Last week was the Edmonton Poetry Festival, a legacy of the city's first Poet Laureate, Alice Major. One activity was the Short Order Poetry booth on Churchill Square, where I took a chair three shifts, and part of a fourth, out among the lunch-break crowd in the most public outdoor space in the heart of the city.  A Short Order Poetry booth, by the way, invites the public to come up and give us a topic, a line, a prompt, and then we have to produce something the one(s) requesting will find acceptable as a poem, and do it while they wait in front of us instead of in front of the hot dog stand or food van on either side of us.

Some of the topics are silly, some sober and serious--like the request from a woman who, as the big sister, wanted a poem to give to her "beloved younger brother" (that was the prompt), who had just come through cancer treatments. I didn't make a copy of that one--too personal and for too private a special occasion, but I also think it was the best one I did that week (or maybe I'm fishing for validation here).

The poems, admittedly, are not uniformly fine examples of the art (that last clause would be a euphemism), but the thing is, the public seems intrigued enough at the sheer unlikelihood of it all, and there is often a look of appreciation at seeing their own words and phrases come back at them in the context of patterned and playful language.

Pasted in below are a few of my (slightly edited) pieces that emerged "on order" from some of the over fifty requests we took over the five days.

Edmonton Poetry Festival Short Order Poems

22 April 2013

Bonsai Trees 

Stunted perfection

forest in a teacup

bonsai thrives on

destructive attention

botanical malfeasance

becomes beauty

mediated, meditation

on the grain of sand

     universal

"Early English"   (a phrase used by a middle-aged Chinese ESL learner to explain why he could not write a poem of his own in the guest book. He had, he explained, only “early English,” then inscribed a Li Po poem, in Chinese symbols, into the book.)

Early English

or Late-Mid-Mandarin:

a language fresh each day

ancient metaphors meet

modern necessity

across oceans

across airways

and understandings

forged in two languages

learning toward each

    other

Canada Goose in Churchill Square

Putting the public in their place

waddling in congruous

concrete marshless city centre

proud, curved neck

mocking, bird out of step,

remodeling our public park-

ing lot into a hard

stiff parody of the wild

April 25

Jukebox ….Springtime (the challenge set by two women on their break, calling out prompts together at the same time)

Season in which all songs

all sounds, all rhythms

come round and round;

season of requests, of  programmed

resonance, of choices stacked

and pending, waiting only

to be demanded, commanded

into performance, to join

desire with fulfillment

fresh, refreshed, refreshing,

shared meaning—joined cycles

celebrating love and life

April 26  Queen of the Moon/Rainbows

The Queen of the Moon

mopes at her window,

       mourns

the silver predictability

    of night after

         night

of waxing and waning---

   eyes enviously

the flash and vigorous

   hues of cousin

     Rainbow’s

explosions drawing

ooohhs and aaaahs--

    while he frowns,

       mourns

a life lived brightly

     but too

      briefly