Schroedinger's Cat

IDEA: by FLORA-JO ZENTHOEFER

2011-11-21T13:39:00.000-08:00

Poet Flora-Jo Zenthoefer, age 10

In a restaurant
... Written on an old napkin
This Idea takes form

Not really an idea
More an ambition
An ambition to have a shape
To have a form

To live in this world of
Reality and
Specialty

To be a person
Rather than an idea

A noun rather than a verb

Three dimensions all of which you take for granted
I’d like to have even one

I am an Idea

Flora-Jo Zenthoefer is the daughter of the poet Joanne Arnott, whose work and blog links also appear on Schroedinger's Cat. Flora-Jo's marvellous graphic of a cat, made of special tape representing the cat's fur, painted seeds for eyes, a penny for a nose, and a rose petal for the mouth, is now the logo for this blog

In my mind, the "idea" Flora-Jo's poem addresses is the basic unit of imagination, the expression of the wish and desire to bring something new and different into the world. Half-formed ideas, as they struggle for concrete realization, are obviously one of the fundamental elements of poetry. Flora-Jo's poem gives voice to this longing and desire so purely and completely that it cried out loud to be included in Schroedinger's Cat, the place where things are always on the verge of coming in or going out....jr

STEPHEN ROXBOROUGH

2011-04-26T12:42:00.000-07:00

the sky he contemplates
this evening

may not be the one he thinks

he sees

hard to tell in this light

the size of sky

tonight cannot be measured

might be too much

to know

the clouds change too fast

to recognize them

the sun drops like a god in the ocean

his mind cannot keep up

with his eyes

his eyes reflect the fire in the sky

he rubs them and the fire

spreads to his hands

and whatever he touches

catches fire

his world engulfed in flames

everything bends and waves in heat

sucking atmosphere

and melting landscape

until the pinks and purples

filter through

and day heals itself

with night

freezing frames

snap shot eyelash

shutter stutter crackle flash

fisheye redeye mind’s eye

all seeing eye

all in favor

say aye

with ultra powerful depth

of stealing souls field

copy capture

picture faker

image maker

symbol taker

icon nikon digital pixel

mega zoom blow up tycoon

pop bulb flash snap

instant paparazzi

pop! pop!

Art

the great wave of dissolve

washes over us

anoints with mortality

and eternity

whispers

you are the sound

of the ocean

the space between mass

the place where vibration

launches itself

make a joyous noise

before your ghost

taps you

on the shoulder

guides you

into another dissolve

elevate your vibration

celebrate the simple

and cyclical

each moment

the great wave of dissolve

washes anew

this wonderful perpetual beautiful

Stephen Roxborough's first collection of poems, recently published by NeoPoiesis Press.
http://neopoiesispress.com/12401/70334.html

Photos 1,3,4,5 and 7 by Stephen Roxborough

AN ABC OF POETRY

2010-10-21T14:50:00.000-07:00

Illustrations by REBECCA DRAISEY
Poem by JAMIE REID

A is for apple, that round shining sphere of all knowledge stuck in the throat of Adam along with his ale. Ael is earthforlich.

B is for butterfly that circles round that tree, a leaf taking flight, a rebuke to all human belief.

C is for culture, a poisoned and depthless, deathless well.

D is for death that driving and depriving force of all forces.

E is for everything, which clamours for inclusion.

F is for flying, a recent invention, a dream of the centuries.

G is for the grain you hold in your palm, and grind in your teeth.

H is for help, which all of us lack.

I is for instinct, or for intelligence, or for inspiration, take your pick.

J is for juice. You drink and you drink and there is never enough.

K is for all of the words that begin with the letter C, a block in the throat........K...K...K...

L is for loose, like those leaves which are flying.

M is for mother, for money, for the mare in the meadow.

N is for no, the space from which yes begins.

O is for Open. No more needs to be said.

P is for pleasing, the play of the tongue on the lips and the teeth.

Q is the same as K, except for a breath of wind at the end...... kww, kww, kww

R is for raiment, the garment worn by the sky at night.

S is for simple, the better the better.

T is for Truth, which is not the same as beauty and never was.

U begins no words properly, but is often the sound of pleasure and fear.

U U U U U U U U U U U

V is for view. Do not leave home without it.

W is for Woman, the source and direction of all verse.

X is a deadly sign. Beyond this sign you must begin to be real.

Y is for you and you only.

Z is for zigzag, for a striped black and white animal, for the name of a magician or a musician.

Graphics by Rebecca Draisey.

Photographs mostly from Morguefile.

CZANDRA: MAKING THE SEEN

2010-10-03T10:18:00.000-07:00

I wonder what captivates me up there
in the inexplicable contented sky.
I'm looking through a window
only metres souther
than my window used to be.
Same square of sky,
same so happiness.

Shapes tease. My eye jumps
to the step-ladder foreground: couch,
window-frame,
tree-leaves,
into the blue where a gull
hangs like a kite
slipping the wind.

Layers of dawn-pink cloud in
air as deep as chickory
appeal to why?
The restless
conversational waving
leaves, the toss of branches
behind a stolid chimney.
Spirals of wind in a marginal mind
over stunningly straight roof-peak,
angled pattern of brick
meeting pattern of shingle:
distractions from knowing

there's something there
I can't identify, name
nor paint into this picture.
Something the eye does,
allowing time to process:
making the seen, let's say.
The frame inverts, translates back
the picture I think I see:
my life, as many-tiered scene
outside the window, reflects
the heart of the prism.

Like seeing time.
The next day that sky thing appeared as
an alligator waiting in the water,
or a stone I saw that way.
Why, paintings are
paintings of time.

Czandra

Alligator photo by Michael Boughn

KIM GOLDBERG'S "RED ZONE" Reviewed by Jamie Reid

2010-04-21T11:46:00.000-07:00

“In December 2007, upon decree of a provincial court Judge, Nanaimo’s Red Zone was expanded by several orders of magnitude. It is now bounded by Fitzwilliam and Bastion Streets on the north, and by Milton and Esplanade on the south. This is nearly forty blocks. Basically all of downtown Nanaimo. Previously it had been one block.

To be banned from the Red Zone, one need not be tried and convicted of a crime but merely accused of one.”

Kim Goldberg boldly declares her poetic intent in the pages of Red Zone, a remarkable self-published multi-media book about homelessness in the Vancouver Island city of Nanaimo.

...I’m an urban

plastic surgeon remodelling the skin of this

declining milltown swelled with mallbloat Let’s make it pop

and sing and splay the rat-torn epic of

late capitalism in fluorescent orange This is the language

of rejoinder in a grilled cheese world encased

in its own sloppy grease The language of things

that cannot be said Of things

that cannot be permitted to be true The language of

unerasure (no matter how many times
it is obliterated) The language

of being

of existence

of We Are Here

The most visible feature of Red Zone as poetry/literature is its manifest intent to exert a concrete and immediate influence on the daily world from which it comes, the exact city of Nanaimo where the author lives, writes and acts. Goldberg's book has been deliberately fashioned from beginning to end as an item of actual practical civic use, a living document and an instrument for social change. It is fully intended to function as a kind of social lever in the hands of its readers to help them move move other minds and hearts, to shake complacencies and to arouse civic consciousness and conscience.

The civic authorities of Nanaimo and the province of British Columbia remain insensate, totally deaf and blind to the need to respond to its content. Nevertheless, other citizens, readers of every kind, are finding their way to the book in greater numbers every day, listening and preparing to act. The more who listen and act, the more possibility for change in a social situation which is becoming more desperate in the face of deepening official indifference and denial.

Goldberg's point is that the establishment of the red zone is an act of insensate cruelty committed by the authorities against not only the homeless, but all the people of the city. Denial and negation of the humanity of any group of citizens is the denial and negation of all citizens and their right to live as equals alongside others.

The red zone edict deprives homeless people of the very services they need to survive and to improve their lives, the needle exchange, health clinics, the food bank. It converts the homeless into pariahs and outcasts, invisible untouchables. It deals with the homeless as non-human trash, literally shoving them away from the table and under it, out of the protection of society, where they become invisible and beyond help.

Goldberg’s book appears in this atmosphere of cold denial as a ray of abundant light, brings the existence of the homeless out of the shadows of the underpasses where they live out into the open light of day and parades it in plain sight where it cannot be denied or turned away from. On one hand, the book provides provides a flesh-rending existential vision of the harsh life the homeless and addicted will continue to be forced to lead unless a way out can be provided through the power of a more compassionate and humane society.

On the other hand, however, Red Zone provides a life-saving and self-affirming vision for the people she writes about. It makes them visible and real to others as much as to themselves. The book thereby functions as a kind of survival manual for living in the urban hell created by the indifference and outright cruelty of Nanaimo’s civic authorities, and by the negligent indifference of governments at all levels.

A self-declared “plastic surgeon” of the real, Goldberg’s aim is not to create an artificial “poetic” beauty, but rather to tear off the masks that hide the ugliness of poverty and homelessness, and thereby provide a real measure of contemporary society and civilization. The scourge of widening homelessness has become a reality in every urban landscape, not only in Nanaimo, but throughout the world of late capitalism. In North America, it exists as an obscene absurdity alongside the huge wealth that capitalism is perfectly able to create, but rarely to share.

Pre-eminently a collection of poems, Red Zone is more than that. Red Zone is a truly genre-busting work in the best postmodern style, combining pop-art features with sophisticated language practice. The added photographs and graphics draw on graffiti slogans and drawings in the Nanaimo cityscape, the decidedly unpicturesque objects and sights of poverty and urban decay. The visual images found in the book are at once found art objects and documentary signs, sharp and funny comments on the crimes and absurdities of a brutal social order where social problems are erased and disguised and hidden away rather than brought into the open and solved.

Goldberg is a fully engaged literary activist, who doesn't simply sit quietly at home in her study. She energetically puts her body where her mouth is, carries her book directly out into the streets, making it available in as many places as she can, reading poems at universities or in urban underpasses where the homeless actually live and sleep. For Goldberg, a book exists manifestly not as a dead and silent object on a library shelf, but as part of her own life practice, part of her on-going life activity of engaging people and the world.

I want to learn if utterance can change the thing being spoken about. Will these mastodon columns [of the underpasses where the homeless sleep] release their hallowed souls?

.........

One never knows these things if poetry won’t leave the haven of the coffeehouse, won’t stand on the precipice, wind-smacked, tongue-kissing the infinite.

The authenticity of Goldberg's concern has already been properly rewarded with a genuine audience, as few poets these days are. Almost immediately, she found an enthusiastic living audience outside the narrow circles of the university writers and the CanLit literati: the book went into a second printing three months after it first appeared, and it has already been included in several Vancouver Island university courses.

The book's deepest appeal is that it makes itself much more than a strident social diatribe. Beneath its pop and comic-book exterior, Red Zone also presents itself admirably as poetry because it succeeds in combining all of the essential elements of poetry: passion, intensity, an engagement with the intricacies of language and poetic forms, startling imagery, subtle and challenging ideas, a rough but magical music, and above all, a happily antic inventive spirit which offers humour and popular appeal alongside the obvious intelligence of the writing.

Among the manifold modest treasures the book provides, is an inventive re-casting of old forms, traditional and ancient. By re-using old forms in a new urban context, Goldberg reconfigures the meanings the old forms are able to contain, and deploys them in an entirely altered conceptual environment.

