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Image: Poetry Postcard with digitally manipulated heron photo
It’s that time of year, so no surprise, we got hit with another windstorm last weekend. Thankfully, for us, it was merely inconvenient, with a brief power outage. But those 90k gusts can be unnerving. I grew up with big winds off the Bay of Fundy and the Tantramar marshes. As a child, I found the winter winds that whistled and howled around the house at night kind of thrilling. Cozied under the puff in my bed, I felt safe and secure, knowing my parents would deal with any calamities that might come our way – and as it turned out, none did. Thinking about this reminded me of another time I felt protected in wind storms. We were living in Vancouver, I’d been on stress leave from my job and I realized it was past time for me to move on. The day I applied for a new position, one I very much wanted, a heron arrived to spend the night in the Douglas Firs behind our house. It was winter, a windy one, making me nervous in part because a few years earlier the top of one of those trees came crashing down in a storm, just missing our neighbour's garage. Anyway, that heron came and stayed every single night for three months, until the job I wanted was mine. And then it left. Which prompted the poem I’m posting today, Guardian, from Suddenly So Much (Exile Editions).
Guardian
Hope sways with the heron on a black bough
gone wild — the storm sleepless, trying
to pitch them from their nest into the night
like brittle wings clipped and dumped with the rest
of the dead, the broken and fallen crushing mauve
primrose and hyacinth; faith fading to darkness
as bleak as the back of the moon where nightmares menace
unfettered by a lucid dawn, gentle
breeze or daydream. Yet the heron on a black
bough gone wild in a wind storm, sleepless
throughout the night, faced with the rest of the dead,
the broken and fallen, the crushed primrose and hyacinth
at the edge of a bleak and moonless future filled
with a nightmare menace unfettered by dawn's lucid
tread, gentle breeze or daydream — regains
his precarious balance, holding on to hope.
This poem is roughly patterned after a passage in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, 16 lines in which Adam extols Eve’s beauty. The form he used was, as Edward LeComte says, “a figure of repetition known as epanadiplosis, or ‘the recapitulator’.” In essence, this is a series that starts and ends with the same word; there is a turn in the poem in which the negatives become positive (from John Milton Paradise Lost and Other Poems, (Mentor, 1981), pp 132-133, ftnote). Milton’s recapitulator can be found here: https://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/content/paradise-lost-book-iv (scroll down to lines 641 – 656, starting and ending with the word "sweet").
Image: At the Door (acrylic on canvas, 24” x 18”)
I love going to live plays, and here on Pender Island, Solstice Theatre puts on a couple each year. This fall they mounted an Agatha Christie classic, And Then There Were None - but I missed it because of a bad cough I couldn’t shake. This was doubly disappointing to me, as I am a huge mystery fan. I hear the play was a smash hit, too. Ah well. To honour drama and mysteries, this week I’m posting “The Eleventh Situation” from my book Suddenly, So Much (Exile).
The Eleventh Situation
Gozzi maintained that there can be but thirty-six tragic situations. Schiller took great pains to find more, but he was unable to find even so many as Gozzi. — Goethe
Another enigma. You're drawn in again, tempted
again to convict the obvious suspect without question.
Except it doesn't work. The lover's alibi,
clearly designed to beguile anyone looking
into his whereabouts, holds up. You assume the problem
lies elsewhere, begin to search for a subliminal hint
lurking in the kitchen. Surely this is where such a hint
would take shape. Bare counters. Cold stove. You're tempted
by aromas, follow them outdoors where a minor problem
takes your mind off the all-important question.
A small voice you ignore tries to suggest you've overlooked
something. You're too busy sniffing two intricate alibis,
morning glory and roses, hopelessly intertwined. Alibi
four steps forward, obsessively dissembling, hints
she likes roses too. You lose track of what you were looking
for, wander back inside where you try tempting
the husband with incriminating questions.
His answers implicate the maid who was away. The problem
seems to be your inability to solve problems.
Stonewalled by everyone, even the most obtuse alibi
secure, you suspect you never knew how to question
suspects. In the corner of your eye a new hint
ducks in and out of the garage (perhaps you can tempt
the chauffeur with a trap) but the camera is looking
at the victim's sister watching the game and you're looking
at third strike for the third time. Face it, the problem
was out of control the minute you forgot that temptation
involves deceit. Was it really a perfect alibi
that led you astray? Did you imagine every hint?
