To thine own self be true

Trevor Hughes. A long-time senior high English teacher like me and a good poet, likewise. (The following sonnet he read at my recent workshop on Poetic Sensibility is reprinted with his permission.)

That Room

I should have known it wasn’t left by chance,
that cluttered box-room full of junk
had no place in my mother’s scheme of things.
Old tins of paint and rusty brushes stank.
The iron bedstead clanked as it was lifted,
loose broken springs protruded from the base.
We dragged the sagging mattress on its side,
removed debris to make a new space
for me to occupy. And exorcize the curse
a dying baby leaves at night,
discharged sick from hospital. Bronchitis.
So, when her crying stopped, the door was shut.
Emerging from my old cocoon, I glimpse the stars’
cold light, feel their distant rays.

but the train has gone.”
–from “Mary Had a Baby”, a traditional Saint Helena carol adapted nicely by Bruce Cockburn on his interesting Christmas CD

(photograph: Lorri Arndt)

When I see barn doors open
I imagine who or what’s
been in or out.
The dark inside
a mystery to ponder.

This one yawns as if
an invite to warmth
and closeness of a kind.
Makes me dream of
straw possibilities that
someone’s lain in.

Deserted or forgotten
it’s hard to tell which.
Perhaps a farmhand dozes
or a girl’s gone out on chores
to fetch the cows home
after school most likely.

But today there is time
to think about the openings
of a life that moves so
slow and care-less
till one no longer knows
the facts of scenes
like this one.

ironic.

This tells you everything you need to know and basically understand. Irony makes it possible, finally, to understand and appreciate most of life. If you are too serious or can’t appreciate irony, that leaves out a lot of life experience and understanding. Lately, the times are incredibly, absurdly ironic. (Example: Trump, legalizing marijuana, etc.) And people are much too serious and narrowly-focused on their little agendas to have much empathy, tolerance, and any kind of perspective. Everything has become deadly serious to the point of violence. A good example is that Saudi woman in the news today who took off her hijab and wore a dress. There are millions of men who want to imprison, beat, kill (and throw her corpse to dogs), behead, and execute her!

I think these are among the saddest, most tragic conditions and ways of our times. Too serious, No humor. No perspective, just agendas of ego, power, and control. A penchant for knee-jerk violence, threats, and killing. No sense of irony. Everything monolithic and obvious (shallow). An inability to understand and appreciate nuance and to make common sense and reasoned distinctions. Gone is a lot of humor, a lot of empathy and caring, a lot of truth and accuracy, and a lot of sensitive and intelligent response to truly unblack-and-unwhite situations, the jagged, uneven flow of real life and real experience. Gone is a lot of richness and beauty, leaving only prejudice, discrimination, and a helluva lot of complaining, arguing, and criticizing instead. We leave in very fearful, disturbing, barbaric times that threaten to totally undo Western civilization and anything true, beautiful, and just.

(Nature is all around us from birth to death. When was the last time you really looked at skies and clouds which are constantly changing overhead? When was the last time you looked at the stars?)

(We constantly note the deaths of the famous and people we admire)

…that the larger backgrounds to my new collection of poems are Nature and Death. Both are in people’s lives all the way from birth to death. Often they are in each person’s day somewhere somehow, often significantly.

‘Ghosting’–what I call conscious moments of people dead and gone often figure in a person’s day and daily consciousness. One might see a family photo on the wall or remember a time when ——- did or said something memorable. This frequently demonstrates the influence of the past, friends, and family on one in the ever-changing here-and-now.

Nature, for me is something I grew up very close to, playing out in it in my mostly free childhood as an only child. One can’t, for instance, help but recall how weather influenced an event or how it affected an occasion, holiday, or weekend.

So, I’m pretty satisfied with those two larger contexts that frame everyone’s lives being ever-present throughout this mature collection of 52 perspective, consciousness poems. Makes perfect sense.

