59. Conversations with the Kid by Marco Fraticelli (King’s Road Press, 2015)
How neat to get a copy of this. It is haibun by Marco of conversations with his grandchild. A limited edition given out at Haiku Canada which I couldn’t attend this year. It was made using one of my templates that I offer under free resources. I’ve heard of other ones coming into being here and there but it’s the first paper I’ve seen myself. Here’s one of his haibun,

Time After Time
I was remembering this morning that there was once a time when I used to wear two watches. Not only that, but I used to collect antique clocks. I was convinced that all these clocks would help me control time.
How come you don’t wear a watch these days, Grandpa?
Because I always know exactly what time it is.
Really? So what time is it then?
It’s now.
‘Now’ isn’t a time.
You’re wrong, kid. ‘Now’ is the only time.
taking off
my watch
for yoga

Funny how yoga seems to be the new beer for poets. Everywhere I look, more yoga poems. I suppose it’s more adaptive in the post-modern era once we take surviving as something to shoot for.
60. The Testing Tree: Poems by Stanley Kunitz (Atlantic Monthly Press Book, 1962)
I read the whole book waiting for a delayed flight. And I only regret it a little. I rushed thru a 5-course cordon bleu meal because I didn’t want it interrupted at an awkward time when we did get clearance to leave the tarmac, in case we hit turbulence. And because I didn’t want to stop. Although often anecdotes, they are precisely worded and not as plain as their syntax. p. 59

Again! Again!
Love knocked again at my door :
I tossed her a bucket of bones.
From each bone springs a soldier
who shoots me as a stranger.

It has a lot of movement in there for the number of words but not haphazard shifts for randomness’ sake. It moves pragmatically but not a straight course.
Even when it is a simple poem of watching a Robin Redbreast, it is shot through with an unexpected trauma where the erratic behaviour of the bird is not its doing but because he had been hunted with a bb-gun and you can see sky thru its skull. That reveal of sky after all the musing to help or figure out the movement before stops the poem like a car against a freight train.
There is the moral tug throughout, attempting to be what is the good in this world, to be pacifist and kind, and yet the bind of all the wrongs leading to a desire to get to the the hangman. That complex nature of humanity is missing in many poems written now. Why should that be? Is it the infinite moral relativism? It helps to read now as opposed to then perhaps because I don’t anticipate I’m being set up. But the twist isn’t away but to the deeper questions. There are also the gentle loving poems such as “After the Last Dynasty”, p. 28-89, there’s a kindliness in the poke, a fond acceptance in tone in the comic hyperbole of distance,

Reading in Li Po
how “the peach blossoms follows the water”
I keep thinking of you
because you were so much like
Chairman Mao,
naturally with the sex
transposed
and the figure slighter.
Loving you was a kind
of Chinese guerrilla war.

And it comes back

“Pet, spitfire, blue-eyed pony,
here is a new note
I want to pin on your door,
through I am ten years late
and you are nowhere:
Tell me,
are you still mistress of the valley,
what trophies drift downriver,
why did you keep me waiting?

I suppose it is a lack of raw thrashing that appeals. There’s a resolution rather than unclarity of how to interpret presented as the finished thing. It has closure as well as an attention to beauty in flow of sound.
61. undercurrent by Rita Wong (Nightwood, 2015)
This was an interesting read. It could have gone towards tiresome lecturing/apocalyptic but it stayed grounded and kept circling. It covers things from canoeing to a tar sands walk, to regenerating wild areas within a city, to resource mining. Various angles turn so the theme of water is there but it feels more suggestive as a theme than project-writing. Unlike The Polymers (House of Anansi, 2013) this kept its momentum and represented more of what I see Canada as— English, Native, Chinese, intellects, personal experiences, men, women, a reach into history and completely contemporary.
Some are plainly stated, others play in language. Some are a list poem such “a moving target” where as “a walking mineral body” “an orchestra of nutrients/infiltrated by capital’s clear shout/consumed while consuming/disoriented in proprioceptive profusion.” Another, a sort of daffynition poem, runs like a dictionary (“micro: a power we don’t have words for ; the burgess shale in your eyelashes”)
Here’s one, p36

