I was sipping a coffee in HUB Mall this morning, the end away from where the shooting happened a week and a half ago, and got waylaid by a "Man in the Mall" interviewer for CPAC. He wanted to know, among other things, what I thought of the current federal government. I mentioned my sense that the current PC government had replaced the older Liberal government mostly by taking on all the negative behaviours the Opposition PCs used to accuse the governing Liberals of: arrogance and bullying. Remember the PC ads a few elections ago, and all the talk of "Liberal arrogance"? Turns out the PCs were mostly concerned with the problematic adjective, not the noun.

What I had been wanting to revel in was the fact that my online bank statement yesterday finally read 00.00 in the line with mortgages and personal loans: the house and car are both paid for. This will be the first time in my adult life I am not paying rent or mortgage to anyone. That didn't take long--merely nearly all of what would have been my "normal working life" a generation ago. I would, in that older dispensation, have a whole year before mandatory retirement in which to put that money away for my old age, before being pensioned off. I'm just enjoying the sensation of not going through the monthly routine of transferring the payment from one line on the statement to another. And the thought that I start a new five-year teaching contract on Sunday.

And my "fence" poem has undergone some transformation--becoming a part of a longer poem on what to do when metaphors present themselves for one's edification and exploration. Yesterday's draft of that portion looks like this:

When a metaphor stretches the idea of a line across

creases in the land, undulates its way straight,determined

through folds, dips, hollows, furrows, gullies, valleys,

across rills and rivers going nowhere

creating borders of everywhere always in

between along the way, the connecting separation

made concrete, inked in by wood and wire and glass-topped

bricks and stones linking points planted along the way,

inviting prolonged unification, purpose as well as place,

trajectory into the out there,

try not to straddle;

centre yourself on your own

ambivalence,

find,

locate yourself

on both sides as the guiding line

disappears in both 

directions

What has been catching my eye is some quotations about the role of ritual and ceremony in life and human relationships:

• We should not, however, be rigid in maintaining a separation of the sacred from the everyday. As already mentioned, many everyday practices are formalized as if they were rituals ( Thomas Leddy, The Extraordinary in the Ordinary, 75).
•  
• “esthetic feeling is perhaps most pervasive in what may be called the ‘ritualization’ of life” (Harold Osborne “Education in an Affluent State,” Journal of Aesthetic  Education. 20.4 (1986).
•  
• “There is a real element of trust, I think, when you support someone in ceremony…. You create a foundation of trust.”  (Darrell Racine, interviewed by Dale Lakevold, “An Act of Healing” alt.theatre 9.3 (March 2012, 37).

Which also remind me of a phrase from Shawna LeMay, "Talisman": "...the cherished unlivable ceremonies..."

There's something to be getting on with...

Seeking common signage

I’ve been prepping a reading of the first novel in Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series for an upcoming “Issues in Popular Culture” course, dealing with the issue of community-building or tribalisms. Part of the motivation for the theme is from Michel Maffesoli, "The Ethic of Aesthetics." Part from John Fiske's idea that we create (or join) popular cultures from the cumulative consumer choices we make from among the products of the "culture industries." Effectively, consumption becomes an act of production as many, many individual choices combine into a community of common interest.

Three quotations rub together in this context: “A work of art only stirs those for whom it is a sign” (J.M. Guyau, Esquisse d’une morale sans obligation ni sanction, trans Mafessoli, I think, in “The Ethic of Aesthetics”: 17);  “In a ceaseless movement of actions and retrospective effects, I recognize a sign by recognizing it with others, and so I recognize what unites me with others" (Maffesoli); and “The combination of widespread consumption with widespread critical disapproval is a fairly certain sign that a cultural commodity is popular” (Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture, 106). Critical disapproval would be an ironic "stirring" of a different sort, by that combination. We can join with the lovers of the sign, or the haters: with those who see a positive, inviting sign, or those who see a negative, off-putting sign.  Or we can, after Stuart Hall, take a more "negotiated" position that sees or accepts some aspects as having value in our personal circumstances, but only when taken just so far.

 Twilight is certainly in the prime seats of Fiske’s arena of the popular: huge enthusiastic consumption combined with some of the most desperate and disparate critical disapproval. It is just as “popular” a different way to scorn Twilight, as it is to “consume” it. Of course, “consumption” is a loaded term when dealing with a vampire book, in which the heroine gets called a “snack” on one occasion. But the book can be “used up” a variety of ways. One novel option I read of was invented by Regina poet and educator Gerry Hill. He did an exercise with his writing class, giving each student a page torn from a found copy of Twilight, with the instruction to find something in the flattish prose to build a poem around. Not that hard, actually, if you get the right page, since Meyer does have a skill with description--so page 8, for example, provides a rich imagery of an “alien” landscape of too much green. But I have to admit, some of the pages of dialogue would pressure the most willing imagination to find some touchpoint from which to go somewhere metaphorical.

