3 poems and 1 ford

i recently remembered i had 2 poems online, as part of the "thank you" zine we whipped up for stephen buckley upon his (2nd) graduation from SFU back in 2004. then, after we'd put in all that effort, he turned around and came back for his masters. now (as of tonight) i'm officially off-campus before him. how does he pull that off?

the poems are "untitled" and "afterthoughts", and you can read 'em here.

also, liam ford is an spankingly good writer (read his blog). he wrote a great review of a bukowski reading/film for kicks magazine called "Impolite Poetry" . read it if you like yourself.

on the subject of mr. ford, and in order to ensure the title of this post makes sense, here's a third poem:

literary revolution

- for liam ford

what if ford and taylor had been poets,
deconstructing and compartmentalizing
poems into images, rhymes, devices, etc.?
an assembly line working all night,
welding on metaphors and greasing the syntax.

think of all the poems we’d have by now:
we’d each get a new one stuffed
in our newspapers every morning,
we’d line our birdcages with them,
throw them as confetti at weddings.

there’d be so many that eventually
we’d stop reading them carefully,
only skimming to that part 2/3rds
of the way down where they throw in
the joke to lighten the mood…
you know, just before it gets heavy.

and we’d like it, of course,
it would be handy and comfortable
unlike the tourette-inspired system of old
where poems would spurt out unannounced
from all sorts of questionable individuals
and locales.

but still, i say god bless the automobile
and ford and taylor and the automated
plague they unleashed upon this earth,
bless them for staying the hell away from
poetry, leaving it to us inefficient schmucks
barking and howling in the woods, mixing
our metaphors in the most unproductive of
fashions, accomplishing little and realizing
that that was exactly the point, all along.

golden

gotta love googling your name while stalling for exams. i found my first wiki-reference. i bet 10 bucks it won't last more than a week.

here's the original article/rant, if yer interested: Is the Golden Key screwing you over?

2 sites

anna moorhouse is a great poet. she has a blog. it has a new poem on it. see for yourself.

also, i believe i have found the greatest poetry blog ever. it has a whopping 2 entries. read the first one first, and the second one second.

lucky number 7

my final column in The Peak just came out. it's called "On truth and tenancy", and you can read it here.

if yer interested, here's the poem i wrote a couple years ago that inspired the column:

in the W.A.C. Bennett Library

maybe Wacky Bennett
built all those dams
and universities
because he knew
that he couldn't stop
the flow, he could
only slow it down

turn it into something
we could comprehend
(something we could power
our coffee grinders with)

a shrine beaten out
with our muddy human
fists where we could
worship the water
as if it were holy,
as if it were our own.