too late

This is a picture of my uncle, Ron Hill, who died yesterday, two months shy of 100 years old. Ron was a very kind and sensitive person who was a force for the cause of blind people in the maritimes.

At age 7, he was having his jacket sewn by his mother when the Harbour at Halifax was subject a massive explosion: a ship loaded with explosives collided with another. Although the family lived at 5 Uniacke Street, just a few feet from the water, the explosion was not near enough to destroy their home. One of his older brothers, who was late for his job in the harbour, was not killed, nor was his father, a marine engineer who was home with the 'flu. He told this story recently in The Halifax Chronicle Herald.

At the age of 17, Ron was hit in the eye by a hockey stick. He lost that eye, and later an infection formed, spread to the other eye, and he lost it too. He never let his blindness be an obstacle to travel or achievement. He was well loved.

"fluffy" and "low gravity"

Yesterday ( December 14) and the day before, I posted a couple of poems as reactions to a substantial snowfall. In /"fluffy", I expressed a grumpy revulsion, and in "low gravity" I took the contrary position.

I think northerners have this love/hate relationship with snow, each of us occupying an ambivalence with considerable scope since snow plays such a definite part in our geographical existence. The only way to avoid it is to stay indoors or to flee to warmer climates; the only way to embrace it is to get out and wallow in it on skis or inside warm clothing.

The only way I can take a convincing stand on contrary positions is to convince myself that I really agree with it. I think of this mental activity as somewhat similar to the actor who is faced with playing an unsympathetic villain--and actors love playing the villain. In virtually every case, the actor has later said that the way to approach it is to believe the character is right.

That is the situation I got into when I took contrary positions on snow. Except that I have to confess I had the advantage of feeling that way on successive days, so that I didn't have to convince myself of anything. When I wrote "fluffy", I was feeling sorry for myself because I could see the snow falling all day, and knew I was going to have to go our and deal with it eventually: it was filling my driveway.

I arose at 5:30 the next morning because we had a TV technician scheduled to arrive sometime between 8 am and 5 pm the next day (Don't you love that? If you miss the appointment, you have to start over.) The shoveling, although pretty exhausting (after all, I am in my seventies) was not insurmountable, and I got it done in forty-five minutes, had a shower, and got about my day. The TV tech arrived, discovered the problem was simple, solved it immediately, then revealed I had taught him some thirty years ago, and we had a wonderful batch reminiscence, followed by the Olympic Torch relay passing in front of my house (which had spurred his early arrival so he could get his truck in and out.) By that time, I was in a pretty good mood, so that when I wrote "low gravity", it was quite natural to come up with a double plus feel-good poem.

On posting 1000 poems

Yesterday I posted my 1000th original poem in my blog, wordcurrents, where, except for a hiatus of fourteen months, I have posted a new poem every day since February 2006.

Not every poem is a "keeper" (as anglers say), but I am pleased with most of them. You may wish to drop by and comment.

In the space of a month, over 2000 visitors read wordcurrents. You can see where they are from by clicking on the link at the end of this sentence, and typing "30" in the "Time" slot: wordcurrents' Visitors' Map. If you hover your cursor over any of the orange dots, the name of the location comes up.

I started this project to jolt myself out of a seven year writer's block. I had always known that I needed a deadline to work, and an editor to create the pressure. In this case, the deadline was the promise to post a new poem every day, and the editor was each reader/subscriber. And it worked. This has been my own personal NaPoWriMo project, except that the time span is open-ended. I have discovered that the experience has really established sold links between the synapses I need to work in order to tap into my right brain.

Here's a preview of the map, in case you're shy about loading the link:

Poetry and the right brain

Poetry presents a rare point of view to the world: the poet presents the world as filtered through the right side of the brain. I think this is an interesting way of determining what is the essential element that qualifies a collection of words to be considered a poem. I note that writers often place words into what looks like verse, but does not strike me as a poem because it is all left brain observation--in essence, pragmatic fact.

This point was brought home to me in an interview on CBC Radio One today (December 6, 2009). In it, Dr. Taylor described how, in the hospital after her stroke, which cut off her access to the left side of her brain for a time, she can recall not having any facts: she did not recognize her mother: her mother's name is Gigi; when she heard Gigi was coming to visit her, she wondered what a Gigi was. When her mother arrived, and cuddled her, she thought, delighted, "Ah, so this is what a Gigi is!" Her mother, arriving to see her twenty-seven year old daughter curled up in a fetal position in the hospital bed, instinctively realized that she needed to be held.

