book review: Purdy

my review of The More Easily Kept Illusions: The Poetry of Al Purdy, ed. Robert Budde, is now online at poetryreviews.ca.

read it here.

while i'm posting: High Altitude Poetry is hosting a picnic/reading tomorrow in the AQ gardens at SFU if anyone's interested. more info on their website.

questions to the stars

when i die, lord, what will my father look like?
i remember him old and wrinkled, but my brothers
remember him when he was a young fighter.
will we all see the same man?

do we get to choose how we look in heaven?
can we pick our perfect age or do we
always appear as we did when we died?
is heaven filled with geriatrics?
are whole aisles of heaven's groceries devoted to prunes?

what about the babies, then?
the stillborns?
do they age?
do they become wise and strong
as their parents would have dreamed?

more importantly, lord, i'm wondering tonight about hell.
if we can pick the age we look, can we not
too pick the age when we were still good?
don't get me wrong, i look around this place
and i understand the need for hell
but i'm certain even little adolf was at some time
dazzled by the endlessness of a snowfall
the tiny mechanics of a frog's legs or
the sunken deliciousness of a black forest cake
(like the one my mother baked for us tonight).

surely that boy deserves a spot in heaven.

and lord, i know you are a busy man and
i don't want to hold you up any longer
i just wanted to say that you and me are much the same.
we both hold a lot of answers inside ourselves.
we gaze out into the unknown,
our bellies full.

- from the September 2005 issue of High Altitude Poetry

read more of my poems from HAP here.

What the hell?

I'm having to say goodbye-for-now to Ida Ferdinandi tonight. A good friend, and longtime High Altitude Poetry member, Ida is heading back to Montenegro, which, to put it mildly, sucks the big dog. It will be a great loss not just for her many close friends, but also for the wider poetry community at SFU.

Anyway, here's one of her untitled poems from the July 2004 issue of High Altitude Poetry, which somehow seems appropriate right now:

An intruder
In a strange land
On a truck
Wind in her hair
Dirt on her pores
There's a man
Smiling
He gives her an onion
With the skin of a chestnut
Taste of a potato
Raw
She smiles back
What the hell?
An intruder
In a strange land

-Ida Ferdinandi

what a robin thinks

~ for Mariner Janes

worm
but not worm
instead: lightning mother waterslide

not the words
but the shape of your mouth
when you whisper them
in a crowded airport.

don’t go to the woods or
some ragged field to try it -
it will not work

for you are the one
who understands those spaces
and a robin’s home is nothing like yours.

in the land of the robins
sounds melt into a different atmosphere
and background noises are scripts,
not soundtracks

in the land of the robins
languages and words are
drunken strangers who
wrestle shirtless in
the back allies of the clouds.

the land of the robins is a place you can never visit
though you can purchase a ticket
and wait

whisper: lightning mother waterslide

taste worm, but not worm,
a flavour that can be spoken to no one,
only sung to the sky.


from the summer 06 issue of one cool word.

water, rocks, cool words

sorry for the paucity of posts lately. i was in the rockies with family taking pictures and writing far too few poems. just got home today.

got a poem coming out in the 2nd issue of one cool word ("what a robin thinks", read it here), and i will be reading at the mag launch in 2 days:

july 28th, 2006
one cool word magazine launch
9:00 PM, Backstage Lounge
10 bucks, 12 at door

[The set list, if ya missed it:
Haiku 1-4
for you, in sunlight
fads
To a girl, distraught, having just lost her first love
amplified
i just noticed
sounds
michael jordan]

bloody expensive, and mostly music (though good music), so i'll understand if many don't make the trek out to see it, but liam ford, colin stewart, and i all have 15 minute sets, so it should be a good evening. i'll be reading around 11:50, by the looks of it, though the schedule might just fall to hell (as they usually seem to), so who knows.

if you want to go, and are travelling from the eastern suburbs, a carpool might be possible.

4 event equation

july 19th:
Barbara Adler CD Launch
8:30 doors, 9:30 show, Anza Club
7-10 bucks
more info: perdido_tusk(at)hotmail.com

+

july 22nd:
Summer Dreams Reading Festival
12:30 - 8:30 PM, Robson Square
free!
all the details here
(note: HAP is reading at 12:40)

+

july 28th:
one cool word magazine launch
9:00 PM, Backstage Lounge
10 bucks, 12 at door
more details here

+

august 10th:
HAP poetry reading/picnic
12:30 PM, AQ Gardens, SFU
(i'll be bringing two-bite brownies)

+

a skateboard and helmet

=

3 poems

when it rains...

three of my poems from the new issue of Red Fez:

the successful people of this world

today

To a girl, distraught, having just lost her first love


if you have the time, read the rest of the issue. it's certainly worth it.

chemical spill

i’m not going to personify the muddy little thing
dress it in the human bondage of nazi
gas or guillotines or worse

i’m not going to invoke chernobyl
or any other place we have
convinced the soil to reject

i’m not going to observe how this
could have been foreseen
how in fifty years we will be dead
and possibly our children too

as will this fish, its gills burned
off by caustic soda, its arc
collapsed as guts fold in on one
another and dissolve

as we too will fold in, one day, like petals
though i need not bother you with details
we have shared before:

we walked slowly forward
hands firm in the bellowing silence
you whispered ‘the smell is weaker than i imagined’
i dropped my pen into my pocket

now, hours later, i pull it out to find
it no longer smells of pocket, or fish, or you.


from the 2006 issue of Quills Canadian Poetry Magazine.

?

The Next Great Proletarian Revolution

It will be led by Dilbert.
He will begin at his office by
tossing the pointy-haired boss out the window
and, swinging a letter opener in the air,
declaring the seventeenth floor a workers’ paradise.

He will then slash through the bottom of panel four
dropping on to Snoopy’s dog house, where,
through a broad-based leafleting campaign,
he will whip the Peanuts into a revolutionary fervour
ousting Charlie Brown’s cruel canine food rations
and Lucy’s abusive monopoly on psychiatric consultations.

The uprising will spread across page D 12.
The members of the Family Circus will
break from their coffee-mug prison
and rally with Calvin and Hobbes
and Marx and Engels
on the spacious lawns of Capitol Hill
that lie nestled in the upper right hand corner
of Doonesbury’s third panel.

Finally, the funny page revolutionaries
will tear down all the borders and titles and by-lines
and with the pieces build one large panel
in which they will gather
chanting and dancing
throwing their three-fingered fists in the air.

And we will chuckle to ourselves
folding them up and sliding them
into our purses and overcoats
as we squeeze into the subway train,
the winter chill clinging to our ears and socks.
We’ll pull our collars up to the cold
smudging new wardrobes with the dark ink of the revolution
and cursing our misfortune,
wondering what on earth we will wear to work tomorrow.


from the July 2006 issue of High Altitude Poetry and the October 2006 edition of memewar

read more of my poems from HAP here.

book review: Zieroth

reviewed The Village of Sliding Time by David Zieroth for poetryreviews.ca. read the review here. i'll post new poems o' mine soon. oh, and the West Coast Poetry Festival is starting on wednesday (runs 'till saturday). seems a good deal smaller this year. all the shows are in the evening and at The Western Front. more details here.