mandate expansion

This journal is languishing with my only putting up the subset of poems that I wrote which are not dreck, which may be of interest to others and yet cannot be sent to market immediately.

Therefore I’m going to pad. ahem, that is expand my mandate.

The thought is I will include what poetry I’m reading, perhaps even what lit I’m reading generally and thoughts on that. Not to take it to the extreme of book discussions or literature reviews. Heaven forbid my making that much work for myself. We’ll see how it goes.

At the moment my head is reeling (in a good way) from the books I picked up at Baico books.

Since I should decompress after an exciting hockey game, poetry isn’t any better than chocolate for the need of the hour but if we stuck only to needs and excluded desires, whereever would we be.

I really should be asleep for an early start tomorrow, I’ll only mention this topmost thought:

Letters on Birchbark are poems of Quebecois writer Uta Regoli in translation by Henry Beissel which have the inner sing of walking deep in the woods as the mind clears and some amalgam rhythm of heart, pulse and footsteps come into music. That may be an entirely internal way of describing it but let me quote a bit and see if you can hear that something beyond words or word choice in a way, beyond concepts. Something like spartan, something like lyricism. I don’t even know if I’ll hear tomorrow but now:

City In March

But in the backyards
there is snow
and broken pieces of plastic
and the wings of seagulls
or paper
caught in wires
and ice […]
But up above
in the tattered clouds
geese cackle louder
than the acid breathing
of this stone animal.