While riding east on Bloor Street, on my way to the Shab-e She’r reading series, a woman wearing niqab stepped partly out onto the road a little bit in front of me. I called, “Watch out!” but she either ignored me, perhaps because she’s not supposed to respond to strange men or she didn’t know I was calling to her. I got the impression that she hadn’t seen me because a niqab must be similar to a mask in that it blinds or limits peripheral vision. It seems to me that it’s kind of a dangerous thing to be wearing when one is walking in traffic. Of course, some niqabs allow for more peripheral vision, but this one seemed to just have eyeholes for vision.
I could smell the
aroma of sage as I approached the front door of the Beit Zatoun Gallery. I
don’t know if they’d put it in their tea or their coffee. I think they put
coriander in the coffee.
When Bänoo Zan began compiling
the open mic list, someone made a special request to go earlier, so Banoo
stepped away from her usual mysterious order and allowed the woman to read in
the first half. Norman Allen was next in line, and Banoo asked him if he had
any preferences as well. He answered that he had lots of preferences but he
wasn’t going to impose them on her.
Speaking into the
microphone, Bänoo made an effort to encourage new people read on the open stage,
saying, “You will be very lucky if you choose to read!” I asked her if that
meant that the less new one happened to be the less lucky they were. I think
that by being “lucky” she meant that those new people that read would achieve
the luck that is already experienced by those that aren’t new.
The room was about
three-quarters full at a little after the official start time of 19:00.
Bänoo welcomed the
audience “to the most inclusive poetry reading in Toronto, and probably the
whole world!” She declared, “Wow! What a great audience! Look around you and
see the diversity!” She listed some diverse groups that were represented there,
such as ethnicity and sexual orientation. But I wonder how would one really
know someone’s sexual orientation unless one was told or unless one saw them
having sex?
Bänoo said that Toronto
is one of the most multicultural cities, but though people go to each other’s
restaurants and musical events, they don’t listen to each other.
The first open
miker that Bänoo called was Brenda Clews, who announced that she’d just had her
first book published.
Her poem was
entitled “Golden Trap” – “The sky trapped in clouds … Crystals breaking on
pavement … I tap on the laptop by the window of an Italian café … The woman
haunting her odd responses … Her hair like seaweed, pulled back loosely … She
moves like an exotic figment of fabric, or that ruby rising out of a ring of
melted cast gold … Open her closet, and on the floor, flaming red, slick
knee-high boots … a vermilion hat … a funerary dirge of black dresses … Her
garden is unkempt, unweeded, like writing that chokes … or Aubrey Beardsley’s
version of Salome … Her fish bones were
broken … Are there any true stories … Help me break free of the undertow …
inside the sharp beak that belabours my writing … Why can’t I go elsewhere?”
Next was Hari
Kumar, who read a poem called “Weight of Memory” – “When you think of it, it is
just data. Data is weightless … When you erase messages from your mobile phone,
do you expect it to become lighter?”
After Hari, Joanne Deane read a poem that she’d written that
afternoon, called “Life and Death” – “Isn’t it all too much? I almost got hit
from the left before the streetlights were installed … I jump, shake, cringe …
I have an escape to the river … Death waits for me to re-armour myself … I walk
with the trees … I drop my shield … Death and I relax.”
Then Mireille Shenouda read two poems. The first was
called “Young At Heart”. The second one was in french, and had a similar,
positive message.
Following Mireille was Abdu
Wahab, who introduced himself as being from Iraq, Kurdistan. He began
with a quote from Rumi – “Close both eyes to see with the other eye.” From his
own poem – “There is no face without a mirror, echoes are the only answer …
Eyes are catapults that hurl stones of love deep into the fossilized existence …
Heartbeats are the roots of oak trees … heart is an iceberg … only the eyes are
showing …”
Next was Donna Langevin, who told us that her poem was a
palindrome – “An old yarn: the stork carries a blanket in her beak. That’s how
you came into the world. Rewinding my grandmother’s yarn: That stork will carry
my old woman’s soul.”
Miriam Lopez read
“Resettlement – “To all refugees in North Lebanon … Schoolbags and children
pile inside the mini-van … The sheep kicking the last kicks … Sandbags and
razor wire … Glorified diamonds … An ice-cream truck … Winter was brutal … Once
more, celebration is stronger than any army protocol.”
