Griffin Prize Shortlist – Winner Announced Tonight, June 7th 2023 – A Look Back on My Blog Posts on some of the Nominated Books and Authors

June 7, 2023 – 11:50 am

Canadian poet Susan Musgrave and her poetry collection, Exculpatory Lilies, one of the nominees for the 2023 Griffin Poetry Prize

I left this somewhat late! A quick look at blog posts I have written on four of the five shortlisted nominees for the Griffin Poetry Prize – Susan Musgrave, Ocean Vuong, Roger Reeves, Ada Limón and Iman Mersal (translated by co-nominee Robyn Creswell). When I say I left this late it’s because the winner will be announced (in a few hours) tonight in Toronto! The winner receives a lot of attention and a $130,000 prize, said to be the largest of its kind!

Here below is a bit of a mash up on four of the five nominated books!

In 2022 I profiled Canadian poet Susan Musgrave’s poetry collection Exculpatory Lilies and featured two complimentary poems by Ocean Vuong and Roger Reeves based on a poem by Frank O’Hara. And back in 2020 I profiled Ada Limon.

Here an excerpt from my post on Susan:

POSTSCRIPT
SEPTEMBER 14th, 2022

The day you are cremated, a girl modelling a black hoodie
like the one I’ve chosen for you to wear, lights up my Facebook page:
I survived because the fire inside me burned brighter than the fire
around me. I hear you laugh at the irony as they fire up the retort,
a laugh dragged through the ashes of a thousand cigarettes, tokes
of crack, my sweet dangerous reckless girl, what could I do
but weep, the way I did when you were four, butting out
a Popeye candy cigarette you scored from the boy next door
for showing him your vagine through the split cedar fence.
I told you, next time baby, hold out for the whole pack, trying
to be brave, the way only a mother could. Now I carry you home
in a plain cedar urn, the remains of all you were reduced
to this smaller, portable size. Not even you could survive
the fire this time, your light in ashes now.

Susan Musgrave from Exculpatory Lilies, McClelland & Stewart, 2022
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Version 2 – Moving to Delilah – Guest Poetry Blog Series – Contributor # 15 – Canadian Poet Catherine Owen – Part One of Two

May 23, 2023 – 6:56 pm

Canadian poet Catherine Owen: Photo courtesy of Catherine Owen.

Sunflower, August

The mammoth is its own planet.
Each day, for months, it grows inches, thickens,
its pedicel like obese bamboo, leaves plattering out,
shading tomatoes and peas, quashing the cedar’s spread.
Height attained, the fleshy receptacle expands,
florets first petaling within, the whole head
a conjunction of spikes, fortress grin or alien apparition.
Every morning, turning in a different direction,
before its inflorescence, from the dark seed, already prepared
to breathe in the rays, transform bract into corolla.
*
The mammoth is its own planet or a satellite of seeds, each
lipping from a sepal, an anther, but what is most flagrant,
hard to say: the jungle-vast leaves, trunk ridged as night’s
spine or this inflorescence, all the stigmas melded, fastened
in florets, the whole a corolla of twisting always
towards the light.
*
The mammoth is its own planet. Its face uninhabited
by grief. Now, growth peaked, it forms seeds within each
eventual unsealing and release. Its scent a honey-musk
that weighs your leaning towards, your burial in the past.
Redeems it. In part. You’ve lashed it to the deck as if a siren
on the mast but it never stops widening and, at night, floats over
the lawn, a soft moon in prickly carapace.
Believe that it is beyond you and it is.

Catherine Owen from Moving to Delilah, forthcoming in 2024 from Freehand Books, Calgary

RICHARD’S LEAD-IN FOR CATHERINE OWEN AND HER BLOG POST INTRODUCTION

What a delight when Catherine Owen said yes to joining the Recovering Words Guest Poetry Blog Series and, again, when her two posts arrived a few days later! She blamed that quick turn around on the smoke from the awful wildfires in Alberta.  A good but unfortunate excuse to write inside on a smokey day! Her post below is the first of two. And her second  features the celebrated American poet Victoria Chang and her 2020 masterwork: Obit which won a number of prestigous national American prizes and was nominated for others including the National Book Award and the Griffin International Poetry Prize.

Catherine Owen is no stranger to these pages. I have included her in a number of posts, the most recent featuring her poetry collection: Riven published by ECW Press in 2020. To read that blog post please click here.  And I continue to consider her 2014 collection Designated Mourner a must-have in any poetry collection. This book-length elegy made up of individual poems was triggered by the death of her spouse, Chris, in 2010 as a consequence of the damage to his body from a long-term drug addiction. After reading this collection it is no wonder Catherine picked OBIT to feature in her second post.

Designated Mourner captures Catherine’s overwhelming loss from Chris’s death, one of the huge losses captured inside Catherine’s haunting last line to her poem above: with two cats, everything I owned, except for all I had lost. Some of that loss is caught so viscerally in this poem from Designated Mourner: Read More »

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We Can Always Praise – Three Poems – A Meditation on Horseradish and Radishes – Lysheha, Harrison, Issa

May 22, 2023 – 8:25 pm

Ukrainian poet Oleh Lysheha (1949 -)

Song 352

When you need to warm yourself,
When you are hungry to share a word,
When you crave a bread crumb,
Don’t go to the tall trees —
You’ll not be understood there, though
Their architecture achieves cosmic perfection,
Transparent smoke winds from their chimneys.
Don’t go near those skyscrapers —
From the one-thousandth floor
They might toss snowy embers on your head..
If you need warmth
It’s better to go to the snow-bound garden.
In the farthest corner you’ll find
The lonely hut of the horseradish..
Yes, it’s here, the poor hut of a horseradish..
Is there a light on inside? — Yes, he’s always at home..
Knock at the door of horseradish..
Knock on the door of his hut..
Knock, he will let you in..

Oleh Lysheha, translated by Kames Brasfield from BBC Radio, 2012

As so often happens I get inspired by a Facebook post by Ilya Kaminsky. Today, he posted lines from the poem above by the Ukrainian poet Oleh Lysheha. On a horseradish of all things. Knowing the darkness overshadowing Ukraine these days this whimsical poem above is a delight. As Ilya says in his post referring especially to the last five or six lines: There is a curious combination of luminosity and playfulness here.

In the farthest corner you’ll find
The lonely hut of the horseradish..
Yes, it’s here, the poor hut of a horseradish..
Is there a light on inside? — Yes, he’s always at home..
Knock at the door of horseradish..
Knock on the door of his hut..
Knock, he will let you in..

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By Richard Osler | Posted in Poetry | Tagged , , , , , ,

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Guest Poetry Blog Series #15 – Canadian Poet Catherine Owen Features American Poet Victoria Chang – Part Two of Two

May 22, 2023 – 7:00 pm

American poet Victoria Chang: Photo Credit: Jay Glendenin, Los Angeles Times

Tears – died on August 3, 2016. Once
we stopped at a Vons to pick up
flowers and pinwheels on our way to
the graveyard. It had been a year and
death no longer glittered. My ten-year-
old putting the flowers perfectly in the
small narrow hole in front of the stone.
How she somehow knew what the hole
was for, that my mother wasn’t really on
the other side. Suddenly, our sobbing.
How many times have I looked into the
sky for some kind of message, only to
find content but no form. She ran back
to the car. The way grief takes many
forms, as tears or pinwheels. The way
the word haystack never conjures up
the same image twice. The way we
assume all tears taste the same. The
way our sadness is plural, but grief is
singular.

Victoria Chang from OBIT, Copper Canyon Press, 2020

Elegies are my most exquisite addiction. No, obsession. And possibly, the most essential task of poetry is commemoration. And yet, we live in a self-consciously apocalyptic time in which everything seems to turn elegy. So how to make the sub-genre sing again, become rupturous, rapturous?

Victoria Chang’s 2020 collection OBIT has been that form-shaker for me, transforming what is often a typically lyrical response into a puncturingly interrogative one that points to how worlds perish when people do, even if they remain alive in body as her father has, but erased mentally through dementia.

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Oh World, Leave Me Slowly – The New Poetry Collection from American Poet Francesca Bell

May 15, 2023 – 1:17 pm

A launch annoucement for American poet Francesca Bell’s latest poetry collection, What Small Sound, being held today at Auntie’s Bookstore, Spokane, Wa.

Manifest Image

The man keeps telling me I am beautiful.
I still look young.

He says it like I’ve asked for it,
but I don’t care.

For him or beauty.

I am content to slip into old,
wrinkled plainness,

to walk on unimpeded.

I was young once.
My body stunned.
My breasts were really something,

but I was something else entirely.

Something no one one could see
until now.

