The Guest Poetry Blog Series #3 – Introducing the Third Contributor, Canadian Poet and Sommelier, Tonya Lailey – Part One of Two

Calgary-based Canadian poet Tonya Lailey

The Cat Comes to Me

—after Heather McHugh

The future looks like death to me from here
standing behind you, in the musty basement
where the cat is cornered.

You think on your feet, quickly
engineer a noose from a sponge mop and silicone rope –
medieval design, cheap modern materials.

The cat protests wildly, we call it crazy and laugh,
but it knows its boundaries. Instinctively,
it knows this is cruel.

I ask you to wait, to let the cat be calm,
to approach it later, gently, with kindness.
I do it later myself, alone in the house.

The cat comes to me easily,
I hold it for a bit,
then give it out to the neighbourhood night,

quietly out,
like I had been wanting to do
and would much later, finally.

Tonya Lailey, 2015

I came, truly, to poetry on my knees in my forties, having forgotten a lot about myself, having lost the belief that I could love what I loved, could live that way. I was in a week-long program at a drug and alcohol recovery center: the Discovery Program at Cedars at Cobble Hill in B.C. I went there to begin to learn to recover from my addiction to the addict in my life – my former husband, the father of my two daughters.

Here I met others in similar states of codependence, bearing broken relationships with themselves and others. I also met a man with wild, curly white-grey hair, dramatic arms and a regular HA! that leapt from him with the punch of a Pop Rock’s explosion. His whole being seemed to bounce – with joy and love for what he was doing. What he was doing was sharing poetry and providing the encouragement and safe space for us to write our own poems, an exercise that might encourage our healing. This man, HA!, was Richard Osler.

The epigraph poem above is the main one I wrote in that session with Richard during the week of November 29, 2015. The poem still makes me cry, which tells me how much work it did and is still doing for me. It was the first poem I had written in probably ten years and one of the few I had written at all.

Richard’s prompt was a line – the last one – from Heather McHugh’s fabulous poem: From 20,000 Feet. That line: The future looked like death to it, from there. I adapted that line at the time for my purposes. Here is Heather’s poem:

From 20,000 Feet

The cloud formation looks
Like banks of rock from here,
though rock and cloud are thought

so opposite. Earth’s underlying nature
might be likeness – likeness
everywhere disguised

by wave-length, amplitude and frequency.
(If we got far enough away, could we
decipher the design?) From here

so much goes by
too fast or slow for sight.
(Is death a stretch of time in which

a life is just a flash?) Whatever
we may think, we only
think that we will lose. The foetus,

expert at attachment, didn’t dream that
cramped canal would open

into sound and light and love –
it clung. It didn’t care. The future
looked like death to it, from there.

Heather McHugh (1948 -) from Hinge & Sign, Wesleyan University Press, 1994. (McHugh, a much celebrated American poet, nominated for both the Pulitzer Prize and a National book Award has written thirteen books of poetry, essays and translations. She also won a Griffin Poetry Prize in 2002 for her co-translation of the poems of Paul Celan and in 2009 was awarded a prestigious US $500,000 MacArthur fellowship or so-called genius grant.)

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The Guest Poetry Blog Series # 2 – Daniel Scott Features Canadian BIPOC Poet Chantal Gibson – Part Two of Two

Canadian poet Chantal Gibson with her visual art in the background. Photo Credit: k.-b.-kadanoff

( EDITOR’S NOTE: Please excuse the distortions in some of the photographed images of Chantal’s poems in this blog post.)

Chantal Gibson from with/holding, Caitlin Press, 2021

Although we have a rich and vibrant poetry community in Canada with voices from a wide range of social locations, perspectives and poetic genres represented, we do not have a significant media presence to bring these voices to a national audience. We do not seem to have a national sense of poets – with a few notable exceptions.  Poets and poetry are regional and local. It is great strength but also a weakness. It does mean we have a lot of poets writing and being heard by their regional audience but we do not have a vibrant national interplay of voices.

My first challenge in writing this guest blog post was to decide whose work from my stacks of poetry books would I  present?  My choice: Chantal Gibson and her break-the-mold 2021 poetry collection with/holding with its innovative use of unusual layouts and design. And, also, because of the focus of this book and her visual art as she describes below from her website:

Working in the overlap between literary and visual art, her work confronts colonialism head on, imagining the BIPOC [Black, Indigenous and People of Colour] voices silenced in the spaces and omissions left by cultural and institutional erasure.

