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League of Canadian Poets

Boreal poets

Sunday carried on being warm and sunny…


Even the birds get pretty houses on Signal Hill Road

and some more mailboxes.

The party bus was waiting and we all piled aboard

and had a photo op at Portugal Cove

before embarking on our Boreal Poetry tour led by Marlene Creates, who read poems in the places where they were composed

like this rock face

pointing out the wildflowers that inspired one poem.

Feels like another spring dawning for me. Fiddleheads and flowers…

A stream runs through it

we endured the blackflies – out in their fury – for the sake of poetry

and forest

and nautical knots in the rope handrails

And then we had a reading. In the garage, which was not entirely blackfly-free, but quite comfortable and atmospheric. Penn Kemp

Sharon Singer,

Susan McMaster,

Joe Blades, and then

Barbara Nickel

And then it was back on the bus, back to the hotel (where food service stops early) so we wrapped up with some pizza we ordered in at the bar.

Newfoundland Sunday

The sun finally shone on St John’s today. We were unprepared for the sudden brightness and warmth! Here, at last, “the million dollar harbour view” (taken from the Dildo room – named as they all are after places in Newfoundland in the Battery Hotel… but who would request this room I wonder?)

We had Cod Au Gratin yesterday for lunch, featuring salt cod and surprisingly good despite appearances:

Last night’s banquet, Anne Szumigalski Lecture, book launch and prize-giving ceremony took place at the Fluvarium, where you can go eyeball to eyeball with brown trout.

Many poets milled…

The banquet’s highlights were the salad which had a good dressing and amazingly sweet cherry tomatoes

and the cheesecake, but the routine banquet choices of salmon or chicken were about what you might expect; the chicken was uninspired. How does one choose between industrially-reared chicken and farmed salmon anyway? Tough call.

Then Maurice Mierau

introduced the night’s star turn, Don McKay delivering a talk on geo-poetics.

Followed by prizes, book launch readings…

Afterwards there was music; the harpist, I was told, plays with the symphony. The squeezebox players were excellent.

It all sounded great but I had to scoot off early in order to catch my ride back. The rest was a blur….

There are some great mailboxes on Signal Hill Road.

Breakfast at Coffee Matters on Military Road (I’m afraid the fruit was awful – sour, unwholesome, nearly fermented and I suspect it was a pre-cut restaurant pack rather than a salad made in house. The yogurt wasn’t good either. The coffee was ok…)

Lunch from Sweet Relic, an absolutely four star foodie joint,

in the oldest building in the oldest city in North America;

just fabulous: spinach torte with goat cheese, and a sweet potato frittata with brie. In compostable packaging, no less.

Another day, another bed….

And tonight I’m going on a Boreal Poetry Garden walk.

The Eastern front: League of Poets meeting in St John’s, Nfld.

Toronto traffic wardens waved us in and out of Pearson Airport on Thursday

where I paused at Wolfgang Puck Express and had a pretty good (though overly sweetened) bowl of butternut squash soup in a styrofoam container, with a freshly-dressed green salad on a plastic plate. How dismal the meals of today’s travellers. I thought longingly of the clever system at the Edmonton Folk Festival where you pay a deposit on a plate (not china, but better than styrofoam and disposable plastic, and still served with regrettable cutlery). Why oh why?

Then a two and a half hour flight to St John’s, with an hour and a half’s time change, making it all four and a half hours later than Victoria, if I counted that right. We landed in dense fog that made me wonder at the marvels of modern navigation systems, and was whisked away with a pair of fellow BC poets to the conference hotel, the Battery, whose name might better be changed to Battered from the smell of the fat fryer that permeated the careworn building.

My “million dollar harbour view” was this (though no water visible even when the fog lifts):

and I helped another poet decamp down the hill after being offered two different rooms, each with a unique view of a different parking lot.

Bedroom decor, St John’s style:

After one night myself in what I can only describe – even after two nights with both windows wide open – as smoky hollow, I was moved late last night to a different and less pungent room due to the massively popular party that was building steam across the hall. Although it was due to be shut down (“they won’t last long”, the security boys told me) on a third complaint, it could have been an ordeal they kindly thought I wouldn’t want to spend the night living through. The new room was better and life carried on.

