I’ve been poking away at various local histories. Finished a couple. It’s good to clean the palate with straight-up language. Poetry can try to be difficult and claim the art is the being difficult. It’s touching earth to have people talk about events and people instead of ideas.
I say I don’t read novels and it’s largely true. It’s like people having wine with their meals. It’s easier to say that I don’t drink than to explain that I might a handful of times per year or over a few years.
My mom reads a novel a day. I might read a novel or two some years. Basically I light up for poetry. Or essays about poetry. Or memoirs by poets. But I like to keep variety in poetry and in genre. So,
120. Waging Peace: Poetry and Political Action, edited by Susan McMaster (Penumbra Press, 2002)
(seen references to here and there, finally tracked down a copy thru the editor)
The book was part of a process of approaching Members of Parliament petitioning them to be aware of the wages of war and to raise consciousness about peace, giving them abstract visual art and poems.
Jerahmiel S Grafstein also had this to say in an essay,

Roger Nash asks about lines, jingoism vs. steering well clear of anything risky. Where do we fall?
The poetry is not about how to do peace but largely complaining about war being destructive and hurtful. To torque a phrase, peace is not the opposing of war but the presence of seeking a difficult compassion and solution.
I actually liked the essays much more than the poetry. Sarah Klassen’s in particular as she got at the core of my understanding of what the book’s work is, to “propose an alternative to aggression”. I have a book of her poetry that I’ve never read. May have to crack that spine.
121. 20 Most Asked Questions about the Amish and Mennonites by Merle & Phyllis Good (Good Books, 1975, 1995)
(The Ottawa heart institute has a May Court Library and a library cart and accept donations to any information desk or nurses’ station there.)
The authors are articulate in belief, “Each group draws its boundary lines differently–but no less sincerely” (p. 25) and cover food and gender relations, and formation.
This didn’t exactly cover its subject of answering the questions of why the appeal of farming but there are a million of Amish or Mennonite people worldwide across various continents, more outside Europe than in it, the most in Africa now, especially Zaire (136,000) and Ethiopia (50,000). the Caribbean, Central and South America, most concentrated in Paraguay (22,000) and Mexico (20,000). There’s a lot of diversity and each community self-governs, isn’t a central top-down system.
The old order conservative of each group have more in common than the more liberal orders. Some use motorcars, buttons and the internet, selectively and enter trades. They are often a parallel society with their own system for childcare and care of the elderly and in some regions have exemptions from the military.
From p. 4-5,

“It is impossible to summarize these peoples’ lives in one short sentence.[…] It is impossible to interpret the lives of a people—any people—in one or two quick sentences. It sees a violent act.”

