footlights: illuminating the metaphysical

 In these times of isolation and uncertainty, especially through the shutdowns that occurred earlier this year, room has been given for contemplation upon things that exist and happen in our own backyards.  So many of us have been given an opportunity to turn our gaze within, to familiarize ourselves with the things that had long awaited for our attentions.

Through the thick of this global pandemic, poet Pearl Pirie brings a collection of introspections and meditations that she has called “footlights”. The source of the title comes from another title in the book- ‘the saplings are yellow as footlights in the forest’.  Through this poem and others, she is able to capture moments of light, when something turns full frontal to the sun and seems to illuminated brighter than its surroundings, as she has done with the opening lines of ‘honey locusts shed gold at whippet dawn’:

“along the cracked sidewalks

dog, bright as a mote

translucent as a glass fish.”

Pearl lives in the wilds of Quebec’s Gatineau Hills, close to nature, immersed in its quiet, peace and microcosmic dramatic plays.  In them, she sees the synchronicity between the natural and the human, the artificial.  She sees their metaphysicality, their metaphors. Everything literary runs on metaphors, acting as a lubricant for us to move through our lives.  Pearl has a sort of sixth sense when it comes to seeing these devices, as if she sees a dimension few people can see.  A penny for her thoughts indeed would be an investment with high returns.

As an empath, she carefully considers everything, observing from afar, yet her affection never diminishes with the distance. Her observations of nature are subtle, as she tries to not be obtrusive, in ‘what is set in motion’

“aware of my indelicate

predator eyes,

through its reflection, 

I watch the loon.”

Or in ‘ant by lamplight’

“Pausing, head tilted

    we, despite ourselves,

      cheer.  she’s started down:”

She writes with a powerful candid sensuality, as in ‘the ligaments hop over one another’ 

“here, put your thumbs

(each deserve an Order of Canada)

into my waiting shoulders,”

Or she uses powerful corporeal metaphorical imagery as you may find in ‘in the park’s verges’

 

“Will our ribs find they can intermesh like fingers

In a bit of scrub and cedar verge?”

And again in ‘house with you’, we see a lover as furniture, an accessory for your decor where we seek the comfort of human contact, sinking into the contours of your lover’s body.

“you would make a wonderful wingchair

my back to your stomach, your jaw for my temple.”

“footlights” covers so much ground, touches so many different things, oscillating from a lighthearted play on words such as ‘a flannelette’s flannel’ or the life/death drama of watching a cooper’s hawk attack a pigeon while she orders pho in ‘waiting for menus’.

Even her titles tell stories solely on their own, such as ‘pollinators think the bouquet is for them’ or ‘old habits are hard as a boiled egg to beat’.  Still, all of them comment on the human condition through so many transparent layers, like looking into a lenticular picture, where what you see depends on the angle at which you view.

In the end, “footlights” is luminous with the energy of Pearl’s bright and brilliant mind.  She illuminates so many different questions and reflects back the answers through beautiful imagery and lush metaphors.  In what seems to be dark times, she lights us a pathway with which we can traverse safely and confidently through the theatre of life, grateful for her vivid poetic projections and music.

Skookum Haley: a review of Heather Haley's "Skookum Raven"

 Skookum (adj.): A Chinook Jargon word that has historical use in the Pacific Northwest. It has a range of meanings, commonly associated with an English translation of "strong" or "monstrous". The word can mean "strong", "greatest", "powerful", "ultimate", or "brave".

When a writer chooses a title for their manuscript, they know it has to be one that encapsulates its theme or at least captures the mood or atmosphere that the piece conveys.  In “Skookum Raven”, Heather Haley has given a name to the muscular, assertive, confident personality that pervades her third full printed book of poetry. When you get to know her, you realize it’s her personality there- strong, intelligent, unapologetic, sexy, genuine.   You also realize that it is the backbone of the coastline off the Pacific surf as well, the staggered archipelago, the jagged spine of mountains off in the fog, the skyscraping palisades of buildings in the urban fallback and the resilient denizens of the derelict old city...

Haley has had the title of “The Siren of Howe Sound” given to her for her stalwart presence on Bowen Island as a prolific sonic and visual artist through the first decade of this millennium, as well as having been a punk princess through the Eighties and early Nineties with such bands as The Zellots and the .45s.  Recent years have been much more domestic in comparison to her formative years, but her poetry testifies that she will never be milquetoast, and she remains as vibrant and vocal as she has ever been. With ‘Skookum Raven’, Haley reasserts her tenure as a powerful and eloquent poet, still tied in to the pulse of the human condition, still cognizant of the vibrations and reverberations of modern life.

