On Tuesday morning
I recorded another one of my song practice sessions. The sky was providing a
little more light than the day before, though in another month the sun won’t
quite be up yet when I start. I don’t think that anything that I did before the
camera stopped recording was worth sharing, which is too bad because I did a
pretty good version of “One Hundred Hookers” later on.
After song practice I started
working out the chords to another Serge Gainsbourg song.
I was planning on reading my
translation of a story by Boris Vian that night on the open stage at Shab-e
She’r, but since the piece is longer than three minutes I needed to choose an
excerpt that would stand up alone. I set the countdown timer on my phone for
three minutes and read various sections of the prose aloud in order to hear how
they worked. I decided on a four-paragraph section just after the introduction
of the character, but I removed the third paragraph and then tweaked everything
a bit for better coherence and flow.
I worked for about an hour on my
book cover and also did a few translations.
Late Tuesday afternoon I printed a
copy of the story I planned to read and took it with me to Shab-e She’r. When I
arrived at St Stephen in the Fields, while I was looking for a post ring to
lock my bike, there was a group of young Muslim women walking by, some of them
in hijabs and some not. One of them, perhaps reading the sign about the poetry
reading, said, “Let’s go in here!” Another girl laughed and protested, “It’s a
church!” and so they continued walking. I had to cross the street to find a
free post.
When I walked in, Bänoo greeted me with a one armed
hug. The church had kind of a woody smell like that of wet cedar. Although
there is plenty of old woodwork in the church this was a new fragrance. I’d
wondered if they’d done some renovations recently that might have brought these
new smells out of the old wood. I mentioned that I’d ridden past the church a
few weeks before and heard banging inside that sounded like workers using
hammers. I supposed it could have been drumming. Bänoo jokingly added, “Or fighting!” Riffing off of that I mimicked a
fistfight while saying, “My personal Jesus is better than yours!”
I noticed for the first time, though
I’m sure it’s been there all along, that there is a small altar to the left of
the main one in sort of a separate room separated by pillars on the same level.
There are a few chairs for a smaller congregation, but in this section the
altar is on the same level as the seating. I don’t recall there having been a
separate space like that in the Anglican church of my childhood. Maybe it’s the
baptismal. I told Bänoo that she could have a
special poetry reading for elite members in there.
The volunteer who was minding the
donation table was wondering about the fancy chair to the side of the stage. I
suggested that maybe it was for when the bishop visits. I looked it up later
and saw that I was right and that it’s called the cathedra. The one at St
Stephen is pretty modest compared to some pictures I’ve seen of such chairs in
other churches.
At 18:30 Bänoo got up to the microphone and told everyone that if they wanted to
sign up for the open stage they should come forward. I got up, turned around
and walked backward toward her.
Cy Strom arrived and sat next to me.
He told me that he doesn’t usually sit in the front. I told him that I like to
be in the front everywhere I go, including all my university classes. At U of
T, some students refer to other students that like to sit at the front as
“keeners”. At school, it’s partially because I’m near sighted that I like to
sit in the first row, but I told him that my main reason in general is just
because I feel like I’m more a part of the event when I’m in front. Cy said
that he sits further back because he likes to feel separate.
We discussed Cy’s job, which in all
these years that I’ve known him I don’t recall asking what he does. He’s an
independent editor and gets jobs from the government but also private firms.
Sometimes he edits business documents but often essays and sometimes
literature. It sounds both interesting and sleep inducing at the same time.
We started at 19:10 as Bänoo announced that it was episode 53 of Shab-e She’r. Then the woman
who’d been minding the donation table got up to do the aboriginal land
acknowledgment.
The open stage began with Rula Kahil
– “ … The pitch blackness of majestic night … the notes of my soul … the
longing of my heart … I stumble … I face the tearing of the worlds: yours and
mine … I hear the wailing of the moon … in the silence of my southern soul … in
the presence of my northern existence … I surrender.”
Lisa Richter read “How to Write a
Hanukkah Poem” – “Choose your preferred spelling from the seven or eight …
Paper towels to soak up the grease of the latkes … Don’t call the menorah the
hakea … Subvert … Make dreidel games dirty … Make space latkes … Snort lines on
pages of the Talmud … Invoke small haloes around each candle … the light that
issues you through December’s dark.”
Mojgan Khatami began her poem in
Farsi and then read it again in English – “Possession of evidence … using your
harmonious mind … But we don’t reason … Once again we are defeated by this
destiny … Unethical gain … Impossible to cheat … I choose not to believe.”
