Tonight’s Literary Landscape show features Sandra Ridley, Jennifer Londry and the Hagios folk, dispatches from the launch of their books in Saskatoon and Winnipeg. at 6:30 PM, CKCU 93.1, or online.

Some brave volunteers demonstrated juggling.

Juggling is a metaphor for haiku; you try to balance something close to you and something high up. One line of haiku is cast high, the second low and the third is the hard one to involve and keep everything moving in the air in an interesting way without something going sideways.

I have put up 45 photos from the Haiku Canada Conference Weekend. More to come here and there.

Drifting thru my 1958 edition of John Donne: Selected Poems. The same 1635 edition is online as well.
It’s remarkable how much carries over the 400 year gap. I wonder what that means about culturally embedded and stylistics tweaks. How can I hear his voice more readily than a contemporary who has more aggregate culture, general and poetic, in common?
In 400 more years, will he still be comprehensible? He could go thru rounds of the wardrobe room of translation which pushes him forward through time in new fashions like any old text.

for the first twenty years since yesterday
I scarce believed thou couldst be gone away
for forty more I fed on favors past.

That still feels fresh and utterly worth thieving. So it’s over the top hyperbolic yet for moods that are that, seems more accurate than accuracy would be.
Languages die when there’s an upgrade to one conferring more advantage. English itself has a had a long run of popularity globally due to economic advantage, status wars and political luck. To know Japanese, German, or Latin were the linguistic means to power. When will English hit a backwater and the thing to do to optimize one’s chances, is to move to a city and learn one of the top languages, Manderin, Spanish, Hindi, Arabic, Portuguese? When the economic peace powerhouse gets the top position for quality of life, people will want to rush their, individuals aggregating for selfish gain.
Anyhew, John Donne. It’s too funny to get the text from the digital edition by going to “find > calm”.

Storms chafe, and soon wear out themselves, or us ;
In calms, Heaven laughs to see us languish thus.
As steady as I could wish my thoughts were,
Smooth as thy mistress’ glass, or what shines there,
The sea is now

That’s just a well-composed, well-controlled, thought.
The syntax chunks into different lengths that makes it feel nimble, not a slave to its line length. The metaphor extends but doesn’t natter away repeating itself.
The slant rhyme of were and there are still regional, or eye rhymes or did one of the words not show up at the dock and got left out of the Great Vowel Shift?
There’s a self-awareness of the immediate sensations of upset and of the second mind reporting and being aware of where one is and is not and how absurd this is. And yet, chop-chop, must be where one is and deal with the choppy waters at hand.
The length of the poem is rife with lovely turns of phrases: “All the tackling is a frippery”, which notes say he meant as a second-hand clothing shop. I knew it as luxurious gaudy cheap excess of ribbons, sparkles and things like bows so it hasn’t drifted far over the years.
“Each one, his own priest and own sacrifice./ Who live, that miracles do multiply/ Where walkers in hot ovens do not die.”
Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego (Hananiah, Mishael and Azariah) references don’t happen in modern poetry. Everyone seems in love with reference to TV, movies, or Ancient Greece and Rome and Old Europe, a little Hinduism thrown in for good measure, but Christian myth has been losing ground. It has the weight of obligation and the past that must be cast off.
Of course, that’s not entirely true, but largely the culture doesn’t teach itself the stories. We want to save children from the harm but loose the intensity of the gain as a lingua franca, like a metaphoric version of latin botanica names, a reference bank of shorthand shortcuts.
I wonder if this would eventually create walls from Christian metaphor that resonates culturally, emotionally, with proving one’s well-readedness by transposing one’s personal story into the framework of epic or anti-epic wrestle. Can we just set down the irony bag and leverage the richness of myths of the People of the Book? Or is there no familiarity with that for there to be richness of caught references?
Anyhew, he says,
I am two fools, I know,
For loving, and for saying so
In whining poetry.
~ The Triple Fool
Although John Donne was a couple centuries earlier (from the history-flattening of now) there’s almost a touch of Issa in the attentiveness to The Flea. Glad that the squalor of needing to live with fleas isn’t such accessible poetry fodder.

MARK but this flea, and mark in this,
How little that which thou deniest me is ;
It suck’d me first, and now sucks thee,
And in this flea our two bloods mingled be.

It is kind of witty. A romantic pining — or is that pleading — to be one body, a pick-up attempt, sweet but lame and eager in any century. Look, our blood is already one: “This flea is you and I, and this/Our marriage bed”. We may as well do it proper and completely. He could have made that up on the fly, or rather, on the flea, but it fell out too easy. It sounds like he’s a player, doesn’t it? or more charitable, a hopeless romantic shirt-chaser?
One can almost see her crossed armed response as he sees a no coming and in S2 protests “Let not to that self-murder added be,/ And sacrilege, three sins in killing three.” As in, don’t kill the symbol of us joined and our blood making life continue. Maybe he has a soft spot for her, and for the tiny beastie that he was roping in as an actor to his patter. Does she fall for that?
In S3, her bloodied her nail squashes the flea and crushes him in the same gesture. Does she smirk or have a level eye. She’s still there which he probably takes as promising, a convertible no, rather than a refusal to back down and drawing a clear line.
He replies with, “learn how false fears be ;/ Just so much honour, when thou yield’st to me,/Will waste, as this flea’s death took life from thee.” He thinks he can logic-her into it.
That’s one last attempt before he either grovels, or straps on the 1635 equivalent speed of a jet pack for moving on to next likely candidate, probably with a lamb’s intestine tucked in his long sock.
Like how an anonymous put it
“this donne guy should have just asked the lady nicely rather than go into some quantum bullshit about the flea marrying them. Sheesh, no wonder this lady though he was a creep. for god sake woman, you should have called social services.”
He probably thought he was acting nicely. He’d thought thru his side entirely.

