I’ve been going through that, generating poems in this wild bit of heat and storm we find ourselves in, within a side of vertigo (to go soon I hope).
One of her prompts was take a rough draft and translate it. The overall theme of chapbook to keep in mind is “Add a warrior to it” as feedback she got once.
I searched files of poem drafts for July, and found an underwhelming poem in July 2021. Aha. A basic, I-am-bored-and-nothing-is-happening interstitial self-indulgent poem.
the white noise
between stations
of the b&w tv smaller
then a tablet screen
halfway between
two shows listening
to both. the snow
in mid-summer
a cooling focus
from the fly buzz
It’s been a while since I did homophonic translation. Machine translation is too good and too AI to be useful for adding the chaos factor but I can work more from ear.
So I then subject it to pretending what I’m hearing and transcribing sound by sound is a muffled French. See if I can “overhear” anything vivid.
des whitérite noix
et patin stations
odeur baver sur des evenements à smala
dans un tabletter screau
il y as un oui beton
tu as choisis… les quoi? tiens, et
deux boits. les nons
sont fais à midi, et ses meres
as culé, focus
pomme de poing, il s’est fait flinguer
Then I translate back to English and see if I can take this randomness and reassemble towards sense.
meteorites, beer-nuts and bench rest stations
we are tourists in our own lives. may as well order the Beavertail. the scent of our tribe at events is sour as unwashed sheets, skunk sunk into the skin. we hover each other’s shoulders like dragonflies, protecting against deer flies that draw blood.
we drool over a tablet, its five-left-sealed apocalypse. we fall to kiss the ground as if it were a yes in concrete as if bumps on manhole covers were nipples of a Celtic king to suck and pledge our fealty.
you chose yours, and drinks for two others. the nos will come at noon with our mother’s dead-end focus. an apple of a gist will get thrown. tossed back until it is brown pieces. the tempting trees are sure they are tornado’s match.
So now although it is language-as-material-based content, it feels more distinctive and alive than the original. We have multiple people and interaction instead of poet-is-solitude-trope. We have particulars and actions. We have relationships to the world and to each other. It is less predictable. You don’t know where the poem is going when you start any given line. It travels. It is more of a wake up exercise but it pleases me now.
There’s a certain inflexibility to a mind that replies with quotes, cited rules. But.
An antiquarian bookshop, Ageless Literature, posted about the cultural value of memorizing. The act internalizes a rhythm. Its breath becomes yours, and by repetition, you understand it more intimately. You can continue to access what is memorized and it can access you.
Ageless Literature, shared,
The Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi argued that the default state of the human mind is not calm but chaos: anxiety, rumination, and distraction fill any silence the mind is left in. He called this psychic entropy.
A memorized poem gives the mind somewhere to go in those silences. It is one of the few activities you can do anywhere, with no equipment, to bring a restless mind back to order.
If you are stressed, you may want to ground yourself instead of building up to more angry or scared.
How? The funny thing is: the function matters, not the content. The act of focussing does the same thing. A head can’t spiral, panic, let an emotional tornado build in a box that small. It’s a sort of automatic sheepdog of the mind for the mind.
Count ceiling tiles, or calculate number of people in the room, or work out the next numbers of Pi, recite a favourite poem, or calming mantra, or recall a Koran or Bible verse, work out a new poem, throw yourself into woodworking to do something that absorbs attention, cook something hard. Or rehearse a worst case dialogue you’ve done a dozen or hundred times. Siphon off extra cognitive space that allows for rattle stuff the brain tight.
The anchoring touchstone can be memorization or making. It is a scaffolding when there is only a blinding disorienting chaos. Make something: set to rhythm the Lord’s Prayer: our FAther who ART in HEAven, HALLowed be thy NAME. Make a song set to the yellow rose of Texas: the YELLow ROSE of TEXas, she KNOWS the DUES I’ve PAID. Or infill a line, keeping the rhymes from any sonnet, the points of structure and pivot.
In other words, keep busy. All things pass. Some too slowly like a certain person’s government position..
I said I’d mention when a post went up about haiku community. It took me a week-long minute. But that’s up to the plasticity of time, isn’t it?
I’m doing very well on my to-do lists, measured by the one of mid-May. June, well, progressing.
I think of spring, but also summer. The sheer amount of birdsong is stunning. Last night fireflies all across the grass. If you think Mother Earth is scorched earth, try not weeding a garden. It rebounds.
Summer gives a different quality of pause than winter. Winter feels heavy and tight-lipped. Summer doesn’t try to kill you. Unless you’re in the UK or France at the moment.
Summer you can just be and not do do do to stay warm.
I had to restart my computer which was grinding to a half with all the apps and all the windows open. Alas, I was using all of those, in a longitudinal sense.
