About Me

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Most recently, Kees Kapteyn has self published an e-novella 'individe' which can be found on Amazon. He also has a flash fiction chapbook entitled "Temperance Ave.", published by Grey Borders Press. He has also has been published in such magazines as flo., Wordbusker, In My Bed, blue skies, ditch and other literary journals. He lives in Ottawa, Ontario where he works as an educational assistant.

Sunday, November 15, 2020

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.


Saturday, November 14, 2020

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...”


Sunday, November 8, 2020

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/