Distorted Mirror

            I’d thought that after successfully applying for OSAP and the Noah Meltz grant that I’d be free to write and study for the rest of the term. But on Thursday I got an email from OSAP asking for documents. They wanted my 2017 tax information and so I uploaded to the site a pdf of my 2017 income tax form. In retrospect I think they wanted a pdf of my official notice from Canada Revenue, but they also wanted me to sign and upload a consent form allowing them to look into my tax records, so it seems redundant that they would need me to upload them if they can just look at them anyway.

            I downloaded a pdf of the form but still needed to use a password just to open and print it. I only printed the fourth page, which contained the declaration and the place for me to sign. After signing that page I took a photo of it and uploaded the photo to my computer so I could convert it into a pdf with ABBYY Fine Reader. But when I was about to upload the pdf to OSAP, I noticed that the instructions are to make a pdf of all four pages of the form, even though there’s nothing for me to fill out on the first three pages. So I had to use the password again to open the pdf and print the first three pages. I photographed the three pages, uploaded them and then converted those into pdfs. I highlighted all four pages and converted them to one pdf, which I uploaded to OSAP.

            The other document they wanted were my school transcripts, so I had to order them from U of T and charge the $12 fee to my student account. I didn’t see an option for receiving my transcripts online and so I’ll have to pick them up on Monday and rather than take them home, photograph them, convert the photos to pdfs and upload them, hopefully I’ll be able to simply deliver them to the Admissions office.

            I updated my journal during the day and in the late afternoon I started getting ready for my Poetry Master Class. I printed five copies each of “Wave in the Air”, “One-Handed Rolly Haibun”, “Tailor-made Chain Haibun" and “Raja".

            I put freshly charged batteries in my front flasher and taped it back onto the broken bracket on my handlebar.

            It had been raining quite a bit though it had stopped by the time I’d headed out. The downpour had considerably diminished the amount of dirt slurpee that I had to drive through.

            I was the first one there and the Spanish-speaking group was still in the room. They seem to be all fluent in Spanish so I don’t know if it’s an actual class or just a conversation group.

            I did some writing in my notebook.

            Margaryta arrived and did not greet me or look me in the eyes. She just looked down the hall towards our room and asked if it was occupied.

            When the room cleared of the attractive Latin women we went in. When Blythe came she said hi to me.

            Albert came in and started the class a little after 18:15. He said that Arin and Nicole were both at Hart House doing a play and Alyson wasn’t there yet, though he said she might not make it because she has to drive in from Niagara. There were only nine of us and my group was the only one that had its full membership.

            Vivian, Blythe, Margaryta and I stayed in the classroom while the group with two students went to Albert’s office and the one with three students went to another classroom. For the first time Albert stayed with us for the first round of poems.

            We started with Margaryta’s poem, which I think was called “Claudine”. I’d had the impression that this was about people in an audience for a can-can performance buying tickets to die, because she’d talked about them waiting to go through the portal. But it turned out that they were all waiting to be born and the can-can dancer was giving birth. She often uses references that I don’t get, as she mentioned “Courbet’s portal. I hadn’t realized that Gustave Courbet had made a famous painting of a woman’s body with the vagina prominent called “L’Origine du Monde” (The Origin of the World).

            Margaryta had also mentioned in small case “the age of the woman” and I’d thought she was talking about the number of years the particular can-can dancer had been alive, but she’d meant the Age of the Woman as a historical age. I wondered if the Age of the Woman would be The Femicine Period.

            We looked at a very teen oriented and somewhat comical poem by Blythe that she said she’d named “Fred”. I told her that it reminded me of a parody of Gidget but of course none of the young women in my group got the reference.

            We looked at my poem, “Makeup Mirror”:

My mind is not a blank.

It’s a world-class junkyard,

and sometimes I’ve got to pull rank

to not soil my hands on it’s deck of discards

by sifting through the debris

for treasures that I know are there yes

because people don’t like what they see

when your nails are all dirty

from clutching awareness.

