samedi 17 décembre 2016

Paper Reunion: Eye catching poetry and come-on cars!


Berg, Sharon. (Ed.) (2016). Paper Reunion: an anthology of Phoenix a poet’s workshop (1976-1986). Sarnia: Big Pond Rumours Press. ISBN 978-0-9780201-6-3

Paper Reunion is a rich eye-catching anthology of poems and narratives from Ontario’s seasoned writers, and well-worth a trip down Ontario’s literary lane.
Big Pond Rumours Press editor, Sharon Berg, of Sarnia, has assembled a cast of writers out of the well-known Phoenix Workshop. Berg’s own glittery lines and sexual graveyard of automobiles evoke Ontario’s James Reaney’s ‘cars with ruby red behinds’:
“But starlight gathered like silver
across those wasted bodies in the yard.
The cars were our fathers’ dreams,
a harem of submissive curves
in midnight blue or a red dangerous as
putting it all into a woman they wanted
on the tarmac, foot to the floor.” (Berg, p. 14)

Envisioning the 1960s men using their unrequited energy to fuel the reconstruction of a ‘midnight blue’ or red car with ‘submissive’ curves, so eloquently captures the trapped lives of the husbands in her lines. Their physical exhaustion used for the re-capture of lost love:
“We have both stepped in and out of our bodies
with our arms crooked for love.” (Berg, p. 15)

Similarly, Marja Jacobs’ ‘Fifty-five socks’ (p.24) is one of several working narratives, and this one, I thought, was particularly appropriate at Christmas, and in this world of global migration. It captures beautifully the incredible resilience of newcomers over poverty. Set in rural war-time Ontario, the ballad details a mother re-knitting, and then selling, her bridal bedspread into 55 socks to sell for wheat and eggs, all that her family must live off of for the Winter months in her new country. This poem alone could be Ontario’s, “Gift of the Magi”.

As writers, we go to other worlds, and make connections with the smallest of fields, to produce our craft. Julie McNeill’s ‘The Paper Flag of the Poet’ provides a marvellous metaphor for the poem, and its “first line/an invisible passport/ into the country of our loyalties.” (McNeill, p.31) Writers like the Phoenix group in Paper Reunion are the cruise ships to foreign borders. No, you don’t need a passport to travel there, but isn’t it wonderful that, in this world of super-speed headlines:
“Some languages are never foreign
linked by subtle rhythms
the long lines dancing with the short,

stanza break and pause.” (McNeill, p.31) ?

mercredi 7 septembre 2016

Heat

It’s ten the bells say, but my eyes will not open.
Sluggish, lugubrious steps
Not ‘slow’;
that is too fast for me.   Leeeeentemeeeeent
Lentement.
Lendemain?
The fly happy in his 40C state
dances around my giant
Bulbous grave of a head.
His
   blood
     speeds.
Mine thickens like wet rolled tar in July.
A frog whose heart beat in Winter
Can only beat once.
Must conserve.

Must get through.

jeudi 11 août 2016

I Walk the Hypersurface (of artist Leonard Jubenville's 'Searching for NOW')

I Walk the Hypersurface
At the occasion of artist Leonard Jubenville’s exhibit, “Searching for Now” (August 11, 2016)


At 16, my life existed in 2-Dimensions.
like a caterpillar crawling one side of the milkweed,
or King Ferdinand walking his flat earth.
Being was just what I could see:
this or that,
here or there –
a standstill of absolutes.

At 36, the 3-Dimensions of my life’s loves,
the new-born atoms of my family,
triggered blood-tie ripples into the world,
each particle concurrently connecting
to the wondrous change I wrought.

At 66, I stand in this 4-Dimensional
hypersurface
absorbing all
the reverberations of
those earlier epochs.

Powerless to change what’s arose;
begun anew:
Art, Babies, Baking, Creating, Crops, Cycles,
Death, Dramas, Families, Friendships, gods
Grandmothers, Heartaches, Houses,
Loves, Lusts, Marriages, Moments, Paintings, Pies,
Seasons, Sex, Sensations, Space, Times, Worlds
The Alpha to Omega of my co-existing
16-36-66-continuum travels
with me
in me
here

NOW.

samedi 16 juillet 2016

Melanie Morgana (the opening for Montréal artist Melanie Authier's exhibition, 'Contrarieties & Counterpoints')

Melanie Morgana
For the opening of Montréal artist Melanie Authier’s exhibition, “Contrarieties & Counterpoints” (July 16, 2016)

The Artist works her sacred magic
inside crystal caves.
Wands of flat brushes wave
ink of elderberry and linden;
angelica and jasmine upon
her transparent sheet.

Inks twist and fold,
dancing beneath the Artist’s spinning
light, up and over each
other across and through
the page. The cool colours
and patterned dancers
recede into the steps as
their warm, solid partners
spiral forward.

The movement leaps and
jumps around the altar as the
colours search for their counter
points and partners across the
cave’s centre.

Only White is the Artist’s
Résistance: the antagonist
to all her colours. White
blurs the horizon, coming
forward even when all
energies strive to keep it
back:
The only dissident in a room of

unified magical ground seekers.


Change (At the occasion of artist Becky Fixter’s exhibition, “Impermanence” (July 16, 2016))

Change
At the occasion of artist Becky Fixter’s exhibition, “Impermanence (July 16, 2016)

1. Shift the colours on your page;
and softly coax your reds and purples,
that have concealed themselves
for years beneath
the permanent seams of this life.
Touch them. Glow them. Let their souls
 emerge, and alter your course.

2. Click the innate lights within,
those ancient synapses of the girl
you once were, and still can be.
Flick on that insight in your world,
firing up the lost electricity.

3. Drift to the forgiving music of
the earth, the oregano greens
springing to reach the hanging
cloudy whites in your air of un
certainty.

4. Freefall through puffs of colour:
down through smoke rings of rose,
lilac, snowdrop and pussy willow
grey rising from the primal pipe of
Persephone.

5. Even after years of dark hibernation,
it only takes the flux of alert female
foresight to snap those wandering
fraying fragments of the self into

the authentic route of your path.

(Chatham Artist Becky Fixter)

Change (At the occasion of artist Becky Fixter’s exhibition, “Impermanence” (July 16, 2016))

Change
At the occasion of artist Becky Fixter’s exhibition, “Impermanence (July 16, 2016)

1. Shift the colours on your page;
and softly coax your reds and purples,
that have concealed themselves
for years beneath
the permanent seams of this life.
Touch them. Glow them. Let their souls
 emerge, and alter your course.

2. Click the innate lights within,
those ancient synapses of the girl
you once were, and still can be.
Flick on that insight in your world,
firing up the lost electricity.

3. Drift to the forgiving music of
the earth, the oregano greens
springing to reach the hanging
cloudy whites in your air of un
certainty.

4. Freefall through puffs of colour:
down through smoke rings of rose,
lilac, snowdrop and pussy willow
grey rising from the primal pipe of
Persephone.

5. Even after years of dark hibernation,
it only takes the flux of alert female
foresight to snap those wandering
fraying fragments of the self into

the authentic route of your path.

(Chatham Artist Becky Fixter)