59. Conversations with the Kid by Marco Fraticelli (King’s Road Press, 2015)
How neat to get a copy of this. It is haibun by Marco of conversations with his grandchild. A limited edition given out at Haiku Canada which I couldn’t attend this year. It was made using one of my templates that I offer under free resources. I’ve heard of other ones coming into being here and there but it’s the first paper I’ve seen myself. Here’s one of his haibun,
Time After Time
I was remembering this morning that there was once a time when I used to wear two watches. Not only that, but I used to collect antique clocks. I was convinced that all these clocks would help me control time.
How come you don’t wear a watch these days, Grandpa?
Because I always know exactly what time it is.
Really? So what time is it then?
It’s now.
‘Now’ isn’t a time.
You’re wrong, kid. ‘Now’ is the only time.
taking off
my watch
for yoga
Funny how yoga seems to be the new beer for poets. Everywhere I look, more yoga poems. I suppose it’s more adaptive in the post-modern era once we take surviving as something to shoot for.
60. The Testing Tree: Poems by Stanley Kunitz (Atlantic Monthly Press Book, 1962)
I read the whole book waiting for a delayed flight. And I only regret it a little. I rushed thru a 5-course cordon bleu meal because I didn’t want it interrupted at an awkward time when we did get clearance to leave the tarmac, in case we hit turbulence. And because I didn’t want to stop. Although often anecdotes, they are precisely worded and not as plain as their syntax. p. 59
Again! Again!
Love knocked again at my door :
I tossed her a bucket of bones.
From each bone springs a soldier
who shoots me as a stranger.
It has a lot of movement in there for the number of words but not haphazard shifts for randomness’ sake. It moves pragmatically but not a straight course.
Even when it is a simple poem of watching a Robin Redbreast, it is shot through with an unexpected trauma where the erratic behaviour of the bird is not its doing but because he had been hunted with a bb-gun and you can see sky thru its skull. That reveal of sky after all the musing to help or figure out the movement before stops the poem like a car against a freight train.
There is the moral tug throughout, attempting to be what is the good in this world, to be pacifist and kind, and yet the bind of all the wrongs leading to a desire to get to the the hangman. That complex nature of humanity is missing in many poems written now. Why should that be? Is it the infinite moral relativism? It helps to read now as opposed to then perhaps because I don’t anticipate I’m being set up. But the twist isn’t away but to the deeper questions. There are also the gentle loving poems such as “After the Last Dynasty”, p. 28-89, there’s a kindliness in the poke, a fond acceptance in tone in the comic hyperbole of distance,
Reading in Li Po
how “the peach blossoms follows the water”
I keep thinking of you
because you were so much like
Chairman Mao,
naturally with the sex
transposed
and the figure slighter.
Loving you was a kind
of Chinese guerrilla war.
And it comes back
“Pet, spitfire, blue-eyed pony,
here is a new note
I want to pin on your door,
through I am ten years late
and you are nowhere:
Tell me,
are you still mistress of the valley,
what trophies drift downriver,
why did you keep me waiting?
I suppose it is a lack of raw thrashing that appeals. There’s a resolution rather than unclarity of how to interpret presented as the finished thing. It has closure as well as an attention to beauty in flow of sound.
61. undercurrent by Rita Wong (Nightwood, 2015)
This was an interesting read. It could have gone towards tiresome lecturing/apocalyptic but it stayed grounded and kept circling. It covers things from canoeing to a tar sands walk, to regenerating wild areas within a city, to resource mining. Various angles turn so the theme of water is there but it feels more suggestive as a theme than project-writing. Unlike The Polymers (House of Anansi, 2013) this kept its momentum and represented more of what I see Canada as— English, Native, Chinese, intellects, personal experiences, men, women, a reach into history and completely contemporary.