More than enough to pleasure
eyes or soul, take your pick.
Sirmilik does not disappoint
beyond the treeline and barrens
with its tundra and moonscapes,
the frosted mounts and few carpets of green
hugging hills you could never hope to mow.
Glaciers rolling out to basins of stone
or ice, chilblain-cold.

So which Sirmilik do you desire?
The hoodoos like motley pagan worshippers?
Hills that spill against one another?
The lake below that is cool snow-illusion?

Sirmilik, a state of raw wild being,
impossible to reduce to a clause or phrase.
Oystered boulders, snow-illumined peaks,
ranges forever spilling over,
gravelling downward everywhere you look
to multitudinous vistas.

Polar shelves and pale-layered strata.
Minute rivulets heading south or brooks
negotiating throngs of rocks.
Impossible to render except visually.
Inexplicable snowbergs without a Titanic
to waylay amid the blue or purple snow.
Striated coulees run dry
onto an interminable plain
with heaps of antlers now backlit by the sun,
just a weird dispatch from Sirmilik.

(Established in 2001, Sirmilik National Park is located in
Nunavut. Its name means “the place of glaciers.”)

Across from the Banana Republic
near an armored truck,
Duane Eddy’s “Rebel Rouser” blaring
from the corner Starbuck’s,
he sat on a Robson sidewalk,
awaiting The Second Coming
with his battered New Testament,
green porcupine exercise ball,
and a selection of
hotel body-wash bottles;
his La-la Land newspapers
weighted to the pavement
by a lint-roller and
leopard-spotted umbrella.

Head down,
he was passed by
an endless parade of
hand-held screens,
tattoos, suits,
low-cut blouses,
leashed dogs,
veiled faces,
and sunglassed-mothers
with frappes and Winners bags,
wheeling their babies by,
their eyes blind to him too.

He only came to
when I dropped a fiver
into his empty
black food tray,
smiled and said
“Ya know,
I was just dreaming
of my mother
taking me to school
for the first time
back in Thunder Bay.”

(“Only connect!” -E.M. Forster)

(to the memory of Glen Kirkland)

The grumpy queue shortened.
“No fat” decreed the matron
in front of me.
“No whip” cried her friend.

“Next” and a barrista’s
what’s-your-pleasure look.
“Latte,” I asked
and settled for a tall.

Oh, the way she pulled
the nozzle down
and wiped it clean
left no doubt she knew
how to handle a customer,
brisk and business-like.

“Do you want foam?”
she whispered, pumping
and I pondered her performance
and Sigmund Freud–
Would he have had his grande?

“How come no men serve?”
I ventured.
She smirked and shot back
“They don’t keep things clean.”
“Ah,” I said, suppressing a grin
and stirred my poem to go.

marijuana is being legalized in Canada for the simple reasons of federal government greed and its desire to make a ton of money. Ethics, morality, and the negative effects on health, road safety, and children’s safety don’t matter. Much as in the drones that will eventually crash into people, buildings, and airplanes.
We’re talking a big shift away from humanism, safety, and common sense. A sign of the ever-devolving and destructive times we live in.

(notes on my own poetic sensibility, from the recent workshop, based on a recent poem)

………………………………………………………………………………………….

…and the possibilities of new friends, unexpectedly. Even kindred spirits, potentially.
UK-born (and now living in France) Trevor Hughes and I will have our first coffee today at Block 1912 in the Frozen North that is Edmo out there this morning. I met Trevor at a unique, amazing workshop I gave a few weeks back on Poetic Sensibility. He is visiting family in the city till the end of December and read at Audrey’s the following day. At the workshop, he presented a strong poem which he wrote, and I have invited him to bring more of his work to coffee.

Like me, he taught secondary ELA into the 2000s. he has a similar interest in poets (including a personal favorite–Robert Frost). Today we will, no doubt, chat further about poetry, English literature, English culture, and compare notes on our teaching experiences and memories. I am looking forward to the sharing and perhaps beginning of an unexpected friendship. Serendipity and dumb luck–lots of it–the way most of my life has gone, fortunately. My life continues to complete itself, following my bliss and filling in more missing pieces in the pursuit of happiness.