Medicines in the city
一
horsetail hints
at abundant water beneath
transformed into fine green nodes
sprouting up from cracks in pavement
near Main & Broadway […]
scrub brush, toothbrush, removed of toxins
horsetail ever-so-slowly heals inflictions
a living fossil who quietly outlasts our cities

The book itself is gorgeously designed and I hope whoever did it gets an award. The simple touches of water text running along the bottoms of the pages hold a common’s day book of quotes of a wide range of thinkers. Much better than to epigraph and try to parse how you got from A to B or it looking arbitrarily tacked on. They sit near each other in a sort of dialogue.
Also recommended as one of my most recommended reads. She is also going to be my guest on Literary Landscape on the second Thursday of July, that is this week. Tune in one 93.1fm to hear more.
62. Flamingo Watching: Poems by Kay Ryan (Copper Canyon, 1994)
This is an oldie, relatively speaking, but goodie. They are plain parable, carefully considered truth-kernal sort of poems. p. 39

Half a Loaf
The whole loaf’s loft
is halved in profile,
like the standing side
of a bombed out cathedral.
The cut face
of half a loaf
puckers a little.
The bread cells
are open and brittle
like touching coral.
It is nothing like the middle
of an uncut loaf,
nothing like a conceptual half
which stays moist.
I say do not adjust to half
unless you must,

A simple object turned around in the head, suggesting an allegory for all the things we live on which from the outside of unstarted seem more complete than they could ever be if we start. How can you stay with your dreams and pursue them both? It seems tongue in cheek. It seems a careful new way of seeing bread. Bread as it comes out of the oven continues to bake for a while, small crackles as it completes its trajectory of being baked. The structure is worse if you break the steam’s crust seal and open it too soon.

p. 30, The Narrow Path also has those lessons on how to live. If you’re prepared to plan your pleasure, your delayed gratification, there are tools and ways. If you follow the whimsy of the moment’s pleasure, the way looks easier but there is no rest searching for the next hit, and hold. The value, like a tortoise and hare story, of daily discipline rather than impulse takes you further
63. MxT by Sina Queyras (Coach House, 2014)
This book came out and I am still in the swaying foothills of grief of my father as well. Does one ever get over a loss of any person or just shift the acuteness is getting over the worst?
It wasn’t as fraught as I expected. My favourite parts were the pataphysics type graphics of circuits marking each chapter. Each chapter was different. I didn’t think I’d get thru the first but somewhere in the first third was captivating.
There are immediate bits: “I want to take you by the scruff of your heart” and the book caused a new poem to spring into existence, so that’s something.

with poetry of grief to temper the sunshine. sheesh, poets. good stiff by Sina.

A photo posted by Pearl Pirie (@pearlksp) on Jun 4, 2015 at 5:03pm PDT

64. Comparing Tattoos (Haiku Canada, 2015)
An anthology of who’s playing in that haiku pool this year, the snapshot was edited by Mike Montreuil and Cathy Drinkwater Better. A favourite piece was David Randen’s

mom busy
organizing photos
two clocks ticking

which sits nicely on the line of literal, clean observation and with the sense of double meaning in the second part. Another senryu by Judit Hollos was around mother,

cataracts
in mom’s eyes—
the clouds only he sees

I seem to have a thing for cataracts. They keep appearing in my poems. Probably being raised around people in their senior years I grew up with a sense of immediacy of old age, expecting arthritis, loss of one arm, paralysis, all that glamour, as normal.
65. Maestro: A Surprising Story About Leadership by Listening by Roger Nierenberg (Portfolio, 2009)
A business parable it talks about how to do company management by understanding how a conductor works with an orchestra, picking up cues, leading while also interacting but sharing a vision, letting people have control and ownership of the direction, so they can do their best. I may understand classical music a little better. I know more about how conducting music works at least.
Slow paced and rather high ratio of say it, say what you’ve said and recap once more before you move on, but was an interesting enough read, better than the standard extended allegory for how to do business fare.

