Poetry Month: Cristina Perissinotto - Exhale, Exhale

Cristina Perissinotto is Professor of Italian and Medieval Studies at the University of Ottawa, where she also directs the Italian Language Program. She studied philosophy at the University of Venice in Italy; she then received an MA in Medieval History and a PhD in Italian literature at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, with a thesis on Renaissance Utopia. Her intellectual interests are on the relation between the literary word and philosophy. She has published a book on the Mediterranean entitled Mediterranoesis.

She has completed a monograph on Italian political theatre and has published widely on Renaissance and contemporary literature. She has also published about 50 poems in North American journals, including Poetry East and The Antigonish Review. In 2010 she published two poetry collections: Exhale, Exhale, (Guernica, Toronto, 2010) and e Taprobana Tea (Campanotto: Udine, 2010). She has a weekly column in the Corriere Canadese where she muses about poetry and philosophy.

Her writing has taken her to many different places. She has been writer in residence at the Writer’s Center in the island of Paros, Greece and at the Center for Writers and Translators in Rhodes, Greece. In 2011 she will be writer-in-residence for part of the month of July in the Viking Island of Gottland, off the coast of Sweden.


TTQ - What role do you see poetry playing in an increasingly digital world, and do you feel the e-book will ultimately take the place of the printed page?

Cristina Perissinotto - I think poetry can console, inspire and in general nourish the soul of the reader; the number of people who reach for poetry is not enormous. Anyone who is exposed to very good poetry realizes how much they need it, and keep going back to it. I believe that a true appreciation of poetry is challenged by the noise, the constant music and the barrage of words by which we are surrounded every day. However, if people find the necessary silence, they are then happy to read and appreciate poetry. I believe that in the future people will not read less, but more poetry, because of its compact profundity. Most people write poetry, especially free verse, and because of the digital revolution there will be more exchanges and more circulation of poetry too.

Regarding the e-book, I think that in the future our physical home libraries might become somewhat smaller. Encyclopaedias and reference books are already stored in databases and cloud computing; I think that even CD roms will be a thing of the past. But we shall still have books in bookshelves, books by the bed and paperbacks in our purses. E-books are an amazing innovation that has increased immensely our ability to learn. However, paper books are beautiful objects, simple and comforting. The pleasure of cracking them open, smelling them, turning their pages, their portability and sheer beauty will help them stay with us for a long time to come.

                                                 MURANO

                                      Exhale, exhale. Do it slowly
                                   This is not a trombone, you see.
                                      What lies on the other side
                                     of this cane is not just sand,
                                    but a glistening globe of liquid
                              sun. Keep rotating the cane, or the sun
                                       will fall. To master this art,
                                       you need to keep turning it
                                             slowly and regularly.


                                    Powerful lungs are not necessary,
                                but a long cane and an eye for colors.
                            Come to think of it, you should also entertain
                                daring thoughts, a volcanic disposition.


                                   Blow, but delicately. Concentrate
                           as this white-hot globe becomes a purple horse.
                                   You pull his limber legs into place
                             (like so) with pliers, then dip him in water.
                                 The horse will be alive for a second,
                               and scream. You can touch him now,
                                            he’s quieted down.
                                           Would you like to see
                                       how a paperweight is done?


                                   Do not draw too near, the sacredness
                                   of this work is lost at close inspection.
                                      Or are you not yet convinced
                                  that the gods still dwell in these islands?


                               You can almost see them, when the lagoon
                                      shimmers at dusk, in the reflection
                                           of the sea light on the ceiling.
                                      We have a special name for it -
                                            no, I do not remember.
                                     I am not the linguist, young lady
                                             You think of the word
                                        while this paperweight sizzles.
                           

*Note – Photo of Cristina Perissinotto credited to Hadhazyphoto.

Poetry Month: Molly Peacock - The Second Blush

Internationally published poet, essayist, and creative nonfiction writer Molly Peacock is the author of The Paper Garden: Mrs. Delany Begins Her Life’s Work at 72 and Paradise, Piece by Piece, a memoir, both published by McClelland and Stewart. Her essay on Mrs. Delany, “Passion Flowers in Winter,” appeared in The Best American Essays, 2007 and won a Leon Levy Biography Center Fellowship. Other essays and articles have been published in O, the Oprah Magazine, Elle, House & Garden, and New York Magazine. Molly Peacock has published six books of poetry, including The Second Blush (McClelland and Stewart) and Cornucopia: New and Selected Poems. Her poems appear in leading literary journals in North America and the UK and are widely anthologized in textbooks as well as in The Oxford Book of American Poetry and The Best of the Best American Poetry. She is also the author of How To Read A Poem and Start A Poetry Circle and the co-editor of Poetry in Motion: One Hundred Poems from the Subways and Buses.

She is Series Editor of The Best Canadian Poetry in English (Tightrope Books) and a Contributing Editor for the Literary Review of Canada.

Peacock is a Faculty Mentor at the Spalding University Brief Residency MFA Program.


TTQ - What role do you see poetry playing in an increasingly digital world, and do you feel the e-book will ultimately take the place of the printed page?

Molly Peacock - I think that poetry is the screen-size art. Though always claimed to be dying, especially in the late 20th century, poetry revitalized the computer screen, even as the web revitalized poetry. Poems and poetry sites proliferate. Poems are quoted by the minute and tweeted by the second. I think poetry is perfect for e-books, which I avidly read. I also think it's perfect for Audiobooks. Does this mean that the poetry book as an object will be obsolete? Far from it! As printed books become all about their design as beautiful objects, and as fine presses flourish by creating this book art, there will be a premiere place for the gorgeously printed poetry volume.

The Cliffs of Mistake

To know you’re making a mistake as
you make it, yet not be able to stop,
is to step off a cliff, expecting to scramble
backwards and up through the air to stand
on the outcrop you stepped from,
even though it can’t unhappen as you
backpeddle wildly with the second step,
looking far, far below onto the moraine
of pain you anticipate later, which is now
only the shock of recognizing the result
there’s no leaping back from.
Oh God, and this is only a metaphor.
Might this be what metaphors are for?
To say what it’s like before you hit what it is.






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Poetry Month: Sonia Di Placido - Skins Over Pompeii

Sonia Di Placido is a published poet, playwright, freelance writer and publicist. She published her first poetry chapbook, Vulva Magic, in 2004 with LyricalMyracle Press. Her second chapbook of poems titled Forest Primitive with Aeolus House Press, 2008. Sonia is currently working on her first volume of poetry with Guernica Editions to be launched in 2012. She is also currently working toward her MFA in Creative Writing through the University of British Columbia, optional-residency program.