My heart is a silver ball

rolling on the glass roof

of a sea-nymph game

in an arcade hall.

of the traps and the buzzers I’m somehow aloof,

but the mermaids’ little tails

are constantly helping me roll

up and back down that tedious hill

it seems totally out of my control.

Then sometimes they hold me fixed

long enough to apply

adjustments of makeup and lipstick

in reflections distorted by my rounded sides.

            There were issues of punctuation.

            Some people didn’t get why I used “your” in line eight. I explained that “ … people don’t like what they see / when your nails are all dirty / from clutching awareness” is using the plural “you” in a conversational tone as in “I did such and such but people don’t like it when you do that”. Albert thought that “your” was fine because saying “one’s nails” would sound too prissy for this poem.

            Blythe thought that “from clutching awareness” should be “from clutching awareness too tightly” but I pointed out that “clutching” is already a tight form of holding and Albert agreed with me.

            Albert thought that the line “of the traps and the buzzers I’m somehow aloof” seems tortured for a rhyme with “roof” and I agreed.

            A couple of people mentioned that they found “the mermaids’ little tails” awkward and confusing. Their tails are meant to be flippers in a pinball game and so maybe I should say “flipper tails”.

            There was a lot of discussion about the last four lines: “Then sometimes they hold me fixed / long enough to apply / adjustments of makeup and lipstick / in reflections distorted by my rounded sides.” It was not clear whether the mermaids were applying make-up to themselves or to me. I said that they are doing it in the distorted mirror of my heart, which is the silver ball. But Albert said the silver ball is too many lines away for that to be obvious and so maybe I should bring it back at the end and maybe I should use “their make-up and lipstick”.

            Albert said, “It’s a puzzle, but I know you’ll work it out.”

            I found this bit of workshopping very helpful and I see now I have to tackle this poem again. Albert’s comments are always more productive than those of the members of my group.

            Vivian’s poem was called “Meditation” and she said that she’d rushed it to have a poem to present. Albert joked that it might not be a good idea to desperately rush a poem that’s supposed to be about peace.

            Albert left to sit with one of the other groups and we went around the circle with our second poems.

            Margaryta had written a poem about someone that she used to follow on Instagram who had gotten pregnant and chronicled the birth and early raising of a daughter that she’d named “Summer Honey Rose”.

           

            Of my poem “The Long Warm Thread Between Us”:

I feel the tug

of the long warm thread between us

Interesting things materialize

Firemen lift up a man from his knees

I don’t ask for much

Just a slow-healing touch

That streetcar. I want to be on it

though I don’t know where it’s off to

There are lots of discarded parts

to Frankenstein’s monster in the cause of art

Abundance is lush

It’s just too much

The ego is a person too

though there’s so much pimpin it do.

            I had neglected to mention when I’d handed it out that this is a ghazal. When I let everyone know before we spoke of it, Margaryta crossed out all of her comments. The couplets of a ghazal are not supposed to be conceptually coherent with one another and so since they hadn’t been told it was a ghazal, a lot of the comments just critiqued the lack of coherence.

            Vivian liked the title but she didn’t get the last couplet: “The ego is a person too /

though there’s so much pimpin it do” and neither did Blythe. I explained that the ego may be opportunistic but it is still human.

            Of my poem “Princesses Hear a Pea”:

A young couple gave me the evil eye

as I was unlocking my building door

They were turning their tumblers two numbers up

to their place above the Japanese restaurant

They whispered to each other and looked down at me again

I was pretty sure my penis wasn’t hanging out

through all of my layers of winter armour

so I didn’t know what had agitated the gentry.