A sequence of 11 haikus, for example, brings fresh contemporary images to a form traditionally more pastoral than urban:

small dog in plaid coat
      trots past sleeping bag, leaves frosty
                        stitch of paw prints

fourth week of snow
          and only the unitarians open
     their doors

Goldberg has also created a short series of poems in a form that she calls a "minotype," “a form that resembles another in general shape but not genetic makeup.” In these poems, each two-line stanza line begins with the same word. A pastoral image is balanced against an urban image. Together, the stanzas create a series of sharp contrasts that combine to make not only a social/political statement about environmental destruction, but also a semantic statement about how words shift their meanings as the social atmosphere changes around them. These lines almost seem to say that the dehumanized world of industrial cities requires the invention of a new language entirely. In these examples, the words “crumpled” and “flat” seem almost opposite in meaning from one line to the next:

Crumpled as the bracken unfurling each spring
Crumpled as the beer cans hurled from diesel stinking cabs

Flat as the red wing blackbird’s black eye
Flat as the real estate sign that went up last night

Goldberg ends her book with a plea ambiguous and challenging in its demand for the recognition of the humanity of the powerless victims of a heartless society ruled by capitalist greed and indifference:

We are more than subject-verb-predicate

We are more than a governing device

We are more than war bled dry, epicenter aslaughter

We are more than warbled dry epic, enter as laughter
We are more

Red Zone is available from:

Pig Squash Press,
35 Prideaux Street,
Nanaimo, B.C. Canada, V9R 2M3
http://www.pigsquashpress.com/

Kim Goldberg will be launching Red Zone in Vancouver at W2, 151 Cordova Street, 8PM, May 8, 2010. All are invited.

THE CONSTRUCTION AND OPERATION OF A DEVICE FOR TRAVELLING IN SPACE

2010-04-10T13:29:00.000-07:00

The rendering of space is a time old lashing together of assorted species, soft and melting. Its construction is simple. No voice is needed. Carry out construction in total darkness. Space is thick and often has a handle. It can be eaten.

Its height is relative to the length twice the equal distance from aft to mid-bow. Tangent, yet seemingly arbitrary, angles comprise the prow of polished porcelain. The length is relative again to these tangent distances, adjacent to height over width in the proportions of the Golden Mean.

Now heat it quickly before the hole closes. Quietly erect the oddest assortment to the tune of width over the proportionate volume squared. In cross-section, the hull comes apart in sixteen definite sections, commencing with the drunken gentleman at the rear who serves as a tiller.

The preceding sections have a pronounced lisp, which makes their speech soft and waxy. The wax, however, is edible. When moving the craft will make a loving sound, something like a nightmare.

This will serve seven and is rainbow coloured. The length is variable. Stoke it. Finalize your preparatory analysis with checkerboard patterns. A handle and windows are optional. If it is squeezed, no deflection will occur in the surface if all parts are doused and steamed in malleable pearl.

To launch this device, have your hash browned at 170 degrees F. This will cause swelling of the joints and other enlargements. It is windy and there is a blue sky with puffy white clouds. On all sides can be seen shiny spheres of various sizes and colours. Fields stretch away to the horizon and back again. Once aboard the craft, the controls are nowhere to be seen. Sit back at a considerable angle.

On arriving at denseness #1, we discover semi-distraught species of many earthly hues. They are salty and are ground up into small sections, right, centre, left and up.

Denseness #2, area of perfumed atmosphere, comes along on armadillo back, with a siren. The armadillo may rent itself asunder behind your very eyes. Nevertheless, the next and last denseness is cerebral honey. It covers everything outside the craft.

This density, by the way, may be calculated with your finger nail, or similar measuring device. The mean division is upper, while the axis swings on a definite line toward the South Pole. No deflection is possible, however, if you are prepared with either ether or some other ethereal substance. Mixing it may prove difficult at some altitudes. The swinging motion may be adjusted by a small lever on the right.

At any moment, a small man, usually about 2 to 6 inches high, with a bowler hat and sixteen pairs of alligator shoes may land on your knee. Ignore this as you must concentrate on your instruments and charts. Straight ahead is affixed nothing less than a facsimile penguin-shaped duster. Dust everything. Polish and spit on it. Cover your mistakes with a black swan made of aluminum heated to its latent squid-diameter. If anything squeaks, abandon ship. There is no room for error here. Remove it and replace with sawdust, rouge, or a fine layer of mercury. This too must be polished if maximum equilibrium is to be maintained.

Now the provisions are loaded and we are on our way, alone in an ever expanding radius. Soon after departure we corner a number of small black hornets, six or seven to be precise. They seem perfectly adept at black-jack and other sports, but fail to be any use as food. With these, however, and little else, we set off for the nearest point.

At first things went well and morale was high. Some of the men played black-jack with the pseudo-food, and the rest meanwhile, lay stacked one upon the other in the corner. The negotiations and perturbations we were making were up to me to correct.

Some of the hornets could speak a little French and soon had engaged several of the crew members in discussions on neige-noir in the upper reaches. Black snow falls from the ground to the skies at certain periods when the moon is eclipsed from a certain angle around 80 degrees from the sun’s acute tangent running off to somewhere near my old barn. (It is sooty and smells of oats.)

The time was drawing nigh once again for this phenomenon to begin, but luckily, just as one of the hornets began an oratorio, we literally bumped into the strangest thing I have ever seen. It was large and rather bulky, with horns and several pods which I later found out were atrophied. Grey in colour and smelling rather musty, it made large leaps in the direction of just about everything and produced black smoke which it belched forth, interspersing with drops of pure gold, from several mummified segments. As if to mock us, each segment had its own hammer which it used to beat time with on a nearby wooden platform, as it danced about in a terrible and unwholesome jig.

The men were stupefied. Here, not five feet from our home, we had run across this denizen from the netherworlds. At first we mistook him from afar for the three foot extension eyebrows we has ordered. But no; these sanguine and aimless trolly babies were nowhere to be seen. Only this uninvited witness, who after several more astonishing leaps, finally sauntered off to the nearest archway and flashed away.

It was dawn. The sun was glowing, but not in its usual way. It was more as if it was split up like sections of an orange; each part hovered around the other and made an annoying buzz.

Finally, near the end of the voyage, we chanced to see a lonely figure coming across the dunes. As he drew near enough to be visible to us, we could perceive that he had only one leg, a body like a turnip and on top a single quivering blue eye.

I asked this nomad who he was and whence he came. He answered, “God”.

Gregg Simpson is a visual artist and musician now living on Bowen Island, British Columbia. This piece was written in 1968 when Gregg was still a a young man. Some of Gregg's lifelong work as an artist and local art historian can be found at the website listed below in his name.

http://www.greggsimpson.com/

CAIRO: a poem

2010-03-10T05:00:00.000-08:00

During my night in Cairo,

the pyramids were pointing,

as they always point,

towards their various points in space.

Larger, cosmic pyramids without a base

were formed invisibly by the passage of their abstract edges

into emptiness.

These pyramids met and crossed each other

on the way to infinite space,

forming still further pyramids,

which crossed and recrossed

infinitely.

There was no message in this fact,

this truth,

devoid of all significance or meaning.

The pyramids do not dream,

their purpose being not to dream,

but to inspire dreaming.

The Sphinx, however, dreams uninspired.

It's broken nose is proof of this.

The night I was in Cairo,

this sphinx was dreaming.

It dreamt of sand.

Can you believe it?

The sphinx

was dreaming

of sand!

It might as well
have simply stayed awake.

What a waste,

what a desert,

what a waste

of a night in Cairo.

by Jamie Reid

2010-01-31T07:27:00.000-08:00

THIS STONE
(from hand to foot)

THIS           STONE

no longer     cold
held in     hand

held in     hand
this       stone
no longer     cold

no longer     cold
held in       hand

THIS          STONE

MARIE ANNHARTE BAKER: THREE POEMS

2009-12-13T08:02:00.000-08:00

Forget Grandmother

Woke up one morning to forget new status as grandmother

cognizant barely I am a woman of nature listen up now girl

nature is saying I understand everything I forgot grandmother

iffy culture shows me not to be too certain over not knowing

what to do each morning the quick little steps warn me I must

pretend grandmother she asks again “coo coo, where are you”

pays to answer or she might color a design on me with marker

like she did yesterday when I accidently posed as a toy or doll

Rev Me Up Double Take

In Nicaragua, a woman revolutionary celebrates

with her cadres. One of them might notice her

dark colour. Ask her if she has been to the beach.

It is a subversive way to ask if she is an Indian.

Stories told about solidarity & racism in Nicaragua

divulge greater quandary of how colour and class mix.

Woman thinks she must be Inca. Let’s hope she is that.

She confesses she has many resemblances to one.

Cuna might be another possible rival ancestry.

For sure Cuna because she is so like a friend I know

who is genuine San Blas Cuna when dressed in regalia.

It is not always the convincing evidence we need.

Someone at work told her she has the hands of

a potter. Generations sculpted those hands. Proof.

Five hundred years have faded our recollections

of who we are. In 1992, we trade past glimpses.

I remember I am a Mohican queen not half

wit half baked half hearted descendant but one

total regal caste in blood bones bare chested

Indigena who paddled out to check her weir.

Never precious pocahontas or Matoaka waiting

for discovery in original Tsenacomaco land.

Takes five centuries for a resurgence take back

ancestral dreamtime before us forgotten women

use imperialist nostalgia to reconnect the power:

resistance revitalization regeneration revolt

Taken for granted a woman juggles identities

--poet, revolutionary, Indian, mother, daughter

wife, ex-wife, grandmother & cultural worker--

I catch a peek of who I am when she talks.

Indigenous Verse Ability

Right off, ingenious character needs to apply

any part-time genius res identity on or off

assimilated come lately fork off tongues hack

Right on, dress accordingly use convenient

scalp wig or beaver hat trap appendage bag

reach for medicines label holistic holocaustic

Always, fuk wid Indin expert tease please

even if disabled walk with crutch is not even

Never, forget internal voice represents eternal

Injunaity croak sing songs of constant repetition

Remember, all ancestors big small fat lazy do-gooders

disguised helping professionals vary alarm sounding

Forget, ancestry breeds contempt for lesser bestials

why curse the drumstick butterballed to death apart

Come to it, pretend to copy another native vernacular

open the new age um biblical encyclopedia manual

Come off it, dust off the tonsil or operational vacancy

veer forward given our future is likely double doubt

Grab, bundle get a move on after all nomadism calls

visit worlds not on the internet or don’t shop around

not always about financial welfare though it helps

Let go, recognition reputation respite any reservations

linguistic liars documentaries what takes honest breath

Laugh it up, not everyday is a good day to genocide

not easy to chortle word choice snicker sounds cute

gross indigenous digs gross out counter digital return

Laugh it off, easy enough to do if a feather is stuck

unusual place not tickly by any standard of remorse

diversify humour learn to laugh at uncomplimentary

http://www.stony-hill-madison.com/servlet/the-153/Panama-Cuna-Kuna-Indian/Detail

http://www.vianica.com/activity/36/ancient-footprints-of-acahualinca
http://www.nald.ca/CLR/chikiken/page23.ht

Marie Annharte Baker is the author of Exercises in Lip Pointing, New Star Books, Vancouver

A review of Exercises in Lip Pointing by Reg Johanson:
http://www.rainreview.net/rain-010107.html

JOHN BARLOW ON THE FERAL CATS OF DOWNSVIEW

2009-11-19T13:44:00.001-08:00

the 'star' is the bird in gem's eye

called them gem because of the eyes

small inside the head eyed cats

rackurrrrrsss~ gem

3/5ths smaller cats than usual, except Gem

like a sleek special Panther

it's like a holy night in Guatemala

when the gemcat is there

like a storm stewer that goes in reverse

like a dream of a religion

a strange catlike idea

http://barlowhockey.wordpress.com/marlies-join-leafs-in-shootout-success/

With the cat tail of a hurricane saturating the 401 (and my chief context being awaiting arrival of a wonderful friend via that highway, I find myself with the time to wonder about my friendship with these fine feral cats of Downsview once again, as I am entirely entirely in a mode of waiting, gliding, and focusing all luck, intuitive and teleginetic, focus, I think of the brilliance of the cat colonies, the commitment to coming through in all moments is complete, always in beam, always exemplar. Others may, I never tire of seeing their prints in winter, days after storms, watching their relationships with each other, contemplating their territories and their histories, and trying to explain it to my mother, how instead of travel and theatre, museums and galleries, concerts, trips to Europe, or even more practical quests, if I have the time, I like to visit feral cats in the light industrial wasteland, and try to befriend them with gifts and all the sorts of friendly utterances that downtown most cats will recognize as cat conscious voice, and to this day, never, not one feral has cared back. Not even gem.