TTQ - What role do you see poetry playing in an increasingly digital world, and do you feel the e-book will ultimately take the place of the printed page?

Sonia Di Placido - Poetry, I feel, will continue to play an avid role, whether it is electronically transmitted or part of a book or found on the page for at least the next decade. It is true that people do not read enough poetry, but I don't think that has anything to do with the advent of mainstream technology or the internet since the early 90s. I believe prior to that time, it was always so. Poetry is often overlooked and not attributed enough value in popular culture. Moving forward in a more digital world, poetry is under threat of getting lost among all the other mediums and senses that compete to encompass the digital age. For example: visual, sound, touch stimulation tends to override that of reading poetry on a digital device such as the kobo or an Ipad. Yes, I do feel the e-book will become a popular phenomenon in future, but I do not feel it will completely override the book for at least another 40+ years. As the information age grows, access to knowledge will become more of a priority and more of it will be processed electronically. Therefore, I see the e-book being more about carrying large amounts of information within one small device. However, a book or magazine or poetry or art zine will continue to be regarded as an important piece of technology all on its own.

Skins Over Pompeii (after Pat Lowther)

These are the things that I don’t want to know
that I don’t want to believe
what rests between ‘us’

you write your skin over pompeii
narrowing the focus on stone remains that lift
out of burnt embers, lava and ash.

What else is there? I ask, to find this poem in a compatriot–
the restless search among a place or time, this capsule
that we both know, the ancient city we share

you were hammered, drowned, blood sodden
I am here, now alive, having escaped my killer, my destroyer
of song. It is thirty five. That many years later from

your murder, my first year born. We meet, our skins
hurting with beauty, this poem not published yet
but I am the new flesh of your land, 1975.

My birth certificate is proof of the semen that
has moved from blind and lucent [Pompeii] stone
to speech transferred here, on this granite shield

don’t drop these words over me Pat
or I will want to write that I know them
this tongue/skin/bone/my breath burned to pure gesture

Now, our absolute stations of a dance with words
mimic the intricate griefs found in the catacombs
I have skinned their surface with my hands

with my fingers, too many times
housed in my hollow self
whereupon I return home to find you here

skin over pompeii, my friend
I know this/that place, my blunt tattoo
—a sumptuous usefulness of flesh informs

strong decisive faces
My tattooed woman; she is inked,
what was juice is now skin over Pompeii

Here on your trajectory of death
is my awakening to these words
This is our Leviathan II

it joins populous as all sub-cellars
I went there often
heart and lungs I moved

always pursuing
the sensual words and forms
visiting the hurting ecstasy of rock

the gut’s sorrows
where light washed through doorways
I return often like a sudden horizon of sea,

I move with the wide and wishing
inside the mind’s oblique lusts
you know this, you are here too.

We are exquisitely skilled—our words
their eyes
that are like wishes

our songs become the stones
over ground and territory.
A Stone Diary.

These are the things that I don’t want to know
that I don’t want to believe
that rest between ‘us’.





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Poetry Month: Elana Wolff - Implicate Me

Elana Wolff has taught English as a Second Language at York University and at The Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She currently divides her time between writing, editing, and facilitating therapeutic community art. Elana’s poems have appeared online and in print-journals and anthologies in Canada, the US, and the UK. Her third collection, You Speak to Me in Trees (Guernica Editions, 2008) was awarded the 2008 F. G. Bressani Prize for Poetry. Her most recent book, Implicate Me (Guernica Editions, 2010), is a collection of short essays on individual poems by Toronto-area poets; a new book of poetry, Startled Night, is forthcoming this fall.

TTQ - What role do you see poetry playing in an increasingly digital world, and do you feel the e-book will ultimately take the place of the printed page?

Elana Wolff - After all, come hell, high water and horror, art endures and poetry as part of it. Man the old and man the new, and man at all intermediary stages is man the maker. The Greek noun poiesis— from which the word poet derives—means making. I’m going to quote Hölderlin, which can’t be hip, but his line that “man lives poetically on this earth” coincides with my bias. I won’t imagine a world without art, and don’t foresee a world without poetry. At its most powerful, poetry resonates with something indestructible in us—in the writer’s psyche and in the psyche of the reader or listener. Poetry has a unifying capacity and a loved poem can be inexhaustible. I don’t believe this capacity has been or will be cancelled by “moving forward in a digital world.” Analogous to the adage that whatever doesn’t kill you will make you stronger, I would say that as long as we’re not dehumanized by our technology, the role of poetry could be enhanced because of it.

It wasn’t so long ago that online publication of poetry carried less cachet than print publication. I would say this bias no longer holds, at least not as rigidly. E-zines of all genres have proliferated and are supported by established and emerging writers alike, the tech-savvy and the less-so. Astride the tide, print publications have converted to internet-also publication—to become more comprehensive resources and more accessible hosts for art and literature. Speed and accessibility are key features of e-appeal—it’s easier to access information, including poetry (though I differentiate between poetry and information), at a finger’s tap than it is to visit a library or bookstore; cheaper and greener too. We’re in a weird world where virtual publication has become less transient, more available than traditional print publication—of newspapers, journals, and books too.

As for e-books, you can’t help noticing that many more people have their heads buried in e-readers these days. The e-book is still a secondary market, by authors and publishers, but developments in publishing technologies and meteoric sales can’t be ignored. I read somewhere that e-book sales increased by more than 200 per cent in 2010. Everyone—publishers, agents, retailers, authors also—seem to be scrambling to be in best position for the moment digital books take over once and for all... As a reader and writer with a partiality for the printed page, I don’t envision this happening—particularly not with literary fiction, devotional and philosophical works, art books, children’s books, and poetry.

It’s hard for me to conceive that the e-reader—I still don’t have one but am looking into getting one—(and the Internet) will be able to replace the aesthetic, tactile, up-close-and-personal encounter, even relationship, that a person—reader and/or listener—can have with another person by way of a book. But I’m also well-aware that this connection has to be cultivated—by parents, educators, publishers, the media—across societies.

I suppose what I’m counting on—as a book- and poetry-lover—is that what is deep and old and human in poetry will prevail, and that what is burgeoning in the world will serve it. What I’m hoping is that poetry online will bring readers to books containing that same poetry and other poetry (which for me it has done), and that people will continue to seek and find themselves and the other in art. What I envision is not the end of the physical book, but its graduation into a more limited-edition art object—still held and smelled and loved and kept for good—as a thing in itself and as a conduit between people.