More people were
arriving, and so Banoo asked for anyone that had a free seat next to them to
raise their hand.
Norman Allan read a
piece of short fiction – “In 1970, Bill Crow was a graduate student … After the
Indian wars, the army herded the Cheyenne into two camps … Bill was a student
during the Vietnam War … He decided to come to Canada and do post-graduate work
… His grammy asked, “You’ll come back for the war, won’t you?”
Aparna Halpe, before reading, explained that she
dances Argentine tango. She told us that just as Murielle’s poem in French was
about nostalgia, so would be her poem, entitled, “Four Seasons in Toronto seen
as Tangos” – “Summer in the city … Misha enters the line at Kennedy … The
trowel abandoned … in the brief measure of a dream … A long distance traveller
far too far from yearning … His fingers flicker and begin the hesitant … a
different storm.”
From Karen Lee we
heard – “You disappear behind shining eyes … Hold the other in … gaze …
Ancestors … When you first knew … In the span of a kiss, I become a piece of
sand … Only the love gaze, fluent, freeing, strong as silk … Blaze widen soft
tissue … Leaves seethe crisp gossip … Grow love in warm, honeyed light … In the
span of a kiss I become a pearl of dew …”
Then it was time
for our first featured reader.
John Portelli is
from Malta. He writes his poetry in Maltese and he has friends that do his
translations for him.
His first poem was
called “I Was Asked”. He first read it in Maltese and then in English – “I was
asked am I from Romania. Lebanon? Are you by chance a Jew? Salaam! Are you a
Muslim? Perhaps my thick, black hair … What a heavy accent you have … He
stamped the passport … How come you did not tell me you are Canadian?”
From his second
poem – “The river of bombs … Blinded by choice … Motive after motive … without
an end …”
John explained that
Maltese is a Semitic language that is written in Latin script.
He told us that his
next poem was for a Palestinian poet who wrote to him after reading his last
book. From “To Walid Nahab” – “I see you every day, briskly walking towards her
in a light veil … Once there was a Palestine … Loving her as if you have not
yet found your love … You are born to bear love … The prophets are no longer
obsessed and scrupulous … Zenga Zenga … Today you are still here … hovering in
the fields of your land.”
John explained that
the above line, “zenga zenga” was a reference to Gaddafi, though he didn’t go
into detail. I looked it up later and found that it’s from a speech that
Gaddafi made on television in February of 2011. He spoke about hunting down
protesters and repeated the phrase “zenga zenga”, which in Libyan dialect was
expressing an Arabic phrase that meant “alleyway by alleyway”. An Israeli
musician took the speech and autotuned it to Pit Bull’s “Hey Baby”, then put it
up on YouTube where it went viral.
Next John read,
“Playing the Pots” – “I hear the clanging of the pots and pans … He threatened
you with water cannons … Bang the pots … Play a rhythm to Erdogan.”
From “Blood” – “The
goose flesh cried of a blood-worried soul … Blood generated blood … Nothing
could quench it that day.”
From “Forever
Unbounded” – “Last week I was asked, ‘How do your students understand …’ … I
see and feel the pain of the anger of a foreigner … Strange accents … Have a
nice day.”
From “To My Mother”
– “I killed my mother almost 39 years ago … I ran away almost without luggage …
From the distant land I could not bury my mother.”
From “Arab Spring”
– “ … Waiting for the gulls … The waves enjoy themselves … People sunbathe … An
Arab spring.”
From another poem –
“I guess when you live in a country like Lebanon … the runways in fragments,
the streets smashed to pieces … You believe you will find a road still level …
How do you sleep with bombs over your head every day ….”
From “The Bread of
Pragmatism” – “The smooth sea sparkles, a mirror of tomorrow … Death spreads
itself out on the horizon …”
John introduced a
poem, and it sounded like he said it was called “Delodos” and that “Delodos”
means “the south wind” in Turkish. But when I looked it up I found “Lodos” but
not the “de” sound in front of it. From “Lodos” – “Lodos blows, rippling the
waters of the Bosphorus …”
From “I Remember” –
“I remember in my childhood the passionate cry, ‘British go home!’ Today I
visit Malta of the EU and hear ‘Africans go home!’”
