What I do in my Spare Time--Moonwalking EPF Style

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCLZIFrd2mc

A workshop we had back in September 2013, right at the brightest point of the brightest full moon of the year:


My contribution---

Harvest Moon we call this glow, this ripened

Moon of Gathering that guides our steps,

encourages our taking in,

through eye, ear, nose, tongue, skin

and yet even tonight as she comes to

full bright perfection, joins us

together points our ways along

moon-shadowed paths, because

the moon is made for changing,

ever cycling, waxing, waning—

eternal analogue reminder of

continuity in our

on-again-

off-again 

digital times, 

she styles herself as well

a Moon of Letting Go, 

shifts, begins to perfect her darker, 

shaded other faces.

       Here we gather, 

give and take illumination

collect ourselves, reflect upon, 

       then moon and we

            continue on....

 

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.

Reading for something different in the way of "pleasure."

I didn't get as much reading done this year as usual. At least it feels that way. Didn't maybe get as much writing done, either. It might just be that more of my reading and writing were "professional" and tied to my teaching and other job-related duties. That is often useful, often opens up undetected and unexplored byways for my own curiosity. It's just not quite as satisfying. It feels too much like work for others, not work for my own benefit. (Though I must admit, I do appreciate the paycheques and find them highly beneficial.)

I did get a poem and a short non-fiction piece on winter into the popular (locally) 40 Below, an anthology of writing about winter in Edmonton. And Anna Marie Sewell, the outgoing poet laureate for the city, put a piece I wrote, "Wresting Place," onto her Poem Catcher website, one of her legacies (http://webofvisions.wordpress.com/). And I did get asked to join the board of the Edmonton Poetry Festival, which means I at least have to spend some more time around poets and their works.

Reading is another thing. The two books that made me sit up and think about where I have been and where I am were both memoirs: Just Kids, by Patti Smith, and The Edmonton Queen: The Final Voyage, by Darrin Hagen. Both are stories of lives lived dangerously, on the margins and in the Underground, lives that have led to highly productive creative careers, but lives that have also seen the deaths of a lot of loved ones. For Smith it was life in sixties and seventies New York, with Robert Mapplethorpe, working her way to recognition as an artist, poet and singer-songwriter. For Hagen, it was life in the Edmonton drag community in the 1982-1993 period, a life lived as Gloria Hole, and a life leading also to recognition as a multi-talented actor, composer, playwright, writer.

What is the attraction of these books? Part of it is the pleasure of the reading itself. Part is just amazed wonder mixed with gratitude that they lived to tell about those lives, and that they have the talent to tell it so well.

The attraction is not exactly from envy at lives lived in too kind of Blakean excess. Like the rest of my generation--every generation, I suppose--I had opportunities for the kind of wisdom that comes only from going too far. I just did not have the motivation or the testicles for it. I was of the same generation as Smith and Mapplethorpe--but not of the same reckless, relentlessly desperate stamina.  Undoubtedly I was also too chicken, to unready to risk the predictable creature comforts of home on the prairies for cold, inspired starvation in infested apartments in bigger cities--definitely not Big Apple material. And no real incentive or life-models to emulate or guide me along. If I thought of it at all, I thought that kind of life was for other people, talented people but slightly (or extremely) odd and pushed by a creative bent. And I did not really have any ambition, motivation, encouragement, or mentoring to think of myself as "creative." Then, as now, audience material at best, I was programmed and prepared to want and pursue a middle class professional life.

Then, when I got it, as a public librarian in Regina and a newspaper librarian Saskatoon in the mid-seventies to mid-eighties, I was bored senseless by it. At least I had a job at a newspaper, and took to the chance to try some writing--entertainment, theatre, and book reviewing, with occasional magazine features, as a relief from boredom and for some modest-sized fish in an even more modest-sized pond kind of recognition. That last was the kicker. People actually began to refer to me as a writer. Occasionally some still do. Good for the ego; bad for the career focus.

Later, I arrived in Edmonton not much later than did Hagen, who had come from an even smaller home town, right out of high school, to find himself in the Big Onion. I was many years older, starting my fourth university degree, and waiting out two divorces: one for me, and one for Eva, so we could start over, together. I was too broke and too focused on Ph.D. studies and getting established in a new marriage and on the child that came along a year later. I just was never really the type for endless nights of drugged and drunken clubbing. So, too chicken, too broke, and too straight.

Now? Well, I've never met Patti Smith, and likely never will. But I have met Darrin Hagen, several times. One of these times I think he might remember that we have met before. That's not exactly a fair observation--when we meet at workshops and other theatre-related events, he makes the connection readily enough. But when he has been emceeing a fashion show for Stanley Carroll, in a dimly-lit venue, and is surrounded by large numbers of friends and fans, then he gets momentarily distracted and has to be reminded for whom he is autographing this copy of his book.

I have seen Darrin perform. I don't think Darrin has ever done a number as Patti Smith. Patti remains an amazing talent, though not nearly glamorous enough to be of interest to Gloria. But I do think it is an act I would go to a club to catch.

NOTE FROM JANUARY 28, FROM DARRIN HAGEN BY WAY OF A MUTUAL FRIEND:

"I have performed patti smith music. In fact, it was my first punk-ish rock chick number. Guess what song? G-L-O-R-I-A of course. It kinda became my calling card."

