WomanWyrds

Publishing Poetry of the Spirit

2010-09-28T15:22:00.001-07:00

A friend has written to ask why I chose to self-publish my anthology of poetry (Hierophany: Poems of the Sacred). The truth is that many people had been asking me for a collection, and I was having no luck with the small independent publishers here in Canada. It's discouraging to send your work out consistently and have it come back with "Lovely work. Unfortunately it's not right for our company right now" letters. I understand that this is part of the writing process, and I am not really as peevish as I sound to myself as I type, but...well, part of me is a little peevish!

I think it's not entirely because I am dubious about what else I will need to do to turn "pro", so to speak. Poetry continues to be a passion, and I continue to read other poets widely as well as occasionally getting up the gumption to submit to things. However, I am gradually recognizing a few things about getting published: one, the field is capricious. It's often just a bit of a crapshoot: who receives your poem, who reads it, who shortlists it, who just doesn't like your style or the way you put words together. Another reason is that I am rather cheerful by nature: I don't write a lot of I'm-depressed-woe-is-me poetry. Yet it strikes me that at least some of the post-modernist ethos is to revel in the dismal (or perhaps, as one of the Baha'i prayers puts it, to "dwell on the unpleasant things of life".) I am usually not a "dweller". Yes, I like the contemplative life, and yes, I tend towards the serious, but no, I am not a dweller.

My poems tend, however, to be a little "spiritual", and I think that doesn't go over well in 2010. I don't mean this in a self-help-guru-I-have-all-the-answers kind of way. I'm not (self-helpish), I don't (guru), and I don't want to pretend to know more than I do. But I do tend to want to lean towards the spiritual. I wonder if I should explain that a little?

There are some classic, and in some cases, quite popular writers (Rumi, Mary Avison, Lorna Crozier, Mary Oliver, Rilke) whose voices are spiritual. They may not be commenting directly on the spirit (although sometimes they do) but they imbue the words with the transcendent nature of longing, which to me is a spiritual condition. Exploring God, or whatever you might wish to call the Creator or the Universe or the Magic-that-makes-us-alive, is an essential component of their relationship with the world. It's beyond time-and-space. It's soul work. I love it; I love reading a poem by Rumi or Oliver and discovering that even back then, even now, there is someone who speaks my language and who has left letters to the world about spirit, in poetic form. This is also intimately connected to beauty, both in the Big Letter Beauty sense and in the small, macrocosmic, delight-in-the-beauty-of-the-world beauty. The poetic ability, it seems to me, is to take the time and place you find yourself surrounded by and make it, through your words, a time and place anyone can enter with you through the magic of your words, descriptive, narrative, and honest.

So if I am to write, I want to write from the spirit. And in this day and age, it's really hard to do well. Sometimes I hit it, and some of the poems in my own collection are ones which I feel leave a glimpse of the unblemished spirit within me, the part which has been untouched by all the mistakes I've made. For this is the thing: it's the human condition, it seems, to make mistakes and have regrets (or at least something like) but to dwell on those is also to deny the beauty of the power of redemption. And trust me, redemption is not a popular word in modern-day poetry, really, although there are a few authors who write themselves into that sacred space through beauty. That's the poet I'd like to be, and gradually, through patience, prayer, and some perseverance, she's emerging. I hear her voice whispering within, sometimes softly, and I want to recognize her and allow her to speak.

Annie Dillard did this in prose, of course, with that amazing work, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, and Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés, whom I've just re-read, kindled spirit throughout Women Who Run With the Wolves...and Barbara Kingsolver consistently does it, works through words and the deep longing of the world to create beauty. Their works are redemptions, and they are not alone. And their poetry is lovely, too...but, there's something hesitant, perhaps, when we try to understand the numinous. I find that I have to wait for it, and sometimes it just flows into me like heat. Something kindled. Crozier said this; I listened to her at the Ottawa Writers' Festival a few years ago and she reminded us of the gift of immanence. Yes.

This is also kind of why I blog, too: not just to send letters to my parents (although that too) but to leave an exploration out there, something for both friends and strangers to ruminate about and perhaps share right back. So I published myself because I got impatient! And when you hope that what you have said can kindle something for someone else, find that resonance, then you want the words out there. If poets are given a gift (even minor poets like me!) then it's best to share it, and sometimes you just have to get it out there whether the literary powers-that-be think it's worthwhile or not. One acquaintance reminded me that there is value in following your passion.

So here's someone who said all of this better:

Word Fog

Words, even if they come from
the soul, hide the soul, as fog

rising off the sea covers the sea,
the coast, the fish, the pearls.

It's noble work to build coherent
philosophical discourses, but

they block out the sun of truth.
See God's qualities as an ocean,

this world as foam on the purity
of that. Brush away and look

through the alphabet to essence,
as you do the hair covering your

beloved's eyes. Here's the mystery:
this intricate, astonishing world

is proof of God's presence even as
it covers the beauty. One flake

from the wall of a gold mine does
not give much idea what it's like

when the sun shines in and turns
the air and the workers golden.

Rumi

Summertime poems

2010-08-17T12:16:00.000-07:00

Summertime brings more opportunities to read. I revisit poems I have come to love, and thought that I would share one with you. Mary Oliver is a stunning poet. One of my favourites is a poem ostensibly about summer, but more about how we spend our lives. Check out "A Summer Day".

From my daughter

2010-03-03T09:38:00.001-08:00

Here is Melodie's newest poem as published to her blog.

The Stranger

The face of the person at the front of the bus this afternoon - I wish I had a camera.
Almost comical, with surprisingly young, popping eyes.
The young eyes make the skin seem pasted on.
The skin is a city map.
Not an old city.
Not spidery arterial roads stretching from freshly designed traffic circles - a touch of design amid ancient, sprawling arrondissements.
A new city - a grid.
So many lines both horizontal and vertical, it seems the result of modern planning.
Modernity in a face made for a student's black and white photography exhibit.
You can just see this face under a big straw hat, next to a llama.

He is speaking to a man standing near him and it takes me a minute to realize they are strangers.
He speaks with the familiarity of one ignorant of etiquette, and right I way I think I know this type.
He is ancient and yet ageless. What type? He makes me think of Forrest Gump at eighty.
The standing man moves back and the old one turns to speak to a woman next to him. His young eyes, so odd in his face, are restless, energetic, wide awake next to tired commuters with their sore backs and impatience to get home.
The woman is polite, answers as though to a child. He grins and one dirty stub appears in an otherwise toothless mouth.
I feel a little humbled.

Inspiration

2010-02-07T14:38:00.000-08:00

Every so often a quiet Sunday. This one is replete with sunshine and everything outside is dressed in sparkling frost. It's not warm: -21 but not too cold either. In short, February.

I thought some of you might be interested in what I am reading. From time to time I go to Value Village and check out their books. It's a way of buying books on a somewhat limited budget; most are about $3.99 and every fifth book is free. It is in this manner that I have found several terrific literary reads. To wit: today I am reading Kingston, ON author Steven Heighton's 1997 Anansi-published work, a series of essays entitled The Admen Move on Lhasa: Writing and Culture in a Virtual World.

So here are a few gems for your ruminating pleasure:

"Art is an invitation change what can be changed - one's self, first and finally - and to cherish what is receding, vanishing, as all things are." p. 19

"Poetry and fiction - especially when the writing is sensuous and visceral instead of cerebral, abstract - are deeply rehumanizing and for that reason they're subversive, whether overtly political or not. Art, and literature above all, is uniquely equipped to convey that indispensable facility, that rare and socially redemptive force, the habit of empathy - of trying to see through the eyes of others and to feel with another's body and heart. I think of literature as putting us face to face - and, at times, hand to hand, in struggle or in love - with strangers. So we're forced to look them in the eyes and see them not as others but as variations on a vast, familiar theme. Ourselves." p. 32

"And surely the first step for any writer who dreams of reaching the cells and cadres of the fed-up and the disaffected is to shun capitulation to the Disneyesque spirit of the age, to Casper, the friendly Zeitgeist; to refuse to fiddle around in cyberspace while the ghettoes burn; to remain a believer, unafraid of the unfashionably serious engagement with human joy and sorrow that still yields meaning and still seeds in readers the socially vital habit of empathy; to resist not only the virtual realities and cyberabstractions of post-modernity but also the atavistic impulse to heroic vitalism, that fascist denial of the modern world that seduced and so often stultified Eliot, Pound, D. H. Lawrence, and others..." p. 48

"...literature is uniquely armed to introduce each new generation of readers to the habit of empathy - of learning to see things through another's eyes and to feel with another's body and heart. Film has an instantaneous power that books can't match, and at its best it makes us see in startling new ways, but only literature can offer the kind of nuanced, qualified, many-dimensioned psychological insights that let us feel things, however briefly, with a stranger's heart. / Fresh poetic images that in some small way change forever the focus and range of the eye; how the inviting openness or alarming finality of a novel's conclusion reawakens readers to the course of their own lives, the possibilities of a life. How the rhythm and music of a poem reawaken sedentary readers to the half-forgotten metres of their own pulses, while certain lines of poetry elicit a primitive, physical response - cause shivering, tears, cause hairs to hackle on the forearm. Re-embody us. Reconnect us to real life." p. 59

There's more...but this gives us a start on contemplation.

Thanks, Steven Heighton.

Writing English as a Second Language

2010-01-18T13:20:00.001-08:00

Writing English as a Second Language

Posted using ShareThis

Elegy for Jacob Bighorn

2008-10-04T17:33:00.000-07:00

Lakota Man
(for Jacob Bighorn, d. Oct. 4, 2008)

There are many languages.
There are many colours.
Our rainbow leads to a pot of gold
upon which is written:

Allah'u'abha, Allah'u'abha, Allah'u'abha.

These are the magic words.
These are the chanted psalms
for this day, for every day.
These are words

like confetti, strewn by scattering angels
as you join the winged ones
blessing the weary world.

These are words offered
like the scent of smoke from sweetgrass,
like incantations heard as though from a distant room,
from a sky become water and back again.

Jacob, you climb that ladder
with the ease of a hunter,
with the ease of a master gatherer,
filling your strong arms with bouquets,
garlanded by Ridvan's messengers,
trumpets blowing the new pageantry and party:

Jacob is arriving, is breaching gates
carried by tears of pearl,
tears of joy wept by all these willing ones,
those whom you brought to story,
those whom you brought to prayer
and the power of the chanted incense,
the song you shared through the beating drum
of your stalwart heart:

Allah'u'abha, Allah'u'abha, Allah'u'abha.

Whom will you visit, in the dream world?
With whom will you tarry, offering words
and worlds, wisdom? Whose will be this
benediction, memory carrying us from here
to you in the spirit world, and back.

Pray for them, as they pray for you.

We're praying, Jake, we're singing,
good neighbours here below and there above,
rousing the chorus of forever more,
Jacob, yours forever more in this vale of love.

2008-04-26T09:18:00.000-07:00

Here is a lovely link for moviegoers, from my daughter. Enough said.

Poetry by a 'friend'

2008-04-04T10:19:00.000-07:00

I belong to a group of Baha'i Writers online, and this morning one of the members shared a poem his daughter had written in response to a journey undertaken during her time in Haifa at the Baha'i World Center. I thought it was a great poem and have been granted permission to share it here. Here, then, is a poem by Laurel Tomanio, posted with permission. I like it very, very much.

On Interconnectedness

In Eilat, there are curves of camels in the sand and
coral growing by the centimeter in the Red blue Sea and
Hebrew rushing through the hot, dry bones of mountains,
a ghostly whisper of freedom

In the middle of the night,
the moon blows in dust from Egypt's pyramids
coating the houses in the memory of pharaohs and slaves.

I lie still in our tent on the tip of Israel watching
the dust settle and listening
to the lilting staccatos of the Philippines

Later, a Brazilian Jew wearing an American
flag t-shirt serves us tea in chipped white mugs.
When I comment on my country,
he tells me, "You like? It's not for sale."
then looks far away to where
the anger fades around the edges

I glance up quickly, surprised by
the ownership he found in my voice.
In his eyes, there is nothing
but dead mountains. When he reaches the last
peak and finds it already occupied
by its own sadness, he looks down
and I follow his gaze to the sea.

For minutes, we two search the liquid,
I for the border of Jordan and he
for the safety the land could not give.

My skin is dry, so dry, and suddenly I need
to be in that water where
it is whole and men
cannot draw lines in the sand

that widen into cracks
crevices, gaping rifts.
Where nothing asks permission
to move and whales brush against
my body reminding me that I am not
alone

I think about all the lines I crossed today—
Ofa the camel carrying me, uninterested,
from the Negeve to the Syrian Desert.
Face down in the Red Sea where
Israel and Jordan's angelfish
exchange secrets.

Singing Filipino love songs under a full moon,
between us only a thatched roof
that in the end kept apart neither moonlight nor music

I dream that night of weaving
mountains out of wind
Oceans out of Words.

2008-03-25T10:41:00.000-07:00

A new poem in memory of Mona Mahmunizad, who was killed in Iran in the 1980s for teaching Baha'i children's classes. She was sixteen.

Martyr

The fine bones of her neck snapped quickly
as osteoporosis of the age permitted,
no jeweled pendant for her slight brown clavicle,
no crescent moon in silent witness of this shedding jewel,
no ululation to break that weary night of courage and of pearl.

The hyoid bone, that fragile spot where pulses beat
remembered speech, and crushed. She sang her poet song
to ancestors: Tahirih looked upon her naked
throat and held her hands as moonrays from calibrated skies,
lent Beauty to her daughter's eyes immersed in waiting night.

She was the last, and so became the first,
her name calligraphied within a newer constellation,
a risen star still seen cross mighty nebulae of reasons,
each fingerling joint a quasar of eternity.
Mona, who otherwhere would have become a saint
instead became a houri leaping cross
the line-dance colours of the Persian desert

sky. There, striation carries angels scattering letters
at the sound of sand and feathers,
a white scarf floats down from the brightened heavens
and bones break into supernovae stars,
the suns of necklaces draped on tea-soft neck and scars.

The firmament is bruised, and with its tears,
tells woman stories of these yesteryears and gems,
these orbits, moons and stories made of light,
these pure ones' broken bones in history's night,
till bursting forth the weary ones will dance,
till whirling into space, these helix souls
move time, and rest.

copyright Heather Cardin 2008

Beauty

2008-03-02T08:04:00.000-08:00

Now that the announcements are over, I am free to say how delighted I was to be one of the finalists in the year's CBC Literary Awards for Poetry. It is a great honour to be so selected.

In my own reading, I have come across the beautiful poems of the unbelievably talented Anne Michaels. I am slowly savouring her book, The Weight of Oranges. Let me share with you just one tasty poem which reached my heart, and also honour the spirit of painting by sharing a link to the astonishing art of my friend, Garry Berteig, whose painting I borrow here to illuminate the poem.

The Day of Jack Chambers

The day of Jack Chambers
we are black smudges on the frozen river.
You're walking ahead - in summer I would've said "upstream" -
sky, blue of veins, air the palest skin.
Old February light, weakest of the year,
casting its tinge like light in paintings
when the varnish has aged.
You're halfway up the river,
it's five o'clock and I can tell
by the way your back's to me, you're measuring pigments,
stealing the contents of this light, and sure enough
it begins to get dark.

We spent the day looking at Chambers' painting.
Even the earliest have the magnification of dying.
Ten years of leukemia, you have to think what you fear,
not just be afraid.
When he worked from photos
he added what happened before the shutter was pressed -
and what happened after.
Objects hang in the air where they'd been the moment before,
floating like dust in sunlight.
Always the same light - captive, gasping to get out
from Sunday place settings, his wife's hair,
from chrome trim and roofs of cars on the highway.

You explained visual time,
how there's no weight without shadow.
Nothing falls, every figure has a ghostly buoyancy.
You explained how Chambers grounded things with his light,
leaving the ghost inside.

I understood this by thinking "language" instead of "light,"
how everything suspended stays temporal.
I understood it as a grammar of beauty
with its apex of loss,
dishevelled burning trees half leafless.
As a room full of rain and the raft of our bed.
The way we fall from each other like halves of an orange,
skin dark as pottery in lamplight.
I know it, naked in the light of the fridge,
cold plummy resins in our mouths, warm sticky resins
of our bodies. By nights
we drain the pictures from your head and words
from my throat until I find nothing but sounds there.
And today, by way of light closing around itself
until the river is dark and all I see is your white breath.
By way of a young woman's hunger
so taste every part of her lover, even his words.

Chambers' painting of a girl: if the light were stronger
you'd see her bones, the green-blue tributaries
beginning and returning at the heart.
And the sky that's "wrong,"
cloud-mottled, above the horizon,
yet painted as if we're looking straight up.
Your brain tricks you,
like losing your balance in a dream,
being woken by the feeling of falling.

What you pain
are the parts left behind
when two people join.
Your figures look calm,
but their throats are closed
with cries that can't get out.

They are in mourning.
Your canvas finds a weakness in the air's tension,
someone's past seeps out.
We arrive by accumulation.
Time twists us by the shoulders until we're positioned to die,
looking backwards. Twisted into the ground.

Night. Soon we are pushing our faces
into the bin of stars. Lamplight
melts the windows of the river houses.
I can feel your bony fingers in your gloves.

This day belongs to Chambers. This
his river, his light. His eyes
that watched your black figure on the river,
sky the blue of veins, air
a translucent skin over everything.

There are three kinds of teachers, you said.
One who teaches you by making you afraid,
one who makes you angry.
The third makes you love him.

Poems come to my life

2008-02-06T12:52:00.000-08:00

I have recently watched "What the Bleep Do We Know" and "The Secret". There are many elements of truth, I think, reading within the graphics. Also, a book which fell into my hands, Chopra's How To Know God. Brilliant. And here is more of spirit, one from Herman Hesse, and one from my late aunt, found in her papers. Both speak, I think, to my poetic preoccupations: spiritual growth and how it connects with our unity. Pictured, my cousins (two of Hope's children) and an extended member of the family.