With each piece, she displays an actor’s eloquence, slinging together rhythmic verses that contain an elastic energy, as she does in ‘A Larcenous Groom’s Cool-Off Period’:

“He boosts

street signs. That’ll stop their goddamned

touch the sky routine,

bestows his buddy Guy

with a JACKSON ST,

a little vainglory for the double wide.”

Throughout the book, each poem is imbued with the light of the salty coastal sun, rich with the recognizable language and topography of the B.C. coast, as illustrated in ‘Pacific Time’:

“Cedar jungle.

Left coast.

Mellifluous bees and

Hummingbirds swarm

The morning, a teeming creek

Bows to the sea.”

Or as in ‘I Saw You’:

“Teacher in Surrey, living in Van.

You had a giant bottle for making mead.

Whistler Gondola Saturday morning,

Still embarrassed by my runny nose.”

With smouldering heat she enforces her feminism with several bold vignettes of dalliances with capricious, idiotic men, taking snippets of conversations she’s had or overheard, and elaborates the unintended self-incriminations and the metaphors that come from them, as again with ‘A Larcenous Groom’s Cool-Off Period’:

“He pinches

his sister-in-law Emily

in the pocketbook.

Emily, who mourns the loss

of her younger sibling.

“I’d like to hearse her away

for Chrissakes.”

She latches on to her connections with the existing punk ethos with ‘Riots of Pussy’, referring to the Russian feminist punk activist movement, evoking the knitted balaclava, the political witch burnings and consequent police crackdowns, finishing the piece with the single, final assertion: “nyet.”

It’s a pattern in her style, where she makes her metaphorical observations, then  encapsulates them all neatly in the last verse.  In such style, she also closes the book with a comment that is close to the bone with the province of British Columbia and its history of man camps, toxic masculinity and murdered and missing indigenous women.  ‘The Last Ping’ is heartbreaking in its depiction of the soulless industry surrounding the investigations of missing women in Northwest B.C., and the interjections of male toxicity throughout is haunting in its richness.  Lost is the girl at the center of it all, buried, mired in all the societal dissonance that obscures her humanity, forsaken in all of the distractions that cancel her existence and thus any hopes for her salvation.

In all, the power of Heather Haley, siren, poet and punk princess, burns hot and bright in these pages.  Her fire is as constant as the sun that blazes in her hair, through her words which convey a sharp and powerful thrust that stitches truth and education in us.  It pulls us in and holds us captive, slave to her truth, helpless to argue.  With “Skookum Raven”, Haley assures us that she always has something to say, has more stories to tell, because the world around us still revolves, and still offers things for us to observe, judge and beg for commentary.  As long as there are things to be said, she will have the strength, bravery and intelligence to say them.

Your Beleaguered Vocalist

 I take the mic and lean in while Paddy starts to thrum the monkeybar bassline to ‘Vapid Apathy’ and Vince kicks in with the accompanying drum beat.

“Folks, just to remind you, we are The Conifers. On guitar is Mr. Zack Anaphylaxis, our bassist is Hat Trick Patrick and on drums is Jacob the One-Legged Trapper…”

The crowd, lost in a haze of cigarette smoke and verbal fog, doesn’t react at all while I give them space in which to react, so I shrug inside and continue with the final address.

“And I’m Pseudo Proscuitto, your beleaguered vocalist for the evening. I want to thank you on behalf of the band for your tepid indulgence tonight.  We’ll play just one more song and leave you to your vapid apathetic sense of status quo...”

Navigating the Geography of Grief: a review

     It’s an unseasonably warm and hazy November day as I finish reading the personal essay anthology Locations of Grief, an emotional geography, edited by the poet Catherine Owen. As construction workers sling wood and puncture nails into a new structure of residency across the street and in front of me, I soak up a mid-autumn sun and consider the messages the book delivers. Locations of Grief is an exploration of the role geography plays in the act of mourning and grieving. In her own travails through the spheres of loss, Owen had noticed the theme of geography as a recurring feature in writings about grief.  With that in mind, she assembled 24 writers from diverse backgrounds, to study how death can alter perspective on a place, how trauma and emotional upheaval can taint or flavor one's view of the world. Whether we intend to or not, we all inhabit many things.  Our clothes, our homes, our communities.  In these inanimate or abstract structures, we leave legacies and affect changes in our insular or secular worlds.  These things house memories of our lives and by effect represent us when we are gone either temporarily or permanently.

