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we, we multitude on sun blossomed leaves

dark spotting petal pistol stamen knowing each flower’s golden mean

  • Music ‘n poetry

    Just received my brochure for the Wired Writing Studio which starts with the Banff Centre residency October 2-14, 2006. A wonderful thing is Wired. Robert Hilles and Marilyn Dumont will be excellent poetry resources. Fred Stenson runs a comradely ship, with the hilariously droll technical support stylings of Chris Fisher. The food’s not bad either, and there are some great deals on concerts for participants: I began my lifetime of fandom to the Jaybirds early in my stay, and also attended a bone-shaking appearance by Steve Earle and the Dukes (I prefer him acoustic, thanks, but good to have had the experience). And the Calgary/Banff Wordfest happens during the studio time as well. Geez, what am I waiting for??

    Among the many musical offerings we noticed in Austin, the best ones all seemed scheduled to begin after we left. The rodeo, the SXSW conference, everyone but AWP seems to schedule music. (Actually that’s not fair: there was a boogie night at AWP that we were simply too whacked to attend.) Playing in town after we left: Eliza Gilkyson, Ruthie Foster, The Gourds, Bela Fleck & the Flecktones, Lucinda Williams, Rhonda Vincent. It’s not fair it’s not it’s not. But I have to think, on the other hand, why do I know about these people? Because I have seen them play way up here, at the Vancouver Island Music Festival in Courtenay/Comox, and the Edmonton Folk Music Festival. All that is except Bela and he comes up here from time to time, so I live in hope. And except Lucinda, because you have to have some event to look forward to.

    So I spent yesterday meditating on oulipo. It sounds like about as much fun as you can have with poetry, but I need more than that, or do I mean less, to move me in a poem, and I wonder at the wisdom of narrowing the readership of the already microscopic readership of poetry for the sake of intellectual gymnastics. Old fartism I suppose, and there are doubtless many fine, coherent examples out there I wouldn’t guess were oulipean. Christian Bok certainly made headlines with Eunoia a couple of years ago, each section consisting of poems made of words that use only one vowel. Damned clever it may be, but it’s not for me, except in small doses. There’s no getting around the fact you have to compromise the sense of a line when you’re performing that scale of legerdemain. Anyway, I found a charming interview by John Ashbery with Harry Mathews, the only American oulipoean, which was worth the journey.

    So the point of all this was that we had to invent our own form and write a poem in it for last night’s class. I decided, since I was in sonnet mode, to mess with that. I took the end-rhymed words from an existing sonnet (arbitrarily chosen; I used Richard Wilbur’s Praise in Summer) and used them as the first word of each line of a new poem. To escalate the challenge, I decided to invert the metre into predominantly trochaic pentameter (which makes sense since the chosen words were stressed syllables from the end of iambic pentameter lines) and to rhyme as best I could the first word of the line with the last, so that the poem still rhymes (murderous rhyme scheme too: ababbcbccdcdaa), but it does so at both ends of the line, which pleased my symmetrical soul. Some of the rhymes had to be feminine rather than masculine, and a lot of them are very loose, but I did what I could. And I thought I should mirror, to some extent, the meaning of the source poem, so mine is a rant about winter. It took me so long to write it ended up being an imperfect first draft and I’m waiting for workshop feedback next week before I carry on working it, but I enjoyed the challenge.

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  • Sonnets a-gogo

    Double-barrelled week for me, this. I missed last week’s class on sonnets and am plunging in to the one on oulipo. Thought I’d catch up on last week by reading the always readable Don Paterson‘s introduction to his anthology, 101 Sonnets. He did not disappoint:

    “Academics, in particular, have talked an awful lot of rubbish on the subject of rhyme; they often make the crucial error of failing to understand that the poem ends up on the page as a result of a messy and unique process, not a single operation.”

    “Rhyme always unifies sense, and can make sense out of nonsense; it can trick a logic from the shadows where one would not have otherwise existed.”

    “…[the sonnet is] a box for [poets’] dreams, and represents one of the most characteristic shapes human thought can take. Poets write sonnets because it makes poems easier to write. Readers read them because it makes their lives easier to bear.”

    And the anthology is a little treasure, not least because of Paterson’s brief notes on each piece tucked away at the back of the book. So helpful to have had someone else do the brow-clutching and rhyme analysis for us.

