Killing Jar

            I spent quite a bit of Thursday figuring out which poems I wanted to put in my final manuscript for the Poetry Master Class and editing them. I didn’t pick any poems from my book Paranoiac Utopia since I’d already given that to Albert on Wednesday. I selected the ones that he’d been the most critical of and which I’d revised, but they didn’t fill up the fifteen-page requirement and so I added three that he’d never seen. I also printed a couple of poems for our group poetry reading and two of my translations of Prevert to give to Albert.

            I planned on taking my guitar to class but the low E string was frayed and since I didn’t want it to break in the middle of a song I changed it. I practiced my song “The Next State of Grace” three times and the string went out of tune several times before it finally started settling in.

            When I got there Alyson and Aaron were already there. Alyson was talking about a term paper she’s working on about gambling. She was hoping for at least 70%. I would consider 70% or even 80% a personal failure.

            When the Spanish group left the room I went in, set up my guitar stand and tuned my guitar.

            Aaron asked who’d brought the guitar and seemed excited that there would be songs.

            I noticed that everyone else’s poetry manuscripts had cover pages with titles and course codes. Albert seems so informal it had never occurred to me to do that but maybe I should have.

            I told Albert that I preferred workshopping poems with the whole group rather than the small groups. Aaron agreed but added that the small groups allowed us to have more poetry critiqued. Albert said that he’d take that into consideration.

            Albert said that after the launch he would be going out to the baby G at 1608 Dundas West for the Coachhouse spring launch. He told us that Roman Walker, a former student in this class, organized the event. He says she’s English and he reunited with her last summer at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. He thinks she wants to become a Canadian.

            He mentioned another former student that is published by Frog Hollow Press.

            We started our group poetry reading in alphabetical order. There are three students whose names start with A and he got the order wrong when he started with Ashley. She read “Adopted Genealogy” and her second poem had a Punjabi title that sounded like “Naan Corrage” but I don’t think that’s even close to the spelling. The two poems were the bookends of her manuscript.

            Aaron read “Thursday 3pm” and “Aftertaste”.

            Alyson Doyle read a couple of humourous poems: “Beckett V Tolstoy” – “Beckett and Tolstoy / jousted on Tuesday / one had a horse and a spear / and a blister on his index finger / the other / the minimal shield / of a tin can buccaneer / and the steel to / let less words /  linger”. From “Transcendental Waitressing” – “I read the work of the monk, Hahn / all the way from Vietnam / 'If everyone gave up grain alcohol and meat / there would be enough arid soil / to grow food for all people to eat’ / So, I gave up beef and booze / and lost my job / because I worked at a bar / and my coworkers were pretty sure / my abstinence was judgement / But, that’s not how I meant it / I wanted to sustain the right / to go back to beef and booze / if the need presented / I read Robert Thurman’s interpretation / of the Tibetan mother meditation / ‘Look in the eyes of all people / as though they were your mother / because when we nurture life / we always give birth to one another'/ But, not everyone's mother taught / that love is the answer / so, I stare at a spot / above this man’s eyes / where his balding forehead / is baring skin cancer / and, pitying the vulnerability in him / I forgive my own / because otherwise / I can’t atone / for my dismay / for my dismay / at the rude way / he orders lunch / every day / I read the dalai Lama / and for a while / gave up on all drama / save for the histrionics / of the woman in furs / who suddenly demurs / ‘This food is no good’ / She takes me to task / I just smile / ‘Have you tried the beef and booze?’ I ask”.

            Blythe read “Still” and “Wide Open”.

            I sang my song “The Next State of Grace”. I thought I noticed a few people nodding their heads to the rhythm. I didn’t do the instrumental break with the high vocal because I was afraid of screwing it up in front of everybody. I had changed the lyric during rehearsal earlier that evening from “tar paper third world heart” to “tar paper shack dwelling heart” because it’s not considered appropriate to say “third world” anymore:

I’m sitting here cooking

in the stew of the street

I’m the part that won’t ever get stirred

but as I am boiling I drink my own broth

and bend noodles to the shape of these words

Oh when oh when will I ever learn?

