From Eighteen Days Without You

December 11

Then I think of you in bed,
your tongue half-chocolate, half ocean,
of the houses that you swing into,
of the steel wool hair on your head,
of your persistent hands and then
how we gnaw at the barrier because we are two.

How you come and take my blood cup
and link me together and take my brine.
We are bare. We are stripped to the bone
and we swim in tandem and go up and up
the river, the identical river called Mine
and we enter together. No one's alone.

Nothing Is Too Small Not To Be Wondered About by Mary Oliver

Nothing Is Too Small Not To Be Wondered About

The cricket doesn't wonder
     if there's a heaven
or, if there is, if there's room for him.

It's fall. Romance is over. Still, he sings.
If we can, he enters a house
     through the tiniest crack under the door.
Then the house grows colder.

He sings slower and slower.
     Then, nothing.

This must mean something, I don't know what.
     But certainly it doesn't mean
he hasn't been an excellent cricket
     all his life.

                                     - Mary Oliver, from her collection Felicity

Six Awesome Poetry Events at Blue Met 2015

This is a big year for poetry at Blue Met and on both Friday, April 24 and Saturday April 25, we have several poetry events for either lovers and fans of poetry or for those who maybe don't know a lot about Canadian poetry but want to learn more.

Our top six poetry events for 2015 include:

Don McKay and Mark Abley

Don McKay

Don McKay is one of Canada's most respected poets and his new tome, Angular Uncomformity, collects much of his long career's work into a single volume. This is the kind of book you keep my your nightstand and pull out each night to read a poem or two. I love that kind of poetry book that might take a year or longer to get through, and when you fall asleep the words are still ringing around in your head. McKay talks with Montreal poet and writer Mark Abley (who launches his own collection, Tongues of Earth immediately after).

Don McKay hasn't been in Montreal in many years, so now's your chance.

This event is on Saturday, April 25 at 12:30 and tickets are $8 (and is followed by Mark Abley's launch of Tongues of Earth at 2pm, free). Both of these events are at Hotel 10.

Jeramy Dodds

Marie Howe and Jeramy Dodds
The New York State Laureate, Marie Howe, is one of contemporary poetry's most unique talents. Author of What the Living Do and several other collections, Howe is a master of delving deep into the ways we grieve and let go, the way we weave memory in with a loved one's legacy.

I first came to Marie Howe's work via NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross and have been a fan ever since.

Howe speaks about her unique work and career with Canadian poet Jeramy Dodds (author of The Poetic Edda, a fascinating translation of Icelandic chronicles). When I was asking around to find a good host for the event, at least three people mentioned Dodds' name. Not only was he an extraordinary young poet, I was told, but he's great on stage.

Don't miss this rare chance to see two amazing poets in dialogue. Even better: it follows immediately Don McKay and Mark Abley so you can get your entire poetry fix in a few hours.

This event is on Saturday, April 25 at 3:30 pm. Tickets are only $8 and can be bought here. This event is at Hotel 10.

Annharte and Taiaiake Alfred
Our First Peoples Prize Winner, Anneharte, will discuss her fascinating work Indigena Awry, on-stage at 11:00 on Saturday April 25 at Hotel 10. I wrote a couple of weeks ago about this event but for lovers of poetry or for lovers of Indigenous Canadian writers or culture, this is a must-see event.

This one is $10 and tickets are here.

Poetry at the Zen Centre

Linda Besner

There are two events planned for the Enpuku-ji Zen Centre in the Plateau/Mile End on Friday, April 24. Both of these events are free. The first is a round-table on New Directions in 21st Century Poetry with Jeramy Dodds, Jeff Latosik and Linda Besner.. This event starts at 6:00 pm.

The reading which follows at 8pm will have readings by Marie Howe, Don McKay, Annharte, Jeramy Dodds and German performance poet Paul Weigl.

Both of these events are hosted by Carmine Starnino. And if you haven't been to the Enpuku-ji Zen Centre before, the space itself is worth the trip up. It's ideal for poetry and the evening is sure to be magical and inspiring.

Enpuku-ji Zen Centre

PRESCRIPTION by CZESLAW MILOSZ

Prescription

Everything but confessions. My own life
Annoys me so, I would find relief
In telling about it. And I would be understood
By those wretches -- how many! -- who wobble
In the streets of cities, drugged and drunk,
Sick with the leprosy of memory and the guilt of living.
So what restrains me? Shame
That my misfortunes are not picturesque enough?
Or contrariness. Wailing has become fashionable,
Unhappy childhoods, trauma, all the rest.
Even had I been ready for a Job's complaint,
It is better to keep silent, to praise the immutable
Order of things. No, something else
Forbids me to speak. Whoever suffers
Should be a teller of the truth. Should? How,
With all the disguises, comedy, self-pity?
Falseness of feeling results in a false phrase.
I value style too much to take the risk.

