Short Order Poetry

This week, on Wednesday and Friday, I had the numbing joy of sitting at a table in the concourse of the Stanley Milner Library, and, as part of the Edmonton Poetry Festival, writing short-order poems for the public. I think there were six of us shared the opportunity--six I can name (in whole or in part, but I don't have permission--though one was Alice Major, the city's first Poet Laureate. Gotta drop at least one name. And another was Kelly Shepherd, a former student, now a writing colleague with whom I've shared similar tables on a few other occasions--but usually to write stories or short non-fiction explorations--things I'm much more comfortable with).

The original plan had been to set up in Churchill Square--but it rained and blustered Tuesday, and the week became horribly cold and we even had snow (heavy, wet, slushy stuff) on Friday morning. When Tuesday was a true washout, Alice (who is festival organizer) decided to move us into the library. In what amounted to four writing spurts from 11:30 to 1:00 on the four functional days, we served up poems (or poem-like drafts) on 51 topics:

Short Order Poems topics, April 23-27, 2012

Monday

amber
space
integration/anti-segregation
harmony
Wild Rose Party
sexual exploitation

Tuesday

none (bad weather)

Wed.

teaching English
the name John
liver cancer
tea
love
earache
Wild Rose Party
skateboarding
no words
wave
literacy and flight

Thurs.

cats

sleet

pistachio ice cream

birthday wishes from kid to mom

prisons

invidious

joy

Shreveport, Louisiana

food
Kinsmen gym

toilet bowl

“teach me how to write a poem” (wrote about a baby)

running shoes

survey

new Edmonton arena

graceful

Edmonton road closures

grand-babies

intriguing

the pleasure of giving away poems

an excuse for being late

uplifting/get well poem

bulldogs

Friday

letting go

magnanimous

addiction

“anything funny – just don’t go near relationships”

weather

movie theatre

ladybugs

three-year-old granddaughter who has a temper

mountains

the Beatles

Spermy, the origami sperm whale

(only one repeat = the Wild Rose Party)

This was one of those "step outside your comfort zone" experiments, as far as I was concerned, and now I'm glad I did it. It left a buzz for a few hours after. Though to be honest, as I explained to a woman who asked how this short-order poem thing worked: "Sometimes it works pretty well, and other times not so much." It's the finding out that makes the experience what it is.


What keeps me in a humbler space about my uneven contributions to the overall event is encountering a truly gifted recent graduate of the street school of hard learning, a man my age (Kevan) who sits out in Churchill Square and walks the few blocks around it, collecting observations and stories, and who had recently lived on the streets for a year and a half. He stepped up to the open mike and read a few of his poems, all written in the last two years about things observed or overheard within those few square blocks, any one poem of which has more genuine empathy with stark realities than anything and maybe everything I've attempted. And he also writes poems for children, and reads them in schools. I gather he started writing as part of a journaling exercise to help him recover from an unspecified addiction (along with a ruptured hernia and colon cancer). Until that moment, he had never written a thing in his life. Now, he is working on a manuscript that will combine stories behind the poems--and some of those stories are evocatively lyrical in themselves--with the poems that emerged. 

It makes my sense of "outside my comfort zone" a pretty puny feather bed of a space. I didn't even need to get wet or cold for my art. We were spared those inconveniences. Maybe we should have called ourselves the "hot-house flower poets," rather than short-order poets. 


But risk is relative, as well as absolute. It's tricky, that way.

Speaking of tricky, some thought on fences, occasioned by seeing a flock of crows, two ravens, and a blue jay sitting on and above the fence that divides the University of Alberta South Campus farmlands from the Lendrum residential area, along 115th Street (A work in progress, by the way--what you see today might not be what was here yesterday, and might change tomorrow):




Fence: a trick
played on and with
open landscape


A line in the land
both in and out
and the connective
in-between.


Fences mark a delicate
space: both sides and the middle
ground despised but maintained
out of mutual
    otherness, that need to be
    different;
neither here nor 
     there
but both at once
defining your own space
and mine


and making that middle
ground possible, bringing
together to keep 

apart.