Some are plainly stated, others play in language. Some are a list poem such “a moving target” where as “a walking mineral body” “an orchestra of nutrients/infiltrated by capital’s clear shout/consumed while consuming/disoriented in proprioceptive profusion.” Another, a sort of daffynition poem, runs like a dictionary (“micro: a power we don’t have words for ; the burgess shale in your eyelashes”)
Here’s one, p36
Medicines in the city
一
horsetail hints
at abundant water beneath
transformed into fine green nodes
sprouting up from cracks in pavement
near Main & Broadway […]
scrub brush, toothbrush, removed of toxins
horsetail ever-so-slowly heals inflictions
a living fossil who quietly outlasts our cities
The book itself is gorgeously designed and I hope whoever did it gets an award. The simple touches of water text running along the bottoms of the pages hold a common’s day book of quotes of a wide range of thinkers. Much better than to epigraph and try to parse how you got from A to B or it looking arbitrarily tacked on. They sit near each other in a sort of dialogue.
Also recommended as one of my most recommended reads. She is also going to be my guest on Literary Landscape on the second Thursday of July, that is this week. Tune in one 93.1fm to hear more.
62. Flamingo Watching: Poems by Kay Ryan (Copper Canyon, 1994)
This is an oldie, relatively speaking, but goodie. They are plain parable, carefully considered truth-kernal sort of poems. p. 39
Half a Loaf
The whole loaf’s loft
is halved in profile,
like the standing side
of a bombed out cathedral.
The cut face
of half a loaf
puckers a little.
The bread cells
are open and brittle
like touching coral.
It is nothing like the middle
of an uncut loaf,
nothing like a conceptual half
which stays moist.
I say do not adjust to half
unless you must,
A simple object turned around in the head, suggesting an allegory for all the things we live on which from the outside of unstarted seem more complete than they could ever be if we start. How can you stay with your dreams and pursue them both? It seems tongue in cheek. It seems a careful new way of seeing bread. Bread as it comes out of the oven continues to bake for a while, small crackles as it completes its trajectory of being baked. The structure is worse if you break the steam’s crust seal and open it too soon.
p. 30, The Narrow Path also has those lessons on how to live. If you’re prepared to plan your pleasure, your delayed gratification, there are tools and ways. If you follow the whimsy of the moment’s pleasure, the way looks easier but there is no rest searching for the next hit, and hold. The value, like a tortoise and hare story, of daily discipline rather than impulse takes you further
63. MxT by Sina Queyras (Coach House, 2014)
This book came out and I am still in the swaying foothills of grief of my father as well. Does one ever get over a loss of any person or just shift the acuteness is getting over the worst?
It wasn’t as fraught as I expected. My favourite parts were the pataphysics type graphics of circuits marking each chapter. Each chapter was different. I didn’t think I’d get thru the first but somewhere in the first third was captivating.
There are immediate bits: “I want to take you by the scruff of your heart” and the book caused a new poem to spring into existence, so that’s something.
64. Comparing Tattoos (Haiku Canada, 2015)
An anthology of who’s playing in that haiku pool this year, the snapshot was edited by Mike Montreuil and Cathy Drinkwater Better. A favourite piece was David Randen’s
mom busy
organizing photos
two clocks ticking
which sits nicely on the line of literal, clean observation and with the sense of double meaning in the second part. Another senryu by Judit Hollos was around mother,
cataracts
in mom’s eyes—
the clouds only he sees
I seem to have a thing for cataracts. They keep appearing in my poems. Probably being raised around people in their senior years I grew up with a sense of immediacy of old age, expecting arthritis, loss of one arm, paralysis, all that glamour, as normal.
65. Maestro: A Surprising Story About Leadership by Listening by Roger Nierenberg (Portfolio, 2009)
A business parable it talks about how to do company management by understanding how a conductor works with an orchestra, picking up cues, leading while also interacting but sharing a vision, letting people have control and ownership of the direction, so they can do their best. I may understand classical music a little better. I know more about how conducting music works at least.
Slow paced and rather high ratio of say it, say what you’ve said and recap once more before you move on, but was an interesting enough read, better than the standard extended allegory for how to do business fare.