Bänoo called me up earlier than usual. Without using the mic I read an
excerpt from my translation of Boris Vian’s “Le Loup Garou”- “The night of the
full moon, he emerged from sleep, shivering with fever
and intense cold … Staggering, he
advanced to the mirror … surprised to be standing on his hind legs, but even more
amazed when his eyes
fell upon the image in the mirror. A strange, pale figure faced him … He
looked at his body and
realized the origin of the icy
cold that now gripped him
from all sides. He let out an inarticulate cry. His
rich black fur had
disappeared and before his eyes stood the malformed body
of one of those awkwardly amorous men for whom he had always felt so
much ridicule.”
From
Simon’s poem – “I wait in the darkest part of the night … Startled by the
changes that light brings … the jagged lights of somewhere else … in an
alleyway … I seem to be so necessary … Hiding as a husband … taking what I need
… She looks at me sometimes … The morning doesn’t show decency … It has to show
everything.”
From
Puneet Dutt’s “Chicken Street” – “Never saw Jalalabad … The great fear was
pedestrians with IEDs … Crowds surge at every corner … We would be so annoyed
when someone bumps the car …”
At
this point it was time for the first feature, Heather Wood. She was using a
page stand, but when she tried to use it the top came off and she assumed she
had broken it because it would not fit back on again. Paul Costa, who was
sitting in the front row got up and went to help her because she’d simply had
the top upside down.
Heather
began her set by producing a bag of fortune cookies and then opened one to read
our collective fortune: “Be yourself and you will always be in fashion.”
Her
first poem was based on results from a fortune cookie generator – “August: Do
not expect wisdom to arrive by express … September: Watch for weaknesses on one
side of the body … October: You could find yourself taking care of the
situation.”
She
then read a cover poem – “You were taller than the sky … Your hands are dragons
… Our delight comes not from love but from recognition … We would eat each
other if we could and we do … They tell me you’ve been conquered … Love comes
quickly to the monstrous, to the ugly … all devouring … Who would have me but
you … Your rages are quelting … Our children are long slaughtered …”
From
a series of poems about Marilyn Monroe, a poem by Monroe – “From time to time /
I make it rhyme / but don’t hold that kind / of thing against me / Oh well what
the hell / so it won’t sell / What I want to tell / is what’s on my mind … It’s
thoughts / flinging by /before I die / and to think / in ink.”
Heather
explained that for this series she sometimes rewrote Monroe’s own poetry, made
poems out quotes by her or of things that others said about her.
From
“I Am Both Your Directions” – “ … existing in your painting as a cold wind …”
From
a poem based on a Monroe quote – “You said ‘Please don’t talk about me when I’m
gone’ / You didn’t get your wish.”
Based
on quotes about Monroe by men, Heather wrote “Blame It on Psychoanalysis” – “ …
She would have looked good on a couch …”
From
“Marilyn Monroe On Mars” – “The bus stop stops on Mars where some like it hot …
It’s the river of no return for the misfits like you.”
From
“Expertise” and based on the rumour that Marilyn Monroe was frigid – “ “ …
Seems even Joe couldn’t jolt you with ecstacy …”
Moving
on from the Monroe poems, we heard “The Appropriate Poem” – “The long awaited
special edition … The overnight social chatter … The not so good apology … The
‘we didn’t mean to offend’s … The man named White … The hideous $500 prize …
the endless whitesplaining …”
The
next poem, she explained, was written with her other half, based on their
experience of having a house guest from Sri Lanka during the the time when the
tsunami hit the island nation in 2004 – “ … We call him Siz … He sits on the
sofa watching CNN … There is no money for a trip home …” They cut him off from
watching CNN.
From
one more Marilyn Monroe poem – “I like to feel blonde all over … I’m not the
devil … Just a small girl with the right shoes.”
From
a flash story called “The Big Time” – “Bill comes in the mail / Not a bill,
Bill … Bill’s hit the big time … Everything about Bill is big, except his
talent … ‘Your voice is pretty small, like your tits’ … Double mastectomy … I
begin hacking his site.”
From
another poem – “She found her family slumped over the couch, snoring … ‘Raw
vegetables are bad for you / Beef steak is all I eat … We’ve got to take our
country back … Doctors are scam artists … and that’s a fact …”
Heather
then announced that it was time for audience participation and that, “We are
going to write a poem together.” She pulled out a bag of coloured squares and
asked us to pick four colours. “Purple”, “Gold” “Magenta” and “Red” were called
out. She put the four squares in a bag and shook them. She retrieved them one
by one from the bag and each one had a phrase on the other side which was read
in the order of their retrieval – “Extra bold / music park mascot / Company
hires co-worker with secret criminal past / Swoon!”