This set of poems is a coin of two sides, observation of concrete world, and moral engagement.
To my eye it doesn’t look well for tanka and haiku side but it’s not a football match where winner takes the cup, is it?
Thinking about diversity more, what is salient to define? What is achieved with the goal if VIDA and CWILA achieve parity of presentation? What if consumers become indifferent to genitalia-culture and who sleeps with whom (although that’s always interesting, isn’t it)? Do we have a better world?
In putting Diversity as a priority, am I looking for allies with a different skin tint and a different distribution of body fat without changing content?
Should it only qualify as diversity if it’s disagreeable? If my goal is not to reinforce what I already know and agree with in new variations, should I be looking for spy novel authors who are wife-owning neo-Nazi factory beef farmers/Rhino hunters who hobby farm because they already made generations of income from oil money and dog fighting, so dabble with gay-conversion fundamentalist Sunday Schools?
If I’m not willing to change my mind going in, there’s no point in reading. I’d just be propping up by arguments by knowing the “enemy side’s”, creating more entrenchment which is against the point of diversity.
If I read only what is liable to resonate, if that were possible to line up, am I not just in a constant state of vibration and chasing sensation, not caring what is true or valuable or out there. Almighty aesthetics displace the value of people putting a mental construct of art before honouring what is. Again, morality creeps into choice.
Does reading what you like work? Does it build a safe space against the world? Is that what the art is for? There are parallel systems of aesthetics rather than hierarchy. Yes, some things are more perfect for a time and place and particular person. And we go on,
53. Doubleheader: Hurrah for Anything, Poemscapes & A Letter to God by Kenneth Patchen (New Directions, 1958)
Patchen is brilliant and twisted and confounding and wise. I think I’ll collect everything of his.
His Poemscapes,

47) Getting Up Early
Such a marvelous delicacy of castles shimmering out upon these bushes in the morninglight…

That oblique yes. It doesn’t parse straight up and yet it is that exactly. Waking before normal time. The quality of light like a different planet. Ephemeralness and constancy. Castles in the sky at earth level so close you can touch them and all seems not daunting. I stopped on that line for miles. People y’all can stop writing now.
It has more density than you’d get from compressing many books. And yet it doesn’t become precious overextenuating of tone.
And there’s crossing some of the same paths but things sitting side by side, coming back to “conversations with mirrors” or “little essays”. Things can’t be said if everything has to fit together like marquetry over a flat square surface. There’s no anticipation of what will come with non-sequitur and yet it is not unconsidered mood blurt.

Friend the Rabbit (72
They were both frowning up at the Tower Room, where sometimes lovely maidens have a hard deal escaping the clutches of wicked (but rich) kinds. He whispered something to his mule, and — bam ! ! ! no castle

Same castle. Symmetry of word or overall picture? It confounds.
As Jack Underwood points out, a poem interrupts a day and has to make it worthwhile for someone to care about what the poem says. The audience has no obligation to be polite if it is not engaging.

167) You’re all nuts
Boobs, scamps, frauds, and you assorted blaugh-swilling drearies — oh, COME OFF IT!

The other half of the book, if you flip it around becomes Hurrah for Anything which have comic illustrations as if bpNichol and bill bissett came out of a tradition.

Kenneth Patchen, Hurrah for Anything (1957)

A photo posted by Pearl Pirie (@pearlksp) on May 21, 2015 at 3:07pm PDT

p. 27

Perhaps it is time
Does anyone think it’s easy
To be a creature in this world?
To ask for reasons
When all reasons serve only
To make the darkness darker,
And to break the heart?
— Not only of man,
But of all breathing things?
Perhaps, friends, it is time
To take a stand
Against all this senseless hurt.

