thoughts below ground, the series

This series of poems is based on the fact that my office is in the basement, it is spring, and I have been noticing worm castings all over the lawn.

Worms remind me of the Hamlet's line in Hamlet, in which having killed Polonius, he tells the king to look for the old schemer "not where he eats but where he is eaten. . . certain politic worms are e'en at him."

The setting, then, is under ground, from the narrator worm's point of view.

The snake references came about as a result of a breakfast nook conversation with son Pete. We were discussing out-of-character actions that people take; he told me about the belief of

Kundalini yoga, in which there is said to be a fire-snake, coiled in three and a half coils in the base chakra (one of seven power-zones along the human spine). It is coiled around the Shiva lingham ­ the male line of force that comes down from the sky. Kundalini is an Earth force that comes up from the Earth. Kundalini yoga is the practise of awakening the snake and allowing it to rise up the spine until it reaches the highest chakra, the Crown chakra, where the meeting of Shiva and Shakti lead to enlightenment and the trance of Samadhi ­ ecstasy ­ the annihilation of the ego and the end of duality.

[I refer for my source here to a Google search using the terms snake+"human spine"+mythology and I excerpted this passage from an article in http://www.2012theodyssey.com/articles-beyond.html to which I do not particularly subscribe; however, I find the speculation interesting.]

podcast

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

Poet In Residence Gig

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 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.

My niche of the St. Lawrence River

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

"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.

Out the train windows

Here is another image of northern Ontario, taken from the lounge car. I like the contrast between the frozen evergreens outside, and the colourful flower arrangement inside.






To the left is a town we passed late in the day. see the light at the horizon.

"The Canadian" — a train ride, a country

The link for the title of this piece takes you to the whole category of poems I posted in my blog (and will continue to post there) . Here is a photo of the staircase in the lounge car:

The cars (manufactured in 1950) used to belong to the Candian Pacific Railway (CPR), which ran a little to the south of the Canadian National Railway (CNR). They are stainless steel and very art deco. In the photo, you can see the dome, which gives a 360 degree view of everything.






Here is a unique view out the rear of the train, through the lounge window:

In future posts, I shall give you other views, some particularly inspirational with regard to particular poems.

Blue

This trip inspired "Blue"; as you can see, there is a lot of blue in the photo.



This is a view downstream (towards the north-east) at the head of Lake St. Francis in the St.Lawrence Seaway. To starboard is one of the green winter stick-buoys marking the south (Quebec) side of the channel. What a beautiful day this was. All of the land masses visible in this shot are islands. Below is an enlargement of the horizon, showing the little floating islands that really seem to inhabit a never-land between earth and sky.

Wet snow

Here is the photo of one of the scenes that inspired "Wet snow", the little poem that I just published in wordcurrents. We were driving home from an afternoon with friends, playing bridge, when the rain turned to snow. Back home, I took this photo with flash off the deck in our back yard. You can see the snow on the horizontal leaves. There is a fragility to this delicate scene; you can see why trees with leaves have to be deciduous in our climate.

About "Four percent"

"Four percent" is a screed and a sort of a poem that I published yesterday in wordcurrents. As I was writing it, I was thinking of the Star Trek the Next Generation episode in which the Enterprise crew captures a warrior who has been genetically modified into the perfect fighting machine; and after he and his brethern have won the war for his civilization, they are exiled to a moon. They are only dangerous when threatened. Like so many SNG plots, this one is related to actual human archtypes, in this case, the psychopath, whom research has shown was necessary for human survival in more primitive times (and, I would argue, today and tomorrow), but is unacceptable in present "civilized" society. I suppose John Rambo is another example, or just about any lost veteran who can't fit in after the fighting is over.

I see "Four percent" as a template for some future poems that are more like poetry, because I think there is a lot of pathos and therefore poetic subject matter in such a subject. The psychopath has several characteristics of the tragic figure: alienation, isolation, a tragic flaw — all built in.

Another current literary example of the interesting psychopath is the main character in HBO's new series on the Movie Network: Dexter. This is CSI is Jack the Ripper is Sherlock Holmes *shudder*. Here is a serial killer who works to solve crimes by day and secretly hunts down and kills serial killers by night. The interesting twist on this is that Dexter himself is being stalked. It would be even more interesting if the stalker were his sister, an apparently not-so-smart police woman he helps progress through the ranks by giving her clues that make her appear smarter than she is.

CBC Literary Awards

I was just reading Alison Pick's winning entry for the most recent awards. If you click on the title above, or this link — CBC Literary Awards 2006 — you will open a window on the links to all the winners from last year. Pick's entry is pretty impressive.

When one enters one of these contests, it is useful to be able to read previous winners, just so you can allow yourself to fall into the morass of despond and not expect too much. * signs and pounds forehead *

The winners are published in Air Canada's En Route Magazine, which appends the following disclaimer:

"The views expressed by the writers do not represent the views of enRoute, Spafax or Air Canada. Certain readers may be offended by the contents."

Don't you love it? More of Big Brother looking out for those of us who may be offended. I think there are a lot of people in this world who should be offended more often. Just in our own country they should be offended by child poverty, homelessness, the hoarding of wealth — and the list goes on; don't get me started.

On that subject, I am offended by the huge number of times TV programs warn us after each commercial break that "the following program may contain scenes of nudity, violence and coarse language. Viewer descretion is advised" — and then after they've gotten my hopes up, the closest thing to nudity is an occasional unclad family pet, the closest thing to coarse language wouldn't be bleeped on The Actors Studio and the violence is all about the same as you see on the street at noon. I recall sending a letter home to parents in the seventies, when we decided to show Roman Polanski's MacBeth* to students in the school auditorium. I told them that the film was reputed to have a nude scene and considerable violence. The only reaction I got back from the parents was that they applauded our decision to show the kids saw something with some issues in it, keep up the good work. The film really impressed the kids, and the followup classroom discussions were very productive. About ten years later, I showed the same film, and found the kids giggling at the gory death scenes, then realized, during the followup discussions that they were seeing the gore through the filter of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which I think may have used the same costumes. How times change.


* Produced, dear readers, by Playboy Magazine

Swamped

The CBC Literary Awards deadline is November 1. I have just realized, upon reading the rules, that I cannot submit any of the 260+ poems I have published so far this year in wordcurrrents, nor any of the other poems I have published in the three poetry forums I post in.

Interesting limitation; interesting complication. Fortunately, I still have time to work on my entry of 1,000 - 2,000 words of verse. But, in the meantime, I am trying to learn the music for our concert November 18, and work on the playscript. If I still had a job, I would probably have time to do this; but since I am retired, it is quite hopeless. Now we know what a job is for: to protect one from the demands on free time.

I had better get going on writing todays' poem for wordcurrents; I haven't even decided yet what it will be. I drove the boat down river to the marina for winter storage today. Beautiful bright calm day for a ten kilometre trek by boat. Maybe I'll write about that.