Well, I’ve gone and done it again. By time I do a round up of what I read the start of the list is starting to fade from memory. Complicated by my computer battery kacking, attention divided and my iphone frying and with it photos of pages I did take. Ach. Some weeks, I tell ya.
I’ve got 27 books open under currently reading and as many stacked under the start next once i corral them all up.
So better sooner than even more later.
107. Dickinson, Emily. “Poems (Vol. 3).”
(Got by searching book app for free books)
Have I mentioned how struck I am by how religious they are?
She is in myth a hermit but lived with her father and sister and was the yearly hostess to her father’s party. She went to church until she found sacredness more in the woods. Lover-of-my-soul pining could be for an object of smittenness or Christ lover of soul longing for the next world. Pining for death, to the better world coming could be depression or religious ideal. Still they’re pretty goth overall. Sometimes it’s more being a completist than engaging. 3 books was something of a marathon hobble. It’s not that it was bad, but more down-in-the-mouth than I recall, which might say something about where my equilibrium was the last time I read vs. now.
108. The Wrong Cat: poems by Lorna Crozier (M&S, 2015)
(got by browsing at a library)
Interesting to read alongside her husband’s biography, seeing the cats in the round. There’s a light touch of grace that is harder to achieve than one might think. Pretty gentle and light, a fast read but not fluffy. Necessarily but The Moose’s Nose was pretty straight-up comic.
I swore I took notes, and a couple photos of poems but can I find either? No, but I recall liking Deer’s take on Man which Amazon will also let you preview.
109. Industrial Sabatage #64
(by subscription.)
New issue finally made it to production. (#63 came in 2008.) It’s the thing you do not the scheduling it as if poetry is a business. Even when there is a business of subscriptions. Weird poems, various pages printed in different ink colours.
Judith Copithorn’s Anti-inflammatory is my favourite. “Plum blossoms in the incandescent light/as silent and slippery as snow” Beyond sound there’s the indoors lighting and ephemeralness of electricity compared to snow. A modern sort of comparison. As if this power grid too shall pass.
110. aberrant lounges by Kimmy Beach (The Martian Press, 2006)
(found again by sorting my chapbook drawers and boxes)
A road trip thru the prairies via dingy diners. You can nearly hear the flies. Strangers in bars.
From Cudsworth Saskatchewan, January, 2003…
I ignore the NO TRESSPASSING sign between
Stations VII and VIII of The Cross
trudge up the hill and there she is
a foot of snow around her bare feet
an angel faces in every direction
they keep an eye on her abandonned barns,
dead tractors, Our Lady
of Perpetual Frostbite
the blue jays scream at me
I leave peanuts for them at her hem
and from Grand Hotel Patio
a very important business man is a the next table
and my left hand is low at your back
he speaks to someone on a headset
about Futures I let my shoulder lean into your arm
the man’s companions swirl expensive wine over their tongues
stare past his busy head
they could all be in different restaurants
you are not mine to hold or touch
I do it anyway
the night bleeding onto my bare and sweating hands
111. update by Bill Kennedy & Darren Wershler (Snare, 2008)
(found in library browsing)
I probably wasn’t suppose to read the thing. It’s conceptual poetry. The concept that you feed in the status updates of the authors, have the software strip out your names and replace with names from a list of index of poets.
Culture is replicated not embellished to model the world we want to create. So 4/5 of the poets are male while reaching thru centuries of world literature. Is our obligation to reflect history or fix it?
Identity is melded. One is one with them all. Your thoughts are my thoughts. A vulcan mind meld with a disordered mind of much pain like Horta except on the subjects of being hung over, dealing with email, thinking about the Flintstones.
It did run on. It aims to be against Great Significance and the Poet As Heroic Figure Thinking Timeless Thoughts.
I’m not sure if it was the best of the algorith’s randomness or if that would be against process. It is commentary on data stream of trivialness I guess. It’s alternative to narrative, significance, and authorship. Look ma, no hands.
112. return to open water: poems news and selected by Harold Rhenisch (Ronsdale Press, 2007)
(found at a used bookstore, Black Squirrel I believe)
To read is to map your thoughts into the gait of another, go thru the gates of their choice. This selected was by someone I’d never read.
It is about curating the significant.
It was a bit distracting/amusing to read since it is used and a previous reader did scansion marks on quite a few poems and here and there edited with marginalia and crossed out wording. Have to go with the author’s original wordings or line breaks.
“like a man’s life
pouring out of his eyes in sleep—”
p. 22 a previous reader was sure the line break should put pouring up on the line to make lines even. I think it would trouble the read and to have the line short and the couplet uneven unlike the other suits the shift in tone there.
p. 19
“The sun is a white glare
glancing off a crow’s blue wing feathers,”
The previous reader struck ‘wing feathers’ as redundant. I might have to agree with my co-reader on that one.
Despite there being a lot of poems troping bird and river and darkness, copse, grass and poeterly poems of quietude, it was a pleasant read.
p. 133, some beautiful slow reveals and expansions.
“the white house,
the red door, the shock
of arrogance
and settlement”
Some true observations like the list of things at the flea market, a pottery with a thumbprint and whatnots, who “plunks their money down// to live the life. We all take on/what others have put off.”
113. Land Without Chocolate by faizal deen (Wolsak & Wynn, 1999)
(given to me by rob mclennan)
Accumulation-style poems of run-on sentences. Seeming stream of consciousness. Not feeling particularly cooked or too tangled but a tangled spilling forth.
Is this like the sensation when I was teaching ESL and the quorums of students would come forward and ask that I not use “that word” any more? The word in that case was “gay”. So people couldn’t conjugate some verbs. They could learn the distinctions between gay and transsexual and cross-dressing and bisexual, or least learn not to make jokes where in gay marriage one had to be the woman.
I digress.
Intense as a read. Dark. I didn’t often follow what was going on.
114. Beatitudes of Ice by Rienzi Crusz (TSAR, 1995)
(found browsing the library catalogue)
He has written an enormous number of books and yet they don’t blather. Tight poems from this Canadian Sri Lanka writer who has been in Canada longer than I’ve been alive. Some poems about elephants but not in the superficial way that is more common. Some poems of everyday life of seeing the snow plough come but with a deeper reach thru history.
Suitcase, p 50, revolves around a list of things in the suitcase with “a small white pad/ of unwritten poems—/white gold/asking to be mined.”
I’d happily read another of his books. In Canada since the early 60s some of the poems are about Sri Lanka, some, like this, below, are grounded here.
A poem on page 4 is about a suburban snowstorm evoking let my people go. For the plow to drive thru would be like parting the Red Sea.
“There shall be no diaspora today[…]
Your Egypt still shines[…] in its white misery”
How unfortunately typical that hounding assumption “but what are you really”.