You're not quite ready to question
your own motives — if you start that line of questioning
there'll be no end to it and you're out of time as it looks
like the end is near. At last an obscure hint
surfaces, explaining nuances until the problem
dissolves and the case is cracked with a broken alibi
(finally!). The small voice interrupts when the ads attempt
to tempt you with mattress sales and a barbecue hinting
at your hunger. It says the only problem worth looking
into is all you will buy without question.
This poem is a sestina, which features a specific pattern for repeating the last words of each six-line stanza. As Kate Braid and I explain in In Fine Form (Caitlin): “If the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 represent the end words in the first stanza, then the pattern for the end words in each of the next five stanzas (when compared with stanza 1) is: stanza 2: 6-1-5-2-4-3; stanza 3: 3-6-4-1-2-5; stanza 4: 5-3-2-6-1-4; stanza 5: 4-5-1-3-6-2; stanza 6: 2-4-6-5-3-1.” All six words also appear in the final short stanza, in the middle and at the end of each line, in the following pattern: 2-5 / 4-3 / 6-1
The eleventh situation is the enigma.
Image: Desire, archival digital print (manipulated photograph)
It's December and that means the season of festive lights has begun. The Butchart Gardens’ amazing Christmas Lights display has been turned on, and here on the small island where I live, as elsewhere, people are stringing lights on porches and trees to brighten these deep winter nights. I love these lights, and thought I must have a poem about them somewhere – but no, it turns out I’ve never written one. However, several decades ago, when we were both starting out as poets writing about work, my friend Kate Braid and I wrote companion poems inspired by the lights on Vancouver’s Geodesic Dome, built for Expo ’86. So here they are, first Kate’s, then mine, responding to hers:
Union Welders: Overtime
- for Sandy Shreve
My brothers are building a dome
of crazed bars jutting
stiff into Expo air.
I watch them at night
hundreds of feet off the ground
magnificently poised
up where the air is clear.
As they work they are stars to me
shooting novas as they strike their arcs,
set welding rods
and build.
That’s not welders, my son explains
sixteen and wise.
Those are lights, set to flash.
Construction is finished,
done.
That night it is joyless to me.
I see builders no more,
just the built
ugly attempt
to mimic heaven.
─ from Covering Rough Ground by Kate Braid (Polestar), reprinted with permission
Night Lights on the Geodesic Dome
- for Kate Braid
You mentioned the welder you imagined
working late into the night, how
the sparks you saw flying from a torch
held by hands still fondly binding triangles
kept you fascinated
until you realized the delicate
firefly dance
was only an erratic flashing of bulbs.
Construction of this sphere never
intrigued me. It has always
looked cold, the metal more
like tinsel ribbed with acrylic
inexplicably curved to a finished glitter,
an irritating scrape
across my eyes.
This lattice of arched angles
seemed like sterile growth around a void ─
but last night, driving by
I think I saw your welder
dancing on the dome.
─ from The Speed of the Wheel Is Up to the Potter by Sandy Shreve (Quarry Press)
In addition to appearing in our first published books, these poems were published together in Canadian Dimension (June, 1988).
Image: Tear, archival digital print (manipulated photograph)
Lately I’ve been steeped in C. S. Harris’ Sebastian St Cyr mysteries, set in the early 1800s. Which has brought to mind the wonderful works of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec created later that century. Some years ago, after seeing his Elles lithographs at a Vancouver Art Gallery show, I wrote a sequence of poems responding to those powerful images. Each poem, titled after the lithograph, is in the voice of the woman depicted, either speaking to us, the viewers, or to herself, or commenting on Lautrec’s image. Lautrec created these lithographs as homages to the women, after living with them in their brothel at the rue des Moulins, with the intention of depicting them going about their everyday lives, seeing them as fully human, not defined solely by their profession. Here are a couple of poems from that sequence (published in Suddenly, So Much, Exile Editions):
Woman with a Tray — Breakfast;
Madame Baron and Mademoiselle Popo
Is this the way she will
remember me? A mother with her back turned
to her daughter —
I would take her
away from here if I could. Perhaps
if I had abandoned
her at birth…
Now all I can do is take away
the tray, worry about her
inadequate breakfast, coffee
with a bit of cream. She watches
me leave, is still in bed, reclining
on her side, hair
tousled, head propped
in her hand. Where on earth did he find
all that love in her eyes?
Woman Washing Herself — The Toilette
When you think about it, really it is odd
the way we choose one part
of the body
to love best. How we
bargain with God over tragedies
that may never happen —
take an arm if you must, but leave me
two good legs;
my hearing
but never my sight
This young artist
loves women's backs. While he was drawing
mine, I asked him to put down
his crayon, and wash that bit in the middle
I almost can't reach.