WHAT’S BECOME OF US

                        in the manner of “Antique”

                        by Robert Pinsky, Gulf Music

                                                                       

I burned in the crime of having you,

drowned in the light of leaving you, we

died together jumping from the Second

Narrows Bridge and were eaten by fish—

caught in a net, trawled to a deck.

Moon-glow bathed the slippery hill

of achromatic scales. Two bodies

will be lifted from a tidy bed of ice,

weighed by the monger before they’re

filleted. The woman who selects them,

skinned, has in mind an intimate dinner

served with Pinot Grigio, no bickering.

Scraps will go to the tabby.

And far down the hallway of horrors,

someone will uncover what’s become of us.


*Note - Originally published in the print journal, The Nashwaak Review, Volume 22/23, Number 1, Spring/Summer 2009.

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Poetry Month: Julia McCarthy - Return from Erebus

Julia McCarthy is originally from Toronto. Her poetry has appeared in magazines in Canada, the United States and the UK. She has been short-listed for the CBC literary award for poems from her first book, Stormthrower (Wolsak and Wynn 2002). Her second collection, Return from Erebus came out in fall 2010 with Brick Books. For a decade she lived outside of Canada in various places, most notably Alaska, Georgia, and Norway; she also spent significant time in South Africa. For the last thirteen years she’s made her home in rural Nova Scotia where she works as a freelance editor and is at work on a new collection.

TTQ - What role do you see poetry playing in an increasingly digital world, and do you feel the e-book will ultimately take the place of the printed page?

Julia McCarthy - I don’t see the role of poetry as changing; like all art, poetry continues to call us to be more fully human. Poetry has been in existence long before the digital world and will exist long after the digital world has come and gone. The latter is about communication whereas art and poetry are more concerned, I think, with communion.

For me, the e-book will not replace the experience of reading an actual book though it may be supplemental at some point. Whether or not this is true for others, I can’t say. But McLuhan’s “the medium is the message” comes to mind when I see this question.

Poem In White

Half-bred from absence    fathered by silence

it's the colour of paradox    it rejects

the weight of the world    the burden of matter

it's the omission

of substance    it is and isn't

at exactly the same moment    it bears

its loss well having never known

anything else

white is the colour of laughter

held back    of desire waiting

the cup's regret when drained

it's the first colour    the primary wound

blindfolded    it's the bowl of ashes

you pray over    it flies

into fury    oblivious    its heat is absolute

its memory is porcelain    it dreams albino

it's the colour of a promise

before it's broken    the size and shape of

a child's coffin    a child who never existed

a funeral never performed

white is formless and void

fragile    without edges    persistent

as chaos and full of light

if you touch it you'll know absence

so profound you won't feel a thing

white turns its blind eye to the leaves

eloping with grass for winter    it’s deaf

to the canticle of crows flying over

and utterly mute

to the autism of the stone

mistaking snow for its own infinite mind.

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Poetry Month: Jim Nason - Narcissus Unfolding

Jim Nason’s stories and poems have appeared in literary journals and anthologies in Canada as well as the United States – including the Best Canadian Poetry 2008 and 2010 (Tightrope Books). Narcissus Unfolding (Frontenac House, 2011) is his third collection of poetry. He has also published a novel The Housekeeping Journals (Turnstone Press) and a short story collection The Girl on the Escalator (Tightrope Books, 2011). He has been a finalist for the CBC Literary Award in both the poetry and fiction categories.


TTQ - What role do you see poetry playing in a more digital world?

Jim Nason - Methods of communication are constantly changing. In a digital world poems will be accessible in a way that fits our time. Digital is fast, easy and exciting! Poetry needs to be seen and heard and has always played a role in mirroring what is going on in the world – concerns about war, celebrating love and expressing loss – the role of poetry in a more digital world will be the same, only more accessible for techi folks.

TTQ - Do you feel the e-book will ultimately take the place of the printed page?

Jim Nason - There is plenty of room for electronic information in the world. How we are entertained or how we gather information isn’t the question for me, but why people buy books is. For some, having an e-book will satisfy them. Not me. I need the page in hand, to write in the margins with pencil, to physically enter the material, feel the weight of the words … I want to be able to throw the book in my backpack or put it on a shelf with others of its kind and watch it age. When I look at Narcissus Unfolding, and the beauty of that book, I need to hold it in my hand and celebrate the hard work that went into creating it – the design and editing, Kelley Aitken’s gorgeous art … the physical package is important to the words. I need to know I can tuck a book review or an article about the author into its back flap. Like many things that I appreciate in life, I could easily look at a picture of it on line, but with books, I’m still partial to the smell and texture of pressed pulp. Narcissus Unfolding is a multi-layered love poem, an unfolding … it needs to be held …the reader should be able to feel the give in the spine, experience the sigh of turning pages.

HORSE

You sink into the rose-print
sofa you bought at the Salvation Army,
wake slowly into morning. Sunrise
is fire through a crack in the curtain,
circling your feet like an improbable halo
on the pine floor, the consoling warmth.
Hung above the Medici vase, a black
and white photograph of a thoroughbred –
foaming flank of neck, strong legs weak
with rain and mud, zero percent body fat
you would say if the horse were naked
like a man – maybe the man who spends
an extra ten minutes in the steaming shower
across from you at the gym, wanting eyes
on his lonely chest, loving the world of sit-ups
and iron, hating himself for what he craves –
you see this in the way he looks at your own
fit body, how he soaps his rough thighs, bends
slowly to massage his knees, by the way he
hangs his beautiful head – hot water dripping
down around the scalded circle of his neck
like a flaming lei of pink roses.

The horse’s wet mane
and ballsy stance, framed
in slick hardwood – complex weave
of petal and thorn, you want to touch it,
smell the sexy mix of lime powder
and hay, hear the steady grind of oats
like gravel between his massive teeth,
heavy tail swatting flies from his tensed-up
rump, stomping in the stall, the water bucket
spilling, sunlight over piss-soaked straw.






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Poetry Month: Elisabeth Belliveau - don't get lonely don't get lost

Elisabeth Belliveau was born in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, Canada in 1979. She is a published author of three graphic novels and an interdisciplinary artist, working in stop-motion animation, drawing and fibre arts. Her latest collection of poetry, prose, artwork, and accompanying short film is don't get lonely don't get lost (Conundrum Press, 2010). She completed an MFA at Concordia University and a BFA from the Alberta College of Art and Design. She is the recipient of grants and awards including the William Blair Brucebo Scholarship and has attended residencies at KIAC, Struts, Banff Centre Women’s Studio Workshop NY and The National Film Board of Canada. Currently her studio is in-between Montréal, Québec and Ithaca, New York. Her work and animations can be viewed at: www.elisabethbelliveau.com.


