For Dean



My worst moments as a teacher have always been these: when a former student is sadly torn from our love and affections, in death. Dean Cudmore had by the time of his twenty-second year developed a daringly creative flair & edginess that made for great poetry and friendship. The kindly look and boyish smile hid--as I see now four years later--creative forces that always seemed about to erupt, as they did on one special evening in 2009. I was privileged to have been his teacher but, as it turned out, it was Dean and a group of wonderfully talented young people who'd, in fact, turned an English class into a spectacularly special celebration of song, poetry and school community: an entire semester dedicated to a uniquely special celebration of the arts in the form of a 60s coffee house nite.

Dean had been particularly attuned to the dithyrambic lines of Ginsberg and the Beats. I believe it was his own "Rock Out" poem, written for the 2009 coffee house evening, that defined for me the spirit of his own generation (as Ginsberg's did his) though it was ostensibly about classrooms, school life and gratitude. It was Dean who'd managed to transport me back, in substance and style, to a 60s generation that had somehow inspired him and, through him, a class & an entire cafeteria audience. We'd all even dressed in black.

Of Dean I can say (but only in Ginsberg's words) that he was one of the "angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the/starry dynamo in the machinery of night". I grieve for the young poet swallowed by that night but to him--and this gives some consolation--I'm sure the whole thing must have in some devastatingly fleeting way also seemed pretty cool.

Below is the text of Dean's "Rock Out" poem. I dedicate this post to a former student, poet and "angelheaded hipster".
_________________________________

Rock Out
By Dean Cudmore
May 2009

You are receiving direct orders to rock out. To be more specific,
Rock out like you just got good on that first report card, and you know you could count on one hand the hours of homework you’ve completed.
Rock out like you’re eating crackers and cheese and you match up the crackers perfectly with the cheese.
Rock out like you are the last one through a yellow light.
Rock out like you’re the first one at a red and you’re beside a grandmother, and she wants to race and there’s no speed limit.
Rock out like you have the perfect amount of anything: change, beer, people in a car.
Rock out like you have fourth and fifth spare and nothing to do but play Frisbee.
Rock out like you wake up in the morning and you look around and you look up at the ceiling and you are fully awake.
Rock out like you don’t shave for a week and a girl you like happens to ask if you forgot to shave this morning.
Rock out like your parents give you the car on a Saturday night and the only thing they say is: Keep in touch.
Rock out like you found out how much better a beer tastes after you’ve finished cutting a half acre lawn with a push mower.
Rock out like you’re pulling an all nighter for no reason other than to see what it’s like to do it.
Rock out like Mr. Didiodato is arguing with four teenage girls about the likelihood of a psychic being a valid profession.
Rock out like you’re in Mr. Didiodato’s class at all, ever.
Rock out like you’re going to Stratford.
Rock out like you’re going to a party tonight that could easily be the best party of your high school career.
Rock out like you’re playing Assassins and your target asks you for a ride home.
Rock out like you’re playing Assassins.
Rock out like you’re standing at the bus stop on the last Friday of the month and you see three people simultaneously sprint home to change out of their uniform.
Rock out like its prom night.
Rock out like its prom night two times for good measure.
Rock out like you’re camping.
Rock out like you’re camping with your friends and you’re wasted as fudge ad you’re watching the sunset.
Rock out like you finished the last night of the school play.
Rock out like you just slept over at the school one night, just to see if you could get away with it, and you do.
Rock out like your younger brother and sister and cousins all look up to you and aren’t afraid to show it.
Rock out like Rachel Keenan is in a shouting match with Conrad.
Rock out like Nicole is in a shouting match with Conrad.
Rock out like Matt Berkopec is sitting in the back of class stoned out of his mind, reading the Tupac book and applying hand lotion.
Rock out like Eman is... doing anything.
Rock out like when Gougeon looks around for two minutes, checks outside, then grabs his bag and says: “Frisbee?”
Rock out like when Conrad doesn’t care about Frisbee.
Rock out like when Conrad says “smackdown”, “old school”, holds the skull book up, or says anything about back in the day.
Rock out like when he said, and I quote, “Kyle, get your mind off basketball, we’re talking Shakespeare”
Rock out like the day the Red Bull car came to the school and everyone here went nuts.
Rock out like in our Grade Nine Christmas assembly when Mr. Desantis came in on a stretcher and we played Hells Bells.
Rock out like you’ve ever seen Nadine really really yell at someone.
Rock out like it was Kevin Arujo.
Rock out like you’ve ever seen Joel Lane rap.
Rock out like when Mr. Daly came to the school and he addressed the student body without the microphone.
Rock out like you would have passed your last semester of high school if you showed up once a week.
Rock out like you did.
Rock out like you didn’t wear a uniform for a month.
Rock out like you went inside the old school when it was being torn down and saw Mr. Picone’s office, and peed on his old floor.
Rock out like you’re really glad school turned out the way it did.
Rock out like you’re really glad you met everyone you did.
Rock out like you’re really glad you can say:
I went to the original STA.

Urbi et Orbi, again

 

I knew there was something about this guy I didn't like: and the sudden resignation, with all the rumours resurfacing about sex scandal cover-ups, seems to clinch it for me. Here's something I penned when Ratzinger became Pope, still every bit the crackling harbinger I intended it to be (and that doesn't happen often).

__________________________

When folio editions dripped from the first movable types,

quasars twitched with pleasaunce!

"Please to render unto Spirit what is Spirit's," saith one emerging

Sense, einmal...nur einmal.

With every intention, of course, of ending thought like a dot,

and defending Abelard at the Sorbonne,

&, among other things, his contributions to free love verse,

Aion plied the reins more softly, as it were

and stood to suffer real imprisonment for time bound views!