As I listened to the broadcast, I realized that What I do when I write poetry is to filter reality through the right side of my brain. I also realized that this is what makes poetry unique and significant for human experience: while most writing is filtered through the left side of the brain exclusively, it is poetry that takes language through the other, more intuitive route.

As one of the participants in the Zeugma Poetry Forum recently said in a thread: you may have to trick your ego (in essence, your chosiste left brain).

I think this is an idea worth exploring.

Podcast of Mary Hynes's interview with Dr. Taylor is the Tapestry program of December 6, 2009: Interview with Jill Bolt Taylor

Dr. Taylor has also written a book: My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey

"prescription"

On the Dr. Oz Show the other day, Dr. Oz was talking about coffee addiction. One of the points he made in passing was that it takes the body twenty-eight days to detoxify itself after you stop taking the addictive substance.

After two and a half years of use, I have been off the Temazepam that was prescribed by the sleep clinic doctor, for eleven days. Except for really sore places and severe muscle cramps that may or may not be related, I am doing well. My brain is coming back along with my memory and, I think, my creative ability.

Just to bring you up to speed in case you missed it, I went to my family doctor on October 17 to renew the prescription for my sleeping pills. The above mentioned Temazepam was prescribed in the spring of 2007 to help me sleep while wearing my CPAP mask for my sleep apnea. When he saw what I was taking, he became somewhat upset, and told me I couldn't take that because aside from the fact that it is quite addictive, it has a significant side effect for people over sixty 50 significantly decreasing mental ability and memory, in effect mimicking dementia.

I have to tell you that my wife and I had discussed the possibility that I was exhibiting symptoms of Alzheimer's, as I was having great difficulty remembering things, and becoming stymied by software programming problems that used to be easy for me, and most important, my duplicate bridge scores were going down precipitously.

I celebrate the release from this strange situation in "prescription", which you can see by clicking on the above title. It's not quite over, as I still have seventeen days ago, according to Dr. Oz.

easy

I wrote this poem after meeting my cousin, (let's call her Mary) whom many years ago, my sister and I babysat many times, back when we did not know she was our cousin, once removed. A little over twenty years ago, Mary found her biological mother, my first cousin, who acknowledged her but blocked Mary's contact with her children (Mary's half-sisters and half-brothers) and the rest of the family. Mary finally discovered where I live, but was afraid to contact me until she saw my picture in a magazine and decided to call. Mary lives about an hour and a half away. The story is more convoluted that this, but in deference to her mother's wishes I am blurring things. You may not sympathize with her mother's obstinacy, but it is rooted in the attitudes of the 1940s, when marriage out of wedlock was serious business that made Mary one of the "Butterbox Babies". That scandal has been the subject of at least one book.

Mary has children who know her story, as does my branch of the family, now. She is a witty, accomplished woman with sons and daughters, all of whom are married and have their own children. But she has this ache to know her mother's family. I am so pleased to be a chink in the wall to her family. Welcome home, Mary.

"The Colours of the Day"

I took this photo today after I finished raking. This is part of what I was talking about in the poem.

Who reads wordcurrents?

This is a map generated to cover the past ten days. It does not show bots, just human visitors. I have very little idea who these people are, but I can see where they are. Each orange dot represents a reader's location. If you can't see the fine type, there are 1089 of them, during a time span of about nine and a half days.

If you click on the map, you will see it full size.

More trouble at wordcurrents

Last night, not only did my site lock up so that I was unable to post, just when I was trying to post yesterday's poem, but my Internet service went down shortly after, and I finally had to give up. I lost more than half of the poem in the process, and upon recovering my connection today, proceeded to rewrite the piece; however, when I tried to post it, my blog locked me out.

I did manage to save it, and have pasted it into my word processor for safekeeping. My process is to dictate the poems into my blog editor, using Dragon Naturally Speaking. In the rare case that the blog ties up, I can lose the work. If the blog is working properly, it backs up the work on line whenever i pause. That was not the case last night however. Grrrr! I hope my ISP can solve this soon.

wordcurrents is up to date.

