Life in the Graveyard

            On Tuesday I edited one of the videos that Nick Cushing shot of me singing and playing my song “Love In Remission”. There’s a section when I stumble almost four minutes into the piece and then start again from just before the mistake. I cut out the error so there’s only a slightly audible pause in the song. The moving image at that point though looks a little more awkward. I don’t know if there’s any kind of effect that I can apply to make it look less glitchy. The only other problem with that take is that I’m not looking enough at the camera to engage the viewer. But though in the other takes I looked at the camera more, I tripped over the chords more often, so I might just go with the one I edited for now, for the sake of getting something up on YouTube for people to see and hear. 

On Tuesday evening I headed out for the Shab-e She’r reading series looking for a rainbow along the way because there had just been a rain shower and now the sun was shining. I didn’t find one but maybe I was facing in he wrong direction.

            On the way up Brock Avenue a grate that I ran over seemed to grate pretty hard, so when I got to the light at Dundas I reached back to check the back tire. It felt a little soft, so I decided to turn around, drive home and pump a bit of air into it. After about two blocks though I changed my mind because I figured that if there was no leak the wheel would last me till I got home that night and if there was a hole then pumping it up wouldn’t keep me from having to walk home later anyway.

            I’d brought along my guitar, wrapped up, in case of more rain, in two garbage bags inside my ragged gig bag. When I arrived at the St Stephen in the Fields Anglican Church on College Street my instrument was surprisingly still in tune.

            I sat in the front as usual and was quietly practicing the song that I planned to do that night when I was surprised to see Zak Jones come in. Zak had taken the yearlong Canadian Poetry course with me at U of T that had just finished at the beginning of April. He sat down beside me and asked how I’d done on the course and I was relieved to hear that it had turned out that we’d both gotten A-minuses on both the course and the final project. We’d both opted to submit a manuscript of poetry for the last paper rather than an essay. Zak concluded that our professor, George Elliot Clarke is just a very tough marker. I agreed and shared that Giovanna Riccio had told me that George had commented to her that if he gives a student an A-minus it’s worthy of being published.

            I recounted to Zak that I had expected to see George a week and a half before, as he was supposed to have been the toastmaster for the 40^th annual Haiku Canada Conference banquet at the U of T Mississauga campus, but he hadn’t shown up. Zak nodded knowingly and related how he’d had the same experience of George not making it to events that he’d been scheduled to attend. I conveyed that on the evening of May 20^th George had finally texted the host of the conference to tell her that he’d gotten lost on the way to the campus but added that he’d also misdirected himself on a previous occasion trying to get to the same place. I wondered if George Elliot Clarke just has a bad sense of direction. Zak concurred that’s probably the case, since he’s often heard George confess to explaining lateness with disorientation. I offered that he certainly gets lost during his lectures but that it was such a fun ride that it didn’t matter. Zak felt the same way. I declared that I would definitely take another course with George if it fit with my degree and, remembering that Zack had taken one of George’s other courses but I’d never known what it was. He clarified that it had been African American Epic Poetry and that George’s lectures for that class were much less distracted than they had been for Canadian Poetry.

            I’d heard Zak announce at the beginning of spring that he’d been one of just seven students admitted into next year’s Creative Writing Masters program. I inquired about that and he replied that it’s a two-year program but that he plans on continuing on after that for a PHD.

            I disclosed that I had wanted to take Albert Moritz’s Creative Writing third year course next semester but had been disappointed to learn that it wasn’t being offered for the upcoming term. Zak informed me that Albert was going on sabbatical next year. He let me know that although he had already taken Albert’s course, he has sometimes found it useful to go back and sit in on it again.

            Zak pulled out a pack of cigarettes and confessed that he was going out for a smoke. Shortly after that Allan Briesmaster, one of the features for that evening arrived with his wife Holly. I have known them both since the early 90s when Allan was the host of the Art Bar Reading Series. Allan is a chronically nice guy but it’s hard not to like him anyway. We shook hands and chatted briefly about writing before he continued making the rounds to converse with the many others he knew there.