I really should have seen that one coming.....  A true failure of my imagination.
 

Christmas Thoughts from a Lounge Chair

So, 9:00 in the evening Christmas Day, 2013. The nineteenth Christmas we have spent in this house. I guess it has become the place we mean when we use the phrase “home for Christmas,” since it is the place our son comes “home” to from his studies—this year at York University; the last two at Concordia in Montreal. Of course, today he spent most of it at his partner’s parents’ place. Last night was our evening for family at home: David and Kat; our neighbour, Dale; Eva and me. We have this tradition of the Christmas Eve dinner. David told us last night he plans to keep that tradition going—the Italian style fish / seafood soup with seven or eight different fishy ingredients swimming in a home-made tomato soup base; Polish herrings and a Polish potato and herring salad; red cabbage, and a huge bowl of trifle the main ingredients.

I wasn’t sure quite how to take the “I will keep this tradition going” statement. Is he already planning for a time in his life without us to come home to for Christmas? A time when he will be too far away, or too busy with his own life (and maybe family, though he says no to that right now. As did I until I met his mother-to-be). “Home for Christmas” will be a pretty empty phrase if it’s just Eva and me. We are “home” pretty much every day already. 

But the last time I spent a Christmas at my parents’ home was forty years ago. Dad spent a couple of Christmases here with us, before becoming an ex-pat in England for the last twelve or more years of his life (hard to calculate, because he went, came back, then left again).

Christmas was a slow starting affair this year. Eva and I got into a round of running errands for all the ingredients, some receptions from work, that sort of thing. She had kind of shopped for her own Christmas presents from me. Which maybe left me off the hook, but also delayed my getting out and into the seasonal rounds. In fact, all I had for her for under the tree up until the afternoon of Christmas Eve was a flashy pair of red knee-high ski sox.

I’m not a huge retail my way into Christmas kind of guy, anyway—especially since we do not go on such prolonged toy-hunting expeditions for David anymore.  That was a lot of fun when he was smaller. And the odd cool little gadget from some electronics store still has some cachet. But this year I just wasn’t feeling right. Not depressed, the way I used to get for a lot of complex and now by-gone reasons. Just not companionably engaged.

Then yesterday afternoon we went to a couple of our favorite shops—clothing boutique and coffee--where we go as much for the fun of meeting the owners and staff, and the atmosphere, as anything. That turned things more seasonal. At the boutique (Threadhill, on 124 Street) Kim was pretty much on her own, with only her Maltese terrier for company. We were chatting when a father and son arrived, for some last-minute Christmas shopping. It seems the wife/mother had been by earlier in the season, just browsing through the place for the first time, and had mentioned she liked it. So there they were. No idea of her size. No idea really of her taste. But as  luck would have it, Eva knew both men slightly, and she has known the wife/mother for many years. So we became consultants for the afternoon, and Eva modelled some of her favorite designers for them, being about a size smaller than the soon-to-be gifted one. 

That was fortuitous in a couple of ways. One—Eva was able to show them what the garment looked like off the hanger and on someone who wore it well and with pleasure (since neither father nor son had done any boutique shopping before, and didn’t really get the way some designers’ clothes can have surprise elements of shape, texture, or color, that are apparent only when worn). The second: it left the size Eva was modelling available when they bought the next size up. So soon enough I had a couple of surprise gifts for under the tree after all—things Eva had not really been interested in until she tried them on for the two men and realized herself there were some details she had missed. What we really wished was that we could have been at the others’ home this morning to see what reaction the clothes got. But by the time we all shook hands and wished each other Merry Christmases and other joys of the season, Kim was happy. The father and son were very happy. And I was suddenly feeling in the mood.

Then we went to Sorentino’s on 107 Ave. at 109 St. Our two favorite, most hospitable and outgoing baristas, Shai and Daunia, were there. Carmelo (the owner) was there. The place was reasonably busy but in a relaxed sort of way, as Carmelo chatted with some of his older buddies at the counter, but still stopped by to offer us a seasonal handshake and a small liqueur to go with our coffees. When someone asked why he was in on a day so close to Christmas, he laughed and said, “It’s the best day to be here. All my friends come in.” As he put it, on Christmas Eve afternoon, “We are in the people business, not the food business.” And he reminded us to come back on Boxing Day, which we just might do if the freezing rain doesn’t make the street impossible to drive. 

By the time we were home, getting things ready for dinner, I was just ready to be with people again, in a way I had not been, earlier in the day. And it was people who had put me in that mood, just by being on upper moods themselves. We had stopped “working at getting ready.” We were no longer doing the “countless chores of Christmas”: A bit late, maybe, but definitely a better feeling.

Today, out with George, our German wire-haired pointer, to the off-leash park (very empty) and then later around the neighbourhood (after our other neighbours’ pit-bull/American bulldog cross puppy planted Eva in a snowbank in his muscular enthusiasm). 

Eva, this evening, noted how she just could not see herself retired. A day by ourselves to relax together was lovely. But what if it were every day? She mentioned how one of her recently-retired friends is in the mode where she goes one way in the morning, and her also-retired husband goes another, so that when they get back together at home later in the day, they have something to talk about: “If they spent the day together, they would have nothing new to say to share with each other.” 

Time for that another year. This has been a good one after all, and in the end.