Me, I adore
breasts, and the way you get a glimpse
of mine, full and firm in the small
mirror above the wash basin
is my favourite part of this picture.
These are ekphrastic poems, the name given to poetry written in response to visual art.
Image: Maelstrom, 12” x 12”, oil and cold wax on canvas
We are well into storm season now – not just politically, but weather-wise too. Another big one is pummelling the west coast as I write – they are calling it a bomb cyclone. I thought atmospheric river was a scary enough term for these massive storms, but now we have another level of warning to terrify us. At any rate, with all this going on, I decided on Storm Warning, from my chapbook Level Crossing (Alfred Gustav Press) for this week’s Wednesday Poem.
Storm Warning
We ignored the signs all morning – that wreath
around the sun, then the fires the floods the freezing
extremes defying disbelief in a sky feathered
all morning with signs. We ignored the wrath
of the fevered wind and the first percussion clouds
rolling in behind silhouettes of the dead trying with
opaque hands to feel their way home again, ignoring
the signs of mourning wrapped around the sun.
This poem is another triolet, that little eight-line poem in which line one is repeated as lines four and seven, and line two is repeated as line eight. It is one of a dozen I wrote over a two year period some fifteen years ago. Poet David Zierothpublished them in his delightful Alfred Gustav Press chapbook series, in which he asks authors to include a comment about their poems. Here are a couple of the observations I made there about the triolet:
“In the process [of writing the poems] I realized what I love about the triolet is how much freedom its tiny scaffolding supports, how far you can travel without fear of collapse. How it insists on precision, sharpens focus.”
and:
“You might say the triolet is shaped like a figure 8, the way its refrains start and finish the poem and create a kind of intersection in the middle. You might say our lives are a lot like that, too. This sequence … uses the form as a way of looking at our everyday lives, the implications of our actions in any given moment, the Möbius strip we ride daily.”
Image: “Looking at pictures Jeff took at Panama and since. He has some pretty good ones but the best is one of Christine looking out the porthole. I hope to get prints of a few of them.” (Jack Shreve journal entry, April 7, 1936, Tasman Sea)
Last weekend, Tom Wayman was on Pender Island reading from his latest books, The Road to Appledore (memoir published by Harbour) and How Can You Live Here (poems, published by Frontenac House). Tom started the Vancouver Industrial Writers’ Union in 1979 and over the years gathered together numerous men and women who were writing about work. The group met, in various iterations as members came and went, until 1993. As it happens, several former members of VIWU now live on Pender (Kate Braid, Zoe Landale and me) or nearby in North Saanich (Kirsten Emmott) – so we joined Tom at his reading. Afterward, we got together for a mini reunion at our local pub. So, for this week’s Wednesday Poem, here’s another one about work, from Waiting For the Albatross (Oolichan), a collection of poems I crafted using segments from the diary my father, Jack Shreve, wrote at age 21 while working on a tramp freighter during the Great Depression.
Luck
1.
The cat has been chasing cockroaches ever since supper – good luck!
When we hit the warm weather we’ll get bed bugs too! Tough luck.
Robbie smashed three teeth on one of the funnel stays.
Went ashore to have the dentist yank them. Tough luck.
Last night cook cut his hand open with a meat cleaver. Bled like a
stuck pig and had to have three stitches taken in it. Tough luck.
Al found a great big worm in the soup! Bob saw a grub
in his biscuit. Three of the boys found maggots. Tough luck.
Len lost his little finger in the machinery. What it didn’t cut
off it crushed. Mate cut off the rest and sewed it up. Tough luck.
Took a minute to sharpen my knife and my hand slipped, cut my thumb.
Mate said to get out the needle and cat gut, joking, tough luck.
One of the firemen was tight and tried to sell a pair of new boots he’d bought.
When he got no bids he threw them over the wall – tough luck.
Cameron was tight last night and fell overboard!
Jackass. Lucky he didn’t drown.
2.
Don’t get me wrong about this trip. I wouldn’t have missed it
for the world. Too bad young Sullivan couldn’t get anything.
It makes me realize I was very lucky to get placed so easily.
Boys swapping yarns to-night; I don’t think I’d care for their
experiences, how they rode the rods, the rows they had.
While the work may not be interesting, it isn’t too hard;
I expected lots worse than I’ve had so far. Don’t get me
wrong. I wouldn’t have missed this trip for the world.