I had forgotten what I used to know about the anabaptists. There was violence for belief and a response 400+ years long.
122. The House of the Black Goat by R.M. Ferrier (self-published, 2015)
(written by son of dad’s friend, passed thru family)
This is twisted and odd and every few pages made my head hurt. A lot of gods in these machines. Back story revealed by conversations. A lot of generational incest.
Spoiler: It became a ghost story around page 70. There’s a ghost who aged which is something I hadn’t seen before. Her green eyes cried so much her eyes became colorless/black.
At the same time, without spoilers, villains become more noble and heroes become villainous. It spans the better part of a century so whole generations die. The landscape is as much a character as anyone living or dead in the book with its boggy morass that eats whole herds of cattle.
It’s got a gothic feel. Warning: there is a late scene of women slut-shaming each other. Maybe the language is a little anachronistic here ad there, but it has a momentum hooking forward. The language was strikingly poetic at times.
I jotted quotes but (glitch) often almost entirely illegibly. p. 51 in light of a death of a child, “The old plastered and varnished pine walls warp around in eloquence”, p. 113 “these memories have been left to drown in a pool of their own vagueness”, p 115 “he makes the finest of gestures by biting his lip and presenting his teeth most amiably”.
123. The Boy from the Farm by Frank Hedley Arnold (Epic Press, 2002)
(book by the neighbour of a man my dad used to sell horses to who came and sold the book.)
Interesting person. A real go-getting who hopped from career to career in agriculture but I wish it had been fleshed out more. Here’s a sentence summary of a story. Next story. No, that was an upshot of what could be an interesting story which you just skipped. Bah. Frustrating.
But odd things turned up, like how he met his wife. He was in England in line to see a movie in 1946 and the wicket ticket fellow asked the woman ahead of him if there was someone she knew she could sit with. (blink). The writer volunteered. The date went well. They married the next year.
He ran a milk route and expanded and sub-contracted out part. He managed a plant. When the factory closed, he hopped to something seemingly random. He and his wife ran a factory putting caramel on apples and expanded it. He had a nose for opportunity and a tough gut to go for it. He wasn’t opposed to working flat out for years, but drove himself to 2 heart attack and exhaustion. He was fervently anti-union feeling it was an impediment to getting things done. In a factory when something broke, he applied his mechanical skill to get the assembly line running with minimal interruption but was called on the red carpet because proper procedure was to get a union mechanic to come out and do it.
He jumped on opportunities to improve process on farms where he was a milkhand, and to run farms for others on vacation. He built up his reputation a business in Canada called Agricultural Labour Service where he would supply himself or other people to allow a farmer a vacation. The Agricultural Labour Pool still exists. What a good service. Most farmers never get an hour’s vacation over a lifetime. He would have his guys shadow the farmer to learn how that person ran things so the farmer could be sure the substitute would do thing his way.
He competing in international plowing matches with horses and tractors and naturally rose to chairman since his habit is absorb something completely, then manage from the top.
124. Arden Blackburn’s Mail Route: The Early Days at Christie Lake by John A. McKenty (Wheels Gone Bye, 2012)
(book that is about dad’s cousin in part)
The title was the organizing factor— who was on the mailroute around Christie Lake 15 clicks from Perth. There’s little about Arden or the mail route, even in chapters titled after them. Once he was on the route, he ran mail 6 days a week, and whatever items people wanted, whether grocery pickup (since he was in town anyway) to a stove or giving someone a ride in.
Apart from tidbits like before there was a mail route who had mail at the town post office knew that from a notice in the newspaper. Once there was a postmaster station on the lake in 1914, George Noonan was named postmaster although it was actually his wife who did it but women weren’t legally allowed to be postmasters. (p. 204) 30 years later George received a government medal for longtime service instead of her.
From sentence to sentence the subject and year change even when there’s a narrow subject chapter heading. And sometimes unanswered questions. Amelia Rancier worked for the Noonans from 1895 as a house cleaner, nanny, maid, cowherd, and then at some undated time members of the Methodist church arrived with the sheriff and took her to work at the Matheson House as a maid. She bolted back to the farm ad when the sheriff came back Noonan ordered the sheriff off the property or face consequences. The sheriff left. The servant (worker? slave?) stayed.
A game warden complained that he was shot at for trespassing by George’s grandsons. George asked, did they hit you? The warden said no so George said, those are no grandsons of mine then. (p. 205-206)
There was a school for poor boys and girls and sports teams, race days for boats and swimming, a phase of sports fishing, and a stream of cottages built, sold, closed, used for scrap to rebuild, expanded, etc.
There was the story of putting the railway through Mud Lake in 1913. It was 2 or 3 feet deep but below that was 20 feet of muck and then clay and sand. To find bedrock they had to set a pier a 103 feet below water level with concrete footings poured on site.
There was a whole Hollywood North sort of scene in the 1930s-1960s with a choreographer and ballet director for the Rockettes. It was a theatre colony for the off-season with the Marks Brothers and their friends of the touring theatre road shows. Strauss who wrote documentaries on Marilyn Monroe and Jascque Cousteau summered here. (Chapter 8).
.
Part of Chapter 11 is on Dickie Patterson who was profoundly mentally challenged and lived at the dump in a shack he built himself and hoarded in. People brought him meals, even built him a toilet but he destroyed it and went back to the log he was used to. He was a character who didn’t understand money but worked odd jobs and errands and was watched out for by the community.
It has fascinating information but is terribly arranged in the common manner of local histories. It’s like the book was cut to pieces and then pasted together randomly by machine. Photos and years and people are all scattered. Good material, good anecdotes. Good for bathroom reading where you don’t expect you can sit through a whole chapter or book so don’t need continuity.
125. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King (Simon & Schuster, 2000)
This is recommended from various directions, lists of what to read, recommended at Author for Indies day, a couple friends said it was worthwhile.
What I took away wasn’t anything I’d seen quoted. For example, a tip given to him that the second draft should be 10% smaller than the first draft. Or that to overexplain is rooted in fear of not being understood. In writing as in theatre, nothing should be on stage that doesn’t serve. And if you didn’t put it on stage in act 1, it’s inelegant and ill-advised to lob it in late as surprise.
Independently of each other he and Jeffrey Skinner (in The 6.5 Practices of Moderately Successful Poets) talk about how alcoholism and drug addiction aren’t mandates of creativity but impede living. And how art is to make life better; life is not to make art better.
He talks about how if you love words, how can there be an excuse to not read or write at any time? There is no muse. Drop that. Show up 3 hours a day and if the muse wants to find you, it knows where you are. You’re working on your quota of words.
He didn’t think much of workshops as they flatter without trying to cut the fat. He learned more in a few black lines of a newspaper editor than in two workshops. Curious that Alden Nowlan wrote so astutely and came from newspaper world, carrying forward the lessons of what works for comprehension.
I’ve never read his novel. I first heard of him in grade 7. A classmate consumed book after book standing on the front porch at lunch reading Thinner and Carrie.
It was interesting how he locked into horror from a very young age. People lock in early. Girls in 4H with me were mad about horses. 30 years later they compete in rodeos. I was ambivalent on horses but scribbled poems during 4H. Now look where we all are still.
King lives a fascinating life and it is an easy and lively read. Long but it doesn’t feel bloated. I’d pass on the recommendation.
Worth a read and a re-read.

