Elegy by John Glenday

Elegy

and now that

his song is done

open your hands

there can be no

harm in that

let the notes go

let them become

ash in the wind

gone back

not to nothing

no

to everything

John Glenday is the author of two poetry collections, Undark & Grain (Nominated for the Griffin Prize). He lives in Scotland.

route by Barbara Langhorst

route

1.

thud  (a death in the house) 

the strong beating of portents returns and how poetry moves 

the gray bird hangs (dismiss signs) suspended moving in rhythm feathers splayed  

such odd calm my long fear  reality  helpless voyager folding wings  breast crushed

to the screen  eyes  darting  confidence  regaining  long long minutes  this smash

of the heart 

and suddenly  flight

2.

and suddenly  flight

or flit the freedom of yellow amongst august leaves  gold above and below black wing

last week a glancing note  faced with a name scrawled 500 miles away at my man's work migration halts for fear of deep water   forced on by cold (o wild canary of my youth) american goldfinch mates late  so vibrant a cautious approach

to the season

in our reckless garden

3.

in our reckless garden

sweet clover scotch climate russian thistle and yarrow tall stand a promise to legions

a phalanx of sparrows pick at the well-soaked alfalfa wild war mosquito and blackfly

a mite in my eye (castenada's gnat  guarding the next new dimension) fear devours my undulating delphinium world  monsoon summer a changed saskatchewan  a gray convention mobs

the blue glowing screen

4.

the blue glowing screen

tells all  chickadee brains (too tiny for irrelevancies) shed details that pertain no more regrow neurons in fall   register fresh seed caches   my aging mind  forgets    details

retains the way  not the matter   search for a black-capped bird online by headgear

find cornell lab report  fall feeding moves from insects to seeds  wild chickadee casts pathways anew

recaps flight to the source

5.

recaps flight to the source

the mystic mind hums   interaction calls an immanent world to light on monastic

paw  from sources unseen (o so intimate)  wired  household canaries take radical paths ditch last year's song learn fresh each fall as one first beginning to build the talent

for immortality hatched in one's children  the celebrant clears thick aphasic slush

in karmic shed

the diminished heart flies light

6.

the diminished heart flies light

in deeper solitude each burst of pain  a brush or touch transcends lost words

rescinds berkeley's fallen tree  what song heats february or august apocalypse

that monitors   an interface glimpsed through a veil  projects surplus shadows  

such reckless concentric wars articulate change the constant of love of fear

and immanent life

thud  (a death in the house)

7.

thud  (a death in the house)

the diminished heart flies light

recaps flight to the source

the blue glowing screen

in our reckless garden

and suddenly   

flight

Barbara Langhorst's first book of poetry, restless white fields, was published in April 2012 (NeWest Press).  Her work has appeared in CV2, filling station, the Society, and the collection Bush Dweller (2010).  Born and educated in Edmonton, AB, she holds a PhD from the University of Alberta and teaches at St. Peter's College in Muenster, SK, where she has had the pleasure of meeting many of Canada's finest writers.

basho meets sappho meets burroghs IV & inkbox by Peter Ciccariello

 

   Peter Ciccariello lives and creates on the edge of a forest in Northeast Connecticut. His work has been widely exhibited internationally and in the United States.

Ciccariello explores diverse sources of material for his collage-based 3-D image poems including high resolution scans, digital photography and 3-D typographical models, culling most of his material from the fields and forests of New England.

His cross-genre, interdisciplinary work has been exhibited at Brown University in Providence, RI, Harvard University, Boston, MA, The University of Arizona Poetry Center, Tucson, AZ, and most recently will be included in the “Back to the Future” exhibition at Texas A&M International University.

Ciccariello’s work has appeared in print & online, in amongst other places, Poetry Magazine, Fogged Clarity, Hesa inprint, MAINTENANT 5, A Journal of Contemporary Dada Writing and Art , Leonardo On-Line, National Gallery of Writing, and the Adirondack Review

'Most Trusted Remedy' by Kimmy Beach

Most Trusted Remedy

in the numb, yellow plummet of September, I would settle you

under the Mexican blankets on my couch. a sweating Margarita on the coffee table.

a green cloth napkin. custard-filled croissant from an elusive café we don’t yet have

up here. powdered sugar and roasted almonds flaking your fingers.

you would surely ask me, but I wouldn’t tell you how I acquired such a foreign treat

in this baked goods wasteland of Tims and nothing else. (we women must have

some secrets left to us.)

