Feather Tongued Dodos

            I spent a lot of time on Thursday writing my review of Shab-e She’r.

            In the evening I printed six copies each of the three poems I would be bringing to the Poetry Master Class that night. The poems were an old one called “The Wives of the Prophets”, one from two years ago called “This is a Manner of Flight” and a fresh poem entitled “Evangelikaraoke”.

            I was a lot more organized this time and stapled together and labelled copies that were for a specific member of my group or for Albert, the professor.

            It seemed quite a bit lighter out when I left than the same time last week. The sun sets about seven minutes later every week but maybe it was overcast last Thursday and the sky was darker because of that.

            I was sitting on the cushioned bench in the hallway outside of our occupied classroom when Albert was passing. We chatted briefly about the extra daylight but he thinks we get an extra six minutes a day. He said that up in Nunavat they get an extra hour a day. I just looked it up and found that we gained nine minutes of daylight in the evening between January 17 and January 24. In Iqaluit they gained twenty-two minutes of afternoon daylight in the same week.

            Ashley was the first other student to arrive and when I asked how she was she said she was winded from the stairs. She explained that she has injuries left over from childhood that cause her physical difficulties now and she has to take physiotherapy on a regular basis to deal with them.

            Margaryta was the next one to get there. I tried to make eye contact to say hello but she avoided looking at me. Ashley is actually the only member of the class that has chatted with me at all. Margaryta readily made conversation with Ashley and informed her that they are neighbours and even ride the same bus to Kipling Station.

           

            The chairs around the big table in our classroom have long backs and they are very comfortable. It would be nice to have one for my computer.

The women engage with one another easily so I was thinking it was a gender thing but then when Matthew came he was immediately exchanging verbiage with Lara and so maybe it’s a generational thing or maybe it’s just me.

Ashley told Blythe she hates Facebook and really thinks that Mark Zuckerberg is the devil.

Our group was even smaller this week as we learned that Andrew has dropped the course and Emily and Arin are away doing a theatrical production.

Albert complains that what annoys him is the way they keep improving the Web, which is often a deprovement.

Except for Emily’s poem and those of the two that dropped out, we finished looking at all of the poems that were read on the first night, beginning with “Swainson’s Thrush” by Jenny.

Someone argued that her use of the word “instant” to indicate a moment didn’t work and that she should have used “instance”. I said that I got right away that “instant” meant the present.

Albert commented that Jenny’s poem is in between a verse poem and a prose poem. He said a prose poem tends to be more sober and accommodates description.

Albert declared that the most rabid desire is to be cosy.

Next we looked at my own poem “The Street Sucks the Sandman’s Bag”.

I was pleasantly surprised that so many people liked it.

Albert pointed out that the title has a double meaning. Matthew loved the title. Someone else said that she was confused in trying to relate the Sandman in the title to the speaker and his sidewalk home.

The Sandman is not meant to appear in the poem. The Sandman presides over the poem and over the street. He causes things to wind down but the street also sucks both his sleep dust and his genitalia.

Albert admired the development of metaphor in the first stanza:

My eyes are pans that sift the river of the street

for anything that shines.

Everything passes through me,

I’m a fixture in the plumbing

of the street’s collective mind.

I filter everybody’s emotional trash,

I’m the bend in the pipe

that the shit has to pass

           

Vivian thought my rhyming of “shines” and “mind” was interesting.

Someone said of “the street’s collective mind” that “collective mind” implies plural and yet my street is singular. She misunderstood and thought that I was implying that the street itself has a mind and that there have to be several streets for the mind to be collective. My point is that the street itself is a collective mind of all the people on it.

Matthew singled out “I’m the bend in the pipe

that the shit has to pass,

and though I do find gold

you know it aint the kind

that makes me worth a lick of a woman’s time” and declared it was a powerhouse.

Of the second stanza:

I make a smash with this uptight-rope circus act

I do upon this bench.

I’m an ambidextrous lighthouse

warning every side at once

to maintain a safe distance.

cause they would scrape like a rasp upside of my mind 

like the curious stares

of many passers-by

that like the leaves of fall

that scratch along the road

will only serve to satisfy a dying itch.

            Someone said that the tone changes here and it stands out awkwardly from the rest of the poem.

            Instead of “I do upon this bench” Matthew suggested, “I perform on this bench”.

            Someone else suggested I replace “cause” with “otherwise” in “cause they would scrape like a rasp upside my mind”.