So it is still largely humans I look to for consciousness and meaning.

But think of it: the World Symphony Orchestra playing Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony magically entering into a finish! Joy, amazement and at intermission, in the lobby with our kale curry salmon wraps, sun dried tangerines, and gin & tonics, I’d be explaining again about not so much how the feral cats are fascinating in their greater totality and meaning, but are fascinating in the absolute immediate of daily life!

Ordinariness is one of the hidden wonders of existence. Every few days or week and a half, I’ll be walking along and computing away and realize, yes, it is a completely ordinary day, there really is nothing about this set of hours, there isn’t preoccupation, this is what my life was/is like presently, “shipping yards” and “truck docks” and “hopping fences” rare and blessed moments unspoken for in time. I feel like these moments of ordinariness are my greatest accomplishments. And even though it stresses the always en garde alert ferals, they somehow give lessons to it, hyperexpressive eyes blazing away, unremittantly present to the real day. And suddenly they begin to sing, welcome welcome, happy birthday, happy birthday, welcome welcome, happy birthday, welcome welcome, happy birthday, in their never before heard voices, the epileggo to Schubert’s long broaching immanence.

http://oversion.wordpress.com/2009/08/

on criticising religion: by John Barlow

2009-10-14T15:15:00.000-07:00

the problem with criticizing religion

is that it's all too easy.

it really makes you wonder

about the religion forming enterprise,

the seemingly natural tendency for the world religions

to, like anchors bumbling across lakes,

gather up all sort of stuff in the lake

and become attached with (besides branches, innertubes, flung clothing)

sexual violation, warmongering violence, terrorism, international vendettas,

repressive mores, inflexibilities around human relationships,

unhealthy garb, pathologically vindictive seizures of mind,

and obedience to business and false authority,

colonial holocausts and, for all that, crushing boredom as well

and yet this is the fate of most world religions;

it'd be easy to just conclude they all suck,

but for all the hegemonic monothetic aggression

all the our-way-or-hell admonitions, the religionists

are often milder than corporations, murderers and rattlesnakes;

or often were, in the past, milder than national entities and soldiers;

assessing how harmful religion is has to be weighed

with the perpetual warrings of all power,

then subtract out the perversities caused

by so many religion's hatred for sexuality,

the unexplainable sickness in most religion

and conventional bourgeous shit too,

almost always hypocritical, implying

it isn't even meant in earnest;

most of us in the 70s influenced modes

tend to see the violent deranged pathological hatred for sexuality

as a religious hangup, or a bygone quest to harvest and control sex,

like an alien takeover of the planet, "invade their sex life"

"become the bosses of their families" "then stray several religions

identical to each other with tiny sick twisted differences onto them

and make the different religions hate one another, besides sex -

...am i giving the aliens too much credit for their depth of conspiracy

against us? think of it the other way, if you

were the alien, trying to paralyze another planet

for takeover, if you paralyzed their conception of sexuality

and family life, wouldn't they be then easy knockoffs in all else?

of course we humans have never been in a position

of having to invade another planet and fuck everything up.

europe was though, and really fucked up the other continents

and so we have this hodgepodge of religions trying to act nice with each other

even though none of them are good plans for life

and they can seem naturally quite hostile by definition,

remarkably presenting themselves each as the only

path to heaven and avoidance of eternal hell

in the afterlifes. if only people would just get away from religion

john

Editors note: the two final pictures represent the savage persecution and expulsi0n of the Cathars of southern France in the 13th century, in which 500,000 Cathars were killed in a crusade waged by conventional Roman Catholics against a parallel Christian belief which was condemned as a "Manichean heresy." The crusade against the Cathars has been called the first medieval holocaust. For more information, Google "Cathars".

homage to tristan tzara

2009-09-03T15:00:00.000-07:00

by Jamie Reid

In the hidden gravel courtyard of your semi-famous former mansion at Montmartre, today musicians play some amplified flamenco, well-dressed revellers play at bowls, tossing balls high into the air.

In the grassy lane adjacent to this stone-walled courtyard, the strolling tourist comes upon a dark and leafy bower overgrown with branches.

Within this darkened grove, there sits immovably a lump of indiscernible matter, almost as tall as a man, as wide and as thick as a man is tall.

At first glance, and even afterwards neither eyes nor fingers can easily discern if this pocked and pitted presence is animal, vegetable or mineral, a meteorite fallen from the sky, a 12 ton bit of worthless metal slag, or something entirely hybrid, entirely in-between.

There it sits, disconsolate, hidden, isolate, covered with droppings from the surrounding branches, with dust, bits of dried leaves, dessicated fronds, the webs of touring insects.

Some few steps beyond this secret copse, the pathway opens to a set of stairs. In the distance against the silver-pale evening sky, the Eiffel Tower, the solitary upraised finger of an iron skeleton beneath the city's surface.

A moment of eerie freedom seizes me,
completely inarticulate.

Approximate man.

Approximate monster.

_____________________________________________________

Author's Note: Approximate Man was the name of Tzara's most important collection of poetry, written in the years after the notoriety he gained as the youthful wild publicist of the Dada movement. When Dada subsided, as it was bound to do, Tzara's life, before, during and after World War II, was dedicated to the anti-fascist cause in France. He gave life long service to the literary and plastic arts as a citizen of Paris. Among his many unsung deeds was his service as a Deputy in the French National Assembly following the war, and his assistance in bringing Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot to the stage in Paris in its first appearance.

you sometimes wonder what tomorrow will be
soaked in the salt liquor of the air wedged between the lands
you never wonder what
you are
in this instant which could not await your answer and flees

from Tristan Tzara, Approximation

CATH MORRIS: TWO POEMS

2009-08-02T14:09:00.000-07:00

Sometimes at night

I see the spirits of the trees rising up
in pointed obelisks of mist

Go to sleep, my angel, I say to myself;
I answer, Yes, I'm your angel -- and your devil, too.

Often, too, in the night sky,
just above the darker end of the city,

I see large blue-white vaporous clouds:
these are their gatherings;

memories rise up in the same way,
crescendo-like, and fall again;

these spirits meet at night
when no-one is looking up;

the obelisks become rectangular at the top
to show they have a point;

sometimes at night, I also see small upright poles
that look like miniature men
between the shops and bars lit up by a street lamp;

the tree spirits rise like barometers of lies
and join into oblong shapes;

perhaps they funnel up to breathe the cleaner air
or they're practising for their demise

I can't hear them whispering, though,
because of the sound of wet pavement tires;

I try to listen; are they weeping?
I hope to my angel self
they're only sleeping.

Moon Orphans

The earth, it was revealed, once had three moons, the two lost moons may have crashed into the surviving moon, or been sucked into the sun, or flung out of the solar system to drift through deep space

from Findings, Harper's Magazine, August 2008

or one of the little moons may have felt neglected

and run off with the spoon

while the other decided to make her way north

to the galaxy known as Pegasus Dwarf

how beautiful the configuration of three --

the magic triad! of wishes, pigs, and little birds,

hauntings, blind mice, circus rings;

they must have looked lovely dancing round our globe

like sad girls doing the moondance at a spherical fancy-dress ball --

a pity how they left the nest

to meld their bodies with other worlds

our orphaned satellites, lost luminous pearls.

Rilke: Orpheus, Eurydice, Hermes

2009-08-02T09:00:00.000-07:00

translated by Marshall Hryciuk

It was a mineshaft peculiar to souls.
Like silent seams of silver ore they moved
as veins through the darkness. Between roots
sprung up the blood that issued to humankind
and heavy as porphyry this seemed in the darkness.
Nothing else was red.

Rocks were there
and forests lacking substance. Bridges over abysses
and the great, grey, opaque pool
that hangs over its long-distant source
like rainy skies over a landscape.
And between meadows, gentle and forebearing
appeared the pale stretch of a single path
laid out like a cloth strip for blanching.

They came along this very path.

In front, the slender man in the blue cloak
who mutely and without apology looked forward.
With no concern for chewing his step ate up
the path in huge bites, his hands hung
from his garments ungainly and clenched
and no longer knew the delicate lyre
that had grown into his left hand
as rose tendrils do on an olive branch.
And his mind was rent in two:
while his gaze ran on ahead like a canine,
turned round, came back and ever again went
on ahead and stared at the next turn waiting,
his hearing lingered back like an odour.
Sometimes it seemed to him this reached all the way
back to where they both were walking
who would follow him for this whole ascension.
Yet really this was only his own climbing's echo
and the waft of his mantle that closed behind him.

But he said to himself: "They are still coming."
Spoke it aloud and heard it echo away.
They were still coming but both of them
only frightfully slow. If he dared
turn around even once (were not turning around
the destruction of the whole process being accomplished
thus) he would surely see them,
the light-footed couple following him soundlessly.

The god of gateways and far-off messages,
with his helmet down for travel over his bright eyes
a slender staff slung from his body
and wings beating on the ankles of his feet
and to his left hand beholden: her,
The so-beloved, for whom out of one lyre
more sorrow poured than from all sorrowing women;
that became a world of sorrow in which
though everything were still there: forest and lake
and path and village: field, river and beast,
they were yet wholly within this sorrow-world;
as if round this other-earth a sun
and star-filled silent sky revolved,
a sorrow-sky with distorted constellations --
so beloved was she.

But she went by that god's hand
her step restricted by long winding-shrouds
uncertain, gentle and without impatience.
She was within herself, like one whose hopes are high
and thought not at all of the man who strode ahead
nor of this path they were climbing up into life.
She was within herself. And her state of being dead
filled her to completeness.
Like a fruit with sweetness and darkness
she was so full with her great death
so new to her that she grasped nothing.

She was within a new maidenhead
and untouchable; her sex was shut
like a young flower's petals toward evening
and her hands had grown so unused
to marriage that even the gentle god's
infinitely lightly guiding contact
she suffered as a too sudden intimacy.
Already no longer was she the fair-haired woman
that in the poet's song she sometimes echoed,
no longer the scent of the wide bed and its island,
the belonging of that man ahead no longer.

She was already loosened out like long hair
and surrendering like fallen rain
and shared about like hundredfold provisions.

She was already root.

And as abruptly
the god halted her and with anguish in his voice
spoke the words; "He has turned around!"
She grasped nothing but asked softly, "who?"

But in the distance, dark against the shining gateway
someone stood whose features
were not to be recognized. He stood and saw
how on the strip of the meadow-path

with a sorrowful look the god of far-off messages
turned away in silence, the form following
that was already going back its very same way
her step restricted by long winding-shrouds
uncertain, gentle and without impatience.