I’ll have to backtrack and figure out what was open. Also marked up pdfs of books being reviewed were not saved. I had to reread anyway. Small annoyance.
I’m remaking the chapbooks, in a small way, reprinting a page where I mis-pasted attribution of a poem.
I reprint, re-trim, refold, and reinsert. (Thank goodness I stapled and not sewed.)
Not too many went out yet, and from demand, looks like another print run anyway so not Done-done. e-copy sent to Library and Archive Canada. I’ll send ones out to contests.
All day I feel tired then the lights go out and I’m finally wired awake, more clear and alert than all day.
In order to sleep, I count things sometimes. Sometimes if I’ve seen a movie, I count iterations of something. Say, how many cars, or horses, or hats, or whatever and try to find one instance only of a hat, and two instances of horses, etc.
The other night I tried to bore myself to sleep with composing haiku and doing editing cycles. Another night, an abecedarian list of things in the room, moving outwards away from the bed. Listing fruit alphabetically in French.
One night I listed things I volunteer at. The number of things has crept back up. I’m not director, or president or main organizer of any organization any more. I don’t organize workshop series any more. I don’t host a radio show nor am a treasurer or on a board. I don’t do a cooking column anymore, nor do I maintain a dozen daily blogs. (It’s basically 3 and, some not even so much as weekly.)
It’s a sign of concussion recovery that I can read, write, edit, move and do more. It’s a second chance at life. I didn’t expect recovery. I accepted, this is me now I guess. These are my limits. And there on the far side of the parking lot is the chalk line I drew of all the things I want.
Over at Instagram KJ Dorman said,
“you’ve spent years thinking in short distances…and now you get to ask a new question. what do I do with all this future?”
I have spent lifetimes waiting for Armageddon. Literally going to bed since grade 4 expecting the 2nd Coming before I wake. Wake to normal and expect it before noon. Not afternoon, maybe at supper. And so on. Continue for a decade. Or so.
Fast-forward. Transition towards agnosticism, then atheism but still the waiting for the other shoe to disastrously drop and lose everything and everyone. (While being both depressed and pessimist and optimist all in different corridors of my brain. And mind-zipping around at over-sugared, overpressured and probably ADHDed)
Waiting to be abandoned. Turned out of home. If not by people, then by natural disasters. To be killed in traffic. Practicing ambidextrousness because I was sure I’d lose, or lose use of, an arm. The game of relying only on my ears for when I lose my eyes, On my eyes for when I lose my hearing. Hyper-vigilance that won’t step down. Panic attacks. Migraines. Exhaustion. Brittle cheer.
Assuming everyone was living the same in parallel so be kind to everyone because anyone is liable to nuclear meltdown at any minute. Kind of like when little girl in Amelie movie believing she was causing traffic accidents because the mean old man said it was all her doing.
Because extended family that I saw was rather high in the dysfunction level. It was healthy to be on alert. It was safe. There were a lot of hot heads, bullies and predators. I got out of that god-foraken place as quickly as I was capable. I did what I could. For the body to understand it is safe takes time.
Even with rife evidence that I am not in danger, my body has its habits of stance. The sense of security was mistaken in the past; danger would jump out at any innocuous moment. I learned, wisely, not to trust anyone to have my back, for then. But this is now.
When that relented, when I wasn’t under constant pressure of survival, it was easier to assess danger, and gradients, and options, and feel on equal footing.
I shed people consciously, twenty years ago, who did not respect me or my boundaries or enjoy my company. I made a list, spreadsheets, graphs. Okay, maybe not that much but I was clearly critical of outcomes and input. I twigged that I may have agency and maybe be feeding cycles. I learned to talk and walk differently. To take the floor, to not cede proactively.
I learned to signal I am not a good mark to steal from, use, take advantage of. I am not infinitely patient and a sucker. The people wandered off looking for easier targets. A little willingness to be right backatcha is good. I don’t have to sponge any overflow of stress of people. I can set boundaries. I can let things flow off, around. I can walk. I don’t have to be sorry to earn not being blamed.
Community is made by people who are happy to see you and who you are happy to see. Then there are incidental people who are attached to core community.
I want to build a world that connects, supports, helps each become the best person they may become.
Changing the rules I give myself, I have the spoons to listen better. To see patterns dispassionately. To choose rather than be carried downstream, reactive and melting down into the whitewater.
To return to that quote. If I could do anything, and if I can, what do I want? What have I turned down before I could be refused? What did I not dare want or expect? What have I settled for when actually I could have x instead?