I was able to solve the problem. Apparently there was an error in the code at the ISP level, and that caused strange issues in the software. I found it frustrating to have written a post that I could not share.

wordcurrents Down

I have been unable to post yesterday's poem in wordcurrents. I was able to write the poem in the editor, and save it, but unable to post it, and cannot get back into the editor to copy it here. Nerts!!

stained glass window

Here is the photo that appears in the thumbnail with the poem. Click on it to see the large version of the photo. A larger version is available on line, as are details.

vacant lot

There is a progression in these photos. I will probably post more later as they build the new fibre-optic cable system centre. The poem pretty well says it all. Click on the title above to visit the poem on wordcurrents.

"cool flame"

I wish that the sun and the colour of the leaves would cooperate: when the leaves were brightest, it was raining. Now that we are getting some sun, they are thinning out. This is a view of the bush from the back yard. Note the green lower leaves. Click on the title of this post to see the poem.

End of summer

This was a ceremony Colin asked us to perform, on the dock in front of Reynolds' cottage. Peter read Colin's poem, then Colin threw into the river symbols of the summer, that he had collected. He wants us to do this at the end of each summer, using items contributed by each person who visited the cottage. The poem appears below. I find this very moving.

Just in time

You can see the leaves that have fallen overnight. Just two days ago I finished grouting the walk. The main reason I wanted to grout it was to keep leaves from filling in the spaces between the rocks. It is also a rainy day, and the rain is forecast to continue for at least sour days. So, as I said above in the title: "Just in time."

Grouting the flagstone

Here is the walk as the polyplastic sand grout is setting. You can't see that it is raining.

















In the background are the unusable bags of polyplastic sand that were partially wet when I received them. The supplier is making good.



















This is a blurry photo of me a few days ago, getting ready to go out and adjust reluctant flagstonestone's opinion of me.

Slow sleep of stones

The poem is a meditation upon a path I am building of pink flagstone.

The poem count

When I started this blog, I started counting the number of days I posted a new poem. Today that count stands at 895.

However, I looked at the number of posts with the category "poem", and see that it says 901. That is due to the fact that on some days I have posted more than one poem, but added only one to the count because at that point I was counting days instead of poems.

So now, I am thinking of adjusting the count to show the number of poems instead of the rather irrelevant numbers of days I have posted a poem. That means I shall be adding 6 to the count.

wordcurrents new look

I have started using a new theme, "EBusiness" a premium theme by Elegant Themes

I am still playing with it: most parts are working, but some are not.

The New wordcurrents Logo

I have been wanting to develop a logo for wordcurrents for some time, and when matias s' Shockingly Simple Favicon plugin was swiftly followed by Dan Cannon's Dynamic Headers plugin, all the pieces were in place for me to put together the logo that would serves as a favicon too. So here it is, in both forms:





The smaller one is the Favicon, which is displayed at the front end of your address bar when you are on my web site, just the way Blogger's white-on-orange "B" is displayed up there, now.

The logo now appears before the title on every post on wordcurrents.

Cha-cha-cha!

Using a dictation program

With my recent review of "Kingfisher Days", I discovered once again the perils of dictating to a computer. The dictation program requires relative silence to interpret speech and convert it to text. Unfortunately, when I was dictating the review, two of my grandchildren ( seven and three) were entertaining (read: "running and shouting enthusiastically with")two friends (six and two) in the room next door.

This state of affairs had the effect of confusing the poor program (Dragon Naturally Speaking) and produced some wonderful expressions that a spell checker will not pick up and even cursory proofreading misses: " . . . very few of the negatives of the college experience . . . " should be " . . . very few of the negatives of the cottage experience . . . " and " . . . the narrator was an adult would like experience . . . " should be " . . . the narrator was an adult with life experience . . . "

This situation must have confused my readers until Flora drew my attention to it. I would have corrected it earlier, but at the time, the seven year old was playing a wizard game on-line, and I did not want to disturb him, even though he is very polite and instantly lets me back at the keyboard if I request it.

There is an interesting corollary: the ability of DNS to give me homonyms has given me some interesting lines in the occasional poem that I have dictated, thereby suggesting a whole new art-form: poetry by a hard-of-hearing speech to text program. I have commented on this before, and have posted one or two such works, with advisories, of course.

The other poems I wrote for the Gala

This week, I am posting some of the other poems I wrote in preparation for my reading at the Mayor's Celebration of the Performing Arts at Aultsville theatre on March 28, 2009.

I scheduled "Circling the Moon", the Gala poem, to post during the Gala, after I performed it. I brought out my recorder with me, placed it on the podium, and recorded the reading, which I posted that night, with the poem.