I can’t get my heaven

with wheels that don’t turn

I’ve got no ambition and that’s a disgrace

Guess I’ll sit here and wait for

the next state of grace

Well I’m dug down so deep

in the trench of my heart,

I can’t seem to climb back out again,

and my voice is so distant it can hardly be heard

by the women who pass in the rain

Oh when oh when will I ever learn?

I can’t drive a girl home

with wheels that don’t turn.

I’m buried with pride when I try to save face

Guess I’ll sit here and wait for

the next state of grace

And my mind hangs above

this emotional wreck

like a scavenger looking for parts,

and it lives in a mansion that’s built from the sweat

of my tarpaper shack dwelling heart

Oh when oh when will I ever learn?

I’ll freeze here on earth

with a heart that won’t burn.

so I’m biding my time here as fate’s welfare case

while I line up and wait the next state of grace.

I’m biding my time here as god’s welfare case

while I line up and wait for the next state of grace

            Albert said that he’d first saw me singing my poems on the street back in the 90s and he’d also come to my reading series, The Orgasmic Alphabet Orgy a couple of times. I hadn’t known that he’d been there but maybe I hadn’t met him yet. I remember meeting you at the Art Bar reading series. I asked him if when he was at the Orgy he’d contributed to the Gumby Bible. He said he didn’t know about that so he didn’t think I’d find him there.

            He asked me to read something and so I read “Killing Jar”. I said that if we’d had more time in the course I would have submitted it to the workshop:

Poems are a class of writing that came before reading

on wings known as verses whose rhythmic beating

gave them flight through language on currents of singing

to fertilize minds with the pollen of meaning. 

Many poems migrate over long distances

crossing borders or morphing to other languages

Poems feed on arousal, long walks on the beach, rolls in the hay,

relationship feces, desolation and decay.

Many species of poem can live for centuries on one single carcass

and the nutrients that are collected from solitude’s detritus

are frequently offered as a nuptial present to lovers

during mating, along with the poetic spermatozoa

Poems maintain territories known as genres

and chase away others that try to cross over

Many poems use camouflage to survive

with their surface meaning being only a disguise

Before the fifteenth century all poems could fly

but they were sucked out of the musical sky

by the vacuum machine of Joe Gutenberg

and pressed flat and dead inside of the printed word

Because it’s hard to see beauty when it’s flying around

it is very important all poems be earthbound

in such a way that they can be enjoyed and read

so of course for this reason poems must be made dead

You’ll need a spreading board of paper and pins of punctuation

and a display case called a book to show off your poem collection.

the easiest way to put poems to death

is in a killing jar also known as a manuscrypt

Poems in their efforts to be able fly once more

batter their bodies inside a killing jar

and in this way damage their delicate verses

so it is best to stun them by removing their rhyming organ.

Poems are generally pressed and preserved on paper

with a complex medium of particulate matter,

solvents, pigments, dyes, resins, lubricants, surfactants,

solubilizers and fluorescents known as ink.

Collecting poems is a fun activity for me and you,

and poem collections have artistic value!

And the poems we kill really suffer no more pain

then the bugs that we crush with our feet every day.

Collecting poems connects us not only to the poem

but to the flora and carrion it fed upon

to the context of its existence when it was alive

surrounded by language predators and parasites.

Requiring just nets, killing jars, titles and printers,

all of which can be bought for just a few dollars,

it leads to marvelous poetry collections,

that help children to revel in classification.

Nothing has ever rivaled poem collection

because putting songs in suspended animation

destroys the distractions of musicality

and turns kids into little murderers of poetry.

            Albert said that I’d summed it up nicely and he liked the rhymes. He asked if I’d been influenced by Rap. I said that I came to poetry through the songs of the late 60s and early 70s because in that era people were really trying to write meaningful lyrics. He said he likes those songs as well. One student that took another class with Albert said that he would bring in Doo Wop for them to listen to.

            Emily read “Returning Home” and “The Names We Give Ourselves”.

            Jenny read, “Dogs” and it reminded me of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s “Dog” and so I asked her if she’d read it. She hadn’t even heard of Ferlinghetti.

            Jenny’s second poem was “Blueberry Pie”.