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The Guest Poetry Blog Series #2 – Introducing the Second Contributor, Canadian Poet (Among Many Other Varied Life Roles!) Daniel Scott– Part One of Two

Victoria-based poet Daniel Scott at Lake Bolsena, Lazio, Italy, May 2022

Please allow me to introduce myself” sang the Rolling Stones a long time ago. And so here is some background on me: Daniel Scott. I am husband ( married to Christine) father, grandfather and twice retired – once as an academic and the second time after a stint of 6 years as Artistic Director of the Planet Earth Poetry reading series in Victoria.

I have been writing poetry for decades and can honestly say it has saved my life more than once. The first time, in my early thirties, I had a bad case of glandular fever (mononucleosis) and was overwhelmed with repetitive dreams. When I was down to ten hours a day sleeping (from eighteen plus hours) I bought a little notebook and started to write. Out came poetry in a steady stream – as many as six poems a day. What a relief to get so much from inside out on the page. I have been writing on a regular basis since then.

The second time poetry saved my life was when one of our children faced serious psychiatric challenges in Europe and I wrote myself through the journey initially and then over the years. Here is one of those poems:
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S Is For Snake – A Poem by Terry Ann Carter in the Voice of the Virtuoso Artist Niki de Saint Phalle.

Franco-American  artist Niki de Saint Phalle (1930-2002) with one of her characteristic snake images.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Alphabet of Tarot

(from the Diary of Niki de Saint Phalle)

All day I have been in my body.
At night my skull. The architecture
of my mind is a building of letters.
Flying, lying low, on its side

A V represents a bird.
The tarot totems are pulsing
in my veins. I will slash them
to set them free.

A finch has landed on the feeder.
Please come and look. It is
the last rain of spring, and I desire
fire, earth, air and water.

Major and minor arcana.
When the apricots first bloom
on this Tuscan hillside, my thoughts
turn to kings, the letter F is a fool,

my prince of darkness. The sculptures
will glint golden in sunlight
reflect like pieces of mirror. I will bring
my coffee and converse with Jung.

The letter S is a snake.

Terry Ann Carter from First I Fold the Mountain – A Love Letter To Books,  Black Moss Press, 2022

I was astonished and delighted when I found the poem above in First I Fold The Mountain, the latest full-length poetry collection (2022) by Victoria-based poet Terry Ann Carter. (For a previous blog post on Terry Ann please click here.)

Terry Ann was part of the La Romita online retreat ( as participant and paper artist faciltator) I facilitated in 2020 (the planned in-country retreat at the La Romita School of Art was cancelled due to Covid-19) and one of our retreat adventures was based on the art, especially the celebrated Tarot Garden, of Niki de Saint Phalle. If we had made it to Italy in 2020 one of our likely destinations was that extraordinary garden! (For a summary of my La Romita 2017 retreat in Italy featuring a trip to the Tarot Garden please click here.)
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They Would Write About It!!! – A Tribute to Sharon Olds and Muriel Rukeyser

American poet Sharon Olds. Photo Credit: Poetry Society of America

Physician

You sit at the head of the table. You say
you have wanted to write about— not depression,
it is worse than that, it is rock bottom:
the frightfulness.
             People don’t like
to hear about it, you say to a friend.
People don’t like to read about it,
he answered—
and then you knew that you would
write about it.
            Tonight you are wearing
a knot over your breastbone, tied in
tiger-colored silk. Your eyes are not
shining. They are deep in your face white as a rock.
you believe in the healing power of the words,
you turn to each as she speaks, he speaks,
until we are holding speech together like hands
around the hard table in the difficult night.

Sharon Olds from A Student’s Memoir of Muriel Rukeyser, from They Say This, Poetry East, Numbers 47 & 48, 1999, p. 195-214. Also from By Herself: Women Reclaim Poetry, ed. Molly McQuade, Graywolf Press, 2000

I will have more to say about the much celebrated American poet Sharon Olds and this poem celebrating the remarkable human being and poet Muriel Rukeyser, but to say here: how she captures the power of sharing poetry in a group, poetry from an earlier assignment or written in the group on the spot. How poetry can build a warm and intimate community through sharing words, especially those new and less guarded ones. These lines:

you believe in the healing power of the words,
you turn to each as she speaks, he speaks,
until we are holding speech together like hands
around the hard table in the difficult night.

