Welcome to the first issue of my Poem-a-Month e-newsletter in its new location at nouspique.com. If you're not already a subscriber, I would encourage you to take a few seconds on the homepage of nouspique.com to sign up for a monthly mailing of poetry and conversation about poetry.
The nouspique version is expanded to reflect the aims of nouspique. You'll still find my monthly snippets here, but I'll also be sharing news about poetry and featuring the work of other poets. While I'm always thrilled by good poetry wherever it comes from, you'll find a leaning towards homegrown Canadian work here.
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The reed leans into the wind
The reed leans into the wind
as if listening for a secret,
an image which stirs the eye within
the eye within, and no less real
for the fact that it happened here
at a pine table in a suburban
kitchen with not a reed for miles,
but a pen poised over a scratch pad
leaning, steep, like a reed into the wind,
the children, buffeted to their rooms,
leaving the dog who's blind and
sprawls at my feet, oblivious
to reeds that lean into the wind;
of all the creatures in the house
this beast knows the approaching storm
has no more froth than an ill-timed joke
for there is nothing — not you,
not me, not the force of gravity —
that can pull me away when
the reed leans into the wind.
David A. Barker - May 01, 2010 |
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Griffin Poetry Prize 2010 Shortlist
On April 6th, in addition to revealing the 2010 shortlist, the Griffin Poetry Prize announced that it had doubled the total value of the purse from $100,000 to $200,000. Winners to be announced on June 3rd. See the Griffen Poetry Prize website for details.
International Shortlist
Grain • John Glenday
PicadorA Village Life • Louise Glück
Farrar, Straus and Giroux The Sun-fish • Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin
The Gallery Press
Cold Spring in Winter • Susan Wicks, translated from the French, written by Valérie Rouzeau
Arc Publications
Canadian Shortlist
The Certainty Dream • Kate Hall
Coach House BooksCoal and Roses • P.K. Page
The Porcupine's Quill Pigeon • Karen Solie
House of Anansi Press
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 Featured Poet: P.K. Page
Among those on the Canadian shortlist for the 2010 Griffen Poetry Prize is P.K. Page for her collection of 21 glosas, Coal and Roses. Page died in January at the age of 93 after a distinguished and varied career that included a Governor General's Literary Award and paintings exhibited in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Canada and the AGO. Read more about her life and work in the CBC's obituary.
In Coal and Roses, Page plays with a poetic form popular in the court of 14th and 15th century Spain. The glosa borrows four lines from another poet and incorporates them into a fresh poem of four ten-lined stanzas. The final line of each stanza must be a line from the borrowed quatrain, presented in consecutive order. Just to complicate things, the sixth and ninth lines must rhyme with the borrowed tenth.
Here, part of the charm lies in the selection of poets, a smorgasbord drawn mostly from the 20th century, including Canadians like Gwendolen McEwan and Marilyn Bowering, Americans like Wallace Stevens and John Ashbury, poets from the U.K. like Ted Hughes and Gerard Manley Hopkins, and poets in translation like Jorge Luis Borges and Federico García Lorca. As an aside, this would make an excellent pedagogical tool, offering crisp introductions to a wide selection of plundered poets and then playing with their lines the way a cat might play with a ball of yarn.
The centrepiece of this collection is the triple glosa, "Coal and Roses," based on three sets of lines from Anna Akhmatova's 1922 poem "Everything is Plundered." The triad follows a progression of thought that begins with the recognition that we live in a world where "everything is plundered." This is the world Page presents in the first stanza of the first poem, and which I have reproduced below on the left. But then we have the final line of the poem, a line drawn from Akhmatova: Why then do we not despair? That, perhaps, is the question of our age.
The second poem begins to answer that question by visiting the natural world, a world in which spring follows winter, a world in which sexuality binds us to deeper rhythms, a world in which the stars draw us outside ourselves and our plundering to a place where "[F]lesh is forgotten."
But with the third poem, Page makes it clear that she isn't content to live in a world of simple dichotomies where evil is set off against the transcendent and
flesh against the spirit. As she observes in an earlier poem titled "No Exit," "[a] soul without flesh is lost." She opens the third poem with: "There is a place, not here, not there." It is in this place that is neither here nor there that we encounter "[a] gift of coal and roses." Below on the right is a stanza from the third poem:
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I read the papers with my morning coffee.
Only the horoscope columns offer hope.
We sell our birthright piecemeal to our neighbour.
Our natural resources are going, going, gone —
our oil, our gas, our water, clear-cut forests.
We dynamite glaciers in our greed for gold.
Polar bears, seeking ice floes, swim and drown.
The pillars of our society are felons.
To those of us who knew a more innocent world,
everything is plundered, betrayed, sold. |
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It is as if a beam
embraced us and transformed our molecules
and merged us with some cosmological
and fractal universe we never dreamed,
more vast than any thought we had of love
divine or secular, a synthesis
of right and wrong, of midday, midnight, dawn,
of poverty and wealth, sackcloth and silk.
A gift of coal and roses
to the ruined, dirty houses ... |
Pitch-perfect, compassionate, wise, P.K. Page has left us all with a gift of coal and roses that we can scatter over the illusory differences in our lives. |
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