Stages
by Hermann Hesse

As every flower fades and as all youth
Departs, so life at every stage,
So every virtue, so our grasp of truth,
Blooms in its day and may not last forever.
Since life may summon us at every age
Be ready, heart, for parting, new endeavor,
Be ready bravely and without remorse
To find new light that old ties cannot give.
In all beginnings dwells a magic force
For guarding us and helping us to live.
Serenely let us move to distant places
And let no sentiments of home detain us.
The Cosmic Spirit seeks not to restrain us
But lifts us stage by stage to wider spaces.
If we accept a home of our own making,
Familiar habit makes for indolence.
We must prepare for parting and leave-taking
Or else remain the slaves of permanence.
Even the hour of our death may send Us
speeding on to fresh and newer spaces,
And life may summon us to newer races. S
o be it, heart: bid farewell without end.

The Blanket
By Hope (Babe) Halsted Hubbert
November 21, 1974

The Blanket of love, so warm and clean
Wipes away the past – which never should have been
Taking with it - the bitter hurts
Cleaning up - that pile of dirt
Brightening the future, so beautifully bare

By telling the past – it was never there
Shortening the memory, from day to day
So the Blanket of love, can have her way.
The Blanket of love, can have no pride
Not even one corner of self, to hide
It opens itself to everyone
Where the truth of tomorrow, has just begun.
The demon of self, lays, covered with dust
The Blanket of love, cleans off all that rust
Forgiving – what was yesterday
So the Blanket of love, can have her way.

Taking the hurts – yet to be born
Covering them up, so cosy and warm
It cannot remember – it always forgets
And kills the memory, of all our regrets.
This sin covering Blanket, has a wonderful art
It can put life together, or take it apart
Exquisitely sketching a pattern sublime
From out of the realm, of spaceless time

Like painting a picture, with an artful brush
And tossing the clouds, into a sunset’s blush
Inking the clouds, and deepening the night
Molding the future, by putting things right
Removing the pieces, that should have been better
And fading them out, forever and ever.

Such a warm lilting Blanket, giving new birth
Kissing with love, like nothing on earth
Humming a song, that is wholesomely plain
And chanting our thoughts, toward heaven again.

This Blanket of love, is holding the key
To smother the monster of self, within me
Wooing it gently, as never before
Disarming the heart, and unlocking the door
Soaring the spirit, as high as a kite
Capturing with love, and giving new sight
Like bursting the “Milkweed” that is ready to bloom
Tearing it open, to give it more room
Removing the miserable self, from the Pod
And leaving the heart full, of nothing but God.

Rest in peace, lovely Aunt.

Found Poetry

2008-01-27T13:11:00.000-08:00

Some time ago, I assigned my students the task of writing a found poem. I was most interested to see what they would come up with. I very much liked the one created by Taylor, in grade nine, and have asked his permission to post it here. He has kindly assented. Here it is, for your enjoyment.

Found Poem

by Taylor C.

The God Whispers of Han Qing-jao

At last,
A few weeks to her hundredth year
Han Qing-jao was found curled up in her father’s room.

The exact spot her father sat in to perform his labors;
Murmuring,
Muttering,
Inching her hands across her body
As if tracing lines in her flesh.

The holy woman’s disciples gathered
Ten at time,
To understand her muttering,
Setting down the words as best they understood them.

“Mother.”
“Father.”
“Did I do it right?”

Original Citation:

From Xenocide, by Orson Scott Card (pg. 592)

At last, only a few weeks after she completed her hundredth year, Han Qing-jao was found curled up on the floor of her father’s room. Some said that it was the exact spot where her father always sat when he performed his labors; it was hard to be sure, since all the furniture of the house had been removed long before. The holy woman was not dead when they found her. She lay still for several days, murmuring, muttering, inching her hands across her own body as if she were tracing lines in her flesh. Her disciples took turns, ten at a time, listening to her, trying to understand her muttering, setting down the words as best they understood them. They were written in the book called The God Whispers of Han Qing-jao.
Most important of all her words were these, at the very end. “Mother,” she
whispered. “Father. Did I do it right?”

Doris Lessing

2008-01-11T19:02:00.001-08:00

A friend sent me Doris Lessing's Nobel acceptance speech: every word is precious. Read it below.

Nobel Lecture
December 7, 2007

On not winning the Nobel Prize

I am standing in a doorway looking through clouds of blowing dust to where I am told there is still uncut forest. Yesterday I drove through miles of stumps, and charred remains of fires where in '56 was the most wonderful forest I have ever seen, all destroyed. People have to eat. They have to get fuel for fires.

This is north west Zimbabwe early in the eighties, and I am visiting a friend who was a teacher in a school in London. He is here "to help Africa" as we put it. He is a gently idealistic soul and what he found here in this school shocked him into a depression, from which it was hard to recover. This school is like all the schools built after Independence. It consists of four large brick rooms side by side, put straight into the dust, one two three four, with a half room at one end, which is the library. In these classrooms are blackboards, but my friend keeps the chalks in his pocket, as otherwise they would be stolen. There is no atlas, or globe in the school, no textbooks, no exercise books, or biros, in the library are no books of the kind the pupils would like to read: they are tomes from American universities, hard even to lift, rejects from white libraries, detective stories, or with titles like 'Weekend in Paris' or 'Felicity Finds Love'.
There is a goat trying to find sustenance in some aged grass. The headmaster has embezzled the school funds and is suspended, arousing the question familiar to all of us but usually in more auguest contexts: How is it these people behave like this when they must know everyone is watching them?

My friend doesn't have any money because everyone, pupils and teachers, borrow from him when he is paid and will probably never pay it back. The pupils range from six to twenty-six, because some who did not get schooling earlier are here to make it up. Some pupils walk every morning many miles, rain or shine and across rivers. They cannot do homework because there is no electricity in the villages, and you can't study easily by the light of a burning log. The girls have to fetch water and cook when they get home from school and before they set off for school.

As I sit with my friend in his room, people drop shyly in, and all, everyone begs for books. "Please send us books when you get back to London". One man said, "They taught us to read but we have no books". Everybody I met, everyone, begged for books.

I was there some days. The dust blew past, water was short because the pumps had broken and the women were getting water from the river again.

Another idealistic teacher from England was rather ill after seeing what this "school" was like.
On the last day, it was end of term and they slaughtered the goat, and it was cut into mounds of bits and cooked in a great tin. This was the much looked forward to end of term feast, boiled goat and porridge. I drove away while it was going on, back through the charred remains and stumps of the forest.

I do not think many of the pupils of this school will get prizes.

Next day I am at a school in North London, a very good school, whose name we all know. It is a school for boys. Good buildings, and gardens.

These pupils have a visit from some well known person every week, and it is in the nature of things that these may be fathers, relatives, even mothers of the pupils. A visit from a celebrity is no big deal for them.

The school in the blowing dust of northwest Zimbabwe is in my mind, and I look at those mildly expectant faces and try to tell them about what I have seen in the last week. Classrooms without books, without text books, or an atlas, or even a map pinned up on a wall. A school where the teachers beg to be sent books to tell them how to teach, they being only eighteen or nineteen themselves, they beg for books. I tell these boys that everybody, everyone begs for books: "Please send us books". I am sure that everyone here, making a speech will know that moment when the faces you are looking at are blank. Your listeners cannot hear what you are saying: there are no images in their minds to match what you are telling them. In this case, of a school standing in dust clouds, where water is short, and where, at the end of term, a just killed goat cooked in a great pot is the end of term treat.

Is it really so impossible for them to imagine such bare poverty?

I do my best. They are polite.

I'm pretty sure of this lot there will be some who will win prizes.

Then, it is over, and I with the teachers, ask as always, how the library is, and if the pupils read. And here, in this privileged school, I hear what I always hear when I go to schools and even universities.

"You know how it is. A lot of the boys have never read at all, and the library is only half used."

"You know how it is." Yes, we indeed do know how it is. All of us.

We are in a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned and where it is common for young men and women who have had years of education, to know nothing about the world, to have read nothing, knowing only some speciality or other, for instance, computers.

What has happened to us is an amazing invention, computers and the internet and TV, a revolution. This is not the first revolution we, the human race, has dealt with. The printing revolution, which did not take place in a matter of a few decades, but took much longer, changed our minds and ways of thinking. A foolhardy lot, we accepted it all, as we always do, never asked "What is going to happen to us now, with this invention of print?" And just as we never once stopped to ask, How are we, our minds, going to change with the new internet, which has seduced a whole generation into its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging and blugging etc.

Very recently, anyone even mildly educated would respect learning, education, and owe respect to our great store of literature. Of course we all know that when this happy state was with us, people would pretend to read, would pretend respect for learning, but it is on record that working men and women longed for books, and this is evidenced by the working men's libraries, institutes, colleges of the 18th and 19th centuries.

Reading, books, used to be part of a general education.

Older people, talking to young ones, must understand just how much of an education it was, reading, because the young ones know so much less. And if children cannot read, it is because they have not read.

But we all know this sad story.

But we do not know the end of it.

We think of the old adage, "Reading maketh a full man" – and forgetting about jokes to do with over-eating – reading makes a woman and a man full of information, of history, of all kinds of knowledge.

But we are not the only people in the world. Not long ago I was telephoned by a friend who said she had been in Zimbabwe, in a village where they had not eaten for three days, but they were talking about books and how to get them, about education.

I belong to a little organisation which started out with the intention of getting books into the villages. There was a group of people who in another connection had travelled Zimbabwe at its grass roots. They reported that the villages, unlike what people reported, are full of intelligent people, teachers retired, teachers on leave, children on holidays, old people. I myself paid for a little survey, of what people wanted to read, and found the results were the same as a Swedish survey, that I had not known about. People wanted to read what people in Europe want to read, if they read at all – novels of all kinds, science fiction, poetry, detective fiction, plays, Shakespeare, and the do-it-yourself books, like how to open a bank account, were low in the list. All of Shakespeare: they knew the name. A problem with finding books for villagers is that they don't know what is available, so a school set book, like the Mayor of Casterbridge, becomes popular because they know it is there. Animal Farm, for obvious reasons is the most popular of all novels.

Our little organisation got books from where we could, but remember that a good paperback from England cost a months wages: that was before Mugabe's reign of terror. Now with inflation, it would cost several years wages. But having taken a box of books out to a village – and remember there is a terrible shortage of petrol, the box will be greeted with tears. The library may be a plank under a tree on bricks. And within a week there will be literacy classes – people who can read teaching those who can't, citizenship class – and in one remote village, since there were no novels in Tonga, a couple of lads sat down to write novels in Tonga. There are six or so main languages in Zimbabwe and there are novels in all of them, violent, incestuous, full of crime and murder.

Our little organisation was supported from the very start by Norway, and then by Sweden. But without this kind of support our supplies of books would have dried up. Novels published in Zimbabwe, and, too, do-it-yourself books are sent out to people who thirst for them.
It is said that a people gets the government it deserves, but I do not think it is true of Zimbabwe. And we must remember that this respect and hunger for books comes, not from Mugabe's regime, but from the one before it, the whites. It is an astonishing phenomenon, this hunger for books, and it can be seen everywhere from Kenya down to the Cape of Good Hope.
This links up improbably with a fact: I was brought up in what was virtually a mud hut, thatched. This house has been built always, everywhere, where there are reeds or grass, suitable mud, poles for walls. Saxon England for example. The one I was brought up in had four rooms, one beside another, not one, and, the point is, it was full of books. Not only did my parents take books from England to Africa, but my mother ordered books from England for her children, books in great brown paper parcels which were the joy of my young life. A mud hut, but full of books.

And sometimes I get letters from people living in a village that might not have electricity or running water (just like our family in our elongated mud hut), "I shall be a writer too, because I've the same kind of house you were in."

But here is the difficulty. No.

Writing, writers, do not come out of houses without books.

There is the gap. There is the difficulty.

I have been looking at the speeches by some of your recent prizewinners. Take the magnificent Pamuk. He said his father had 1 500 books. His talent did not come out of the air, he was connected with the great tradition.

Take V.S. Naipaul. He mentions that the Indian Vedas were close behind the memory of his family. His father encouraged him to write. And when he got to England by right he used the British Library. So he was close to the great tradition.

Let us take John Coetzee. He was not only close to the great tradition, he was the tradition: he taught literature in Cape Town. And how sorry I am that I was never in one of his classes: taught by that wonderfully brave bold mind.

In order to write, in order to make literature, there must be a close connection with libraries, books, the Tradition.

I have a friend from Zimbabwe. A writer. Black – and that is to the point. He taught himself to read from the labels on jam jars, the labels on preserved fruit cans. He was brought up in an area I have driven through, an area for rural blacks. The earth is grit and gravel, there are low sparse bushes. The huts are poor, nothing like the good cared-for huts of the better off. A school – but like one I have described. He found a discarded children's encyclopaedia on a rubbish heap and learned from it.

On Independence in 1980 there was a group of good writers in Zimbabwe, truly a nest of singing birds. They were bred in old Southern Rhodesia, under the whites – the mission schools, the better schools. Writers are not made in Zimbabwe. Not easily, not under Mugabe.
All the writers had a difficult road to literacy, let alone being writers. I would say print on jam tins and discarded encyclopaedias were not uncommon. And we are talking about people hungering for standards of education they were a long way from. A hut or huts with many children – an overworked mother, a fight for food and clothing.

Yet despite these difficulties, writers came into being, and there is another thing we should remember. This was Zimbabwe, physically conquered less than a hundred years before. The grandfathers and grandmothers of these people might have been storytellers for their clan. The oral tradition. In one generation – two, the transition from stories remembered and passed on, to print, to books. What an achievement.

Books, literally wrested from rubbish heaps and the detritus of the white man's world. But you may have a sheaf of paper (not typescript – that is a book – but it has to find a publisher, who will then pay you, remain solvent, distribute the books. I have had several accounts sent to me of the publishing scene for Africa. Even in more privileged places like North Africa, with its different tradition, to talk of a publishing scene is a dream of possibilities.

Here I am talking about books never written, writers that could not make it because the publishers are not there. Voices unheard. It is not possible to estimate this great waste of talent, of potential. But even before that stage of a book's creation which demands a publisher, an advance, encouragement, there is something else lacking.

Writers are often asked, How do you write? With a processor? an electric typewriter? a quill? longhand? But the essential question is, "Have you found a space, that empty space, which should surround you when you write? Into that space, which is like a form of listening, of attention, will come the words, the words your characters will speak, ideas – inspiration.
If this writer cannot find this space, then poems and stories may be stillborn.

When writers talk to each other, what they ask each other is always to do with this space, this other time. "Have you found it? Are you holding it fast?"

Let us jump to an apparently very different scene. We are in London, one of the big cities. There is a new writer. We, cynically enquire, How are her boobs? Is she good-looking? If this is a man, Charismatic? Handsome? We joke but it is not a joke.

This new find is acclaimed, possibly given a lot of money. The buzzing of paparazzi begins in their poor ears. They are feted, lauded, whisked about the world. Us old ones, who have seen it all, are sorry for this neophyte, who has no idea of what is really happening.

He, she is flattered, pleased.

But ask in a year's time what he or she is thinking: I've heard them: "This is the worst thing that could have happened to me.

Some much publicised new writers haven't written again, or haven't written what they wanted to, meant to.

And we, the old ones, want to whisper into those innocent ears. "Have you still got your space? Your sole, your own and necessary place where your own voices may speak to you, you alone, where you may dream. Oh, hold onto it, don't let it go."

There must be some kind of education.

My mind is full of splendid memories of Africa which I can revive and look at when I want. How about those sunsets, gold and purple and orange, spreading across the sky at evening. How about butterflies and moths and bees on the aromatic bushes of the Kalahari? Or, sitting on the banks of the Zambesi, where it rolls between pale grassy banks, it being the dry season, dark-green and glossy, with all the birds of Africa around its banks. Yes, elephants, giraffes, lions and the rest, there were plenty of those, but how about the sky at night, still unpolluted, black and wonderful, full of restless stars.

But there are other memories. A young man, eighteen perhaps, is in tears, standing in his "library." A visiting American seeing a library without books, sent a crate, but this young man took each one out, reverently, and wrapped them in plastic. "But," we say, "these books were sent to be read, surely?" and he replied, "No, they will get dirty, and where will I get anymore?"

He wants us to send him books from England to teach him to teach. "I only did four years in the senior school" he begs, "But they never taught me to teach."

I have seen a Teacher in a school where there was no textbooks, not even a bit of chalk for the blackboard – it was stolen – teach his class of six to eighteen year olds by moving stones in the dust, chanting "Two times two is....." and so on. I have seen a girl, perhaps not more than twenty, similarly lacking textbooks, exercise books, biros – anything, teach the A, B, C in the dust with a stick, while the sun beat down and the dust swirled.

We are seeing here that great hunger for education in Africa, anywhere in the Third World, or whatever we call parts of the world where parents long to get an education for their children which will take them from poverty, to the advantage of an education.

Our education which is so threatened now.

I would like you to imagine yourselves, somewhere in Southern Africa, standing in an Indian store, in a poor area, in a time of bad drought. There is a line of people, mostly women, with every kind of container for water. This store gets a bowser of water every afternoon from the town and the people are waiting for this precious water.

The Indian is standing with the heels of his hands pressed down on the counter, and he is watching a black woman, who is bending over a wadge of paper that looks as if it has been torn out of a book. She is reading Anna Karenin.

She is reading slowly, mouthing the words. It looks a difficult book. This is a young woman with two little children clutching at her legs. She is pregnant. The Indian is distressed, because the young woman's headscarf, which should be white, is yellow with dust. Dust lies between her breasts and on her arms. This man is distressed because of the lines of people, all thirsty, but he doesn't have enough water for them. He is angry because he knows there are people dying out there, beyond the dust clouds. His brother, older, had been here holding the fort, but he had said he needed a break, had gone into town, really rather ill, because of the drought.
This man is curious. He says to the young woman. "What are you reading?"

"It is about Russia," says the girl.

"Do you know where Russia is?" He hardly knows himself.

The young woman looks straight at him, full of dignity though her eyes are red from dust, "I was best in the class. My teacher said, I was best."