The League of Poets AGM steams ahead in convivial fashion. Yesterday’s panels included Newfoundland Voice in Poetry, featuring St John’s poet laureate Agnes Walsh and screenwriter/poet Des Walsh, no relation

as well as Mary Dalton and Carmelita McGrath, speaking about the frictions and inspirations of being caught between a lively but unwritten oral culture and the alien traditions of English literature. The panelists had all lived the wave of Newfoundland poetry and publishing that began in the 1950s and grew through the 1970s with magazines like TickleAce and publishing companies like Breakwater Books to support the writers who were surfacing through that time. The Newfoundland contingent has made available copies of a new magazine, Riddle Fence so we can see for ourselves what’s happening here.

Then a panel paying tribute to Margaret Avison, who died last July, by Sally Ito, Stan Dragland, Barbara Nickel

and Maureen Scott Harris.

They paid tribute to Avison’s skills as a poet and editor, talked about her roots in Regina, her connections with the Black Mountain Poets, and read from her challenging but rewarding poetry.

And then we piled into taxis and got ourselves down the hill to City Hall for a reception, where the nibbles were like this

with circulating platters, one of them – according to its bearer – “deep fried goodness” (the usual offenders, deep fried shrimp and fish of various kinds); the other with somewhat local fare including cod tongues, which were unidentifiably battered and fried to an unidentifiable fishiness. The free bar was a great attraction, and then we sat down to enjoy new member readings

and a few words from the mayor, Dennis O’Keefe

and then were set free to seek out our own suppers in town.

We went to Restaurant 21, where the waitress rather too glibly advised us that “everything” on the menu was local. So I asked someone else where the tiger prawns came from, as it stretched credibility to say they were from Newfoundland, and the kitchen confirmed they were Thai. This is the second reputable restaurant in a row I’ve been to on this trip across Canada that proclaims its food is local – I guess that’s what they think we want to hear – when it can’t possibly be so. Live, learn and be cautious.

Anyway, Restaurant 21 was a nice place, and I liked the needlework that greeted us.

After some warm sourdough bread with four kinds of butter (plain, partridgeberry, maple and pesto),

we got an amuse-bouche of beef curry

and then I had mussels, with quite a lot of cream in the bottom,

followed by some tasty halibut sous-vide with grapefruit and black rice.

Stopped in at a kitchen party up the road, but was fading at that point so after greeting the resident tortoiseshell,

climbed the hill with a couple of compadres and (after the room-shifting had been carried out) finally hit the hay.

Ottawent

So, party’s over, and I’m back at the trail’s end/beginning.

League of Poets AGM ended after two more days of meetings and readings and meetings and readings. By the end of Saturday’s banquet I could not have eaten another bite or heard another word.

We had a keynote address on Saturday night by longtime member (indeed present at the founding meeting of the League) Margaret Atwood. She was in droll mood and after a charming and carefully bilingual introduction by Pauline Michel, she launched into a quip-packed 40th anniversary address, on the subject of Why Poetry? (Her lecture will, they tell us, be printed in full in a future issue of Prairie Fire.)

She said she’d joined the League back “when poetry was top dog,” when, like her, many of today’s Canadian novelists were beginning their careers — as poets. Recounting a couple of sweetly sordid anecdotes, she remarked that back then the poets – mostly male – were living in the afterglow of Dylan Thomas and John Berryman, and self-destructive acts were part of the job description. She felt that these days she’d send aspiring poets to plumbing school: there’s always a demand for your services; it’s easier to think about poetry when doing something with your hands; and it’s nice and dark under the sink.

So then she got to her question. Though we no longer think we can conjure rain, or even mildew, or have our heads chopped off for writing poetry, we are in a tamer age than when words were more potent. Why then do we do this poetry thing, whether written or oral, or is it built in?