            Zak returned after quite a bit longer than the length of a smoke break and admitted that he’d gone for a burrito.

            At around 19:00 one of the volunteers stepped up to the mic and read an acknowledgment that this event was being held on Native land and that we eat out of the “dish with one spoon”. The dish with one spoon is a treaty between the Anishnaabe, the Misissaugas and the Haudenosaunee to share and protect the dish that is composed of the territory of Southern Ontario from the Great Lakes to Quebec and from Lake Simcoe to the United States. Others, including European newcomers have been invited into this treaty. She spoke of the name of Toronto being derived from the Iroquois and Mohawk name “Tkaronto”, meaning, “Place where trees stand in the water”. That’s certainly one of the strong possibilities for the meaning of the name, but in the Huron language “Toronto” means “plenty” and the Huron also lived in this area before moving further north. Even if the name comes from “Tkaronto” it would not have originally referred to the actual location that is now the city of Toronto, but to the channel between Lake Simcoe and Lake Couchiching, close to the city of Orillia, which is 100 kilometres away from Toronto.

            At around 19:11 Bänoo took to the stage and announced that Shab-e She’r has now had more than 100 featured poets. She said that there would be three photographers chronicling the event this time around, including former regular volunteer, Janine, who was visiting from her new home in Iowa. Bänoo asked that no one else take any photographs of the audience.

            The first poet on the open stage was Jeannine Pitas, who read an English translation and the original Spanish of a poem by Pablo Galante – “I have waited for the train that will take me back to myself, but it hasn’t come. I guess I will just have to keep walking …”

            Next came Bunny Iskov, who before the event started had handed to everyone an extremely wordy and rule-ridden flyer that promoted something called “The Golden Grassroots Chapbook Award”. The entry fee is $15 and the prize is $50 plus fifty free 24-page chapbooks. If one page costs ten cents to copy and since two chapbook pages would technically be one horizontal page that works out, as far as I can tell, to a prize with the value of about $110 or $150 tops. Compared to most literary contests the prize in this one seems pretty chintzy in relation to the entry fee. $500 is the usual. But Bunny did bring cookies, coffee and tea for everyone, so that was nice.

            From Bunny’s poem – “ … A sensible vocabulary concealed in a broken drawer … The mustiness of the used bookstore … pretending someday somebody may uncover a truth.”

            Bänoo announced that Bunny would be one of the featured poets next month.

            After Bunny we heard from Jeff Cottrell, who read a new piece called “Empowerment” – “Help … I’m trapped … Hello … I’m sorry, I can’t hear you … Help, I’m trapped under this rock … You know my friend, life is full of diversity … Just get this rock off me … I’m asking you to help me … Sometimes the only way we can make progress is to help ourselves … Get this fucking rock off me … I ask myself … what did I do to bring this little calamity … Get this rock off me … What good would that do … Only you are responsible … Don’t you feel empowered now? I’m glad we had this talk … Don’t forget what Marilyn said: If you can’t handle me at my worst you don’t deserve me at my best …”

            Bänoo reminded us that Shab-e She’r is the most diverse poetry reading in Toronto. She also declared that the answer to a poem is another poem.

            Then we heard from Yecid Ortega, who read us a poem entitled “Asphalt Beggars” that was inspired by two homeless people – “They leave our coins … Today they leave love poems … I am white, I have privilege … I own this bus stop, it is my shelter … Your mental health lies in the connections you make … Two plastic bags: one with scraps of food from the local restaurant … You and I my friend, we are not other.”

            After Yecid was John Portelli, whose poem, “Walls” began with a quote from Sara Ahmed - “Equality is not a credential. Equality is a task”. From the poem – “Concrete walls, stone walls, brick walls … Walls of prayer … Walls to keep Mexicans out … Walls to put Mexicans out/ Walls to put Muslims out … Wall of bitterness/ Cold glass … Take shelter in the shade of the wall of life.”

            Succeeding John was Justin Lauzon, who offered the observation that this night’s audience was the biggest in the last three months. From his poem – “I often wade in the still pools … curated by the choices of my late read books … It is only from the centre, further in … at the end of things the water stands … Electricity on a rapists tongue … erect among that pressure … so in the wake of it I may have to alter the language … Every wave converges …”

            Bänoo then began introducing our first feature: Allan Briesmaster, which included mentioning that several books that Allan has edited have won national awards.

            Throughout Allan’s set the microphone or perhaps one of the speakers was malfunctioning, which resulted in a distortion of his voice, but not so much to not be able to hear his poetry.

            Allan’s first poem was entitled “Free Flight” – Thanks to your star, in moments when logic itself seems mirage … The dark in your light lifts like fog.”

            From “Grandparents” – “Much about cranky grampy … or twice his girth, gentle grammy … Quite childlike … Strained my mom’s patience … He fixed anything … She cooked roasts/ Beans and carrots were tended in back … She laundered, crocheted and sewed … Groucho would make him laugh … He was palace guard for the czarina … Disinherited too … Began as a maid to a rich Jewish lady … In her big flower dress grammy always gave me the best hugs.”

            From his love poem, “Partner” – “This life tears on through progress and decay … It seems un-Frankenstein … love under antique dawn … Without … my spirit would be … Timely consummation … charge me with a use for troubled age.”

            In response to our clapping, Allan told us, “You can hold your applause, but if you can’t contain it …”

            From “Ask”, which he called an “ecologically anxious poem” – “ … Then who can sight the shadows on the wind … sense the pain of dawn … call up the grief … Ask dying fish what difference fire and mud … Ask through the unlit chambers down your brain.”

            Allan shared that he lives close to a historic cemetery in Thornhill. There is a tavern where William Lyon McKenzie conspired rebellion.
            From “In Thornhill Cemetery: Part 1” – “In the faux colours the high sun is wrought … How far I’ve missed my mark … Shake off the guess and lie of streaming news … yellow swallowtail … Lawns where the dead reside give off no whiff today of herbicide …

            From Part 2 – “Catherine Hall lived on past the rebellion and confederation … Can any rebel hopes grow … Zombies puppeted by death … What’s the post-mortem report … That scarlet tanager there, may they outlast these graves … Unseat the sick regime.”

            From “An Outdoor Vigil” – “ … Half-consciously breathe deeper …See the tree branches as rungs on an ascent … Spot the resting place …What is plain wrong with the exhausted air?”

            From “Dependence”, which Allan referred to as an “anti-self-help poem” –“ … Drag … deflate all outward perspective … No way you can trust yourself now … The hand that hold you up cannot be only your own.”

            In introducing the theme of his last two poems, Allan declared, “music has the ability to dissolve the barriers between us”.

            From “In the Spirit of the Blues” – “Blue, white or no collars … An ancient, long river … from scalps to toes … misery’s forestalled … Pill popping, chain smoking … excess of sex … from which nothing sounds out more deep … Kicked like a low-down stray dog … However the snub or the trip comes, the blues is a life-lifter.”

            Allan told us that Joe Henderson is one of his musical heroes. He also offered the view that small jazz groups are a paradoxical fusion of individual and community.

            Allan’s final poem was called “Joe Henderson Quartet” – “From the dark solar month … pistons … thunder … Out-walk all bars … One hand grabs the ground, another hammers embers into stars.”

            Allan Briesmaster is often a fine craftsman of poetry, with a gentle and quiet touch on his subjects but lifting them high nonetheless with a leverage applied to strong adjectives.

            As usual, after the first feature we had a fifteen-minute break.

            Having been supporting my guitar on my knee, I now rose to delicately prop it up in my empty seat so I could make a trip to the washroom. The first two were occupied and so I moved on to the two gender-neutral loos in the back beside the gym, which had a line-up. A few places behind me arrived Holly Briesmaster and we briefly exchanged pleasantries before my turn to flush arrived.

            When I got back to my seat I asked Zack if he was planning on going back to visit North Carolina during the summer. He told me that he would be going down to Florida to help his mother move to Virginia. He shared that though she and her husband have yet to find the final home they plan to live in there, she’s already hired the movers.

            Zack went out for another cigarette and then Holly came up to chat with me. She inquired if I was planning something for the open mic and added, “Dare I ask?” I think that she has the impression that I set about to shock people when I step onto a stage. I do try to surprise myself as I think that every artist should, but it’s never my intention to electrocute anybody.

She also wanted to know how my friend Cad was, who she’s also known a long time. I gave her the sad news that he has gotten outspokenly conservative and that he really loves Donald Trump. She gasped with surprise, “Really?” She expressed despair at what a horrible turn of events Trump’s presidency had been, but then suddenly declared with optimism that she didn’t think he would be serving a full term. Then she suddenly asked me cautiously, “You don’t like Trump too do you?” I assured her I didn’t and she was relieved to hear that. Then she offered the wish that Cad would soon get over his obsession with Trump.

             As usual after the break Bänoo threw a sacrificial open stager onto the audience’s conversation-dulled attention in order to re-sharpen it in preparation for the second feature. This time her victim was Khashayar Mohammadi, who read his poem, “Influence” – “I slept yet another morning through the crack of dawn … Slept through every sunrise …No meadows, no junkyard … Thick skin that doesn’t crack under sickles or snow … Sun stricken effigy … Mother nature flung in her sinuous arms … against a crimson backdrop of painted lips … deconstructed man … Mosaic reflections of neon … beauty … evening slowness … Every telephone wire nest … The big pillow casts a shadow of you …”

            There was a lot of good imagery in that poem.

            Bänoo introduced the second and final feature, Catherine Hernandez.

            Katherine stood back from the mic, I think with the intention of both projecting to the room and getting amplified electronically. I could hear her in front but I suspect that people in the back might have had to strain a bit.

            I was disappointed when she announced that she’d chosen her first piece “because this is a church”. I don’t think that poets should be distracted by the location in which they read at all. By all means let writing be inspired by where you are but don’t let place be an editor.

            From “I Cannot Lie to the Stars that Made Me” – She began by singing the third verse of “Be Not Afraid” the Catholic communion hymn “Blessed are your poor for the kingdom shall be theirs / Blest are you that weep and mourn, for one day you shall laugh / and if wicked men insult and hate you all because of me, blessed are you and hail you”

            Catherine began – “That last line … No two for one coupon, just a blessing … The church program, I used it to cover my face as I wept … My kid and I ran … I was so scared to speak the wrong way … I whispered the song to myself … I felt spirit rise inside of me … I started singing louder and louder … Be not afraid … Sang songs I didn’t know … Rest, for there will be lots of work to do in the morning.”

            For the rest of her set Katherine read section of her new novel, Scarborough. She first asked if anyone was there from the east end and when one person raised their hand she exclaimed, “Thank god!” She suggested that most people dislike Scarborough for racial reasons. In my experience people dislike the place because it’s a desolate, sterile, plague of apartment high-rises and malls. It’s not nicknamed “Scarberia” because of its ethnic mix but because it feels empty.

            She began with a chapter written from the point of view of Edna, a Filipino immigrant who works as an aesthetician. Katherine even put on a Filipino accent for this part – “The day started … Good morning officer … He nodded … You ready for me? His face winced at the smell of bleach … The lotion splattered across my thighs … He’s smirking at me …  His smirk grows bigger … Today he had asked for a back wax … He flopped his body face down … I slapped my latex glove into place … He moaned … I would enjoy his pain too much … I did not stop … Are you crying? No.”

            Catherine told us that the above situation really did happen except that it was a fireman instead of a policeman but that she did make him cry.

            She dedicated the next excerpt to the four-year-old girl that she’d mentored at a community centre when she was fifteen. She taught her how to do basic things like brushing her hair and her teeth. The child was in the care of a grandmother that didn’t want her and Katherine had actually seen the grandmother running ahead of her in the subway in an effort to lose her.

            The section is from the point of view of Michelle, who works in the shelter – “They come when they are young … They come with their plastic bags and their dollar store purses … They come with babies … They come with children looking like different daddies …”

            The final part that Catherine read was set in the 90s when there had been a rise in skinhead hate crimes – “Laura quietly made her way into the school … Laura looked around at all the drawings on the walls.

            Hi Laura! How are you today? Laura shrugged. Can I see the inside of your lunch bag? It was empty. We have muffins. Do you want one?

            Daddy says you eat babies. Laura pointed to Melina’s hijab. Why do you wear it?

            Because it reminds me of who I am …”

            Catherine Hernandez’s opening piece was somewhat slamulaic. Of her novel, while the subject matter is both interesting and important and her dialogue has a natural flow, her prose is ordinary at best.

            As usual, there was no break between the final feature and second half of the open stage. We began with David Clink, whose poem was entitled “The Red Barn” – “Pickers fined … Amongst the shadowed ghosts of pulling horses … The bell that hung on the porches signalled a returning.”

            Next we heard from Theresa Hall, who read two poems. The first was called “The Message” – “I am just a messenger … listening to the wind … shot through the stars … We hold the key … There is only one Earth, but enough for each and every one of us.”

            From “The River” -  “Only the Natives know the way to the sacred ground … The chanting of the women … The deep connection …”

            Then Bänoo called me to the stage. I began by saying that a couple that had been friends of a friend of mine had a gap of 40 years between them. I admitted that maybe it had been true love but that it seemed off to me that after her husband died, the picture of him that she’d posted on Facebook had been taken after he’d died. Then I sang my translation of Serge Gainbourg’s “Jeunes Femmes et Vieux Messieurs” – “ … When she finally tells you that she loves you, be careful of your pacemaker if she lives higher than floor number two and there’s a broken elevator. Young women and older men, at his age it’s really not that important … but he’ll make it up in a day or ten.”

            After I was finished, Bänoo introduced Henry Knight, adding that he had also brought cookies. A woman behind me called out, “Home made and delicious!”

            Henry informed us that he’d written the poem he would be reading us thirty-one years ago – “This for sake of sorrow I will burn my lips away and swim translucent … I will watch my lover’s face blotch with cloud … I will draw him back again … This for sorrow I will do.”

            Following Henry was Alexandra Seay, who chose to eschew the mic because she’d found it more difficult to hear anyone that night that had used it.

            From “Because I Am A Girl” – “Women know the smell of blood: bitter-sweet iron … If we bled rainbows would we be proud … You can taste the smell of blood … When we bleed you run / When you make us bleed you laugh … We learn to be stainless … We will trash the messy resolution … We live with them in shades of red.”

            Before reading her second poem, Alexandra said, “And then I got really angry”.

            From “Cunt 2.0” – “Firebrand and phoenix … Just another angry bitch to you … ever rising … She remembers you … Because I am a girl I have a cunt … It knows me like you never will … She will remain ever rising … always your terror threat …”

            When Bänoo called Zak Jones to the stage he also did not want to use the mic. After seven months of hearing Zak critique poetry I finally had a chance to listen to a sample of his work. The piece he read was called “Tidal Waves Surmounting” – “The moonlight bearing down above me … I see milk on the water … powder and pontificating sand … I see the warning of water … I see the closeness of cowardess … the mundane murder … the coming of water … the timing … The Earth under water.”