From “I Am Enraged”
– “I am enraged at the arrogance of neo-liberalism … the kiss of Judas … The
game of evidence brings fatalism to seed … I am enraged for the fucked up
promises … The foam spins from my mouth … How many cries must we hear … Those
who regard everyone else as if they were flies … The elitism of liberalism …”
John then said he
would read a haiku, but clarified that it is more specifically a senryū, which is constructed like a haiku, but
rather than capturing a moment in time, offers a human observation – “marketed
man / so enchanted by rigor / even rigor mortis”.
John’s
final poem was entitled “All In A Row” – “A row of colourful crowds promenade
on the streets of Ankara in Istanbul … lodging itself like an email in
junkmail.”
John
Portelli’s poetry is more about sentimental and political observations in verse
form than any attempt to be artistic or innovative with his use of language. I
did though think that his senryū was interesting and would have liked to hear
more, if he has any.
Bänoo excitedly announced
that Shab-e She’r had broken its attendance record this night, with 103 people.
She
called a fifteen-minute break and most everyone packed themselves thickly at
the front of the room near the coffee, tea and snacks. The blended
conversations were like that from an amplified beehive. Some of the attendees
had left after the first feature, but there were still a lot of people.
When
the break was finished, most everyone was still standing and chatting at the
front. Bänoo spoke to them
through the microphone, “I know that you are all having wonderful
conversations, but could you please take your seats?”
As
a warm-up for the second featured reader, Bänoo selected Transient from the open mic list to
come up and do a short reading.
From
Transient’s piece – “ … Dorothy was shocked at who stays a virgin … You have to
swipe your v-card before the end of first year … I was part of that group …
breaking bread with the man that broke your consent … The devil is in the
details … She cries rape … Is she awake … I wasn’t awake … I was high … The
grapevine was blurry and I was in a hurry … Even if someone says yes,
unconscious means no … Where was the human at that table we were breaking bread
at …”
The
second feature was slam poet, Kay Kassirer. She performed barefoot, just like Anne Murray
used to do.
Kay
gave us a “trigger warning”, saying that she would be covering topics that some
people might find distressing. It seems to me that one of the main reasons to
write or listen to poetry is because it’s somewhat distressing, so I don’t
quite understand the point of being warned about it beforehand. Most of us
didn’t come to be lulled to sleep with pleasantries. Also, according to most
experts in trauma, the worst thing a victim can do is avoid triggers.
Kay
began – “I am your postcard, borderline kid … Doctors say I’m high functioning.
I only function when I’m high … I’m restless and moody … I’m too Gay to think
straight.”
Her
next piece was “Stonewall 1969” – “A series of riots that started the LGBT
riots … We cannot forget Marsha P. Johnson … She threw the first brick … They
beat her back in the closet … The life expectancy of Black trans women is only
35 … In order to be placed on gender reassignment therapy one has to be
diagnosed … Why is being trans still a diagnosis … A Black trans woman who
fought until they locked her in a men’s prison … When these women fought, they
were fighting for everyone, yet people think the “T” should be removed from the
acronym …”
From
“Sink Girl Part 1 - Belonging” – “I long to feel your lips pressed against mine
… Doing Sudoku puzzles together in pen … Lt’s go on a road trip with no
destination … I want to make memories of you … the same lips that you’ve
memorized …”
From
Kay’s next piece – “Trauma gets passed down through generations … My
grandparents were Jews … We know anxiety, we who cry at everything except
funerals … We are scientifically proven to have less cortisol … Maybe this is
why I can’t handle the stress of getting dressed in the morning… The
intergenerational effects of genocide will blow your mind … No matter how hard
my body tries to hold its breath … despite the years we were not allowed to
sing along …”
She
seems to be implying that Jews in general have less cortisol, but the study she
seems to be citing only found this to be the case among Jews that descend from
Holocaust survivors. There are Jews from other backgrounds that show very high
levels of cortisol.
From
“Sink Girl Part 2 – Shooting Stars and Fireworks” – “I should have known better
than to fall for you … Remember the night we broke the frame … kissing like we
need each others’ lips to breathe … I remember our ‘to be continued’ … I am
getting more hung up on you … I am tired of dreaming that I am with you … you
have … the ability to create butterflies in my stomach and clip their wings …
Where did I go wrong … You’re probably fast asleep with her in your arms.”