if you weren’t so goddamn far from me now, I know just how I’d soothe you.

the crunching ache. twitching cartilage and veins. I know just what I’d say: I need to

get the laundry. into your left hand, I’d place

I don’t know what book. the libretto of our favourite musical? it wouldn’t matter.

you know it by heart.

in the leftover, dirty-windowed sun, I’d pull hot towels and sheets from the dryer. spill them into the basket, a tangle of eggshell and cream. I’d carry it - balanced on one hip -

to where you’re curled up. dump it unceremoniously over your exhausted body. 

my mother’s most trusted remedy for all ills: moved-away friends, the sniffles,

shattered families. rattle and swirl of drying towels a promise of hot, powder-scented burial. on the saddest of days, she’d pull all the tea towels,

old rags out of the cupboards. throw everything clean in there: a falling mountain

of warm cotton big enough for three. wiping our hidden eyes

on purple pillow slips and Bugs Bunny beach towels.

your pills would fail you after a while. an hours-long rattle ahead of you now. your hands moving without your agency. fingers under shuddering kitchen towels stained  moussaka eggplant and Marks&Spencer-tea brown.

I’d wait for it to ooze its vanilla warmth into you, then lift the worn linen

from your shoulder. your quivering wrist. reveal you, calmer

under blankets and - hopefully

- sleeping. dream of stillness. everything back in the dryer, just in case.

Kimmy Beach's fifth collection of poetry, The Last Temptation of Bond, is forthcoming from The University of Alberta Press in 2013. Kimmy was co-facilitator (along with John Gould) at Sage Hill Writing Experience in the summer of 2012. She has read across the country and in Liverpool, UK. She writes from Red Deer, Alberta, where she lives with her husband, Stu.

Get the poet upstairs by George Bowering

Get the Poet Upstairs

Get the poet upstairs however you can,

push on the seat of his pants if necessary,

         peel his fingers away from his pen,

then frisk him for other writing utensils,

         check out his shoes and his coat

         lapel,

tell him it’s time to take a rest, five

         poems a day about every stray cat

and lame dog are too many for any poet

         or reader,

advise him to close both his eyes, say omm

         and then omm, until the whole universe

         drops by,

ask him to get into his striped jammies, no slippers,

         lie down and remember yesterday’s poem

         about the bum on Yonge Street,

then let it go, familiar face in a comfy world, to

         walk into the library, let it go to

         find its friends between the covers

         of the university anthology.

                  Translation of “Get the Poem Outdoors” by Raymond Souster

George Bowering is a serious older poet who also writes fiction,
even history and memoirs. His latest book is Pinboy (Cormorant), a novel in the form of a memoir or the other way round. His next book of poetry will be Teeth (Mansfield) in 2013.

Two poems by Jill Jones

Cirque du Suburbia

The thing you think of is jangling the breast bone

you don’t splurge or heave but it threatens like morning

Someone’s been hiding the ducks and tangling the burbsong

almost in jest, chirpy-chirpy cheep-cheep, as nuts with guns

short cut down classy streets with beautiful mullets and nipples

The whole town is tempted onto the showboat, even I

was drooling about the new weather, the way RayBans

fit an image that’s deceased or a tiara if you need

an unhealthy respect for precious minerals, abandoned atmospheres

misreading the lux aeterna through a plain curtain

Nothing repeats like television or spaghetti, we’re told to

save it with our golden slumbers weighing more than you think

Verisimilitude seems like a good idea until

the autumn snow of tax deals starts hackling the yard

Impossibility

Each day is impossible

I fight with contours.

My horizon breathes its narrow fog

militaries hedgehop by day.

Dusty trees tremble

in darkness.

Silver-plated clouds and tiny craters

slip stones into my mouth.

Here I wait for breaks at sea

cracks in holes made by language.

I’m a stone at the base

where each word will be stolen.

I head for a pale yellow distance

or die into my life.

Jill Jones has published six full-length poetry collections, most recently Dark Bright Doors in 2010. She recently published Senses Working Out, a Vagabond Press Rare Object chapbook. A new full-length book, Ash Is Here, So Are Stars, will be published in 2012. She won the 2003 Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize for Screens Jets Heaven and the 1993 Mary Gilmore Award for The Mask and the Jagged Star. 