The young woman resumes her reading: she wants to get to the end of the paragraph.

The Indian looks at the two little children and reaches for some Fanta, but the mother says "Fanta makes them thirsty."

The Indian knows he shouldn't do this but he reaches down to a great plastic container beside him, behind the counter and pours out two plastic mugs of water, which he hands to the children. He watches while the girl looks at her children drinking, her mouth moving. He gives her a mug of water. It hurts him to see her drinking it, so painfully thirsty is she.

Now she hands over to him a plastic water container, which he fills. The young woman and the children, watch him closely so that he doesn't spill any.

She is bending again over the book. She reads slowly but the paragraph fascinates her and she reads it again.

"Varenka, with her white kerchief over her black hair, surrounded by the children and gaily and good-humouredly busy with them, and at the same visibly excited at the possibility of an offer of marriage from a man she cared for, looked very attractive. Koznyshev walked by her side and kept casting admiring glances at her. Looking at her, he recalled all the delightful things he had heard from her lips, all the good he knew about her, and became more and more conscious that the feeling he had for her was something rare, something he had felt but once before, long, long ago, in his early youth. The joy of being near her increased step by step, and at last reached such a point that, as he put a huge birch mushroom with a slender stalk and up-curling top into her basket, he looked into her eyes and, noting the flush of glad and frightened agitation that suffused her face, he was confused himself, and in silence gave her a smile that said too much."

This lump of print is lying on the counter, together with some old copies of magazines, some pages of newspapers, girls in bikinis.

It is time for her to leave the haven of the Indian store, and set off back along the four miles to her village. It is time... outside the lines of waiting women clamour and complain. But still the Indian lingers. He knows what it will cost this girl – going back home, with the two clinging children. He would give her the piece of prose that so fascinates her, but he cannot really believe this splinter of a girl with her great belly can really understand it.

Why is perhaps a third of Anna Karenin stuck here on this counter in a remote Indian store? It is like this.

A certain high official, United Nations, as it happens, bought a copy of this novel in the bookshop when he set out on his journeys to cross several oceans and seas. On the plane, settled in his business class seat, he tore the book into three parts. He looks around at his fellow passengers as he does this, knowing he will see looks of shock, curiosity, but some of amusement. When he was settled, his seat belt tight, he said aloud to whoever could hear, "I always do this when I've a long trip. You don't want to have to hold up some heavy great book." The novel was a paperback, but, true, it is a long book. This man is well used to people listening when he spoke. "I always do this, travelling," he confided. "Travelling at all these days, is hard enough." And as soon as people were settling down, he opened his part of Anna Karenin, and read. When people looked his way, curiously or not, he confided in them. "No, it is really the only way to travel." He knew the novel, liked it, and this original mode of reading did add spice to what was after all a well known book.

When he reached the end of a section of the book, he called the airhostess, and sent it back to his secretary, travelling in the cheaper seats. This caused much interest, condemnation, certainly curiosity, every time a section of the great Russian novel arrived, mutilated, but readable, in the back part of the plane. Altogether, this clever way of reading Anna Karenin makes an impression, and probably no one there would forget it.

Meanwhile down in the Indian store, the young woman is holding onto the counter, her little children clinging to her skirts. She wears jeans, since she is a modern woman, but over them she had put on the heavy woollen skirt, part of traditional garb of her people: her children can easily cling onto it, the thick folds.

She sent a thankful look at the Indian, whom she knew liked her and was sorry for her, and she stepped out into the blowing clouds.

The children had gone past crying, and their throats were full of dust anyway.

This was hard, oh yes, it was hard, this stepping, one foot after another, through the dust that lay in soft deceiving mounds under her feet. Hard, hard – but she was used to hardship, was she not? Her mind was on the story she had been reading. She was thinking, "She is just like me, in her white headscarf, and she is looking after children, too. I could be her, that Russian girl. And the man there, he loves her and will ask her to marry him. (She had not finished more than that one paragraph) Yes, and a man will come for me, and take me away from all this, take me and the children, yes, he will love me and look after me."

She steps on. The can of water is heavy on her shoulders. On she goes. The children can hear the water slop in the can. Half way she stops, sets down the can. Her children are whimpering and touching the can. She thinks that she cannot open it, because dust would blow in. There is no way she can open the can until she gets home.

"Wait" she tells her children, "Wait"

She has to pull herself together and go on.

She thinks. My teacher said there was a library there, bigger than the supermarket, a big building and it is full of books. The young woman is smiling as she moves on, the dust blowing in her face. I am clever, she thinks. Teacher said I am clever. The cleverest in the school – she said I was. My children will be clever, like me. I will take them to the library, the place full of books, and they will go to school, and they will be teachers – my teacher told me I could be a teacher. They will be far from here, earning money. They will live near the big library and live a good life.

You may ask how that piece of the Russian novel ever ended up on that counter in the Indian store?

It would make a pretty story. Perhaps someone will tell it.

On goes that poor girl, held upright by thoughts of the water she would give her children once home, and drink a little herself. On she goes ... through the dreaded dusts of an African drought.

We are a jaded lot, we in our world – our threatened world. We are good for irony and even cynicism. Some words and ideas we hardly use, so worn out have they become. But we may want to restore some words that have lost their potency.

We have a treasure-house – a treasure – of literature, going back to the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans. It is all there, this wealth of literature, to be discovered again and again by whoever is lucky enough to come on it. A treasure. Suppose it did not exist. How impoverished, how empty we would be.

We own a legacy of languages, poems, histories, and it is not one that will ever be exhausted. It is there, always.

We have a bequest of stories, tales from the old storytellers, some of whose names we know, but some not. The storytellers go back and back, to a clearing in the forest where a great fire burns, and the old shamans dance and sing, for our heritage of stories began in fire, magic, the spirit world. And that is where it is held, today.

Ask any modern storyteller, and they will say there is always a moment when they are touched with fire, with what we like to call inspiration and this goes back and back to the beginning of our race, fire, ice and the great winds that shaped us and our world.

The storyteller is deep inside everyone of us. The story-maker is always with us. Let us suppose our world is attacked by war, by the horrors that we all of us easily imagine. Let us suppose floods wash through our cities, the seas rise ... but the storyteller will be there, for it is our imaginations which shape us, keep us, create us – for good and for ill. It is our stories, the storyteller, that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, what we are at our best, when we are our most creative.

That poor girl trudging through the dust, dreaming of an education for her children, do we think that we are better than she is – we, stuffed full of food, our cupboards full of clothes, stifling in our superfluities?

I think it is that girl and the women who were talking about books and an education when they had not eaten for three days, that may yet define us.

Poems

2007-11-13T22:01:00.001-08:00

I am pleased to say that one of my poems is in lovely booklet from Ascent Aspirations (see the link) so I hope you will consider getting a hold of it! Also coming soon, a chapbook edited by Patrick Lane, in which a group of us who wrote at the Glenairely Retreat, a year ago already, are grouped. Look for this from Leaf Press. And I am hoping one of these days to see the Cranberry Tree Anthology, in which apparently I have a poem.

I also want to promote the Massey lectures this year, available on podcast from CBC Ideas. The scholarly and sometimes eloquent literary gentleman, Alberto Manguel, offers his insights. I will dwell in his ruminations on the power of poems, and Words.

More poems

2007-11-03T12:28:00.000-07:00

I hold to memory, stone and sea
the holy places we walked together
the simple silence of heat
I watch you see me
through lens to soul
and say a prayer
by ancient rock and sea, in Akka.

nearing twilight

2007-10-16T17:25:00.000-07:00

today i wandered through the orchard
to find remaindered fruit upon the upright
soldier trees. gathered ambrosias
in a red cloth, filled, then searched
the neighbour's delicious goldens
falling, falling into cider.

a scent of spices as i bent for walnuts,
shells crackling open through black
mud around them. protection has its price.
in the garden lay green tomatoes. two blushed.
once more my shawl was pregnant,
rounded shades like one of those

other trees. close up, i saw the flaws,
threw one or two back to meandering
birds. much left from summer.
still, the hovering clouds pretended
there was nothing new, no yellowed hills
to press these viscous bones back to their cores.

A Moment of Beauty

2007-10-09T18:24:00.000-07:00

A friend sent this amazing YouTube video. I am so pleased to be able to share it with you.

Carolyn Forché

2007-08-25T12:23:00.001-07:00

I have been doing some reading...mostly of Carolyn Forché, who edited my all-time favourite anthology, which I studied in a course at Carleton, The Poetry of Witness. If you have not yet read her, you should. There are too many links to her work for me to choose one, but I will share with you what is probably one of her best known poems.

The Colonel (From The Country Between Us, by Carolyn Forché.)

What you have heard is true. I was in his house. His wife carried a tray of coffee and sugar. His daughter filed her nails, his son went out for the night. There were daily papers, pet dogs, a pistol on the cushion beside him. The moon swung bare on its black cord over the house. On the television was a cop show. It was in English. Broken bottles were embedded in the walls around the house to scoop the kneecaps from a man's legs or cut his hands to lace. On the windows there were gratings like those in liquor stores. We had dinner, rack of lamb, good wine, a gold bell was on the table for calling the maid. The maid brought green mangoes, salt, a type of bread. I was asked how I enjoyed the country. There was a brief commercial in Spanish. His wife took everything away. There was some talk then of how difficult it had become to govern. The parrot said hello on the terrace. The colonel told it to shut up, and pushed himself from the table. My friend said to me with his eyes: say nothing. The colonel returned with a sack used to bring groceries home. He spilled many human ears on the table. They were like dried peach halves. There is no other way to say this. He took one of them in his hands, shook it in our faces, dropped it into a water glass. It came alive there. I am tired of fooling around he said. As for the rights of anyone, tell your people they can go fuck themselves. He swept the ears to the floor with his arm and held the last of the wine in the air. Something for your poetry, no? he said. Some of the ears on the floor caught this scrap of his voice. Some of the ears on the floor were pressed to the ground.

It's hard to know...

2007-08-04T10:31:00.001-07:00

sometimes, when you've been published. I was googling (is that a verb?) and came across a reference to my inclusion in the Cranberry Tree Press anthology. News to me, but glad to hear it.

We've been away: here are my husband and I sitting in front of the fountain at Trafalgar Square, London, before going into the National Art Gallery there. Bernie commented that our National Gallery is better. For the collection, I agree: we have more contemporary art, sculpture, and First Nations stuff...but I must admit I sat in front of the Monet display in London for a long time, enjoying my favourite impressionist. There, I penned some short reflections, not worth submitting to publishers (although I am always surprised at what publishers like and don't like...so I just keep sending out poems and getting surprises, sometimes good ones). Anyway, this would be the best place to share my thoughts-in-front-of-Monet, I guess.

in front of Monets

light falls on lilies in water.

the flowers, the artist long dead,
the bridge an arc above
light falling on lilies in water

long left behind.

does Monet still paint?

do lilies bloom again?

Iris sea of aqua light
Air is water
The breath of mauve
This happy turn to green

The bottom white corner
White canvas
Place of departure, or arrival.
Which way does the brush stroke?

Hidden in the depths
A little black paint
Can never be as visible
Or green, as blue as this:
still, there, it endures
and draws the dark eye of light.

This is how to paint
Willows: near an arced bridge
Under light, over water.

Any other dome
In any other water place
Could not be Venice

the hard muscle of remorse
melts to a bluegreen sea
in sight of watery paintings
so wet i can't feel weary
but fill my gaze upon
these salty memories
made fresh in meditations.

the soft light of sky
the gleam and glimmer
something worth feeling
below, in the drowning
swim of air, still light.

Memories of Belize

2007-07-18T07:54:00.000-07:00

A friend sent me an interesting form of poem this morning: 'British' English/Jamaican translations. It made me homesick for Belize. Thanks to Hunter!

ENG: It's been a long time since I have seen you girl.
JAM: Gal yuh noh dead yet?

ENG: Oh Lord, we have lost electricity again.
JAM: Lawd Gad current lack aff again to rahtid.

ENG: This meal is not too bad.
JAM: Di food can eat.

ENG: Where did you buy that awful Bracelet Cindy?
JAM: A weh yuh buy dat deh big ole ugly bangle deh
missis?

ENG: Hors d'heurves
JAM: Ah wah dis likkle sinting you a gi me?

ENG: Here kitty kitty... get down from the roof.
JAM: Hey dutty puss come aff a di house tap before a
buss yuh**?@!

ENG: I think something is wrong with Susan, she might
have the flu.
JAM: Lawd gad obeah tek up Suzie!

ENG: Oh my God, I just broke mom's expensive plate!
JAM: Lawd mi gad, mi bruk up mama stoosh crackry!

ENG: aren't those pants a bit short?
JAM: you did a expect flood or yuh tek yuh
measurement inna wata?

ENG: Why are you squeezing the mangoes like that?
JAM: Lissen to mi nuh, mi a beg yuh stap fingle-fingle up
di mango dem.

ENG: Sir, please don't throw my luggage like that.
JAM: Aye buff teet bwoy, tap fling up-fling up mi bag
dem suh man.

ENG: I wish you would quit lying.
JAM: Tap di blinkin lyin, yuh ole liyad.

ENG: Lift up the hood of the car for me John.
JAM: Hey my yute, fly di bonett rasta!

ENG: I am Waiting for a taxi and it's taking so long!
JAM: But wait, no Robot naah run todey!

ENG: Get me a pop please.
JAM: Beg yuh carry wan drinks fi mi deh

ENG: It's time for a Perm.
JAM: Gal yuh head waan Cream, yuh noh si how it
tough?

ENG: I say! This is nasty.
JAM: Kiss mi neck back!! What a sinting tase bad

ENG: I wish you would close your mouth.
JAM: yuh mout come in like when grip cyaan shut.

ENG: Girl, your acne is terrible. (I find it difficult to imagine someone actually saying this, but whatever.)
JAM: Massa gad, pickney, yuh face bumpy-bumpy an
fayva grayta eeh.

ENG: Please make some room on the bus so this man
can have a seat.
JAM: Schoolas, small up unnu self man mek daddy
siddung.

ENG: I have a stomach ache.
JAM: Mi belly ah gripe mi.

ENG: These mangoes look a bit over ripe.
JAM: Missis move fram in front ah mi wid dem fluxy
mango deh

ENG: He has very large full eyes.
JAM: Wat ah bway fayva patoo

ENG: He has no manners.
JAM: Him dont have no broughtupsi!

ENG: perspiration odour
JAM: him smell green

ENG: poached (boiled) chicken
JAM: dat deh sinting nuh start cook yet

ENG: oh, dear
JAM:ee-eeeee

ENG: Josh is suffering from Attention Deficit disorder.
JAM: Di pickeny too dam hard ears!

ENG: He has a touch of Dyslexia.
JAM: What a bway Dunce sah!

ENG: I need a bottle of Pepto bismol...my stomach
hurts.
JAM: Lawd mi coulda do wid a wash out yah now...
mi belly bine up.

ENG: That man over there is missing his dentures.
JAM: Cooh pan dat deh mashmout bredda ova deh
soh.

ENG: OH my, your feet are so ashy...
JAM: yuh foot tuff like aligata back...yuh couldn't rub
likkle cocanat ile pon yuh foot dem...

Quote of the Day.

2007-07-12T07:36:00.000-07:00

A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
Thomas Mann

Another small acceptance...

2007-06-12T12:35:00.000-07:00

Props to David Fraser at Ascent Aspirations for continuing to be open to newer writers at his small press. My next poem with them will be in the Borderlines issue.

Tonight I think I will try to pop in to the Royal Oak II, where among others, poet Barry Dempster will be reading. In Canada, at least, that's too good an opportunity to miss. The more I get to hear the "masters" the more I can learn, and hopefully write better.

I also want to give a shout on behalf of Tabula Rasa, too. Again, an independent small press, in this case both online and some hard copy, where poems are welcome and where spirituality is invited.

Other news as I receive it.

The company of strangers

2007-04-18T14:55:00.000-07:00

Today I went to the English Department final luncheon for Professors at Ottawa University. It was good to meet a few of my "colleagues". I had a pleasant visit with a famous person! Cyril Dabydeen is the IMPAC nominated author of Drums of My Flesh, along with a gazillion other books, mostly novels and short stories. He was very kind to this fledgling author and co-teacher, and I really enjoyed conversing with him. We had people in common, which was fun! The gist of it was that I decided to read him, so will certainly be seeking out his work and I'll keep you posted about my reflections on this Caribbean-Canadian writer.

In the meantime I am finishing up Rabbi Jonathan Sacks wonderful book, The Dignity of Difference. I am tempted to write out great segments of it for you, but instead will satisfy myself with this lovely bit, to whet your whistles:

One of the classic roles of religion has been to preserve a space-physical and metaphysical-immune to the pressures of the market. When we stand before God we do so regardless of what we earn, what we own, what we buy, what we can afford. We do so as beings of ultimate, non-transactional value, here because someone-some force at the heart of being-called us into existence and summoned us to be a blessing. The power of the great world religions is that they are not mere philosophical systems, abstract truths strung together in strictly logical configurations. They are embodied truths, made vividly real in lives, homes, congregations, rituals, narratives, songs and prayers-in covenantal communities whose power is precisely that they are not subject to economic forces. They value people for what they are; the value actions for the ideals that brought them forth; they preserve relationships by endowing them with the charisma of eternity made real in the here-and-now.

p. 158

I must add that there is a terrific analysis of the relationship of religion and economics, and in nearing the end, a lovely rumination on forgiveness.

Deep-hearted stuff, well-thought out and presented in language which is both uplifting and accessible.

A Picture's Worth...

2007-04-12T21:24:00.000-07:00

This is where I live; the building is our National Art Gallery.
Photo Credit: Gabriel Jones

Monday's poem

2007-03-10T17:20:00.000-08:00

I am delighted to hear from Ursula Vaira at Leaf Press that she will be posting one of my poems. I believe that this will be this week, so do have a look!

reviews

2007-03-09T12:29:00.000-08:00

Checked out www.bywords.ca, as I often do, and found a review of my reading, which I share, feeling a little spicy:

Next up was Heather Cardin, a seasoned performer with tremendous presence. She gave a dramatic delivery of "Capable" (Bywords, Winter 2006), an homage to "women past / poets who left a mark." Then, Cardin treated the audience to "Belizan Tales" a post-colonial piece whose highlight is a monologue by the saucy Creole-speaking Carlos Seguera (wonderfully mimicked by Cardin), followed by a rejoinder from a cynical, civil British soldier who longs for tea and crumpets.