Yes, Twilight could use a serious edit as a single title and as a series. But it also provides so many points of connection and decoding for so many potential audiences, ranging through Hall's schema of reading positions from dominant-hegemonic to counter-hegemonic (oppositional). It develops lines and relationships that are right out of the formula that has made the romance novel a staple since the formula was first used “seriously” over two-hundred years ago. A heroine who has to overcome her own squeamishness about herself and others to accept the finer qualities of herself and of the hero (or to bring them out in him). A darkly mysterious but wealthy and caring hero who evolves into a “perfect” match once he overcomes a problem in the way he behaves or is perceived by the heroine. A “rival” (Jacob), who is also a stud, but not quite “perfect” for her—in this case too young. And, as it turns out, expresses himself through the wrong kind of inner animal to cure what ails her.

Fine. Harlequin has made a fortune off this formula, and it is one that actually does open up a wealth of signs. The solutions (love conquers all, after it soothes and humanizes the beast in the man) are often laughable, but the problems are real enough to stir something familiar in a reader, to stir that “ethical” attachment Mafessoli writes about: “something which leads me to recognize myself in something which is exterior to me” (“Ethic of Aesthetics” 17).

Just consider two of the “critical” points of departure: What do we usually call a 100+-year-old man who hangs about in a high school and picks up a seventeen-year-old girlfriend?  “Hero” is not quite it. (Dorian Grey, maybe?) Then again, Edward is an eternal seventeen-year-old himself, in one sense, having been "saved" to eternal living death at that age. In Washington State, Bella and Edward are at least past the age of consent--Edward WAAAAY past. The age of consent for sex, anyway. I have not been able to fine an age of consent for vampire conversion, for allowing oneself to be envenomed (serpent allusions, anyone) by the love bite of your boyfriend.

What do we call a man who hangs hidden in a girl’s bedroom, watching her and listening in on her when she talks in her sleep? “Hero,” again, is not quite it. Consider what Bella would say if some other classmate, Tyler for example, were found at her window at bedtime? Yet in Edward's case, all she can do is worry about what he might have heard. 

So where is Edward’s “heroic” quality? In his self-control, apparently. When he practices self-control, and prevents Bella from acting on some of her own self-destructive impulses (urges, stirrings---), he is exercising positive choice. Of course, as a 100+-year-old, he has a much bigger perspective than she has. And he is a typical older man in the way he controls her options. Model of self-control? Or control freak? 

Where do I recognize myself in Twilight? Where would I find my contact point with “others”? My "ethical vector"? The logical node would seem to be Charlie, the concerned father/law-and-order enforcer, who wants his child to have a normal and safe life, with lots of friends, but has no sense of what she has attached herself to (he defends the Cullens against local gossip), so has to be protected in and by his own ignorance of what’s really going on. Maybe.

I feel a more common bond with Tyler, I think: The class clown, the eternal optimist who thinks he’s finessed a prom date with the delectable Bella, and shows on the night up all tuxxed out only to be told she’s been taken by that weirdnik, Edward. Any of several of the high-schoolers, actually—maybe a combination of them, even if I’m maybe now almost as close to Edward’s true age as to the seventeen-year-old I once was. They have so much to learn about themselves and each other, our life-long pursuit. The big thing they have to learn is that they have a lot to learn. That's always such a downer.

I think what stirs me most is the sense I am just as glad not to have to be that age again (though it would be nice to be it physically, if I could age eternally like the hard-bodied Edward), needing to go once again through all that awkward socializing into functional adulthood. Then a sense of chagrin mixes in, and I have to acknowledge that we never really age past the need to adjust, explore, reread the signposts, and find our fit; we just move farther along in our starting (over) points. 

coyotes and ravens

I've just been watching the video of the female coyote running around the schoolyard at Marlborough Elementary in Burnaby, trying to find a way back under a portable where she had denned up with her four pups (Jennifer Moreau's blog at blogscanada.com/2012/05/30/coyote-pups-trapped-under-portable-at -burnaby-school/). The place had been boarded up earlier that day, on the mistaken belief the pups and mother were out. It took her a long time, until after dark, to work up the nerve to go back under, where someone had peeled back a board to give her access. Then the pups came out (or she brought them out) and started to play, before she hurried them all off to a safer place. But you sort of have to wonder how on earth she ever picked that spot in the first place--with kids stomping around overhead all day, and yelling and running about in the schoolyard. Maybe the strange indifference of the people walking by the coyote all day as she prowled about, waiting for the pups or trying to find a way back to them, has something to do with it.

