Portage -- an amazing poetry resource

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.

The alphabet series of poems

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.

Weather reverse

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:

Katisha

Photo of Katisha and her mother Willow, and sister. The poem is at Katisha

Photo by Frances Merlo

spring kludge

Here are photos of what I am taking about in "spring kludge".

wordcurrents goes podcast

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).

My driveway and "thoughtless"

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.