Here are some pictures from the day after we received 50 cm of snow, with winds that left it a lot deeper than that where it drifted. On a clear day like the one shown, even the shadows in the snow are blue!
The poems in wordcurrents I wrote about the snow in latish December are based on this event.
The title of this post for December 15 is a play on CPAP, the acronym for Continuous Positive Airway Pressure. This is a device to overcome a condition called sleep apnea, in which the airway to the lungs is cut off during sleep. The device reminds me of Jonathan Swift's take on science: complicated silly invasive procedures applied to human problems.
Don't get me wrong: sleep apnea is a serious problem. But the apparatus you have to wear to solve it is silly-looking. Fortunately, it is worn in the privacy of your bedroom, and privacy should preserve one's dignity if one's spouse is not laughing too loud. I think comedians are missing a great sight gag here. Picture a huge clear plastic nose that you strap onto your face with a giant set of velcro-adjustable straps that hold it onto your head. Attached to that is a long corrugated plastic hose looking for all the world as if you are wearing a vacuum cleaner to bed.
Anyway, if this article does not convince you that I am serious, "See Pap" should.
Hmmm. Maybe I should write a poem about a guy who goes to bed with a vacuum cleaner on his face . . . .
Once again, I have posted a reading of one of my poems. This reading of "elephant waltz" is about two minutes long, in MP3 format. The file size is a tad larger than 2Mb. The poem is part of an experiment in rhythm. The rhythmic poems in this series are tagged under "rhythm" in the tag cloud at the bottom of the left column in wordcurrents. (Clicking on "rhythm" in the cloud, brings up excerpts from and links to all the poems with that tag.)
Here is a direct link to the reading: elephant waltz podcast
It turns out the problem was not a hacker, but some internal security software that accidentally identified me as a malicious fiend intent on destroying the blog and world peace or something. A great many conscientious bloggers who use this software were locked out of their own blogs. Here is a link to a discussion of the problem: Bad Behaviour
Yesterday's poem, which, because of the screw up, I was not able to post until today, is "garrison there", which deals with the issue of barricading ourselves against enemies who may be out there. I have included this poem in the Lotus Eaters series. That series continues later today (December 6) with "garrison here".
wordcurrents has been hacked. For the time being, I can neither post nor edit anything in the blog. If you try to post a comment, you will see an error message that says you can fix the error. Please do not try this procedure, as it will probably create more problems.
I shall post a note here when the error has been corrected.
A group of us went to the virtually sold out 2300 seat Southam Hall at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa, Canada's capital, last night. The three hour performanceof Pina Bausch's Les with a cast of ten men and ten women was mesmerizing. The setting was a bare black-box stage with a shallow depression where a pool of water formed, ostensibly from drips above. The piece comes to us from Tanztheater Wuppertal in Istanbul, and had many Turkish musical, costume and movement themes. The variety and thematic unity of the piece was wonderful to behold. For more information, photographs and reviews, just Google Pina Bausch. She is a world renowned choreographer whose inventiveness is legendary. If you have a chance to see this, I advise you to go—this is advice from a theatre person who seldom goes to dance performances.
Here is a link to my poem for November 24, "to Pina Bausch"
A note about sites for Pina Bausch: this site, Istanbul Theater Festival, is very interesting, as it links to photographs of the piece we saw, Nefes, as performed in 2003 with the same dancers.
I used to call my wife and her sisters the Four Sisters of the Apocalypse. A joke, of course. Sure they were four very definite women of Scottish-Irish descent—that tells you a lot. That gave their four husbands a kind of collegiality in my mind.
Now, just as there are only three sisters of the Apocalypse, so also are there only three husbands: Ed has left. He didn't exactly want to go, and certainly none of us wanted him to go; but a certain cancer took to partying in his innards, and sent him packing. It doesn't seem right that some of us can entertain the cancer party and still hang around, but that's the way it is.
"thinking about ed" is a little bit of my story with ed.
Yesterday, because Flora was curling, I was alone as I drove down to Lancaster for my haircut. The day was pretty wet, with dark but distinct heavy clouds hanging low over the river. The road hugs the river quite picturesquely for most of the half-hour trip, making the drive a pretty Zen experience.
I like to drive with the radio off, mainly for the sake of absorbing the experience. I don't know why people are so afraid to be alone with themselves that they have to keep a radio blaring. I like the solitude. I guess that is a writer thing, part of the habit of being a contemplative.
Oh, yes: this is about "rainy river road", yesterday's poem of the day in wordcurrents
I have just finished a gig as "Poet in Residence" for October at youngpoets.ca.
The site is run by The League of Canadian Poets for students and their teachers. My job for October was to comment on poems posted in two parts of the forum: the General Forum, for young poets who are sensitive about criticism, and the Advanced Forum, for young poets who can take and give serious constructive criticism.