            I said both those changes would screw up the rhythm and Albert added that he thought both “do” and “cause” are fine.  

Of the third stanza:

I’m in the cold because it serves much more comfort

than lonely heated rooms.

It’s just where my life escapes me,

Do I even have a choice

of get away cars or routes?

Do I make things happen from this pivotal place

or just weakly mimic

some kind of female strengths?

It seems mostly women

can make events happen

even when they’re sitting in one place alone.

There was some criticism, as I expected there would be, about my reference to women in the lines: “It seems mostly women / can make events happen / even when they’re sitting in one place alone …” but Ashley didn’t think it was sexist. She thought it was true. In the same vein there was argument over my lines: “Do I make things happen from this pivotal place / or just weakly mimic / some kind of female strengths?” Lara said that it does not sound like the speaker in the poem is a feminist. Someone said that it comes across as misogynistic. Blythe added that my use of “female strengths” might be offensive to a transgender person. It was suggested that maybe “feminine” would be more accurate than “female” and I think that I agree. Matthew however declared that it’s a great stanza and it should not be altered.

There was also a question as to whether in “mostly women can make events happen even when they’re sitting in one place alone”, whether “events” is the right word. I agree that “events” feels wrong.

In the fourth stanza:

Now a guy that I’ve seen but I hardly know,

invades my Space here at my sidewalk home

& the storm of his conversation

keeps droning

on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on.

and when anyone sits with me on this bench,

my static journey begins to tailspin

and the tumour of their presence

 starts to drain upon my life again.

Someone said that my use of repetition in the lines, “ … the storm of his conversation keeps droning on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on …” and “ … the shooting gallery where I perfect my endless, endless, endless, endless stare …” helps the poem to hang together, helps it be understandable and the whole poem has a lovely rhythm. Vivian thought the repetition was too much.
            Vivian thought that my line “tumour of their presence” was interesting.

Matthew thought that the fifth stanza was great:

He makes me less handsome

by association and

my aim is deflected by his invasion

of the shooting gallery where I perfect my endless, endless, endless, endless stare.

            Of the sixth stanza:

This talking man’s become a blemish

on the face of my spaceman vanity.

I know that he’s schizophrenic,

yet those psychiatric drugs

just seem to plug his sanity.

            Vivian thought the first two lines were interesting but someone else said that they imply some kind of relational character development but sudden and unclear. She added that she felt a bit uncomfortable with my use of mental health.

            Someone liked the phrase “psychic mayday” from the seventh stanza.

            Of the eight stanza:

I’m convicted of shyness

when my clumsy heart gets tangled up inside my mind,

but maybe that restriction

is what holds me back from serving any institution time.

            The person with the most critical comments said that this stanza has a different tone from the rest of the poem and it’s a bit out of place but Vivian thought it was interesting.

            Of the final stanza:

The projector light of sunset

 shoots a golden beam

above my aisle-way seat,

while theme music of evening

begins slowly moving in upon the gentle sunset breeze.

I pour time into space

as I wait in the street

for just one kind word

or else anything sweet

to fall from a woman’s mouth

so I can swing on home upon its memory.

            Vivian said it was very rich. Matthew thought the ending was great.

            I was also told that my use of slant rhyme or what Albert calls “occasional rhyme” really works. I said that I think that effective rhyme is like the perfect crime: it has to look like an accident.

            Albert praised the musicality of my poem and said that sound is equally important.

            Jenny commented that it has a Bob Dylan vibe and qualified that she meant that as a compliment.

             Nathalie said that the way I break the pattern for a while and then return to the origin pattern is very satisfying.

            Someone pointed out that I had written “upside of my mind” but when I read it out loud I left out the “of”. I said that when I read it out loud it became organic and proved that “of” was unnecessary in the poem.

            Vivian pointed out my use of one ampersand although I use “and” everyplace else. I explained that the poem used to be all ampersands and that I’d just missed that particular one when I changed them.

            Matthew said of the whole poem that he absolutely loves it. It’s profound through astute self-reflection and deprecation. “You did a great job of knowing where and when to rhyme and how to set the scene as a poignant sort of purgatory. You’ve mastered the art of drama without being melodramatic.

            Someone else said she loves the rhyme and rhythm. It flows nicely and just works.

            Blythe said it was beautifully done.

            The person with the most critical comments said she liked the tone of the piece.

            Someone else added, “Super cool poem”.