I started reading this while the world was figuring out how to celebrate Hallowe’en in a Covid-19 stricken world.  All Hallowed’s Eve; the night before the Feast of Saints; the overmorrow of which would be All Soul’s Day, the day in the Catholic calendar on which we commemorate the faithfully departed- all of it was a backdrop to reading this. So it seemed appropriate to read such a collection in these times of reminiscence and considerations of mortality. Additionally, as I type through this, my orbit is passing through another anniversary of my father's passing. November 7th 2003. Because of this, anyone that knows me knows that I hate November. So many bad things have happened in that month, but losing my dad to leukemia was the worst. My mother lasted only 10 more months after that, succumbing to COPD. Reading about grieving has been difficult because I had been feeling that miasma rising, cold, damp and dark, but today the air is warm, soft and kind, so I continue, stooped over, typing, re-reading, and then occasionally straightening up, taking off my reading glasses and considering the senescent autumnal views around me.

This collection of personal essays and memoirs teaches us how we can retain the lives of our dearly departed, keep their memories alive. With the concept of Locations of Grief, we realize that we can dedicate a space to a deceased loved one, and can inhabit the expansiveness of their influences in that locale. The abstractness of their absence is then fitting when we experience them in an either expansive landscape or a focal locality. 

For example, in her essay ‘Changing Our Address’, poet Lynn Tait spread her son's ashes all over the world, and in doing so made him omnipresent in body and spirit, his spirit participating in their daily lives with humour, affection and shared grief that was still to come. Jenna Butler, in her essay ‘worry stones’, created a memorial with which to create an interface with grief and assume the act of healing after the loss of daughters unborn or taken too soon.  Waubgeshig Rice, in  ‘Ancestral Waters’, joins his two grandmothers who come from seemingly diaposed backgrounds, intermingling in the storied waters of Georgian Bay which connects them as family and people, even though in life they had settled on the opposing shores of Parry Sound. In the book’s last essay ‘Never Released: Hamilton, ON and Scotch Village, NS’ by Ben Gallagher, his partner suddenly becomes the victim of an impaired driver in Hamilton. As she had been originally part of the Nova Scotian Mi'kmaq community, Gallagher honours her and maneuvers his grief to right the wrongs of colonization upon the indigenous peoples from whence his loved one hails.  Committing himself to the cause, and straddling the secular and the spiritual world, tackling the dichotomies of grief, he seeks to assuage the vexed yin and yang of existence in the temporal world.  As with other concepts in the book, peace comes from a reconciliation of all the polarities; alive/dead, present/absent, here/there, and more. All the dearly departed- Nikki Reimer’s brother, Onjana Yawnghwe’s father, Alice Major’s dog, Marilyn Dumont’s departed ex-flame, and even Christine Lowthers’ family members who have left her legacies of either trauma or providence, all of them have been assigned a space where their survivors can connect with and commemorate them.

Of all the stories however, it is the editor’s contribution that touches me deepest.  In Catherine Owen’s piece ‘Thrall: A Year of Grieving’, it’s the first time we can read about her husband’s decline in candid language; how, in his last days, he’d divested himself of his possessions as if they were parts of his own self, allowing his addiction to fill the vacancies.  In ‘Thrall’, Edmonton exists as the venue of this sad succession of events, coexisting with not the least bit of awkwardness the beauty of their loving one another in spite of it all.  Their shared living spaces, the hotel rooms, and then the hospital and funeral home all occupy the area and perimeter of that Alberta city. Owen’s returns through the years are always marked with uninvited recollections and unavoidable reminders, but the most poignant takeaway for it is what is not included in the narrative.  

  After years away, she returned to Edmonton, the venue of so many things in her life, her thoughts mostly centered around her life with her husband.  Buildings, streets, roads, neighbourhoods present reminders that perpetuate her sense of grieving.  Still, she buys a house in the middle of it all and creates a new life there, one in which she engages completely in the present, living new joys regardless of the past, as life post-loss should ultimately be lived.  In Edmonton now, she has a new life, new loves, new occupations and projects.  She lives a full life, with all its highs and lows.  She immerses herself in it all, past, present and future; happiness, sadness and even beautiful anger.