    I also enjoyed reading the American queen of formalism, Marilyn Hacker, who wrote the chapter on sonnets in An Exaltation of Forms. She notes that the North American rant against form often uses the sonnet as its kicking post, and that this scale of objection is absent from British and Irish debate “perhaps because the sonnet, if an ‘interloper’ from the Romance languages, nonetheless has five hundred years of history in their literature…” And nonetheless herself finds early and perhaps unexpected examples in American literature: Ezra Pound, H.D. and Gwendolyn Brooks.

    What both poets say is that sonnets have had a bad rap, to be tagged as difficult and constricting. But poets, it seems – if the Oulipians are anything to go by – not only thrive on difficulty but invent it if it appears to be lacking in their lives:

    Raymond Queneau, Oulipo’s co-founder: Oulipians are “Rats who build the labyrinth from which they will try to escape.”

    As for eats, this week has been a wash since return from foodsville, TX. Not least because there’s been no time to get to the grocery store and I’ve been surviving on things I stashed in the freezer before I left, and a few limp vegetables that survived my absence. I did attempt cajun blackened ribs last night, but although they were acceptably spicy, I’d call them undistinguished. I think I prefer tomato-based rib recipes. The spice mix will be employed in further experimentation once the weather warms enough to bring out the barbecue.

    Anyway, Anton the awesome is returning for indefinite stay tomorrow. Maybe I’ll make him some Flea Fighting Biscuits to welcome him home? These rely heavily on garlic and brewer’s yeast to work their magic. Gives dog breath a whole new dimension…

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  • Collisions with poems

    Here’s another quote from the Don’t Ask Me What I Mean anthology:

    “The poet only speaks one way. He hears nothing back. His words as he utters them are not conditioned by a real ear replying from the other side… He never knows who will collide with [the poem] and maybe even use it as a different utensil from what he intended.” —W.S. Graham

    A good ‘un for anyone who’s had their poems workshopped or reviewed… or indeed even had their poem used in a sermon. Which was my experience: a friend googled me a few years ago and discovered the text of a Mother’s Day sermon based upon my poem The Boston School of Cooking Cookbook. I wondered how the sermonizer had found it (he was from the Unitarian Universalist Church, in Chandler, Arizona) until another friend mentioned she’d seen my name in a women’s poetry anthology, Claiming the Spirit Within: A Sourcebook of Women’s Poetry, which I discovered came out in 1996. I bought my contributor’s copy from Abe last year. According to the permissions listed in the book, the poem appears courtesy of Iris, where it first appeared, and from whom I never received a contributor’s copy either. Who knows why. I’d probably moved by the time the poem appeared in the journal. That all happened back before googling and email made it easier to track people down I guess.

    I’d also had to buy my own contributor’s copy when I discovered (by googling myself this time) that my poem Circle Game appeared in Thru the Smoky End Boards: Canadian Poetry About Sport & Games . But that was after a few fruitless go-rounds from my publisher to them at Polestar / Raincoast. I’m always charmed to appear in anthologies, but it gets tiresome when it actually costs me money to have my poems published.

    The well-travelled poet Glen Sorestad has just returned to Saskatoon from a different part of Texas. We’ve been doing a kind of long distance duet lately: I went to Saskatoon a couple of days before he left for Victoria. He returned from Victoria the day I left for Victoria. And we both left for Texas the same week. Down in Brownsville he was part of a reading which to his surprise and delight the local paper actually reviewed. Good on them. What kind of world could this be if we were able to get poetry books reviewed in our newspapers, and readings too?

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Book cover of Rhona McAdam's book Larder with still life painting of lemons and lemon branches with blossoms in a ceramic bowl. One of the lemons has a beed on it.

In her latest collection, Rhona McAdam navigates the dark places of human movement through the earth and the exquisite intricacies lingering in backyard gardens and farmlands populated by insects and pollinators, all the while returning to the body, to the tune of staccato beats and the newly discovered symmetries within the human heart.

Enjoy

“…A beautiful, filling collection, Larder is a set of poems to read at the change of the seasons, to appreciate alongside a good meal, and to remind yourself of the beauty in everything, even the things you may not appreciate before opening McAdam’s collection….”

Alison Manley

Rhona McAdam is a writer, poet, editor, and Registered Holistic Nutritionist with a Master’s in Food Culture from Italy and a deep-rooted passion for ecology and urban agriculture. Her work spans corporate and technical writing to poetry and creative nonfiction, often exploring the vital links between what we eat and how we live. Based in Victoria, BC, and available via Zoom, Rhona is always open to new writing commissions, readings, or workshops on nutrition and the culinary arts.

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