But how to stop the ungovernable Infinitive!

One did. Unmoved by You or Time, he's authorized to halt any star

and take away its salt,

one Ratzinger who's rung the chapel-bell a lot for inquests

into the matter of bad Aion-Jesuits.

"To be can be construed as an affront, can it not, to Being on High?

Sense is the Es-sence as Smell is the Sense

of all pollen-bearing Plants, is it not?" the Cardinal sniffed and made

the Earth ill. Now Aion replied, pettishly

but the only thing that could be compared to it, for rhetoric & verve

was one absconding God

who cracked his knuckles. "To be is to be for me," the Ratz said, and

one more quasar limped

"A Eulogy for Dirty Stella" by ginamarie lobianco

A superb poem by ginamarie lobianco (reprinted with permission). I thought as I first read it that a  fading lopsided typed 'Form' never suited subject so wonderfully...Verisimilitude can be hard to detect at the best of times but to find her Stella like this, discarded among cds, cigarettes holes and
toilets, is remarkable, indeed. I haven't felt like this in a long while.

Click on poem to read.



 

When is too old for passion?

At just the right age to stop trying the usual chit with lip,
  (wondering, Why I'm here?), it'll start to matter--
     nails & tails

 How?

say, like bees who whack into regnal rumps ( or else die), for
  the mass of possessed know, resolved into need,

that no lover flumes between needs who hasn't felt the
 bliss of self-pejoration nor shoved into one, &

   like deers

who cannot be shunted aside and have a good time only
 for the unobtainable roe who's shoved hard, too

(this jagged-edged roe of Life!) by some sweet ab-
  dominal heat-- who's loved hard, too

Praise, the crustal or covered sore til the bliss of the true
  coprolalia as you rub Him that's ahh! one

sweet pierced ahh! of Life pulled as by rings towards Him,
  pulled til it redden, as costume brow & lip swell til
   it redden

And why?

well, in remembrance of the sated bees dropping over us--
  the naughty nances whose jasmines swell, &
   shit nectar!
 

Canada's great Elder Statesman: David Suzuki

"Education has failed in a very serious way to convey the most important lesson science can teach: skepticism." (David Suzuki)


 I recently heard the annual National Symons Lecture on the State of the Canadian Confederation given by Canada's greatest spokesperson for the environment, David Suzuki. I am both inspired and impassioned to continue promoting (as I have for many years) the man and his views to my students; in fact, I am determined to invite him to our school to address an audience of high school students who never more needed than now to hear Dr. Suzuki's dire prognostications of a modern civilization that has made it impossible to advance without destroying the biosphere that sustains us. Canada's great Statesman will tell the young, in no uncertain terms, that a growing appetite for a lifestyle predicated on more gadgetry, transportation conveniences and urbanization of a once pristine rural environment is incommensurate now with survival as an animal species.

A time was never more ripe for skepticism among our young and a serious reevaluation of what our role is as co-sharers of a very precious non-renewable planet.

Frank Samperi: The New Heaven Now



In 2002 Longhouse Publishers (Bob Arnold, editor) gathered into one exquisitely elegant "accordion booklet with decorative band" a series of Frank Samperi verses entitled The New Heaven Now that had appeared in early Longhouse publications. When I first saw it I happened to be scrolling down the 1990 to 2006 Longhouse Bibliography of published works (each elegantly edited and printed, each respectfully brought back to life from as far ago as 1971). The Longhouse Samperi was a wonderful surprise and I ordered a copy. The simplicity of the Samperi booklet was perfectly suited to the purity and profundity of the verses lying within. I'd like to share my good fortune here.

The New Heaven Now poems come from Samperi's The Repulsion. I recognize here the images of the lonely viator  journeying with difficulty through the world but guided always by visions of a "new heaven": the mystic's lonely vigil in his room or garden, a broken angel held tight by a wife and daughter. And verses that appear to falter and drift the higher they climb to the light and love of divinity.


the in   our love
the out   our light

the new heaven now
heavenly in communion
pro vobis et pro multis


                                              looking to the garden
                                              hearing the bell
                                              from the wind

                                              and  a  ways
                                                                      out
                                              ear to eye
                                              a great tree

                                              hair to sea


returning coming quemadmodum

cloud is number not conversely

draco seven seven (ten)

bestia mare seven (ten ten)

bestia terra (two)    (n)


                                          where did I sit?
                                          what window?
                                          when?

                                          a  bird  a sole  drop of rain
                                          on a branch
                                          of a bush

                                          you  keeping me in view
                                          my hand at rest on
                                          yours


aperto ore suo


in the dark
          I sit

in the light
         I am

                                         since I see thru a veil
                                         the old
                                                    see
                                                          me

                                                                 dark
                                                                         ly

bird dropping effortlessly
tree or sky
hard to say
blades of grass

fluttering

as well

Idle No More

Idle No More

"Whether the Canadian citizens know it or not, Indigenous sovereignty and Treaties are the last stand protecting our lands and waters. It is our task and our duty to inform everyone that this is NOT about us and them. We must do this in a way that is peaceful and collectively done with all people."      (Sylvia McAdam)


"Word-Dreamer" blog is a supporter of the Idle No More movement in Canada. I am dedicated to the preservation of the identity of our First Nations people and, above all, to the idea of establishing an Aboriginal nation with full sovereignty rights. Assimilation means death to our Aboriginal peoples and to Canada itself. It's in my view tantamount to genocide.

I hope I live to see the day of a great Aboriginal nation not assimilated but equal to Canada and other nations, proud, sovereign, spiritually and culturally great. I feel privileged to be a non-indigenous ally.