Philip Levine, 1928 - 2015

The Simple Truth

I bought a dollar and a half's worth of small red potatoes,
took them home, boiled them in their jackets
and ate them for dinner with a little butter and salt.
Then I walked through the dried fields
on the edge of town. In middle June the light
hung on in the dark furrows at my feet,
and in the mountain oaks overhead the birds
were gathering for the night, the jays and mockers
squawking back and forth, the finches still darting
into the dusty light. The woman who sold me
the potatoes was from Poland; she was someone
out of my childhood in a pink spangled sweater and sunglasses
praising the perfection of all her fruits and vegetables
at the road-side-stand and urging me to taste
even the pale, raw sweet corn trucked all the way,
she swore, from New Jersey. "Eat, eat," she said,
"Even if you don't I'll say you did."
Some things
you know all your life. They are so simple and true
they must be said without elegance, meter and rhyme,
they must be laid on the table beside the salt shaker,
the glass of water, the absence of light gathering
in the shadows of picture frames, they must be
naked and alone, they must stand for themselves.
My friend Henri and I arrived at this together in 1965
before I went away, before he began to kill himself,
and the two of us to betray our love. Can you taste
what I'm saying? It is onions or potatoes, a pinch
of simple salt, the wealth of melting butter, it is obvious,
it stays in the back of your throat like a truth
you never uttered because the time was always wrong,
it stays there for the rest of your life, unspoken,
made of dirt that we call earth, the metal we call salt,
in a form we have no words for, and you live on it.

          -from The Simple Truth by Philip Levine

Wanting by Ruth Stone

Wanting

Wanting and dissatisfaction
are the main ingredients
of happiness.
To want is to believe
there is something worth getting.
Whereas getting only shows
how worthless the thing is.
And this is why destruction
is so useful.
It gets rid of what was wanted
and so makes room
for more to be wanted.
How valueless is the orderly.
It cries out for disorder.
And life that thinks it fears death,
spends all of its time
courting death.
To violate beauty
is the essence of sexual desire.
To procreate is the essence of decay.
                                                            -Ruth Stone (from In the Next Galaxy)

The Boy by Marie Howe

The Boy

My older brother is walking down the sidewalk into the suburban summer night;
white T-shirt, blue jeans - to the field at the end of the street.

Hangers Hideout the boys called it, an undeveloped plot, a pit overgrown
with weeds, some old furniture thrown down there,

and some metal hangers clinking in the trees like wind chimes.
He's running away from home because our father wants to cut his hair.

And in two more days our father will convince me to go to him - you know
where he is - and talk to him: No reprisals. He promised. A small parade of kids

in feet pajamas will accompany me, their voices like the first peepers in spring.
And my brother will walk ahead of us home, and my father

will shave his head bald, and my brother will not speak to anyone the next
month, not a word, not pass the milk, nothing.

What happened in our house taught my brothers how to leave, how to walk
down a sidewalk without looking back.

I was the girl. What happened taught me to follow him, whoever he was.
calling and calling his name.


From What the Living Do

Richard Blanco

LAST NIGHT IN HAVANA by Richard Blanco

Drifting from above, the palms seem to sink
willingly into the saffron ground, all I can map
is the marble veins of rivers turning static,
the island coastline retreating like a hem
from the sargasso patches of Caribbean.
I think of you primo, huddled on the edge
of an Almendares curb last night,
El Greco shadow split across the street,
and over the tracks stapled to the weeds
below your open bedroom window.
Covered in cobwebs of humid wind,
we slapped at unreachable mosquitoes
as Havana's tenements collapsed around us,
enclosed us like the yellow of old books
or the stucco walls of a hollow chapel.
You confessed you live ankled in the sand
of a revolution, watching an unparted sea,
marking  tides and learning currents
that will carry you through the straits
to my door, blistered and salted, but alive.
You said you want silence, you want to leave
the sweep of the labor trains in your window,
the creak of your father's wheelchair in the hall
searching for a bottle of pills he will find empty,
and the slam of your eyelids forcing sleep.
The tires are ready, bound with piano wire,
the sail will be complete with the linen scraps
your mother will stitch together after midnights
when the neighbors are trying to fall asleep.
Last night in Havana, your face against your knees,
your words drowning with the lees in an empty bottle
of bootleg wine you clutched around the neck
and will keep to store fresh water.

Poem by Carl Sandburg

At a Window

by Carl Sandburg

Give me hunger,
O, you gods
that sit and give
The world its orders.
Give me hunger, pain and want,
Shut me out with shame and failure
From your doors of gold and fame,
Give me your shabbiest, weariest hunger!