Francesca Bell from What Small Sound, Red Hen Press, 2023

The poem above comes from Francesca Bell’s latest book, only her second collection, but her poems have been making waves in recent years appearing in many journals, notably Rattle, where she has been featured in the Poets Respond series and where she won the Neil Postman Prize for metaphor.

Like wildfire smoke, loss hangs over the poems of  of What Small Sound  (loss of innocence, of bodily and mental health, to name a few) but like smoke, sometimes these losses can retreat leaving the landscape still there, fully revealed, still holding on. Other times, especially in her poems of sexual violence, it stays. But in her epigraph poem of this blog post, the last poem in her collection, she ends with the smoke gone. The triumph of this. The triumph in the quick colloquial pace of these lines:

I was young once.
My body stunned.
My breasts were really something,

but I was something else entirely.

Something no one one could see
until now.

This confidence, this  wisdom of Francesca’s in a culture where female beauty is held up like some idol to be worshipped. So often a false idol that betrays the beholder and the one beheld. And in this poem her characteristic quick biting wit, this delightful ouch:

He says it like I’ve asked for it,
but I don’t care.

For him or beauty.

This collection like her first, Bright Stain, which I reviewed in a post here in 2019, holds a magnifying glass to the ugliness in the world but will not succumb to despair. In this I think of something Jane Hirschfield said to Kaveh Akbar in the American Poetry Review in the March/April 2020 issue about a poem she wrote in response to a dark and despairing poem of hers. In the response poem she remembers that mourning must not overwhelm gratitude for what is being lost; that grief must not obscure praise; that it is, quite simply, rude not to love this moment’s very existence.

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To Celebrate the 2023 Pulitzer Poetry Prize Winner – Esteemed American Poet and Teacher, Carl Phillips – Two of His Poems and One By American Poet Linda Gregg

May 8, 2023 – 4:59 pm

American poet Carl Phillips (1959 – ) Photo Credit: The Huffington Post, 2015

That the Gods Must Rest

That the gods must rest doesn’t mean that they stop existing.
Is that true? Do you believe it’s true?

                                       I could tell it was morning

by all the crows rising again from that otherwise abandoned husk
of a car over there – so ruined, who can tell the make of it now,
what color. Or maybe if being stranded on a wind farm at night
with no stars to sing to could be a color – that color, maybe…
The way an unexpectedly fine idea will sometimes emerge from
what looked on the outside like the mind as usual treading water
was the crows, rising. A misleading clarity to the air, like logic:
he only wants what he deserves; he deserves everything he wants;
I deserve all I’ve ever built and fought for; we deserve our loneliness.

Carl Phillips from Then The War; And Selected Poems 2007-2020, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2022

I was delighted to discover that yesterday it was announced that the gay black American poet and teacher Carl Phillips had won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for poetry for his latest (his sixteenth) full-length poetry collection, Then The War; And Selected Poems 2007-2020. Back in 2020, after the publication of his, then, last collection of poems, Pale Colors in a Tall Field, I featured him in a blog post. To read that post please click here. From that post this description of Carl:

To enter into a Carl Phillips poem is to embrace wonder and mystery and to surrender to both. The wonder of his rich language and his disarming conversational voice that seems to place him right beside me as I read. Yet in that seemingly casual voice he can throw out astounding complex and perplexing ideas one after another. And as well he can communicate a sense of physicality and intimacy especially around sexual encounters that adds a haunting immediacy to his work.

What I didn’t say in that post was how, so often, his poems end in a startling and utterly unexpected way as the does the epigraph poem featured above. How we go from gods, to morning, to crows, an abandoned wreck of a car, to being at a place on a starless night and how that could be a colour, to how great ideas arrive, to deserving, then wanting, then this:

I deserve all I’ve ever built and fought for; we deserve our loneliness.