In my poetry therapy circles so often how the new words from on-the-spot poems created group cohesion and understanding and dare I say healing as raw and intimate words were shared out loud. So often a healing for the reader and those being read to. How our circles were like this circle described by Olds as we would hold speech together like hands/ around the table in the difficult night. And how often I would share this poem! I know some poet teachers do not like inviting on-the-spot poems to be written. With great respect to them and their experience, I am not one of those. I first leanrned on-the-spot writing from my mentor and friend, the great Canadian poet Patrick Lane.

I was shocked to discover this morning I had never featured Sharon Olds in a blog post. She was an early guiding light in my first years of beginning my own poet’s journey. Her startling intimacies in her poetry including her sexual and bodily candor gave permission to so many other poets to bring more of themselves into their poems. Her 2016 volume, Odes, covers many subjects perhaps thought improper for poetry in past times but not now! Poems such as Ode to the Hymen, Ode to the Tampon, Ode to the Clitoris and one so appropriate to our time: Ode to My Whiteness.
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From May 2022, The La Romita 2020 Online Poetry Community’s Kaminsky Prompt Poems – Part Four

A still picture from the puppet show, Deaf Republic, performed by Maribor Puppet Theatre, Maribor, Solvenia. Next performance, Sept. 11th, 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A City Like a Guillotine Shivers on Its Way to the Neck

— Ilya Kaminsky from A City Like a Guillotine Shivers
on its Way to the Neck
from Deaf Republic, Graywolf Press, 2019

it is a matter of physics,
mechanics
weight, acceleration, impact
the sharpness of the edge
the softness of tissue
the fragility of bone

it is all science
cold and impassionate
impersonal
but even the blade
in its steel
knows it deals
death

the mechanics may be
sophisticated
electronic, lethal
but there will be
bodies broken
someone will grieve
blood will be shed

war is not a matter
at distance
but intimate
no matter how
it is delivered

somebody builds
the bombs
somebody fires
the weapons

when the place of living –
city, town, village, farm
becomes a theatre
for death
trembling and sorrow
like a river in flood
black, cold,
seep in
wash over
wash away
the cloak of civility
lay cruelty bare

Daniel Scott, May, 2022

Preface to the Series: The La Romita 2020 Online Poetry Community’s Kaminsky Prompt Poems

In June 2020 a group of poets gathered on-line for a week’s generative poetry retreat that I facilitated. Most of the poets had been registered for a ten-day poetry retreat at the La Romita School of Art which was cancelled because of the pandemic. Thus, the La Romita 2020 Online Retreat community was formed and subsequently most, but not all, of those poets have gathered three or four times a year to share poems inspired by prompts suggested by the La Romita 2020 Online participants. (There were three on-site-in-Italy retreats that I led before 2020 and the fourth one was held this past May.)

One of the recent La Romita Online poetry prompt challenges came a month or so after the beginning of the war in Ukraine in late February 2022. That challenge was based on lines chosen by Calgary-based poet Joan Shillington from the Ukrainian/American poet Ilya Kaminsky’s 2019 poetry collection, Deaf Republic published by Graywolf Press. To see a link to my review of Deaf Republic in The Literary Review please click here.

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From May 2022, The La Romita 2020 Online Poetry Community’s Kaminsky Prompt Poems – Part Three

Street Mural from Cardiff, Wales by My Dog Sighs, posted by My Dog Sighs on Twitter, Feb. 28th, 2022

What something in me listens

—after Ilya Kaminsky

I try to hear the people breathing
in parkades and the sound
of talking over Molotov cocktails
over making them and later
the fhhhhhh shatter whoosh
of the toss and the blaze in the street
I don’t like to play the video footage
the sound a peephole                        You are alive,
a squeak through my laptop
speakers I tap to send money
it’s dry here I heard rain might
come today I heard the war
would last a few weeks only
but relief doesn’t fall doesn’t follow
from the west clouds as promised
and if the long awaited water does
land it will have to sink so low
reach so deep for its reception             I whisper to myself,
what’s the sound for a deep seep
what’s the sound for an emergency
on top of an emergency on top
of an emergency how many alarms
required for a response
can I at least imagine hearing
sirens death silences all the violence
even the violence that doesn’t obey
the war doesn’t take its sides even
the shrink-wrap squeak-pull-stretch
by men over men around poles
over looting a cookie a mute
in one man’s mouth war is in
and out and not over did you hear
explosions in Odessa just yesterday
so loud one witness said
she had trouble hearing even after
minutes and minutes had passed
I have heard the sounds of yesterdays
pile into what we hear today
into stories we will hear ourselves
tell about what happened.                   therefore something in you listens.*