AS A P.S.: we have been asked to do another Short Order Poetry table for an Edmonton Arts Council event for downtown businessmen, the evening of May 12, so I guess the Edmonton Poetry Festival people thought it worked well enough.

Measured Wave Lengths

Some more haiku-formed musings, this time with "wave(s)" as syllable #5:

Rolling, tossing waves
calmed by a softening voice
pattern for the ages

Ringlets, curls in waves
wind-tossed strands across bright eyes
flirtatious protein

Rippling shimmers waves
gold to the edge, bread basket
migrant peasants dream

Star to the crowd, wave
walking the fame eternal
self adoration

Never amber waves
grainy photos black and white
myth and nostalgic

Roll in, roll out, waves
push up the strand pull full back
note of joy? Sadness?

Invisible waves
communicate essentials
twittering nuisance

And, a late addition Saturday, in honour of the snowstorm that settled in for the weekend last night:

Mid-April flurries
delicate disappointment
crystal on crystal

"Snarkenfreude"

I ran across this delicious word for a malicious behaviour in a column by Aretha Van Herk, in the Winter 2012 New Trails magazine from the U. of A. Alumni Association ("Telling Hard Truths," page 9, for those who worry about the finer details of apparatus).

It's a portmanteau from "snark" and the German word "Schadenfreude." "Snark" everyone has had experience of, probably even spoken or written an example of. You might be familiar with the word via Lewis Carroll, but Urban Dictionary says "snark" already a portmanteau, is a "combination from `snide' and `remark.'" "Schadenfreude" refers to pleasure in the misfortunes or unhappiness of others. Hence this combined term for taking sarcastic or snide pleasure in remarking on the misfortunes or unhappiness of others. Or maybe taking pleasure in causing unhappiness or misfortune for others through snarkiness: Snarkenfreude.

One place snarkenfreude tends to show up is in the "Comments" sections of the blogosphere. In one form, it is cyberbullying, the online hobby of literate narcissists and cybersociopaths.

The Van Herk column brings up the word in a discussion of a bigger issue worth thinking about. Why do we assume that "the hard truths" are always the unpleasant ones? At least, that's the way the saying gets passed around. And some just take snarky pleasure in spitting it out to watch the misery it creates.  Is good news, then, a "soft truth"? Is that why when we have a hard truth to convey, and we are not in a snarkenfreude mood, we look for language to soften the blow? And end up, in my all-too-frequent experience, muddying the issues, confusing the situation and making a sour hash of something better made short and, if necessary, unsweet.

Why pretend the bad news isn't really that bad? Why not just let the person receiving it get on with the next stage--anger, grief, frustration, depression?...  Of course, there is always the fear that the recipient will shoot the messenger--even if the messenger did not create the bad news in the first place. Messengers tend to be less powerful (which is how they get to be messengers in the first place), so easier to take things out on--less dangerous. Fewer bodyguards and enforcers.

A former student was by my office today. She has been working for Health Canada, but is on a lower rung on the seniority ladder, so is likely one of the upcoming Budget-Balancing Layoffs. She was one of the thousands of recent public service hires, after all, of the minority Federal government, so will be one of the face-saving victims of the majority Federal government. She was telling me she was going to think of it as an "opportunity." Sad, thinking of her going gentle into a different good night.

There is a passage in Timothy Findley's Not Wanted on the Voyage that keeps coming to mind when government or any other institution begins to solve its own self-inflicted financial or other problems by resorting to decisions to cut back everything and everyone they have been spending madly on for years:

The building of the ark was a monstrous undertaking--and once the keel frame had been laid and the ribs of the ark itself set in place, it was obvious how vast its size would be: the largest structure ever built in the whole district. The workmen now were in awe of it, as though they were building a temple, and this produced a thoroughly satisfying atmosphere of  "no more questions asked--no more questions needed." Noah was able, now, to stare each workman squarely in the eye and dare him with a look to challenge the grandeur of the project. As if the grandeur of the ark was its own justification. (119)

In the present circumstances, that would sound something like: "Just question how we're balancing the budget--we dare you. Surely you must believe that the budget needs to be balanced and the deficit we created for you must be paid off? Surely you don't want to leave a mess for your children and grandchildren to pay off and repair after you have taken more than your fair share out of the system we built to give you access to more than your fair share as a way of buying your votes the way we now are forcing your shamed silence?"

