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Some Musics, for Ken Pickering (poem)
Here is a brief elegy for Ken Pickering, who passed away yesterday and will be sorely missed.
Some Musics
for Ken Pickering
Some musics draw you in and pull you near.
Some musics sound what words fall short about.
Some musics free you up enough to hear
what offers a brief means of letting go.
Some musics can’t be bought again, even
by special order at Black Swan Records.
Some musics refuse the done, the given.
Some musics have a way of happening
that defies and embraces love at once.
Some musics winnow a few greasy vowels
down to their consequential resonance.
Some musics make life a bit more worthwhile.
Some musics have little to do with notes.
Some musics improvise what can’t be said.
Some musics stir what grieves and celebrates.
Some musics keep good company in loss.
Elegy for Aylan Kurdi, Galip Kurdi, Rehan Kurdi (poem)
2 September 2015
Most of us saw those photographs.
Washed up small sneakers first, face down
in the blunt sand, forehead lapped
by the torpid, receding surf,
a drowned three-year-old slumps against
the gritty diminishing edge
of one flotsam-caked Turkish beach,
one among others. Waterlogged,
red t-shirt and blue shorts cling
to his numb frame. Officially
compassionate, a policeman
puts on a pair of latex gloves
and grimly lifts the child’s slack form
away. Somewhere along the strand,
his drowned mother and brother wait
their turns. There can be no refuge,
no coming home, no going back
for them now that a capsized world
sees fit to care. Who can gather
their overwhelming remainder
into our staid human embrace?
"A Friend in the Art": For Elise Partridge
Galanthus, 31 January 2015
Weeks early,
snowdrop clusters poke
through moss and unraked, rotted leaves:
green, fetal fingertips,
small-scale
backyard congregations, the chewed
ends of some child’s coloured pencils,
spring stubs.
Friends in the vernal art,
they’ve already
managed to start
unclosing their glandular blooms,
split, mute bells
inclined to tremour
in this one winter’s milky breath.
This piece is for Elise Partridge, who died a week ago. Her poems and her friendship over the past twenty years have meant a great deal to me. I hope my brief elegy pays some tribute to her life and work by attending to the kinds of small, often unremarked things, like snowbells, that her poems often did, in a mode that wants to approach her own careful craft. Hers is a poetics of care — in its senses of close attention and rapt formalism, of respectful humility and warm concern. I last heard Elise Partridge read her poetry in January 2012, at the Vancouver Public Library on a triple bill with Stephanie Bolster and Barbara Nickel, two other members of the Vancouver Poetry Dogs. That night, I bought a copy of her chapbook, which was a supplement to her second book, Chameleon Hours, and she autographed it for me, as “a friend in the art.” Elise had done readings with me many years ago — I recall presenting on poetry and translation with her at Brock House (Esther Birney and Miriam Waddington were in the audience) in, maybe, 1998, and she had also invited me to several meetings of the Poetry Dogs, though I soon fell away from attending. In the past year or so, I hadn’t seen very much of her at all, and I regret my negligence. She was a deeply kind, warmly engaged person, and a truly gifted poet.
Partial Elegy for Charlie Haden
The great Charlie Haden passed away Friday, July 11, and tributes of all kinds have been appearing over the past two days. I hadn’t really realized how many records in my collection Charlie Haden had appeared on; his bass playing, his sound, has been a pivotal and essential part of much of my listening. I saw him a few times in concert. Once, with his Quartet West on a double bill with John Scofield’s quartet at the Orpheum in Vancouver; and once, very memorably, with Geri Allen and Paul Motian in Montreal, as part of the 1989 invitational series. I wanted to write something in his memory; for some reason, I found myself thinking of the Kurt Weill/Ogden Nash standard “Speak Low,” an evocative version of which Charlie Haden performed with Sharon Freeman for Lost in the Stars, a Hal Willner tribute to Kurt Weill. The song leads back to Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, but I have also recently been pretty heavily under the sway of Nathaniel Mackey’s word music, so some echoes of that must have found their way into this piece. It was composed very quickly, so I’m sure there are a few rough edges and infelicities, but I’ll leave them in to honour the improvisational drift of Charlie Haden’s music.
Partial Elegy for Charlie Haden
Already gone too soon, other than him
who in this fraught hereafter could have named
the ruminant lumber his instrument
had been assembled from? Dark-toned boxwood,
hickory, lacquered spruce. Coaxing a deep
murmur from heavy-gauge strings, propounding
their full-bodied, hefty resonances,
he re-curved chthonic rumble into line
and cadence, his trademark over-fingered
pizz and tectonic double-stops marking
the thick eddies where sound and purled silence
abutted, then let go: a politics
of left-leaning, strung-out torch-songs that tell
you, “Speak low if you mean to speak at all.”
Half Sonnet for Nelson Mandela
I have been putting up the odd poem in this blog, self-publishing what feel to me like more public pieces, and maybe worth getting out there quickly enough, after they’re done. There’s an element of the improvisational in these ones, for me, because they’re pretty immediate, not heavily revised. So here is what I have done in memory of Nelson Mandela, who not only called for racial justice, for human dignity and respect, but lived that call. I was listening to Eddie Daniels interviewed last night on As It Happens on CBC Radio about his friendship with Nelson Mandela: powerful stories of Mr Mandela’s humility and the politics of care.
Half Sonnet for Nelson Mandela
Fact is,
Nelson Mandela died today.
Half a cold world away,
the pared-down moon
hangs like a tin cup,
like an upturned palm
low in the ecliptic.
He said: own up,
atone. Moonlight
pushes it blue fingers
through the chain-link back fence.
Fact is, he said,
it falls to us
to put this world aright.
5 December 2013
Without Lou Reed Around
Here’s a short tribute piece, an elegy that came together quickly earlier this week – a small offering from a listener, in memory of.
Without Lou Reed Around
Without Lou Reed around
the real world starts to feel
under rehearsed.
Without Lou Reed around
you’re going to get away
with less.
Without Lou Reed around
you’ll find out how much noise
those one-chord wonder boys won’t throw your way.
Without Lou Reed around to set you straight
you’ll wish you’d paid
a lot better heed the first time.
Without Lou Reed around
bootworn floorboards ought not
to rumble like the trashed cones of blown subwoofers.
Without Lou Reed around
any silk-screened bananas
on leftover album covers will likely turn brown.
Without Lou Reed around
dog collars and lampblack lipstick
become a hard look to pull off.
Without Lou Reed around you’ll never know
whatever else it was you once
needed to know.
Flow, Fissure, Mesh 