Wicihitowin

The thing that amazes people about the pair of geese that have made a home in the fountain in front of City Hall is not that they are there, but that they should not be. The geese seem unperturbed by the distinction. They waddle/strut with goosely dignity and unconcern across 102A Ave between the fountain and Churchill Square, pose occasionally for phone cameras. Let people share the space with them.

Usually, Canada Geese, especially in large migrant flocks, are symbols of the wild and of the north. Their coming and going marks the seasonal shifts—just as Wade Hemsworth, who wrote an iconic song about geese on the north shore of the Lake Superior, letting the worker know the end of the season of whatever he had been doing in the north was coming to an end, and that he would soon be going home to spend his money and earn the necessity to come back to the north woods.(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4Z13wmZlsU)

Canada Geese typically are not symbols of city centre, not habitués of concrete and high-rise. So when they set up housekeeping in front of City Hall, the civic living room, they challenge our own sense of the qualities of the places we have created for ourselves. They adapt, and let us know we have to, as well. They accept.

What is a goose in front of city hall a metaphor for? Validation of our choice of place? Parody of our self-important claim to ownership and belonging?

What if the geese had never stopped to smell the flowerless park and swim in the treated water? Would our civic square be any the lesser for it? No. Or at least we would not have that standard of measure against which to judge ourselves and our spaces. But now that they are here, what would it say if the left? That we have created a park unsuitable for geese? That we have revealed ourselves to be unfit neighbours, unamiable hosts? Not worth sharing the space with?

But they do stay--in summers, anyway. And in so doing, maybe the geese are showing us that we need to designate that Square? They might be part of a movement to rename it not for a dead English Prime Minister who never passed through here that  have heard, but for something much closer to home. For our home itself, in a way.  

The name being promoted, my friend Anna Marie Sewell (a former Poet Laureate for the city) tells me, "would be Wicihitowin Square - after the Cree concept for 'working and sharing together.' Wicihitowin Circle of Shared Responsibility is a long-standing advisory body of reps from Aboriginal community liaising with the City." 

Honk on that, City Council...

Rainbows

As sometimes happens when we are walking our dog on the University of Alberta South Campus, a photo op comes along. And as I sometimes do, I snapped it with my phone camera, then sent the picture to my much-published poet friend, Anna Marie Sewell. And as Anna sometimes does, she returned a poem based on the photo. She focused on the geese.

And as I sometimes do, I pulled a few of my favorite lines from that poem (italicized to give credit where it is due), and worked them into one of my own. I focused on the rainbow:

Eyes follow the refraction:

a call to attention,

a suggestion that all

songs slide down from above….or

another on-ramp to the sky? 

a reminder that song also rises, 

reaches from the singer’s depths

to enrich the chorus all around, to feed soul-

hungry voyagers from their own resources, turn

their emptiness, their appetite,

into sustenance, the chance to feed

on their own need, to answer the question:

“Shall we be fertile?”

 What, then will

we bring to the table, chanters in the

choir that never ceases?

Then another friend, Shayne, came back with a poem on the Portuguese concept of "saudade, for which there is no complete translation in English, a poem that connected through both geese and rainbow as essential to the landscape, so  went back to work with lines from both Anna Marie and Shayne to push things along:

a constant

vague desire for something

lingering at the bright

union of rainbow reaching

down to the grass and the geese,

backs turned to the spilling

violent color behind;

or hiding just beyond

the ragged edges refracting

into the clouds that half-

helped create this call to attention:

the sense that we have not

exactly seen this all before

in all its rolling untamed

familiarity

Singing with Joy

Several years ago I heard Renny Khan from U. of A. International, originally from Trinidad, tell the story of a group of Caribbean islanders in the early 16th century. These people had heard of the Spanish and their ships--news had gone around the ring of islands fairly quickly of these sailing ships that arrived and enslaved or eradicated the populations. So when the sails appeared on the horizon, the entire population, which might have been Carib, or might have been Arawak, or maybe of some other culture (and probably did not call themselves either Carib or Arawak in any case), walked off the island and drowned themselves. The obvious story was framed in the knowledge of what they walked away from, drowned themselves to avoid. To me, the more pressing story was what they walked towards--what in their worldview was waiting for them in that possibly saving embrace of the sea. With the entire population gone, no one was left to tell that story, and it was that loss--the loss of a functional world view--that began to pick away at me. At that time, I had not turned my hand or mind to poetry in a shamefully long time, but the occasion put me back in that mode--in a messy and erratic way.

This past April, when Joy Harjo was the opening guest artist at the Edmonton Poetry Festival, my friend and mentor, Anna Marie Sewell (whose name comes up in earlier postings), the former Poet Laureate of the city, organized a Poets' Jam to kick off the Festival. She invited a number of us to consider performing something on stage, in a loose group, after Joy and Anna had done their opening performances. I had never done anything like this, and had not even tuned my old guitar in another shamefully long time, let alone sing along with some others or supply accompaniment. But we can die only once--so I submitted that poem of the islanders who chose the water, and Anna accepted it. That acceptance began an educational couple of weeks of rewriting to get it into a shape and rhythm that could work out loud and to accompaniment.

In the end, it appeared to work pretty well--thanks to some strong percussion support from the others on stage (Gary Garrison, Ivan Sundal, Joshua Jackson, Daniel Poitras as well as Anna Marie and Joy) and from the audience, to keep me on pace. At least, nobody got up and left or called for their money back...