I enjoyed the month, and commented on about fifty poems.
The final problem, keeping anyone including search engines form finding wordcurrents, was that Google Analytics was preventing pages from loading. I removed it, and everything is A-okay. What a relief!
True horror story: The past week, I have been working desperately to overcome a disastrous database problem in wordcurrents. Two fields in the database totally disappeared, making linking from page to page impossible. All six hundred-plus posts were there, but there was no way to read anything but parts of the front page. Search engines could not find me, and my readership dropped dramatically. I tried several approaches to resolve the problem, but the ultimate solution was to delete the whole database and install a backup copy of the database I made a couple of weeks ago.
Am I glad I believe in backups! I have altered my back up procedure to have the system back itself up automatically on a regular schedule.
I am almost back to normal: I have just a dozen and a half posts to restore, in order to fill in the gap left between September 27 and October 18. The saving grace here is a program called Clipbook that came with WordPerfect. Clipbook saves a permanent copy of anything you save to the clipboard. So, when I knew that I was going to have to replace those items, I went into the database and saved them all in Clipbook, so I could restore them, even the drafts I have not yet posted, like my unfinished review of the production of The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood.
My thanks to Fei-Jan, who called my attention to the problem.
This is not about anything Biblical: it's about sunsets. I posted a few from this summer on facebook. These look so much more amazing on a monitor than on paper. This one is from July; it is the view from our cottage.
Yikes! I posted my next poem after taking the summer off.
As September approached, I was beginning to wonder if I might face an insurmountable writer's block, but "Centaur" just flowed out easy as sighs.
I originally started blogging in wordcurrents as an antidote to blockage; it seems to have worked so far. I watched Stranger Than Fiction again last night on TV. It is one of my real favourites, partly because three of my favourite movie actors are in it: Will Ferrell, Emma Thompson, and Maggie Gyllenhaal. Unlike Emma Thompson's character, a writer who is horribly blocked, I seem able to function (for the present, knock would)
I was moved to write "Centaur" after seeing people--mostly macho guys--roar past the cottage on seadoos, going nowhere as quickly, loudly, and annoyingly as pointlessly possible. Of course I feel the same way about snowmobiles, which are just as unathletic, dangerous and macho and pointless and annoying. Heaven help anyone hapless enough to be swimming away from the dock when one of those "personal watercraft" screams recklessly around the corner of the island at lethally high speed.
It will be a slow process: first, I have to figure how to turn on my computer; summer has been so wonderfully Luddite--no TV, no Internet, no WordPerfect--just birds, river water lapping, and the patter of grandchildren's feet as the cicadas sang in the island heat . . .
Starting July 1, riverwriter will be working on two significant writing projects for print media, and will not be posting in wordcurrents. This hiatus will probably end in September , although there may occasionally be a post in the interim, in wordcurrents or here, in platinum river. Jean-Marie Morin will be taking over the posting of Duplicate Bridge scores during that time.
So until next time, both blogs are still here for browsing!
I just discovered that I am listed in Arc Poetry Magazine's list of Canadian Poets, along with some fifty, including Margaret Atwood, Margaret Avison, bill bissett, Patrick Lane, Dennis Lee, and rob mclennan. Here is a link to the listing: Canadian Poets —awesome. Thank you, wordcurrents! this process is working!
The reason I call this entry "Vanity Googling" is that I notice many people Google their own names to find reviews I do of their work in theatre. So I tried Googling "Doug Hill"+poet, and found the above entry not far from the top of the five hundred and change entries that came up.
I wrote the poem, "Katisha of Abyssinia" based on this situation.
This is Katisha, our new Abby, lying in state on two seat cushions piled atop a wicker table. From time to time, Circe, our elderly hybrid shows up to hiss at her, and establish the order of precedence. Generally, Katisha does not look as startled as this. She is our first cat to lie elbows out like that. Look at those eyes!
Katisha is a birthday present to me (I recently became quite alarmingly milestone-old), from Frances, my dear sister in law, who is a renowned breeder of Abyssinians in Montreal. Fran's site is Etochat. She and her partner, Nicole, have bred Grand Champion Abyssinians with the patient backing of Fran's husband, Richard.
When I started wordcurrents, my main motives were two: to get my work out to readers and to motivate myself to write every day. I certainly have become a daily writer, and I do have readers that I never had before. My craft has improved in that I can achieve a result more consistently and more quickly than I could previously (witness "in perpetual schottische"*, which I wrote in about an hour and change for a competition, whereupon it won the competition of the week in WILD Poetry Forum, and later was named competitive poem of the month of May in that forum). These are all good reasons to continue the status quo.