We see and hear a lot of coyotes in our neighborhood, a block away from the research farm at the U of A South Campus. Not as many as a few years go, when we could sometimes watch six or more come out in the evening from a dense thicket of poplar and other scrubby bush at the corner of 115 St. and 51 Ave, now largely turned into a deep dug-out park that doubles as a dry pond. But, still, most nights in summer, when we have the windows open, we hear them in the middle of the night. We see them on our street, too, once even sitting under the streetlamp outside our bedroom window. We have seen them in the Community Centre park area in  broad daylight, and in winter trotting along by the community hall. Sometimes we hear puppies squabbling.

Last October, in Terwillegar off-leash park, we heard and then saw one disconsolate young coyote sitting across one of the borrow ponds, on the bank, in mid-afternoon, barking and howling and otherwise protesting being alone. It is that time of year that the mothers leave their pups to fend for themselves, and this one was pretty disappointed or disgusted with the whole process. We kept George, our German Wired-haired pointer, away from that area that day, though it is a lovely area to walk in.

Next day, it was quiet and empty, so we went back along that trail. George wears a bell, since he likes to explore, and we like to keep tabs on his exploration. He went along behind a thick growth of shrubs, and his bell started a bouncy rhythm, like he was trotting, so I went around to see what was going on, and there he was, jogging along behind the young coyote, who seemed to enjoy having another canine to play with. Of course, the coyote was also jogging along over the crest of a hump, into some more shrubs. I hollered "George! Come here now!" And for a change he did. The coyote kept on going. It might have been alone. It might also have been bait for a pack over the hump.

Coyote, of course, is one of the creative/re-creative force figures of many First Nations cultural stories. With Raven, Crow, Hare, Iktomi the Spider, and others, Coyote falls into that misnamed category of "trickster." And, in the words of a song by Ian Tyson, "Coyote is a survivor." Our department Chair is not so enamored of Coyote these days, however. Her family dog, or what was left of it, and its collar, was found at the mouth of a coyote den along the edge of Mill Creek Ravine a month or so ago.

Ravens, technically the largest  songbird in North America as well as the prototype for another important trick-playing force figure, are also very common in our neighborhood, and on the U. of A. main campus. Noisy, large, gregarious ravens. Not so obviously threatening as coyotes, and more entertaining. Mostly to themselves.

Leanna from my writing class a few years ago spent five years in the north, and gathered a number of raven stories, first hand. Her favorite, for a while, was of the day she tricked a raven. She told us how she had been walking home one evening from Arctic College, and a large clump of snow shook loose from an overhead branch, down her neck. She looked up and saw a raven on the limb over the sidewalk. The raven casually flew off down the street to the next tree, and landed gently on another snow-laden limb over the sidewalk. "Couldn't be deliberate" Leanna told herself, but kept a lookout, and sure enough, just as she got under the limb, the raven shook it, and down came a clump of snow, just missing her. And off to the next tree went the raven. Leanna got to just before the tree, then took a detour, into the ditch beside the sidewalk. It meant going up to her thigh tops in snow, but she avoided the avalanche. She bragged about how she had fooled the raven.

 I kind of spoiled the moment: "Let me get this straight. You're up to your thighs in a snow-filled ditch. And you fooled the raven?"  Leanna got this look. And then she groaned and then she laughed. That was a game the bird could not lose.

Getting distracted, Del Mastro style

On Facebook, I get a link to a message from Mike Rilstone, Friend of a Friend, under the title

WAKE UP CANADA!
-----------------------
At what point in time does a party duct tape a buffoon's mouth?
Isn't a used car salesman taking a medical doctor to task in her own field, (albeit something a bright Grade One kid would probably know), a bit much?

What he's talking about is the comment PC MP Dean Del Mastro made on radio to Liberal MP Carolyn Bennett that biology was not science. Bennett is a medical doctor. Apparently she burst out laughing. On blog spots, and comment sites all over the internet, Del Mastro has been pilloried as a bozo, a clown, and, as above, a buffoon. Maybe so. But don't expect him to get the duct tape treatment any time soon, because in making these kinds of comments, he is doing pretty much the job assigned to him. He is not supposed to be an expert; he is supposed to be a distraction. 

Need proof?  Ask yourself, what was the occasion for this comment? Why were these two MPs being interviewed in the first place? About what? What was the outcome for the issue they were debating? 