'Elidius thinks of death' by Lawrence Upton

Elidius thinks of death

I can imagine being dead –

and, presumably, removed as waste –

being, nevertheless, being,

more aware than I'd been living

alive to an aesthetic sense,

full of my own centrality

as one is of anything dominant

even if it is not present

knowing hearing filling a head

beyond the imagination

and impossible in one deceased

neither in heaven nor in hell

a consciousness concentrating

on now and now and now and now

to an outside metrication

without understanding without

the dimension of dimensions

a pendulum slowly turning

unto circles of rounding self

into circles of rounded self

(Saint) Elidius is one of the English names of one who may have lived at some time after the Roman period on Scilly. There is no evidence of him apart from the earlier name of St Helen's island, Insula Sancti Elidii. His feast day is 8^th August. Until now he has had no hagiographer.

 

Lawrence Upton; poet; graphic & sound artist. Most recent publications wrack (Quarter After, 2012); Memory Fictions (Argotist Online, 2012); and Unframed Pictures (Writers Forum, 2011). Recent exhibition: from recent projects, London 2012 + collaborative exhibitions with Guy Begbie. Currently Honorary Research Fellow, Goldsmiths, University of London.

Swoon by Shawna Lemay

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SWOON

I thought by now I’d have logged more time with the women who come and go talking of Michelangelo. Or Anselm Kiefer or Judy Chicago or Paula Modersohn-Becker. In my twenties I went to university because I imagined I’d have long conversations about the nature of art, of beauty. That just going to university would be the beginning of this conversation. And it was, only mostly I have it with myself.

Who has time to think about beauty, or read essays by Susan Sontag where she quotes Gertrude Stein who said that to call a work of art beautiful means that it is dead. Is beauty dead? Are we deadened? Do we believe in art? How that question is tied to the one, do we believe in beauty? Well, we might not, we might not believe in or be consoled by delicate and breakable old beauty, but Sontag says that: “the capacity to be overwhelmed by the beautiful is astonishingly sturdy and survives amidst the harshest distractions.” We can experience beauty, even if it is sometimes tough to believe in. I believe we can still be astonished by beauty and apples, if not by Vogue magazine and the way 14 year old girls are used to advertise products targeted at 45 year old women.

If you study art or write poetry it’s impossible to avoid the subject of beauty, or at least it should be IMHO. You might ramble through the history of beauty, of aesthetics. Hit upon Kant, Nietzsche, Sartre, read the lines by Keats, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty ,—that is all. / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” This is just the tip of the philosophy of beauty iceberg of course, and you can’t think about beauty without bringing in ideas of the sublime, or wrestle with the notion of ugliness.

It’s become unfashionable to talk about beauty, beauty has become neglected, you read this from time to time. It’s problematic, it’s suspect. And it is, you know it is. But people are still arguing for it, quietly, persistently. Kinds of beauty, rather than Beauty. Which itself is pretty beautiful.

What do we talk about when we talk about beauty? (That’s a bit of a rip-off of a Raymond Carver title which you probably knew but in case you didn’t. It’s impossible to catch every single allusion right?). I like to talk about how it’s never one thing, that there are so many possible permutations and that it’s always shifting, our idea of what might be beautiful. The hairstyles and shoes of the 18^th century compared to the ones in the 21^st century. Discuss.

I make it a point to read or make or attempt to write something beautiful every day. So much failure.

You might say failure has a side to it that’s quite beautiful and light-filled. There’s the potential for light, sidelight, in these instances.

Maybe I’m more interested in light these days than beauty. The way it eases through the slats in a fence late in the day, so golden and sneaky and surprising.

I’m interested in being overwhelmed by beauty, the sturdy experience of it. I’m interested in the swoon. That thing that happens before something overwhelming. A sort of brain-swoon, like brain freeze, the thing you get when you quickly drink a slushy drink from the corner chain store. You’ve mixed it just the way you like, lime, cream soda and coke with a touch of Mountain Dew on top. A kind of ugly sluiced rainbow. Which has nothing to do with the sensation – the sensation that you expect but doubt.

What about the people who drive to their jobs in office towers or warehouses or windowless shopping malls? I guess I’ve been one of those people often enough. So let me tell you it’s quite possible that the expectation or hope of brain-swoon melts away from you. And it hurts, throbs, if you’ve known beauty however thinly, however splintered.

Listen. If I have known beauty

let’s say I came to it

asking

(That’s Phyllis Webb)

I’ve learned to stay away from women who come and go and refuse to talk about Michelangelo. Of course with the friends I have, we talk about our children as well, about what and who we love, and sometimes we exchange recipes and gossip and tell stories. But there’s this one person I keep meeting, Helene Cixous talks about this phenomena, of meeting the same person in a different guise throughout a life, the one who impedes us from living joy. Living the blue flower. Or reaching for the blue flower. The blue and delicate longing that lies incessantly at one’s heart.