I recall a hospital administrator, in the mid-1990s, when Ralph Klein was slashing budgets of all sorts of Alberta public institutions in order to eliminate the deficit, to make this the one shining glory spot in the nation, the only province without a debt--well not one to talk of, anyway. All that decayed or never built infrastructure? Not worth mentioning: "Go on, mention it. I dare you." The administrator, who had yearly asked the province to increase the budget of the hospital, for the good of the public and to create better access to health care, immediately turned tail and proclaimed that his could be a better institution for the cut-backs--a leaner, more efficient, more effective machine. In one of those cases, he had to be messing with the hard truth. Maybe in both.

In Alberta today, if you question the grandeur of some of the tar-sands development policies, such as the virtual holiday from royalties the richest companies in the province enjoy, at the expense of the taxpayer, you are in for a dose of this "dare-you" look.

"Surely you cannot question the need to develop this valuable resource for the good of all?" Nope, I can't. And if it were for the good of all, we could all rejoice in its completion. Of course, when it is complete, there will be a big messy hole in the province, and not much carry-over. We'll be the provincial equivalent of a ghost-mining-town, the likes of which dot the interior of British Columbia, northern Ontario, Quebec.

Remember what happened to all those silent, bullied workmen who toiled on the ark?  They were left with their families and animals to drown in the great cleansing flood that carried all the undeserving undesirables to their doom, after they had built the lifeboat for the few deserving desirables: Noah; his wife; their sons Shem, Ham and Japheth; and their wives. Apparently the wives didn't have names, only roles to play in the grand scheme, so a place in the lifeboat. Probably feeding the animals. Then looking after the livestock.

A few snarkenfreude-like retorts begin to frame themselves at the core of my otherwise carefully maintained, mild-mannered Canadian politesse. If only I thought they might cause a few seconds of unease among today's Noahs.

But I'm too restrained and intimidated by years of such symbolic violence as "the look" ever to comment on such things.

Not all differences are created equal

We have an election going on in Alberta. The conservative party pushing hard to replace the conservative party that has run things (increasing badly) for the past 41 years has a couple of interesting promises in its bag of tricks: revise access to information laws to make information about government easier to access, and bring in whistleblower legislation to protect public workers who expose government waste or bad behaviour.

Interesting not because I ever expect to see it, but because I've heard this all before, from other parties not in power making promises about what they will do when they are in power. Then, suddenly, if and when that day arrives, they suddenly have other priorities from the back pages of the party manual, and the other stuff they were elected to deliver just has to wait its turn--in the platform of a party now in opposition.

But an item on the local news tonight put another interesting perspective on things: take the four parties most likely to elect members to the legislature, and the costs of their top few promises, and oddly enough, the whole election seems to be about how to spend $1.3 to $1.5 billion of public money to buy votes from the public. That's not all of it, obviously--just the part that is getting most of the media attention.

There was a bumper sticker around in the 1960s, as I recall: "Don't Vote. It Only Encourages Them." That, too, seems pretty self-defeating. Not voting just seems to keep them happy doing nothing, to disturb nobody. Our outgoing conservative government, the one that called the election, had a huge majority, so after years of consultation and revision, it decided not to pass a new Education Bill, because it might give the opposition conservative party too much ammunition in an election. The new Bill might have upset 5 000 families spread out throughout a province with 3.5 million people. It might also have encouraged a few thousand other voters to believe the old government was actually willing to make a difference, after years of trying very hard not to. Better not risk that. What's that line about cowards dying a thousand deaths?...  But did they have to take us with them?