Small notes: Belizean, Segura would be the more accurate spellings...this is also the reading where I contributed to nasty rumors of the early demise of Adrienne Rich.

Words of Wisdom

2007-03-08T07:21:00.000-08:00

A friend, Kurt, sent me this quotation. I love it. For your meditating pleasure:

Every word of thy poetry is indeed like unto a mirror in which the evidences of the devotion and love thou cherishest for God and His chosen ones are reflected. Well is it with thee who hast quaffed the choice wine of utterance and partaken of the soft flowing stream of true knowledge. Happy is he who hath drunk his fill and attained unto Him and woe betide the heedless. Its perusal hath truly proved highly impressive, for it was indicative of both the light of reunion and the fire of separation.

Tablets of Bahá'u'lláh,
p. 175, 176

V Day, late

2007-03-03T15:28:00.000-08:00

Periods can sometimes be late, and that can be good news, or not. This year, V Day came late, for me: The Vagina Monologues, normally on Valentine's Day, were showing last night and tonight at the Bronson Centre, on, you guessed it, Bronson. I went because my resident niece was one of the players and also because I am happy to support fundraisers for worthy causes. This qualified.

That said, there were some lovely highlights and a few disappointments. This is the fourth time I've seen the play staged, and the first time my husband went along for the immersion in the feminine side. We were a cuddly group: two eldest daughters, one boyfriend, one current friend-and-colleague, one past colleague and friend, one sister-in-law, me husband 'n me. A very good job done by: the young lady who did the blue mat, getting-to-know-your-vagina encounter group scene (despite the fact that she had crib notes). A believable job by the woman playing a Bosnian rape victim. Delightful to see both women of colour and a woman in a wheelchair on stage. Disappointment: the famous moan scene. Orgasmic it was not. Also a little strange: a rather young woman, somewhat glamorous, playing a grandmother in the paean-to-childbirth scene. I know that grannies can be glamorous, but they are unlikely to be thirtyish or less. There were older women there who might have been more credible. At least her cue cards were guised in a journal-looking document. And the short-skirt scene was...contrived. I find it passing strange that reclamation of sexuality is accompanied by denials of sexuality. On the other hand, I understand, I get it: it's the liberation from objectification. I think I might have found it slightly more believable if the person in the short skirt had not been quite so rail-thin. There was still a paucity of women of size participating: maybe this is still the last domain of prejudice. If you're fat, don't show up in a mini-skirt.

Whatever.

I also have gone beyond my initial raptures of delight in the production as I have listened to the "I-ness" of the vaginal monologues: "My vagina is me" , "I am my clit" and the repetitive litany of comparing our woman smells to lush forests. Please. I personally am much more than the sum of my parts, and the idea of dressing up my parts with anything remotely rocky (diamonds?) begins to wear, if you'll excuse the phrase, thin.

Still, a worthy cause, an immersion, an opportunity to venture out in the lull between the storms. All in all, a little slushy.

Meditations

2007-02-20T11:51:00.000-08:00

I am immersing myself in Annie Dillard. It's like swimming in a language already made familiar by love of the word, by love of the world, by love. Every day I find more reflections. Here are some:

The writer studies literature, not the world. ...He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write. He is careful of what he learns, because that is what he will know.
The writer knows his field-what has been done, what could be done, the limits- the way a tennis player know the court. And like that expert, he, too, plays the edges. That is where the exhilaration is. He hits up the line. In writing, he can push the edges. Beyond this limit, here, the reader must recoil. Reason balks, poetry snaps; some madness enters, or strain. Now, courageously and carefully, can he enlarge it, can he nudge the bounds? And enclose what wild power?
The body of literature, with its limits and edges, exists outside some people and inside others. Only after the writer lets literature shape her can she perhaps shape literature...The art must enter the body, too. A painter can not use paint like glue or screws to fasten down the world. The tubes of paints are like fingers; they work only if, inside the painter, the neural pathways are wide and clear to the brain. Cell by cell, molecule by molecule, atom by atom, part of the brain changes physical shape to accommodate and fit paint.
You adapt yourself, Paul Klee said, to the contents of the paintbox. Adapting yourself to the contents of the paintbox, he said, is more important than nature and its study. The painter, in other words, does not fit the paints to the world. He most certainly does not fit the world to himself. He fits himself to the paint. The self is the servant who bears the paintbox and its inherited contents. Klee called this insight, quite rightly, "an altogether revolutionary new discovery."...'
A well-known writer got collared by a university student who asked, "Do you think I could be a writer?"
"Well," the writer said, "I don't know....Do you like sentences?"
The writer could see the student's amazement. Sentences? Do I like sentences? I am twenty years old and do I like sentences. If he had liked sentences, of course, he could begin, like a joyful painter I knew. I asked him how he came to be a painter. He said, "I liked the smell of paint."
...
Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed?
...What do we ever know that is higher than that power which, from time to time, seizes our lives, and reveals us startlingly to ourselves as creatures set down here bewildered? Why does death so catch us by surprise, and why love? We still and always want waking...

At its best, the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace. It is handed to you, but only if you look for it. You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then--and only then--it is handed to you. From the corner of your eye you see motion. Something is moving through the air and headed your way...

One line of a poem, the poet said---only one line, but thank God for that one line--drops from the ceiling...It is like something you memorized once and forgot. Now it comes back and rips away your breath.

Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

Magic Reading

2007-02-13T15:50:00.000-08:00

Winter's hibernation brings with it the opportunity to read. Serendipity has brought me this winter to the incomparable Annie Dillard. I started with Teaching a Stone to Talk, which fell into my hands at a local second-hand bookstore. I am a believer in these kinds of signs: an impulse stop, and while I couldn't find the poets I was looking for (Marianne Moore and Wallace Stevens), there was Annie, waiting. I read, and fell in love. So I ordered from Amazon...and today, two of her books arrived. I could have kissed the mailman.

I am deep into Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Next will be The Writing Life. I wish I could just loll beside the fireplace, drink tea with honey, and read Annie. Wait! I can. Well, almost. I have one class left before we have reading week at the university, so must venture out into the unseasonable cold in order to teach. Until then, I am working on my own books but also allowing myself to curl up with Dillard, and in the spirit of sharing, I will offer you some of her lines.

It's about spirit: I have come to believe that perhaps we are not as fearful of showing our spirit-life, in writing, as post-modernism had led me to believe. I can't be quite as cynical as I thought I was supposed to be, and in fact, this week a letter came from Oberon Press in which some very interesting critique was offered of my own work. I was told that my "collection of poems is literate and intelligent." This was a fine opening line, and the writer went on to let me know the elements which I need to work on. The gist of it was that I was sacrificing some things for the sake of "experimenting with words and structures." However, he said, "What I do like most about your work, though, is the vision that seems to be inherent in the words; the scope and depth of what you see is manifest and impressive." I can live with rejections like that; the writer gave me some good advice and suggested I submit elsewhere, since they are now almost not publishing poems. I found it a very helpful critique, however, because it seemed to me that it was correct: I have been sacrificing substance for expediency. I have lost my true voice in experimentation, and I think it is time to revisit my heart, not in some solipsistic fashion but to remember who I am, and my spiritual core, and allow this to be the tone animating my work.

In order to do this, I have to "fill up" with spirit again, and I can't imagine a better teacher than the writing of Annie Dillard. Her work is, in a word, numinous. I wrote three response poems to her, a couple of weeks ago, and read them at a poetry event to a receptive crowd. I like them. I like their form and flow, and I have sent them out to see if others like them too. But I think they will mark the core of a new direction, for me. At the same time, I am working again on myth; Karen Armstrong's short work, The History of Myth, also fell into my hands, and I feel like I am being immersed in the pellucid warmth of history, the return to the present, and hopefulness, all of which are very powerful as I wait out the cold.

Here is Annie. She starts by citing the Koran, when "Allah asks, 'The heaven and the earth and all in between, thinkest thou I made them in jest?' It's a good question. What do we think of the created universe, spanning an unthinkable void with an unthinkable profusion of forms? Or what do we think of nothingness, those sickening reaches of time in either direction?" She continues, cites Pascal coining the idea of God as Deus Absconditus, and asks, "Is this what happened?" Later in the same paragraph she says, "It could be that God has not absconded but spread, as our vision and understanding of the universe have spread, to a fabric of spirit and sense so grand and subtle, so powerful in a new way, that we can only feel blindly its hem."

This passage launches me into a meditation, a recognition of the ideas behind Baha'u'llah's mystical work, The Seven Valleys and the Four Valleys (in which He draws on Persian mystic lore and poets, including Rumi and Hafiz), and we wander the valleys of search, giving ourselves up through love and knowledge ultimately to the seventh valley, the Valley of True Poverty and Absolute Nothingness. A gift, a paradox. So much of Annie Dillard's work recognizes and explores the paradoxes of creation. Oh, oh!

And so much of her work is grounded in the animating principle of the infusion of beauty into the living world. Beauty, beauty. She says, "...that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there." Here is an invitation to presence, to the Presence, to the acknowledgment of our deep need to swim in the ineffable. It is no surprise to me to find her swimming in light.

I know she understands these mysteries, at a level beyond "understanding", when she says, "But there is another kind of seeing that involves a letting go. When I see this way I sway transfixed and emptied. The difference between the two ways of seeing is the difference between walking with and without a camera. When I walk with a camera I walk from shot to shot, reading the light on a calibrated meter. When I walk without a camera, my own shutter opens, and the moment's light prints on my own silver gut."

Yes, yes. I learned, the other day, that when a Baha'i goes on pilgrimage (as I will with my family this coming summer), the first time you enter the holy buildings, it is without a camera. You are free to go back afterwards and take pictures to your heart's content, but in the first moments of communion, you rely on the present-ness, the being-ness of the moment of intimacy. Spirit, walking in the world.

Yet you can't just make it happen, and Annie writes to this, as well. "But I can't go out and try to see this way," she says, speaking of the second way. "I'll fail, I'll go mad."

Indeed. I know. She adds, "All I can do is try to gag the commentator, to hush the noise of useless interior babble that keeps me from seeing just as surely as a newspaper dangled before my eyes. The effort is really a discipline requiring a lifetime of dedicated struggle; it marks the literature of the saints and monks of every order East and West, under every rule and no rule, discalced and shod. The world's spiritual geniuses seem to discover universally that the mind's muddy river, this ceaseless flow of trivia and trash, cannot be dammed, and that trying to dam it is a waste of effort that might lead to madness. Instead you must allow the muddy river to flow unheeded in the dim channels of consciousness; you raise your sights; you look along it, mildly, acknowledging its presence without interest and gazing beyond it into the realm of the real where subjects and objects act and rest purely, without utterance. 'Launch into the deep,' says Jacques Ellul, 'and you shall see.'"

There is more, much more, of what one can call, in a somewhat facile manner, meditation. It is tempting to share every morsel, but you can always buy and read the book. She says, "The secret of seeing is, then, the pearl of great price....But although the pearl may be found, it may not be sought. The literature of illumination reveals this above all: although it comes to those who wait for it, it is always, even to the most practiced and adept, a gift and a total surprise." She says, "Litanies hum in my ears; my tongue flaps in my mouth Ailinon, alleluia! I cannot cause light; the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam. It is possible, in deep space, to sail on solar wind. Light, be it particle or wave, has force: you rig a giant sail and go. The secret of seeing is to sail on solar wind. Hone and spread your spirit till you yourself are a sail, whetted, translucent, broadside to the merest puff."

This is me, sailing, flying, immersing myself in water, in words, in the Word. This is me praying, shimmering alleluia. This is me reading Annie Dillard, a woman who writes of trees, "The trees especially seem to bespeak a generosity of spirit. I suspect that the real moral thinkers end up, wherever they may start, in botany. We know nothing for certain, but we seem to see that the world turns upon growing, grows towards growing, and growing green and clean."

This is me waiting for planting, waiting to sink to my calcified knees in the greening of spring, praying, almost in bloom. This is me, hoping for Amen.

An Annie posting

2007-02-04T21:17:00.000-08:00

Every so often the right book falls into your hands at the right time, and you immerse yourself in words of beauty. This week, my gift was to find and read Annie Dillard's Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters. So here, I give you a gift, of some lovely lines from Annie:

We are down here in time, where beauty grows.

I have some experience of these palo santo trees. They interest me as emblems of the muteness of the human stance in relation to all that is not human. I see us all as palo santo trees, holy sticks, together watching all that we watch, and growing in silence.

It is difficult to undo our own damage, and to recall to our presence that which we have asked to leave. It is hard to desecrate a grove and change your mind. The very holy mountains are keeping mum. We doused the burning bush and cannot rekindle it; we are lighting matches in vain under every green tree. Did the wind use to cry, and the hills shout forth praise? Now speech has perished from among the lifeless things of earth, and living things say very little to very few. Birds may crank out sweet gibberish and monkeys howl; horses neigh and pigs say, as you recall, oink oink. But so do cobbles rumble when a wave recedes, and thunders break the air in lightning storms. I call these noises silence. It could be that wherever there is motion there is noise, as when a whale breaches and smacks the water-and wherever there is stillness there is the still small voice, of God's speaking from the whirlwind, nature's old song and dance, the show we drove from town.

Thank you, Annie.

Reflecting on the Word

2007-01-26T13:55:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Pearl Pirie, who writes me that she has posted a promotion of my book on her blog.

I also wanted to tell you that the other day, after I finished marking quizzes in my little shared office at the University of Ottawa, where I am working part-time, I read some poetry I've been wanting to look at for some time. I share some lines from Wallace Stevens which I may someday use for an epigraph, if a poem "comes". In the meantime, they sing to me.

She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker.

Wallace Stevens, “The Idea of Order at Key West”

Tonight I will read some poems I have written for my father, at the Baha'i Centre coffeehouse, in downtown Ottawa. I am pleased to be included on their program, and will tell y'all about it sometime, perhaps with a picture or two...

Chelsea woman

2007-01-22T19:00:00.000-08:00

Between here and Wakefield lies Chelsea. Actually, it's a quick walk as the crow flies and it's another amalgamated community so it stretches a considerable way along the Gatineau River...but it is undoubtedly one of the prettier Chelseas in the world and in addition, there are a lot of women named Chelsea. This picture is of one of them. She is a former student of mine, and I spent some time with her last week while doing some moonlighting (supply teaching at a local Adult Ed. school). This particular Chelsea dances to her own tune, and gave me permission both to photograph her and to post her radiant smile for you all to be inspired. Introducing Chelsea, from close to Chelsea...and so it goes.

She's NOT dead...

2007-01-22T18:47:00.000-08:00

Adrienne Rich is not dead.

I say this because on the list of "you got it wrongs", this weekend I did a doozer. I was one of the featured poets at the Bywords winterfest of poetry, held at Chapters, the Rideau store in downtown Ottawa. While I was introducing my poem, "capable", which begins with an epigraph by Adrienne Rich about Muriel Rukeyser (see it in the Winter chapbook which you can buy at the Bywords site), I mentioned the "late" Adrienne Rich. This is because I thought she was dead. I was dead wrong! and thanks to fellow Ottawa poet Barbara Myers for pointing this out. I don't have a clue where I got that idea...but I am glad to hear that rumours of Rich's death were greatly exaggerated and she's alive and well and still writing. My apologies (mea culpa) to any and all who were present for the occasion.

Despite my misinformation, I must say it was a lovely afternoon. Above, you see pictured the versatile singer-songwriter Lindsay Ferguson, who entertained us for a considerable time both before and after the readings. I must say: if you haven't heard this young woman perform, go and hear her if you can. Better still, follow this link and buy her music. I bought CD's on the spot. Lovely, lovely. Apparently we are almost neighbours: she's a Wakefield girl. I shall pay attention.

And speaking of attention, I want to give my next picture some front and centre, so will post again.

To say goodbye

2007-01-15T17:21:00.000-08:00

Joan Doran, died January 14, 2007
surrounded by her loving family
Rest in Peace
With Love,

Heather

at passing
(for Joan Doran)

if one could give
a tanka in her honour
it would speak to beads
and unfamiliar sound
of her rosary, singing,

speaking memory.
she would live again inside
six strong and distant men,
each strong generation passed
to the rising moon

to hold her as she
slips away. west, something new
opens to a surging sea
while smoke, unfurled,
wisps slowly past closed eyes.

never again will
we like the colour yellow.
he puts these fine brushes down
to search for stillness, finds it
in another art, their sons.

A New Year

2007-01-12T13:14:00.000-08:00

...and it's finally winter. Canadians have a propensity to comment on the weather, anyway, but this year the winter has been even more a conversation piece, a national news item, and the subject of lots of hot air about global warming. It has been truly sad to see the news coverage of great large trees falling in Vancouver's Stanley Park, and sadder still to hear all the debate about whether they should be allowed to go back into the forest or whether they should be cut up for the money each board foot provides. Global warming is real, and still the debate. If you want to hear some lovely music on the subject, I refer you to Nancy Ward, whose song, "To The Planters of Trees", has to be as sweet as you can hear, and to one of my favourite Vancouver Island groups, Wyrd Sisters, who taught me the word which I used for my blog. Their music, both Ward and Wyrd, is wonderful.

...and another thing

2006-12-18T12:52:00.000-08:00

Today I have been blessed with poems coming in many forms: my friend, Kurt Hein, sent me a compilation of Rumi poems and I choose this one to post because it seems....seasonal.

There Is Something in Us

Imagine a man selling his donkey
to be with Jesus.

Now imagine him selling Jesus
to get a ride on a donkey.
This does happen.

Jesus can transform a drunk into gold.
If the drunk is already golden,
he can be changed to pure diamond.
If already that, he can become the circling
planets, Jupiter, Venus, the moon.