Through her piece in the anthology, you can see how she frames the rest of the stories and essays therein, illuminating in each one the fact that grieving is not something we can grow out of or heal from, slotting the pain of loss into the past and moving on as if the trauma had never happened.  Grief is something we can inhabit.  By projecting grief upon a location, there is room to move and a space to be shared with both the living and the lost. This way, our material world can be heaven, hell, purgatory and all divine states to which we assign our souls.

This anthology teaches us that we can’t be fixated on the throes of grief.  We have to find a way to move on.  A life can’t be full without the experience of loss and grief.  Geography itself is marked with highs and lows, different topographies, different habitats and densities.  Such is life.  The aim of this anthology was to illustrate the pervasiveness of memory and legacy through geography.  24 times, it succeeded. So it can be for us, as readers and as fellow citizens of heaven, hell and all points in between.

So as I type these last words, and as the warm sun sets behind the building to the west of me, I receive news that Joe Biden has succeeded in becoming the 46th President of the United States.  Finally 6 or so years of farce and incredulity can come to an end and we can finally see some rationality from south of the border.  The air is cooling and I’m considering going inside to put a sweater on after spending this entire glorious day outside on my deck typing this review up.  I haven’t been able to do this in quite a while.  Tomorrow promises to be another warm sunny day, as do the next two after that, then it will begin to rain once again and we will return to our regularly scheduled cold grey and brown November.  Thank goodness I had this day.  I’m ready for the future.

Locations of Grief: an emotional geography is available through Wolsak and Wynn Publishers;

https://www.wolsakandwynn.ca/

Cygnus to Cygnals to Signals...

 

Was listening to Moving Pictures this afternoon and remembered a conversation I was having with a friend back in what was probably the spring of 1982, when we had just gotten news that Rush's next album was going to be called "Signals".  We were sitting at the back of the school bus being driven to our high school, speculating on what the new album might be like.  At that point, we hadn't even heard the first single yet, so it was anyone's guess, since Moving Pictures had been such an anomaly compared to anything the band had done before, though still a progression from what they'd started with Permanent Waves.  My friend insisted that they were going to go back to writing prog rock and the album would actually be spelled "Cygnals", referring to the Cygnus X-1 saga and there was going to a whole sidelong continuation of it.  I highly doubted that because I couldn't see them returning to that mode after releasing PW and MP.  I thought that it would be something with more keyboards and technology, referring to the last track on MP; Vital Signs. I said that the last track on each album always seemed to be an indication of where they were going, so I was sure this was going to be way more technical and 'modern' (in terms of Eighties modernity). 

 

Then in August, I heard "New World Man" for the first time on my radio in my bedroom down in the basement.  It wasn't anything like Vital Signs and it certainly wasn't like anything from Hemispheres.  It was nothing that would have ever have fit in with anything they'd ever done before. Geddy's voice was softer, with no amount of falsetto in it.  He was actually just singing.  The song was in a jaunty reggae beat that didn't have the raw distorted power of the metal of that day, though the guitar work was dynamic and ever-changing, as could be expected from Alex.  It was so different, I couldn't decide what I really felt about it.

 

When the full album came out in September, I skipped class to go to the mall the very day it was released, which was a tradition I tried to keep for every album afterwards. I went home and listened to it and at first I had no idea what to think.  I knew the powerful musicianship was there and so were the intelligent and worldly lyrics.  It was still everything I loved about Rush, but it was so weird and new.  They had definitely turned a corner with this album and it would take me a while to catch up.

 

Meanwhile, the friend I'd had that conversation with back before the summer break had ripped his pictures of Rush off the inside of his locker and replaced them with pictures of Eddie Van Halen.  He declared that Rush had sold out and he was going with a band that he knew would never let him down...

 

Such was the divisiveness of that new album back in 1982. 

innervu with ottawa small press fair

This was an innervu conducted via email by the curator of above/ground press, one Mr. rob mclennan, Ottawa's patron saint of poetry.  It alludes to my participation in the Ottawa Small Press Fair which happens twice a year, yet due to viral pandemics was shelved twice already.

Q: Tell me about your writing. How long have you been publishing, and what got you started? 