Heather
finished with a tribute to Shab-e She’r – “A poet came / bringing her powerful
words to our community / making a place for poets of the page and stage …”
On
her way off the stage Heather dropped her poetry and several pages fell like
autumn leaves along the steps. Maybe that’s why the word for page aand leaf are
the same in French.
Heather
Wood is not without charm on stage, though she often reads so quickly that it’s
sometimes difficult to make out every word of her poems. She seems to be
interested in writing as a type of play more so than as art, as is evident in
her use of gimmicks such as fortune cookie message generators, celebrity quotes
and randomly created poems. All of those would be fine if she used them to
arrive at something that is more than superficially exploratory of language as
art.
Bänoo announced a fifteen-minute break and then Cy immediately pulled out
his Blackberry to pull up his calendar and offered me a booking at Artists 25
for the nights of December 7 and 14. He said he might get some flack for
booking a male model right after another male model but he doesn’t care.
He told me that he’d
enjoyed the piece I performed and we talked about the French word that Boris
Vian had invented and which I kept in my translation: “anthropolycie” or wolf
that changes into a man, which would be the opposite of “lycanthrope”, which is
a man that changes into a wolf. I couldn’t think of an English equivalent to
anthropolycie, unless it would be “anthropolycope”.
I commented that I’ve noticed that
French writers make up a lot of words, and I offered the view that it’s perhaps
because French is so restrictive. Cy argued that he thinks it’s a myth that
French is a prohibitive language, adding that he thinks that francophones have
always played with it. I countered that English doesn’t have something like the
Académie Française guarding the
language. He asserted that their word is not exactly law but I observed that
they are pretty much in charge of how French is presented in education and that
seems to me like a lot of power.
Cy got up to walk around and I went
to the washroom. The toilet in the back beside the gym has two side-by-side
buttons for flushing as if each controls a different choice. I mused that one
could be the un-flush button or that maybe the one on the left made the water
spiral counter clockwise. I pushed the left and then the right but they both
seemed to do the same thing.
I looked this up later and saw that
it’s a dual flush toilet, with one button for solid and the other for liquid
waste. I wondered which is which and the answer seems to be that there’s a
bigger button for the bigger flush, but in this case they looked the same size.
Maybe I didn’t look closely enough.
As usual, Bänoo had an open stage poet follow the break and precede the second
feature. In this case it was Shei Al-Khair, who said he was from Sudan and that
he would read his poem entirely in Arabic. At one point he read a line while
gesturing behind him at the religious symbols and a few of the Arabic speakers
behind me laughed in understanding.
The second feature was Mugabi
Byenkya and he began as soon as he was on stage – “I let my writing speak for
itself … up, down, left, right … with this clever articulation … Staring at
this blank, white sheet … Wanna go out with a bang … I wanna do things au
naturel … huffin and puffin like a gale … literary serotonin flooding our brain
… I think I just came … Giving myself up to the creative process instead of
just processing creativity … My name is / what? My name is / who? My name is
chakoochakachoo … Hi my name is Mugabi / That’s Ugandan for ‘the giver’ / My grandmother
spoke my name into existence … Hi my name is Augustine, the second most famous
man after Usher to release his Confessions … I’m homeless in my own home … Have
I gotten so used to the unfamiliar … In god we trust … Does god trust us or
does god even exist …”
At this point Mugabi finally
unperformatively addressed the audience and said “Hi”. He explained that the
poetry he would be reading was inspired by his novel, “Dear Philomena” and
conversations about it.
“Starts in July 1991 when I was in
my mother’s womb … She picked the name Philomena for her baby girl … My mother
gives birth to a baby boy … My mother was stuck with a baby boy … She dressed
me in all those pink dresses … I suffered from strokes … Strokes usually happen
to people at a certain age … I was having multiple seizures a day … I started
these conversations … This book is a story of a year I was supposed to die in
conversations with Philomena who I was supposed to be.”
From a poem for Rachel – “On July
11, 2005 my father died … I feel the noose tighten on my father … on July 11,
2005 more than my father died … My innocence died … My self-love died … A part
of me died … Walking and talking … I pause … She said something that got me
thinking … July 11, 2007 / I was dark skinned … It happened gradually … Pinned
to the bottom of the barrel of racial inferiority … I used to be light skinned
… I was the one who merely had to blink to indicate … light was right … July
11, 2012 / Burning with righteous indignation … I was jealous … Light was might
… you perceived as she spoke her grounded tones … We walked and talked and I
gawked … The blacker the berry the sweeter the juice … I don’t remember exactly
what Rachel said to me … On that third day Rachel resurrected me …”
Mugabi explained that while writing
the book he started drawing parallels with his life as if he were a girl.