            Julia read, “Soul Marinating in Hell’s Kitchen” and “All Ground is Made of Lava”. In the poem she says, “An albatross flies for three years without touching land”. That’s a deceptive phrase since it makes it sound like the bird remains entirely in flight for that long. It’s true that they sleep in the air and could theoretically stay aloft for three years, but that would depend on the wind. If it dies down they land on the water to rest. Even with wind they have to touch the ocean to get food. If they can pick something off the surface they might eat it in the air but often they have to dive to fish, in which case they are technically landing because they have to take off again afterwards. After a big meal they might float on the water for a few hours. They only touch land to raise their young.

            Lara did two poems but I only caught the name of the second one, which was “Valentines Day”.

            Margaryta read two poems I remembered from our workshops. One was “Olympia” and the other was the one about the can can dancer and Courbet’s painting “L’origine du monde (The Origin of the World)”. She and Albert spoke as if the painting is missing. It was but it hasn’t been for a while. The image is of a woman’s genitalia.

            My pen had been getting very faint for a while and had finally run out. I was just writing ghosts of words on the page because I didn’t want to interrupt a reading but since Albert and Margaryta were chatting I got up to get my backpack on the window ledge and brought it back to the table. I fished out a new pen and put the backpack behind me against the wall but at the moment it hit the wall the lights went out. I thought that I’d hit something but it turned out that it was a coincidence and that the power had gone out.

            There was still enough ambient evening light coming in through the windows for us to read and so we continued with Nichol. She read “Asian Canadian” and “Strangers”.

            At this point everyone had read and someone requested that Albert do a poem. He recited from memory a poem by Yeats called “Cold Heaven” – “Suddenly I saw the cold and rook delighting heaven / that seemed as though ice-burned and was but the more ice / and thereupon imagination and heart were driven / so wild that every casual thought of that and this / vanished and left but memories that should be out of season / with the hot blood of youth, of love crossed long ago / and I took all the blame out of all sense and reason / until I cried and trembled and rocked to and fro / riddled with light. Ah! When the ghost begins to quicken / confusion of the death-bed over, is it sent / out naked on the roads, as the books say, and stricken / by the injustice of the skies for punishment?”

            Albert’s second recitation was four stanzas from the very long Tennyson poem “A Dream of Fair Women” – “I read before my eyelids dropped their shade / ‘The Legend of Good Women’ long ago / sung by the morning star of song, who made / his music heard below / Dan Chaucer, the first warbler, whose sweet breath / preluded those melodious bursts, that fill / the spacious times of great Elizabeth / with sounds that echo still / and, for a while, the knowledge of his art / hold me above the subject, as strong gales / hold swollen clouds from raining, tho my heart / brimful of those wild tales / charged both mine eyes with tears / in every land I saw, wherever light illumineth / beauty and anguish walking hand in hand / the downward slope to death”. He explained that “Dan” in those days was a respectful form of address like “Sir”.

            We still had an hour left and there was still enough light to read and so Albert decided to go around the table again, starting with Ashley who read “Consumption” and another poem.

            Lara read “Aging Alone” and “January 17”.

            Alyson Doyle had been reading on her laptop from poems on her blog. She no longer had wi-fi because of the power outage, but the page was still open so she could read two more poems.

“Raspberries” – “I study human nature / as a bird sustained / by the beauty of brains / formed on brambles”.

“Not All Who Are Lost Wander” – “I hit a pothole in the blacktop / deep enough to force a Mack truck / full stop / But my hatchback was synched to Iggy Pop / and the car’s backbeat sustained the song’s / daring hop / ‘Got a Lust for Life’ / The licence plate on the grey sedan / I was behind / read ‘PERDU 1’ / and a blue car crossed the broken line / with a licence plate that replied / ‘PSHERPA’ / and I followed them around the curve / that hugged the water line / and the sun pulled me closer to an ending / and I was unafraid”.

I sang my translation of Charles Baudelaire’s “Le serpent qui danse”: I love your body uncertain / lovely and indolent / now as restless as a curtain / exposed to the wind / From your hair, so deep and luscious / an acrid perfume / rises as if from the ocean / in waves of brown and blue / Like a ship catching a fresh gale / at the break of dawn / my dreaming soul sets its sale / for deep horizons / In your eyes that serve so little / nectar or poison / are two cold jewels whose settings mingle / shining gold and iron / To watch you moving in close cadence / sweetly unrestrained / is like watching a snake that dances on the end of a cane / Beneath the weight of languidness / your head is an infant / nodding slowly just as softly / as a young elephant / Like a stream made large by the melting / of glaciers in spring / your mouth is filling up with fluid / that drips from your teeth / I believe I’ve drunk a sweetly bitter / Bohemian wine / as the stars of my heart scatter / through the liquid sky”.