Rainer Maria Rilke Frankfurt-am-Main

photo of Eurydice in veil by Yana Zerkalova. See more at http://www.facebook.com/pages/PHOTO-ART-by-YANA-ZERKALOVA/112914482063035

Richard Rathwell: Unrevised love poem

2009-07-11T17:05:00.000-07:00

To be Googled (for Metatext)

We all go through each other whether we like it or not and this may be a partial proof of Averroism and other heresies and witch crafts with words and deeds as well as proof that the beginning of courtly love at Castelnou and Narbonne when Sufi Arabic poets worked out the method and the steps of it going from loving from afar through first sight to illicit desire and endless dual adventure of soul and flesh which the Christians caught onto as they all began to speak that going through and leaping language to both sides twisting up and down through the Cathars through the romantics where every poem is the same poem and our individual soul dies but the one in the river goes on forever loving rebelling

And it worked well that notion that there are two fields of truth one the field of what is called reality and reason with those iron dialectics and the other which is the field of image and magic including divinities and really deep feelings ennobled by intellect sitting there with Bukharin and Saint Stephen and Rosa and Eleanor and you

Two fields of truth never say the arrows and the flame

Always
The mud of the Aude took Narbonne twenty miles from the sea and no canal would save it poor Septimus another poor kingdom of double light gone

Seville
Skodra
Vancouver

Add your
Rivers gone to the sea

Here I implore you read this or don't as
I once drove with you to Florence chasing light through wet and lime green fields past an immobile river past the sign that said Ravenna thinking it was another industrial town despite the climbing yellow dawn and so missed the wizardry of dying Byzantium through the cryptoportico through which I crossed the mountains up and down to Orveito Butte snowed over where Siger de Brabanto saint of the visual exegesis died and I didn't know it even though he had been Bruno Pound and me

I do now back at Castelnou halfway between heaven and hell, Rome and Seville, Prato Del Moro and the Ocean between the Tec and the Aude is returning here

It is orange and the fields are rows it is where the love came from and went and is still

YAY CROWS!

2009-07-01T18:15:00.000-07:00

Crow

I have no song.

Think consonants --
hard beads
at the back of my throat

Think black fan
snapped open.

Think Hasidim,

barefoot
on a sandy beach

Eve Joseph

This Crow

knows who I am
& what I do here.Knows where he goes,
knows who owns what,
knows what's what.
Knows he knows.

His big broad voice
lets me know, too.

We belong here both.
Both know it well.

Our cats, my wife, and he,
together
on this tiny territory
on this round earth,
for all it's worth,
birds above,
worms and bugs below.

small and black,
the shining buttons
he wears
for eyes
placed each side
on his lustrous skull,
seeing me
quite perfectly.

From his tall tree,
he yells at me,

see you later
in hell

haw haw haw

no need
for hurry.
I can wait
& so can he.

Sooner or later
is soon enough.

A black wire runs
from house
through tree.

Upon this he sits,
indifferently...
just one more branch
on his black tree,
beneath his black eyes
and his black feet.

On the bottoms
of those sharp black feet
electrons itch:

our human speech
too pale and soft for him
and his harsh dark voice.

Time alone will tell
who will be the last
to leave.

Him or me.

haw haw haw

Jamie Reid

Crows

Those fucking crows those four brilliant
gawking crows almost shoulder to shoulder
on the roof's ridge

that oily sun and the pale cloth of sky
slim fingers shaping the thin bone
of a perfect blue cloud

the crows have wrecked the street
with their curses, they preen in anticipation
and are ready.

The bushes and the trees are silent
and reach for a possible suicide
from the hanging
balcony above

and those four crows in their purple soutanes
their birettas nodding as they wait for
another view

the work of crows is sometimes the work of murder
but always the work of
witness and last rites

the cloud has charred and begun to crumble
falling in flakes in soot and ashes
all over the world
the crows hunch beneath the ash
growing grey and annoyed as they endure a death
that no one sees.

Patrick Friesen

in praise of bad things

praise milfoil weed, long green strands snagging the motors of powerboat; praise man-eating grizzly bears and up-tight Iranians; praise rust, mold, moths, racoons, buzzards, housemice, sharks; everything that breaks us down and cleans up the mess and drives us on to think and plan and turn ourselves about.

praise the hawk that steals the heron's fish; praise the heron raising her true harsh cry of protest; praise the biker gang of local crows and the seven angelic screaming gulls that wheel about together at last calling;

drop it
drop it
drop it

and the humans on the shore.
that call out

yay gulls
yay crows
go go go go
hawk
go

Maxine Gadd, Backup to Babylon, New Star Books, 2006

* HAW HAW HAW *

LORCA: BALLAD OF THE MOON, THE MOON

2009-06-30T10:30:00.000-07:00

translated by Marshall Hryciuk

The moon comes to the forge

in its polished mother-of-pearl

the child stares at it, stares

the child is staring at it still.

Into the rippling air

the moon lifts up her arms

and bares moistened and pure

her breasts that are hard tin.

--Run moon, moon, moon.

For it is the coming of Gypsies

out of your heart they'll beat smooth

collars and amulets of white.

--Child stop your dancing

for when the Gypsies have come

they will find you on the anvil

with your little eyes sealed tight

--Run moon, moon, moon.

I hear their horses approaching.

--Child, stop, do not crush

my tunic ironed out and white.

The rider and his stallion are drumming

on the stretched hides of the plains.

At the forge it is the child

Holding his eyes well-shut.

Moving from the fields of olives

brown and dreamy the Gypsies. . .

their temples held up lofty

their pupils downward turned.

How loud sounds the screech-owl?

Ai, sound as would pierce a trunk!

Across the sky moon loosens

like a child from your hand.

Within the weeping forge

The shouts rise up from the Gypsies.

The air is watching over, watches

The air become their watchman.

Federico Garcia Lorca, Romance de la Luna, Luna
Madrid 1924

about the translator

Marshall Hryciuk is a poet living in Toronto, Canada. In the last year, he has electronically published no fewer than 257 translations of modern and classical poetry, from Pindar to Paul Celan, including Sappho and Catullus, Rilke, Rimbaud, Mallarme, Quasimodo, Basho and many others. He says that although he feels that many of the poets like Baudelaire, Rilke and Rimbaud “hardly need to be translated again,” he does so because he likes to “keep the rhyme schemes and where possible, the metres.”

He finds the translation of Federico Garcia Lorca gratifying, “…because he brought the symbolist poetic practice into the Spanish language (to the dismay of many) so i feel a driving momentum to be both as literal and metaphorically ambiguous at the same time as possible.”

Asked about his method of translation, he replies: “ I have no method but dictionaries, and with Garcia Lorca as with Mallarme, Sappho and Parmenides, my approach is reverence.”

….”i translate not to 'make it new,’” he says, “but to make it ‘originary’—the genuine response to a genuinely great poem should be more poetry. The symbolist poet finds the contact with language about a compelling experience just as exciting as the original experience…”

Flying Away: Poems by several authors

2009-06-23T10:00:00.000-07:00

...out the window then?

less like a curtain caught in the breeze
more like a bird launching
into morning

out of the cage and into the house
out of the house and into
unrestricted day

day becomes night & seasons
turn, the budgie among
the swallows

this is what freedom is
what it looks like

Joanne Arnott

homage to paul eluard

the birds of the lawn what
do they have to do
with poetry what
do their wings say
about words and things
or words
about wings

even if they catch the rays of the sunset
flashing, even if
each bird sings

they have already gone lightly
to their home in the night, heads
tucked under their wings, song
unsung…
words under the tongue
unspoken.

Meanwhile
poetry burrows, burrows,
borrowing the colours of the earth,
paying no interest. Gone
in the flutter of an eyelid
the flutter of a wing,
the fluttering flattering tongues.

Jamie Reid, from homages, Pooka Press

Warbler

how language at least English
deteriorates no longer says
what it used to say sentences no longer
than they used to be but without
periods no thought ever completed run on
into the next one too much expected reality
overcrowded too few words one word doing
multiple duty what was actually meant the mouth
the page cannot contain ambiguity
burgeons less for distraction more than attraction all's
garbled that warbler warbles distinctively
in the very far distance

Jamie Reid (this poem first appeared in Open Text, Canadian Poetry in the 21st Century, edited by Roger Farr, Capilano University Editions, 2008).

from a work in progress: First Book, Three Gardens of Andalusia, by Gerry Shikatani

how now, it's the best of the light
when the cats creep alone
the grounds and the flowers begin to
grow Now the road leads to
everywhere in the plan
that has brought the tongue to
bear and wander.
Then is the time of sitting
with the voice held against the thin chest
the birds echoing up the road.

Even the hedges hold evenly
as if shaping the hours to come
the sun moves through this thin rain,
a rain heavier, the ink staining
my hands.

I have a nose.
Someone is cooking.
It all comes together with such lexicon.
Polite.
Cats dart for escape.

Gerry Shikatani, from First Book, Gardens of Andalusia, Capilano Review, Winter/Spring 2003

photo by robb: see http://www.morguefile.com/creative/robb

writing per-verse writing birdsong

When, in the comics, a character is knocked on the head
and hears birds, it's real
I was clouted once and saw stars, not nice.
But once you shut out the cartoonish clamour of men,
you hear birdsong. Thousands in every range,
especially the ones that tip up their heads,
open tiny jaws and sing
full-voiced with the heart.
This is what poetry does;
it clouts you over the head so you hear
eagles to distraction, finches to tears;
you hear flocks, with a twitter, swoop on single wing.
I think, when there were forests,
this country was once deafening. Altogether
deafening, and maybe people were silent,
and when they spoke, they spoke in song.
When you listen to language,
you don't understand, like birdsong or poems,
your mind disengages and sends itself off
to search for subtler signs around the words,
signs of truth or humor, maybe some intrigue
to be found in the corner when you're not listening;
and the birds report in the same tongue at home,
or sit portentously quiet.

Czam

photos by Carol Reid unless otherwise noted

Gerry Gilbert: 1936 -2009

2009-06-21T06:55:00.000-07:00

Bursts of friendliness

when a chunk of the story repeats itself
& homer & chandler do it all the time
there's a faintly mental smell
& you can tell
you're in the presence of poetry

i went to the convention of
the american institute for the conservation of
historic and artistic works
saying
i heard there was someone here
who could make my poems last forever

rock & roll is all one song
kids want to be beautiful
any poem is one more

Gerry Gilbert, from Azure Blues, Talonbooks, 1991

from Peter Culley's blog

Farewell to Gerry Gilbert 1936-2009, the great poet of Vancouver in the second half of the twentieth century. When David Bromige died last week I remembered that I'd had a number of conversations with him & Gerry in the kitchen of Gerry's place, called the "New Era Social Club", which consisted of a small two story house with warehouse space above, in a narrowish alley in the Japanese section of the Downtown Eastside, a couple of blocks off the water. This was in the early 80's, when Rob Johnson took the above portrait. The other photo is of how it looked last winter. Gone is the pear tree and the ivy-covered fence, gone too the hole through which one had very carefully to retrieve the key on a string. I stayed there a lot during that period, helping & hindering his work on his own poetry, his magazine BC Monthly & radiofreerainforest, his show on Co-op Radio. Whatever literary community I've ever been a serious part of had him at its center. I remember little (tennis? Ava Gardner?) of the content of the

conversations with David & Gerry but recall with great clarity David opposite me at the table, still-longish hair, a patterned shirt under a patterned vest, Gerry making pancakes, a pony-tailed short order cook, his vest limp pinstripe with a little bit of satin in the back. I forget thin men need that little extra warmth. Both men had bright, translucent eyes & used a lot of neat quick motions to both do & describe things & their exchanges had a musical, bantering, ping-pong lightness to them, a quality I used to call "zen", but with their neat beards & underlying toughness of wit it could sometimes be a bit Jacobean too..