He read “Don’t Touch My Hair” –
“Don’t touch my hair I said to the Bangladeshi child who had grabbed a clump of
my luscious afro … Don’t touch my hair I repeated turning around, swatting the
little boy’s hand away as he ran away … he fiercely clutched … his conquest -
my curls …The feeling of otherness … lingered … Don’t touch my hair … Uganda …I
was in a country where the majority had hair like mine, I did not expect this …
Why do you act like I don’t have a right to determine how, when, where and why
my body should be touched … I
exasperatedly sigh as they … try to act like being touched without consent is a
compliment … like I should be grateful … like I don’t know or appreciate the
true beauty of my own hair … Lawrence, Kansas … I feel the hand press into my
just combed afro … Don’t touch my hair … I’ve never had a Black friend before …
and I just wanted to know what it felt like …”
From “They Said I Should Talk More”
– “They said I should talk more / What a bore / With the courtesy of an itchy
sore … I savour my words … A connoisseur of diction … Cold cuts of words …
Confident in my insecurity … Big words make me sound smart … So I talk to
myself … I really am a bore … To deal with it I make it sound like Hello Kitty
… Maintain like Adele … I talk to myself more than I talk to others … Screw all
this existentialist promo …”
From M.J. – “My name is M.J. … I
could be your Peter Parker … Instead I say, “Hi, my name’s Mugabi … We both get
very excited about art … Supporting each other’s hustle … I text you … We meet
up … ‘You felt so comfortable being you on stage’ you said …”
Mugabi explained that the character
of Philomena is deliberately unclear. He found out later that it was his
girlfriend’s middle name.
His last poem was dedicated to
Regina. He began singing – “I’m in love with you, even though our love is new
…” Then speaking – “You said you loved me on the fifth date … beat god to the
punch … Gender is a social construct … I’m in love with a Haitian … You said
you loved me as much as you love trees … I found my Philomena in you.”
Mugabi
Byenkya is a good performer; he has a good sense of the musicality and tempo of
language. He has interesting subject matter, some valuable messages, some nice
rhymes and every now and then he comes up with a great line that reveals his
poetic potential. I would suggest that now that he knows he can command the
stage he should spend more time off of it honing his craft as a writer so that
he can bring something stronger at a later date to a poetry audience.
Before beginning the second half of
the open stage, Bänoo encouraged us to listen to poets that are not
like ourselves. As an example, she informed us that of the more than 100 poets
that have featured at Shab-e She’r, only two of them have been Iranian.
The next open stage performer was
Weeda Shareqi with “Who Can Watch the Sunlight?” – “Who can watch the sunset?
Can you? I don’t think so … Maybe never … It looks scary … behind those
mountains … It reminds me of … the helpless nights … a gunshot … mixed with
children screaming… Who can watch the sunset? No … I can hear them crying … Who
can watch the sunset … Not tonight.”
From Jeff Pancer’s poem – “Your
corporate child is now owned … Some are broken … pro and pawn …”
Jane Voll chose not to use the
microphone and she also used her body as well as her voice to communicate her
poem. She introduced it by talking about healing and stated that it should not
be professionalized. From the poem – “You have more grandmothers than you know
/ They reach for you across oceans / across time … Join the rhythm of you
listening … the one voice that has sung every lullaby through all time …”
Chai, also without a mic, started
with what he called a haiku about wild fires – “A is for Alberta, 2015 / B is
for B.C., 2017 / C is for Canada”.
His main poem was called “Dodgeball”
– “You know the game … You’re supposed to dodge the ball until you get hit …
Not one but two balls … Three balls, that would be really tough … Make one ball
invisible … How do you play the game … The game of the nuclear age … They are
here … All of them are invisible … You can’t dodge … invisible dodgeball …”
Mind the Gap was another that
eschewed the microphone. From her poem, which she read while quite often
giggling at the same time – “I wish I was a pompous genius … I wish I was a
white bunny so I could lay Easter eggs all over the internet … I wish I was
Rapunzel … I wish I was an orange cat … I wish I was Snow White so I could eat
all your poison apples … I wish I was a maggot … I wish I was a laser printer …
I wish I was a peace pipe … I wish I was a sugar cane … I wish I was the
grapevine so I could … all of the
utility out of the wire … I wish I was a genius so I could help you all with my
ideas.”
Paul Costa recited his piece almost
as if he was making it up as he went along.