About the poems: Luck 1 is a ghazal, a form based on couplets that feature a brief refrain, just a word or phrase introduced at the end of the first two lines. It is then repeated at the end of line two of each couplet. The final couplet usually includes a signature, either the poet’s name or a pseudonym. Luck 2 is a triolet, an eight line poem in which line one is repeated as lines four and seven, and line two is repeated as line eight. In this poem, I’ve been very loose with what I repeated and where. More about these and many other forms can be found in In Fine Form (Caitlin, edited by Kate Braid and me).
Image: Options, oil on canvas, 24” x 24”
Over the past weeks and months, as I tuned in to election campaign reports that have been dominating our news, I was often reminded of a challenge of sorts that the late Governor General’s Award winning poet Steven Heighton tossed out to his fellow poets in 2011. At the time, he was promoting his latest books at a reading in Vancouver. Introducing his poem “Some Other Just Ones”, Steven explained that it was his response to Jorge Luis Borges’ poem “The Just”, in which Borges portrays a few ordinary people doing ordinary things and ends with the line, “These people, without knowing it, are saving the world” (Steven’s translation). He then casually remarked that he assumed all poets would probably want to add to what Borges started. When I got home that night, I re-read both poems and began to think about how I might contribute to the conversation. For this week’s Wednesday poem, then, here is what I came up with: More of the Just, another from my chapbook The Time Being.
More of the Just
Esas personas, que se ignoran, están salvando el mundo – Jorge Luis Borges
The mother who comforts the tearful child who bloodied her son’s nose.
The estranged friends who get over it.
The citizens of warring countries who refuse to take up arms.
The flash mob dancers.
The driver who screeches to a halt in the crosswalk and blanches.
The estranged friend who calls first and the one who gladly answers.
The teenager who shovels her elderly neighbour’s driveway, anonymously.
The publisher who chooses not to sell to the chains.
The driver who apologizes to the children he just missed.
The ham radio operator who keeps the Morse Code alive.
The husband who reads poetry to his ailing wife.
The publisher who sells, instead, to the staff and the staff, who form a co-op.
The sand artists.
The ones who walk down city streets smiling at strangers.
The husband who doesn’t get the poems, but reads them anyway, beautifully.
The father who teaches the winter sky to his neighbour’s kids.
The mother who comforts her bloodied son without laying blame.
The ones who stop and talk with street people.
The citizens of countries at war who march arm in arm for peace.
after Steven Heighton’s “Some Other Just Ones”
Both Borges and Heighton wrote list poems, so I wanted to do the same – but rather than use free verse as they did, I decided on a terzanelle. Using (and slightly tweaking) the line repetition feature of this form, I could introduce some characters in one stanza, then revisit them later. Other characters would be interspersed throughout, appearing just once in the unrepeated lines. My hope is that the form helps create a sense of movement, an ongoing goodness. Given how this form works, I decided not to use Borges’ final line in my poem, as Heighton did in his, but instead used it as an epigraph.
Details about how this form works are provided in the Villanelle chapter of Kate Braid’s and my book, In Fine Form (Caitlin).
Image: Digital photograph: Red Fox (New Brunswick)
My good friend Diane MacDonald is a marvellous photographer. Most weeks, we choose one of the trails on Pender Island, and meander along, pausing often to chat or take pictures of the beauty that surrounds us. Last week, Diane told me about how, a day or two earlier, from her deck, she spotted a heron patiently hunting in the shallows. Nearby, a deer was grazing. For a change, she said, neither heron nor deer took any notice of her; they just went on about their business, allowing her to get quite close. She took photograph after photograph of the heron; then after some time, decided she had enough to work with, and turned to leave. Of course – just as she turned, her camera no longer at the ready, the heron took flight, its reflection vivid in the still water. Diane’s lament: “If I had just waited one more minute I’d have had a great shot,” reminded me of my poem Shutter (from The Time Being), written about some of my own might-have-been photos during a trip back to New Brunswick some years ago.
Shutter
I almost caught that blue-winged teal standing
with her wings wide open, then three blue-jays
fleeing, peanuts in their beaks. I’m told
that mangy fox we watched cavorting
in the ditch beyond the covered bridge
(where we listened to deep echoes in the stillness
of old wood) dashed right behind us once
we’d turned away. An osprey left its treetop
nest just before I had my camera
set; two bald eagles circled low
as we sped along the highway, past lupine
fields electrified in pink and blue.