Never think that you are worthless.
God has paid an enormous amount for you,
and the gifts keep arriving.

There is something in us
that has nothing to do with night and day,
grapes that never saw a vineyard.

We are all returning

says the Qur'an. Enjoy Shams,
or if you cannot do that, at least
consider what honest people tell you.

In addition, I have had kind greetings from poets Dorothy Mahoney and Amanda Earl. I met Dorothy at the Glenairley retreat in November and this has been truly serendipitous. In addition to being a vibrant and reflective poet, she is warm and encouraging. It is good to have a new poet friend, out there in Windsor-area land. And I have already mentioned Amanda, today...but am happy to remind you to read her poems, blog, and find her at Bywords.

In the mail, literary magazines. Last week I received Vallum on "The Desert" and am finding it rich. Today, Arc and CV2. Now I have something to savour over the next few days. I was interested to find some of the late Anne Szumigalski's work in CV2...and to read Saskatoon poet Mark Abley. When you have lived in a city, and love it, it's interesting to read a poet's works, and Abley narrates a poem in which street names from Saskatoon...Warman Road...appear as part of the geography, and it takes me immediately to those places. It also takes me to memory: back in the days when I was a U. of S. student and did not know much about anything poetic, I had a friend who took me over to another friend's place for tea. The mother who served the tea was Anne Szumigalski. I knew she was a poet, but how could I have known that I would be reading her work, and remembering her, for decades? I think, perhaps, my innocence kept me from having a bad case of the 'groupies'. I still get a little thrill when I encounter a familiar name in a magazine I open...like reading Pamela Porter and Barbara Pelman in Arc and CV2. Both were at Glenairley, and it is no surprise to find their work in these lovely, lovely magazines.

A good day for poetry.

More good news

2006-12-18T08:57:00.000-08:00

This morning I received a note from Amanda Earl, at Bywords, that three of my poems will be published in their winter edition, and an invitation to read at their winterfest at Chapters Rideau on January 21, 2007. If you will be in the Ottawa area, come on over!

I can't say enough about Bywords. Amanda, along with her husband Charles and several volunteer readers, do an amazing job of making poetry accessible and visible in the Ottawa Valley. The chapbooks are interesting and affordable, the opportunities to read and share the poems truly outstanding, and Amanda's personal dedication to all things poetic is remarkable. Plus she is a really wonderful poet herself.

This is my shout out for Bywords...for encouragement, and for caring, and for excellence.

More from bywords

2006-12-15T13:01:00.000-08:00

Please have a look at this month's bywords online, where I am one of three featured poets...hope you enjoy.

I also received a little hello from Prairie Fire, with some encouraging words about some poems I had submitted (one of those you almost made it ones) so I sent them some more.

Read poems! Write a few if you can! What better reflection over holiday times?

Your Turn

2006-12-05T08:12:00.000-08:00

Amanda Earl "tagged" me with a poetry quiz this morning. I am sending it on to the poets I met at Glenairley.

Here are my responses:

The first poem I remember reading/hearing/reacting to was… probably a nursery rhyme, and later a 'classic' but the first time a poem really hit me was hearing Walt Whitman read aloud.

I was forced to memorize numerous poems in school and…well, no, I wasn't.

I read poetry because…it connects with some part of me that nothing else reaches.

A poem I’m likely to think about when asked about a favorite poem is…Song of Myself. No question. I have learned to read many, many poems since Whitman, but that was the first time I realized poetry was not a Hallmark card, and had real meaning.

I write poetry, but…I wonder if it's simply a therapy for me or if the words, when someone else reads them or hears them, have a meaning beyond the personal. I hope so.

My experience with reading poetry differs from my experience with reading other types of literature because…I hear it in my mind more clearly.

I find poetry…more compelling than most other forms of literature. I think it's form + emotion that does that...meaning in a small space.

The last time I heard poetry was…yesterday evening. Once a month, I attend a poetry evening at my cousin's home. He is an Ottawa poet and holds a group called "the Ottawa Creative Writers' Group" which is now about 12 years old. I have been attending for almost three of those years.

I think poetry is like …eating a beautiful gourmet meal. You don't feel sick and full afterwards but know that you have tasted something beautiful and that your heart, mind and soul have been fed all at the same time.

Congratulations...

2006-11-28T18:46:00.000-08:00

to Ascent Aspirations, edited by David Fraser. I received my copy of their newest print edition, AguaTerra, in the mail today, and am enjoying the poems within. One is mine! Yet part of the enjoyment of subscribing to various literary magazines, receiving chapbooks, attending workshops and retreats is the opportunity to hear, and read, the poems being offered by poets known and unknown across the country and in other lands. I commend this magazine to you: support poetry and order one from them. They are worth the read...

also, delighted to hear from Amanda Earl today. She is the really terrific editor of bywords, and I am glad to know that one of my poems will be online with them for the December edition. Look for it after December 15.

I have spent the last couple of days downloading and sorting pictures from my journey. I thought you might like to have a glance at the one above, taken at Glenairley: our mentor, Patrick Lane, relaxed, his foot partially obscuring poet and prolific professor, David Pimm.

It was a very good time.

Glenairley

2006-11-26T18:44:00.000-08:00

Glenairley: seventeen poets gather under the tutelage of Patrick Lane. One of the first to welcome me is Pamela Porter, whose poem/novel, Crazy Man, has recently won the Governor General's literary award. She is also the only one missing from the group shot I share with you: she had to depart immediately at noon on the day we completed our retreat. I call this photo, "missing Pam". There are many entries if you google her...I share the one from Coteau Books:

Porter, Pamela

Pamela Paige Porter is an award-winning poet and juvenile fiction author. Stones Call Out is her first poetry book publication. Her free-verse children's book The Crazy Man received the 2005 Governor General's Award for Children's Literature. Born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Pamela Porter has also lived in Texas, Louisiana, Washington, and Montana. Her husband's family has also operated a family farm near Weyburn, Saskatchewan for generations. She obtained her undergraduate English degree from Southern Methodist University in Dallas, and received her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Montana. She currently lives in Sidney, British Columbia.

I want you to go and buy her books...here is a poet whose words bring joy and tears, sometimes without turning a page. It was an honour to listen to her work. In fact, I found myself a member of one of the finest circles I have ever joined. Nevermind the natural beauty of the place (which was lovely and reminiscent of a summer school I used to attend in an old house in the Laurentians, known as Beaulac). Nevermind the convivial camaraderie of meals prepared for everyone by the irrepressible and audacious Wendy Morton, our hostess, Westjet's "Poet of the Skies" and the author of a variety of books well worth the reading...

Nevermind the running jokes about dogs, brought about via conversations with the warm and incredibly talented Dorothy Mahoney, nor the fun of listening to David Pimm's English accent (now there's a man who knows culture)...nor the pleasure of hearing young poet Andrea McKenzie (buy her book too!)...

Nevermind the warm fire in the living area, the endless cups of organic tea (did I really drink all that honey, she asks)...the photographs of moss and the small statue of the Buddha which oversaw my walk towards the water and the quiet of my cabin each day...

I found myself in a space with writers, all of us talking the same language, delighting in the sharing of works and words past and present (I chose a Jan Zwicky poem to read on the evening where we spoke poems we liked, but I could have chosen from others). It was very interesting having exercises (set by Patrick) and pursuing them and finding out, the next day, how each of us had taken the same concept and turned it into something of individual beauty. We found our voices again and again in a time capsule, away from the madding crowd indeed, and ate a lot of the best shortbread cookies (made by poet Grace Cockburn) that I've ever eaten.

I feel...very full. Watch for the chapbook which will come out, in the spring, edited by Patrick, from Leaf Press...and watch for the names of poets whom it has been my pleasure and honour to meet and to learn from. This was a very rich experience for me, gathering at Glenairley with many poets from B.C., a couple from Alberta, one from Ontario; I think they were glad to have me there, representing the Ottawa Valley (bienvenue à Québec) and I will share with you one poem which I wrote in the Victoria airport, en route.

duty free

moving from rain to snow
island to midland
ocean to prairie:
the same.

moving from November
to memory,
another gate after an initial spin:
surprise.

a lineup forms beside
artificial trees, beneath fluorescents
and a tournament of glass.

alone, i take an aisle seat,
no need for a window,

nothing to declare.

Any Americans out there?

2006-11-08T07:01:00.000-08:00

This morning I am searching for links to American poetry magazines, or literary magazines in general, who invite submissions from new, and young, poets. One of my former students has sent me several of her poems and they are quite brilliant. She is not yet 25 and she writes amazing stuff. I just don't know enough about the American periodicals to know whom I should recommend that she submit to. I can send her some Canadian links but I would sure appreciate it if any of you have some recommendations in this regard.

I have been immersing myself in a number of Canadian poets again, in preparation for my upcoming departure for the Glenairely Retreat. I find that I can't, or shouldn't, write poems myself immediately after reading one or another poet. I just get too derivative. This tricky question of voice is always a little frustrating, particularly in view of the fact that my propensity is towards philosophical, narrative poems. I like to think out loud, which of course is a cardinal sin with most current publishers. I had a very thoughtful reply from one poetry editor this week, at Grain magazine in my 'home' province of Saskatchewan. He (Gerry Hill) took the time to explain a little of why he wasn't accepting my poems...saying that he liked "the range of formal gestures in the poems, but on the whole the poems don't get quite far enough." The rest of his letter had to do with other and more personal issues (turns out that we are both CUSO P.N.G. veterans).

I am giving some thought to what this might mean. I remember maclennan saying that he had submitted to Grain something like fourteen times before an acceptance...and I've only been turned down by them three or four so far. I will keep sending, keep writing, and one of these days, hope for a "Yes!" from them, or Event, or Fiddlehead, or Prairie Fire, or CV2, or Descant, or Arc, Vallum, The Malahat Review, Geist, The Antigonish Review, This Magazine...or even a manuscript acceptance from someone would be rather exciting. I am very glad to have a poem coming up in Room of One's Own. Subscribe! Subscribe! No doubt there are many others...but these are bookmarked on my computer and I have subscriptions to most of them now. I also refer you, as always, to Leaf Press, Ascent, and bywords, in my links, for their encouragement of new Canadian poets.

As a poet, I do not always speak in the same voice. Sometimes I have a 'hard' tone...something of powerful import to me makes its way through my subconscious and it is almost as much of a surprise to me to read what I have written as it is, probably, to anyone else I share with. Other poems emerge from the soft spaces, from the places within myself that I rarely allow myself even to look at. It is not a world conducive to softness. Yet, there seems to be this post-modernist desire for angst, and I don't have so much! (knock on wood) I have a good life. I am grateful for this. But perhaps it leaves me more thoughtful than edgy...and magazines seem to want you to be more edgy than thoughtful.

Of course, there are exceptions. I find that the storytellers, if they are telling the story in language that draws you in enough, can find press (although this may be because of where they have come from rather than where they are going). I really enjoy, especially, the storytelling poems of Don McKay, for example. One just wonders..."go far enough". Where is far enough? I am not going to go and find my poems in a bottle, and Patrick Lane has written an eloquent memoir which touches on this subject. I am not going to find my poems from a life experience which I do not have, but I continue to believe that there is room for a poet whose life experience, whose reflections and stories, could be brought together in a way that has meaning for others, too.

So far, however, the general feeling seems to be 'too much philosophy, not enough angst'. Or, perhaps, it is just the language. There are times when I read someone's poem and just gasp with the sheer stunning words of it. There are also the debates between those who think that "poems should mean something" and those who seem to prefer "if there is too much meaning, there is too much poem." There are the poets-who-write-for-obscurity and the poets-who-write-for-laying-it-all-bare-from-the-guts. I tend not to enjoy either of these too much; I want a balance between having to figure out deep meaning, realizing there is no particular meaning, and wishing that the poet had not supplied quite so much information. And then, of course, there are the poets of Hallmark greeting cards and ditties...some of which are genuinely moving but many of which leave me running back to Wordsworth for a taste of a different kind of daffodil.

Let me give you an example of a poem that tries to accommodate to what I think magazines want, but which I will not submit again because it is not authentic voice from me. This poem is an experiment from my 'dark side', as distinct from my series of 'inner bitch' poems (which have some bite). I don't want to compromise like I did in this poem:

turpitude

those people
who think
they’re all that
cat’s meow shit don’t stink
the world’s plaintiffs

wonder why i
can’t weep at
Quentin Tarantino’s
funeral. suttee begins
to look more attractive

so build pyres
for someone seen those
flames. yawp for the old
imaginary (fucken)
apocalypse.

This poem gives you some of my cynicism (it is true) and language I don't usually use (although the gratuitous use of profanity still seems to me somewhat juvenile as an approach). And of course there are a couple of things you have to know in order to 'get' this poem: what is suttee, what is an apocalypse, and a nod to Whitman's use of 'yawp', among other elements. I assume that I don't have to explain Quentin Tarantino (who, incidentally, directed a couple of amazing segments of CSI, in which Nicky gets buried underground, a very fine piece of acting from George Eads). But.

This poem is attractively short (for magazines which prefer sound-byte poems) and decidedly acerbic (at least for me) but is it true? Is it an ironic feminist protest against? And if so, against what, or whom? I think that's where it came from, when I wrote it (quite some time ago) but as happens often, when a poem just 'comes', I'm really not sure where it came from inside. Maybe the subconscious carries more than I think. Of course it does.

Anyway, I will keep you posted on reflections from a poet coming back from Glenairely, at the end of this month. I am hopefully going to continue climbing this steep learning curve...and one of these days, maybe philosophical ruminations (in tight language) will find their day. Maybe I just need to write skinnier poems. I am a Rubenesque woman in an era of anorexics. Maybe I just need to throw up.

Planning

2006-10-26T18:42:00.000-07:00

I have been finalizing preparations for a trek into poems...specifically, time at the Glenairely Retreat on Vancouver Island in November, under the tutelage and mentorship of Patrick Lane. I try to imagine this: three days reading and writing poems, walking on a beach, sitting by a fire. Someone else cooks the meals, someone listens to me read something that has come from immanence and hears my words as a reckoning. Narrative floats as though cloud could be mystic:

this week my husband brought home two boxes of turkish delight, one with nuts.
the ingredients say genuine. my mother asks what the flavour is, some subtle
something. mastic, he says, then in surprise: that's a gum I use to seal things.
i say, probably some tree with sticky sap.
sure enough, he looks it up. a relative of cashew
Mediterranean. i like them both but mostly like powdered sugar
inside boxes flat as old pencil cases. small sugar dumplings, chewier than
we remember. my father is diabetic so he & i share while others feast.
i think of all it takes to cook candy, wonder if these sweets are made
by women or men after running through forests near seas i have not seen.
he always finds the best treats.
beauty, tempting, from a far away tree.

Thanksgiving

2006-10-08T14:17:00.000-07:00

An American friend sent me a quote for our Canadian Thanksgiving this weekend. I offer it to you all as a worthy minute of your day.

Everywhere I go I find that a poet has been there before me.

--Sigmund Freud

Ascent Aspirations

2006-09-22T06:37:00.000-07:00

Kudos to the small presses. Today I want to give a little plug to Ascent Aspirations, run out of B.C. by David Fraser. I hear that their next edition, Agua Terra, will be including one of my poems. It's always a pleasure to hold in your hands a book or a magazine where you find your works appreciated by others...

Surprise...

2006-09-10T19:37:00.000-07:00

The world of publication is hard for me to figure out. Today I finally got around to opening my September/October copy of This Magazine, to which I have a subscription because I submit every year to their Great Canadian Literary Hunt poetry section. I short-listed for it in 2004, as a matter of fact, with my poem "Summer Journey". So of course today I went straight to the GCLH announcements, and found, to my surprise, that I had short-listed again. The last time I short-listed they sent me an announcement and an encouraging letter. This time, no announcement, no letter, no e-mail. Of course, what with the vagaries of e-mail, it is quite possible that for some reason I didn't receive it, if it was sent. I don't really understand, but at least it was a good surprise. It's the second time I've been surprised this year: I didn't know that one of my poems had been published in this year's Quills, until the issue arrived in the mail. So, I guess it's a good sign...and the first place winner of the contest, one Sean Horlor, with his poem "In Praise of Beauty", is truly deserving of the prize. It's a lovely poem. So why not pick up a copy of the magazine? I think it's great to have that venue for poets...and fiction writers.

These days I'm working more on a short creative non-fiction piece...sometimes it's refreshing to change one's genre for a while. I would have liked to attend Amanda Earl's Poetic Desserts event tonight but it has been a grand day of entertaining (husband Bernie at the BBQ for friends, again) so I have to raincheck. That raincheck may in fact be a chill one...since in October there are so many other events that Amanda is not reconvening desserts until November. I'm glad to be included and will try, try again...I tend to be a bit more of a hermit in winter, and my parents will be here for some months, so our outings may be of a different nature.

In the meantime, I am off to Chicago just after my 50th birthday, coming up soon, because I am needed to do a book-signing! In my other life (sometimes I think admitting to being a member of a faith group is like a kiss of death for an aspiring poet, so I try not to mix those two worlds much) but...I am indeed a Baha'i, and have my first book coming up...Partners in Spirit: What Couples Say About Marriages That Work. If you want to read it, by all means go online to Amazon or Barnes & Noble or Allbookstores in the States, or our Chapters/Indigo stores here in Canada...google my name...or the title...and voila...buy and enjoy. This book is the result of a couple of events. First, I was thinking about how challenging it must be for a lot of people to believe in marriage at all...there are so many divorces. But I taught school for a long time, and I know the value of positive modelling. And I love stories, and know the value of narration. So I started asking people for their stories...not about what didn't work, about marriage (there are so many stories of that nature that it's depressing) but about what did...which is kind of heartening...and one think led to another and I collected them. Thus, I wrote a book (on the side, when I was writing my Master's papers, actually) and it was accepted by Baha'i Publishing in Chicago. So I am an author now! Not that I wasn't before, but the poetic wing has been kept separate from the non-fiction (or religious) works.