What has happened that is not quite so good is that my long-term writing projects have suffered. This suggests to me that in order to focus my creative juice on the novel and the play and the denser poetry, I should discontinue posting a new poem every day on wordcurrents; however, I find the experience of daily composition to deadline (midnight) and posting rather invigorating. This leaves me with the quandry that I mention in Facebook, when I say I am "rethinking my blog". For various reasons, I really have to decide soon.
* For an MP3 of my reading of this poem, click "in perpetual schottische"
We have pink spirreas which will not be out for some time. These are out now, and really make a show. If the sun comes out before the rain bashes them down, I'll take some more sunny photos of them. All this, and lilacs, too!
Blogger is based on web 2.0 (interactive online) software, and so is my main blog, wordcurrents. Both seriously let me down today, causing me to lose hours of work, and making me rethink the way I blog.
Let me explain: yesterday, I saw Copper Thunderbird, in the English Theatre at the NAC in Ottawa. I rose this morning at 5 am to start writing my review in wordcurrents, which is based on WordPress, which has an automatic backup feature, which backs up your work each time you stop typing. An hour and a half later, I discovered a typo, backspaced to correct it, and inadvertently deleted everything. When I stopped to back up my browser to reclaim the work, it had already backed up the deletion over my work. Everything was gone.
I took some time off to stop screaming (or whatever I was doing that passed for a reaction), then came back to platinum river, here, to complain under the title above. At one point, I thought it would be neat to post a photo of my irate face with the article. I opened my photo editor to find such a shot, the editor froze, requiring me to reboot, and I came back to Blogger discover that the only part of the article that still existed was the title, which you see above.
Moral: from now on, write articles in WordPerfect, which has appropriate backup routines, then post. (Now, repeat, one thousand times . . . .)
[I accidentally posted this as a blank post with just a title; I'm going to become gun-shy of posting at all.]
I am really caught on the horns of a dilemma about posting a new poem every day in wordcurrents. On the one horn, the discipline of having to meet that daily deadline is really good for my writing bones; on the other, I am flooded with early drafts (consecutive daily poem 482 today).
Last night, after the movie (I saw Lucky You, with Drew Barrymore and Eric Bana — enjoyed it.) I realized I had not yet written the day's poem. I sat down at the computer, wrote the poem "parking lot", in about three minutes, posted it, and started wondering once again if I should keep doing it. But now that I am writing this piece, I think I see the benefit my craft receives from the exercise. I have come to be able to write "on command" ("By your command", as the Cylons used to say, in the earlier Battlefield Galactica, is fairly appropriate; it feels kind of robotic: I just decide on a topic or image or experience, how I feel about it, and start.) Last night, on the way home, we stopped in the Tim Horton parking lot so that Gilles' brother, Denis, could get a takeout coffee. While we were there, and as Gilles and I spoke idly about the experience of sitting there, I formed the image of desolation that it was, and started processing the experience that later became the poem.
When I sat down to write, I had no idea what the poem would be, but I did not have much time, so I just started writing without thinking about it. The poem is simple, not very ambitious, but adequate.
So I guess I will keep doing it for the time being. This blog, being a diary, reminds me a what diary researcher said: the one thing all diaries have in common is that everybody dies, and they (the diaries) all come to an end. I wonder where this will end?
I was sitting the other evening in our GP's waiting room. I had some prescriptions to renew, and this is the drill: I call his office; the receptionist gives me an appointment; they call a few days later to change the appointment; I arrive a few minutes early, ask if there is a long wait, am told there is not; an hour and change later I am still waiting, but I have accomplished something: I brought my pen and notepad and have written sketches of "lotus eaters 7" as well as 8, 9, and 10, and notes for several other poems.
I don't know what it is about doctors' offices. I can write volumes of stuff there. Maybe it is the slim chance of being interrupted that propels me. Anyway, "lotus eaters 8" came out of hearing the receptionist and somebody else speaking just below the range of my comprehension while an office radio tuned to the local schlock station was grinding out commercial-laden radio, also, just below the level of comprehension, if there is anything to be comprehended there. We usually have CBC One playing at our house, well out of the range of my office. The only sound I have here is the ventilation fan and the occasional rumble of traffic on the street, which is on the main downtown thoroughfare in the heart of this "big city" of forty-five thousand.
Back to the poems. They seem to be turning to subtleties -- that may render them less attractive; however, they are just sketches preliminary to a larger work that may be one poem; hence the sometimes obscure nature of these pieces.
On Thursday, April 26, 2007, I was walking alone in Rideau Centre, an upscale indoor shopping mall in downtown Ottawa, wondering what my next poem should be, hoping that I would see something that would move me to write. Knowing I would have this opportunity, I had tried but been unable to find my notepad before we left home; so I was wondering if I would need a notepad. There were a great many people in the mall, as usual. It struck me that most of these people we talking on cell phones or listening to MP3 players or keypadding on Blackberries or similar instruments: very few were just taking in what was going on in he mall.