 

A: I write fiction of varying lengths. Until recently it’s been short stories and flash fiction but in the last year I’ve been committed to a full length novel.  I’ve been publishing since the early nineties, running along with the zine phenomenon that had tied itself to the indie scene back then. I would hijack the photocopier at work late at night and churn out a hundred or two copies of whatever cut and paste thing I’d contrived at that point. These were fiction chapbooks, poetry chapbooks and an arts and culture mag that I put out somewhat regularly.  It was pretty fun joining this community of other creative people across Canada.  I got to connect with people that I never would have even known about otherwise, being pre-internet and all.  I was invited to conferences, zine shows, benefit concerts and other cool things.  It was a great start.  In 2016, I set up Smidskade 9 Press as a vehicle to participate in shows like the ottawa small press fair, and to act as an umbrella under which to keep my published works.

 

Q: How many times have you exhibited at the ottawa small press fair? How do you find the experience? 

 

A: I’ve been part of the ottawa small press fair twice now and it was a great experience both times.  They were opportunities to network with different presses and individuals in the community and it was also a way to educate myself in what other people were doing with their presses.  It was also a way to get a feel for what the industry (can we call it that?) was up to.  People were so open to talk shop and have been just as curious as I was about the whole thing.  You, Rob, you embody that attitude and I’m so glad you present these opportunities because they’re crucial for this community.

 

 

Q: Would you have made something specific for this year’s fairs? Are you still doing that? How does the lack of spring or fall fair this year effect how or what you might be producing? 

 

A: I have a couple stories that I was going to slap together as chapbooks for the next show.  I want to do it in a more professional manner rather than just street-level cut, paste, xerox and staple.  That will take money, but I think it’s what I have to do to present a sellable product.  Gone are the days of the 5th-generation-image punk zines.  The lack of public displays like the press fair this year only makes me switch to other modes of creating.  It hasn’t really slowed me down.

 

 

Q: How are you, as literary writer, approaching the myriad shut-downs? Is everything on hold, or are you pushing against the silences, whether in similar or alternate ways than you might have prior to the pandemic? How are you getting your publications out into the world? 

 

A: Working in education, the shutdown gave me the precious opportunity to dive into forming my novel.  Every day I did a little bit of something and at this point I can say that I have about ¾ of the rough draft done.  As far as hard copy output, I’m just promoting my fiction chapbook.  Since it looks like we are about to slip into another mass shutdown, I’m not keen on putting anything more in stores, since they all look like they will sink into temporary obscurity, being deemed as non-essential services. Quarantine without books? Seriously?!  They sound pretty essential to me!!

 

 

Q: Have you done anything in terms of online or virtual launches since the pandemic began? Have you attended or participated in others? How are you attempting to connect to the larger literary community? 

 

A: I like to keep up with new releases and support my friends and colleagues.  I’m glad we have the online platforms to do readings because I was really missing them.  It’s so great to see people like Pearl Pirie, Phil Hall and Heather Haley putting works out and going public despite the restrictions.

 

 

Q: What is your most recent book or chapbook? How might folk be able to order copies? 

 

A:  My most recent professionally published work is a book of flash fiction called Temperance Ave., and it’s available from Grey Borders Books. http://greybordersbooks.jigsy.com/kees-kapteyn

 

 

Q: What are you working on now? 

 

A: Right now I am working on a novel I’m calling LefTturn.  It’s about a fella whose wife has been unfaithful and the ensuing separation puts him into a kind of existential tailspin.  The universe is trying to give him clues as to what he should do to get his life back on track, yet he either ignores them or simply does not see them.  As the book progresses, the signs become more and more apparent and outrageous, to the point where strange, supernatural things start to happen.  I’m having a lot of fun with it, and as I’ve said I’m about ¾ through the rough draft, so hopefully it will be ready for the streets in a year or so.  Maybe by then we’ll be done with this pandemic?  I sure hope so!

Flux (from LefTturn)

 It was a time of flux.  The autumn winds arrived through the Valley, some days bringing cold and rain, other days bringing warmth and humidity.  It would swing every few days to either seasonal extreme, indecisively it would seem, but each sweeping wind would strip the colour from the trees until finally there was naught but branches left. When this happened, the cold took over and remained, asserting itself for the reign of winter. It was as if the leaves were a fire and without them, the warmth died out.