Kay
brings a picture of her with her mother at a Passover Seder to every
performance and places it on the floor in front of her – “I am bringing my
mother to this stage tonight, tonight I am bringing her back … I can still see
me and my sister holding my mom’s hand … My first poetry slam … Look Mom, I
won! The pride in her eyes, the smile on her face …”
From
her next piece – “Maybe I’m lying about being okay … I don’t have to see the
pity behind your eyes … Ever since my mom passed … I’m not telling these
stories … Obviously I am not fine … Everyone keeps trying to make it better …
If you want someone happy I am probably not the person you are looking for … I
tried to write you a poem, but I don’t know your stories yet … I am the king,
only able to move one spot at a time … I have a tough body, but a fragile mind
… I just need a little help … That was how far I got in this poem before I
broke up … I will make sure you never hear it …She totally did hear it … Even
pens used to create words of hate can write beautiful poetry on the same page
…”
From
“A Letter to My Borderline – A Letter to Myself” – “That’s how we love
sometimes, we tend to do things backwards … I forgive you for all of the scars
… I am learning to love you … I am exhausted from existing …”
From
another piece – “ There is a girl who used to date a boy who used to date me …
forced him to break up with me … He started to believe that no one could find
him beautiful … My therapist told me it’s probably PTSD … This trauma does not
feel like my own … Nobody wants to hear about the queer beauty being toxic … I
am scared she will hurt my friends … devil’s horns under her backward baseball
cap … Queer people can still be toxic … I don’t care if we play for the same
team, we still have to follow the rules.”
From
another piece – “The first time we ever had sex with a cysgender man … for him
it was as if all the girls I’d had sex with didn’t count … It’s not like some
didn’t make me come … unlike him … He asked me if I was a virgin … ‘A virginity
… Look at what I took!’ …”
Kay
told us that if we buy the book we will find out how the poem “Sink Girl” got
its name.
“Sink
Girl Part 4” as her last poem – “We were sitting by the river admiring the
water … LSD fresh on tongue … I said, ‘listen, can’t you hear it in the night?’
… Do you remember when you taught me to feel the colours … I could hear the
colours. They sounded like your voice … I love with my eyes wide open … You
taught me that love isn’t urgent … You taught me that distance doesn’t mean
ending …”
Kay Kassirer has a lot
of important things to say, but to a great extent her urge to do so conflicts
with her aspirations of being a poet. Great lines like “kissing like we need
each others lips to breathe” and “the ability to create butterflies in my
stomach and clip their wings” get buried in what sounds like a lot of
uncreative talk, ranting and self-therapy. She should build poems around her
good lines because they have the potential to become good poems that way and
her a better poet.
Bänoo returned right away
to the open mic and the first poet she called was Jordan Chiang, who read from his phone – “Hydroxy alpha,
Sichuan peppercorns … Aint no fuckin
pagoda poems here … Are you disappointed by the failure of a culture … Watch it
waive the strategy of coolies … and you’re blathering the song … not Sichuanese.”
Next
we heard from Rose Perry, who read her poem, “Post Humanism, Maybe” –
“Processed parcases … Genetical switch … Ideologues who don’t know any better …
Family, friends, government, the normalcy bias … The new status quo projected
forward … A boogie man in every corner … You are the only atom in the universe
… You wear the mask of normalcy … The superb technician … metaphysical
obstructions … You were rendered null and void from the beginning … The truth
is no defense … A. I. is mapping your frequencies … The profane surrounds you,
sleepwalking your life into the netherland loaded with death and destruction …
Pure fantasy as promised by a reality shift into a higher state …”
I
was after Rose. As I walked to the front with my guitar, I overheard a woman
who’d been sitting front of me say to her friend, “He’s good! Have you …”
I decided for this
night, because of the number of people, to use the microphone when I sang my
poem, “Paranoiac Utopia” – “ … I tip-toe cross a nervous battlefield through a
crossfire of uptight cops and frazzled addicts. Each thinks I’m on the other
side and that there’s no such thing as not giving a shit … The paranoia is so
thick it can cut you with a knife, and even the pigeons are suspect as it looks
under discarded burger wrappers for spies and stifles thought to stop a psychic
phone-tap. A breeze is blowing the sunlight through the slow motion funnel of
the afternoon and Parkdale’s paranoia’s disappeared. Did a young boy’s shooting
briefly muffle its spastic song of fear? Whoever doesn’t share our hell must be
the devil, they believe. Each greeting is a curse and kind words are an even
greater evil. Queen Street West is slippery with ice in summer weather and
amidst all this blindness I feel I can see forever …” After trying that piece
several times at both the Tranzac open stage and Fat Albert’s over the last few
months and getting nothing, I finally got a very good reaction from the
audience at Shab-e She’r.