But I've been thinking about this, too...there are many writers in Canada, poets included, who express their convictions through their poetry. For those whose faith is a part of their lives (Gary Snyder, a Buddhist, in the United States, won the Pulitzer)...Margaret Avison, Lorna Crozier...who else is a 'religious' poet? Tim Lilburn? I suppose I use the term in its broadest context...spiritual & committed. I'm not sure, as a Baha'i, I could be considered 'mainstream religious' anyway, whatever that is.

Musings on synthesis, conflation, the unity of heart, mind, spirit....the poem and the Word; the poet and the Wyrd. So much to reflect upon, mostly my favourite analogy of the human: how we are multi-faceted crystals, and whatever light you see is the one you are shown in the moment. Today I am showing one side of me to the other...perhaps the season change of light refracted back through a lens. Convex, concave, microscope, macroscope...the DNA of dance.

Okay, enough esoterics for one day. Really, it's very simple: still, gratitude. See the poem, archived at Leaf Press. Monday's Poem, where I breathed out to the universe, the counting of blessings.

This soft September chill

2006-09-06T09:49:00.000-07:00

opens me to some quietness, not melancholy but a nature more attuned to inwardness than frantic solstices or summertime fair/fare:

thus, today's sharing, from T.S.Eliot,

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.

"East Coker," The Four Quartets

haiku

2006-09-02T10:23:00.000-07:00

what comes from stillness
is sight of small yellow bird
on red sunflower

Sometimes a Fiction

2006-08-30T14:44:00.000-07:00

Today I want to recommend a novel...which contains some interesting poetic inserts...but which is fascinating in its history. Louis de Bernières has written Bird Without Wings as a history of the period from 1900-1925 or so, centred in the upheavals between Greece and Turkey and the change from the Ottoman Empire under Kemal Atatürk, the First World War, the displacement of the Armenians, the Christian/Muslim conflagration, the destruction of Smyrna, the vilification of David Lloyd George...all woven within a story of a small town caught up by these upheavals. The characters become very familiar and the writing itself is exquisite. An astounding piece of historical fiction.

The change...

2006-08-27T13:18:00.000-07:00

and so begins the shift from summer into fall. rain pours as though oceans released from skies, something pent up, something hidden, something to greet gardens spiralling to grey...

still tomatoes, still a few beans, basil has grown high, zinnias & sunflowers still chorus life but
today, I have made my first fire of the season to ward off cool, to keep light and heat close,

to believe that comfort is still possible. I hope to change my mind, to shift its view of weather
before snow, to enjoy each moment, live to the full. when younger, I was an optimist. change

has sent sensations I scarcely recognize, a certain sadness when light fades early and shadows
begin. there are solutions in the scent of roasted chicken, a potato yellow and fresh, a squash.

sweet peas still climb their colourful way about the garden, yellow still ranges across the back
fence, summer will send its last pinwheel soaring soon and I will wave goodbye, till next time.

a glimpse of mind

2006-08-25T11:50:00.000-07:00

in the mail today: Broken Jaw Press 2006 Catalogue. and a book: Edward Gates' Heart's Cupboard. here a glimpse of the heart of a poet, a life in numbered segments, without titles. how he thinks, what he knows; what he thinks, knows: his are plural, "poem taken/from the closet". a series of poetic impressions, bled of all extraneous chat like a Monet painting of rain. winner of the Poets' Corner Award for 2006, these are, as most things I have read from Broken Jaw, spare. Erin Mouré, in her jacket description, says "The pieces grasp at but elude description..."; in this she finds a "gentle, wild beauty". i find them like sketches which come back as image gaining holographic depth. the whole is more than the sum of its numbers, roman numerals in an accretion of what it is to write and be a farmer. full of blueberries, some too cold to juxtapose.

last year, after travelling Saskatchewan, i made a chapbook which i titled wild blueberries, sent it out in a very limited edition. my poems are more full but the same small sweetness is present, the truth for Gates that "a hundred and/twenty acres ripe//with laughter/keeps me going". it is not all sweetness...there is a "plaintive lament" present and many, many "frozen" moments...emotions stilled at source, walking briskly to XXXXVI where the poet says, "I tighten my jacket//and walk back to//mouth eyes nose//away from the wind/...." to "the houses alone and silent//flesh can freeze if I stop//....a damp damp cold". yet he ends hopefully, "buds open slowly first cat/eyes then the break into blossom."

something to think about from this poet of mind, heart, land.

Stephen Lewis: my hero

2006-08-23T12:04:00.000-07:00

THE 2006 XVI INTERNATIONAL AIDS CONFERENCE CLOSING ADDRESS
BY STEPHEN LEWIS

This is the last speech I shall make at any of these international conferences in my role as United Nations Envoy. I'm glad, for obvious Canadian reasons, that it comes in Toronto. But I'm equally pleased because this has been a good conference, covering an extraordinary range of ground, and I therefore feel confident in asking you to join with me in giving force to the oft-repeated mantra: "Time To Deliver."

Of what would that meaning consist? Allow me to set out a number of items.

Number 1: Abstinence-only programmes don't work. Ideological rigidity almost never works when applied to the human condition. Moreover, it's an antiquated throwback to the conditionality of yesteryear to tell any government how to allocate its money for prevention. That approach has a name: it's called neo-colonialism.

Number 2: Harm reduction programmes do work. Needle exchange and methadone treatment save lives. More, it would be positively perverse to close the 'Insite' safe injection facility in Vancouver when it has been positively evaluated in a number of studies; in fact there should be several more such facilities in Canada and around the world. Russia, Central Asia, parts of India are all struggling with transmission through injecting drug use. To shut 'Insite' down is to invite HIV infection and death. One has to wonder about the minds of those who would so readily punish injecting drug users rather than understanding the problem for what it is: a matter of public health.

Number 3: Circumcision, as a preventive intervention, should not be subject to bureaucratic contemplation forever. We have enough information now to know that it is an intervention worth pursuing. What remains is a single-minded effort to get the word out, respect cultural sensitivities, and then for those who want to proceed, make certain that we have well-trained personnel to do the operating.

The men are lining up for the procedure in Swaziland. And when I was in the Zambian copper belt, just a couple of weeks ago, at an animated meeting with the District Commissioner, he indicated that he was a part of an ethnic group which was circumcised. I then revealed that I was circumcised, and there followed a joyous frenzy of male bonding amongst all the circumciseees. The fact of the matter is that even in the remotest parts of Africa there is now an awareness of the issue; it's important to act on it.

Number 4: The growing excitement around a microbicide is entirely warranted. This is a preventive technology whose time has come. To be sure, there can be no flagging in the dogged quest for a vaccine, but it would appear that where preventive technologies are concerned, the microbicide is first in line. Now is the time to make certain, in advance, that when the discovery is made, it is instantly accessible and acceptable to the women of the world, wherever they may live.

Number 5: In the hierarchy of preventive measures, the Prevention of Mother To Child Transmission is very near the top. It is a bitter indictment that so few HIV-positive pregnant women have access to PMTCT. But that's just the half of it. It is inexcusable that in Africa and other parts of the developing world we continue to use single-dose Nevirapine, rather than full triple therapy during pregnancy, as we do in western countries like Canada. This means that hundreds of thousands of babies continue to be born HIV-positive, rather than reducing the transmission rate virtually to zero. I ask: what kind of a world do we live in where the life of an African child or an Asian child is worth so much less than the life of a Canadian child?

Number 6: It is now accepted as unassailable truth that people in treatment need nutritious food supplements to maintain and tolerate their treatment. And yet, there is a growing clamour from People Living with AIDS that decent nutrition simply isn't available, leaving them in a desperate predicament. The World Food Programme released a study at this conference calculating the cost of food supplementation at 66 cents a day for an entire family; what madness is it that denies the World Food Programme the necessary money?

Number 7: One of the issues that received an insufficient airing at this conference is sexual violence against women. Just a few months ago, I was visiting the local hospital in Thika, Kenya, which houses the one rape counseling centre in that part of the country. The rise in sexual violence has meant that there are over thirty reported cases every month, with multiples of that number never of course reported.

In April of this year there were forty-six reported cases. Twenty-two were under the age of eighteen; half of those were under the age of twelve. Horrific you say? Without question. But how would you characterize an emerging pattern of the sexual assault of women between the ages of sixty-five and eighty, the rapists confident that they can rape with impunity without fear of transmission?

Sexual violence is everywhere reported, from marital rape to rape as a war crime. The phenomenon is by no means singularly African; we live in a world community where the depravity of sexual violence has run amok. In Africa, however, the violence and the virus go together. And yet, we lack the laws, the jurisprudence, the enforcement that would give to women even a modicum of protection. If ever there was a cause to mobilize AIDS activists around the world, this is it.

Number 8: We urgently need a resolution of the vexing debate over testing and counseling. We made progress at this conference, but by no means definitive progress. It seems to me that the growing embrace of routine testing and counseling, with an opt-out provision to protect human rights, is the appropriate emerging consensus. Everyone should keep an eye on Lesotho where the Know Your Status campaign will, I believe, become the bench-mark, pro or con, for the continent and beyond.

Number 9: There is an ongoing epidemic of child sexual abuse. The dynamic of abuse of children is often different from that of the sexual abuse of women: what is common to both is the terrifying danger of transmission. Children require different interventions. Alas, we are nowhere near the articulation of a response. In this instance, as in every such instance, children are relegated to the scrapheap of society's priorities, and have been so relegated throughout the twenty-five years of this pandemic.

Number 10: It is impossible to talk about children without talking about orphans. And it is impossible to understand how, in the year 2006, we still continue to fail to implement policies to address the torrent, the deluge of orphan children. Countries have programmes of action; they languish unfunded. One of the most chilling pieces of statistical data is the finding that only three to five per cent of orphans receive any intervention of any kind from the state.

The monumental numbers of orphans, so many of them now adults because the pandemic has gone on for so long, pose a bracing, almost insuperable challenge for the countries which they inhabit. I appeal to everyone to recognize that we're walking on the knife's edge of an unsolvable human catastrophe. Inevitably we're preoccupied with the here and now, but the cumulative impact of these orphan kids, their levels of trauma, their overwhelming personal needs, their intense collective vulnerability strikes at the heart of the human dynamic, creating a sociological rearrangement of human relationships. And we're doing so little about it; our response is microscopic. We are inviting the whirlwind, and we will not be able to cope.

Number 11: It is impossible to talk about orphans without talking about grandmothers. Who would ever have imagined it would come to this? In Africa, the grandmothers are the unsung heroes of the continent: these extraordinary, resilient, courageous women, fighting through the inconsolable grief of the loss of their own adult children, becoming parents again in their fifties and sixties and seventies and eighties. I attended a grandmother's gathering last weekend on the eve of the conference: the grandmothers were magnificent, but they're all struggling with the same anguished nightmare: what happens to my grandchildren when I die?

We need major social welfare programmes that will recognize these essential caregivers' contributions to society as legitimate and difficult labour, and offer the guarantee of sustainable incomes to the grandmothers of Africa: from food to school fees to income generation, the answers must be found. It's another test for the delegates to this conference.

Number 12: In the midst of everything else, we must continue to roll out treatment. I am worried by the new figures. There were one million, three hundred thousand people in treatment at the end of 2005. Six months later, there are one million, six hundred and fifty thousand in treatment. The additional three hundred and fifty thousand seems a very modest increment. Treatment is keeping people alive; treatment is bringing hope; treatment is stimulating prevention; treatment is meshing more and more frequently with community-based care; we cannot let the process slow.

Number 13: And while I'm on the issue of treatment, I am bound to raise South Africa. South Africa is the unkindest cut of all. It is the only country in Africa, amongst all the countries I have traversed in the last five years, whose government is still obtuse, dilatory and negligent about rolling out treatment. It is the only country in Africa whose government continues to propound theories more worthy of a lunatic fringe than of a concerned and compassionate state. Between six and eight hundred people a day die of AIDS in South Africa. The government has a lot to atone for. I'm of the opinion that they can never achieve redemption.

There are those who will say I have no right, as a United Nations official, to say such things of a member state. I was appointed as Envoy on AIDS in Africa. I see my job as advocating for those who are living with the virus, those who are dying of the virus . All of those, in and out of civil society, who are fighting the good fight to achieve social justice. It is not my job to be silenced by a government when I know that what it is doing is wrong, immoral, indefensible.

Number 14: Unbeknownst to many, we are on the cusp of a huge financial crisis in response to the pandemic. I think we have been lulled into a damaging false security by the fact that we jumped from roughly $300 million a year from all sources in the late 1990's, to $8.3 billion in 2005. And indeed it sounds impressive. But we need $15 billion this year, and $18 billion next year, and $22 billion in 2008. Any straight line projection will take us to $30 billion in 2010 . the moment of universal access to treatment, prevention and care.

We're billions and billions short of those targets. If these circumstances continue, universal access is doomed. All governments, as they continue to expand their treatment and prevention initiatives, are spooked by worries of financial sustainability. They're right to be spooked.

The financial promises made at the G8 Summit in Gleneagles one year ago, are already unraveling. We will never accumulate the extra $25 billion for Africa by 2010 as was committed.

PEPFAR has not yet announced its extension beyond 2008; when it does (as it surely will), the annual contribution, given the other demands on the US Treasury, will probably remain at $3 billion a year. That large amount was a very significant percentage of the total expenditure on AIDS back in 2003/2004. But as a percentage of what is needed for global AIDS programmes in 2008 --- $22 billion --- $3 billion seems pretty paltry from the world's superpower.

The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria is still half a billion short this year and more than a billion short next year. At the moment, there is no obvious way to close the shortfall. It is almost inconceivable that the extravagant promises of Gleneagles are revealed as so fatuous that the Global Fund is now compromised. No one is asking for any more than that which was promised. But the Pavlovian betrayal of the South has already begun.

Everything in the battle against AIDS is put at risk by the behaviour of the G8. Yesterday, Dr. Julio Montaner characterized that behaviour as genocide. I remember back in 2001, in an op-ed for the Globe and Mail, I used the phrase mass murder. It's hard, in the face of the annihilating human toll, not to be driven to linguistic extremes. This issue of resources makes or breaks the response to the pandemic. It is imperative that the delegates here assembled never let the G8 countries off the hook.

Number 15: I want to say a strong word about human capacity.

What has clearly emerged as the most difficult of issues, almost everywhere, certainly in Africa, is the loss of human capacity. In country after country, the response to the pandemic is sabotaged by the paucity of doctors, nurses, clinicians and community health workers. The shortages are overwhelming. Everyone is struggling. Most of the shortage stems from death and illness; some stems from brain-drain and poaching. But whatever the source, we have a problem of staggering dimensions.

The capacity crisis illumines, more than anything else, what is needed. There are solutions: investment in the public sector and in extensive ongoing training can begin to fill the gap. But again it needs the donor community to uphold its responsibilities. And most important, the key to recovery lies at country level. The key to subduing the entire pandemic lies at country level.

What has to happen, I think, is that we place a temporary moratorium on the endless, self-indulgent proliferation of meetings, seminars, roundtables, discussion groups, task forces ad nauseam, plus the production of reports, documents, monographs, statistical data ad repetition, and concentrate every energy at country level.

At the opening of this conference, Peter Piot talked of the next twenty-five years. He's right to do so. He indicated it would be a long and difficult haul; he's right again. But if the next twenty-five years are to take advantage of the guarded optimism of this conference; if the next twenty-five years are to overcome the lethargy and inertia of the last twenty-five years; if the next twenty-five years are to link, inseparably, poverty and disease and the Millennium Development Goals, then it has to happen, in-country, on the ground, organized and orchestrated by the countries themselves.

And the agencies on the ground, whether multilateral, bilateral or civil society, must be held accountable. That's what's been missing. That's the job of the delegates to this conference: holding people and organizations accountable. And that includes everything from the pharmaceutical companies that have been so intractable about prices of second-line drugs to bilateral trade agreements designed to deny access to generic drugs.

Number 16: This 16th International AIDS Conference, beyond any preceding conference, has given voice to youth. But it's still a limited and marginalized voice, reflecting the hostile ambiguity of the adult world. The figures are brutal and stark: fully fifty per cent of new infections between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four. And yet who can deny the appalling absence of programmes for, and engagement of, young people in the fight against the pandemic. The situation cries out for redress, and it must be redressed well beyond smarmy tokenism.

Finally, in my view, as delegates doubtless know, the most vexing and intolerable dimension of the pandemic is what is happening to women. It's the one area of HIV/AIDS which leaves me feeling most helpless and most enraged. Gender inequality is driving the pandemic, and we will never subdue the gruesome force of AIDS until the rights of women become paramount in the struggle.

Last Monday morning, at the women's march, the signs read "Women's Rights are Human Rights". That was the slogan that captured the Vienna International Conference on Human Rights in 1993. It was the slogan repeated at the Cairo Conference on Population in 1994, and yet again at Beijing in 1995. It's never been made real, and so long as men control the levers and bastions of power, it never will be real.

Whether it's the apparatus of the United Nations, including the agencies, or the endless numbers of High-Level panels, or auspicious studies of human development like the Blair Commission on Africa, the demeaning diminution of women is everywhere evident. And those examples are but proxies for the wider world, particularly the developing world, where freedom from sexual violence, the right to sexual autonomy, to sexual and reproductive health, social and economic independence, and even the whiff of gender equality are barely approximated.

It's a ghastly, deadly business, this untrammeled oppression of women in so many countries on the planet.

My closest colleagues and I have come to the conclusion that one of the ways to diminish the impact of the AIDS virus is by creating a powerful international agency for women, funded and staffed to the teeth. There must be voice and advocacy and operational capacity on the ground for fifty-two per cent of the world's population. There is a UN reform panel at the moment, contemplating the creation of a new entity, provided they have the courage to confront the warped and abysmal gender architecture of the United Nations. If they find the courage, I deeply believe that we could begin to still the carnage.

And what works for AIDS can work everywhere.

I challenge you, my fellow delegates, to enter the fray against gender inequality. There is no more honourable and productive calling. There is nothing of greater import in this world. All roads lead from women to social change, and that includes subduing the pandemic.