Petitcodiac Sunset

The sun has set, and some clouds move in from the west, moving east, driven by wind.  As the void in the sky darkens to a dusky navy blue fading to black, the clouds take on an orange tinge.  Jobe thinks to himself that it must be taking in the sunset colours of Thunder Bay or someplace west of him, of them, someplace west of Moncton and New Brunswick, the Maritimes.

The curve of the Earth has the air take on the palette of whatever particulates can stain the atmosphere in the western cusp of its surge of nightfall, and then casts the colours into the Petitcodiac skies, bringing a peachy sheen to the approaching clouds, which may bring thunder or may bring rain, but they float eastward with the insistence of the wind while the spin of the globe swings ever westward; the prevailing fugue, the genuine turn.

My Voice

A few days ago, I read a call for white writers to make commentary about white privilege and the concept of white supremacy.  I tried to woodshed different story ideas and each time I tried, I found that they were inadequate in conveying what really needed to be said.  In this world, there are so many voices, with so much to say about the matter, I don't think I can offer any fresh perspective, because this issue is as old as the countries we live in.  Racism is inherent in our institutions, and though that presence is there for all to see, little has been in order to remedy it, as it is so ingrained in our social structures.  So all my attempts to put commentary into my art have fallen short, drowned out in the din.

  I feel strongly about this, as you all may know, as apparent in my social media feeds.  I feel strongly in my opposition of racism towards indigenous peoples as well as all people of colour.  I still feel a sense of obligation to address everything that is going on.  I've found that it's one thing to post a meme or a link to a news article that conveys your views, but it's quite another to express a commentary that is completely your own while still assisting in amplifying the voices that are crying out for change.

So that is what I am going to try to do.  I will amplify the dissenting voices that push for change.  That will be more effective in facilitating that change. I'm going to educate and amplify and spread the word that society needs to hear.  I'll still post and share media that I feel will be helpful, but I will add my own voice more often because that is really what needs to be heard.  These issues need not just agreement, but conviction.

Black Lives Matter.  No More Missing or Murdered Indigenous Women.  More Truth and Reconciliation. Be The Change.

Chapter Titles!! The Plot Thickens...

During this Covid episode, being off work, I've had boatloads of freedom to get some more done on the novel I'm calling "LefTturn".  Some typing into the document here, free association notes on lined paper (in the sun on my deck) there, some research even then.  I've gotten enough done that I can assign working titles to all my chapters now.  Some will stay and others are just placekeepers. 
They are as follows:

1. Look, Cap'n Oblivious
2. Sinkholes
3. The Virgin Mother
4. Esme
5. Judgement of the Three
6. Left Here, Right Here
7. False Morels
8. Chemically, The Dopes Are Out
9. ...(expressing the conditional mood)
10. In Context of the Moon in Perigee
11. Sancti in Silvis
12. Resurg O
13. Aislinn
14. Archeia
15. St. Michael in the Garden

Cryptic, eh?

Sentinel

Jobe and the old man sat and looked at each other for a while.  In the branches above them, a blue jay screeched its grievances against some intruder somewhere in the woods.  With a flitter of unseen wings, the sentinel and the insurgent both seemed to take flight and the air was quiet for a moment.  Almost in response to the blue jay’s alarm, a far-off monstrous rumble shivered in the air, thinned by distance.  Heavy plodding feet thumped into the earth behind everything, then faded away...

It’s A Bad Time, It’s A Good Time

It's a good time.  It’s a bad time.  Outside, sad and scary things are happening, yes.  All we have to do is stay home and the monster will pass us by.  Another plague that will pass over our closed doorways.  All we have to do is stay home.  Could anything be easier?

So it’s a good time.  It’s a good time to write that story that’s been sitting unfulfilled in your journals for so long.  Read that book that your friend keeps recommending to you.  Find out why Haruki Murakami is such an important writer.  Figure Ulysses out.

It’s a good time to get into that band that you keep hearing about, check out their albums, watch some of their concerts.  Phish.  Now that’s a great band hardly anyone’s ever explored.  What is Django Reinhardt all about?  Why does everyone talk about Lou Reed so much?  Who is Riit?

It’s a good time to watch North of 60 from beginning to end, including all the spinoff movies.  Revisit Battle of the Planets.  Are there any reruns of Get Smart on YouTube?
Now’s a good time to find out.