I was all ready to read a poem since everyone else was doing two, but Albert moved on to someone else. I assume it wasn’t a slight and but just an oversight. I was disappointed though.

            Someone read “Sea Queen on the Subway” and “Subway Strangers”.

            Ashley was looking up the blackout situation on her phone and announced that the only campus with power was Trinity College.

            Margaryta read “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors” and “Alternative Uses I Have Found for My Lungs”.

            Aaron read “Hamartia” and “Driftwood”.

            Blythe read “Black Bag”, “Blue Jacket” and another poem that I remember but not the title.

            Emily read “Gertrude Zachary Sits in Neon Outside Your Window” and “Rembrandt in Yellow”.

            I confess that I may have confused Julia and Aaron. They kind of look alike and so if I say that Julia read a poem it might be Aaron and vice versa.

            Julia read “Reverse Entropy” and “ Salt Water Groves”.

            Jenny read “Geography” and “Calling Cards on Purpose”.

            That was another round and so Albert finished things up with a recitation of Charles Baudelaire’s “L’examen de minuit” (Examining Conscience”) as translated by Edna St Vincent Millay - “Ironic as the voice of fate … How we have erred and fallen low … We have insulted Jesus … approved what we have horror of … paid homage to cold matter … To cheat sadness we have revelled at the board of greed …”

            The lights were still out as I packed up and left. Several of the women were chatting loudly in the hall and went down the stair ahead of me. Everyone seemed to have made friends during the three months of this course. I felt kind of depressed and it was also ironic that in every other course I’ve taken, I have at least briefly made at least a chatting friend, while in the one course that is of a subject that is second nature to me: writing poetry, I didn’t make a single friend. The women were gathered and still talking at the front door. As I was about to leave, Julia or Aaron turned to me and said, “Thanks for the songs! Those were really cool!” That was nice. I would have preferred to be in a different workshopping group than the one I had. I think I lucked out and got grouped two of the angriest feminists in our class.

            There was surprisingly still some daylight as I left, but I knew it would be dark in minutes and so I put my flashers on.

            I stopped at Freshco where I bought grapes, raspberries, lettuce, green onions, cilantro, avocadoes, tomatoes, strawberries and honey Dijon dressing.

            This was the last day of my fourteen-day fast and so I had to settle for tomatoes and avocadoes with no dressing for dinner.

            I watched The Rifleman. In this story a witness being escorted to testify against Slade Burroughs, a man being charged with murder, is shot on the trail from out of nowhere. Slade claims that he was in Arizona at the time of the murder, but Lucas says that he saw Slade riding near the crime scene on the day it happened and so Lucas is asked to be the new witness. The sheriff figures that the other witness was killed with a new type of weapon: a rifle with a telescopic sight. Later we see a man ride into North Fork with a telescopic rifle in a holster. Mark is nursing a sick horse that doesn’t look like it will pull through but Lucas comes home to see that it’s on its feet and eating. Mark says that his new friend Brad helped the horse recover. Lucas tells Mark that it’s best to make friends slowly. Lucas meets Brad and invites him into his home for breakfast. Lucas confronts Brad about the fact that when he arrived he saw a stock of a rifle in the boot by Brad’s saddle but now the boot is empty. Mark is on his way to school and asks Brad is he’s going to take care of Blue Boy while he’s at school. Lucas says, “Sure he will son! He’s our friend isn’t he?” After Mark leaves Brad pulls his rifle from between two bales of hay and says, “It’s a Lyman special, ten power scope, full windage, elevation knobs, optics, best made in Europe. There’s not more than three like it west of the Mississippi.” Brad forces Lucas into the barn to saddle up. Brad reveals he’s Slade’s brother. Lucas is getting his saddle with Brad’s gun pointed at him. Suddenly Mark calls for Brad and Brad turns his head just long enough for Lucas to knock his gun out of his hand. They fight and Lucas knocks Brad out. Mark says he came back because of what Lucas had said, “Make friends slowly” and yet Lucas had said when Mark left for school, “He’s our friend”