
      reading
        under
         a
          tree

"Love. Leaf. Light." (for John Perlman)

"Tu non se’ in terra"
                          (Dante)


John says the vision narrowed to curtain slits,
                                                               in a city of the sun,
  made the sage and the rose scent one, &

poet who coincides with Leaf and Light  "telically" strung
  once wrote a sun- or plant- or sage-Love:--
                                                                    a Trilogy!

Appearing to John were even a room lone as a world & poet
                                                                on the Village streets,
  -- every situation never good with him --

  swept once into the heart, age-old and without quietude and
                                                                   a pilgrim's peace