That was the genesis of the "lotus eaters" poems, of which I have written and posted three at this date. I shall not explain the poems here, just indicate the impetus. I chose the title from Tennyson's poem, "The Lotos-Eaters" of course. I am going to write several of these poems, because I think this is an important subject. I am still wondering whether I should use Tennyson's spelling. Let's see what happens.
I have been amazed by the number of hits on my review of NAC's production of Scorched, Linda Gaboriau's brilliant translation of Quebec playwright Wadji Mouawad's stunning play Incendies. Granted, it is my first positive review in a while; but let's face it: this has been a bleak theatrical season, generally, with NAC's new Artistic Director Peter Hinton and GCTC's new AD, Lise Ann Johnson both retreating to seasons mainly consisting of short plays. Just a few minutes ago, I checked with statcounter.com, one of my hits analysis services, and discovered that every hit today started with a direct Google for or email link to Scorched. The review is so popular, that when one Googles "Scorched Mouawad" or any variation of the title and his name today, my review is at the top of Google's list. That is astounding to me.
What is also very interesting is that in the past, long before I the advent of the Internet, when I saw a play about which I had an opinion, my recourse was to talk to friends about it. Eventually, I became tired of having such a limited audience, and started reviewing plays in an email newsletter for Vagabond Theatre, our local community theatre club. When I started wordcurrents, it occurred to me that this was a place for my theatre reviews. I soon realized that the cast and crew were Googling my reviews.
Now think about that for a moment. It means that I have a pipeline directly to the people on stage or backstage, including the playwright, the director, artistic director -- that's a great aspect of the Internet: it gives us direct links to people responsible.
So if somebody does something that I react to, I am not limited to showing my response by my hand clapping at the curtain call: I can say it in a review, fairly certain that it will go directly to the people involved and others who saw it with me or will decide whether or not to see it based partly on my review.
Let's hear it for technology!
Last night, I attended a read by Charlie Wilkins, a writer of note who has the distinction (for me) of having once been my student. Charlie's writing includes considerable very insightful freelance journalism and several books about his travels and very astute observations.
A few years ago, he achieved some fame by walking from Thunder Bay to New York City. The walk was chronicled on CBC Radio. The resultant book was Walk to New York (Viking Canada, 2004), a rich and insightful commentary upon this unique adventure.
Charlie is a widely published free lance journalist whose harrowing look at the final years of Maurice "The Rocket" Richard should be required reading for any sports thinker or fan.
I shall not list all of his published major works here, but do draw your attention the the most recent: Circus at the Edge of the Earth (McLelland & Stewart, 1998) chronicles Charlie's extensive travels with the Great Wallenda Circus touring the hinterlands of north-western Ontario and Manitoba, and A Wilderness Called Home (Viking, 2001) is his account of traveling across Canada, partly from Thunder Bay to the Gulf of St. Lawrence in a working freighter.
Last evening, Charlie read from two works. The second was CC200- A Memoir of Voices, which he edited on commission from the Cornwall Collegiate & Vocational School's 200th Reunion Committee; the first work he read from was an unpublished memoir based on his job working in a cemetery in Toronto. This memoir is richly layered with outstanding details, vividly recalled and expressed. I was sorry when he stopped. I do not know the title*, but I'll let you know when I do. It is going to be very worth reading.
*Saturday, April 21, 2007: The title is In the Land of Long Fingernails.
I had not realized it until just a few minutes ago, but "You're Soaking In It!" is currently the most popular poem in my blog. Of the most recent 100 hits, it had 26 (that's all my free service counts.) Little did I know when I posted that poem on March 18, 2006, that I was fascinating some people. I remember the line from the detergent commercial, where Madge is doing somebody's nails, and lets drop that her client is soaking her nails in whatever dish detergent it was.
I had to read the poem again to remember that it was about mirrors and mathematics, and visiting Versailles and Firenza and what those places meant to me and how they changed my view of the world.
(several hours later)
I read it to the writers at the club meeting tonight: polite applause, then a newbie who had arrived during my read excitedly asked to read, and we went on with no discussion. I think it is hard to discuss poetry without seeing it; I guess I should expect that maybe next time I'll take copies for everyone. Next time, I think I'll read "Linen", and give out copies. All I have to do is remember that.
These are pictures of George doing the Kung Fu fan form. This form was practised by monks who were forbidden to carry weapons. Of course, the fans can inflict significant harm upon anyone foolish enough to challenge a practitioner. I believe the monks' fans were metal, but just hearing the fans snap through the air is enough to make one realize that cloth and bamboo can be pretty formidable too.