But leave me a little love,
A voice to speak to me in the day end,
A hand to touch me in the dark room
Breaking the long loneliness.
In the dusk of day-shapes
Blurring the sunset,
One little wandering, western star
Thrust out from the changing shores of shadow.
Let me go to the window,
Watch there the day-shapes of dusk
And wait and know the coming
Of a little love.

"If you think about it, it turns into words..."

Always on the Train

Writing poems about writing poems
is like rolling bales of hay in Texas.
Nothing but the horizon to stop you.

But consider the railroad's edge of metal trash;
bird perches, miles of telephone wires.
What is so innocent as grazing cattle?
If you think about it, it turns into words.

Trash is so cheerful, flying up
like grasshoppers in front of the reaper.
The dust devil whirls it aloft: bronze candy wrappers,
squares of clear plastic - windows on a house of air.

Below the weedy edge in last year's mat,
red and silver beer cans.
In bits blown equally everywhere,
the gaiety of flying paper
and the black high flung patterns of flocking birds.

-- from Ruth Stone's In the Next Galaxy

Poet Laureates and Angry Reactions

So the poet Natasha Tretheway was named as the US Poet Laureate this week. Another well-known poet, whose name I won't mention, then wrote a scathing post on his Facebook page about her lack of talent and how poetry has been dumbed down (some clumsy metaphor about lowering the bar so low, we trip on it).

A lesson in the dangers of emotional reactions, I guess. I am all for strong opinions about writers and their work, but reacting in anger or frustration seems like such a dangerous road to go down. I learned the lesson long ago that writing just about anything while angry (Facebook posts, emails, blog posts) is never a good idea and always ends up being something I regret terribly.

Part of what Mr. Angry Poet reacts to, perhaps, is the simplicity of Trethaway's language. She is not, it's true, an overtly complex poet. Yet this tendency for certain male writers to dismiss certain female writers as talentless seems so 1962.  It gets at the heart of a common question I get: about which writers I would never invite. Last night over dinner, I was debating this with someone I had just met: whether a literary festival needs "good" writers in order to be considered successful. And it's something I feel strongly about: while "good" writers are fine, my goals as a Programming Director are to create interesting, complex and, yes, entertaining events. If that means including writers who are not considered "serious" or "good" writers, I really couldn't care less.

Another aspect of criticism easy to throw at Trethaway is how her "story" often seems to supersede her work, as if the details of her biography and those influences on her poems are an integral part of her poems. They shouldn't be. Naturally, though, her experience does reflect a certain kind of American experience and Tretheway's exploration of race and class in modern America does seem to capture something important. But her poetry is very "accessible" (the word my former advisor used to use to dismiss a writer as "not serious," as if an inaccessible writer is naturally smarter. Please. "Inaccessibility" often just strikes me as bad writing. Period).

Natasha Tretheway

Of course, we can't have a Festival with just NYT bestsellers and we do need to present a wide array of writers (representing different ages, genders, life experience, etc.) so that we can appeal to as many different kinds of public as we can. But though I am a bit of a snob in terms of my own personal reading habits, I don't approach festival programming in the same way. As I often say, it's not "my" festival.

No matter how one feels about her work, Natasha Tretheway would be a great "get" for us though I imagine now she's going to be quite in demand so if anyone's hoping to see her in 2013, it's a long shot.

Incidentally, I am fascinated by Tretheway's work and her story personally. That said, I respect Mr. Angry Poet's work a lot more and find his work to be full of subtlety, humour, and intelligence.

Poem by the late Vermont poet Ruth Stone

At Eighty-three She Lives Alone

Enclosure, steam-heated; a trial casket.
You are here; your name on a postal box;
entrance into another place like vapor.
No one knows you. No one speaks to you.
All of their cocks stare down their pant legs
at the ground. Their cunts are blind. They
barely let you through the check-out line.
Have a nice day. Plastic or paper?

Are you origami? A paper folded swan,
like the ones you made when you were ten?
When you saw the constellations, lying
on your back in the wet grass,
the soapy pear blossoms drifting
and wasting, and those starts, the burned out ones
whose light was still coming in waves;
your body was too slight.
How could it hold such mass?
Still on your lips the taste of something.

All night you waited for morning, all morning
for afternoon, all afternoon for night;
and still the longing sings.
Oh, paper bird with folded wings.
                                          -Ruth Stone (1915-2011)

What Love Comes To, Copper Canyon Press, 2010

More on Ruth Stone:

Ted Talk about Ruth Stone's work and creativity

NPR Piece about Stone's work

Guardian piece on one of her most recent collections