(Photo credit Randall Edwards, who took pictures of all the Festival events, photos that can be seen on the Edmonton Poetry Festival Facebook site)

Taking Leave                                     Don Perkins

A community

known

unknown

misknown

to history-- maybe

Arawak--

or maybe

Carib--

or maybe—not,

saw Spanish sails, knew the score,

walked off

the island:

The future’s

vacation

playground.

Beach paradise.   Setting

for countless     beer ads;

symbol   of quiet   retreat.

Packed up   the children   and walked

offshore    and down . . .  into what?

Oblivion? Freedom?

Life? Choice?

What did they call it?

Call themselves?

Optioned out to slavery, debauchery, disease, belittlement, dispossession and all the

     benefits and joys

     of civilization

they took . . . leave.

Of what?

Their senses?

The senseless?

To what? Make sense?

Stay sensible?

Get   away   from it all?

They took ---- leave.

To say “NO”?

To say “Not us”?

These are not their words

but ours: Not their answers

but ours. They took--leave,

moved down – and under—

maybe not away

but to.

Just maybe

meant  not  “No,”

meant,  just maybe, “Yes.”

We latterly enlightened latecomers

presume empathy  

for fellow humans

gone,    not lost--

Can there be lost

when found is not an option?

Not absent.

Not away for the day

from the office or school,

or missing some great party.

If we hear it at all,

their silence

gifts us this:

Dead certainty of our eternal ignorance.

Ghazals with Anna Marie

Occasionally and with great pleasure I get a chance to set up a playful exchange with my friend Anna Marie Sewell, and at times another friend, Shayne Golosky-Johnston joins the party. One of us will send off a picture or a recent piece of poetry we have been working at, or just a line or two of found potential. The other takes a line or two, or maybe even just a phrase from that as a prompt and begins something new and sends it back. And back and forth we go, building up from the original.

On Jan 17, I sent Anna Marie and Shayne this:

I was looking through a back issue of prairiefire and found a poem by Erin Noteboom, called "Ghazal beginning with lines by Yannis Ritsos."

One of Noteboom's own lines struck me:

"Learn to walk as if you had a different history"

Care to start there? In Ghazal form (if not mode)?

As, for example:--And I wrote this rather freer than appropriate opening gambit:

Learn to walk as if you had a different history,

Had not been born of immaculate deception.

What would we gladly give for total independence?

Everything but reliance on experience over novelty.

The moon last night shone off icy crust across my walkways

Snow polished to glistening seduction, fixed uncertain fluidity.

If I read the ravens rightly, we live in a permanent joke

But lack the sense of humour to recognize the punch line.

The predictable seasons regularly erase my frames of reference:

From a river frozen over is there an upstream and a down?

The little rituals we make up daily keep us going on and on

Let us call love to account, proclaim our unpolished desire.

I am preoccupied with form. Pattern resolves doubt

when topicality fails and nature hides from metaphor.

Then I revised and tried something a little more "formally" responsible

Jan 18 (3)

Learn to walk as if you had a different history,

The one to come from wellspring and ashes in the making.

What would we gladly give for total independence?

Everything but reliance on experience unforsaken.

The moon last night shone off icy crust across my walkways

Fixed uncertain fluidity, snow polished seduction.

If I read ravens rightly, we live in permanent joke

But lack the sense of humour to recognize the punch line.

Predictable seasons erase my frames of reference:

From a river frozen over is there upstream and down?

Let us call love to account, proclaim unpolished desire;

little rituals we make up daily keep us going.

I am preoccupied with form; when topicality fails

and nature hides from metaphor, doubt seeks out pattern.

Anna Marie took the challenge to heart, and wrote a witty and thoughtfully lush riff on the “ashes in the making.``  You can find it on her January 19 blog entry at  http://prairiepomes.com/ Please go there, appreciate and enjoy, and leave her a comment….

Deciding to try in my own halting way to take a more traditional approach, as did she, I gave it one more try for now, on a riff from hers: “addicted to the blue,” from her couplet

          she never shared her bed with any one addicted to the blue
           consuming smoke, yet she found ashes, in the making.

January 27:  Addicted ghazal:

Against habit, law, life’s lessons, precept, and parent’s rules,,

the rebel strums a twelve-bar tune, addicted to the blue.

Nose to ground, feet mired in mud, cold, wet and tired, by raven’s

sly croak tricked skyward, no longer addicted, to the blue.

What mood is this, an angel’s fete, from Mary’s lap, outreaching,

tricks shepherds from their own true work, addicted by the blue?

Romance passed through puritanical monochrome mind’s eye

an art color blinded, blinkered, addicted to the blue.

Awake to the simpler rude multiplication, hue Dons

a clearer perspective, far from addicted to the blue.


February 18 update:

And speaking of lines that beg to be taken up and thought through, these lines from an Italian songwriter, Claudio Lolli, from his 1980 song "La canzone del Principe Rospo" ("The Frog-Prince Song" translated by my colleague from the University of Alberta Department of Modern Languages, William Anselmi):


Si potrebbe parlare delle parole e della loro strana mania di mettersi ensieme,
basta una penna o una bocca disposta all'amore e niente piu le trattiene,...

One could speak about words and their strange obsession to get together,
you just need a pen or a mouth given to love and nothing holds them back,...

 

That`s as far as we got—or have managed to get so far. But from her blog, apparently Anna Marie has caught the bug.