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.