You can be one of the first to check out this site: The Divine Women. Rosemarie Collins gave me the link. Her daughter, Carla is one of the partners in it, and Rosemarie will be writing a column called "Ask Mama Divine". Since Rosemarie and Carla are both wickedly funny, whether you are male or female or both, this is a site to put on your favorites list.
Carla's current blog on the site, called "I Am So Not Money", features a Canadian Tire bill — glad I checked (that was so yesterday) a new article is up, called "Big In Japan", and features a shot of sumo wrestlers.
My buddy Bill Roddy, (photo left) has just won the best actor award in the EODL Full Length Play Festival, for his portrayal of the father in A.R. Gurney's The Cocktail Hour, which I reviewed last week in wordcurrents.
Bill has been an actor since the beginning of the universe. He has a comic sensibility that reaches deep into the character with total commitment. But he is also a dramatic actor of great sensitivity, as some of you saw when he played the whole life-span of the central character Bubby in A Song After Living at the proto-Weaveshed theatre that we built specifically for the show, and tore down right after.
Congratulations, Bill! Well done.
I have just discovered an amazing poetry resource called Portage. It is a site sponsored by Arc Poetry Magazine. Portage contains links to multiple poetry resources which as yet, I have hardly looked at. If you are interested in poets or poetry, check out this comprehensive site.
I discovered this site by looking into links supplied me by Ottawa poet Max Middle, who gave me a link to Ottawater, a site for Ottawa born and Ottawa based poets, which contains downloadable copies of their works in three editions of O2(H2O). On Ottawater I found the link to Portage. Max came to me through interest in The Four Horsemen Project, which he found reviewed in wordcurrents. He saw the show this evening. I am hoping he will comment on it in my blog, or at least comment in his blog. Max has videos on Youtube of sound poetry readings he and the Max Middle group have performed.
I have started a series of poems, each on a letter of the alphabet. I am hoping to look at what I thought of the letters when I was first learning them, but I don't know if I can sustain that or not. I have decided to concentrate on the capital forms of the letters, although I have already thought of a little detour involving the letter "D". This will take several weeks to get through, not counting detours into other realms.
Today I had a look at the web site of another local writer, Sylviane Duval, who is publishing a collection of short stories on line.
March 17: We have gone from wearing street shoes outside yesterday to six inches of snow overnight. Check out "trip up" in wordcurrents. The change from Friday to Saturday out my kitchen window is shown below:
I have posted my first podcast. It is a reading I did of "noun theft", today's poem. There is a link to the mp3 podcast at the bottom of the poem. What do you think?
I am still planning to post the podcasts on ipod and so forth. This is a whole new world for me . . .
I have added two podcasts to "The Allegory of the Photographs", one gives an outline of Plato's "Allegory of the Cave", and the other is my reading of the poem which refers to Plato's work. One disadvantage to this sound project is that the files are rather large. "noun theft" is 1.2 Mb, and the "allegory" readings come in at almost 1 Mb (Plato) and over 2 Mb (my poem).
Both of today's poems, "crisp" and "thoughtless", were inspired by things that happened in my driveway. In "crisp", I stepped into the driveway to put out the garbage and was almost blown over by the cold winter wind swirling around in the carport, and in "thoughtless", I face a car temporarily abandoned in the driveway and blocking our ability to drive our car out.
In the back seat of the car, I spotted a stack of resumés, with two contact phone numbers, describing a guy by the name of Adam L, who has worked as a "concession attendant" and previously as a "laborer". I tried the two numbers. One wanted to take a message, and the other was obviously a cellphone that was not turned on. This guy did not live on the same street as the cop told me the owner lived on. So he may have borrowed the car, or the resumés just happened to be there.
Later, I checked the glove compartment, looking for ownership papers, but there was nothing there but a receipt for work done on the car a year ago. There was a "home" phone number that turned out to be a business with a very complex automatic phone pyramid. I looked up that guy's address and phone in the phone book, and he did live on the street that the cop said the owner lived on. This guy was one Brian B, but there was no answer at that number either.
I don't know when the guy left the car there, but from the time I discovered it to the time he returned was about two hours. In the mean time, I played telephone tag with two towing companies, had a very pleasant talk with the guy from Cameron's Towing, who put me on his list of jobs, as I said in the poem. I asked him if it would cost me anything, and he said no: the guy would have to pay towing and storage to get his car back. When I called to tell him I wished I had been there to talk to the guy, he said, "So you could tell him what an ass he was." I thought that about summed it up.
But it makes you wonder: does the guy have a mental problem? why did he leave his car unlocked, but without a key in my driveway when there were two free parking lots within a hundred feet? I checked every nearby business in the direction his footprints indicated he walked, but he was not there.