For my own part, when I leave my post of Envoy at the end of the year, I have asked that my successor be an African, but most important, an African woman.

-- Stephen Lewis

Writer's block

2006-08-22T10:05:00.000-07:00

Each day more writing, discipline, the gifts of listening. Yet sometimes the words do not come. It isn't something you can force, although the simple act of sitting down and waiting, what Crozier described in terms of 'immanence', can open areas you did not know were within. Sometimes a scent, a letter, a glimpse out the window can begin to create the poem.

Yesterday I was on the phone and outside my living room window, where tall red sunflowers have grown, a bird stopped to feed from seed. Tiny, not as small as a hummingbird but small, delicate, a gift of pale yellow lingering on the broad leaves while I watched, breathless, until my exclamation. I don't think the stranger I was speaking with was overly amused to hear my shout-out for the bird. Who cares? I am learning to appreciate moments of beauty.

more on mclennan

2006-08-21T17:16:00.000-07:00

I mentioned rob mclennan's new book, aubade, the other day. I am making my way through it and wanted to share a little sample with you today. He has written an elegy for Diana Brebner which moved me deeply. Read it and remember. Better still, order the book so you can read this poem and others...simple magics...

in the darkness of that same century
(for diana brebner

what thru the stony ground, elevates, a need
or consideration

it speaks to the same, what you think
you are thinking of

is this the best or the worst time for small-talk

delivering packages to the nurse where yr
sound asleep, not
what a memory is for

this is still, & still a place for
what the heart goes out to

sharing a pack of earth, whether carrying
a satchel, or walks w/ a cane, still takes
the same #14 bus, still talks a while

we know where this is heading

& borders thru archways, the tremble
of past lives & present neath yr feet

& ishtar gate, astarte, the goddess of,
youd so long been searching, love

Aylmer Marina: moments of beauty by a river

2006-08-16T12:53:00.000-07:00

Today I took my daily exercise in a different venue. My son wanted a ride to Aylmer (which has been amalgamated into the larger city of Gatineau but still retains its character.) It is an old town, old buildings, and along the river, a lovely walkway from the boats to riverside homes through a park.

Someone was flying a kite shaped like a fish, multicoloured. A small girl ran after a seagull. She did not think about running. She just ran, calling to the bird as if expecting it to come. On the water, sailboats, a kayak. In the water, a few small children on the sand. Along the pathway, an older, rather portly couple, holding hands. Slim young runners. Many cyclists, one an older man, grey-haired, carrying a bag of milk in his basket. Some helmeted, some not. Beside the pathway, a fountain. A breeze. I gathered a feather, a shell. Two small schoolboys were eating lunch near their summer class in sailing. They greeted me with a friendly bonjour, much to my surprise.

I could feel the smiles inside. For a while, I listened to the sound of water and wind. Then, my trusty iPod, starting with Van Morrison, then hearing Alanis and Seals&Crofts and Cat Stevens and Smith & Dragoman, Rosemarie Petersen, and the Baha'i Choir singing Blessed is the Spot. It was exactly that: 50 minutes along a river, blessed in summer sunshine. A breeze.

More on our evening of Poetry

2006-08-16T06:11:00.000-07:00

On the principle that a picture's worth (or a few pics) a thousand words (which I actually heard turned nicely on its head as a thousand words are worth a picture (somewhere along the line) and in fact, as a wordsmith, I value words...

with this wordy introduction, allow me to link you to Pearl Pirie, who has made a lovely wee blog of our evening here of poems.

Aubade

2006-08-14T18:55:00.000-07:00

rob mclennan, chez moi. Photo is courtesy of Pearl Pirie.

Tonight, as always happens in the company of fine poets, I learned a new word.

Aubade.

It's the title of a new book by rob mclennan; I now have a signed copy...

after an evening here at home with rob, Amanda Earl, Jennifer Mulligan, and Pearl Pirie, who joined our family for burgers (thank you my husband the chef) and brownies (some with pecans, some without) and lots of conversation, the reading of poems (our own and others'), a little laughter, fullness.

If you ever have a chance to hear Ottawa poet rob mclennan read, do go and hear. When rob reads a poem, whether his own or someone else's, there's an uncanny quality of voice which brings the words alive on the page. I am very appreciative of this; would rather listen to a good poem well read than almost any music. Of course, some poems and music are song, but that's a different sing. A sound.

Aural.

Aubade.

Connections

2006-08-13T18:53:00.000-07:00

Today is not a poem. Today is a suggestion: read The Ottawa Citizen for its amazing special edition, edited by the incomparable Stephen Lewis. The whole thing is on the HIV/AIDS Africa issue, for which, of course, Mr. Lewis is the Canadian U.N. Envoy...

look in section B for the story of the Grannies...and see my friend Marilee Rhody there. Marilee and husband David have spent considerable time living in Africa, and I am way proud of her activism...

Today is a poem, too...it has been rich with family and friends...

and tomorrow we welcome some Ottawa poets here for a BBQ and evening of new works...

Summertime, and the living is...

blessed.

Borrowed Words

2006-08-11T18:44:00.000-07:00

The other day I received a copy of a speech from my cousin, Jack McLean. I won't reformat it...but I cannot resist posting it here for anyone interested in its analysis. I found it intelligent and disturbing. And I am also about to read another book from Gwynne Dyer. Call it history month...

This speech is by the former President of Weizmann Institute of Science,
Haim Harari April, 2004.

UNDECLARED WWIII

By Haim Harari

As you know, I usually provide the scientific and technological
"entertainment" in our meetings, but, on this occasion, our Chairman
suggested that I present my own personal view on events in the part of
the world from which I come. I have never been and I will never be a
Government official and I have no privileged information. My perspective is
entirely based on what I see, on what I read and on the fact that my family has
lived in this region for almost 200 years. You may regard my views as
those of the proverbial taxi driver, which you are supposed to question, when
you visit a country.

I could have shared with you some fascinating facts and some personal
thoughts about the Israeli-Arab conflict. However, I will touch upon it
only in passing. I prefer to devote most of my remarks to the broader
picture of the region and its place in world events. I refer to the
entire area between Pakistan and Morocco, which is predominantly Arab,
predominantly Moslem, but includes many non-Arab and also significant
non-Moslem minorities.

Why do I put aside Israel and its own immediate neighborhood? Because
Israel and any problems related to it, in spite of what you might read
or hear in the world media, is not the central issue, and has never been
the central issue in the upheaval in the region. Yes, there is a 100
year-old Israeli-Arab conflict, but it is not where the main show is.
The millions
who died in the Iran-Iraq war had nothing to do with Israel. The mass
murder happening right now in Sudan, where the Arab Moslem regime is
massacring its black Christian citizens, has nothing to do with Israel.
The frequent reports from Algeria about the murders of hundreds of civilian
in one village or another by other Algerians have nothing to do with
Israel. Saddam Hussein did not invade Kuwait, endangered Saudi Arabia
and butchered his own people because of Israel. Egypt did not use poison gas against
Yemen in the 60's because of Israel. Assad the Father did not kill tens
of thousands of his own citizens in one week in El Hamma in Syria
because of Israel. The Taliban control of Afghanistan and the civil war there had
nothing to do with Israel. The Libyan blowing up of the Pan-Am flight
had nothing to do with Israel, and I could go on and on and on.

The root of the trouble is that this entire Moslem region is totally
dysfunctional, by any standard of the word, and would have been so even
if Israel would have joined the Arab league and an independent
Palestine would have existed for 100 years. The 22 member countries of the Arab league,
from Mauritania to the Gulf States, have a total population of 300
millions, larger than the US and almost as large as the EU before its
expansion. They have a land area larger than either the US or all of
Europe. These 22 countries, with all their oil and natural resources,
have a combined GDP smaller than that of Netherlands plus Belgium and
equal to half of the GDP of California alone. Within this meager GDP, the gaps
between rich and poor are beyond belief and too many of the rich made
their money not by succeeding in business, but by being corrupt rulers.
The social status of women is far below what it was in the Western World
150 years ago. Human rights are below any reasonable standard, in spite of
the grotesque fact that Libya was elected Chair of the UN Human Rights
commission. According to a report prepared by a committee of Arab
intellectuals and published under the auspices of the U.N., the number
of books translated by the entire Arab world is much smaller than what
little Greece alone translates. The total number of scientific publications of
300 million Arabs is less than that of 6 million Israelis. Birth rates in
the region are very high, increasing the poverty, the social gaps and the
cultural decline. And all of this is happening in a region, which only
30 years ago, was believed to be the next wealthy part of the world, and
in a Moslem area, which developed, at some point in history, one of the most
advanced cultures in the world.

It is fair to say that this creates an unprecedented breeding ground
for cruel dictators, terror networks, fanaticism, incitement, suicide
murders and general decline. It is also a fact that almost everybody in the
region blames this situation on the United States, on Israel, on
Western Civilization, on Judaism and Christianity, on anyone and anything,
except themselves.

Do I say all of this with the satisfaction of someone discussing the
failings of his enemies? On the contrary, I firmly believe that the
world would have been a much better place and my own neighborhood would have
been much more pleasant and peaceful, if things were different.

I should also say a word about the millions of decent, honest, good
people who are either devout Moslems or are not very religious but grew up in
Moslem families. They are double victims of an outside world, which now
develops Islamophobia and of their own environment, which breaks their
heart by being totally dysfunctional. The problem is that the vast
silent majority of these Moslems are not part of the terror and of the
incitement but they also do not stand up against it. They become
accomplices, by omission, and this applies to political leaders, intellectuals,
business people and many others. Many of them can certainly tell right from
wrong, but are afraid to express their views.

The events of the last few years have amplified four issues, which have
always existed, but have never been as rampant as in the present
upheaval in the region. These are the four main pillars of the current World
Conflict, or perhaps we should already refer to it as "the undeclared
World War III". I have no better name for the present situation. A few more
years may pass before everybody acknowledges that it is a World War, but we
are already well into it. The first element is the suicide murder.
Suicide murders are not new invention but they have been made popular, if I may
use this expression, only lately. Even after September 11, it seems that
most of the Western World does not yet understand this weapon. It is a
very potent psychological weapon. Its real direct impact is relatively
minor. The total number of casualties from hundreds of suicide murders within
Israel in the last three years is much smaller than those due to car
accidents. September 11 was quantitatively much less lethal than many
earthquakes. More people die from AIDS in one day in Africa than all
the

Russians who died in the hands of Chechnya-based Moslem suicide
murderers since that conflict started. Saddam killed every month more people than
all those who died from suicide murders since the Coalition occupation of
Iraq.

So what is all the fuss about suicide killings? It creates headlines.
It is spectacular. It is frightening. It is a very cruel death with bodies
dismembered and horrible severe lifelong injuries to many of the
wounded. It is always shown on television in great detail. One such
murder, with the help of hysterical media coverage, can destroy the tourism industry of
a country for quite a while, as it did in Bali and in Turkey.

But the real fear comes from the undisputed fact that no defense and no
preventive measures can succeed against a determined suicide murderer.
This has not yet penetrated the thinking of the Western World. The U.S. and
Europe are constantly improving their defense against the last murder,
not the next one. We may arrange for the best airport security in the
world. But if you want to murder by suicide, you do not have to board a plane
in order to explode yourself and kill many people. Who could stop a
suicide murder in the midst of the crowded line waiting to be checked by the
airport metal detector? How about the lines to the check-in counters in
a busy travel period? Put a metal detector in front of every train
station in Spain and the terrorists will get the buses. Protect the buses and they
will explode in movie theaters, concert halls, supermarkets, shopping
malls, schools and hospitals. Put guards in front of every concert hall
and there will always be a line of people to be checked by the guards and
this line will be the target, not to speak of killing the guards themselves.
You can somewhat reduce your vulnerability by preventive and defensive
measures and by strict border controls but not eliminate it and definitely not
in the war in a defensive way. And it is a war!

What is behind the suicide murders? Money, power and cold-blooded
murderous incitement, nothing else. It has nothing to do with true
fanatic religious beliefs. No Moslem preacher has ever blown himself up. No son of an
Arab politician or religious leader has ever blown himself. No relative of
anyone influential has done it. Wouldn't you expect some of the
religious leaders to do it themselves, or to talk their sons into doing it, if
this is truly a supreme act of religious fervor? Aren't they interested in
the benefits of going to Heaven? Instead, they send outcast women,
naive children, retarded people and young incited hotheads. They promise them
the delights, mostly sexual, of the next world, and pay their families
handsomely after the supreme act is performed and enough innocent
people are dead.

Suicide murders also have nothing to do with poverty and despair. The
poorest region in the world, by far, is Africa. It never happens there.
There are numerous desperate people in the world, in different
cultures, countries and continents. Desperation does not provide anyone with
explosives, reconnaissance and transportation. There was certainly more
despair in Saddam's Iraq then in Paul Bremmer's Iraq, and no one
exploded himself. A suicide murder is simply a horrible, vicious weapon of
cruel, inhuman, cynical, well-funded terrorists, with no regard to human life,
including the life of their fellow countrymen, but with very high regard
to their own affluent well-being and their hunger for power.

The only way to fight this new "popular" weapon is identical to the
only way in which you fight organized crime or pirates on the high seas: the
offensive way. Like in the case of organized crime, it is crucial that
the forces on the offensive be united and it is crucial to reach the top of
the crime pyramid. You cannot eliminate organized crime by arresting
the little drug dealer in the street corner. You must go after the head of the
"Family".

If part of the public supports it, others tolerate it, many are afraid
of it and some try to explain it away by poverty or by a miserable
childhood, organized crime will thrive and so will terrorism. The United States
understands this now, after September 11. Russia is beginning to
understand it. Turkey nderstands it well. I am very much afraid that
most of Europe still does not understand it. Unfortunately, it seems that Europe will
understand it only after suicide murders will arrive in Europe in a big
way. In my humble opinion, this will definitely happen. The Spanish
trains and the Istanbul bombings are only the beginning. The unity of the
Civilized World in fighting this horror is absolutely indispensable.
Until Europe wakes up, this unity will not be achieved.

The second ingredient is words, more precisely lies. Words can be
lethal. They kill people. It is often said that politicians, diplomats and
perhaps also lawyers and business people must sometimes lie, as part of their
professional life. But the norms of politics and diplomacy are
childish, in comparison with the level of incitement and total absolute deliberate
fabrications, which have reached new heights in the region we are
talking about. An incredible number of people in the Arab world believe
that September 11 never happened, or was an American provocation or, even
better, a Jewish plot.

You all remember the Iraqi Minister of Information, Mr. Mouhamad Said
al-Sahaf and his press conferences when the US forces were already
inside Baghdad. Disinformation at time of war is an accepted tactic. But to
stand, day after day, and to make such preposterous statements, known to
everybody to be lies, without even being ridiculed in your newspapers
from giving him equal time. It also does not prevent the Western press from giving
credence, every day, even now, to similar liars. After all, if you want
to be an anti-Semite, there are subtle ways of doing it. You do not have
to claim that the holocaust never happened and that the Jewish temple in
Jerusalem never existed. But millions of Moslems are told by their
leaders that this is the case. When these same leaders make other
statements, the Western media report them as if they could be true. It is a daily
occurrence that the same people, who finance, arm and dispatch suicide
murderers, condemn the act in English in front of western TV cameras,
talking to a world audience, which even partly believes them. It is a
daily routine to hear the same leader making opposite statements in Arabic to
his people and in English to the rest of the world. Incitement by Arab
TV, accompanied by horror pictures of mutilated bodies, has become a
powerful weapon of those who lie, distort and want to destroy. World does not
notice it because its own TV sets are mostly tuned to soap operas and
game shows. I recommend to you, even though most of you do not understand Arabic,
to watch Al Jazeera, from time to time. You will not believe your own eyes.

But words also work in other ways, more subtle. A demonstration in
Berlin, carrying banners supporting Saddam's regime and featuring three-year
old babies dressed as suicide murderers, is defined by the press and by
political leaders as a "peace demonstration". You may support or oppose
the Iraq war, but to refer to fans of Saddam, Arafat or Bin Laden as peace
activists is a bit too much. A woman walks into an Israeli restaurant
in mid-day, eats, observes families with old people and children eating
their lunch in the adjacent tables and pays the bill. She then blows herself
up, killing 20 people, including many children, with heads and arms rolling
around in the restaurant. She is called "martyr" by several Arab
leaders and "activist" by the European press. Dignitaries condemn the act but
visit her bereaved family and the money flows.

There is a new game in town: The actual murderer is called "the military
wing", the one who pays him, equips him and sends him is now called
"the political wing" and the head of the operation is called the "spiritual
leader". There are numerous other examples of such Orwellian
nomenclature, used every day not only by terror chiefs but also by Western media.
These words are much more dangerous than many people realize. They provide an
emotional infrastructure for atrocities. It was Joseph Goebbels who said
that if you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it. He is now
being outperformed by his successors.

The third aspect is money. Huge amounts of money, which could have
solved many social problems in this dysfunctional part of the world,
are channeled into three concentric spheres supporting death and murder. In the inner
circle are the terrorists themselves. The money funds their travel,
explosives, ideouts and permanent search for soft vulnerable targets.
They are surrounded by a second wider circle of direct supporters, planners,
commanders, preachers, all of whom make a living, usually a very
comfortable living, by serving as terror infrastructure. Finally, we
find the third circle of so-called religious, educational and welfare
organizations, which actually do some good, feed the hungry and provide
some schooling, but brainwash a new generation with hatred, lies and
ignorance. This circle operates mostly through mosques, madrassas and
other religious establishments but also through inciting electronic and
printed media. It is this circle that makes sure that women remain
inferior, that democracy is unthinkable and that exposure to the outside world is
minimal. It is also that circle that leads the way in blaming everybody outside
the Moslem world, for the miseries of the region.

Figuratively speaking, this outer circle is the guardian, which makes
sure that the people look and listen inwards to the inner circle of terror
and incitement, rather than to the world outside. Some parts of this same
outer circle actually operate as a result of fear from, or blackmail by,
the inner circles. The horrifying added factor is the high birth rate. Half
of the population of the Arab world is under the age of 20, the most
receptive age to incitement, guaranteeing two more generations of blind
hatred.