Photos and text: Peter Culley's blog at http://mossesfromanoldmanse2.blogspot.com/

See also: www.gerrygilbert.blogspot.com

DAVID BROMIGE; 1933 - 2009

2009-06-04T07:17:00.001-07:00

Last week brought the sad news of the death of David Bromige, a friend and companion of the poets of Vancouver since the earliest days of the Vancouver poetry community of the 1960s. He was known in those days at the University of British Columbia as a brilliant scholar of English Literature, poet, actor, wit, bon-vivant, editor of the student literary magazine and of the Arts and Literary section of the student newspaper, an all-round dashing and life-affirming personality, which he remained throughout his life.

David died on June 3, 2009, after a distinguished career as a poet and a teacher at Berkeley and Sonoma State University in Northern California.

He was known among the wide circle of his friends for his great personal warmth combined with a razor wit.

A Wikipedia article notes that "Bromige published thirty books, each one so different from the others as to seem to be the work of a different author."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bromige

A website created by his family contains reminiscences and comments about David's life from some of his many friends:

http://bromige.wordpress.com/

A selection of his work linked with some of his Canadian friends:

http://www.theeastvillage.com/tc/bromige/a.htm

Joanne Arnott: World Poetry Day 2009: Part 3

2009-06-03T18:20:00.000-07:00

"To tell the intimate, inside story of anything, to be relaxed enough to receive that story, to feel it completely, and to allow ourselves to be both affected by and motivated by what we have received, that is, in my view, the heart of poetry."

I put together a forty page collection, to send to a poet in Lebanon who was asking for forty pages of poetry from anyone in the world, and this was the title poem. I wove poems of love and despair, politics and yearning, to attempt to articulate an Aboriginal woman’s realm in a way that translates beyond culture: this needs a good edit, a few key poems are terribly flawed. Like myself, it’s a work in progress. Part of my progression has been to attempt to weave more, and more daringly—that is what I am reaching for, in the following poem. As I said, it is unfinished. But, to place more clearly my perspective on a poet’s place in the world, or at least, my own place as a poet in the world, I give you this: embodied awareness is the greatest gift.

If I am to receive or otherwise contemplate stories, like an immigrant man beheading an aboriginal man on a bus outside my home town—passing the very place I was taken and compelled to have sex when I was fifteen years old, among other hard-to-assimilate experiences— or the impact among four generations of people of a man stomping his wife to death with his work boots, if I am to assist writers who have these stories to tell and be a leader, a sane source of reference, in my own family, or my community, or my world, despite having been burned with cigarettes, locked in root cellars, beaten with a leather strap, and so on: and on and on: telling the truth is absolutely necessary.

Telling the truth also requires some delicacy, because brutality causes the human animal to withdraw into self-protection or to surge out to combat and defend against the incoming brutality: is it a poet’s job to recreate brutality? No, not in my view, but much depends upon what you intend your poetry to do. For one motivated by world repair, cherishing of the health of human being, the way is clear. Brutality must be broken down into elements that we can wholly understand. To tell the intimate, inside story of anything, to be relaxed enough to receive that story, to feel it completely, and to allow ourselves to be both affected by and motivated by what we have received, that is, in my view, the heart of poetry.

We can draw in metaphor and old stories of our own, or even of others, to articulate what it is on a dense feeling level we have become motivated to say, but we must remain true to the world. At the same time, we must gather whatever resources that we can, to make and keep our balance while walking in the world.

"...a slow and stupid evolution of how to go about telling my own truth, without sacrificing the privacy of others."

I have had over the years some (for me) wonderful conversations with Lee Maracle. One in particular stands out these days, a teaching received from her or (from another perspective) a point well-made: there are many different traditions, and we must choose with awareness those we want to cherish and bring forward and practise, and those that are best left behind us. The example that she used to illustrate this point was slavery, an indigenous west coast practise as well as a form of human relationship finding expression in many parts of the world. “Don’t be a slave, Joanne,” she said, and my uncomfortable world simply turned on its head.

I am still struggling to assimilate this; as a person of no value, what else is there for me to be? To offset the slave possibility, Lee offered a different tradition, “Honour the Position.” So, I have been practising that, in relation to the various positions that are mine to fill and fulfil, as well as those of others around me: able to perceive the value in the roles played, if still struggling with an underpinning effort to heal a base injury.

On my very first book, the writer Beth Brant told the world, I am a “truth-teller.” I have struggled with this in so many ways over the years—my own ignorance and confusion and lack of comprehension, weak theories evolved to explain half-understood situations, as well as family punishments, backlashes, screams of deep pain, in a slow and stupid evolution of how to go about telling my own truth, without sacrificing the privacy of others.

It has been a long journey. I cannot say that I am a truth-teller. I can say that I do strive to be, and that I do so from a humbled place, humble in the sense of having been taught, very young, that I am a person of no value, and in the sense of being a poor person in a wealthy land, and again, in the sense of a person with little arrogance: I have no need or desire to impose myself or my deep held beliefs and passionate opinions on others. What I have both needed and desired to do is to make sense of my world. My song arises as a part of that, and is both a dance of elation and pitiful struggle.

a night for the lady (shahrazad)
Dunyázad, free the world

my slave my slave my sister
leading me on by clever means to
better things
in a house
built of many rooms that spill
each one contained, conjoined, connected
altogether across the mountainside
through the riverbottomlands
deep in the wooded places
lost in the grass, covered
in the daily falling snow, hidden
in the shifting sands
dislocated
dissociated
linked
all along the backs of hands and minds
the living and the dead together sing
rhapsody
monody
poetry the whole world over
the whole world over
the whole world over, stories spill
and traverse the skins and permeate
our lives
the sound of the horses arriving at a run
the abrupt end of the scream that slashes
my heart
the rediscovered graves that now have sides
in human eyes
in human ears
in living minds
the concussions
of the bombs of the good

my slave my slave my sister
you who lead me on by
clever means
better things
await
a feast in the garden of our safekeeping
grandmother’s ancient laughter at
the timing of this
thanksgiving
transmission
via peaceful means
of the glory of
of the glory of
of the glory of
our human being

my slave my slave my sister
i wrap the fabric round and round and round
i learn the arts
of careful draping
how to balance the water on my head
with the snake on the ground
how to balance the fathers of sedna, kuan yin, ma tsu
with the guardians of the oceans of compassion
wherein you and i must swim and swim and swim
calling forth
the children of tomorrow
through these sacred slippery gateless gates
of self
the sweatdamp limbs
that part
allowing
this one into self
this one in a linked but separate migration
into the world
allowing
allowing
allowing
not captured not endangered not callously
overrun
not sundered by the sword of death
not split by the rulebearing knuckles
of angry brothers
not slashed with impunity, kill this
and you kill the community
not slit and stitched with
well-meaning fingers
not
not
not
just
called forth
called forth, beckoned
called into the delicious warmth
of safe harbour
safe journey begins by
surging out toward that which
calls us in
gathering gathering gathering
the nourishing harvest
of all that we love

my slave my slave my sister
stories age and figures shift
slave becomes sister
counsellor becomes queen
the rise and the fall of world-freer
dismissed to diminutive roles
half-forgotten
discounted
o
world-freer
remember
remember where you come from
remember upon whose body
you sup
remember the sound of her
heartbeat
and the deep thrilling peace
at the sound of her voice

my slave my slave my sister
mother of my heart
through all your many changes
there is none
none
more beautiful than you

Joanne Arnott, 21 March 2009

Images by permission of the artist, Christi Belcourt: http://www.belcourt.net/home.html

I Dreamt of Spiders In My Hair, Christi Belcourt, 2008

Bloodletting (does that make you more comfortable with who I am?) Christi Belcourt, 2008

Joanne Arnott: World Poetry Day 2009, Part 2

2009-05-27T08:25:00.000-07:00

I attended a reading recently in which two of the three performing poets stated, "when I say ‘our father,’ I don't mean mine." This accepted stance of poet as fiction writer, promulgator of artful lies, is very far from what i love about poetry. Vitality and truth are, for me, the main values in literature. Is this an effective vehicle for vitality and truth? This is the measure I use against stories that come my way, poetry made or received.

I travel the world (computer chair traveller, for the most part) for two reasons, out of curiosity, and to find succour.

Most of my research is driven by this need to find succour, from unbearable tension and pain, within myself, within my family, within my local community, within the world as a whole-- searching out stories and thoughts and ways of channelling information, that will allow for the truths of our worlds to become possible for us to assimilate, to damp down the poisons and poke holes in the walls, to open out into a safer space and a more empowered and nuanced embodiment of the world. I am alive, and in the world, and have an effect: that is about all that is for sure.

The motivation that i call curiosity is much more fun, but no more effective: the surging forth from my place, motivated by a powerful desire to know. This passionate, basic force of life leaping forth is the driving force behind much human creativity, and the dance between the two—passionate desire and dread, need for succour— familiar through all the ages of human storytelling and extant in all forms of human literature.

The title for the poem, "a night for the lady," i found on a poster for an event in honour of imprisoned Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, and the first poem that i wrote on it's basis is quite brief: weaving heroic lovers Sovann Macha and Hanuman from traditional Cambodian lore (and other Asian traditions) with a deceptively folksy quote by Iranian ex-pat author, Azar Nafisi, and a slip of conversation with (if I may use the term) my beau, articulating my emotional optimism in one of a long series of love poems in this way:

a night for the lady (building bridges)

I always had a hankering for the security of
impossible dreams.
Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran

sovann macha
& hanuman
diving for joy

began in opposition—
he charged with building
the bridge to lanka

she charged with keeping
the waters open
running free

do you feel pursued?
not nearly enough!

they say the chase is
better than the catch, but i
disagree

the two
blend

Image adapted from photograph by Margery H. Freeman at http://www.learnnc.org/lp/multimedia/2564

Richard Rathwell: Canadian and Other Psychic Waste Bins

2009-05-24T07:54:00.000-07:00

photo: Water Street, Vancouver, by John Ward-Leighton

North Americans are terrified by big ghosts and old monsters and I will tell you why. And I will tell you why Canadians are terrified in their own peculiar little way.

And I will tell you why they are frightened of Europe. But like school kids spit on the sidewalk and call names.

Europe in the North American narrative is a place that North America is not. It, with increasingly other places, is where waves of dissonant, victimized entrepreneurial people came and freed themselves from old cultures and class structures to make a new and popular, a more democratic world. Lights on the hill.

The new world was then partially by that myth justified in its new genocidal approaches to previous inhabitants, in its murderous settling of class issues, in its continuation of abhorrence elsewhere rejected as slavery and in its official culture and polis, its ethnic, humanitarian gaps, and, in the culture, its avoidance of philosophical discourse, replacing that with the discourse of experience and utility.

The locations in North America were mythologized differently than in Europe (and those elsewhere). This was done with a transcendentalism of place and with romantic genesis myths involving small and big capitalists, individualists, not heroes, pioneer bourgeois not those bad tribalists and feudalists. The new place became a mythic non-European wonderland free from the passive feudal and free from the bindings of old ideological discourse and selfish rapacious war.

While Europe struggled on with murderous ideologically justified actions to justify market monopolization through conquest, and the suppression of resistance to that, with the corrupt pontifications of political classes, North America developed a discourse in murderous social engineering to continuously re-invent economies it had established through the prolonged retention of slavery, through genocide, continuous war and primitive accumulation. And America did this less bothered by that intellectual resistance that developed in new Europe.