            We broke up into our groups. Because of the diminished size of our class Matthew moved to another group to balance things out. Our group now consisted of four people: Vivian, Blythe, Margaryta and myself. We only had half an hour left and so it was a bit rushed and so we only had time for one of my poems and so I chose “Failed Launch for the Rocket of the Day”.  Someone thought it was cool that I’d written a ghazal but someone else had written on my poem “not a ghazal”. Both Blythe and Margaryta said they’d had to look up what a ghazal is. My impression from a lot of the comments were that they didn’t understand that the verses of a ghazal are not obligated to be conceptually coherent with one another but to all convey the same mood. Some comments kept on asking for a connection of ideas.

            Of the fourth stanza:

Not connecting with the sad uglies

that stare me down with their mad slug eyes.

            Someone said they loved the matching of “uglies” and “slug eyes”. Someone wrote next to “sad uglies” the comment “women”. Huh? Why would she conclude that I was talking about women? No gender is mentioned in the entire poem.

            Of the whole poem someone said that the rhyming distracts from the narrative. But there is no narrative and a ghazal is supposed to rhyme. Someone else, I think Vivian wrote that it was interesting but wondered if it follows the form of a ghazal.

            I didn’t find the critique very satisfying. It seemed rushed and the comments were mostly on elements that have nothing to do with how a ghazal functions.

            We exchanged our written comments about each other’s poems.

            Of my poem “Maroon River”:

Business is unusual as usual

tonight on Parkdale’s streets:

The endless search for jagged cracks

to fill with future heart attacks

hardly ever skips a beat.

Testosterone’s tapping

the pussies like trees:

two fins for a swim in the estrogen sea.

and every space cadet is a nervous wreck,

twisting to watch their backs

as they float with the other space debris

in a twitching, spinning hoedown

around the quaking planet Crack.

            Blythe said the first stanza is really charming.

            Margaryta liked lines three and four but thought five feels out of place.

            Of “Testosterone’s tapping the pussies like trees” Vivian said she couldn’t review it because she keeps laughing. She said she loves it though. She thought that “two fins for a swim in the estrogen sea” doesn’t fit but I wonder if she understood that there is a double meaning there and that a fin is a five-dollar bill.

            Of my poem “Feather Tongued Dodos”:

When we are together we know we are lost

We don’t know each other any more

than ourselves and so we die by the way

we talk, but the chatter, it’s not

supposed to mean anything together

The word reflects until it dulls

like a bull-bell like a wall-well, a wind-war,

or an aptitudinal appetite whether askew or not

We don’t place blame on ourselves until we find

our missing loss but then it’s too late

to communicate, we’re sorely in need

but too sore to soar so we do

not fly with these wings but we flap a lot.

            Margaryta thought the title was fun but she thought “We don’t know each other any more than ourselves” is confusing. Vivian thought “die by the way we talk” is unclear. Blythe said the stanza is great.

            Vivian loved the complicated lines and rhymes of the second stanza.

            Blythe suggested I put “we flap a lot” on its own line and I think I will. She also said that of the phrase “sorely in need but too sore to soar” that “sorely” pushes it too far.

            Of “our missing loss” Margaryta asked, “What is it?”

            Of the whole poem Vivian said she really likes it but doesn’t find anything in it. It seems every stanza is stand-alone and that even internally the thematic is struggling.

            On the way home I stopped at Freshco because I was out of fruit and needed some potato chips to have with a quick, late dinner. The red grapes there were too soft and so I settled for green grapes but they kind of tasted like medicine. I also bought cherries but they were a bit dry and withered. I grabbed a mango, some Greek yogourt and a bag of Miss Vickie’s chips.

            I had the chips with a bowl of spicy black bean soup. It was from a carton but it was pretty good.

            I watched an episode of Peter Gunn. This was basically a simple cat and mouse story. A mob boss pays a hit man with white hair and dark glasses to kill Peter Gunn, but the stipulation is that it has to be done far from town because Gunn has too many friends. The killer captures Gunn in his own apartment and forces him to drive his car out to an abandoned mine that for some reason still has working machinery. Gunn escapes after suddenly accelerating and slamming on the brakes. The impact of slamming forward against the front seat stuns the killer long enough for Gunn to run from the car. The chase goes through a mine, out the other side of a mountain and then through various equipment of a mining operation until Gunn disarms the assassin and becomes the pursuer until the hitman falls and dies.