Is it hard to be alone?  If you can’t be alone with your thoughts, then you need to think some more.  Get to know yourself.  Think about what you want.  About where you want to be.  Think about who you would like to be and how you can get there.  Make a plan.  This is a good time to do that.  Time alone is time with the most important person in your life, who is often also the most neglected.  You should go good together.  You might be The One.  Nah, who are you kidding? You ARE The One.
So it’s a bad time out there, but it can be a good time in here.  Then when the shadow has passed, you can step out into the sun refreshed and maybe even enriched.
Definitely healthy.

All we have to do is stay home.  What could be easier?

Floating Down The Lyrical River: reviewing Catherine Owen's "Riven"

We have always been close to the river.  Even in prehistory, mankind has always settled along the riverside.  It’s there where the plants and trees are most lush, it’s where our food has always been most plentiful, and its waters have always been available for swift commute from community to community.  Perhaps this is why we have always had an affinity to bodies of water.  We have always been there.

The waters by which poet Catherine Owen has metaphysically settled are those of the Fraser River, which flows through the heart of Greater Vancouver where she was born and raised.  Though currently based in Edmonton, Owen’s time within walking distance of the Fraser has given her immeasurable solace and wrought this book of poetry, which she has entitled “Riven”.  As she says in “The River System”, the long poem on the last pages of the book:

                “if I were only staring out

upon land, I would be

heartbroken...”

In Riven she considers with keen observational depth the lessons that a river can offer about the brevity of life, the eternity of love, the continuity of survival and the futility of death.   With these rich descriptions, Owen brings you into the space that she occupied while on her morning stomps along the industrial rubble and eroded pebble at the water’s edge, using the river as a constant metaphor for life, death and their byproduct, which is memory.

In memory, her thoughts fall upon her deceased husband as she remains true to his legacy as her muse, the basis of much of her poetic thought. Much of her works has centered around that loss in previous works that she has made, but as Junot Diaz will tell you- “the half life of love is forever”, which is to say that love- even lost love- never fades. From the river, she considers the paradox of grieving in the collection’s first poem; “Thirty-Six Sentences on the Fraser River That Could Serve as a Very Small Nest”

                “The river is like your death; it just keeps moving away from me.”

She notes that the river is water that constantly passes us by yet remains a constant presence, illustrating the paradox of both the river and of death.

She touches on even more paradoxes during her morning walks along the Fraser, documenting the industrial constructs that have been erected on the waterfront as well as the natural insistences that grow between and beneath them. She doesn’t differentiate the artificial from the natural.  They all exist in the same environment, as she considers in the poem; “Beseech”

                “Their origins, stone, perhaps, or song.”

Her most frequent imagery, and the one that brings us alongside as she would “prolong along the estuary” is that of the “silver river”, especially in the series of aubade poems, which serves as the centerpiece of the book.  The imagery conjures up that magical phase of the early morning when the sun has just risen and the perspective of light gives the river a pristine metallic shine that cuts through any depression or dulling effect of the surroundings.  As she says in “The Last Aubade”:

               

“…silver you could say as scars, as age,

Or ashes – silver as what holds everything this morning…”

Throughout the book’s conception, the shining quicksilver of the Fraser has lit Owen’s solitary mornings and cut through the miasma of her grieving.  The river has also served well as a backdrop and starting point for her to create her ideas that form this beautiful tribute to the rivers that constantly flow through our lives as well as the beautiful man for which she grieves.  Riven presents some of the most descriptive and incisive poetry that Catherine Owen has ever offered, derived from a place of deep contemplation and raw emotive power, a place not unlike the river that flows through all of us, through time, love and memory.

In Context of the Moon in Perigee...

"On the night of October 4th and 5th, 1869, exactly 110 years ago today,  occurred the Saxby Gale,  to leave a legend that still provokes our wonder.    It swept up the Bay of Fundy  smashing wharves,  tossing vessels ashore,  and creating tides that may have set an all-time world record.  An account of it appeared in the AMHERST GAZETTE,  three days later,  which said that: "the tide must have been eight feet above the ordinary high-water level  and four feet above the dykes."
Oddly enough,  it hardly affected Nova Scotia's Atlantic coast - the South shore and the Eastern shore,  but confined itself to communities along  New Brunswick's Fundy coast  - and the inner reaches of Minas Basin  and Chignecto Bay.

No one really knows how many lives were lost in that gale.  In the churchyard at Hillsborough, in Albert County (N.B.)  is a whole section of tombstones  raised to the victims of the Saxby "tide", as some called it,  because it was the phenomenal tide  that accounted for most of the casualties.  Farmers had gone down to the marshes,  in an attempt to lead their livestock to safety,  and then  the dykes broke,  and they were swept away  by a great tidal wave.