*You are alive I whisper to myself therefore something in you listens. Ilya Kaminsky from the poem Alfonso in Snow from Deaf Republic, Graywolf Press, 2019

Tonya Lailey, May, 2022

Preface to the Series: The La Romita 2020 Online Poetry Community’s Kaminsky Prompt Poems

In June 2020 a group of poets gathered on-line for a week’s generative poetry retreat that I facilitated. Most of the poets had been registered for a ten-day poetry retreat at the La Romita School of Art which was cancelled because of the pandemic. Thus, the La Romita 2020 Online Retreat community was formed and subsequently most, but not all, of those poets have gathered three or four times a year to share poems inspired by prompts suggested by the La Romita 2020 Online participants. (There were three on-site-in-Italy retreats that I led before 2020 and the fourth one was held this past May.)

One of the recent La Romita Online poetry prompt challenges came a month or so after the beginning of the war in Ukraine in late February 2022. That challenge was based on lines chosen by Calgary-based poet Joan Shillington from the Ukrainian/American poet Ilya Kaminsky’s 2019 poetry collection, Deaf Republic published by Graywolf Press. To see a link to my review of Deaf Republic in The Literary Review please click here.

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From May 2022, The La Romita 2020 Online Poetry Community’s Kaminsky Prompt Poems – Part Two

Dwight – guide dog in training

REMAIN SILENT

(With thanks to Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic)

Deafness passes through us like a police whistle
Dogs understand everything and
bark and bark

Ilya Kaminsky from the poem Alfonso Stands Answerable from Deaf Republic, Graywolf Press, 2019

Teaching Dwight
Not to bark when he sees
Not to bark when he hears

As a service dog in training
He is learning to keep
His bark to himself
To not react

He is rewarded
He looks up to me
For direction
Remains silent

“Good job”
“Good decision”
“Good Boy Dwight”

I too have learnt
Been rewarded
To turn a deaf ear
To not whistle blow

“Good girl Sarah”

Sarah Wilsom, May, 2022

Preface to the Series: The La Romita 2020 Online Poetry Community’s Kaminsky Prompt Poems

In June 2020 a group of poets gathered on-line for a week’s generative poetry retreat that I facilitated. Most of the poets had been registered for a ten-day poetry retreat at the La Romita School of Art in Terni, Umbria, which was cancelled because of the pandemic. Thus, the La Romita 2020 Online Poetry Community was formed and subsequently most, but not all, of those poets have gathered three or four times a year to share poems inspired by prompts suggested by the La Romita 2020 Online participants.

One of the recent poetry prompt challenges came a month or so after the beginning of the war in Ukraine in late February 2022. That challenge was based on lines chosen by Calgary-based poet Joan Shillington from the Ukrainian/American poet Ilya Kaminsky’s 2019 poetry collection, Deaf Republic, published by Graywolf Press. To see a link to my review of Deaf Republic in The Literary Review please click here.

Kaminsky’s book, one for the ages, feels like an eerie premonition of the Ukrainian war as it is set in an imagined town/city called Vasenka invaded by a foreign army. When I look up Vasenka online I discover it’s a surname most commonly found in Russia and Ukraine. That’s why using this collection to inspire our own poems in response to the war in Ukraine seemed so appropriate.

After hearing these poems in a Zoom gathering this past May I wanted to feature these poems in a blog series to honour these important poems and the people of Ukraine and to help us who live far away from that war and its atrocities to stay awake to its grim reality. And in this we also honour Ilya and his now much-shared poem from Deaf Republic: We Lived Happily During the War. This is Part Two of a three or four part series. Part One featured poems by Nancy Issenman, Pat Scanlan and Linda Crosfield.

Part Two of The La Romita 2020 Online Poetry Community’s Kaminsky Prompt Poems

 

Calgary-based caligrapher and poet, Sarah Wilson at Marta, beside Lake Bolsena, Lazio, Italy, May 2022

I was gobsmacked when I first heard the epigraph poem to this blogpost by caligrapher, poet, guide dog trainer and former financial planner, Sarah Wilson from Calgary. How she took a line from Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic in the context of the Ukraine war and found in it a huge personal truth. The bravery that a good poem requires. Or, should, I say the authenticity a good poem requires. While I am so grateful for this poem I am also grateful to Sarah for running Zoom for all our on-line gatherings and the way she keeps coming back to the in-country La Romita retreats including the one this past May!