Instead of providing answers, she offered what she called some potentially interesting sidelights.
1. Reading, writing and speaking are all located in different parts of the brain.
2. If the speaking part of your brain is knocked out, the singing part may still remain.
3. Words have their own address book in our brain: we recognise that John Smith is a different thing from a carrot. Poetry can serve as an aide-memoire (to prove her point, she had us filling in the blanks of Alligator pie; Alligator pie… )
4. Music, poetry and mathematics are more closely related than poetry and prose. There’s a system of pattern recognition at work that’s connected to music and math – and of course she was speaking here of rhymed and metered verse rather than “that which resembles prose”.
5. Fire and grammar are what distinguish humans from other life forms. Only humans cook their food, and having reduced the time we would have spent digesting unprocessed food, we have thus liberated up to five hours per day for other pursuits. And though animals may communicate through noise, they lack grammar. The dog can and does think in past and future tense, but no dog is likely to question where the first dog came from, and where do dogs go when they die.

Oral cultures, she went on, swam in a sea of language; but now we live on comparatively dry shores, extruding our brains into other technologies, and so that part of our brain has probably shrunk. Technology and numbers are said to represent ‘the real world’ – as opposed to the obsolete world that poets occupy. But we make what we long for, and destroy what we fear, as we have always done; these things have not changed, and we know this because we have poetry. Human imagination drives the world: it directs what we do without our tools, and poetry is part of the way we sing our being.

There followed the banquet (some very good grilled chicken or cedar-planked salmon) and awards ceremony. I was thrilled that Suzanne Buffam won the Gerald Lampert Award for her wonderful book Past Imperfect. She read the lovely poem Please Take Back the Sparrows.

The winner of the Pat Lowther Award was Sylvia Legris, for Nerve Squall, reviewed with considerable venom in the Globe and Mail earlier that day. A tragic waste of newspaper space for the single review of poetry on offer, and a badly ill-judged match of reviewer to subject, as the reviewer himself admits: “Those who enjoy linguistic foreplay, and the pinball wizardry of caroming words, will favour this book. Those like me will find that it all adds up to narcissistic inconsequence.” Well, it’s not my cup of tea either, but if it was good enough to engage the not inconsiderable intellects of the juries of both the Griffin and the Lowther awards, and prove itself the stand-out over hundreds of other collections, it can’t be as bad as all that. It would have been far more useful to hear from a critic able to explain just what that power was, in the context of all its competitors. Surely the Globe could have scraped the barrel a bit harder and found a reviewer who could deal with the book in its own terms?

A more interesting article in the Globe and Mail about the origins of ABE, the online treasure trove for book lovers.

League Day One

Day one of the League of Canadian Poets AGM (and 40th anniversary celebration) was meet ‘n greet — lots of people I haven’t seen since my first League AGM in 1993, and some I have met along the way. We had an open mic (asking for trouble, I read the Rhonda Poem, but it didn’t – as I feared – initiate a rash of “d” word mishaps) which rattled along despite the looong list of participants. It was a great way to introduce ourselves to our fellow bards. After lunch there were a couple of afternoon workshops.

I went to the poet laureate panel, which featured Pauline Michel (Poet Laureate of Canada), Louise Halfe/Sky Dancer (PL of Saskatchewan), Lorri Neilsen Glenn (PL of Halifax) and Alice Major (PL of Edmonton) plus Cyril Dabydeen who had been the second (and second last) PL of Ottawa. They spoke about their various duties and the many surprises that awaited them when they took up their laureates.

Michel spoke at length, in beautifully written English, and occasionally burst into song, about what and why she does what she does. For her the job of the poet (“we are all poet laureates”) is to promote writing as a means of artistic expression: “what is not expressed either implodes or explodes” she said; “but where do the arts firt into a culture where a good living is more imnportant than a good life?” She had managed to get funding for an assistant to schedule her events, a role that was fulfilled during the term of the first PL – George Bowering – by his wife; the requests come thick and fast and Michel said she thought three years should be the minimum length of the term to allow enough time to see through her various projects and duties.