But North America concurrently developed a popular culture increasingly mannerist with depictions of abstractions in sex and violence and now today trivialized with extreme infantilisation based on a virtual universe of cultural and material consumption endlessly repeated with the tiresome litany, the official dissonance that each individual is a unique experience in a homogenous norm.

This cacophony embraces a counter industrial revolution to relocate lower classes in a dislocated world of debt and electronics where the more communication one has, even the more actual, even the more travel, the further one gets from reality, and the further you get away from the ruling class. The more humanity you have, the more you stay in your compound.

And so this now is a world haunted by the ghosts of the actual. And now a consciousness haunted by high cultures of old and the populaces that embraced them. Those from Seville to Angor Wat, Hermes Trismegistus to …..

In ‘Old Europe’ and old elsewheres, while popular culture was being built in North America to saturate the world, especially after the Second World War, to saturate it with a mass, secular, de-politicized consumer culture reflecting U.S. imperial interests, people went on, and intellectuals, artists included in that lives having a strong sense of duty to recover, recover for popular use, and transmit, high cultures, to make new, and continue discovering, including engaging in that of classical antiquity. Some Americans joined them, I know. But most simply developed characterizations and loutish derision.

The exploited classes of Europe including those who were rendered to America as surplus to the requirements of profit, surplus to a conquering polity or surplus to dominant thought, religion and race; those classes had considered critical and renewed access to high culture as liberating. They considered the avant garde of that as their own. The actual revolutionaries did too. The ones who weren’t entrepreneurs substituting themselves for the given political classes.

The workers’ educational associations, mass organizations, the lending libraries, the revolutionary cells sucked it up. The philosophers, the artists gained mass audience. The avant garde nearly always tried to wire that register to the popular. This is an old European thing. A discourse of art, not of stereotypical experience, and between intellectuals and the polis.

In North America instead the so-called avant garde never was, instead charlatans who romanticized the infantile and so infantilized and caricatured the experience of the public world of underclasses. Either that or became a service organization to the bourgeois elite. There was the workerist romanticism of the left, the niggerising of Black culture, the narrative cults of the rogue cop manager/individualist, the party girls of sexual mystery, the outlaws of fashion for ends of meaning, and on and on. Springsteen, Paris, Rappin Death Head Joe.

And wow! Does this create ghosts and monsters. From Poe to the Matrix and on and on, one flies from a scary, just distant, reality. From classical thought.

That is what you twitter about little ones.

In North America committed literature is committed to depiction of types and self. For co-option and consumption.

Art in general in N.A. proposes a disassociation of all spheres of experience, one from the other, each becoming a technical domain and non-convertible (or translatable) from one to another, severing all connections with their development, always in crisis, always instant, always personal to the stereotype. Even if that stereotype is presented as a developmental radicalism it is merely a recreation of the cartoon derivative. (I give you American Art and Picasso).

So among the ghosts (and the ones called to séances by North American academics to try and interpret what for them is gnomic mutterings to their own North American caricatures) , among the ghosts are Picasso and Rimbaud and foremost right now are such as Negi, and Heidegger, Benjamin, Marx. These the North Americans try to explain in terms of their own passive and resentful personal religious sensibilities and not as persons who meant cultural action. Who meant some kind of ferocity and freedom. Not a Peter Pan dress up.

Melville revealed a connection in The Confidence Man between deceit and commodity exchange. Now North Americans love to be deceived commodities, including the artists.

Writing is often fabliaux masquerading as realism. Novelli and plague tales, sparse but with all the blanks filled in for the reader. The sensibilities that were left to be created by Boccaccio and Dante are now supplied in the download package.

Life in discourse is parataxis.

The textual culture in general is no longer a translator's culture, because mono-culturally to the monoculturist that is just not worth doing when a précis for college purposes, a pastiche for a grant, is all that is necessary.

That series of notions is culturally a resurrection of the anti-Christ.

The notion of what a writer is, and does, is now confused with the car salesman or the singing cousin at the wedding. Popular culture becomes a persistent giddiness, nostalgic and stoic in the experiential banality of it all.

And this is what the counter revolution has become! Ekphasis!

The new dogmatics of banality, including the derived ideologists of capitalism and Communism find dynamism eternally foreign to their personal nations. Those that enter the apocalypse with a positive frame of mind towards their assumptions. Abstracting the abyss in their smugness. They rely on the notion of a vast imperial public, the masses, which is permanently submerged in the limpid pool of the narratives of incompetent and inarticulate elites. They see a populace permanently sleazy, stupid and far away.

No . Beyond a radical Gesamtkunstwerk, there will inevitably be passage, a derive, through the ambiances to a detournement.

Capital will be overthrown, and done culturally, especially where it has accumulated to the point where it is only cultural symbol and empty desire.

The psycho-geography will be unmapped and the world revealed. There will be in art a practice of life.

There will be culture where deletion of a poem, rejection of a poet, expulsion and imprisonment, rendition, will not be an attempt that thought and experience so that the person ceases to exist.

Because they won’t, will they?

Now back home.

Canadians are obviously embarrassed and oppressed by their diminutive culture of not being Americans, they are resentful, as the early American artists were by theirs of not being Europeans.

They are haunted by the reality that they have, with the rest of the settler colonies actually, repeated in new ways the worst of European thought and rejected the best, as they have done with other cultures. They suspect they have rejected the development of strategies to liberate that best thought. They suspect they are banal and this makes them silly.

They may wake up to discover they also have recreated the worst of European ideologies and practices and rejected the cures. The final coffin nail was hammered in by the national institutionalizing of banality. Education as socialization, health as maintenance of stupefaction for the workplace and bedroom, and universal commodification in the polis, art as pacification and the mythologizing of the stereotypical “nice” individual, usually done electrically.

Canada is a part of a new global city of Dis. It is static with genres froze to stereotypes, from fantasy not our own. Family dysfunction as horror, class and race dissonance as narrative, beginning middle and end as alternative justification of unformed identities, unresolvable conflicts changing, changing static.

And a derived from stories of minor gods but frozen, frozen. The popular is frozen. The modern is frozen.

The ghosts are reminders in memory and language that those who fled or were expelled from Europe and elsewhere, who were happy to be not European, who defined themselves as that, are now similar old European blockheads or worse.

You name it. Violent, war like, imperialist, oppressive, mystifiers, bread and circus dumb. Everyone a denizen of a world of trouble and pleasure that everyone else can understand. Each in their place. There is no other world. But will they ponder the thinking and art that engaged these things? That is, in Canada, quite literally illegal, and grounds for institutionalization, ostracism and all that sort of European stuff.

The only questions about existence are the officially sanctioned ones which is those one feels good about pondering because they are authorized. Similarly for art.

High culture is a cartoon. Not as it once was…. a revolution. An opposition to the bestialisation of the mind.

In Canada art itself is a delusion, something pretty and topical. The next thing. A heritage of freshly painted totems. A tradition of gibbering and sarcasm in philosophy, in writing, a coke machine. A way to be bad at the back of the class. A way to get laid. Something that for real, only assholes would do.

Canada, you are a new wasteland, tarsanded, pissing yourself, haunted by Gog and Magog, Anubis, Ourobouros, The Hanged Man. The New Things. Woooh. Grrrrr.

Bankelsanger: Genetic Factors Underlying Metrical Diseases

2009-05-21T11:52:00.000-07:00

There is currently great interest in the prospect of genomewide association studies (Starnino 2005) to identify the genetic factors underlying metrical diseases. To design genome-strings appropriate to the production of promising poetic prototypes for the isolation and treatment of invasive cognitive pathogens (Rogal, 2002), it is important to have a detailed description of linkage disequilibrium (LD) in the metrical genome (Barlow 1999). Information about the distribution and extent of LD is critical for (1) estimating how many test animals will be needed to achieve statistical significance in genomewide studies within deregulated literary laboratory settings as archivists and metrical mechanics abandon past models of human cognition exemplified by the often elaborately di The extent of LD is highly variable across the genome (e.g., bissett et al. 1998; Lane 2000 ; Braid. 2000), and the post-hominid determinants of LD are not yet fully understood (Domanski 2001 ). However, several recent empirical studies (Ondaatje, 2007) suggest that the seemingly complex patterns of LD among stem cell grafts between poets and their meta-selves can be represented as a series of "haplotype blocks" that is, consecutive sites that are in complete (or nearly complete) LD with each other (Robertson).

Images: U.S. Department of Energy Genome Programs: http://genomics.energy.gov

Terrence Loychuk: We live in an uncertain universe of unintended consequences

We live in an uncertain universe of unintended consequences. Early science drew it's power and influence from it's ability to predict through cause and effect. Newtonian physics could calculate and predict motion and position with enough precision to bring a measure of discipline to the art of war, previously elusive.Science would eventually erode all uncertainty from the natural order. Or so they thought, until quantum physics has put us firmly back into the age of superstition.

Schroedinger and Heisenberg created principles and experiments to explain the need for faith in the irrational. Although Schroedinger's cat is a diabolical paradox, fundamentally it is a challenge to the first law of logic that states that a proposition cannot be true and false at the same time. This is called the law of contradiction.

When Erwin put his cat in a box making it a character in a macabre medieval inquisition play, he was attempting to transcend the boundaries of animate and inanimate as well as illuminate the nature of uncertainty. Another approach is to use Heisenberg's Uncertainty principle as a metaphor for the human condition that forms out of choice.Heisenberg states that one cannot know both the position and the velocity of a particle or point at the same time. One can know one or the other, but never both simultaneously. So it is in the human condition. In defining oneself and forming his or her world view, one can take either the perspective of motion or of place, but never both at the same time.

I am a gypsy forever moving through life in my caravan and I will be happy to drop by and see you anytime. Or, I am in a particular fixed place or position, I have an address and you are welcome to come and see me anytime.This is a clear choice that each of us not only can make but does make. It is the fundamental premise of our interaction with the internal and external realities that contain and govern us.Would that it was so simple.

The law of contradiction is challenged every moment of our lives when we find ourselves struggling to find deeper meaning flowing out of our actions. Rarely is a problem or question simply one thing or another. Most times difficult decisions are made more difficult by the illusion that they are true and false at the same time, and breaking them down into separate manageable constituencies is the role of logic.

The universal success of the Leibnitz's binary system that produced the computer and made it accessible to humanity in general speaks to humankind’s comfortable natural sense of number being two. Now two isn't much but look what we have done with it.

Image: The philosopher's stone has the power to reconcile irreconcilable opposites by virtue of possessing the power of both (From the book The Golden Game: Achemical Engravings of the Seventeenth Century, by Stanislas Klossowski De Rola).

Richard Rathwell on Translation

2009-05-19T11:55:00.000-07:00

Translation or transliteration where another language appears into your own specific kind of English as islands do above a whitening torrent with dropping water levels. When you are on a boat in the dark. On a saint's day. Say the Nile. There's a bird.

There are places where the English spoken or written drops down below the regional or market level, that it drops below the colonial level, then below that of the historic language of those conquerors (a language which is used in the marketplace), below then that language of the traditional rulers.

That in turn can drop below the local language. Finally it may get to language the local group. You can have scrip and phonetically carried standardized languages drop below ideogram and tonal to polytonal and runic. The gestures change and the music of it.

Hear, for example, greetings which go on and on for a time to review a conciousness in which the words and sounds, in which the senses and the mind that deal with placing the other, the individual entity spoken too, only does so in a questioning of a series of family and tribal relationships, an inquiry into the regard to the events of the age grade (say the Leopards of the seventies), the weather.