Isn’t this the joy of a creative mind, that Sarah could read Kaminsky’s lines about dogs that bark and bark, reflect that her job as a guide dog trainer is teach them not to bark and then take the big leap and realize how much of her cultural training has been not to speak out (bark) or become a whistle blower in business. And I think of all the times a culture teaches us not to bark.  And how I am chilled by Sarah’s last line: Good girl Sarah. It says it all.

I also so appreciate the crafted simplicity of Sarah’s poem. Her use of anaphoric repetitions: the double not in stanza one, the double he in stanza two and three and the triple good in stanza four echoed again in the last wonderful line. This drives the poem forward to its devestating and surprising conclusion.

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From May 2022, The La Romita 2020 Online Poetry Community’s Kaminsky Prompt Poems – Part One

Ukraine in Wartime, February 2022. Photo Credit: State Border Guard Services/ Reuters

For Ukraine, Listen

You are alive, I whisper to myself, therefore something in you listens

— Ilya Kaminsky from the poem Alfonso, In Snow from Deaf Republic

You tell me you don’t recognize your life
that you hear even fear is prohibited
so you hold yours close.

You are running, always running, 
away from all that is not alive
just to stay alive.

And when this is finally over will you
hear again the nightingales
trilling your name?

Every dog in Ukraine a shaking leaf
about to fall, yet camelias continue
to bud, maybe you’ll recall

the one first open, finding
what’s precious
in the rocky rubble.

There is something inside the echo
of bloodline, my grandmother in Kiev
fleeing running away, then towards

the end of an unending cycle.
Tell me, is there anyone who
listens?

Nancy Issenman, May 2022

In June 2020 a group of poets gathered on-line for a week’s generative poetry retreat that I facilitated. Most of the poets had been registered for a ten-day poetry retreat at the La Romita School of Art in Terni, Umbria, which was cancelled because of the pandemic. Thus, the La Romita 2020 Online Poetry Community was formed and subsequently most, but not all, of those poets have gathered three or four times a year to share poems inspired by prompts suggested by the La Romita 2020 Online participants.

One of the recent poetry prompt challenges came a month or so after the beginning of the war in Ukraine in late February 2022. That challenge was based on lines chosen by Calgary-based poet Joan Shillington from the Ukrainian/American poet Ilya Kaminsky’s 2019 poetry collection, Deaf Republic, published by Graywolf Press. To see a link to my review of Deaf Republic in The Literary Review please click here.

Kaminsky’s book, one for the ages, feels like an eerie premonition of the Ukrainian war as it is set in an imagined town/city called Vasenka invaded by a foreign army. When I look up Vasenka online I discover it’s a surname most commonly found in Russia and Ukraine. That’s why using this collection to inspire our own poems in response to the war in Ukraine seemed so appropriate.
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Rosemary Griebel’s Guest Poetry Blog, Part Two – Praise and Lamentation in the Poetry Collection “God of Nothingness” by American Poet Mark Wunderlich

American poet Mark Wunderlich

from A DRIFTLESS SON

It came to me to sell the family farm,
shift its failures to a man who planned

to occupy the place for recreation,
to hunt the deer that spook and shadow in the pines,

my job to consign to another my granddad’s stunted grove
of walnuts planted—against the forester’s advice —

with his hired man Tiny, who died
by stepping in front of a train, though first he roped

his dog Bear to a nearby tree, tacking on a note
that read “Take Care Off Me.” Does anyone

remember this fat fact — a loaf of toast and a dozen eggs
was Tiny’s daily breakfast meal? Give it

to me. I’ll remember that bit too…

Mark Wunderlich from God of Nothingness, Graywolf Press, 2021

Every poem has a story to tell but unlike memoir, poetry doesn’t require fidelity to events, only to ideas and emotions, which often are fed by childhood experiences. The landscape of our youth with all its bitter and its sweet is braided into our psyche and informs the adult years in ways that are inexplicable. As we age forward, we are drawn backward to the place that formed us. Or, as American poet Mark Wunderlich has written in his poem Midsummer from his poetry collection God of Nothingness: My future is the only future, my past a story or a scar, / / a body, a book, a bed to rest my head in.

Mark Wunderlich is the award-winning author of four collections of poetry, the most recent being God of Nothingness. He is currently the director of the Bennington Seminars graduate writing program, and lives in the Hudson River Valley. More information about the author can be found at www.markwunderlich.com. Wunderlich is a Rilke scholar, and we see Rilke’s influence in Wunderlich’s skillful pairing of praise and lamentation throughout this lyrically charged collection.

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