Some years ago, when I lived in central London, an Afghan restaurant on Baker Street called Caravan Serai was one of my favourite places. In one of those life coincidences, I’ve found myself on another caravan here in Canada.
For much of this year, the Planet Earth Poetry series in Victoria BC has been filming local poets reading their poetry in their chosen location. Poets Caravan is a project that maps the various locations using Google Earth; the texts of many of the poems are shown alongside the readings. The poems are also available on Youtube (without the texts).
Here’s mine from Youtube (click here for the Google Earth version – patience: it takes time to load). I chose to read at Haliburton Community Organic Farm where I’ve been volunteering since 2008. I selected poems suited to the environment I was reading from, which prompted the videographer to ask me if I was an entomologist! (Nope, I’ve just been spending time looking closely at what bugs me and my garden, heh heh.)
Most of the poems are from my new manuscript, Larder, which will be published by Caitlin Press in 2022. One (Vegetable Kingdom) is from my 2006 collection Cartography.
I’ve been to a few poetry (& other) readings since my return to Victoria, and even given one, and time to report on a bit of that with more on the horizon.
It’s gratifying to have the recognition: most of us are small fish in a small pond and it can make for a life of overcrowded isolation. These were the first reviews in any media that I’d had for the book, and I’m delighted. Not least because my last collection. Cartography, of which I remain very proud – a dozen years in the making – garnered not a single print review, nomination or mention since its publication in 2006. That is, until social media struck most kindly again in December last year, and then out of the blue this month with a warm and thorough online review.
Chris Levenson (poetry)
Cathy Ford (poetry)
So. Returning to Victoria after the infinite literary delights of London… I have been more regularly attending Planet Earth Poetry, our local weekly readings series, than I had been able to over the last couple of years while travelling up and down Vancouver Island in search of nutrition training. We’ve had some great readers passing through from near and far, among them Christopher Levenson from Vancouver, Cathy Ford from Sidney,George Szanto from Gabriola Island, and Julie Paul from Victoria.
George Szanto (fiction)
Julie Paul (fiction)
Swiftly ollowed by Lorri Neilsen Glenn who took a cherry blossom break on the West Coast from a truly ugly Atlantic winter in Halifax to read us a mixture of poetry and memoir; and by Alice Major, taking a green break from a prairie winter in Edmonton, who read mostly new and unpublished work.
For my own part, I gave a local reading back in February, in the friendly performance space at Gorge-ous Coffee. The place is fully booked with events of all kinds, musical, poetic and beyond, so was delighted to find an open slot.
Coming up soon: April is National Poetry Month, and I have three performances booked for that. The first is billed as a Read Local BC event, Poetry Without Borders, and takes place on Wednesday April 8 at the very lovely Munro’s Books in downtown Victoria. I’m reading with local poets Patrick Friesen, Beth Kope and Inge Israel. Next up is Poets Converse With Street Art – a poetry tour organized by Victoria’s own newly crowned Poet Laureate, Yvonne Blomer, which will be a poetry tour of Victoria, with poets strategically placed to read works inspired by public art; look for me beneath a sculptural streetlight, as I’m engaging with a pair of hands that were part of The Hands of Time, a project that marked Victoria’s 150th anniversary in 2012. That takes place on Saturday April 25, with morning and afternoon strolls planned. On Wednesday April 29 I’m part of a Food, Farming & Fishing Poetry Potluckat Haliburton Community Organic Farm, with Brian Brett, Linda Rogers and Dennis Reid.
And that’s the poetry bulletin for today. Next time I’ll do a little food security/urban agriculture update. My interests and involvements are like a spreading pool, so I have to keep track of the rivulets and my inner librarian is trying to create order in all this. You’ll find most of my hands-on, face-down food writing taking a decidedly nutritional vein, over at the Go Local Nutrition site. I’m also tweeting @iambiccafe and @golocalnut, and Facebooking at Digging the City, Go Local Nutrition, and Rhona McAdam (my writer page) (please Like these pages rather than trying to Friend me if you don’t know me personally).
Last Friday the Leaf Press chapbook launch at Planet Earth Poetry went well, aside from the fact I ran out of books before the reading started!
I went first, because I had the fewest books, having sold my remaining 3 copies of The Earth’s Kitchen before I read. Actually I had plenty, as I brought some of my other works along, including the recently deeply discounted and suddenly out of print Sunday Dinners, which we launched in Victoria only last June. I have snapped up the few remaining copies so it’s now officially a rare collectable, like Crosswords from Frog Hollow, and Old Habits, from Thistledown/Slow Dancer. Happily, Cartography, from Oolichan, still enjoys currency as an increasingly rare first edition.
who read some ghazals from her new chapbook, This Awakening to Light: a Year of Ghazals, a sequence she’d begun when they started rattling off her pen with surprising ease at a writing retreat. As she said in her introduction, the ghazal is not for everyone, but it obviously suited her well.