It occurred to me later that I should have moved my car close to his so he would know he blocked me; otherwise, he probably assumed nobody even noticed him. I could probably call and talk to the guy, but I think I'll let it pass. Oh, yeah, Flora had a neat idea: if he does it again, we should put a club on his steering wheel.
There I am, in SCUBA gear in the Caribbean, at the place I wrote about in the poem. The photo was taken with my underwater disposable camera, by our instructor, who is pictured below, feeding kibble to the fish that swim in the bay we were in. This was 1999, during a loop down the so-called eastern cruise route; the ship was SS Norway, the remade France, which was commissioned just as trans-Atlantic jet flights were coming into vogue. It was mothballed soon after, until it was purchased by the Norway Cruise Line, and rebuilt. It is a real classic ship, in the trans-Atlantic mode. For details, see the link.
It is hard to believe I have posted 400 of my own new poems in just 375 days. I am printing them each day, and have filled one binder and started a new one January 1. (see photo below)
The new result has been that even if I sit down to write with no idea what is going to come out, I can usually start and finish a fairly serviceable poem in a few minutes. Today's poem, "I started to write a Saturday poem", was one of those: I typed what I thought was the first line, then looked up at the screen, and realized I had typed it in the subject slot. I left it as the title, and continued, realizing it was giving me the poem's theme, and the changes would provide the poem's arc.
When it comes right down to it, I often find the process of discovering the poem as rich as I hope is the reader's experience reading it.
I wrote this piece early in the morning, prior to facing the foot or so of snow in our driveway. I had an appointment for an interview later in the morning: Kathleen Hay, the arts reported for the Cornwall Standard-Freeholder, was coming over to do a piece on the anniversary of wordcurrents, and I wanted her to be able to access the house. As well, Flora had to get out for her curling in the afternoon.
I was surprised that the shoveling did not completely crush me, leave me aching and breathless as I expected it to. I was shoveling for close to an hour in a pretty stiff wind, moving snow that was about ten inches deep except where it swirled around the house in a two foot deep drift. (Interesting: we say "two foot" instead of "two feet". I wonder why that is?) When I went to the door to let Kathleen in, I noted that the plow had passed and left a foot-deep bank across the driveway. It never fails.
The snow really was aniu. It chopped into blocks easily, nut was hard to scoop, as large sections broke away, too big for the scoop, and would tend to tumble off inconveniently. So I guess I don't feel quite as much like the old guy approaching the particular multiple of ten anniversary that I am approaching; I feel more like that number minus ten or so.
Alexandrine lines appear in the brilliant poetry of Alexander Pope, who is quoted daily by people who have no idea he is their source. Pope often used Alexandrine lines, that is, lines of six metrical feet rather than the usual five. Pope was known for his towering intellect, often displayed with devastating effect in his poetry. One example I like was written for engraving on a jewelled silver collar intended as a gift for the King, to be worn by His Majesty's dog, which frequented Kew Gardens: "I am His Majesty's dog at Kew; pray tell me sir: whose dog are you?" Perhaps less well known is that Pope was virtually a dwarf (4'6" tall) as a result of a childhood battle with tuberculosis. Another well known Popism: "A little learning is a dangerous thing . . . ."
"Italian Restaurent", which I posted on February 9, 2007, is written using Alexandrine lines. I used that approach to give the poem a slower, more relaxed rhythm than iambic pentameter would achieve. I also used alternating rhyme with that intent in mind.
I like to experiment with the sonnet form. My most recent to date (February 6, 2007) is "Hearth". In it, I use a rhyme scheme in which there is a single repetition of one word as an alternating rhyme for each stanza, as abcb, defe, ghih. The final couplet is the only true rhyme in the piece. I am hoping this approach gives the piece a primal sensibility to go with the primal subject matter. Maybe the sensibility is more primative. I noted, when checking the sonnet category, that I have 24 sonnets to date in wordcurrents.
The title of this poem come from a scene that intrigued me in a thoughtful sci-fi movie, The Final Cut, starring Robin Williams. Williams plays a despised man who works as a cutter, editing the film of people's lives. The film he edits is garnered from an implant placed in a baby and harvested after death. In a very poignant scene, the cutter tells of the legend: after a death, the loved ones would place on the dead coins on the eyes, bread and salt on the chest; the sin eater would eat a dead person's sins to ensure he would be received into heaven, then take the bread and salt and coins as payment. I believe I have heard of a sin eater somewhere else; it seems very primitive and necessary, but as the response in the movie puts it: what happens to the sin eater?
