Welcome to the second issue of my Poem-a-Month e-newsletter in its new location at nouspique.com. If you're not already a subscriber, I would encourage you to take a few seconds on the homepage of nouspique.com to sign up for a monthly mailing of poetry and conversation about poetry.
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Fixing A Hole
There's a hole in the bottom of the sea
and a log and a bump and a frog and flea
and a child on my knee who asks:
"What will I be when I'm big like you?"
I hum a song while his mother bleeds out
in a growing pool on the kitchen floor.
She stares up through a mile of clouding water
to a sky that once teased the sea.
Afraid of dying eyes and blood at the nursery door,
I twist the child to look out the window
but the sun has turned black, the sky rains gasoline,
and crackpots scream vitriol from the street below.
"Will I be a liar and a fraud," he seems to say,
"who pours wormwood into riverbeds and seas?
Who quotes apocalypse verses and struts
like god's instrument come down from the mountain
robed in prophecy fulfilled
by the blood splashed on his own hands?"
"Of course not," and I let the lie sit
in the stink of the times blowing off the water.
I know! Let's go to the beach and play,
the sand scoured white, the shimmering heat,
the plastic bucket, inflatable fish,
bathing suit woven from synthetic fibre.
Styrofoam bobbing, umbrella toppled,
clear wrapper scudding along the beach,
a flag (dyes faded) whipped on the breeze,
the scent of coconut oil high in the nostrils.
I'll gather it all, bundled and weighted
with chains that drag it to the bottom.
I'll stop up that hole with its frogs and its fleas,
and the mother will rise and totter a few more steps.
David A. Barker - June 01, 2010
Watch me reading the poem on YouTube. |
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Poetry Bits
Poetry Is Dead
No, no, no. Poetry is anything but dead. But Poetry Is Dead is the name of a brand new poetry journal that hails from Vancouver and you can sample it at their website. I'll be reviewing the first issue next week here at nouspique.com, but just to give you a taste ... the first issue engages readers in a question of relevance that looks a lot like (and may well overlap with) a similar question that organized religion has been wrestling with for years. PID's approach? Engage people in events like poetry slams that make poetry social and immediate, work at dispelling the notion that poetry is difficult and best left to people with special skill sets, and get poetry out of the classroom and into the street where it belongs. 2 issues per year. $12 for a year's subscription.
Wimbledon appoints first official poet
Running from June 21 to July 4, this year marks the first time the world's most famous tennis championships will include the work of an official poet. Watch a short video of Matt Harvey reading a poem and talking about his plans for Wimbledon.
New Collections of Conceptual Poetry
Ever stay up late at night wondering what conceptual poetry is? Neither do I.
Nevertheless, there seems to be an awful lot of talk these days about what it is and whether it counts as poetry. Sometimes, showing is more effective than explaining. This month, Erin Wunker gives an excellent review of two freshly published collections by Canadian conceptual poets. Wunker guides us through some of the poems and shows us what they're about and why they work.
Period 9 Poetry Rubric
Ever wonder why kids grow up hating poetry?
Maybe you were one of those kids. HtmlGiant has posted a teacher's rubric that pretty much nails it. (My apologies to English teachers.)
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Featured Poet: Kate Hall
Kate Hall is on the Canadian shortlist for the 2010 Griffin Poetry Prize for her collection of poems titled The Certainty Dream. Last month we looked at another contender, P.K. Page, whose book, Coal and Roses, represents the culmination of more than seventy years of writing. Hall provides quite a contrast. At 33, this is her first published collection of poetry. Nevertheless, there is a connection between the two women, as you can read in the Kingston Whig Standard.
The title is ambiguous. It suggests (accurately) that Hall explores the terrain between certainty and doubt, waking and dreaming. But the title can also be read as suggesting that the aspiration for certainty is illusory, that we live in a world inherently ambiguous and more comfortable with dreams than with certainty. While these sound like issues more fitting for epistemologists, Hall demonstrates how well-suited poetry can be when contemplating questions about the nature knowing.
I offer a full review of The Certainty Dream here. But to whet your appetite, here is a short poem from Kate Hall's collection. "The Factory Factory" is representative of her work because it includes some of the strategies she uses in many of her poems. There are figures of containment, like a suitcase and (echoing Coleridge's Kubla Khan) a giant domed ceiling -- images which might well stand for the Poem, or more generally, for art and creativity. But the suitcase is full of dirty underwear, and the most beautiful place (a well-crafted poem, for example?) is clautrophobic. But most prominent in this poem are figures of recursion. This is a factory for making factories, papers about papers, dreaming dreams, algorithms to create more algorithms, mechanized creativity. Often that is the way we approach poetry -- as if it's reducible to simple explanations (like the Period 9 Poetry Rubric above). If only we could cut a hole in the dome ... Hall seems to be inviting us to break out of the claustrophobic processes that a mechanical approach to our world implies.
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The Factory Factory
The programmer forgot to fill in
the papers about the papers about
somewhere there is a poem. It was
a minor news story. I dreamed
the factory into the dream world,
then walked by on my way to school.
How will I ever pack in time to catch the train?
My suitcase is bottomless and fits
an infinite amount of dirty underwear.
The most beautiful place in the world
is claustrophobic. A gigantic warehouse of
machinery created by us for us to create.
We scurry up wooden stairs to find
a lookout without a lookout in sight.
It continues so far beyond the small patch of sky.
We hit a giant domed ceiling somewhere ...
if we could cut a hole in it
the rain would come in. |
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Watch for the Griffin Poetry Prize winners to be announced on June 3rd, 2010. |
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