Yvonne Blomer brought the evening to an end with Landscapes and Home, another sequence of ghazals that periodically followed some of the formal rules (such as including the poet’s name in the concluding couplet) and drew on her Zimbabwean origins and Victoria location, which gave the poems. A Zimbabwean friend of mine who had come along said she found the imagery rang true for her.
I was confused when I first moved to England about use of the term “corn” – which to North Americans means the yellow kernels that brighten every summer picnic. In England it’s used in its traditional and more wide-ranging sense, meaning any grain, and generally the kind that feeds livestock. According to Michael Pollan, it used to mean literally any grain at all – including grains of salt, hence the expression “corned beef”. And hence the qualifier “sweet” which is added to the kind of corn that people eat, as in sweetcorn.
While passing through London in November, on my way to Italy, I happened on a copy of his recently published and much-praised book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, right there in the Bloomsbury Oxfam Bookshop. Delighted I was, but long in the opening of this fascinating story. I have started reading it this week, after coming upon an interview with him recorded a few months before the book hit the shelves. The interview is more about Pollan and his research and writing methods than the content of the book, but he does preface the interview with a reading from it and answers some interesting questions about it at the end. (Corn Maiden, in the sculpture garden of The Museum of Indian Arts & Culture, Santa Fe)
And so I’ve been reading the first section, which is a depressing story about the appropriation of corn – one of the traditional foods of American Indians – by agribusiness, and about the enslavement of American farmers to corn subsidies which in turn has created such a surplus of corn that its products form a shocking part of the fabric of American life, from sweeteners to manufacturing materials.
And if we thought it was cruel to feed cow by-products to cows, it turns out it’s actually not much better to feed them corn, which they aren’t designed to digest either (they are grass not grain-eaters). Luckily Pollan is a talented, humane and funny writer, so it’s possible to survive the facts he’s presenting to his fellow humans. I thought I’d take a break and look at some of his other writings today.
His 2003 article about Slow Food (from Mother Jones magazine) is interesting reading, particularly following turkey season. I hadn’t realised, when I wrote my poem, Lamenting the Turkey, that I was writing about Broad Breasted Whites, but seeing them described in Pollan’s article as “mindless eating and shitting machines” that are so deformed by breeding they cannot reproduce without artificial insemination, I’d say that’s exactly what they were; lumpy and awkward like the poem. Here it is, (from Cartography) – let’s dedicate this iteration to Pollan and to omnivores everywhere (oh, and by the way I do -really!- like eating turkey but will of course be more diligent about buying traditional breeds in future..).
Lamenting the Turkey
Stub-winged idiot, a food whose life is a brief hymn to gluttony: crescendo of feathers and flesh fills our tables, bloodlessly knifed as the red leaves of Christmas bloom in the background, remorselessly bright.
In a time we’re kneeling to stars and shepherds this is our chosen meal: a feathered blunder so dumb it drowns in rain, gaping at skies as they seal its throat with liquid wonder.
We adopt all the symbols of peace but consume the corpse of a baleful thing: it riots at the scent of blood, will slay wounded brothers with its bladed chin.
We fill the season with music, and stop this wobbling voice with a plug of bread; it ends its time as it always lived: stuffed with food, yet never fed.
So this is our festive platter: a death of stupidity and fatted fear, naked and shining beneath the candles, a meal we gobble in the gullet of the year.
So.. the launch was a lovely elegant affair in a lovely elegant building, adorned with fantastic art and incredible furniture. Note the throne they seated me on and the special little signing mat, and the height of the table which meant supplicants practically had to kneel for audience. Here you see the back of Pam Porter, winner of this year’s GG for Children’s Literature, whose own poetry collection is due out any second now from Coteau and will doubtless sparkle brightly with a light all its own. And here’s a gaggle of gastronomes nibbling on that ever present smoked salmon cheesecake. More photos another time, perhaps, once I’ve seen more of them.
I caught the cooking section of CBC’s North By Northwest this weekend; apparently Ricardo Larrivee is Quebec’s answer to Jamie Oliver (and way prettier, IMHO). He was by some curious coincidence making a vegetarian lasagne with eggplant caviar — which latter substance was one of the items I made for the launch. I wonder if I can use leftovers in a lasagne?
Well, I have it in my hands, Cartography, this product of a 13 year gestation. Delighted I am, but U.A. Fanthorpe captures that sense of our poems never quite living up to the perfection we’d aspired to (which is why we keep trying?!): “As usual, when they’re together, and bound, I feel ashamed of them. Individually, they had a right to exist. But when they gape out at me, cheek by jowl, I feel like a mother with a whole clutch of unsatisfactory children.”
Anyway, it is here, and it is particularly lovely thanks to a cover image by the quite extraordinary Calgary artist Colleen Philippi, whose art has blessed the cover of three of my books now. The launch will be lovely too, and I hope anyone in the area will come and celebrate with me on May 3.
Supper tonight will be arroz con pollo which I haven’t had for a very long time, and which I saw described as the Cuban cousin of paella. I can’t help but admire a meat dish that incorporates both starch and vegetable, yet doesn’t come across as a casserole. Or maybe I’m just falling for an exotic sounding name for good ol’ chicken and rice.