"I have no craving to be rich, but I long to see the blue flower. It lies incessantly at my heart and I can imagine and think of nothing else. Never did I feel like this before. It is as if until now I had been dreaming, or as if sleep had carried me into another world. For in the world I used to live in, who would have troubled himself about flowers?"

(This is from the novel The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald about the German poet and philosopher Novalis)

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In Buddhism, there is also the recognition of the soul who repeats in your life, for a reason. Which has to do with what you can learn from that person, how to be kinder, better. Remember the rules that Henry James set out: 'Three things in human life are important: the first is to be kind; the second is to be kind; and the third is to be kind." Or maybe in repeated meetings, encounters, what happens is that you learn how to relate to this person who perhaps works in the cubicle next to you every single livelong day so that you can smile like the Dalai Llama. You learn how to smile and wave, smile and wave, and how to be in their presence, at peace with yourself and you find out how at last, you can simply take a few steps back, and then walk away, smiling.

.

There is the beauty of thanking one’s enemies. There were two bully girls, we called them the mean girls, where I once worked, years ago now. I tried many approaches with them. But in the end I read somewhere that sometimes the only way to resolve such dreadful blue flower killing episodes is with your feet. So I left. And it took me a while to find beauty again, but you know it was always there. It took years but now I thank them, even though for a while I felt like the next best thing to unemployable, because of the paths I’ve been on since. Without their insidious and secret meanness who knows where I’d be.

A terrible thought got me through this ordeal with the mean girls though. I didn’t think they knew how to experience beauty, and I did. Rotten, I know, and possibly wrong. For them, I imagined a murky rainbow brain freeze rather than brain swoon. Still do. Can’t help it.

Be happy and write. That’s a line from an Ondaatje poem. I always think of the line in fancy curly brackets, but I don’t think it’s printed this way. {Be happy and write}. It’s sort of a happy/beautiful line though because it’s so futile. Even so it’s bored into me. Someone is telling this to the narrator who is going through a kind of personal hell, fleeting though it is, he has no way of seeing his way out at present. The narrator responds, not happy, but lucky, yes.

When I’m writing I’m usually happy, but kind of a weird tortured perfectly grey happy you know. A delicate heartbreaking tenuous happy. An overcast happy but with that soft light on a light blue wall. Rilke (who Ondaatje references in his poem) says, “I basically do not believe that it matters to be happy in the sense in which people expect to be happy.” I have this underlined in my copy in a very vibrant spring green colour. May green.

Rilke, this mournful castle dwelling creature has a lot to say about working cheerfully, about how magnificent this unforeseeable life of ours is, how to endure, how to get through. His was a gloomy happiness, and what beauty he produced! Impossible to argue with that at least it is for me.

The passionate flying of strange birds and terrifying angels. That’s as good a plagiarized definition of beauty as any perhaps.

The rejection of beauty troubles me. How people hold themselves quite intentionally from the experience of beauty. A withholding of the self. I guess I’ve made peace with the rejection of things that I’ve made, things I’ve tried to fill with light so that they might be of interest. I’m interested in strange little bits myself, things not for everyone. Beauty for mad women, that kind of beauty. The kind of beauty that refuses to be called dead. I’m interested yes in going on, working toward it anyway.

 Shawna Lemay is a writer who has published five books of poetry, a book of essays, and an experimental novel.  She is currently working on her second novel as well as a long prose piece on beauty. She works part time at the Edmonton Public library.

Two by Pierre Joris

Two by Pierre Joris

R Train Spotting

young man

head shaven

pale serious mien

agingly punkish

reading deeply

in Spinoza’s Ethics

from 59^th Street

until he gets out

at Pacific, sud-

denly gone

before I can doff

my cap verbally

or even nod

approval.

2.28.2012

QUERY

how can I get

from seepage

to sea page

this morning

without leaving

this seeded page?

Pierre Joris is a poet, translator, essayist & anthologist who has published more than 40 books. Just out: Exile is My Trade: A Habib Tengour Reader and Pierre Joris:  Cartographies of the In-between, edited by Peter Cockelbergh. Forthcoming are Meditations on the Stations of Mansur al-Hallaj (poems, Chax Press), The University of California Book of North African Literature (anthology), Aljibar America (Poems 2000-2011 Black Widow Press,) & his translations of The Collected Late Poems of Paul Celan (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux).