Marilyn and Philomena

            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 29^th.

            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.”