TTQ - What role do you see poetry playing in an increasingly digital world, and do you feel the e-book will ultimately take the place of the printed page?

Elisabeth Belliveau - For me, most poetry needs to be held in hand. The architecture of a book can complete poems by demanding time and space- almost in a sculptural way. As a writer who uses space - I enjoy work that considers the page, isolating and giving weight to certain moments allowing the work and the reader to breath. Books make me slow down - which is necessary for reading poetry. My tendency with an e-book is to hurry, I can't seem to forget that there is a battery, it is too much like a computer, it is still too plugged in. The physicality of a book connects me to the writing - even the timing of turning pages adds to the opportunity to reflect and feel in the moment. Perhaps it is a bit romantic or nostalgic, but I enjoy the work of finding the right light to read under, reading book spines on shelves, appreciating cover design and choice of paper stock. One of my favourite parts of any home is the physical presence of books.

E-books are convenient - but I can't imagine how they will replace writing forms that are woven with imagery and color like graphic novels, children’s books and artist books. There are so many kinds of reading - blogs, zines, novels - all demand different kinds of attention. It is exciting that writers have so many options. I just hope that they will continue to have access to the best forms to fit their work. As an artist who works in printmaking, zines and hand-made books - the e-book can't take the place of the printed page in my heart.

If there is a storm.

Everything before and everything to come is being decided in this moment
in this deep sound coming.
An audience of tall grass, the sky hints neon.

She picks at the dried bits of food glued to her cookbooks pages.
The recipes move into poems
she can’t read anymore, she watches the houseplants, they move just barely with the breeze.
Their waxy leaves are covered in dust,
she spends one hour gently cleaning them with a damp cloth.


Words have already been used to say this thing, I find myself tracing their steps

Her shoes are beige high heels,
they could get stuck in the grates of the fire escape.
It feels like Paris, but it is not.
He feels rich, like wool and butter, but he is poor.
Here the air tastes different, birds are still breaking the law.
We should take more trains in our own country.
Almost anywhere can look like Sweden.
My coffee is bitter.
I have been working so hard at getting married.



Words have already been used to say this thing, I find myself tracing their steps

Her shoes are beige high heels,
they could get stuck in the grates of the fire escape.
It feels like Paris, but it is not.
He feels rich, like wool and butter, but he is poor.
Here the air tastes different, birds are still breaking the law.
We should take more trains in our own country.
Almost anywhere can look like Sweden.
My coffee is bitter.
I have been working so hard at getting married.









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Poetry Month: David Seymour - Corpsing This Century

David Seymour’s first book, Inter Alia (Brick Books, 2005) was short-listed for the Gerald Lampert Award for the best first book of poetry in Canada. His essays, poetry and reviews continue to be published widely in literary journals. Some of the poems in Inter Alia were also used as lyrics in songs by the alt/folk band The Warped 45s for their debut album 10 Day Poem for Saskatchewan. Most recently his poetry has been short-listed for the 2009 CBC Literary Award, and twice selected for the Anthology of Best Canadian Poetry. David is currently living in Toronto, where he is at work completing a third poetry manuscript for publication, titled For Display Purposes Only.

TTQ - What role do you see poetry playing in an increasingly digital world, and do you feel the e-book will ultimately take the place of the printed page?

David Seymour - The reason people write poetry and the reason people continue to read poetry is not a quantifiable sum, and remains unchanged, I think, regardless of the popularity of its reception or its method of conveyance. This has been the case unequivocally across the ages. In terms of whether the so-called digital age or information age spawns greater isolation between us and whether poetry can somehow eschew this outcome, one might argue that modern digital technologies are only extensions of the first telecommunication technology, writing, of which poetry is, of course, a part. Writing induced perhaps the greatest form of isolation thus far in its ability to transfer meaning while simultaneously disconnecting that meaning from its dialogical context; the transmitter from the receiver. Blanchot called writing the non-absent absence, a gap in the universe, and in his fairly cryptic way touched upon the aloneness the act of writing has always entailed. Etchings on stone placed in a gunnysack for transport down the mountain is equally isolating as writing an email to a friend on one’s Ipad or tablet. The degree of isolation isn't much changed, only the time it takes for the message to travel across that imposed distance, and the medium within which it travels. Poetry, as such, persists.

I believe the e-book (or by extension let’s say any of the various digital/virtual modes of communication) has been gradually taking the place of the printed page, oh, for a good couple of decades now. I’d wager there are children growing up in our lifetimes that will never crack the spine of a book and yet be no less well read for it. The debate we read and hear today on this topic is an after-effect brought about by a blend of residual fear of the change that’s already occurred and our ongoing nostalgia for the loss that change has incurred. The transition from paper to screen is well underway, but I’m interested in the fact that, like vinyl, paper persists despite its culturally agreed upon obsolescence, its primitive wastefulness. It’s no accident that the length of a poem often neatly conforms to a standard 8x11 sheet of paper, nor is it an accident the computer screen and the word processing software we use accommodate that specific design in their default formatting. A blank piece of paper has become a parcel of thought for us and it will be some time, I think, before we relinquish the size and shape, the comfort, of this limit. Long after the ink has run dry in our printers. For the record I still write and edit on paper and will read paper books as long as I have sight, used as I am to the old ways.

Corpsing This Century

I know what you are about to say and you know what
I’m about to say. This turns our conversation into a gas.

Despite the vocal exercises I still avoid your eyes, stare
at the space due left of your head, and pretend I’ve just

come to, try to forget what you’ve said and will say again;
but anticipation throws my better, composed self into a face-

eating grin. When you repeat words like that I can’t help it,
the fascination’s morbid with me; history, politics, eject

like Wernher von Braun plastics from their seamless moulds,
unpatented, synonymous with landfill. The miscues are

grave and the retakes no picnic. Because we’re never not
aware of our surroundings, if you and I were in a Herzog

these would be the lines we couldn’t get past, landing on the gag
reel as a gaff, though they’re the lines we’d continue to recite

until we nailed the scene. But we’re not. In a film, that is, so
the replays keep playing on their loop. Similarly, art resulting

from the exhaustion of easy living provokes a stifled laugh.
I should say absurdity sets in earlier and earlier. Whose was

that exhibit, the sculptural gack suspended in the dark only after
the opening ended, the patrons gone? There’s a memory, too,

that makes me crack; a friend falling in slow motion from another
friend’s horse. I’ve reduced it, for quick recall during crises,

to his look of surprise and the expression of air leaving him
on impact. The serious is so ripe, a cathedral for hysterics, really.