Putting your poetry into the stream of culture and literature takes either guts or naivety. Maybe both. But one does it because one must.
It’s an art, it’s a science, a compulsion and derived from pulse.
115. Trout Stream Creed by David Carpenter (Coteau Books, 2003)
(found at a bookstore in Saskachewan)
Write about what you love. There’s an argument for that. I find the notion of fishing horrific. Sports fishing is the same as game hunting as incomprehensibly callous but these poems are glowing. The love comes thru. Some of the poems are about caring for dying parents, coming to realization of his father’s mortality. I’ll be out of here tomorrow, says his father. The son thinks release, optimism, renewed life-wish and only considers later that his father meant acceptance of death. Which is understandable since there’s that decline in late life then a sudden improvement which is a hallmark of the zag before the end instead of a new better era.
You can tell when a writer is in their passion, not talking for platform or audience. It is written with a love and skill.

As father in the hospital again and may not come out this time, it becomes grounded in observations such as relating dad’s life attitude,

A thoroughly enjoyable book for craft and content.
116. Nicholodeon: a book of lowerglyphs by Darren Wershler-Henry (Coach House, 1997)
(found in library catalogue)
How curious vispo tributes go to men. Are there that few practioners? What would tilt to disproportionally male? Is it a generational thing related to socialization of females chatter of their lives and males speak more externally? Or about who mentors who and males happened to give access at a certain time and place?

This tribute to bp of using his elements in a letterpress tray particularly popped, as well as breaking the form of the book by having a fold out sheet. Wow, in a land of tidy bound pages it seems extravagance more typical of hand-made press items.
Structured as tributes, an insiders kind of book. I wonder what some people would get out of it.
117. Grey Owl: The Mystery of Archie Belaney by Armand Garnet Ruffo (Coteau, 1996)
(found in library catalogue)
What an enjoyable read, quite compelling as it went thru his life in a chronological memoir. I’ve seen a few books by Ruffo but this is my hand’s down favourite.
I too read of Grey Owl as a figure in my childhood and didn’t know he wasn’t native. A complex figure rendered from poems from various points of view to build a complete chronological memoir. It reads like a biography and unfolds like a mystery wondering what turn his life will take next. It hooks forward like a whole unit more than individual poems although each poem stands alone. I liked the research aspect and how thing from his journal were actually from his journal, like this,

We don’t have to make stuff up. There’s a wealth of out there to draw on.
118. Riveted: The science of Why Jokes make us laugh, movies make us cry, and religion makes us feel one with the universe by Jim Davies (Palvgrave & McMillan, 2014)
(seen at writers fest)
Everyone should read this. I was skeptical about it being pop sci with a lot of hook but no follow thru but it was chock full of neat little facts. It’s almost manic energy keeps up without being too all over the place. It took a while to adapt to the jumpiness of the almost stream of consciousness text but it is clustered by subjects. Still, I wish it had an editor to corral it a little more, but as the text and studies show, to work more to understand leads you to believe the text more.

Fascinating stuff.

OC and religion. Better than his talk at Writers Fest focussing more on how vs. people believing in UFOs.
119. Our Days in Vaudeville: 29 Collaborations with Stuart Ross (Mansfield Press, 2013)
(bought at an Ottawa small press fair)
Because it’s collaboration, it’s a different beast than some. Some poems went back and forth by word, or line, or couplet or quatrain. It has the feel of a exquisite corpse. Sometimes they jazz together. Sometimes it feels like two writers competing and resisting one another like a jazz improv I once saw.
Sometimes its reeling to sillyland like this,

Non-sequitur jumps is my mother tongue.
Favorite one has a sense of humour in playful pokes against one another as the two styles were collaged:

It has a meta level that reminds me of Michele Provost’s work in and against text.

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”.