Of the three circles described above, the inner circles are primarily
financed by terrorist states like Iran and Syria, until recently also
by Iraq and Libya and earlier also by some of the Communist regimes. These
states, as well as the Palestinian Authority, are the safe havens of
the wholesale murder vendors. The outer circle is largely financed by Saudi
Arabia, but also by donations from certain Moslem communities in the
United States and Europe and, to a smaller extent, by donations of European
Governments to various NGO's and by certain United Nations
organizations, whose goals may be noble, but they are infested and
exploited by agents of the outer circle. The Saudi regime, of course, will be the next victim
of major terror, when the inner circle will explode into the outer circle.
The Saudis are beginning to understand it, but they fight the inner
circles, while still financing the infrastructure at the outer circle.

Some of the leaders of these various circles live very comfortably on
their loot. You meet their children in the best private schools in
Europe, not in the training camps of suicide murderers. The Jihad "soldiers" join
packaged death tours to Iraq and other hot spots, while some of their leaders
ski in Switzerland. Mrs. Arafat, who lives in Paris with her daughter,
receives tens of thousands Dollars per month from the allegedly bankrupt
Palestinian Authority while a typical local ringleader of the Al-Aksa brigade,
reporting to ------, receives only a cash payment of a couple of hundred
dollars, for performing murders at the retail level.

The fourth element of the current world conflict is the total breaking of
all laws. The civilized world believes in democracy, the rule of law,
including international law, human rights, free speech and free press,
among other liberties. There are naive old-fashioned habits such as
respecting religious sites and symbols, not using ambulances and
hospitals for acts of war, avoiding the mutilation of dead bodies and not
using children as human shields or human bombs. Never in history, not even in
the Nazi period, was there such total disregard of all of the above as we
observe now. Every student of political science debates how you prevent an
anti-democratic force from winning a democratic election and abolishing
democracy. Other aspects of a civilized society must also have
limitations. Can a policeman open fire on someone trying to kill him?
Can a government listen to phone conversations of terrorists and drug dealers? Does free
speech protects you when you shout "fire" in a crowded theater? Should
there be death penalty, for deliberate multiple murders? These are the
old-fashioned dilemmas. But now we have an entire new set.

Do you raid a mosque, which serves as a terrorist ammunition storage?
Do you return fire, if you are attacked from a hospital? Do you storm a
church taken over by terrorists who took the priests hostages? Do you search
every ambulance after a few suicide murderers use ambulances to reach their
targets? Do you strip every woman because one pretended to be pregnant
and carried a suicide bomb on her belly? Do you shoot back at someone
trying to kill you, standing deliberately behind a group of children? Do you raid
terrorist headquarters, hidden in a mental hospital? Do you shoot an
arch-murderer who deliberately moves from one location to another,
always surrounded by children? All of these happen daily in Iraq and in the
Palestinian areas. What do you do? Well, you do not want to face the
dilemma. But it cannot be avoided.

Suppose, for the sake of discussion, that someone would openly stay in
a well-known address in Teheran, hosted by the Iranian Government and
financed by it, executing one atrocity after another in Spain or in
France, killing hundreds of innocent people, accepting responsibility for the
crimes, promising in public TV interviews to do more of the same, while
the Government of Iran issues public condemnations of his acts but
continues to host him, invite him to official functions and treat him as a great
dignitary. I leave it to you as homework to figure out what Spain or
France would have done, in such a situation.

The problem is that the civilized world is still having illusions about
the rule of law in a totally lawless environment. It is trying to play ice
hockey by sending a ballerina ice-skater into the rink or to knock out
a heavyweight boxer by a chess player. In the same way that no country has
a law against cannibals eating its prime minister, because such an act is
unthinkable, international law does not address killers shooting from
hospitals, mosques and ambulances, while being protected by their
Government or society. International law does not know how to handle
someone who sends children to throw stones, stands behind them and
shoots with immunity and cannot be arrested because he is sheltered by a
Government.

International law does not know how to deal with a leader of murderers
who is royally and comfortably hosted by a country, which pretends to
condemn his acts or just claims to be too weak to arrest him. The amazing
thing is that all of these crooks demand protection under international law and
define all those who attack them as war criminals, with some Western
media repeating the allegations. The good news is that all of this is
temporary, because the evolution of international law has always adapted itself to
reality. The punishment for suicide murder should be death or arrest
before the murder, not during and not after. After every world war, the
rules of international law have changed and the same will happen after the
present one. But during the twilight zone, a lot of harm can be done.

The picture I described here is not pretty. What can we do about it? In
the short run, only fight and win. In the long run - only educate the next
generation and open it to the world. The inner circles can and must be
destroyed by force. The outer circle cannot be eliminated by force.
Here we need financial starvation of the organizing elite, more power to women,
more education, counter propaganda, boycott whenever feasible and
access to Western media, internet and the international scene. Above all, we
need a total absolute unity and determination of the civilized world against
all three circles of evil.

Allow me, for a moment, to depart from my alleged role as a taxi driver
and return to science. When you have a malignant tumor, you may remove
the tumor itself surgically. You may also starve it by preventing new blood
from reaching it from other parts of the body, thereby preventing new
"supplies" from expanding the tumor. If you want to be sure, it is best
to do both. But before you fight and win, by force or otherwise, you have
to realize that you are in a war, and this may take Europe a few more
years. In order to win, it is necessary to first eliminate the
terrorist regimes, so that no Government in the world will serve as a safe haven for these
people. I do not want to comment here on whether the American-led
attack on Iraq was justified from the point of view of weapons of mass
destruction or any other pre-war argument, but I can look at the post-war map of
Western Asia. Now that Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya are out, two and a half
terrorist states remain: Iran, Syria and Lebanon, the latter being a
Syrian colony. Perhaps Sudan should be added to the list. As a result of the
conquest of Afghanistan and Iraq, both Iran and Syria are now totally
surrounded by territories unfriendly to them. Iran is encircled by
Afghanistan, by the Gulf States, Iraq and the Moslem republics of the
former Soviet Union. Syria is surrounded by Turkey, Iraq, Jordan and
Israel. This is a significant strategic change and it applies strong
pressure on the terrorist countries. It is not surprising that Iran is
so active in trying to incite a Shiite uprising in Iraq.

I do not know if the American plan was actually to encircle both Iran
and Syria, but that is the resulting situation.

In my humble opinion, the number one danger to the world today is Iran
and its regime. It definitely has ambitions to rule vast areas and to
expand in all directions. It has an ideology, which claims supremacy over Western
culture. It is ruthless. It has proven that it can execute elaborate
terrorist acts without leaving too many traces, using Iranian
Embassies. It is clearly trying to develop Nuclear Weapons. Its so-called moderates
and conservatives play their own virtuoso version of the "good-cop
versus bad-cop" game. Iran sponsors Syrian terrorism, it is certainly behind
much of the action in Iraq, it is fully funding the Hezb'Allah and, through
it, the Palestinian Hamas and Islamic Jihad, it performed acts of
terror at least in Europe and in South America and probably also in Uzbekhistan
and Saudi Arabia and it truly leads a multi-national terror consortium,
which includes, as minor players, Syria, Lebanon and certain Shiite
elements in Iraq. Nevertheless, most European countries still trade with Iran, try
to appease it and refuse to read the clear signals.

In order to win the war it is also necessary to dry the financial
resources of the terror conglomerate. It is pointless to try to
understand the subtle differences between the Sunni terror of Al Qaeda and Hamas and the
Shiite terror of Hezb'Allah, Sadr and other Iranian inspired enterprises. When
it serves their business needs, all of them collaborate beautifully.

It is crucial to stop Saudi and other financial support of the outer
circle, which is the fertile breeding ground of terror. It is important
to monitor all donations from the Western World to Islamic
organizations, to monitor the finances of international relief organizations and to react
with forceful economic measures to any small sign of financial aid to
any of the three circles of terrorism. It is also important to act decisively
against the campaign of lies and fabrications and to monitor those
Western media who collaborate with it out of naivety, financial interests or
ignorance.

Above all, never surrender to terror. No one will ever know whether the
recent elections in Spain would have yielded a different result, if not
for the train bombings a few days earlier. But it really does not matter.
What matters is that the terrorists believe that they caused the result
and that they won by driving Spain out of Iraq. The Spanish story will surely
end up being extremely costly to other European countries, including France,
who is now expelling inciting preachers and forbidding veils and including
others who sent troops to Iraq. In the long run, Spain itself will pay even more.

Is the solution a democratic Arab world? If by democracy we mean free
elections but also free press, free speech, a functioning judicial
system, civil liberties, equality to women, free international travel, exposure
to international media and ideas, laws against racial incitement and
against defamation, and avoidance of lawless behavior regarding
hospitals, places of worship and children, then yes, democracy is the solution. If
democracy is just free elections, it is likely that the most fanatic regime will
be elected, the one whose incitement and fabrications are the most
inflammatory. We have seen it already in Algeria and, to a certain
extent, in Turkey. It will happen again, if the ground is not prepared very
carefully. On the other hand, a certain transition democracy, as in
Jordan, may be a better temporary solution, paving the way for the real
thing, perhaps in the same way that an immediate sudden democracy did not work
in Russia and would not have worked in China.

I have no doubt that the civilized world will prevail. But the longer
it takes us to understand the new landscape of this war, the more costly
and painful the victory will be. Europe, more than any other region, is the
key. Its understandable recoil from wars, following the horrors of
World War II, may cost thousands of additional innocent lives, before the
tide will turn.

Haim Harari is the former President of the Weizmann Institute.

Quote of the Day! dedicated to rob with affection

2006-08-06T09:56:00.000-07:00

Poetry is what I start to hear when I concede
the world's ability to manage and to understand itself.
It is the language of the world:
something humans overhear if
they are willing to pay attention,
and something that the world will teach us to speak,
if we allow the world to do so.
It is the wén of dào: a music that we learn to see,
to feel, to hear, to smell, and then to think,
and then to answer.
But not to repeat. Mimesis is not repetition.

Robert Bringhurst

Thinking and Singing
Poetry & the Practice of Philosophy

Today's Poem

2006-08-05T12:17:00.000-07:00

cherries

(for Pablo Neruda)

suck small pit
juice inside
flower, fruit
flesh swollen
around sweet
exactly to fit
your mouth

O! red
burst of beauty

fills
summer
full

Links

2006-08-03T12:27:00.000-07:00

The poetry world in Canada is small...but much larger than it used to be. If you want to know about poems, you have to read, of course. I thought today I might tell you where you can find some poems and poets I recommend for your contemplation. Some of these poets have accumulated numerous awards, including the Governor General's award for poetry, or perhaps the CBC Literary Award, or the Griffin Poetry Prize, along with provincial recognition. Some have been published only a few times; some are becoming household names for those who read poems. I share these links not only if I 'like' a poet, but also if that poet makes me think, teaches me something about using words, and mostly, feels like somebody who 'knows' what it is to struggle to make a poem.

Perhaps no poet is more inclined towards philosophy than Tim Lilburn, whose work I first encountered during Brenda Carr-Vellino's Master's class in the long poem, at Carleton University. His work, Kill-site, had just won the Governor General's award (2004) and our class read the poems as almost a final sampler of the course. I can't claim to have 'understood' but something responded to this person who had conflated nature, philosophy, and narrative with something grander: perhaps the exploration of the soul, all done in the context of the Canadian prairie, which I consider my other home in Canada. I may live in the Ottawa Valley and have worked most of my life in British Columbia, and I like both of these places, but Saskatchewan has a hold on me.

I was deeply blessed when I produced a chapbook after my journeys through Saskatchewan last year, wild blueberries, and the illustrious poet, Margaret Avison, allowed me to use an epigraph from her "Prairie Poem": ".....to/live on the Saskatchewan praire is/choosing to find out that/space calls, to a reshaping/of person. This above and/beyond the going to, the choosing."

So Lilburn, though he now teaches in Victoria, embedded himself in the Saskatchewan ground, and grew a tree full of poems. Or, as he says on the McClelland website, "Kill-site is a long poem about prayer..." Maybe that's one of the reasons I keep going back to it; the times for poems tend towards the secular, so something in my spirit responds to the sense of soul embedded in a work.

Lorna Crozier is another prairie poet who is now teaching in Victoria (the weather's better out there, friends). I don't yet own all of her works, but I have Whetstone close at hand. Given the date I am writing, the heat, I can offer you no better sample than this, "The Weight of August":

The exhaustion of flowers, midafternoon,
the stale sun's spill and stutter
across the lawn, a sprinkler lifting
its tired arc and letting it fall. All things
moving to an end. Soon
I'll go in, wake you from your nap
and start our supper, anything
the garden's greens have left to give,
lettuce and chard, that undertaste of
bitterness. We live with who we are and not
what we once wanted. Late August,
its weight on my shoulders, my hand
not on your skin. I turn back
the page and start again,
not sure if I've read
this part before.

Here she writes a story of garden, time, marriage...and here she writes a world:

"...We live with who we are and not/what we once wanted..."

This is a woman who, like me, is coming to terms...and taking in the details, the small senses attuned to a pulse in the world. She writes, elsewhere, that "what is holy/is how the light falls on the tomato" and I have just come up from our garden which is full of tomatoes...one, August 2, ripening on the vine. I do not know if my children have eaten many, if any, vine-ripened tomatoes, and this will be their year to do so....we have already begun on the yellow beans Melodie planted, I used the cilantro Maya planted yesterday in a soup, and on one plant, this morning, in our Gatineau garden, a tomato ripens.

On a garden note, I cannot believe how fast a pumpkin grows, and how widely the leaves range.
That particular soft yellow of flowers offering a foretaste of fall. Hallowed evenings.

And back to poets: I spoke to you the other day of Anne Compton. The websites about her are not overly comprehensive: I think she deserves more coverage. I guess you just have to buy her books! Processional is lovely.

Also, Don McKay: I found an interesting article by Stan Dragland, epigraph from Robert Bringhurst (poets on a poet) from UTQ, and some stuff at the University of Calgary site.
You can hear McKay read from Camber, at the Griffin short-list prize site. The Dragland link takes you to Brick Books, one of Canada's foremost poetry publishers. If Brick has the book, it is poetry worth reading. I can also say this of Buschek Books, whom I'm glad to promote. A local (Ottawa) small press, the books from this company are also lovely, and a wonderful representation of Canadian poetry at its best.

A word for the poet who was the main subject of my Master's work, Di Brandt. She is also a writer who has worked through, and continues to do so, the powerful influence of religious belief and family in one's adult life. (For fiction, in this area, I turn to Sandra Birdsell).

I have offered you only a short beginning. Another day, another poet, another poem. I shall finish with Lilburn: "Everything takes a religious pose." Amen.

Love

2006-07-31T12:10:00.000-07:00

How about love? First, think Rumi, for whom you will find many links and who articulates explorations of love with a passion that is exquisite, especially for those of us who conflate love and spirit. Rumi was as in love with God as he was with the world and its peoples and a person, to all accounts. I think perhaps he would have been surprised to find himself so popular in post-modernist North America, where God gets short shrift and spirit is suspect as a place of muse. Do I generalize? Very well, then, I generalize.

Today I refer you to the Atlantic poet, Anne Compton. I find myself seduced by the simplicity of her work. You'll think you're in a narrative poem ("Trees in Summer", from Processional, for example) and then you're blindsided by a line like "The ocean loosens something in us. We step out and for a moment,/anything's possible." Or shortly thereafter, "Desire speaks the numeration of air. We have no words for this./Only the lesser sounds." Where are the trees of the title? Right there in the poem, along ruminations that "...we are small beneath the branching."

Yes. For me, this is not the summer of trees. It is the summer of sunflowers, of blueberries, of too many tomatoes on the vine, something to prop up, something of wonder. Like Compton's poem, I feel "The square root of bliss beneath our feet."

I glance from the corner of myopic eyes and glimpse, a sense of spirit, quiet bliss in ground, on hands and knees, feel my bones become petrified stone, desire to be a fossil.

First, life.

Another poem accepted...

2006-07-30T12:55:00.000-07:00

I am delighted to learn today that one of my poems has been accepted for the winter edition of Room of One's Own.

Home is Where My Poem Is

2006-07-29T16:14:00.000-07:00

Inspired by rob mclennan, Amanda Earl, Jennifer Mulligan, and Pearl Pirie, I begin a more public poetic journey. How better than to start with some new writing...

landfall

Why do I need a secondary process translation to find out what I, myself, am thinking?

Jan Zwicky

a wind: zephyr, chinook, mistral, call it what you will. breeze,
waited scent, wafted. blown. who has seen it?

ill wind, come with wind, or gone.
we try to leave land, then return:
sea and air, our temporary homes, abandoned on a whimsy.
charade.

seeking discovery, we find no answers
in tall catamarans of our minds.
like flying fish, landborne birds,
we spin wheels, tilt windmills
till next apocalypse.

it’s a breeze: draft, breath. Who breathes? slow
currents compose to gales, angered gods whistle,
propel blasts through constituent parts. oxygenation.
a petal drifts through heat haze of summer afternoon
hotter than hell has ever been.

a distant promontory, a mirage. all our senses
shift to cardinal directions. we watch birds soar
as land is sighted, light upon it wishfully.
homecomings are not for strangers.

how do we name? language borrows other places,
sundial turns to shadow. butterfly wings cause tidal wave.
some small miracle, somewhere, longing sailed round islands,
sun and wind. global warming.

restless denizens in each firmament chase seedlings
along chaotic pathways. nothing is random: no maps can find location.
predestinations. gentle prestidigitations from quiescent gods:
a new garden, a tree, leaf blown, a sail.

dervish twirls a dance, no demons follow. land ho, he cries,
and there, truth of windfall. sand. ephiphany?

something true is known. we feel that much, twirl again, skirts
lifted to umbrella air, sea creatures bound for planetary credenzas,
aloft like helium. endure, tarry,
remember invisible space, immanence.

a sign of someone coming.