It is in the form of imbedded parable. Not cliche like ours. It is formal and a story. It is a duet or chorus with answer. It can ask if you have eaten. Have you had water? It is event-centered, like Herodotus; it elicits time and place as parts of a communal narrative, a story of relationships with great dramatic fundamentals of divinity, health and death, marriage; with scandal, perversion and war; about food, geography, weapons, of unusual animals; about people.

It is usually in constructs of narrative energy charged with detail which deviate from a timeless, placeless norm of everyday. In Herodotus (and with some poets like him, some writers of prose like him) this is the thing called romancing or worse, lying. But it is meant to hold the essence of the meaning in the reality of things in the essential way. To project it so it can be received.

I taught poetry in English in places where the local language had no measures, for example, but rather images. A place wasn't miles away, it was an amount of landscape away. The number fifty-three (or so) was a body gesture of hands and legs and the word itself with it was of a grouping of crows with their sound.

Some languages seemed to me, some of the narratives in them seemed to me, remember I never spoke them of course- but I talked with the speakers, sometimes about poetry. Speakers who usually resented English. But not poetry. So I stress here that it seemed so to me (not to them); like the planes and surfaces that fragment and come together in mind and heart, for example, a cubist painting. In the ear in polyphonic music. The way meaning was held seemed like a kind of transferable genre. An objection. I am not the first to think so.

This feature came out in the writing too. Also with dancing and graphics.

The other thing in local languages that I tried to learn was a science of biological detail. Words for different movements of fish in rivers. Words too, on other natural things with gestures as the sound of the insects coming under the cloud from the mountain. Regional languages eliminate or reinforce certain attitudes in massive and complicated structures.

The tones change, the consonants shift. The tones make musical puns. There are twelve or more noun groupings with some known only to women, some to priests. One of the most common was, (if the language is dead or dying, an island in English drowned and only emerging to show the blackened trees covered in weeds), or perhaps still is, is that there were, or are noun groupings and tones for diminution. There was a hierarchy of disrespect and dehumanisation.

Some noun constructions were only for certain classes or the divine. Some for objects that were named in the conquering language that come from the local language, this was often types of birds or stone formations with special significance. The words that came into the regional language from the colonial one were often unaltered by suffix or prefix but sounded as an obscenity. Rocket, Tank.

Now for poetry, which besides being a way in which things can be said that can't be said any other way and so are more true (even if it lies); and is still yet more. The issue is to create the beauty of the true.

The issue is too to mirror content in the aural. Even if that is imagined. That is why there is rhyme, repetition, breathe; or going another way, why syntax. Some of it projects leaping from plane to plane, some sings broken songs on old melodies. The whole thing is a kind of translation from one experience into another.

I got some stick once on using gerunds and weak nouns to reflect things like rivers (but they do, they do, and rivers are a favorite thing) and got stick for an image of birds rising to reflect a dead papyrus, one I actually possess.

I got crap for oblique infinitives in indirect speech. Try rock songs assholes!

Not to mention other translations which were specific event centered, projected in images based on experience, fragmented to hold a feeling which ain't in the conventional.

Let the rivers drop and dry. The birds screeching will still swoop.

Specific examples of the languages I have referred to above (in order) are Jukuns, Hausa, Shona, Albanian, French.

I am thinking of specific poems and songs. Some unsung. Some unwritten. Can English be written like Herodotus did Greek (remember his second language was Illyrian his first was Tosk) ?

You can only try.

from Classic Mode: A Reverie by Gregg Simpson

2009-05-16T08:33:00.000-07:00

A tone poem using various locations
in Europe as 'found art'

The Dream of the Goddess

The Poet's Arrival

A Haunted Archway

In a Dream

The Abduction

Sentry

The Poet's Dream

The Prisoner

Surrealism in Deep Disguise

2009-05-16T08:31:00.000-07:00

A review of Gregg Simpson's Classic Mode: A Reverie, by Jamie Reid

“In the world’s structure, dream loosens individuality like a bad tooth.” (Walter Benjamin, 'Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia')

Vancouver-based artist Gregg Simpson composed Classic Mode: A Reverie as an “…homage to the spirit of classicism from ancient times to the nineteenth century.” Simpson says that the 44 starkly black and white photographs of classical European sculpture, taken by Simpson during several working vacations in Europe, “form a kind of tone poem using various locations in Europe as ‘found art.’”

On its apparently unruffled surface, the book presents itself as nothing more remarkable than a collection of 44 images of classical Western-European sculpture, photographed and published in black and white in deliberately archaic mode and style. But hidden beneath its apparently simple documentary surface, the book delivers a work of profound latter-day surrealism, cunningly disguised as a cheaply produced coffee-table “art book.”

Simpson first composed his photographs with the self-declared intention of ironically mimicking the old style of black and white art museum documentary photography. The resulting photographs became documentary in a special sense.

Each photograph represents an item of “aesthetic beauty”... a beautiful statue. And each in itself is an object of beauty,... a beautiful photograph. The two purposes merge together as in any conventional art book, and they completely fulfill the function of being documentary. But they also serve to bring out some surprising hidden sub-texts, and this is their real purpose.

First of all, these photographs are not images of statues already designated as the kind of “masterpieces” typically appearing in museum guide books or coffee table books. They are statues that have "escaped" previous documentation, part of the multitudinous cultural abundance that can be found in old Europe. They are mainly run-of-the-mill sculptures found in out-of-the-way places, which by some special magic of their own, captured Simpson’s imagination and aesthetic interest.

Each of them appears beautiful or intriguing in some way, each is invested with it own particular magic, supplied by its own inner aesthetic power and the magic of the setting in which Simpson has found it, surrounded by sylvan and pastoral atmospheres: water and vegetation, and sometimes the buildings and artifacts of modern cities.

Simpson has artfully managed to emphasize the magical character of the presence of each of these statues within their landscapes by his careful composition of the photographs so as to allow each sculptured figure its most powerful dramatic presence. The sculptures and the characters they represent seem to appear as living actors in the midst of the lush foliage and calm water or the urban landscapes they have already inhabited for generations or entire centuries. Together they play out a kind of grand formalized drama, but in a dream-like atmosphere, the "reverie" of Simpson's title.

Sometimes their appearance is laughably comic, sometimes it embraces pathos and sometimes terror and awe, but always with a sense of impending or suspended drama, of a mythological and archetypal narrative of gods, goddesses, poets and dreamers, unfolding from secret though powerful beginnings to equally mysterious endings, driven by deep and mysterious motives and desires, a slowly unfolding drama of human power and identity.

Because they cannot appear entirely as modern human beings, the statues carry with them the aura of antiquity, and yet of some still-living presence, struggling and suffering in the midst of being and becoming within the modern world we ourselves inhabit, somehow related to ourselves as living contemporary beings.

The statues themselves are often badly eroded and broken, missing limbs and appendages, covered with vegetable growth. At least two of the statues, one designated by Simpson’s title as a goddess and the other as a sentry, are completely headless. Broken, damaged and eroded as they appear, these statues continue to breathe life, seem to speak and move throughout the centuries, having found new places and new roles through Simpson’s creative work on them. The viewer feels again the mysterious pressure of that past, of ghosts long gone, yet still active in the human imagination.

This uncanny atmosphere was created by a painstaking process: having taken the photographs for his own documentary purposes, Simpson then set himself the task of re-arranging them in a semi-narrative order, breaking the historical order in which conventional treatments would normally place them, including the straight- jacket of his vacation timetable. By this creative intervention, Simpson succeeds in removing the sculptures from the confines of their historical contexts. He thereby instills the subjects of his photographs with a new, or rather, a renewed content. This new content sets up an amusing byplay with whatever meanings history and time have provided to the original statues.

By assigning each photograph a title completely of his own invention, Simpson succeeds in detaching each photograph from its precise place in history and the narrative of his own vacations. They are first decontextualized, and then, recontextualised by Simpson’s intervention, discovering, uncovering or inventing in this process an entirely new set of meanings, previously hidden, but full of drama and sudden portent.

The photographs were then slightly reworked through the hyper-modern means afforded by Photoshop, but without changing the actual content or the form of the images, altering only the brightness and contrast of the photographs, so as to provide a sense of a common emotional register among them within the context of the book.

The two processes of selection and arrangement have served to create and invent a happy surrealist conjunction of accident and design. The overall effect of the work is to induce a dreamlike state of classical calm disturbed by profound psychological undercurrents, including unresolved presentiments of terror, awe and power related to politics and human emotional and sexual relationships.

But behind it all again, another entire dimension appears, the derisive hoot at the pretensions of art and aesthetics that always echoes in Simpson’s ouevre from the influence of Surrealism and from Dada.

Robin Blaser: 18 May 1925 - 7 May 2009

2009-05-11T07:24:00.000-07:00

Robin Blaser and David Farwell

photograph by Carol Reid

the friend passing through the bedroom, the forest, the sea,
the city, the brown grass, the mountain, the fountain, the
friendship could hear the dream-talk - the garble - the
language withholding the words - the non-sense catch at
what he cried out of

from envoi, Charms

Joanne Arnott: World Poetry Day 2009: Part 1

2009-05-07T12:59:00.000-07:00

Doing presentations as an Aboriginal author in several high school and university classes recently, I have found myself mentioning Sumer, the oldest written works currently known, and Inana, whose visit to her sister in the Underworld (a resurrection story), and whose expressions of appreciation for her own ladyparts (vulva in particular), have long held fascination for me. I have tended not to go into detail, just felt a need to bring the existence of these ancient poetries, the pre-monotheistic underlay of modern Iraq, and its powerful representation of female divinity, to the attention of the students, in the context of a conversation about Canadian indigenous people and modern literatures.

In the last year I've researched many things. Careful study by some scholars of the approach of Buddhism to Tibet—two distinct entities now fused in the popular mind, as a result of subsequent history and cultural evolutions, and embodied in the voice and person of the current Dalai Lama —and the use of feng shui geomantic studies to capture and direct the energies of the earth for a successful colonization. The story of the Supine Demoness, and other features of the landscape, and the careful use of architectural placement of temples to redirect the flow of qi by capture of the native energies, binding them into new forms of cultural life, is another old story with deep resonance, in turning our gaze back to the landscapes of Canada.

I have read, more than anything else, many essays about the 1001 Nights, from its translation into native Hawai'an newspapers (there used to be many) to the oldest extant roots of itself. I have not been reading the stories themselves, so much as examining what is known about the stories, where some are told still in oral form, who translated them when, how this became the representation of Middle Eastern aesthetics in the West, and how accurately representative Middle Eastern scholars might feel it to be. In particular I have been interested in the frame story, the tale of the storyteller as healer and political force.

In recent months, cordel literature (string literature) of the Brazilian northeast, a living remnant of eurotraditions, the poor people's newspaper has been my focus: oral verse sung in markets, paper versions of the tales presented with woodcut illustrations and sold for a real. What current news and fantastic old tales are to be found in this living literature, how is this continuous tradition adapting to modern forms of both money-earning and the electronic circulation of poetic information.

If there is something that connects all of this, it is an imagined spectrum between the written on one hand and the oral on the other, and the experienced blend of the reality that exists between these points: and, a bisecting spectrum, the private uses of writing on the one hand, and the public uses of writing on the other, and all of the space between these, as well.

In the writing that I do, and that I like, the poet absorbs the world and attempts to put what has been absorbed back into the world: if you read this poem, if you listen with attention, if you open to receive it, then my experience may be carefully recreated within you, and that intimacy of samesame experience is our shared gift. Some call this perspective naive, marshal alternate conceptions of reality to argue against such human possibilities.