When I convinced myself the man slumped against me in emerg
last night was only sleeping, scanned the room for loved ones

to come nudge him awake, nothing seemed remotely funny. Even
allowing the silence and proximity. What happened next, as you’ve

guessed, was approximately the same as what didn’t. It depends
on timing, not equating deadpan with a winning performance.







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THE TORONTO QUARTERLY - ISSUE SEVEN has now ARRIVED in both PRINT and E-BOOK versions!!!!!

The Toronto Quarterly - Issue Seven has now arrived in both print and e-book versions! We have interviews with Richard Greene (Governor General's Award Winner for Poetry 2010), Johanna Skibsrud (Giller Prize Winner 2010), and Alisha Piercy (bp Nichol Award Winner 2010). We have poetry from Catherine Owen, Bill Howell, John Oughton, Moez Surani, Ruth Foley, Carole Glasser Langille and many more. We have short stories from the likes of Kimberley Fehr, Wade Bell, and David Burke plus more, and read book reviews of new releases from Desi Di Nardo, Steven Heighton, Anne Purdue, and Jessica Anya Blau.

When you order print copies of TTQ7 through lulu.com use the coupon code APRILMAIL305 when you checkout, select Mail Shipping and receive the single book SHIPPING COST FREE. Maximum savings with this promotion is $4.99.You can only use the code once per account, and you can't use this coupon in combination with other coupon codes. This offer ends on April 30, 2011 at 11:59 PM.

Thank you everyone for your continued support of The Toronto Quarterly!

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Poetry Month: Catherine Graham - Winterkill

Catherine Graham is the author of four acclaimed poetry collections: The Watch (Abbey Press, Northern Ireland, 1998) and through (Insomniac Press) the poetry trilogy Pupa (2003), The Red Element (2008) and Winterkill (2010).Vice President of Project Bookmark Canada, she holds an MA in Creative Writing from Lancaster University (UK) and teaches creative writing at the University of Toronto School of Continuing Studies. Her work is anthologized in The White Page / An Bhileog Bhan: Twentieth Century Irish Women Poets and her poetry has appeared in journals in North America, Ireland and the United Kingdom and is showcased in Poetry Is Public Is Poetry and Nuit Blanche Words Travel Fast. Visit www.catherinegraham.com.

TTQ - What role do you see poetry playing in an increasingly digital world, and do you feel the e-book will ultimately take the place of the printed page?

Catherine Graham - Poetry will thrive regardless of the medium. The digital world provides poetry with another platform. Despite the rapid growth of the e-book, the printed page will last. There’s room for both.

Poetry Month: Antony Di Nardo - Soul on Standby

Antony Di Nardo is the author of Alien, Correspondent (Brick Books) and Soul on Standby (Exile Editions). His poetry and non-fiction have appeared in anthologies and in journals across Canada, most recently in Prism, The Capilano Review and The New Quarterly. He divides his time between Oshawa, Ontario and Sutton, Quebec.


TTQ - What role do you see poetry playing in an increasingly digital world, and do you feel the e-book will ultimately take the place of the printed page?

Antony Di Nardo - Poetry, like language and its supporting technologies will continue to evolve and adapt. For storytellers and orators of long ago, quill and ink and its “painted speech” posed a terrible threat to spoken language. Yet, despite those ancient naysayers, it’s obvious language has flourished. I don’t think the e-book or the digital page is any more of a threat to “printed speech,” the hardcopy or the G-book (G for Gutenberg). Some writers, I suppose, have always suffered from a form of “page fright,” a fear of flying, whether resisting the shift from quill to fountain pen or from the typewriter to word processing. The e-book will no doubt re-tool the art of language for other creative and different arenas of discourse. And much like the fountain pen and word processor, the G-book and the e-book will co-exist.

Poetry, in both form and content, has undergone some remarkable changes in the last hundred years. The technologies at our disposal for writing poetry are partially responsible for that. “Make it new,” said Ezra Pound. The e-book and digital page, once we get the broken line and ragged right margin right, will go a long way in moving poets further into their art. Can we expect a fusion of spoken word and visual poetry, animated concrete poetry, the sonnet in QuickTime, the I-Phone haiku? Why not? I’m looking forward to composing my next poem on an I-Pad.

Something in the Sixties

Hell, no, we won’t go!
Hell, no, we won’t go!
barely, hardly, scarcely sums it up,
with all we had to live up

to after the flower girls turned wily
off on a whirl from limb to limb
like the little lambs ate ivy
and the sugar plum fairies limped

or lisped, whispered sweet nothings
in our ears in a foolishness or fashion
long lost to childhood yearn-
ings of the Hooded Fang and sturm

und drang, the utter weariness
of ollie ollie um sum free
and we won’t go looking for you ‘less
there’s something in it for me

was the latest test of said unselflessness,
honestly it didn’t do it either for me
what it did for the drag of history
all aboard the track of happiness.

Two rights and eight of us cooped
up in a co-op didn’t make a wrong
to wring our hands over à la
Lady Macbeth, but we were gaga

for the world to end,
to come marching to a dead end,
tying up all the loose ends
to make a proper ending of an end

in sight. That was some past, the sparkle
of homegrown divinity, the edge of marvel,
all those lonely people from that song,
really, where do they all belong?








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Poetry Month: Kath MacLean - Kat Among the Tigers

Kath MacLean is recognized as one of Edmonton’s most eclectic poet-performers, her unique muse and creative delivery attract attention wherever she reads. Known for rich images, “breath-taking lyricism” and musicality, her award-winning poetry, prose, and non-fiction is generating critical acclaim across Canada.

Praised by the likes of Al Purdy, Judith Fitzgerald, and George Elliot Clarke, MacLean’s first book For a Cappuccino on Bloor (Broken Jaw Press, 1998) was the recipient of the New Muse Award and was short-listed for the Kalamalka Press New Writers Competition.

The winner of many literary competitions, including both the Grain Poetry and Non-Fiction Awards in 2005, MacLean’s imaginative writings have appeared in leading Canadian, American and European journals. Her playwriting credits include circling the moon, a poetic murder-mystery-musical, which was produced and performed at the Catalyst Theatre in Edmonton. Her poetry has been nominated for The Winston Collins Poetry Award (2007), and her nonfiction received 1st honourable mention with Prairie Fire (2007). In 2009 her poetry received both honorable mention from Rubicon Press and was runner –up for Sub-Terrain’s LUSH poetry prize and Malahat Review’s Creative Nonfiction prize. Last year “talking, talking”, a series of ghazals, was listed as one of Canada’s top poems of the year by Lorna Crozier.