All this and more is what I saw – and still
I called everything today a near miss.
Image: Enigma, acrylic on paper, 10.5” x 10.5”
This past week, both British Columbia and New Brunswick wound up their provincial elections. Much of the talk during both campaigns was about whether voters want change after multiple terms of the same government: three of the New Democrats in BC and two of the Conservatives in NB. All this brought to mind my poem, Change (from The Time Being), so I’ve chosen it for this week’s post. More about its form follows the poem. Meanwhile, as I write, the election results remain too close to call in BC, so it will be a few days yet until we know whether the NDP or Conservatives manage a majority or if the two elected Greens will hold the balance of power. In New Brunswick, they chose a Liberal majority, retained two Green MLAs, and elected their first ever woman Premier.
Change
Something has to happen
as we sit inside my car waiting out a downpour.
A stranger's hand
starts tapping at the window
where we talk of triolets and villanelles,
how something has to happen
to give a form's refrains
a fighting chance. More irritating tapping interrupts;
our hands begin
to fumble for some coin,
the windows fogged with talk of variations
making something happen
He's talking at my window -
another version of the stranded tourist scam.
His palsied hand
reaches in so he can take the change
that changes nothing
from our hands.
Something has to happen.
The events in the poem took place one stormy Vancouver night when poet extraordinaire Molly Peacock was visiting. I can't remember now where we were going - probably to dinner somewhere, or perhaps I was dropping her off at her hotel after dinner. Regardless, we sat and talked in the car, waiting for the rain to let up a bit. Several days later, she wrote in an email, “…something HAS to happen to that hand through the car window…” which gave me the impetus for the poem and its first refrain.
Change is a villanelle, a form that features leapfrogging refrains. Line 1 of the first stanza is repeated as the last line of stanzas 2, 4 and 6. Line 3 of the first stanza shows up again as line 3 in stanzas 3, 5 and 6. I’ve tweaked the refrain lines to suit my purposes. There are also rhyme and metre elements to the form, which I’ve ignored. These details and more examples of the form can be found in Kate Braid's and my book, In Fine Form (Caitlin).
Image: Just Ducky, oil on canvas, 12” x 12”
I’ve been in full fall mode lately, loving this, my favourite season - so today’s Wednesday Poem is another one celebrating autumn. Autumn Pantoum (from my book Suddenly, So Much; Exile Editions) is yet another one featuring birds. The form I chose for it is a pantoum (see blog # 20, On Hands and Knees, for how this works). I do love how the refrain lines tumble and cascade through the stanzas, ending the poem where it began, but that first/final line containing so much more at the end.
This poem, like last week’s, also builds on a line borrowed from another poet. The opening (and closing) line, in italics, is from Elegy 10 in George Bowering’s Kerrisdale Elegies (Talon), which to me still stands out as one of the best Canadian poetry books ever. And, earlier this week I got an email that makes it even more fitting to post this poem now.
There is a proposal to install the Bowering Collection and Reading Room in Special Collections at the University of British Columbia. Fundraising is underway for this and there is a pretty short turnaround time: $500,000 needs to be raised by the end of December. So far they’ve raised @$137,000 in donations and pledges. All donations will receive a tax receipt issued by UBC. If you have any questions about the pledge or donation process, please do not hesitate to contact Katherine at katherine.kalsbeek@ubc.ca or 604-822-2819. UBC has also set up a designated giving page https://give.ubc.ca/bowering-collection
Autumn Pantoum
Each quick appearance is a farewell —
the leaves blush and wave goodbye;
goodbye, goodbye to green, everything
eventually dies.
The leaves blush and wave goodbye,
even the junco trilling hello
eventually dies
down, rejoicing becomes requiem.
Even the junco trilling 'hello
cold' is a sign of beginning, of winter coming
down. Rejoicing becomes requiem.
This small bird sings for angels and ghosts.
Cold is a sign of beginning, of winter coming
with white ideas of ice and snow.
This small bird sings for angels and ghosts
rummaging at dusk under a grove of oaks.
With white ideas of ice and snow,
mallards abandon the lake and rushes
to rummage at dusk under a grove of oaks,
butting their beaks at the leaves. They mutter.
Mallards abandon the lake and rushes —
I hear them after dark when they should be asleep,
butting their beaks at the leaves. They mutter
goodbye at last. Listen,
I hear them after dark when they should be asleep.
Goodbye. Goodbye to green. Everything,
goodbye at last. Listen —
each quick appearance is a farewell.