EARLY ONE SUMMER Years from now someone will come upon a layer of birds and not know what he is listening for these are the days when the beetles hurry through dry grass hiding pieces of light W.S. Merwin from Migration: New and Selected Poems, Copper Canyon Press, 2005 My friend Jordan Hartt, who helps […]
Tag Archives: Patrick Lane
The Bigness of Small Poems – # 27 in a Series – W.S. Merwin, American Master of Small Poems!
December 31, 2016 – 9:34 pm
The Bigness of Small Poems – # 26 in a Series – Patrick Lane – On Christmas Eve – And Still We Sing!
December 24, 2016 – 7:11 pm
God Walks Burning Through Me When I sleep the birds come to the garden With their gifts of seeds. Out of ice last year’s leaves of grass lift into night. All my songs have been one song. The palm of my hand and the sole of my foot remember everything I have forgotten. The old […]
The Bigness of Small Poems – # 5 in a Series – Patrick Lane
April 20, 2016 – 11:01 am
The White Box In the white box you keep hidden away a white salamander waits with a flame in his small hands. How bright the fire! How long his breath has kept it alive. But the box is closed. Why do you keep it closed? Patrick Lane (1939 – ) from The Collected Poems of […]
Sing Your Song! Shed That Skin! Commencement Addresses With a Similar Difference – Patrick Lane and Amber Tamblyn
March 15, 2016 – 10:35 am
When I think back on commencement addresses I have sat through I think of shiny, successful speakers urging the grads on to scale great heights and capture their dreams. After all it’s the grads big day. Why mention the worms-under-the-rock moments that might (will) happen in their lives. What to do with those bad dreams? […]
A Clearer Way to See – The Shared Poetic Vision of Lorna Crozier and Patrick Lane
June 2, 2015 – 11:02 am
Yesterday, fleece under my sports jacket, I sat in Montreal with a few thousand others in a gargantuan white tent and listened to the convocation address at McGill University’s Spring Convocation for the Faculty of the Arts and Religious Studies. Yes, it was drafty and chilly under that tent but I didn’t notice. There are […]
Where The God Waits To Eat Us – Patrick Lane’s New Poetry Collection, Washita
November 2, 2014 – 9:00 pm
FOR THE WOMAN WHO DANCED WITH THE ASHES OF HER SON Strange how beautiful when we are diaphanous, a bit of ripped muslin set against the sun, the wind soft as a child’s skin. Tragedy does that to us and we are made the greater for our smallness. A bright pebble among the discarded shells. […]
Wendell Berry and Patrick Lane — How Darkness Comes Into The World — Part Two
January 17, 2014 – 3:45 pm
In Part One of this post I discussed the striking similarities between two, in some aspects, very different poems by Wendell Berry ( A Poem On Hope) and Patrick Lane (Cougar). In Part Two I wanted to feature the full-length version of Berry’s poem and the recent convocation address by Lane that, in some ways, […]
When Beauty Falls In Our Hands – Patrick Lane
July 6, 2013 – 11:14 pm
A few weeks ago I was lucky enough to be in Kelowna to see the celebrated Canadian poet Patrick Lane receive an Honourary Doctorate from UBC – Okanagan. I also was privileged to hear him give the Convocation address. I was thrilled today to discover that the Globe and Mail has published a copy of the address. […]
And There Is No More – But Lots More of Poet, Christopher Locke
May 9, 2013 – 4:55 pm
In January 2007 I was preparing to lead my first Recovering Words poetry writing workshop at The Orchard, a drug and alcohol recovery centre on Bowen Island, offshore West Vancouver. I was looking for poems on addiction from an addict’s point of view. I had found a chilling one called Half-Hearted Moon from the section […]