Blog - Wednesday Poems

Insomnia has been a fairly regular companion of mine lately, and it struck again earlier this week.  As I lay wide awake, I remembered going through spates of this when we lived in Vancouver, and how on one of those occasions I began composing a short sequence of poems – so I’ve chosen those for this Wednesday’s post.  The sequence is modelled after the form Brian Bartlett created for his poem, Shuffles, a combination of anagram and haiku features.  A couple of years ago, after artist Annie Smith taught me how to make accordion books, I put together a few, in a limited edition of 3 each (these are labour intensive!).  The only one still available is the last copy of the Midnight Relay accordion book (image above).

Midnight Relay

Run off their feet, wet
creatures munch to music.  Night
rains on little leaves.


            *


            Creatures munch rain,
            run off on little feet –
            leave their wet night to music.


            *


Feet run on, rain leaves
their music wet. Creatures munch off
little tonight.


            *


            Night run.  Two little
            creatures munch off leaves.  Rain on, music.
            Wet their feet.

      
                                                                                            - from Cedar Cottage Suite (Leaf Press)
 

The idea for the anagram side of things is to use the same words in each stanza, arranged differently each time, but here I tweaked this in various small ways. For example, I changed “to” to “two” in the last stanza and combined “to” and “night” into “tonight” in the third.  Kate Braid and I talk a bit more about Brian’s form for his Shuffles in the Lipogram chapter of In Fine Form: A Contemporary Look at Canadian Poetry (Caitlin Press).