Cate Laurier read “Snakeskin” – “Running to not stand still with frozen fear … Escape
the labyrinth of the past … accusing me with glassy glares … The piercing pain
… like a hungry wolf seeking its prize … It doesn’t prevent my endless arrest …
Is it time then to just stop running from who I am … Be the snake shedding my
outworn skin … Do snakes cry when they shed their old lives?”
Then
we heard from Ross McFarlane, who told us that he was visiting from Scotland
and urged us to come and check out Glasgow’s amazing poetry scene. From his
poem –“ … Come sit on the steps, we’ll huddle up for warmth … This is our world
and it’s fucking mundane …”
Kath Jonathan read “A True History of Words” – “One day
continents went to work until every border was religion … Years passed … words
died out … then music bathed every tree … Drums traded arguments and hymns …
Sitars wept with accordions … Language of cults … Everyone except the dung
beetle … Poetry mapped its DNA.”
Sidney
White read “No More Nice Girl” – “Men in white lace and white slippers who
divide us into hookers and virgins … Men who slither through academia … How
dare you condescend to me … Fuck you shima!”
Eugene
Styles read – “ … Surround the invisible line of my imagination … Rhythm of
the … inner sanctum is the beauty scene
… Water the flower in your heart.”
Naomi
read – “Indigenous maze of concrete utterances where the residue hides with
elements of rapture in a pool of consciousness … The spells of time bleeding in
hymns consume the particles raining with tears, the prophet is vanishing under
a carpet of blue ether.”
Nick
Miceli came to the stage with a tongue drum, which he played with mallets while
reciting his story of “The Humming Bird and the Draft Horse” – “Hummingbird
hovers, so still and serene … harmonious laughter … Hummingbird offers the
finest of art … Horse keeps on plodding, staying close to the earth …
Hummingbird reaches horizons of joy … Horse keeps on plodding, constant and
true, looks up and sees the sun …”
Laura DeLeon read “From the Grave” – “ … Religion is self
taught … Now it is time to open your eyes to other states of consciousness …
The outermost framework of the innermost being.”
Then
Laura read “In the Sphere of Love” – “ … I was called into being … awaiting the
relentless tide …”
Dan
Jiang read a poem called “The Golden Arrows of Anatta’s Poems” but first
informed us that “Anatta” means “no self”– “Anatta, the archer and arrow … drip
heavenly delight … leave moments of awe and openness … for a moment or two.”
Matthew
Johnston read something that he wrote while sitting in the audience and
confessed that he had writer’s block until then – “The lake darkens and scoops
the sand away … I called you up from the water … We suckled sand … I tore my
lip on a shard … It fit my wound on a plaster …”
Our
last reader, Graham Sanders, is a professor of classical Chinese literature,
and he read a poem by Du Fu, first in Chinese and then in English. He assured
Jordon, who had read earlier, that there would not be a pagoda in sight in the
poem. – “Drops of jade dew wilt and wound … Billows and breakers turn up to the
sky … A lonely boat … a heart’s longing for home … Dusk quickens the washing
stone.
Bänoo, in closing,
mentioned the two reading series that ended their runs forever in June.
In my words, “Big
shot readings with big teams: dead”
In Bänoo’s words, “What
keeps a reading series alive is the audience.”
While
I was helping put the chairs away, Rose approached me and told me that my song
was hilarious. With concealed sarcasm I said, “Yes, it was meant to be
humorous.” Before I left, Sidney White also told me that my piece about
Parkdale was “fun”. I suppose they are both right, about parts of the poem.
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