Discussion of the "Sex: A Tell-All Exhibit" at the museum of Science and Technology and of criticism of the government's  negative response to it, has pretty much disappeared, as amused and irate commentators shift focus to the nonsense spewing from the mouth of Del Mastro. He has become the issue. He has succeeded. And because he has succeeded, he will be rewarded with  more opportunities to be a stand-up distraction in the future.

Del Mastro is not a newby to parliament. He is in his third term, so the Prime Minister knew what he was getting when he promoted Del Mastro to positions of increasing responsibility and visibility. 

That's right: his third term. Somebody in Peterborough likes what he is doing for his constituency--a lot of somebodies.

That reminds me of the third verse of Tom Paxton's satirical song, "What did You Learn In School Today?":

What did you learn in school today,
Dear little boy of mine?
What did you learn in school today,
Dear little boy of mine?
I learned our government must be strong.
It's always right and never wrong.
Our leaders are the finest men.
And we elect them again and again.
That's what I learned in school today.
That's what I learned in school.

Within the parliamentary connotations of the word, Dean Del Mastro is doing a "fine job."  Even if a lot of commentators are wondering if he went to school, and if he studied or passed any science courses while he was there.

Another angle he pursued in his analysis of the Exhibit was that if people wanted that kind of information, they should go to an adult video store for it, prompting a few to wonder if he has spent much time in adult video stores, because he seems to need to learn a lot about them, their services and products, too. 

See--a distraction.

Bear Stories

And speaking of monsters: have I told any bear stories lately?

in the late 60s and early 1970s, I worked on the edge of the Chilcotin Plateau for a couple of summers and farther north, along the eastern edge of the Alaska panhandle for three, as a surveyor for the BC Department of Highways. The crews had a core of full-timers ranging from 19 to around 57 years old, augmented in May by university students, and sometimes in July by a few high-schoolers.  We July veterans of two months of not shaving and rarely showering—it was a great summer job in many ways—were not allowed actually to harm the high-schoolers. But we were allowed to have some fun with them—the same kind of fun the regulars occasionally tried to have with us.

The Chilcotin years, we were working in grizzly bear country, right across territory on which Connie King, a retired pro hockey player, had been badly chewed up by a grizzly on his ranch. The first year we drove in to the hopping-off point for our job, we had met King in a café, admiring the scar where half his face had been.  So, we did carry rifles with us on some parts of the job, as grizzlies were a genuine threat, if not the commonplace we let the high-schoolers believe.In fact, I don't recall ever actually seeing a bear while on the job, in all five summers. Once in the north, in the evening, out for a drive along the project, we passed a small grizzly on the edge of an old landing strip. That's it. We saw more wolves than bears. By one. Still, bears were the big worry.

The second summer, I had two of the not-ready-to-shave set working with me doing cross-sections of line. They were not exactly quick or productive workers, to put it generously.  But they were willing to listen to wild stories about bear attacks and wonder aloud how to handle a grizzly (it was always a grizzly) if one happened by.

“Well, you know,” I told them, from my several months of non-experience with bears, and a bit of theory gleaned from unreliable sources, “grizzlies cannot climb trees, so if a bear comes after us, we have to get about twelve feet up a solid tree within a few seconds.”

“How many seconds?”

“Oh, depends. Ten or twelve, I would think. That’s why you always have to have a tree picked out as we work ahead. So if I yell, `Grizzly,’ you can get up the tree without thinking too hard.”

Did I mention we were working on a mountain side? One with trees that tapered very quickly from a foot across to a few inches?  Rooted in thin mountain soil?

So I offered to put them through a grizzly bear drill.  I would suddenly yell, “Grizzly,” and then time them to see how long it took them to get out of claw range.  And as we worked along a steep slope one afternoon, that’s what I yelled.

The more agile of the two leaped to a handy fir, and began to claw his way desperately up the trunk. When he was about 7 or 8 feet up, clinging with arms and legs to the rapidly narrowing tree, it came loose from the shallow litter it was rooted in, and rolled off down the slope, with a seventeen year old firmly clinging for dear life.

“You’re dead,” I called after him.

Later that week, we were dropped off along the line by the rest of the crew who went on ahead.  The basic equipment we needed for the day was a hand level, a rod, a tape, and a pogey stick to rest the hand-level on.  And our lunches.  The teens had their lunches, just fine. But as the truck pulled out of earshot, there was this casual,” Do you have the hand-level?” from the sixteen-year-old whose job it was to bring it. “No.”  “So now what,” he asked, looking for a cozy spot to curl up for the next seven or eight hours.

“Now,” I replied, pointing into the bush, along a row of survey stakes, “you walk about two miles that way up the cut line, till you get to our camp, you go to your tent, you get the hand level, and you come back here and start to work.” 