Yesterday, I posted "Incident in a framing store", along with a podcast of my reading of it. The incident actually happened a few years ago while I was in a framing store admiring a painting by Brenda Beaudette, who has a wonderful ability to see what is around her with her own unique vision. In this case, it was a wonderfully simple painting of a holstein cow. While I was standing there, a young woman came in breathless to buy one of those signed-by-the-artist, so-called "prints" that is actually a commercial mass produced magazine-style fabrication which the artist has glanced at for a few seconds while scribbling his or her signature on the lower corner. Certainly, the artist has produced the original, which is worth something; but I protest strongly that a factory produced replica of a photograph of it is not worth very much, if anything except as an autograph. I can feel my blood pressure rising as I write this; I'd better get off my soap box.

Today, I put together a revised draft and podcast of "Dreaming with fishes", which will appear tomorrow at 8:30 am EDST. Tamia Doll died of cancer a few years ago. I discovered her in the early nineties when I was Chair of the now-defunct Seaway Arts Council. I was fairly heavily involved in the local art gallery at the time, and discovered that there was an artist who actually painted the river. It was one of my peeves, and still is that we live beside the St. Lawrence River, one of the mightiest water systems in the world and ignore it. Especially that our artists ignore it. My theory is that it is too huge a subject; writing about it or composing or painting about it is like writing about sunsets or God: it's too much and in our minds too obvious, too much a life cliche.

Tamia was one of very few artists to paint the river. She loved fishing, and eventually bought a house right down on the river. I saw some of her paintings at the local gallery, but they were all sold. So I went to visit her. She was painting when I got there. She had a painting that I bought; it now hangs in our living room. I never tire of looking at it (see below). It is a simple view of part of a fishing boat with another in the distance. Tamia died of lung cancer a few years later. I eventually asked teh Gallery director if she had any of Tamia's paintings, and she told me the story of the flooded basement. I remember a few of the paintings I saw at Tamia's house that day, and wonder if any of them made their way into the world.

Mayor's Celebration of the Performing Arts

This gig I have at The Mayor's Celebration of the Performing arts, March 28, 2009, in Aultsville Theatre, Cornwall, Ontario, is turning out to be fun. I have pretty well finished my poem, which I shall post simultaneously in wordcurrents with the event, along with several of the poems I wrote so as to have a choice.

I was just speaking with Pam Maloney, the event organizer, Chair of the Aultsville Theatre Committee, who really likes the draft she has seen, and has asked me to read it as the first item after the opening addresses, as it "sets the tone for the whole evening." Cool.

The wordcurrents podcasts

With the purchase of some excellent portable recording equipment (see photo below), I have begun podcasting the poetry in earnest. I have previously recorded some readings and commentaries which have suffered from the quality of the equipment.

I hope I get some feedback to let me know if the commentaries are useful; as well, since some of my readings are a bit unorthodox, to let me know if my experimentation is worth continuing.



This is the ZOOM H2 Handy recorder. It has four micophones (making it handy for our quartet rehearsals) and records in two formats at numerous quality levels (the higher the quality, the bigger the file.) So I am experimenting with that.

I am also using a new setting for the podcasts, in that there is both a list of the recordings and each poem has a player situated beneath it so that the you can read the text while listening. The controls allow you to stop the recording and to start the replay over again as well as to adjust the volume. I hope you tune in.

"wire fence"

The poem is commenting on what is visible in these two photos. The vet's parking lot is to the extreme left of the photos. The yard past our back fence was as smooth as and unblemished as ours still is. My neighbour has commented on the situation previously. In the spring, his lawn is spattered with a lot of dog poop. I wish I had thought to take a picture of the tall spray of snow when it was happening; it was more than three times taller than the top of these photos. That must have been some heavy duty snow blower!

Click on the photos for a close up.

Christmas Cactus in winter

On my windowsill, unnoticeable until you look closely:

 

Another new look

Here is a look at the Inanis Glass view of wordcurrents:



You can change the background and access many other things on the bottom bar:

The glass ball with the pencil in it to the left is where you go to change the backgrounds. The rest is pretty self-evident.

Fortunately, this blog theme is compatible with the version of WordPress I am using.

Here is the bottom bar with the menu open:




The menu on the left is what I see as administrator; subscribers see something like that; anonymous users see fewer options.



This is a pretty handy area, but you wouldn't know about it if you weren't either terminally curious or reading this post.

To get to it, click the ball in the lower left corner.