He walked around the stage with the microphone and went further back
into the nave towards the altar than I’ve ever seen an open stage performer go
– “The dominatrix faced her client before their first session … She asked for
his safe word … others use strudel … Her client asked why a simple ‘no’
wouldn’t work instead … Innocent … Damaging molecular physics … Child’s
perpetual humiliation … You’re a failure, you goddamn child … The statement’s
matter stabilizes … detonated simultaneously … their long twilight gaze … until
a year and a half after they went dark … It became my personality.” When Paul
was done, he stood there for at least another couple of minutes doing a long
promo about his projects.
It might be a good idea for Bänoo to set aside a time during the evening for promos of upcoming events
so that they don’t intrude on the flow of the poetry. It would probably be best
in such a segment for either her or one of her volunteers to give the
information rather than having people get up and sell it themselves. Maybe
around the time of the open mic sign-ups she could also invite people to come
forward or backward with their details.
From Mizan’s first
poem – “Secrets … Your eyes … without talking … I feel my heart is like an
ocean … Love is an addiction … Happy laughter … It is a game of rich people.”
From
his second - “ … For every problem
there is a solution … You just need the courage to use that knowledge …”
Sydney
White also took a little time to explain who she was before she read “Burn Out”
– “Yeah, you can call me cynical … Censored by the local presstitutes … I could
get dramatic and say it’s soul destroying …
It’s fucking annoying … All I want is a ragtop car and a happy hour.”
Before
introducing the next poet, Bänoo announced that the next
Shab-e She’r would be on August 29th.
From Adam B’s poem –
“It’s been a minute, maybe a year now … I doubt you could even believe we would
end up on opposing sides … We were so united in standing against … Did I go
crazy … Next to perfect everything kind of sucks … Sorry if I’ve ever treated
you like a project … There is such a thing as too late.”
Jeff Cottrill read
“Social Media Schizophrenia” – “Oh look, a puppy video … Oh, it’s a news story
about a girl that saved a homeless man’s life … Oh, it’s a long rant against
violence and hate … Terry made a song produced by Phil Spector. But Phil
Spector is a murderer! That makes Terry a murderer too … Bob went to see Wonder
Woman … but Gal Gadot condones killing Palestinian children … Somebody
pepper-sprayed a guy because he was mansplaining on a bus. I guess that’s
acceptable … Did I just use the term ‘brownies’ … I have to go and stab myself
in the eye … This account has been suspended.”
This isn’t on Jeff, but
what he said or repeated about Gal Gadot made me wonder if it was true. She
certainly never publicly advocated the killing of Palestinian children. She
wrote on social media about getting Hamas out of Gaza and accused them of using
women and children as shields. The Palestinian Authority also wants Hamas out
of Gaza and accusing the other side in a war of using human shields is probably
one of the oldest and most common forms of propaganda in the history of combat.
If she were to say that she’s okay with disproportionate retaliation then I
would probably agree that she indirectly condones killing Palestinian children.
As far as I know though she hasn’t said that yet.
From Raj’s story – “Our
guidebook made no mention of it … We wandered the cobbled streets … The
communal toilets where the business got done … A plunge to cool down in the
heat of summer … share stories … the driver told us of the house of Mary … You
really should go … Far away from the chatter … A place where she would find
peace … The mother, the one who suffers the most … ‘I shouldn’t have been so
easy on the boy … so inside himself … when I had to press cold, wet rags to his
forehead …’ … We took a winding road … Trinkets … something ornate to build a
story around … Outside there were three taps of holy water … There was the
short walk with olive trees on each side … The trees were tall and deep green
and the air circled around them … It was a shudder, a presence, a crackle of energy
… and a calmness impossible to contain.”
From Laura DeLeon’s
first poem – “The cracking, the crushing, the breaking of bone … To be caged
from within outside of its element … The universal mind has died …”
During Laura’s second
poem, which she was reciting rather than reading, she paused a bit and had to
retrace her lines because she’d forgotten them. I’m sure it’s happened at some
point to anyone that has tried to memorize a poem and read it in public. –
“Images that transcend space and time … A captive to the celestial flight …
Spring forth, branch out in ecstasy into other worlds sublime … The clay of
thought enkindled in lone passion’s flames / fire created in the arms of angel
wings.”
From Matthew Johnston’s
poem, “Residue” – “ … rained on from below … When you rub the carpet the wrong
way its colour lightens and silvers.”
The last poet of the
night was Alexandra Seay, and I’ll consider her final line to be an appropriate
end for this particular review. Afterwards there were the usual closing statements,
followed by a few conversations. I left pretty much right away and after
getting home I was about to get my bike from the hall to hang it up when my
upstairs neighbour, David, just coming in, stopped to give me two bottles of
Molsen Canadian.
From Alexandra’s poem – “Who rescued this word
from the tundra of etymology … Weave our secret through this frozen seascape …
All I know is we learned a word together my dear.”
