Tents and couch’s cushions, blankets and packs
One in wild beard and Dali moustache is
yelling, making an arbitrary point at one
of the sixty cycling past. Men unkept.
On the grass 7th arrondissement
A dozen groups
Evenly spaced as electrons on valences
Ten women and one man in a circle
A woman and her book
A man on his cell
Three office women, one bicycle dropped
Two women and their prams
A couple sucking each others ears
A shirtless tanned man and his sun
Woman reclined in short shorts, open lower back of rest
Cropped top, mid-back blonde hair, arm extended as a pillow…
She stands, begins an animated gesture
No earbud phone
Her features disgusted, angry, Picassoesque dismay
Arguing in quick succession
Kicks air
Observation easily becomes scrutiny
Becomes unbecoming
Distance of inventory
Demographic checkboxes
A subway’s enclosure
Kneeling breasts to thighs
Youthglow cheek and hijab
Cupped hand raised
Street topside leathered skin, farmers creases
Skin following closely folds of bones
How he flicks three packet backers
For perfume samples
The vials in hand on St Germaine
The well-dressed white college kid
Girl asleep, chestnut hair and her curled around the
Cardboard at the metro that speaks for her
Bald Buddha under blanket on some steps
With half a dozen cola cans.
Almost a birder eagerness
To not meet eyes or sudden moves
But note the trim woman
Short cropped grey hair
Sign about an illness
And someone black, scraggley beard
A call that would transpose to English
Your-o, your-o
The habitat of five in mixed flock
With dogs who are raucous in swallow-like hollows
But don’t interact with the invader species
That come for velos and cocoa in sacs
Each dash into shelter bringing back
Bon bons that are € 40 to €110 per kilo
Or about mid-range accomodation
When not sleeping under skies.
Try to be incidental in the same ecosystem.
Then there is that odd red bird, cawing
A zigzag of gutteral haggard mutter
Our predator eyes on each other.
The smooth face and playing of the
Roma boy with accordian, open mouth of hat
Like a baby maw inaudible though it shifts
Could be the wind
Then the camouflaged species who walk among us,
Part-time asking for well-modulated aid
Well-groomed using the forty cent public washrooms
To stay fresh. Perhaps you talked with one
But what wasn’t pertinent to know never arose
From the pleasant chatter, city noise a kind
Of mechanical birdsong coming from my throat.

I carried around with me An Oak Hunch for days to remember to get Phil Hall to sign it at the above/ground reading and then didn’t end up making my way over to speak with him at all…I really have to learn to move faster. But then one can’t die of que ser-y, usually, so far as I know.
Hall read from his new chapbook (Verulam, above/ground 2009) where he gives tribute to where he’s from and where his family is from “Local is my most shameful pride — local is what threatened me with silence.” And then proceeds on to talk of where is close to heart, compellingly.
He also read from his recent BookThug a bad sequence too, which came across in part like good literary stand up comedy. Titters and surprise cough laughs around the room as he nailed some things.
You can hear him at Atwater with some of the same as he read Aug 13 in Ottawa such as these recollections of his childhood and parts from bad sequence. In part it goes… “I read too much poetry. I ehar the same images over and over again. You probably do too. Most of you are probably poets too. It’s okay that we clap for each other. Only pets get enough attention.”
Host rob mclennan introduces Roland Prevost and his new chapbook Our/ Are Carried Invisibles and advises you get it. You have got it, and Hall’s, haven’t you?

Roland Prevost read from his Our/ Are Carried Invisibles and his second newest, Dragon Verses from Dusty Owl Press in June.
Here’s a sample of his newest, a pressing intensity of cadence on our vulnerable mortal selves…

handsome coils
skin prays under cottons, rayon’s, silks
pleads with no particular negotiates
what music ceremonies its surrender
perfect what makes practice this
repetitious affront bears artificial
under hot limelight; stage of penetrating fear
wondrous how it will burn
so desiring of any aid & coil
mock-holy supplication

Roland was recently featured in a 12 or 20 interview and is an editor of 17 seconds which should have another poetics issue due out in a couple months.

In September, rob mclennan is starting another series of poetry workshops, a 4-week
concentrated conversation about contemporary writing practice to happen at
the Carleton Tavern (upstairs), Parkdale Market, Ottawa. Participants
should be prepared to have roughly ten pages of their own poetry completed
before the first class, to be workshopped throughout the four sessions.
Participants will also be given reading material (reading various works by
contemporary Canadian and American authors) and writing assignments to be
completed between sessions and discussed.
$250 for 4 sessions. 1pm to 5pm, September 13, 20 and 27 and October 4.
For further information, contact rob mclennan at az421 [at] freenet.carleton.ca
or 613239 0337; spaces will be limited.

For the Sweet 16 of above/ground press, chapbook launches by Roland Prevost and Phil Hall. (Veralum by Phil Hall, Our / Are Carried Invisibles by Roland Prevost).
On August 13th, Issue 13 of Peter F Yacht Club will be available. For lucky thirteen, the white album, contributors are: Cameron Anstee, Stephanie Bolster, Amanda Earl, Lea Graham, Gwendolyn Guth, Lainna Lane El Jabi, Marcus McCann, rob mclennan, Sean Moreland, Pearl Pirie, Roland Prevost, Monty Reid, Sandra Ridley and Janice Tokar.

If you have time to chatter
Read books
If you have time to read
Walk into mountain, desert and ocean
If you have time to walk
Sing Songs and dance
If you have time to dance
Sit quietly, you Happy Lucky Idiot — Nanao Sakaki.

A most interesting fellow whose poems were sometimes about the world he lived in intimately, sometimes in the broader political sense, sometimes in the “mystical” sense in unconventional logic.
John Brandi recited one of Nanao’s poems which went Why walk to the mountain? The mountain is me. I am not mountain. I am not me.
In another in which he advised a troubled mind always finds whatever answer in white water.
He travelled extensively, lived with Allen Ginsberg as a hippie, sometimes living in mountains, sometimes living off what he caught in tidepools. Memorials remembering him come from around the world.