Many are unapologetically absurd but not patronizing but with a joy to them. The previous book of his I read felt like contraband, like between mattress banned material calling out war in terms of kindness if the way to live. Written decades ago, they are as relevant.
His poems present to an audience, as if people are colleagues, participants. Calling out not a litany of things to be enraged of as if the audience has experienced nothing, but for thinktank, actionbank.
54. A Charm of Finches: Haiku, Senryu, And Tanka by Richard Stevenson (Ekstasis, 2004)
By booksale luck someone was clearing out several of their haiku books and I was right place and time for the windfall of half a dozen haiku and tanka collections. The prevailing idea of these seemed to look outside such as p. 34

two yellow leaves
or a McDonald’s wrapped
in the cottonwood

A lot of wind and sun but not the plumb bob of insight that some have. p. 59. Decidedly gentle humour where the turn is more the poem and poet than the object,

a squad of Cessnas?
No, just the neighbours mowing
meek suburban lawns

< strong>55. ASHINEoVSUN by John Barlow (Exile, 1999)
John Barlow’s poems are much closer to no bars of Patchen. Straight up plain or a wild ride. p. 59 was some solace thru months of pain,

Two Communists
I guess there’s some sort of solace in knowing
there is no solace for some types of pain,
– they’re givens, and you don’t have to tire
yourself seeking out relief from them – those
ones are just solid there, amount to a kind of
strength.

Some poets aim for wisdom lines tacked on like a sticker to close the envelope but one like that, the whole is the point. Expend what you can’t afford to lose trying to escape the pain when you could just accept and get a windfall. Struggling against not fair barriers reminds me of a man who bummed off my grandma who loved him as a son, accepted him as he was. I challenge you to find any man with a wage or salary who works harder than that man to not have to get a job, scheming thru disability and welfare and favour taking up all his time so he’d have less to do if hired. It gave him zip and a sense of compensating power to work around the givens of disadvantage, born poor, poor in school and with literacy, kicked out of the house as a teen. Start where you are. Feet on the ground. If the systems are built against you structurally, set up to trip you up, why cooperate with them?
Another poem, which I will place whole. It doesn’t confuse poem with anecdote or poem with essay or poem with impressionist mood piece by tralalah and error. It isn’t brokering in language, sidelining ideas or audience. It is itself:

(which you can enbiggen with a click)
56. Islands by Robin Skelton (Ekstasis Editions, 1993)
The intro essay was interesting talking about the history and development, Somonka, Choka, Katauka and other lesser used forms in English. They are deliberately cosmic in scope, not really my cup of tea.
p. 54

Questioning
(Mondo form)
Are you alone?
     The wind has a hundred voices.
Will you forget me?
     I walk in yesterday’s shoes.
Have you succeeded?
     Reeds shiver in the dawn.
Is there no justice?
     The spider has altered the ceiling

His haiku are 5-7-5 and have titles which scrape my sensibilities but it’s good to scrape up one’s habitual thinking or else one becomes petrified instead of tree. p. 56

Contentment
This day is enough,
an apple high on the bough,
a cobweb shining

57. Blasts Cries Laughter by Lawrence Ferlinghetti (New Directions Poetry Pamphlet #9, 1988, 2014)
I actually picked it up for a friend and have yet to deliver it. His reputation precedes my reading him by decades. He’s 96 and still scrappy as ever. The chapbook has been edited to amend the list poem, “The First and Last of Everything”, that starts with the dawn of life on earth, to add 9/11, and Obama,

The next-to-last free speech radio
The next-to-last independent newspaper raising hell
The next-to-last independent bookstore with a mind of its own
The next-to-last lefty looking for Obama Nirvana
The first fine day of the Wall Street Occupation
        to set forth upon this continent as a new nation!