            Behind Zak was Lucile Barker, who dedicated her “Monologue Rant from an Angry Goose” to mayor John Tory – “I don’t want to be on dry land or water … rising … I might as well be a damned cormorant … More competition … Retreating to safer trees … The sun reflects wrongly now … The only happy wings are those of mosquitoes breeding in shallow ponds.”

            Sydney White read “Reporter at the Happy Hour” – “Children and war … beaten and abused … I could have got the hell out but a story is a story … Nothing now could make me cry except a kind word.”

            K. D. Miller shared “Girl in the Morning” – “Thirteen, awake and out of the door … A morning fog she takes as her own … She is too grand on the ground … Those last minutes before seeing that girl on her horse … First the clop of hoof on stone, finally the girl … Do I understand even now why I bow to that girl … Take me with you.”

            Anne Hofland’s offering was “Grandfather Pine” – “The oldest tree on the lake … Dignified but not perfect … Progeny gathered at your feet … I sit today upon your roots … I tilt my head … up to the splayed branches … The grandfather I never knew … Choose a pine cone, take it back to the city.”

            Norman Allan repeated last month’s reading of “When Lucky Met Chase” – “ … She let me believe …I saw all my life as a tempering for my butterfly heart … Walking my dogs … They hunt mice … enjoying the little things right …”

            William Hunt also announced that he would be rejecting the microphone, but he did so in such a quiet voice that he was told by someone behind me to speak up. He did so and everyone could hear him then. From his poem – “The decade passed … Nuance floated across the sympathetic sky … The weight of the world is love (I stole that) … Standing outside in monetary masks … Tall and broke … Pass me that bottle and shut up … I step out of horror … No force allows pure form to pass through unnoticed … Trembling seashells … Punch out horror … Hermetic dribble …”

            The final open stage performer of the night was Valérie Kaelin, whose poem was inspired by Shannon Downey’s cross stitching of the protest sign “I’m so angry I stitched this just so I could stab something 3,000 times”. From “Needle Women” – “ … With my triangular blade … The pocked helmet on my middle finger taking the blows … She would have chewed a wad of cotton thread … I lashed thirteen stars upon a blue sky … I faggoted the hymen sacrificial bed and the christening gown for your cannon fodder.”

            Bänoo returned to the stage to thank us for listening and to confess, “It’s a virtue I do not have.”

            She left us with a final warning: “If you don’t read it your poem it will come back to haunt you!”

            As I was packing up my guitar, Jeannine told me that my song had been fun. I did hear her laughing at one of the lines. One other person told me they’d enjoyed my song as well, saying that listening to just poetry is very hard on the attention span, so it’s nice to hear music as well. As I was on my way out, Bänoo was near the church exit saying goodbye to people and it reminded me of the minister in the country church that I’d attended as a child reverse greeting people on their way out, except that in her case there was less hand shaking and more hugging. As I stood waiting to say goodnight to Bänoo, Norman Allan was chatting with her, and I don’t know what the context was but he suddenly reported to her, “Christian’s song, including his intro, was spot on three minutes!” Though when I bring text to the open mic I do try to make sure that it fits under the three-minute time limit, I had not timed myself beforehand on this occasion since I’d brought a song, and it’s hard to edit something as organic as a song. It would be like cutting off parts of your dog so it could fit the weight requirements of an airplane. It was an interesting coincidence that my set had fit exactly into three minutes, but what really surprised me was that Norman had bothered to time me. I wondered if he had checked his watch for everyone or just the pretentious asshole with the guitar.

            Bänoo gave me a hug and said she would probably be able to make it to my show at the Smiling Buddha that Saturday.

            As I was unlocking my bike, Allan and Holly Briesmaster were passing by and Allen told me that he’d enjoyed my song. Holly had told me earlier that they wouldn’t be able to come to my guest spot at Linda Stitt’s salon because they would be going up to Owen Sound on Saturday. We said goodnight.

            The open stage at this particular instalment of Shab-e She’r was one of the better ones, with a lot of image-rich poetry.