On Monday I finished reading Giovanna Riccio’s
“Strong Bread”. I like the poems in which she writes about herself, but those
about other people read more like lists.
I
started and finished Soraya Peerbaye’s “Tell”, which has poems both about her
childhood and about the murder Reena Virk in Saanich, British Columbia in 1997,
as well as poems about the trial of her schoolmates that were accused of
killing her. I think Peerbaye’s poems about herself are often quite good. They
are tactile and access strong imagery. The poems about the murder and the trial
feel too distanced from the event to conjure up any strong poetic relationship
with it.
I
started writing down ideas for an essay on Armand Ruffo’s “The Thunderbird
Poems” and El Jones’s “Live From the Afrikan Resistance”. I want to show how in
their books they neuter their message by putting the subject matter above the
poetry. A poem is not just a vehicle for a message. It’s your message on
steroids if the poem is good.
In the afternoon I heard someone knocking
loudly on my building’s street door just below my west living room window. I
looked out and I answered, “Yes?” then he looked up and I saw that it was the
guy from Orkin. He asked if I’d let him in to check the meters. Isn’t that a
line from a hundred porn films? I went
down and opened the door. I was curious what the meters were. It turned out
that they are two cockroach traps in the two second floor hallways. Checking
them just involved seeing if there were any bugs in them, which of course there
weren’t because they are in the hallway, away from food and water. He used a
device similar to what I’ve seen in supermarkets on a bar code that had been
pasted to the wall beside each “monitor”. Then he got me to sign his apparatus
with a digital pen. He asked how my apartment was. I told him that I tend to
see one cockroach about every one or two weeks. I asked if he had any of those
traps for the apartments but he said they were only for the hall.
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