Newfoundland’s Christopher Pratt is an old favorite; my wife and I first saw and were impressed by a selection his early works when they were featured in the old Edmonton Art Gallery in 1971-72 thereabouts. They were often of houses, windows, the sea, animals, and women. We were struck by how clean, symmetrical, and picture-perfect his work was. With his passing and Alex Colville’s, Canada has lost its two best, well-known Maritime artists.
There are no available ambulances.
Thank you, UCP, for gutting the AB health system allowing thousands more people to die because they can’t get emergency services, necessary operations, and enough beds, nurses and doctors to take care of the sick. A pox on all of Kenney’s/UCP’s enablers that have broken the health care system while doling out tons of free money for far less important things.
Under conservative governments going back to the 1990s, human life and health and education are the absolute lowest priorities in Alberta. “Let ’em die and be dumbed down so they can grow up to keep voting in UCP governments.”
I don’t view this deliberate, willful disregard and callousness of government to be much different from the GOP indifference to the egregious deaths of school children in Texas. An attitude cut from a similar, shameless, care-less political cloth.
Let there be light! Thank god for advances in medical technology. Cataract surgery–as we know it– came into being some 3 decades ago. Prior to that, people lost their eyesight more frequently. Think of all the great people who might have benefited from this procedure in the past: Milton, Helen Keller, Homer, et al.
The recovery period after surgery is particularly illuminating with extra flashes of light at the edges here and there. My two procedures made me more conscious of and grateful for light and its attendant powers and aspects. Even something like the stars on our house’s downstairs ceilings were more vivid. In a strange way, the surgeries also led to many epiphanies about self.
“To be or not to be, that is the question” every day for the living relative to death. There is a fragile temporalness and transcience to all life. As they used to say, “Here today, gone tomorrow.” This became more of widespread random reality for a lot of folks the past two years, especially for those who are no longer with us.
another vandal-nutcase broke into the Dallas Museum of Art to destroy $5 million of its art because he was “mad at his girlfriend”.
Shades of GOP election-stealing ‘reasoning’, we are getting down to the most frivolous of motivations used to rationalize the stupid destruction of the world’s best artworks.
Museum security will need to be upped to prevent the wanton destruction these idiots are inflicting on the best visual works and artifacts that have been created by humankind. Willful destroyers of Western culture and civilization should receive stiff jail time and fines in the thousands and millions.
An interesting book on another (long-time) art crime:
I vaguely recall elementary students having to put up 1 or 2 fingers to go to the bathroom. Such specificity and detail for all in the classroom to see and know. Unnecessary public humiliation, methinks.
What did it matter in the great scheme of things to distinguish between 1 and 2? Whose business was that? Why?
Only in Vancouver. On holiday several years ago near Stanley Park, I was surprised to see someone rappelling down the side of a condo hi-rise. We were just then heading out from our hotel so I had to write the poem later to bring the rappeller to the ground safely.
(freezing our ….. off at Peggy’s Cove in the ’80s at one of the English conferences that took us from Newfoundland to Vancouver selling over a million books in the process; the Legendary Kirkland on the left)
The late Glen Kirkland, my educational textbook co-author from 1978 to 2000. We shared many overlapping interests, values, and views, partnering for many other projects, too, like 2 plays at the Edmonton Fringe and Spiritus–a memorable performance poetry trio (with the late Dean McKenzie for about 15 years).
I would never have written this poem if I had never met Glen and experienced his naughty, quirky subliminal takes on the sexes and male-female relationships. The metaphors and symbolism tended to spill over from his work to mine even for such simple scenes as a coffee shop line-up in this poem. We both played with words in our work and enjoyed double entendres–a lost art in the oh-so limited/literal, ultra-serious politically-correct public forums that no longer fully appreciate a love of word play or irony of olde.
Bonus: one of Glen’s oft-read poems
I often happen to be where poems occur. This one emerging immediately after a Stroll of Poets financial records meeting at Alice’s. (I finished taking dictation in the van afterward before I drove off.)
Ivan and I had been informally discussing religiosity and spirituality as a feather suddenly descended onto my van. One of those moments when you question whether some kind of synchronicity or ‘answer’ is occurring in response to a context. Yes, just about anything and everything is possible often unfolding in unexpected juxtapositions one is simultaneously conscious of.