In Blind Poet he says, “I am painting the landscape of my bent soul/and the soul of mankind/as I see it.” It is about life amid the apocalypse, politically, in nature, for homeless, displaced, dispossessed. In “Cries of Animals dying he describes and decries, ” “the daily scrimmage for existence/in the wind up model of the universe/the spinning meat-wheel world/about to consume itself”.
58. Narratives: poems in the tradition of black women, 2nd edition, by Cheryl Clarke, (Kitchen Table Women of Color Press, NY, 1982, 2nd edition, 1983)
This was a lucky bookstore find which took me a while to get to. It’s by Kitchen Table: Women of Colour Press which Audre Lorde had a hand in starting in 1980 to build a parallel black culture publishing industry, focussing on women of colour, open to all sexualities. The press has a blog.
Jaime M. Grant, in her 1996 essay “Building Community-Based Coalitions from Academe: The Union Institute and the Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press Transition Coalition” said works published by the press have “literally transformed the conversation on racism, sexism, and homophobia in the classroom in the last decade.” [Wikipedia].
Clarke is a member of the Board of Directors of the Newark Pride Alliance, which is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to LGBTQ advocacy and programming in the city of Newark, New Jersey. This was her first book in her early 30s. Clarke since went on to publish 5 more books including a collected.
It takes to time and place. 1968, Washington and a mixed race family as riots spread. A good enough man but one who goes caveman and sits all night with a gun in case his castle is attacked too. Nervous, he shoots his daughter coming in during the wee hours. The unfolding is gut-wrenching.
Poems with punch, including The johnny cake (for Charley), p. 45, which starts

Death frees people for new experiences.
At the funeral of my friend’s mother I was to learn this.
As no one in my family I care about had died then
I knew nothing of grief.

It returns as a refrain, each time with a different pitch
The 6 page poem continues, driving with the friend 95 miles south for his mother’s funeral, “the car and inexperience between us”. She describes the rituals of visitors, “by noon the kitchen was stacked with food. The rooms filled with the talk of bold/independent women comforting the aunt.” and the aunt. The brightly lit colourful public moments intercut with private,

the aunt brought me cloying peach cobbler
and watched me it and lick the pate.
She licked the plate after me”
And pages later, “I welcome her hand inside my drawers.?And come for the first time/for the rest of the day./With the same hand she kneads the dough/short/and asks nothing back.”
There are many scenes of home violence, from father and boyfriend, mostly left to be inferred. Much left almost unsaid. p. 23, Gum,

Reading all of these now engage in asking what to bring forward into tomorrow’s present? I suppose all poetry is about what not to throw out. If something doesn’t matter to you, why bring it up or tart it up in font? People have the majority of their lives already comprised of minutiae that doesn’t matter. It’s no value added to swill about some more random curation like picking a personalized licence plates derived from I Ching.
To make sense it doesn’t have to be direct. Being blunt is often more a billboard in front of scenery. What you think you mean is the box around the gift. Mostly poetry, some essays.
Working around the edges of what threads are dangling, in translating cross-culturally or cross-century.
47. The Hatch by Colin Browne (Talon, 2015)
Having heard him read from it I wanted to read it myself. Always a good sign, yes? The long movements in the poems are similar to what David O’Meara’s last one did as well. The roots of the poems are more deeply buried so it may not always be evident what’s going on but there’s an intoxicating reel. A freedom to play shift gears, take flight, keep grounded, let the unconscious muse. They seem poems that are not attempting to be poems but thoughts coming to understand themselves, which I take it to be the fruit of working at poetry since the TISH-era.
The notes at the back are a rich read. More can be understood from direct quote than from an amount of my standing in between it and you so in the poem p. 15, the fire

the past is not the barrow of your sorrow
you’re its wings
lombardies, a winding drive
a failed retirement complex
with flower boxes, hops, scrubbed trilobites with tyres
you can’t hose the unhappiness away”

The tone shifts freely, more like gymnast than square dancer. p. 69, the first half of “form”

what gives with
beauty’s nose
for dismembering
and spite?
when he sang, magnolias
keeled over
stones sought stones
to roll against
the limbs of meadows
arched heavily
“Coxwain, my coxwain
in the dory of my flesh”
when grif struck
wheat wept
bird plucked out
their tails
he grew a trunk, a sycamore
they say
young men sighed
in that shade
he laid down his lyre
and his vanity
the old gods
fumed when
he gave them
the finger

