Description: The Poetry Extension brings together poets from around the world, one face-melting gig at a time.
This edition of The Poetry Extension celebrates Black History Month and welcomes the following poets: Ifra Hussein, Jericho Brown, Lorna Goodison, Paulina O’ Kieffe and Rabbit Richards, along with host Natalya Anderson.
Description: #TwitterPoetryClub meets on Twitter, on alternating Monday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. EST. Their formula is pretty simple: members share beloved or interesting poems by posting the poet’s name, hashtagging “TwitterPoetryClub” and including an image of the poem and/or a link to the full text. Once a poem is posted, everyone is free to discuss the work, retweet, and share more poems. Members can also subscribe to meeting minutes, which include links to the books where shared poems can be found, at tinyletter.com/twitterpoetryclub.
Description: In fact, every day is #todayspoem day. With the #todayspoem hashtag, you can share an excerpt from any poem that happens to have made your day. Everyone shares their #todayspoem experience a little differently, with an image, a link, an excerpt, whatever fits in a tweet. Each tweet is enough to spur a moment of delight or recognition or, handily favorited in Twitter, is a lovely bookmark for future poetry explorations.
Description: In fact, every day is #todayspoem day. With the #todayspoem hashtag, you can share an excerpt from any poem that happens to have made your day. Everyone shares their #todayspoem experience a little differently, with an image, a link, an excerpt, whatever fits in a tweet. Each tweet is enough to spur a moment of delight or recognition or, handily favorited in Twitter, is a lovely bookmark for future poetry explorations.
Description: In fact, every day is #todayspoem day. With the #todayspoem hashtag, you can share an excerpt from any poem that happens to have made your day. Everyone shares their #todayspoem experience a little differently, with an image, a link, an excerpt, whatever fits in a tweet. Each tweet is enough to spur a moment of delight or recognition or, handily favorited in Twitter, is a lovely bookmark for future poetry explorations.
Title: The Banff Centre Writing Studio application deadline – extended
Date: February 7, 2018
Location: Banff, Alberta, Canada Description: An ideal environment for artistic inspiration and growth, Writing Studio is structured to provide an extended period of uninterrupted writing time, one-on-one editorial assistance from experienced writers/editors, and an opportunity to engage with a community of working writers. Faculty for this session, which runs April 30 to June 2, 2018 includes Karen Solie, David O’Meara, Hoa Nguyen, Shyam Selvadurai and Kathy Page.
You do not cry because you cannot. I will not cry because you do not.
You give my hands the weight of your body.
Rest in me.
What I mean is this is where I choose to die.
Notes on the Poem
Throughout her 2017 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlisted collection Silvija, Sandra Ridley demonstrates an acute sense of where her words need to be positioned on the page. "In Praise of the Healer" displays notable attention to space on the page with, we believe, attendant impact on how we read and absorb the poem's content.
As the 2017 Griffin Poetry Prize judges observed in their citation for the poems gathered in Silvija, "Words are given the space they need to root and branch." We noted this previously in the horizontal spacing of the words in "Farther / Father", where we discovered that the space on the page translated to space - pauses, silences - in terms of how Ridley read the poem aloud.
Beyond individual words, the configuration of "In the Praise of the Healer" gives entire lines - phrases and sentences - dramatic vertical spacing. The first line mysteriously offers a location, the possessive "our" suggests inhabitants in the setting, but the space that follows sets no context, reveals nothing further, demands that we wait. The spare textual diptych of the second line is made more poignant by the emptiness around it. The space that follows gives us time to determine who "you" and "I" might be.
The relatively tightened spacing of the remaining lines connote urgency, perhaps grim resolution to get something over with, perhaps frightened determination to arrive at that final declaration.
We've examined the effects of word and line spacing in poems such as Robin Blaser's "Suddenly," and an excerpt from "Rising, Falling, Hovering" by C.D. Wright. Ridley has achieved the same memorable power as those examples, with considerably fewer words and lines that, while brief, are still stunning.
I love you as I love the Hatchetfish,
the Allmouth, the Angler,
the Sawbelly and Wolf-eel,
the Stoplight Loosejaw, the Fangtooth;
all our sweet bathypelagic ones,
and especially those too terrible or sly
even for Latin names; who staple
their menfolk to the vagina’s hide
like scorched purses, stiff with seed;
whom God built to trawl
endless cathedrals of darkness,
their bland eyes gaping like sores;
who would choke down hunger itself,
had it pith and gristle enough;
who carry on their foreheads
the trembling light of the world.
