The Fred Cogswell Award for Excellence in Poetry

There was always a pen or a pencil and a book of blank pages. Then one day a black vinyl sketchbook Carolin gave me, inside which came figures drawn, printed or pasted, if sourced from a magazine or, like a leaf, from Nature. In my early twenties -- poems brought to life through an interest in reading them, especially new ones (like mine might be).

The magazines that published new poems were in the UVic Periodical Library, and I can still see myself walking through its doors and strolling excitedly towards them, spaced out flat on gun metal shelves. Prism International, Antigonish Review, The Fiddlehead ...

My first submissions were rejected. One from The Fiddlehead included a clipped-on note encouraging me to "Please re-sumit!" A second submission to The Fiddlehead was returned with notes on the pages! A third had notes on the pages but also a paragraph on a separate card identifying what the editor thought I was and wasn't doing.

My fourth submission to The Fiddlehead contained five poems that did not so much come to me, as ideas or feelings, but through me. These were poems that felt easy to me, too easy, but in another way felt right, as in true. Two of them ("Hitch-hiked" and "Leaving Liberia") were accepted for publication (No. 138, Winter, 1984) by the person who had read my work from the first submission, Fred Cogswell.

I never met Fred Cogswell, but last week I was notified by my publisher that our book 9x11 and other  poems like Bird, Nine, x and Eleven is one of five titles shortlisted (by judge Fred Wah) for the Royal City Literary Arts Society's 2019 Fred Cogswell Award for Excellence in Poetry. Yet another of life's infinite circles returned.

Poetry Workshop

Just a quick note to apprise you of a Poetry Workshop I have devised and will be facilitating for Mobil Art School at the Sun Wah Building in Chinatown on Saturday October 19 10:00am - 1pm.

The focus of the workshop is on writing inspired by the writings of others. In this instance, writing poems from extant song lyrics.

Without getting too complicated, I have developed a method for creating "original" poems that bear no (visible) relation to their source -- very often turning injurious songs (misogynist, bullying, hateful) into more meditative, reflective poems.

Here's a link to the remarkable Mobil Art School, which I urge you to look up if you have not heard of it. (Lower Mainlanders are badly in need of an art school after ECUAD turned into an Institute, then a College, and now a University!) https://www.mobil-art.ca (Scroll down for the school's Misson Statement.)

Guess Who's Coming to Vancouver?

A 40+ year Cindy Sherman survey comes to the Vancouver Art Gallery this month. The question is, Will it include her Bus Riders (1976-2000) series, where she dressed up as NYC bus riders -- Black, white and of Colour?

am friendly, people

feel comfortable

approaching, sharing

their lives, listened to

with interest, without

judgement, leaving

happy, returning

to a world of doubt

angry for sharing

so freely is how

I came to love them

Two Scenes of Glass and Passion

In Dr. Zhivago (1965), Zhivago says goodbye to Lara, knowing he will never see her again. As her sled departs, he races upstairs because he can't get enough of her.

In Body Heat (1981), Matty says goodnight to Ned, who walks back to his car, only to return to the doorstep where he sees Matty staring at him through a window. He tries the door -- it is locked. He moves to another window (locked), then a glass door (also locked), before throwing a chair through it.

The Sixties (2009)

While searching MacLeod's for more Georges Simenon, I noticed atop one of the store's many thigh-high bookstacks a copy of Jenny Diski's The Sixties (2009). Having just finished Myra Friedman's tour of that decade (via the life of Janis Joplin), I thought it time to consult what others have to say about these years, how the English experience might differ from notable American commentators like Joan Didion, who all but owns the decade with books like The White Album (1979) and Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968).

And so it was that I purchased The Sixties (along with two Simenons), digging into it on the bus ride back to Cedar Cottage. As this was my introduction to Diski, I had no expectations. The only thing I knew of her writing is that it is loved by her readers, very few of whom have ever had the time to tell me why -- apart from the usual kite tail of superlatives.

With the book's Introduction ingested, I climbed the hill from Knight Street, reflecting on the author's insights, the best of which are rooted in a World War that could still be smelled on the walls of Coventry Cathedral when I visited there in September 1980. More unexpectedly was Diski's penchant for the long line, which brought to mind another long liner, Doris Lessing, who was roughed up by the shorter line Didion in an essay that appears in The White Album. Interesting to read that Diski was taken in by Lessing at the age of 16 -- the year before many Brits and Americans agree is the beginning of a decade that ran from 1964-1973.

Here is the concluding paragraph of Diski's "Introduction":

We really didn't see it coming, the new world of rabid individualism and the sanctity of profit. But perhaps that is only to be expected. It's possible after all that we were simply young, and now we are simply old and looking back as every generation does nostalgically to our best of times. Perhaps the Sixties are an idea that has had its day and lingers along after its time. Except, of course, the music. (9)

Poetry in Transit

It's been 23 years since poetry and Vancouver's buses started hanging out together. In the early days, poems were printed onto 11x17 sized cards and placed alongside commercial advertising above the windows inside the bus. If you squinted, you could read them from your seat.

The buses I ride on these days (mostly the #19 and #22) still have these advertising strips, and occasionally I'll see a Poetry in Transit poem. A step up from poems on buses are poems in bus shelter windows.

The picture above was taken at the northwest corner of Fraser and Knight. One can see that the window of this bus shelter is occupied by Poetry in Transit, and to a lesser extent, its sponsored poem (an excerpt from Pamela Porter's "Moon, owl, stone"). Great to see -- but to see it like this?

Is it right that a space reserved for poetry should have its poem compromised (imprisoned?) by so much additional textual information? Can't this information be made smaller and placed at the bottom of the page? And with the additional space, can't the poem be made a little bigger?

In lines 3 and 4 of Porter's pastoral, she writes:

Each day I try to be grateful
for what is around me. The apple tree

What is around Porter's poem, in this case, is enough informational bramble to fence-in that apple!