Some recent mullings around the idea closeness to jot on the excuse of Prompt 73: Closeness.
Not all constitute haiku’s brevity and resolvedness, suggestion rather than tell. Some are more lyrical shorts, one more an outline than a tanka, but decide as you may…
**
from 3 rooms away
a breath change. Response:
“something you want to share?”
**
the knife bloodier
than the finger
skeptical goodness
**
bundle of dog
sniffing
leashed by a look
**
100 acre farmsteads
fences in fallow –
who’s your neighbour?
**
George Mercer Dawson‘s
memoir of portage,
1870s swamp –
dad’s story of cow,
Bear Island quicksand
**
tight as hot oil
to wrist skin
the word “buddy”
**
boy in the crosswalk
adjusts shoulders
matches his Dad’s
**
walk thru a space
one person wide
– bang width of 2
**
a double-headed shoulder
a couple watches stage
**
eavesdrop surprised skin
leaning in a private word:
“ma’am fight against
the revolution”
leaf wet night street
**
the tip-tap
nails approach
dawn

HHerménégilde Chiasson is currently working on 15 books. He described himself as never having a fear of the blank page. Once he could read and write, he wanted to keep moving and exploring. He remembers the day he became literate and described how he read from the newspaper to his illiterate mom, deciphering the images of sound. He contextualized himself in Acadie where the population is 1/3 French and 2/3 English. The first books in Acadian were only in the 1970s. The population is centuries old although everything was in the oral register, in prayers, songs and storytelling. He feels this influences how his poetry sounds, drawing on this oral tradition. It’s noted that his French is Acadian French, but deliberately plain-languaged as well to reach as many people as possible.
Chiasson, Lieutenant Governor of New Brunswick wears many hats as artist, thinker, citizen and philosopher. He seems tireless in working for decades in many directions. He was asked how he knows when to stop anything? He answered “to stop is part of the process as well – the energy is redirected some place else.”
He finds he works best under constraint. Complete open form is too open. One of the series he is working on is a long form acrostic. He has taken his unusual first name, Herménégilde, and assigned each letter to a month and to each letter a theme. For example, H is for Histoire (history). In January he wrote a book of poems around the theme of history. He only wrote it inside of January. Each book has a particular form.
This month is the 10th letter of his name, L to which he has assigned the theme of Lectures (reading) and that will be the focus of all the poems, tied in some way to the month.
Similarly he has a solstice manuscript which he only adds to or writes in during the solstice. Another themed book is a variation on Dante’s 3 levels as hell as getting funding from Telefilm Canada as someone from the 1 million French-speaking Canadians who live outside the governing bodies in Quebec. He also is working on a book of essays on visual art.

In the capacity as a poet, he is most recently the author of Beatitudes, a sort of expansion of the biblical beatitudes in a incantatory language that pays tribute to the profound beauty of everyday moments.
He is pictured above (on left) at International Writers Fest October 19 with Wayne Grady (right), translator of one of Chiasson’s previous books, Available Light. Grady has dozens of works published himself. The English edition translator, Joanne Elder, was also present for this Goose Lane Editions book launch on the day of its official release. She expressed pleasure in hearing Chiasson read her/their words. He read in English and in French.
Chiasson remarked that what he has long admired about the English language is how it transcends. In French you must specify gender, must use two forms of politeness (tu and vous) but English scrapes this away. It adds an appropriate universality in translation which he didn’t have as an option writing in French.
His previous book is a book of conversations distilled down to one line. He said any one could have expanded out to an entire book to itself. A second book he described at the book of actions, like a treatise on anthropology. The third was a book of objects where he gave each of about 500 objects about 5 lines each.
The first shape of the concept for this Beattitudes book, he said, was a book listing beauty, but he found that this needs direct experience, not explanation thru words. He next undertook the concept as a book of praise. The ultimate form became the Beatitudes, his forth published book of lists poems. The Beatitudes is a list poem with the rhythm of poems to all those who Chiasson hopes will go to heaven, for examples,
“those of you who tug to make their skirt longs”,
“those who believe paradise is already on earth”,
“those who chop vegetables”
“those who file their pathetic and shattered lives in grey filing cabinets”
“those who feed animals and makes sure each receives a fair portion”, and
“those who iron”
He is hoping to cover everyone. Funnily enough the emotion of the words came thru moving me in the French more than the English. Poetry that passeth all understanding.
I related his goals of writing, one of which was to balance the dissemination of history with the need and duty to generate beauty, for its own sake and as an antidote to despair, depression and obedience to those forces towards inaction. If there is a mantra that runs thru he said it is the notions of generosity and courage among the things which no one notices but which are essential.
He has a worldview that the host described as monoism. Chiasson agreed. The divide between anything is illusionary. We are a product of our environment but also we are our environment and have a responsibility to make what we want.
We have violence and pollution and injustice. He feels if we realize and experience beauty we will be naturally drawn to protect the opposite, be genuinely contrite, sincerely deeply change. It creates more of the same to reflect in art the destructive trends. He said that in the Romantic era we acquired the idea that we could generate or fuel fear to make change. We have to reverse that idea. We need to communicate our world and protect each other but how we do it is key.
This all sounds sound to me. To respond in anger is to add to the negativity we want to dispel. A path of unity is peace is not an easy one. The fast gut response of react against is the easy path.
In the face of wrong, we can always denounce but we must choose our forum wisely. If we retain injustice until one is in a place where one can be heard, the yell will not be lost.
He feels we need to move poetry that moves us towards order and give back to ourselves and to others consciousness of connection, awareness of small beauties, the things that make us aware that we are alive, the things we don’t notice, but which are essential for us.

Balance is the prompt at OneDeepBreath for week 72. My clumsy newbie’s tanka, too busy, too unstill, too undistilled. But one starts somewhere. Perhaps better to call it a lyrical short, two sipped breaths.

It starts for us
when we get there
late. late coming
10 minutes
break, breathe.

A second with more balance then, in a different sense.

lecture forum
one pen and pad
per person. her son,
dapper, opens one
and

And a third response to close.

on one leg
tying shoe –
cat scamp prances

It seems a lot of writers are in isolated areas where there isn’t a large literary community, or the word doesn’t percolate about what there is locally. There are lull periods when not much happens so here’s a list of what I know of the places online for poetry.
For sound of poetry, there are a few places I know of: pō’ĭ-trē of classic poems that people pick as favorites and read, as does Classic Poetry Aloud. PennSound from America, Authors Aloud from Canada, and Poetry Archive from England.
For reference and reading and learning material, there’s U of T, Canadian Poetry, a sort of encyclopedia and Poetics.ca has essays into deeper levels of poetry. Poewar has exercises on aspects of poetry. Erin Thomas’ Journeys into Poetic Forms looks into ghazals, free verse, villanelles and terzanelles. Bob’s Byway takes classic American poetry and maps them to device.
Aha! Poetry, Got Poetry and poets.org are so standard reference that maybe they don’t bear referencing but no harm by doing it.
Contemporary Mexican Poetry Compendium is an entry point to there. This has insights now and then. One Zero Zero is a virtual library of the small press classics from the 1940s to 1980s. Canadian Poetry.ca goes back further putting Confederation Poets online. Busse library indexes American poets from the 1600s to Mark Strand with links to samples. UBU has concrete, visual and sound poetry as well as pdf of editions.
For workshopping:
Internet Writing Workshop has several specialty areas. It’s a listserv model. They have discussion lists around a few nodes of writing and market, and critiquing lists with rules for how many you must submit and how many you must give crit for. There is Fiction, Lovestory, Nonfiction, Novels, Poetry, Practice, Prose/Flash-fiction, Script-writing and Children & Young adult. I’ve been one or two of these for 5 or 6 years.
Poetry Free For All and Blueline are online forums. The latter has 22 more associated forums at IBBC (interBoard Poetry Forum). Some are more pointed critiques and more intense, some less. There seems to be some cross-traffic of the same people. Critical Poet has tiered levels of more intensive critiquing.
There are also networking/cooperative places such as blogs like Aha and book clubs for discussion like Barnes and Noble have set up, and Author’s Den which is sort of a hub for putting out samples and redirecting to your site, but is a magazine-style community for networking as well, a sort of writer’s version of myspace.

Dusty Owl did a night of readings Oct 12. The money raised from the event goes to the charity, Oneness-World Communication which in the writer’s fest will do an outreach of literature and literacy to the homeless, new arrivals to Canada, Native communities and children’s group. 3000 children will be reached within 5 days thru the Step into Stories program.

The reading grounded in Archibald Lampman as a home base, and the diverse shapes poetry has taken in his old stomping ground since he was here. He was only with us in spirit as in person, Lampman would have been 146. He worshipped at the church that the reading was held at, Christ Church Cathedral, which will celebrate its 175 anniversary this year. [An announcement of the poetry event is at Facebook]

Stephen Brockwell opened in costume of Lampman with a retrospective of the man, of the literary scene that was looking utside of Canada for models, and of the place Ottawa was then, rather fractured between rich and rough with political patronage, opium dens and brawls between the Irish and French workers.

He read a number of samples of Lampman including the imagist canoe trip of Morning on the Lievre. It reads in part,

Sky above and sky below,
Down the river; and the dip
Of the paddles scarcely breaks,
With the little silvery drip
Of the water as it shakes
From the blades, the crystal deep
Of the silence of the morn,
Of the forest yet asleep;

He closed with a sonnet of Across the Pea-fields. Quite a large collection of Lampman’s poems are online and in the public domain.

Jacqueline Lawrence, who was part of the Canada Poetry Faceoff slam competition, next shared some of her poetry, including a poem in tribute to the domestic workers immigration plan. In part she said, “Silence bows its head in reverence/as we sing this praise song for you.”

She wrote poems to the women in her family, her dad, pondering how it would be different if he lived in my days. She also a piece of erotic, referencing how she aims to change the canon which Stephen Brockwell noted was oddly absent of the erotic relationships, just as the canon of Canadian painting is oddly absent of human form.

Paul Tyler was up next and started with Lampmanesque portraits of the landscape. He had the room humming a buzz with each piece, from how we react when the aliens arrive, what do we say around the office water cooler, to those B.C. banana slugs that are as long as one’s foot and trampling twigs “go little puddle of nerves”. He also read If I were a painter he would paint the ugly months of March and April that we shut down for “our dislocated gazes/our half intentioned lives”. When’s his book out where?

Sean Zio [photo there] performed a few of his pieces from his Theory of Angels including, “a night. Would a dark life of the soul not be more fair” and speaking to how “we combine our hopes with our timidity’s […]and I’m your no emergency zone”.

Michelle Desbarats read her poem about Eve looking around as the angels close the gates of Eden and as she watched two snails slide away […] she knew she would be blamed for everything. A poem about her mother’s desk “it is a substantial sadness not like pine”, I can’t do justice to in quotes. We need a book. The applause for that poem was the longest of the evening. When it died down Michelle said wow, maybe I should just leave now. She got laughter and continued on.

Max Middle closed the evening with a language poem of sestina that I got too wrapped in to write a word down from. the the window a must /replays confidence of the next poem gives an idea. He performed a chant and his closing piece zedders is here where you can hear it.

Overall a diverse night of great poetry, good turnout, lovely refreshments by candlight and closing somewhere around 10 p.m.