Bread and salt have always appealed to me as primal elements of life, just as for some religions, bread and wine are primal elements of their religious observance. When I have made bread, I always liked my bread better than store bread, partly because it was doughier, but also because I made it saltier.
In "bread and salt", I dig into primal elements of wresting life from the earth, and celebrating with bread and salt.
Feb 3: I have added another poem called "bread and salt and copper — the sin eater", about the death of an imaginary Italian merchant.
This poem consists of a period, subtended by an italicized footnote, in poetic form. I felt the period needed explanation. The concept expressed in the poem is based on A Course in Miracles, published by Schucman and Thetford. This approach to the whole concept of reality is one that I whole heartedly agree with. If you want a refreshing perspective on tired Biblical and religious and philosophical concepts that no longer hold meaning for you, take a look at this approach, which really has the potential to change everything.
I applied to and have been accepted as a member of the Zeugma mailing list for poets. The application consisted of four parts: writing, technical proficiency, critique and analysis, and a bio; here is a link to the criteria. I have not yet submitted a poem for critique, but am working on one. I have submitted a critique of a poem on the list. [Update January 26: I have posted two more criticisms, called CRITs, and finally posted a new poem called "Language Barrier", which has not yet posted because Yahoo is experiencing a huge backlog in which posts are delayed and mis-posted out of order . . . . I guess that will increase the suspense for me.]
There are 66 poets on the list, although I suspect only a few are active at a time. The difference between this list and the usual forum is that I am automatically subscribed to any post; on the writing forums, one must read a post or make a post respond to one before one is subscribed to it. The other big difference is that poems posted on the internet are considered to have been published. The down side of that is that publishers are not usually very interested in such material; however, I believe that material posted in such as the Zeugma list is not considered to be published, since it is not accessible to the general public. (I hope.)
I have started posting results of our Leisure Arts Duplicate bridge, just the first five places. Here is a link, in case you are interested: Bridge. The results are published on Wednesdays.
This post is background for the poem, "Calypso", which I published January 18, 2007 in wordcurrents.
When a beloved pet dies a tough death, it's not the death itself that wrings your heart, it's the moments of beauty from the past that haunt you, bring you to that gulp of emotion that just about ends you. Calypso was our beautiful, graceful twelve year old Abyssinian, who died Sunday of bone marrow cancer.
We have had two cats: Circe, our fourteen year old mixed hybrid, still alive, "my" cat, who is healthy and pretty self-sufficient. Circe adopted us when she was a kitten, insisting that we take her home from our island cottage with us, when the weather started to change in the fall. She had been brought to the island as a mousing kitten, and a fabulous mouser she is, too. Calyso is the long-limbed exotic we bought two years later as a companion to Circe. For about the first year, the two cats had a tough time adjusting, until the following summer, when Calypso became marooned in a tall cedar tree at the cottage, too high for me to reach her. Finally, after several hours, Circe went up into the tree, and in two tries, showed Calypso how to use branches as a spiral staircase to descend. They were close buds thereafter.
At first, Circe was Flora's cat, Calypso mine. Calypso would ride around on my shoulders, comfortably warming my neck. Stephanie has even included that pose in one of her paintings. The two cats had very definite allegiances; for example, if we left them with Flora's sister, Circe would sleep on the undershirt I left out for her, Calypso on one Flora had left out on the bed. After one trip, at some signal that we did not notice at the time, they switched allegiances, and Circe became my cat, Calypso, Flora's.
But I still admired Calypso from afar. Every position she sat or stood in, every movement was ballet. Her breed has very large ears, very long legs and a long graceful neck. She was also one of the rare ruddy haired abbys, without the black colouring.
Her death was a tough one: we did not put her down; she chose her own time. Looking back, we can see that she was not well this summer: she did not hunt; even though she is not allowed outdoors at home, she was during the summer at the cottage, and she loved to hunt. One little guy from next door thought she was a baby couger. In my memory, she was a pistol, one really cool cat. Here's a picture taken at the cottage; I will be cleaning out the background when I have time:
Some nostalgia for better weather: here are some photos from October, taken the day we closed our cottage. I found them stored as a draft in my Blogger account, so: better late than never. I notice that my camera's optical sensor needs cleaning. Anyway, these sunny shots show our dock up on shore, and views around the island as we left. The white thing in the view of the shoreline is a crash wave roaring by the beach. It was caused by a passing freighter, as usual breaking the speed limit during the off-season. These waves cause serious shoreline erosion, but nobody really polices this issue. Another example of a wonderful resource being damaged in an atmosphere of apathy. Getting grim; better stop.