MacLean’s poetry has also been broadcast on CBC Radio, and she’s been a popular guest on arts and entertainment radio shows from coast to coast when touring her work. Locally, she has appeared on CJSR-FM and A Channel and performed at the Edmonton Poetry Festival, ROAR, the Edmonton Olive Reading Series, and in the Nonfiction Reading Series at the Carrot Café. In March, MacLean will compete as the only prairie poet at Harbourfront’s Battle of the Bard in Toronto.

A strong voice within Edmonton’s arts community, MacLean was Writer in Residence (2009-2010) for the Canadian Author’s Association (Edmonton Branch). She teaches writing at Grant MacEwan University and given numerous poetry workshops for students of all ages in Edmonton for many years encouraging them to read, to write, and to perform poetry. She has also been a Professor of English Literature at the University of Alberta, and is a certified teacher (4 – 12) in Ontario.

Recently MacLean launched Seed Bone & Hammer, a CD of performance poetry and a videopoem, There Was A Young Man (both in 2009) which has already received rave reviews at it debut film festivals in Edmonton Stony Plain Rd Storefront Cinema and Vancouver’s International Festival, Visble Verse. Her new manuscript of poetry, Kat Among the Tigers has recently been published by U of A Press. Her new video poem, Doo-Da-Doo-Da, a poem from her new book, will also be released this spring.


TTQ - What role do you see poetry playing in an increasingly digital world, and do you feel the e-book will ultimately take the place of the printed page?

Kath MacLean - There is certainly a place for poetry in the digital world & as the powers that are push for more, we need to think about where we stand on this. I love to hold a hard copy in my hand – the tactile experience is so important when I’m reading a book. Making books available digitally certain may improve availability, but I fear copyright and writers not being properly paid for their work. We make so very little money from our art as is – & this unless the laws are firm & more sensitive to our needs and requirements as artists making a living from our work (& so far they aren`t), I fear it. Having said all of this, I`ve been working on a second poetry video which I will have available on my website along side, There Was a Young Man. Having this up on a site has attracted new readers for me – non-traditional poetry readers who like what poetry video does for a poem. So I see this electronic form as something very important to my career just now. I am also, really enjoying this new medium.

I`m going to hope that the traditional form of the book will continue to be around a good while yet, options are fine, but I don`t see the book in its physical form vanishing just like that. It isn`t magic, it`s going to end up being a market decision – but, I will keep hoping our books in their written form will continue to live and that there are enough of us buying them and craving them physically that the printers keep birthing them. I can’t imagine this love affair coming to an end!

Doo-Da-Doo-Da
Paris, March 1915


The trumpet sounds, the shutters moan
the sky shrinks a hole in the dark.

I’ve never seen stars rush through evening like that –
the Ultimate Fish: its flash of fins dive under the night‘s soft skin.

And the house stretching, rises to its toes, lifts up
its failing arms and scoops life as we’ve known it, always -

People lean into the black and the Milky Way splaying her legs,
her petticoats rising, her feathered hat, her muff and gloves gone --

Who says Romance is dead? When heads rush, bodies turn each to each
steam rises from the cup, the kettle cries –

the sky calls doo-da-doo-da --

In the aftermath, I think of you as a sneak of a pig.
Not writing one ceases to exist among the literati,

their blue swords poke about the fire, picking, flicking,
their lovely tongues full of lovely dreams.

If Romance is dead Jaggle I’m a hatless fool,
muffless, bare- bottomed, fluttering silently across the night’s soft skin;

the trumpet sounding, the shutter’s low moan -
You’re a sneak of a pig.

Ash- mouthed, rushing towards the literati
dreaming the lovely, shivering and shawless,

I scoop stars beneath my petticoat and imagine
a flash of fin diving beneath my soft skin.

The trumpet sounds, the dark moans
a few notes here and here a scarcity of words --

doo-da-doo
da - doo da...






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Poetry Month: Jacob Scheier - More to Keep us Warm

A Toronto poet and journalist, Jacob Scheier’s debut poetry collection, More to Keep us Warm (ECW Press), won the 2008 Governor General’s Award. The book was also named amongst 2008’s “best in verse” by The Winnipeg Free Press and has received praise from Canadian Literature, Matrix and Prairie Fire. Jacob’s poems have appeared in several periodicals in North America, including Geist, Descant, Rattle (forthcoming) as well as being aired on CBC radio and adapted for a modern dance performance at the Enwave Theatre in Toronto. He has read his poems at venues across North America, including the International Festival of Authors in Toronto and the Word for Word Poetry Series at Bryant Park in New York City, and he is the Former co-editor-in-chief of existere, York University’s journal of art and literature.

Jacob's articles and editorials frequently appear in Toronto’s NOW Magazine, and in 2009 he co-won a New York Community Media Alliance award for best feature article in an independent publication. Currently, Jacob teaches “Writing Creatively About Grief” at Ryerson’s University’s Chang School of Continuing Education.


TTQ - What role do you see poetry playing in an increasingly digital world, and do you feel the e-book will ultimately take the place of the printed page?

Jacob Scheier - I see poetry (among other things) as a subjective historical document – telling us what the interior experience is of the times we live in. So in psychological-existential-spiritual (in short, ‘poetic’) terms I expect poetry to show us what it is/means to live in a more digital world.

I don’t think the printed page will die. The book didn’t kill oral narratives – we still tell each other stories from memory, and so I don’t think the e-book will kill The Book – though it may change its role.

-a poem from More to Keep us Warm



I am afraid.
Afraid that art and love
are merely hobbies
and should only be consummated
on 15 minute coffee breaks,
or they are only the ornaments,
the holiday décor
of shopping malls.

I am afraid.
Afraid that Bukowski was wrong.
What matters most is not how well you walk through the fire,
but how well you walk around it
or find a way to sell it
to the wealthy and the bored.

I am afraid.
Afraid I don’t understand ‘the markets,’
any of them.
And this is the only fire left
people are willing
to walk through.

I am afraid.
Afraid books are more commodity
than prayer.

And I have the same fear
for prayers.







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Poetry Month: Tanis Rideout - Arguments with the Lake

Tanis Rideout is a poet and writer living and working in Toronto. In the fall of 2005 she released her first full-length book of poetry Delineation, exploring the lives and loves of comic book super-heroines, which was praised as a “tantalizing, harrowing read.” It has been featured on CBC Radio’s Bandwidth with Alan Neal and Definitely Not the Opera with Sook-Yin Lee.