John Donne under a different lens
The vocabulary is largely direct, concrete, monosyllabic, Germanic and Old French, not Latinate. The plot and personalities come thru strongly so the tools of rhyme and metering don’t draw attention to themselves. Phrases vary length. Lines may be end-stopped or not. It’s all shaken up. The story can be carried by the invisible army of ants of devices.

The more one knows, the more one doesn’t know and the former increases more of less linearly and the latter exponentially.
My dad used to say, I’ve never heard of him, as if that were the final word proving the person’s lack of existence, or lack of merit. Such egocentrism can be a hard confinement to escape. Outward expanding circles always…while there is a crowd of established writers who have worked craft for decades, just counting the English Canada ones, another is always welcome to the brain.
Poet Gerry Shikatani is coming to town June 3rd. He’s also a foodie, having written food columns and the book Passion for Food: Conversations with Canadian Chefs.
Amazon lists him in W.H. New’s A History of Canadian Literature and he’s a benchmark of comparison to others in book reviews. The word humility keeps popping up in reference to his process so that’s promising. What is worse than a pompous poet? I suppose pompous is just another word for insecure and overcompensating the inner sense of walls caving by pushing those walls out onto the street. I wonder how much of “getting” or “feeling” someone’s poetry is personality click?
Anyhew, the library has one collection he edited, Paper Doors and the anthology Another way to Dance which he is in. Aquaduct is a hefty book. He had, as of 2 years ago, seven trade books and five chapbooks.
Described as a diligent practitioner for decades, I’m curious to see how this poetry is that Libby Scheier called “a delicate, intricate verse, cerebral and sensual at the same time”.
As my dad would say, I don’t know either of them from a hole in the ground but I’m intrigued. I’m topped up for poetry that is getting one’s head straight, therapy or stories. He’s done visual, concrete, performance and sound poetry. He does the long poem (“A poem is a small painting, a long poem is a mural.” ~ Sharon Thesen) and short lyric narrative poems that are reflections on identity. He included haiku in his anthology. Now he’s doing essays on cuisine. What’s he up to now, poetry-wise?
Rachel Zolf did an essay [found via West Coast LINE‘s blog] on his Protean Poetics. It’s good to see he practices being rounded as a writer dipping into all kinds of pools.

The title of Shikatani’s most recent book of poetry (inspired by his visit to three gardens in
Andalucía, Spain) is mortar rake glove sausan broom basin sansui. This title is itself a serial or associative list—a list that also presents us with a clue. Perhaps these are the tools we need to read this book.

Over the 11 pages she mentions his interest in Cubism influencing writing, to arrive at the real by the route of non-linear, fragmentary, nonrealist means. He mixes in archival fragments in disconnected bits that are to not be closely read so much as assembled in the head. She explains, Like any good quest, “we come to lose the way” while gleaning what we can.
She also cleared up how it came to be that the 400-pager happened.

he has deliberately challenged the book’s perceived formal boundaries on a number of occasions. For example, Aqueduct could easily have been published as three separate books, but instead Shikatani shepherded an unprecedented collaboration among three Canadian small-press publishers (Mercury, Wolsak and Wynn, and Underwhich) to produce one monumental serial bookwork of over four hundred pages.
He also chose to publish mortar rake… as a special double issue of the west coast journal Capilano Review (also a serial form), in turn distancing himself from the authorial function attached to and promoted with trade book production.

Considered unconventional choices can be indicative of interesting poetry, or independent of. Wonder what I will glean.

The 2010 Pandora’s Poetry Awards are to acknowledge those who are lending energy that contributes to the quality of life and lift of the Vancouver literary community.

We are privileged to bring to you those names that have been nominated in the Vancouver writing community.
They are names that you have put forward. There were many more that could have been on this list, and we do not take anything away from those individuals, they work hard too and should be recognized.
[…]Now it is your turn once again to tell us which of these outstanding individuals you feel deserves to be recognized this year. We thank you for your time.
I thank you for your support
Bonnie Nish
Executive Director
Pandora’s Collective

Organizers/Promoters: RC Weslowski, Ariadne Sawyer, Heather Susan Haley, Fernanda Viveiros and Steven R. Duncan
BC Writer Mentors: Betsy Warland, Eileen Kernaghan, Ivan Coyote, Brad Cran, and Jen Currin
Publishers: Alan Twigg, Paul Taylor, Warren Dean Fulton, David Zieroth, and MEMEWAR – (pronounced “memoir”)
Read about these Nominees and Vote.