“I can’t go alone.”

“Dave can go with you, since you both screwed up. I’ll just wait right here.” 

“What about bears?” 

“I’m not worried about bears,” I replied.

“No, us?”

“Well, bears don’t like noise,” I reminded them. “So take a stick and beat it against your hard hat as you go along.” 

And that’s what he did. Two miles to camp, and two miles back to our worksite. Without first taking off the hard hat. I was sorry I hadn't told them to bang their two hard-hats together.

Where the Wild Things Went

The sad news today is that Maurice Sendak has died. Back in the mid 1970s--1975 I guess--I took a job as a branch library supervisor at the Regent Park Branch of Regina Public Library. I knew just about zip about children's literature, and hadn't looked at a picture book in who knows how long. So I had to find out from the staff who the kids liked, as I prepared for my first pre-school story and craft hours, and for my first Saturday morning story hours. They showed me a lot--Curious George was a sure winner, if any were in. Among the newer books that came along (ordered by my precessor) was Leo the Late Bloomer. Story of my life.


But one they all loved was Sendak's Where The Wild Things Are. We had many copies. We had to replace worn out copies every couple of years.

The first time I read it, I was tickled at the story of Max, a bad boy punished for being too unruly, sent off to bed where he works out his attitude on a dream island full of monsters who have to learn to live and play by his rules. The monsters were the funniest things I could imagine in a picture book. And the fact that Max was pretty unapologetic didn't hurt, either.

So one afternoon, in came a father with several children. They took off into the children's book section while he sat by the entrance to see what they would pick. And to tell them what they were not allowed to have. A parent's prerogative, I suppose. But I was only maybe 26, covered in hair, beard and attitude, and full of righteous indignation at anything that looked like censorship to me. I was, after all, on the executive of the Saskatchewan Library Association. And one day would chair its (one-person) Intellectual Freedom Committee, and write to local newspapers and speak to regional library boards (well, one of them) on matters of censorship. But my training not to interfere with parents showing an interest in their children's reading held cool until one little boy trotted up with a huge smile and Where the Wild Things Are. Without even looking inside to see what it was about, the dad said a firm "No." Surprised, I asked him why, since the book was a major award winner and truly popular with kids the boy's age.

"Too scary. It'll give him nightmares."

The kid had not looked too frightened when he brought the book up to his dad. And there's a monster on the cover. So I honestly do not think, to this day, that was the issue. But the man had not even looked into the book, so it wasn't the story, either.

I tried. I reaffirmed that the book was hugely popular. That it had won major awards. That it was a story of a little boy learning to control his monsters, to make them his playmates. That had surprisingly little impact on the father in question. Well, none.

I hope the kid got to read the book one day. Maybe he had already heard it at school or at a library story hour. Maybe he took a children's literature course at university, where an older, balding and beardless instructor read it to him and gave him permission to study it for credit.

Then again, maybe the dad had also heard about it, about a boy who gets away with being disobedient and who learns to control the monsters in his mind and life. Maybe it was even on some "books to keep your kids away from" list he had been supplied with. There are such things. Lots of them. Maurice Sendak was on lots of them. Still is. He was on them even before In the Night Kitchen, with its full frontal diaperless male toddler nudity.

Shocking. To some parents out to purify the world. Shocking like Robert Munsch with his illustrated great big fart in Good Families Don't.Which also got onto some "do not let your kids see this book" lists.

Kids, even very little ones, sometimes just have too much maturity for their parents to handle. That's one thing I learned, once I became a dad myself. Physical maturity of the kind that takes your breath away as your watch him climb a shaky chain and log ladder and pull himself up onto a platform a foot or two over his height, to take his turn at the slide--when you were wondering how he got there last time while you were talking to another dad for just a few seconds. Then wish you hadn't found out.

Physical maturity of the kind that takes your breath away as you make his supper in the kitchen under your bedroom, and wonder what is that noise coming from the second floor, thirteen steps straight up over a concrete landing where just two seconds ago he was playing with some toys. And he's not yet two.

And mental maturity (or daring precociousness) of the kind that makes you double take when you see that he is still watching the same song on the Muppet Show tape, a good five minutes after you are sure it had to be over. "Wow, that song's going on a long time," you say. "I pushed it," he explains, prodding the replay button. And he's not yet two.

Good thing there's a long training period before they hit adolescence, and really begin to work on you. Too bad it's not ever long enough.

Tonight, I'm wishing my copy of Where The Wild Things Are were here at home for a sentimental send-off read.  Maybe I'll have to listen to The Troggs instead. Wonder if they're on YouTube? Silly question, really.

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.