In the spring of 2005 Rideout joined Sarah Harmer to read a commissioned poem on Harmer’s I Love the Escarpment Tour to draw attention to damage being done to the Niagara Escarpment by ongoing quarrying. Subsequently a performance of the poem appeared on the DVD of the tour - Escarpment Blues. In 2006 she was named the Poet Laureate of Lake Ontario by the Lake Ontario Waterkeeper and toured with the Tragically Hip's Gord Downie to draw attention to environmental justice issues on the lake.

Her poetry and fiction have appeared in numerous quarterlies and magazines and received grants from local and national arts councils.

An excerpt from her new poems Arguments with the Lake received second prize in the CBC Literary Awards and was called Macewanesque in scope, [it] invokes in the reader a sense of timelessness and breathless wonder.

Her first novel will be released in Spring 2012 with McClelland and Stewart.

You can find her online at http://tanisrideout.wordpress.com/


TTQ - What role do you see poetry playing in an increasingly digital world, and do you feel the e-book will ultimately take the place of the printed page?

Tanis Rideout - In some ways I think poetry is ideal for a digital world, a world where we read on cell phones, on tablets, on all sorts of screens we carry around with us, or look at in subway stations. I think are brains are primed right now for poetry – we’re learning, in general, how to fit ideas into smaller textual spaces, making leaps from word to word and functioning in bite/byte sizes. That’s often what poetry has to do.

That having been said I feel the anxiety of poetry on e-books the same way some other poets do. But that is more about how e-books often reformat work to fit the screen, or only use select fonts etc. The anxiety, at least for me, comes from formatting – how that changes on current digital readers and doesn’t stay consistent with the poetic intent. Poets are keenly aware of empty space, of line breaks and page breaks, of indentations and the like. They measure them, think about them, and know how they can change the meaning of a word, a line, a poem.

I don’t think that this is a insurmountable obstacle in any sense, but it is one to be given thought. Currently I still only read poetry on the page. Will e-books usurp that all together, I think not. I think books will remain for some people fetish objects and authentic (for lack of a better word) objects. But I would like to see the book alter somewhat, become more special as an object, in the way that indie musicians have had to do with CDs, hand printing them, making the CD part of the work, not just a carrier for it so that real fans still want the artifact as much as the content.

Ok, I decided not to go with plugging a book per se, but thought instead I’d plug The Toronto Poetry Vendors.

I love this approach – it’s fun, taking away some of the preciousness that sometimes exists around poetry, and they have a variety of poets in various stages of careers. Going back to the discussion of digital and people liking bite sized things, I think they’re fitting into that niche – grab a poem for the bus, for the coffee while you wait for a friend etc. It allows people to try poetry out. And hopefully they’ll find something they like.

On the Waterfront

Marilyn and me

we’re in the dark theatre watching

Marlon and Eva on the waterfront.

Popcorn salt stings my lips

dry, Marilyn drinks water,

always water, thinks water.

She mouths Eva’s lines

                                    I feel like I’m just floating

                                    Just floating, just

                                    floating

while she dances up there with Brando.

I want to ask her

if she’s even thought of the future

in the University matinee,

July wet on Bloor Street.

We should be in the lake in an hour.

I tell her                        you should get some ambition

                       

                                    I always thought I’d live

                                    a little longer without.


* "On the Waterfront" from Arguments with the Lake – this poem first appeared in En Route and was one from the selection that came second in the CBC Literary Awards last year.

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THE TORONTO QUARTERLY - ISSUE SEVEN has ARRIVED!!!!!

The Toronto Quarterly - Issue Seven (print) has arrived! We have interviews with Richard Greene (Governor General's Award Winner for Poetry 2010), Johanna Skibsrud (Giller Prize Winner 2010), and Alisha Piercy (bp Nichol Award Winner 2010). We have poetry from Catherine Owen, Bill Howell, John Oughton, Moez Surani, Ruth Foley, Carole Glasser Langille and many more. We have short stories from the likes of Kimberley Fehr, Wade Bell, and David Burke plus more, and read book reviews of new releases from Desi Di Nardo, Steven Heighton, Anne Purdue, and Jessica Anya Blau.

Starting today, when you order print copies of TTQ7 through lulu.com use the coupon code APRILMAIL305 when you checkout, select Mail Shipping and receive the single book shipping cost free. Maximum savings with this promotion is $4.99.You can only use the code once per account, and you can't use this coupon in combination with other coupon codes. This offer ends on April 30, 2011 at 11:59 PM.

Thank you everyone for your continued support of The Toronto Quarterly!


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Poetry Month: Bruce Meyer - What Is the Purpose of Poetry?

Bruce Meyer is author of 31 books including 11 collections of poetry, the most recent of which are Alphabet Table (Black Moss Press, 2010), Mesopotamia (Your Scrivener Press, 2009) and Dog Days: A Comedy of Terriers (Black Moss Press, 2009). His broadcasts on poetry, the novel and the Great Books are the CBC’s bestselling spoken word cd series. He is Poet Laureate of the City of Barrie and is professor of English at Georgian College where he teaches for Laurentian University. He was the winner of the E.J. Pratt Gold Medals for Poetry (1980, 1981), and was shortlisted for the Arlene Lampert Prize (1989).

TTQ - What role do you see poetry playing in an increasingly digital world, and do you feel the e-book will ultimately take the place of the printed page?

Bruce Meyer - I think poetry will always have a role to play. I'm not sure whether paper will wrap Kindles like the old game. What will survive and what I am conscious of as a poet is the orality of the form. The spoken word resides at the heart of the type of poetry I try to write -- whether formal or free verse. The poem has to speak to an audience. The ideas of meter, rhyme, rhythm and even form have their basis in the spoken roots of poetry, and as long as a poet attempts to reach the spine (nervous system of his audience) then poetry's roots will live on. I am currently working on an emblem book with an oral poet, H. Masud Taj, from India. I think that type of book points us in a direction where the printed word (paper or Kindle) relies on the spoken word, and vice versa.

What Is the Purpose of Poetry?