There are twists that I can’t predict which are tasty. A register change in a poem is apt comes with a “see! see!” at some ghost of a grade 10 English teacher telling me it isn’t done. The book rolls around, doesn’t feel like a project book. You have to sit back and watch the poem unfold without trying to logically parse it’s essay. As Jack Underwood put it, “If a poem wanted you to know exactly what it was about, it would be a boiled egg.”
48. Emily Dickinson: Poems, Vol. 2 (1891)
She seems to have some pragmatic observations with this set that have more quip than longing. Reading is such a funny elephant. Half a dozen people read the same work and one grabs a tail, one an ear, one slaps a flank. What struck me “We play at paste/Till qualified for pearl/Then drop the paste”. They are more circumspect poems than the last set. “Faith is a fine invention/For gentlemen who see; But microscopes are prudent/In an emergency.” Satisfaction after struggle is a transitory thing that makes beggars of us all. “By catching at the twigs that grow/between the bliss and me” and it’s gone, that “instant’s grace.” About the size of it, yep.
49. O Cadoiro by Erin Moure (House of Anansi, 2007)
I love the bits of poems that are stitched together, literally with colored threads in colour photo reproduction tying bits in.
Here Moure is translating Galician-Portuguese cantigua, allowing sense and transparency of meaning to falter where it will. Sometimes it breaks lucid,
p. 53,

Walking is not yet prayer

They are often poems of ache and longing, such as p.79 asking mother to not allow her to go see her love “If I go there I’ll die of love”. There are poems of separation and other unkind kinds of solitude: p. 44. “Please waken. I am suffering from so many/ consonant, consoants, and I am/ not a good sufferer”
50. Sonnets from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
I’ve been meaning to read them. They are here. The more familiar naturally seems better from confirmation bias but that said, it seems the How Do I Love Thee poem stands out for a reason. I didn’t find them all terribly moving nor mind-blowing but not a waste of time either. They feel like a more of a formal exercise than I expected. Suppose it is a working-through “Beloved, I only love thee! let it pass.”
I wonder if she read Bel and the Dragon and when she said she was pulled backwards by the hair into love, was making a religious reference to Habakkuk who was seized by the angel and dragged back to Babylon at windspeed to feed Daniel in the lion’s den.
Although love poems for a husband it feels torqued like an unrequited love, or love between non-reciprocal intensities, not dissimilar to Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella. From EBB’s sonnet 14,

If thou must love me, let it be for nought
Except for love’s sake only. Do not say
“I love her for her smile—her look—her way
Of speaking gently,—for a trick of thought
That falls in well with mine, and certes brought
A sense of pleasant ease on such a day”—
For these things in themselves, Belovëd,

Make an unconditional decision of relationship and fill in the behaviors that follow to maintain such feelings. A bottomless well wanting assurance “Say over again, and yet once over again,
That thou dost love me…To love me also in silence with thy soul.” Or maybe it is more ecstatic jubilation. But as coupleness is negotiated, a fierce: don’t tell me how to be, and let us each be our own selves, she commands,

Accuse me not, beseech thee, that I wear
Too calm and sad a face in front of thine;
For we two look two ways, and cannot shine
With the same sunlight on our brow and hair.

A strong sense of monopolist of love. Giving a lock of hair, which makes sense before years of photographs. But only mother love her hair, then it’s given to the mortician.

I thought the funeral-shears
Would take this first, but Love is justified,—
Take it thou,—finding pure, from all those years,
The kiss my mother left here when she died.

No pressure, no pressure. It almost seems satirical. But then, monolithic intensity does.
51. A Few Words by Czandra (Melinda Cochrane International, 2014)

Poems of nature with a river of sound and passion running through them. Some words of native language to ground as tent pegs sideways, not just down into history of geology and all the species around them. Reciting names of species brings us closer to loving them more.
52. Me Funny, edited by Drew Hayden Taylor (Douglas & McIntyre, 2005)
Since I saw Drew Hayden Taylor at Ottawa Writers Fest I’ve been meaning to get another book by him. I didn’t notice that he edited rather than wrote this and its essays on humour. So it’s more sociology of native relationship to humour and art than anything comedic. It explains humour as a coping mechanism for dire situations where there’s alcohol and family abuse.
Some essays were strong. Some dry enough to put the desert in a dissertation. Most agree that you either laugh or you cry and to laugh is to take control. Humour and teasing are ways to maintain order. Whatever happens to laugh is to not lose face.
The book points out some luminaries in Canada’s native leaders. It talks more about visual art and plays.