Stephen Owen, in writing about Chinese classical poetry for a western, modern, English-speaking audience, contrasts the “made world” of the west, where a God created the world and there it sits, and all the little creators upon it— artists of all kinds—make things, with the dynamic world of a Taoist perspective, in which each living being is a participant in a world creating itself, a dynamic being. Within this world, a living world, the making of a poem and the imbibing of the poet’s perspective is all very much a making, as opposed to a made thing: living interactions of worldmaking and ongoing creation.

We are all connected, a hum of living energies cascading through rock and water, voice and wind.

Joanne Arnott, 21 March 2009

Joanne Arnott is a poet and writer of Metis background, living and working in Richmond, British Columbia. Further parts of this essay will be posted at intervals on Schroedinger's Cat.

Illustrations:
Ishtar (Inanna) vase in the Louvre, photograph by Marie Lan-Nguyen/Wikipedia Commons
Wood engraving used to illustrate the cover of a cordel booklet
Image of Taoist poet and philosopher, Chuang Tsu

CZANDRA: ON VAGUENESS

2009-04-30T16:48:00.000-07:00

As between leaves the breeze,
Speaking with vagueness, with purity
Of the remembered and the forgotten
Who've become legendary with time.

Luis Cernuda El arpa Madrid 1937
trans. Marshall Hryciuk (Franklieocygnatra) To H.:

There’s a kind word for vagueness in this poem.

People almost always dismiss vagueness as

a weakness, an insidious thing.

I'm for vagueness.

I've realized that children love abstraction

and vagueness far more than adults do.

To be adult is to get down to brass tacks.

Kids love ideas.

Abstraction and vagueness are not the same.

Ideas tend to abstraction; some abstractions

are vague; some real things are vague; some

ideas are vague. Real vague things are great.

Vague ideas are not so, but can be useful

and slippery; vague abstractions

may be all we've got.

For example, what are you doing out of bed at this hour?

is a pretty non-vague question, but its answer

is probably threaded through vaguenesses

we don't explore too carefully

like the nature of the time difference between us,

the unclear reasons why

we're still up on this full-moon night.

I guess most ideas are vague at their inception, and

become clearer, sometimes to their detriment.

Ideas about real things is what we are concerned with,

and we do it in very different ways - I tend to work through

abstraction and representation, while you find the metal in

the heart and lay it on the table for all to see.

Richard writes of “the sacred not paralyzingly contained”:

here’s some further thinking about vagueness and occulting,

upon which I will pontificake here:

Vague: French for "wave".

insight comes in waves.

people get frustrated, resentful sometimes

if you send them one wave

and it's not followed by any others

so they can come to attention,

and get the wavelength.

They have already to have been attentive.

to challenge a reader to set (his/her) own wavelength

on the basis of your initial impulse-wave

is not reasonable.

waves issue out of the occult.

The occult is that which is not visible, not ocular.

People think when something is vague, it's because

you're engaged in subterfuge, in occulting.

It's the opposite.

You're engaged in unveiling,

but it happens in waves,

and the waves are often singular.

Sometimes they get followed up later.

Why should anyone take an interest in a single wave?

Because often it carries all the information

of the frequency bundled in itself.

This is just physics,and simple

(but very incisive) observation.

What makes an incisive observation?

The ability to stop time.

The illusion of the passage of time

is a deliberate device we have imposed on ourselves,

whose side-effect is to occult individual moments.

Training allows a person to isolate moments.

A poet may isolate moments,

then attempt to reproduce

them for the reader by providing a wave.

This takes skill because to make the wave un-wavelike

(not vague), requires repeating the wave

as if it were not frozen in time, but the same wave repeating.

This is not the nature of what lies

veiled in the occult, it’s just a simulation.

We can simulate wave activity by asking questions,

as above.

That's all for now. It's vague, but it's the best I can do today.

Czandra

BANKELSANGER

2009-04-30T10:33:00.000-07:00

Nature is being re-dreamed as a non-human space.

Wilderness is being re-dreamed as nature.

Nature is being dreamed of as landscape photography.

Human kind is being re-dreamed as machinery.

Cities are being re-dreamed as ruins.

Surfaces are being re-dreamed as depths.

Rural communities are being re-dreamed as urban ones, but rural communities are not allowed to dream of urban communities or to re-dream urban communities.

Reading is being re-dreamed as writing.

Writing is being re-dreamed as reading.

Well, that's just a tiny start. Is that what you had in mind?

bankelsanger is the pseudonym of a poet now

living on Vancouver Island.

2009-04-30T10:17:00.000-07:00

So ...SoS, NOT YES!

Yes!, to the no on the popular and social processions of conditioned response in official superstructure. The socially associative canon. The commercial of the Banalistan. The Phalanx of the orthodox. That imaginative impediment which sucks out the poetry from the real. That which must be resisted.

Richard Rathwell

Saul Joseph: three photographs of Joe Rosenblatt

2009-04-30T10:14:00.000-07:00

The young photographer and mountaineer, Saul Joseph, is currently studying geography in Victoria, British Columbia.

Poet, essayist and painter Joe Rosenblatt is a national treasure living in Qualicum Beach on Vancouver Island, British Columbia.

Joe Rosenblatt: 10 poems, 3 graphics

2009-04-30T10:13:00.000-07:00

This Forest
Immured inside a gauzy dream.
I slept upon a gossamer of blood.
finding solace in the stillness there.

These woods have pensive eyes
for the sunny pilgrim on a nature trail
idly spinning an arboreal meditation.

Within my web I heard a cry
yet it wasn’t me who bled.
but the Maker of that bed.

The Boat

This is not just some passing fishing boat
Forget the chrome, those screaming colours
Powered by a weighty testicular engine,
this craft bubbling with smoky testosterone,

I want to take this machine out for a joy ride.
They’ll be three of us onboard: myself, my soul, and a bottle of rum:
I’ll carry no lethal fishing rod or line
to jig for salmon, rockfish, lingcod, or flatfish
their teensy harlequin’s mouth whispering
vacuuming a prayer for grub, stirring up sand and sediment.
I’m not an angler, just a thoughtful pilgrim

Water

I am a meandering body of spirited water
Carrying minnows of fleeting thought
Stranger, your artificial flies have no sex appeal.

For what I perceive are emaciated wings
and laughable torsos shamelessly floating;
Select a few meaty voluptuaries dressed in gold
From your wicker basket, cast them out to me!

Starved for iridescence seasoned by a piquant musk
A larvae- fed soul cries: ‘See, there’s my appetite caught on a riffle;
Fetch it quickly lest it be mistaken for a waltzing stonefly
and vaporized by some mottled nibbling phantom.’

Striding in leaden hip waders, evening fast approaches
Wearing the sky for a hat bedazzled with baubles.
He’s there to encircle us all in a wide invisible net
Not his guests, we’re that meal served on a misty table

Kirkby’s Sky

Hello, infinite robin-blue cloudless personality.
The face is pristinely familiar, have we met before?
Mister Sky, you’re a lake concealing troutly eyes:
They’ll be no gurgling outboard engine to spook
those iridescent fish I want to catch and release.

I fancy a snuggly boat with oars for me and my soul.
I want to drift around awhile and maybe cast
some sunny dry overdressed artificial fly
with transparent angelic wings: it’ll stay afloat.
Hey, I see a riffle: I’ll cast in that direction

to entice some passing nibbly speckled phantom.
I think I’ll tie my tired soul to that floating leader.
And try a double loop of a cast out to God.
Or maybe I’ll wait awhile and just keep drifting?
You Cast a Fearful Shadow

Ken, the salmon fold their fins in prayer.
You cast a fearful shadow on the water.
Do they hear the whirl of an angry reel
while nibbling out your name in code?

All that glitters is not food for fish.
The net of eternity catches them and us.
But what Fisher then is steering our boat
through the sexy nebulae and wafting mist?

In the bigger picture we’re all swimmers
gyrating above a sunless ballroom floor
squirming and turning in a flammable waltz
Never accept a gift from a passing stranger

above the waterline. Pity the dazzling catch
kissed by famished hooks, barbed and pointy!

Nature Naturing

Leering in heat and tangled in foliage
She has set up a canvas on an easel.
Nature Naturing views Ken as a tree,
wild and leafy with viridescent libido.
Nature can think, but can she paint?

Attired in bark, he feels suddenly vulnerable.
“Who’s the damned painter here,” he screams
“Paint me thin, not fat! go organic, use
Your natural turpentine: now thin me out;
look, there’s a lot of wall space to work from
and another thing: I want more leafage and shadow!”

Ken finds its comforting to know
Adjoining trees shield him with their branches
providing brambles of muted anonymity.
He’s not alone, but can he handle that compression?
Wielding a brush, a Mother’s love can be asphyxiating!

Predator

Affixed on an artist completing a sketch
a steely emperor on the highest branch stirs

as from a partially-eaten dream, to fit
a curious repast inside a basaltic gaze.

Talons ready, he’ll swoop down, seize
what he’s mistaken for scrumptious quarry

And like some warrior god , he’ll swiftly jet
skyward to a nest filled with fragmentary bones;

Yet Ken keeps on sketching that statuary bird
who sketches him in the carborundum silence.

Hello, Mister Lonely

Immured in minutiae of exacting brushwork on canvas
the mottled rocks on the beach seem funereally silent
having endured the ennui that comes with galactic muteness.
“I want to put all of you in the bigger post-volcanic picture.”
Ken wants to include an adjoining pebbly multitude born of the Blast.
“Hello, Mister Lonely,” whisper their sub visible metamorphic mouths.
“Back again are you, to capture our parched dry symmetry?”
Ken ignores his subjects, best to let a sleeping stone lie . . .
“Say, can you bring the lake over to us—we haven’t had a drop in ages.
“There’s too many of you ---I’ll bring the lake over to you in my painting.
Now don’t move, I want to capture the sunlight spilling on you.”

Silence is an Animal

Ken is familiar with the silence which stares back at him
on the canvas, the oblong shadow moving in the water
at mid afternoon, the eagle resting in the tree silently
contemplating a plat d’ jour, what is available, what stirs
noiselessly in a shrub, and then Ken, metaphysically edible
if he can swooped up by a thunderous god to his nest.
I’m reminded of a pterodactyl, and how the Mighty have fallen.
The silence is a tense animal speaking to speechless Ken
honoured to be observed by that lovely feathered Messenger
who is a carnivorous painter in his own unforgiving kingdom
painting in blood on his boundless canvas of sky and earth.
You are being keenly painted in minutiae, don’t look back.
He can smell droplets of fear --- you are on canvas--- in the air.

Solitude

Out for a thrill, wanting to romp with sunlight
a poodle -cumulus is off its leash in the sky
adrift above a mountain lake, so placidly still
as to appear asleep in some darkened cradle
where tranquility arises as disembodied mist.

Congealing spirits wander over to a solitary figure
on shore, visiting a tableau vivant forming on canvas.
Is that painter aware of an immeasurable loneliness
in a cloud famished for a dab of sunflower-yellow?

You put the stillness on a leash to meet other ghosts
who peregrinate with other drifters inside a painting
Solitude is a friend you take out for a casual stroll.

The Bird in the Stillness is Waiting

The bird in the Stillness is waiting.
Talons honed to make the kill
and fly on a jet stream toward Oblivion
where there’s no streaming light
except for the shining in a bird’s terrible eyes.

Have you come for me, downy messenger?
This must be a dream that I’m staring in
where a bird in the stillness is waiting.

Feathers bristling, a song from hell
shrilling from its vibrant beak . . .

Yet I’m not ready to fly with you.