Louise Halfe spoke first in Cree, and sang in her language as well. She assumed the Saskatchewan mantle from the province’s first PL, Glen Sorestad, and has relished her ability to reach audiences and communities that she is uniquely able to connect with. A former social worker and addictions counsellor, she says she no longer practices but has incorporated her work into her art. She remarked that once again she was the “lone Indian in the room” and that she is expected to represent all the Indians of Canada, regardless of the fact there are many nations.

Lorri Neilsen Glenn, the second PL in Hlaifax, is a year into her four year term. She has a Cree grandmother and Quebecois grandfather and has lived in Halifax for 22 years, “which of course makes me a newcomer” she said. Her appointment coincided with a cut to the municipal arts board, which was shortly followed by the resignation of the cultural officer, so she has struggled without a helping hand to coordinate her duties and help her obtain funding for events. Like the others on the panel she observed the role could easily be full time if she allowed it – though the $1200 stipend would make that tricky. She hopes to help prove that “there is more to Nova Scotia than lobster traps and people who say ‘buddy’ and ‘arse’.”

Alice Major, the first PL in Edmonton, spoke about the politics of her role. She said on her first (of potentially three) command commissions she was asked to write something for a gathering which included the premier. “What,” she asked, “can one say to Ralph Klein?” But because she was there by invitation by the supportive city council who had worked so hard to create the role she was occupying, she put her politics in her pocket and wrote something suitable to the occasion. “Nice,” said Ralph as she walked back to her seat. Her second commission she titled “The hockey poem I thought I’d never write” – a work dressed to impress her audience, it was printed in the Edmonton Journal the following day and then hit the national papers the day after. “All these volumes of verse I have written, which no more than 500 people will ever see” she mused, “and the poem that makes the national papers is the hockey poem.”

The second and last workshop I went to was about poetry in health and mental health institutions. Shirley Serviss kicked things off by describing her work at the University of Alberta Hospital in Edmonton. Working 15 hours a week at this, she is part of a group of professional artists – poets, visual artists and musicians – who are based there, together with volunteers (including poet Ted Blodgett who comes by to play the lute for patients). She described some of her efforts which take the form of anything from transcribing poems to the white boards that seemingly cover every wall, to dispensing poems to doctors, nurses and patients, to bedside work encouraging patients to talk about their lives so she can write them poems, or helping them to shape the words themselves. When she undertook an MA in Theological Studies she had thought she wanted to do a hospital chaplaincy but she prefers this work, which she has had incredibly positive feedback on from family and patients alike. She thinks it fills a gap in patient care as well. “They can turn chaplains or counsellors away,” she said, “but we disarm them: all I’m doing, after all, is giving them a thought for the day.”

Ronna Bloom is a psychotherapist who has given many workshops to health practitioners. She described one of her popular ones on overcoming personal blocks, which works well on people even if they are not writers. She is careful to explain to participants that the exercise will not solve anything, but it might give them extra information about what is blocking them in their lives or work. She pointed out that blocks are there for a reason, and it’s important to remember we might love the places we’re stuck, so her workshops are not about simply kicking them away. She says she knows the things that won’t work, and these include guilt, denial, willpower, or moving house or countries. Her workshop aims to help participants get a good clear look at their block by making it larger. She alluded to a principle of martial arts which suggests that you cannot overcome an opponent by fighting them; but if you join the opponent, you can use that energy to defeat them. And so her workshop starts by allowing participants to describe what they love and hate about the block. They write about what they really want. Ronna then reads them a poem of hers which is a blessing, and asked to write one that blesses some aspect of themselves.

Ron Charach is a psychiatrist who also writes poetry. His poetry column in the Medical Post elicited enough poetry to engender an anthology by Canadian medical practitioners, and he’s had poems in such oblique markets as The Lancet. He discussed research that had been done into connections between poets and mental illness, and ended by giving us a handy prescription to assure mental soundness to allow us to carry on writing.

  • Get enough sleep and natural light;
  • avoid substance/alcohol abuse;
  • keep some structure in your life;
  • pace those overwhelming projects;
  • maintain your relationships;
  • take all threats of suicide seriously;
  • don’t hesitate to get professional help.