"daily route" comes out of my experience delivering mail in the Christmas break from university, in 1957 (I think, although it might have been 1956). This was in Kirkland Lake, Ontario, my home town, in a very cold corner of Nothern Ontario. The temperature in the week or so that I did the job never rose above -34F, and the wind on that exposed side of town was pretty high most of the time; I suppose the windchill was often -60F. Don't worry; I was dressed for it. I was assigned the "Federal" walk, a friendly but thinly travelled region, where I seldom saw anyone outdoors. I walked down many paths and shortcuts upon which I my boots imprinted their distinctive treadmarks, which were almost never trod over by anyone else. I began to see that I was retracing my own footprints every day, and soon saw it as a metaphor for a life that has no possibilities but repetition. Over the years since then, I have thought of that experience often, until it has become one of my life stories. It's not that I hated or depaired of the job: I only did it for about ten days; but there were moments when I saw the possibilities, and they have grown into understanding.
I chose the sonnet form for several reasons: first, I thought that the theme required a disciplined predictable form to reflect the subject matter; second, I write iambic pentameter rather easily; third, the sonnet fell into a Shakespearian pattern because it is not a poem about metamorphosis, as an octave and sestet pretty well requires, but rather a poem about a situation that obtains, with a conclusion that I made hopeful in the couplet, rather than keeping the atmosphere as a total downer.
Here is the latest version of the new look at wordcurrents. The photo I took in July 2006 from in front of our cottage, towards the Ontario shore. This is the view that I see from my favourite haunt, our screened front porch. That is where I do a lot of reading, writing and thinking. I don't have a computer at the cottage, so I write in a spiral notebook with a gel pen.
About the lettering in the photo: I did that in an old version of Ulead's Photo Impact, which came with a scanner that no longer works. I have finally given up on scanners. I don't think any of the three I have owned have ever scanned more than a few dozen things before burning out or failing in some way. That's no fault of Ulead, which makes fine software.
I am trying to make the site more accessible and more inviting and personal. We'll see . . . .
Here is the latest look. I still have some adjustments that I shall try over the next few days. Note that it is similar to the previous one, but has three columns. I have also gotten the widget thingy to work by rewriting the directory structure. So . . . .
I am experimenting with new templates for wordcurrents. As a result, it is looking kind of freaky occasionally, as I run through the twenty or so templates I have down;loaded form the good volunteers at WordPress. I have always wanted a calendar that has live links to the posts for each day, to make navigation easier and more instinctual for visitors. I tried using "widgets" to have one with my usual "becca" theme, but the drag and drop does not work in either Firefox or IE7.
I like some themes, but I am worried about how my readewrs will react to white text on a black background or the number "82" mysteriously haunting a prominent corner. Here is a screen capture of the one I am currently trying. I may run poll here to see what my readers think.
The calendar is live, and gives a popup of the title on that date. I think the header image takes up too much room. I shall probably substitute another, like a photo of the St. Lawrence. This is called Wucoco two column, designed by Mike Lococo. I wonder if he is the same Mike Lococo who studied dentistry and lived with us at St. Mike's.
In 1965 (I think — I have dated "Green Christmas" by the dates of the poems in the box I dug it out of) we had a green Christmas; however, we did have snow in January, unlike this year so far. I have always remembered the poem I wrote about it, and the phrase "clickybuds jiggledeverbore" resounds with me every time we have a green Christmas: I can hear the headcold that the miserable narrator develops as he contemplates a green Christmas. I also got Irving Berlin's history from an article by J. D. Mullane; in the article, he tells of how his firstborn baby boy was just three weeks old when Berlin discovered him dead in his crib on Christmas day, 1928. There is more to Berlin's angst about Christmas.
I recall how Christmas used to be a time of distress in my family: my father, a respected dentist, was an alcoholic who never to my knowledge gave my mother a present. I remember one Christmas, when I was sub-teen, giving my mother salt and pepper shakers I bought at Woolworth's — all I could afford. It was her only present that year.
When I was a parent, I was in anguish every Christmas that we might not have gotten what our kids wanted for Christmas. It was always a very emotional time for me. That is what I mean in the poem when I mention "unfulfilled expectations".
Merchants' hype of Christmas, churches' hype of Christmas always build expectations: the churches' stories are all about perfection to come; the merchants' stories are all about rewards for goodness — in this way, if you didn't get what you wanted, you have been punished. I am sure people who deliver lumps of coal to their kids think the custom is a great lark, and a sort of justice, but I think it is cruel in the extreme. Nobody deserves to be crushed at this intimate level, in the heart of hearts.
By the way, I had a great Christmas. And I hope you did, too.
Percy Billard, a buddy of mine from our work days, has forwarded a file to me http://riverwriter.ca/slr/MonStLawrent.ppt, a beautiful tribute to the St. Lawrence River, featuring photos with French subtitles and music by Lucille Dumont. It is a 10 mb download, but if you have broadband, it is worth it. Here is one of the images:
