The Orchid Flower Just as I wonder whether it’s going to die, the orchid blossoms and I can’t explain why it moves my heart, why such pleasure comes from one small bud on a long spindly stem, one blood red gold flower opening at mid-summer, tiny, perfect in its hour. Even to a white- haired […]
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MESSAGE TO A FORMER FRIEND I just wanted to write and say, in case you are hit tomorrow by a truck or are swept from the beach by a freak wave; or in case your ex-wife decides to take her own life right after taking yours; or in case you go to the doctor, who […]
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April 20, 2019 – 10:39 am
So this is it, Lane. Not a living wake, but a celebration of all your living. And this is only the beginning. Wait until you’re dead. Susan Musgrave, editor, from You Loved Being a Stranger – 55 Poets Celebrate Patrick Lane, Harbour Publishing, 1994 There are times when I no longer know if what I […]
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ALONE ON CHRISTMAS EVE IN JAPAN Not wanting to lose it all for poetry. Wanting to live the living. All this year looking on the graveyard below my apartment. Holding myself tenderly in this marred body. Wondering if the quiet I feel is that happiness wise people speak of, or the modulation that is the […]
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The Hero’s Journey I remember the first time I looked at the spotless marble floor of a giant hotel lobby and understood that someone had waxed and polished it all night and that someone else had pushed his cart of cleaning supplies down the long air-conditioned corridors of the Steinberg Building across the street and […]
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Join the local literary & UVic communities as poets & authors celebrate the life of the late Patrick Lane. This evening of poetry and tribute to the acclaimed poet and late UVic Department of Writing professor Patrick Lane will feature readings and memorials by a number of Writing alumni, including emcee Steven Price, Esi Edugyan, […]
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STATION TWENTY-TWO: FUJIEDA Living Close to the Pacific; Or, Music as a Low Grey Rain Eyes find nothing to see but sea and clouds and a colour without colour. Bashô spoke of this one colour world while birds scissor the water soundlessly. Garry oaks in my neighouring forest and arbutus, bark split like a wasteland. […]
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Two Poets Divorce I want Cohen! No, I want him. You take Dickinson. No! I want Wilkinson. OK, OK, take them. I don’t care. Just leave me Gilbert, Ginsberg, Hass, Hirschfield, Hoagland. and Hughes. Grass is greener when Whitman sings it. Take that! And Plath. But I want Wah, Wallace ,Williams – C.K.,W.C., and Hugo. […]
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People Magazine Sponsors National Poetry Month On this page Angelina Jolie is wearing a skimpy barbarian leotard, laughing and throwing a copy of Sonnets From the Portuguese across the room at the head of Brad Pitt, who is deeply immersed in his sixteenth reading of Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night. He is […]
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Instructions on Not Giving Up More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees that really gets to me. When all the shock of white […]
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