The student asks me and is earnest.
I have a shelf of poetics in my library.
It is bigger than the box in which
I will ride this planet to its end.
Instead, I think of Icelandic sagas,
bearded Vikings with horned helmets,
their language a wood-chipper of gutturals,
because the sea numbs even brave lips.
They arrive on a rock after a long trip.
It is rotty there. It is cold. It snows.
There is only fish to eat and dreams
of future tourism. They don’t complain.
Stories take their minds off bleak despair,
not because they love stories but because
they love each other, they love their Viking life.
They want to foot-ski down icy hills
and split their fears with broad-axes.
They want to wake up in Valhalla
and never suffer a lousy hang-over.
They want to retire and travel peacefully
and pose for pictures with the Eifel Tower,
and believe that courage is just doing
what you love and put it into runes
that others will use for loadstones.
Eventually, they ask each other, “What is
the purpose of being a Viking?” They don’t
know. Silence falls on their rotty house
until Snarlsson Bjornfast answers bravely
“It must be poetry!” They stare in wonder,
hug their swords like children. All shout “Yaw!”


*Note – Photo of Bruce Meyer credited to Doug Crawford.






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Poetry Month: Melissa Studdard - Six Weeks to Yehidah

Melissa Studdard's middle-grade novel, Six Weeks to Yehidah, will be released by All Things That Matter Press in late 2011. Her poetry, short stories, reviews, essays and academic articles have appeared widely in journals such as Chelsea, Boulevard, Gradiva, The American Book Review, Literal Latte, Poets and Writers, Connecticut Review, Dash, The Smoking Poet, and elsewhere. She's a Book-Reviewer-At-Large for The National Poetry Review, a contributing editor for both The Criterion and Tiferet (for which she also hosts the blogtalk radio program Tiferet Talk), and a professor at Lone Star College-Tomball. "Vagabond" was originally published (in a slightly different format) in the 2011 edition of the Austin International Poetry Anthology.


TTQ - What role do you see poetry playing in an increasingly digital world, and do you feel the e-book will ultimately take the place of the printed page?

Melissa Studdard - The digital world makes more poetry accessible, brings poets together, provides new formats for poems, and exposes new people to poetry. It's a wonderful thing! People post poems on Facebook and tweet quotes from poems. Poetry collections can be downloaded at the click of a finger. New and innovative online journals set poems to music and accompany them with images and sound clips and trailers of poems read aloud. I only see this as increasing interest in poetry and expanding the ways in which it can be enjoyed. Yet, I do not feel these new presentations will take the place of the printed page. There is a very social aspect to the internet, and just as we crave "quality" alone time with those people in our lives who we love, so true lovers of poetry and books will probably always crave intimacy with the printed page. I see more and more that people are feeling overwhelmed and exhausted by their computers, I-phones, kindles and so forth - exhausted from staring always at a screen - and they are taking time off - a few days, a few weeks - to unplug and reconnect to their inner batteries. When people do this, there are certain things they will turn to - nature, time with loved ones, and the printed page - tangible experiences that refresh and recharge them. To say that the kindle could supplant the printed book is as ridiculous as saying that texting sexy messages could take the place of sex. Well, okay, not quite as ridiculous, but you get the point. No matter how much people enjoy the auxiliaries, they're always going to want the real thing.

Vagabond

Again at the precipice,
we stood, a torrent of wind,
a rainstorm of love, a dark
and brooding lick of thunder.
Just one slip of the foot
and our gypsy hearts would be
rolling again. While the others
made babies, we birthed the jagged
edges of cliffs, the imperceptible
blue of sky, the spokes of caravan,
swaddled it all in chainmail,
and left it there to fend for itself –
a modern love, birthed but not nurtured,
cherished but not maintained. You
dressed me in bells like a cat, and when
I danced, you dropped scarlet
and lilac scarves at my feet,
you doused me in the thick sweat
of wine, you stained me henna
with your rough and unread palms,
loving me the only way your Bedouin
heart could, like a plectrum kissing
a lyre, strumming magic out of the silence
only as often and for as long
as our voices could lift each other in song.






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Poetry Month: Daniel Scott Tysdal - Please Accept My Condo

Daniel Scott Tysdal is the author of The Mourner's Book of Albums (Tightrope 2010). His first book of poetry, Predicting the Next Big Advertising Breakthrough Using a Potentially Dangerous Method (Coteau 2006), received the ReLit Award for Poetry (2007) and the Anne Szumigalski Poetry Award (2006). His work has appeared in a number of literary journals and anthologies, and has earned him honourable mention at the National Magazine Awards (2003) and the Matrix Lit Pop Award (2010). He currently teaches creative writing and English literature at the University of Toronto Scarborough.


TTQ - What role do you see poetry playing in an increasingly digital world, and do you feel the e-book will ultimately take the place of the printed page?

Daniel Scott Tysdal - In a more digital world, or, to think bigger, in a world even more technologically mediated than our own, the impetus for great poetry will remain the same. It’s the form that poetry takes that will change beyond recognition. Poetry will continue to be a home for the exiled. But the poet’s acts of expression and exploration, her renderings of the beautiful and the sublime, will be undertaken in practices of creation and will require processes of consumption that we, right now, would deny have anything to do with the creation and consumption of poetry.

With this change in mind, we can say that the e-book is already dead. Or, better, the e-book is the zombie or ghost manifestation of the dead book. Poetry in the future will take the form of pills, pulse-bearing wires, neuro-implants, grafts, virtual realities, and genetic manipulations. Every poet will be half-poet, half something else: half-plastic surgeon, half-programmer, half-pharmacist. In anticipation of this revolution, I recently sent my first book off to Pfizer for translation into bite-sized blue pills.

Please Accept My Condo

Her cell phone cut my deepest sympathies
short. The fault of a patchy connection, she guessed,
when she showed me days later and we laughed off
our faces at my truncated text. I didn’t know her
adequately to ask who she’d lost; we were barely
close enough to suffer a telecommunicational blip.
“Please accept my condo” was all that had not
been swallowed by the gaps the sky works
into an ether between towers, as though solace
were the embrace of a room so new you were
certain no one had died in its thoughtless hold.
Or maybe the defective note was meant for me;
I needed to make real the imperative of that
half-sentence and tell this woman in her grief
to care for my concrete cocoon, while I emerged for her
as a mourning cloak butterfly, of the family nymphalis,
so weightless in those winds I was the drunk
who bobbed without sense on the ocean-filled waterbed
of the earth, no path too straight for me to fail it.
Future phones should be programmed to make new
our tongues. “We must honour the memo”
will be our promise to the bereaved, and to dads
and moms freshly minted we’ll cry: “Congratulations
on the birth of yo.” So novelly mobile,
so strangely celled, we will be as original
as the back-flipping dog who learned to leave
his trick unfinished and dangle, flea-bitten, in the air.








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