It was called the Saxby gale because of a certain Lieutenant Saxby,  a young officer in the Royal Navy who was also an amateur astronomer.  Lieutenant Saxby had written a letter to the London  Times almost ten months before this happened  warning  that in October of the coming year,  the position of the moon  in relation to other heavenly bodies,  would cause a gale of immense and devastating force  He even fortold the day - October 5th.

Most of those who read Lieutenant Saxby's prediction - and it was widely reprinted in American and Canadian newspapers - dismissed the warning,  pointing out that gales often did occur in October.  It was almost a foregone conclusion that a gale would occur  somewhere in the world,  and Lieutenant Saxby hadn't said  where this one would strike.

But a gale did strike,  on the evening of October 4th, 1869.  The weather that afternoon  had given no cause for uneasiness.  The day dawned without the slightest sign of anything unsual,  or foreboding.  Along the New Brunswick coast, .from St.Stephen to Saint John,  water lapped gently against the wharf pilings,  under a blanket of fog, which later cleared, giving way to a warm sunny morning.  A perfect Autumn day.

Then, about noon,  at the entrance to Yarmough (N.S.) harbour,  whitecaps began to appear,  while a light  breeze from the southwest gathered strength.  As the afternoon advanced,  the breeze increased steadily,  while the heat became oppressive.  Out by Yarmouth lighthouse,  or at The Churn, on the way to Cape Forchu,  you could hear the waves beginning  to boom.  Soon  the michaelmas daisies were wet with drifting spray.  Toward the south,  the sky loomed dull and leaden,  growing darker as the afternoon wore on,  with the rising wind  riding the sky on a witches'-broom of scudding storm clouds.  By five o'clock  the wind reached hurricane force.  By six,  trees were falling,  as if felled by an axe.  By nine o'clock  the raging,  terrifying Saxby Gale  was at its height.

We, today, can have no idea  how frightening this gale must have seemed,  to people cut off and alone,  with no means of communicating with their neighbours - no telephone,  no radio,  no electric light to snap on.  Many homes without even a kerosene lamp  and hard enough to keep a candle burning in the drafty rooms.

One man described it like this: "The extreme darkness,  the constant roar and tumult of wind,  the lashing rain,  the groaning of great trees,  the hail of debris, shingles, branches, objects large and small, falling everywhere, roofs carried aloft, whole buildings collapsing,  all gave a paralyzing sense of insecurity and calamity."

At St. Andrews (N.B.)  123 vessels were tossed up onto the beach -- a barque named the Genii  was sunk at Lepreau with the loss of eleven lives  [note,  these men were from the area, among them was two McVicar brothers from Mascarene shore, the barque was  named GENIL, she smashed at Lepreau].    On Campobello Island  (Charlotte County),  wind and tide destroyed over 80 buildings -- the roof of the Volunteer Armoury in St. George (N.B.) was carried 100 yards by the wind.  In St. Stephen a man was picked up by the wind, carried across the street, and deposited on the other sidewalk.

As the gale raced up the Bay of Fundy  it swept the water on ahead and forced it into the inner bays and inlets - into Shepody Bay and Cumberland Basin and Minas Basin (N.S.).

In the town of Annapolis (N.S.),  water was knee-deep on Lower St.George Street.  At Grand Pre  (N.S.)  it breached the Great Horton Dyke, flooding 3,000 acres,  and drowning herds of cattle.  Windsor's Water Street  was like a canal in Venice,  and the Windsor Baptist Church had seven feet of water in the vestry.

At Moncton (N.B.),  at the foot of South King Street,  the tide rose nine feet over the Harris wharf  up onto the warehouses, destroying supplies of salt, flour and other perishables.  If you're driving through Moncton  you can see a marker at Boreview Park,  along with a plaque indicating the height of the tide,  just before midnight,  on that fateful 4th and 5th of October, 1869."

Marilyn Bonvie 1999 - The Saxby Gale of 1869

http://sites.rootsweb.com/~nbcharlo/saxby1.htm

from Work in Progress...

His mind was like a top that she would start spinning. It would stand, erect and balanced, and he would never want the conversation to end. He just wanted it to spin and spin, straight and strong, forever...