Notes on the Poem
Isn't it amazing what you can learn from a poem? John Glenday educates while he astonishes in his poem "The Ugly", from his 2010 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlisted collection Grain.
You can't help but be drawn in right away by the opening line
"I love you as I love ..."
which seems a curious way to open a poem entitled "The Ugly", a title which rather sets different expectations than a tribute to any kind of love.
Immediately, you are disabused of any doubts about the title. If it sparks your curiosity, you'll probably start googling (but you're advised not to, or not to click on these links if you're at all faint of heart) hatchetfish, allmouth, angler, sawbelly, wolf-eel, stoplight loosejaw and fangtooth. Oh yes, it would be fair to say this lot, if not ugly, are inarguably unforgettable once viewed. Yes indeed, we've learned a lot.
What we've also learned, either by looking up and poring over the descriptions of all of these fish or by next turning to a dictionary to find a definition for "bathypelagic", is that the term describes fish and other organisms that inhabit the deep sea, where the environment is dark and cold, approximately 3,300–9,800 feet (1,000–3,000 m) below the surface. These creatures lurk in the murkiest regions, surviving and enduring and, amidst these lonely surroundings, finding like bathypelagic company. Did you notice that Glenday labels them "sweet" ...?
In our reading, we've also learned that hatchetfishes "leap from the water and fly through the air, flapping their large pectoral fins, to catch flying insects". Well, wouldn't they have to travel from the deep, dark depths to the surface to do that? And what is the poem's closing lines telling us?
"who carry on their foreheads
the trembling light of the world."
That these creatures can strive to seek and find light, to emerge from the darkness, must be Glenday's unusual but powerful depiction of the tenacity and ferocity of love. If there is any doubt that this is a love poem, listen here to Glenday's presentation of it from the 2010 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlist readings. (We never stop learning from this poem, as Glenday reveals in his introduction that some pairs of bathypelagic fish are "attached for life.")
What is the most intriguing, unlikely thing you've learned from a poem?
Over the lot a sodium aura
within which
above the new cars sprays
of denser many-colored brightnesses
are rising and falling in a time lapse
of a luminous and ghostly
garden forever flourishing
up out of its own decay.
The cars, meanwhile, modest as angels
or like angelic
hoplites, are arrayed
in rows, obedient to orders
they bear no trace of,
their bodies taintless, at attention,
serving the sheen they bear,
the glittering they are,
the sourceless dazzle
that the showcase window
that the showroom floor
weeps for
when it isn’t there –
like patent leather, even the black wheels shine.
Here is the intense
amnesia of the just now
at last no longer longing
in a flowering of lights
beyond which
one by one, haphazardly
the dented, the rusted-through,
metallic Eves and Adams
hurry past, as if ashamed,
their dull beams averted,
low in the historical dark they disappear into.
Notes on the Poem
Our fascination continues with another selection from the thematically linked poems from Alan Shapiro's 2013 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlisted collection Night of the Republic. "Car Dealership at 3 A.M." is yet another setting in which Shapiro examines normally busy locations when they are devoid of their usual human presence.
Shapiro has previously led us to places such as a stone church and a hotel lobby to surmise, in effect, how those settings come to life when there is literally no life in them. Compared to those poems, this selection is distinguished by a particular sense of longing.
Central to a car dealership is, of course, cars. The cars here are wistfully personified:
"The cars, meanwhile, modest as angels
or like angelic
hoplites, are arrayed
in rows, obedient to orders"
It's as if the cars miss the salesman and receptionists and mechanics with whom they spend their days (at 3 p.m., not 3 a.m.) and are hopefully and devotedly awaiting their return.
As one review of this collection posits, "whatever the setting, the places people create and inhabit in these poems seem to live beyond and without us" ... but in this case, the place seems to miss us.
Considered more broadly, Shapiro's collection might remind some readers of the 2007 non-fiction book The World Without Us, in which author Alan Weisman theorized about how both the natural world and built environments would evolve or devolve if humans suddenly disappeared. A description of the book refers to "Earth's tremendous capacity for self-healing" once we, the disrupting and invasive species, are removed from the picture. But does Shapiro suggest that after
"the intense
amnesia of the just now"
... the world might want us to return?
Title: Single Onion 2018 Lecture Series – The Stories We Tell: Indigenous Voices
Date: January 18, 2018
Location: Calgary, Alberta, Canada Description: The Single Onion is Calgary’s longest-running poetry reading series, bringing Canada’s finest poets to its dedicated audience at Shelf Life Books.
This event is curated by Metis poet and Inkspot Collective member Cobra Collins. Join Single Onion for an evening of poetry, performance, and tales of resilience, from Treaty 7 and beyond.