I have traditionally wanted only to be helper, to facilitate, to be background support, to keep things running, to be anonymous. Part of that is internalized vestiges of Christianity that if you get any credit on earth that is deducted from possibly heavenly rewards. You have to do good secretly or it’s like a demerit. No praise, less that attract hated or jealously or pride. Some of these sub-routines are still running unchecked within me.
If I am allowed to want things, big things, beyond the next meal, or a good rest, what would I want? What is in my control? What can I go after?
I do like to pitch in. I volunteer at Rupert Treasures, sorting donated clothes, while the charity shop is closed. I like the small number of people, the hands-on work, the comedy and tragedy of what people donate, the stories is generates.
At the library at front desk on an irregular pattern. I like being around books.
I volunteer as one of the moderators on FB of Ottawa poets and writers. I say I don’t do event photography anymore, but I do tend to log the odd event now and then and promote upcoming things. As a review editor at Shorōyan and at Haiku Canada Review. I’m a first reader at Arc Poetry Magazine. I am a publisher at phafours. I like to promote, encourage, and assist writers.
I blog here, obviously and at Substack and occasionally Patreon and at other venues. I like to think.
I tweet for Haiku Canada. I coordinate the Betty Drevniok contest. I do book reviews for various places. I guess since I lose money at it, I can say I volunteer to write poetry? I am on hand at the gliding club as a runner, making myself useful running wing, or the golf cart, or doing flight sheets, or providing tours or dessert. I like to unite people. I like to connect people, introduce people to people or information or ideas to people who seek that information. I like to work with words, obviously, that’s a constant. And by computers more than in person. I like quiet. I like making.
It might collectively suggest how I don’t get the big writing projects pursued to the nth degree.
is writing books what I want or is that a route to what I want? Which would be what? Which is means? Which is ends? What would purposeful look like? How would worthwhile be measured?
Too big of questions to chew at once. But asking them is a start. There’s a depth to explore.
Another fair wrapped. Next Nov 14th, back at the Tom Brown Arena. I didn’t try to talk to everyone, or man the table every minute, nor did I get to every table I intended, getting caught up in conversations, but it’s all good.
I finished the first printing of Mono at 52 copies and sold a bunch. So that was nice. Last year I barely covered the cost of the table. This year was more normal, just under $300 sold from everything and a whack of new books and chapbooks to read.
New chapbooks:T, W & O(Puddles of Sky Press, 2026) from Michael e. Casteels delivered at the fair. Sold a handful of those, pictured below.
I made another printing of last fall’s Crime and Ornament since it sold out last year, but this time with trimmed pages and staple binding.
I am at a loss of how to get these images to display in any orderly fashion but here’s a couple crowd shots. Since one vendor said I photograph him each year in time lapse until he dies, I’ve been more hesitant to rigorously catalogue all the regulars.
Can’t seem to get text between photos or captions, heaven or WordPress help me, but there’s a phafours author, Tamsym, dropping by, and Sonya with a photo op of buying the first copy of Mono. And the bottom one is Luminita and I sharing a table. She brought her tanka and haiku books and her cards she made.
If you cannot afford, or cannot wait, an ebook version of Mono is at digitally yours.
Last Monday I started collecting leaves and testing designs. I have a post about the earlier stage of inking for making the chapbook covers at the Ottawa small press almanac… The chapbook is coming out on Saturday June 20th at the small press fair. (Another post is coming elsewhere Sunday afternoon about haiku. I’ll let you know.)
Assembly was greatly sped up once the two hour search for my long-armed stapler turned it up, right by the Christmas wrap, which makes a sort of retroactive sense since I last used it in December.
The first dozen are done-done. The print run I’m aiming for is 51. (Printer keeps overheating so plodding along).
It really helps to have page numbers and the numbered mock up to make sure pages go in the right order, and the cheat sheet of what size to do page and cover trimming. Trimming’s not so bad once you get into the production-line rhythm.
You can see some detail inside. One monoku per page on tent folded chapbook. An inner translucent sheet to add a little something. Overall, chic, clean, and elegant I think. And with some fabulous poems by haikuist doing one-line wonders.
Antoinette Cheung
Claudia Coutu Radmore
Chuck Brickley
Dorothy Mahoney
Ellen Cooper
Hifsa Ashraf
Jim Kacian
kjmunro
LeRoy Gorman
Marshall Hryciuk
Maxianne Berger
Michael Dylan Welch
Michael Dudley
Mike Montreuil
Pamela Cooper
Roland Packer
Afternoon of Saturday, June 20, 2026 in the Main Hall of the Glebe Community Centre, 175 Third Avenue (at Lyon St. S), Ottawa. Come see it and all the other literary goodies on offer.
Or, by, you know, email to order, bumping into me, luck. Contributor copies in the mail soon. (Waiting on a few addresses.)