The next morning I was rehearsing songs

when a tall, young man in a baseball cap

came underneath my window and waved at me

With a “come here” gesture he motioned me forward

and announced he was my neighbour in the building next door

At that moment I recognized him as the salty half

from the night before when I was coming home

of the snooty looking pair that had looked at me funny

He said every morning I sing too loud

waking him and her up at six o’clock

I’d been worried I wasn't singing loud enough

I was gratified to hear my voice penetrates

He requested that I sing at eight or nine instead

so he obviously thought I must be unemployed

He asked if I could sing in another room.

Or if I could sing my songs at a lower volume

I’ve been singing each morning for twenty years

and he’s the first person who’s ever complained

No one in my own building can even hear me

let alone across two brick walls and a stairwell

The longevity of my daily songs

makes them part of the culture of my neighbourhood

When I come in to a community

I don't gentrify the behaviour of my neighbours

They come into Toronto from some middle class suburb

And then they take a place facing an ambulance route

in a neighbourhood where the poor are shouting

neath their window all night long in joy and agony

and then they try to control their neighbour’s singing.

Don’t clear-cut the culture of Parkdale

Though you are very welcome to add to it

You can layer yours on top of mine

Until we build a mountain in Parkdale

            Margaryta seemed to identify with the young couple and thought that I was condescending in these lines “I was pretty sure my penis wasn’t hanging out

through all of my layers of winter armour / so I didn’t know what had agitated the gentry” and in these  “I’d been worried I wasn't singing loud enough / I was gratified to hear my voice penetrates”.

            Of the final stanza: “Don’t clear-cut the culture of Parkdale / Though you are very welcome to add to it / You can layer yours on top of mine / Until we build a mountain in Parkdale” Blythe asked “a mountain of what?” I’d thought it was obvious that I was talking about a mountain of culture.

            I never seem to learn much about how to improve my poems from the members of my group. I get the most from Albert’s spoken or written comments.

            I stopped at Freshco on the way home where I bought two half pints of blackberries from Mexico. There were two brands of red seedless grapes mixed together under the same code. The ones from Latin America were all too soft but the ones from South Africa were firm, so I had to sort through most of the bags to find those. I got a loaf of Bavarian bread and some Greek yogourt.

            I had already boiled a potato before leaving for class and so I just had to reheat it and warm up some gravy and a chicken leg for dinner.

            I watched the second episode of the new season of “Star Trek Discovery”.

            Spoiler alert!

            This whole season involves the Discovery following the sources of several mysterious red bursts throughout the galaxy. They have to return to using the forbidden spore drive in order to not spend hundreds of years getting to a burst. In this story they find a human colony that should not logically be at the far end of the galaxy since the populace are from the World War 3 period of the Earth, which is before humans had warp technology. Pike, Burnham and another crewmember beam down and disguise themselves so as not to go against the prime directive: they are not supposed to reveal advanced technology to less developed cultures. They tell the colonists that they are from the north. They learn that this colony was taken by an angel to this planet 200 years before. They had originally had electricity but lost the understanding of how to use it. One colonist who is descended from scientists suspects that these people are from modern Earth and that Earth was not destroyed as they’d believed. He begs them to reveal the truth but they pretend he is wrong about them.

            Meanwhile on Discovery it is learned that the ring of the colonist planet are about to cause a devastating winter that will wipe all life out. Tilly figures out how to use the anti-matter asteroid that they captured previously as a tractor to pull the fragments that compose the ring away from the planet.

            The colonists see the Discovery away team turn to light and disappear on the church altar as they teleport back to Discovery.

            Pike returns alone to slightly break the prime directive. He reveals to Jacob that he was right about them and offers him a powerful storage battery that will give them back their electricity in exchange for a helmet cam that had belonged to one of the original colonists that came from earth.

            Pike reviews the footage from the cam and sees the destruction on Earth and the presence of the shadowy figure of an angel similar to the one that Burnham had seen on the asteroid in the first episode of this season.

            These angels seem to be inspired by Arthur C Clarke’s Overlords in his novel Childhood’s End.