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Life Unmitigated – Guest Poetry Blog # 14 – Introducing the Latest Contributor, American Poet Christopher Locke – Part One of Two

May 4, 2023 – 6:00 pm

American Poet Christopher Locke

Waiting for Grace

Waiting for my daughter’s school bus, a March
afternoon brushed haunted and grey, I keep
company with the clouds, their gaunt reflections
charcoaled atop our pond, the wind tugging its iron
cloak around trees standing nude along the shore,
as if between acts and someone has stolen their
beautiful gowns. I feel feral and alone, slouching
in my black coat and sipping a Pepsi One, thinking
again I’ll never shake my lust for pills, narcotics
which have unknit my life so completely. I close
my eyes and concentrate on something brighter,
take another swig off my harmless soda. Above
me, a small abacus of birds fills a telephone
wire, and I smile when I think of her, my daughter
Grace: ten-years-old and sunk deep in a harem
of gossip as she navigates fourth grade; deciding
at lunch which queen is ripe for the plucking. And
if it isn’t hysteria wrought by the Jonas Brothers,
then it’s the complaint her arms are too fat, holding
them out, incredulous, for my wife and me to inspect.
But what she doesn’t know is that every day she saves
my life—drilling the science quiz together at night,
or just by asking that I pass the ketchup at dinner
is what keeps me here, awkward yet alive. And
now, the yellow cube of her bus rounding the corner,
stopping in front of the driveway. I see her through
the windows laughing, popping gum at her friends.
It’s only when she steps onto the pavement, crosses
the street toward me that I realize we’re both moving,
both in the process of leaving something behind.

Christopher Locke from Waiting for Grace & Other Poems, Turning Point, 2013

RICHARD’S LEAD-IN FOR CHRISTOPHER LOCKE AND HIS BLOG POST INTRODUCTION

So pleased to be able to introduce American poet Christopher Locke and the first of his two guest poetry blog posts. His second post will feature the American poet Dennis Johnson.

I will never forget when I discovered Christopher and his poetry. I was stressed and anxious. It was 2007. I was preparing to lead my first poetry therapy session at a drug and alcohol recovery center on Bowen Island, offshore Vancouver. I had picked a poem by German poet Rainer Maria Rilke and one by Canadian poet Patrick Lane to use in the session but I felt I needed another, like Patrick’s, written from the perspective of someone in recovery from addiction.

In desperation I picked up a copy of the US journal The Sun that had arrived that day. I opened it and found Christopher’s poem New Weather. Holy-frigging-hallelujah! A poem from the front-row of recovery! I wrote about this in this blog post on Christopher in 2013!
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Our Mosaics of Aches – A Tribute to American Poet Jean Valentine (April 27th, 1934- December 29th, 2020)

April 29, 2023 – 3:01 pm

 

American poet Jean Valentine (1934-2020). Photo Credit: The New York Times

Bees

A man whose arms and shoulders
and hands and face and ears are covered with bees
says, I’ve never known such pain.
Another man comes over
with bees all over his hands—
only bees can get the other bees off.
The first man says again,
I’ve never known such pain.
The second man’s bees begin to pluck
the first grave yellow bees off, one by one.

Jean Valentine (April 27th, 1934-December 29th, 2020) from Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems 1965-2003, Wesleyan University Press, 2004

Jean Valentine, the much-awarded American poet who died in late 2020, often wrote condensed poems like this one above. It may seem mysterious. What’s with the bees? But the imagery is arresting.  And it might help to know that Valentine was a recovering alcoholic. It is always tricky to read a poem knowing a poet’s biographical information but it can help. Gives a lens.

I was reminded of Jean thanks to a Facebook post by Ilya Kaminsky on April 27th, the anniversary of Jean’s birth in nineteen thirty-four. I had meant to write a blog post celebrating her life and poetry when she died but time passed. So, what a great time at the end of 2023 National Poetry Month to celebrate her with this signature minimalist poem. And its abrupt and unexpected juxtaposition of opposites so evident in her poetry.
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Joining the Unknown to the Known – Guest Poetry Blog # 13 – Introducing the Latest Contributor, Canadian Poet Terry Ann Carter – Part One of Two

April 27, 2023 – 12:08 pm

 

Terry Ann Carter. Photo Credit: Rhonda Ganz

Windy Nights

Whenever the moon and stars are set,
Whenever the wind is high,
All night long in the dark and wet,
A man goes riding by.

Late in the night when the fires are out,
Why does he gallop and gallop about?
Whenever the trees are crying aloud,
And ships are tossed at sea.

By, on the highway, low and loud,
By at the gallop goes he.
By at the gallop he goes, and then
By he comes back at the gallop again.

Robert Louis Stevenson from A Child’s Garden of Verses, first printed by Longmans, Green & Co, 1885

RICHARD’S LEAD-IN FOR TERRY ANN CARTER AND HER BLOG POST INTRODUCTION

So pleased to be able to introduce Victoria-based Canadian poet and paper artist Terry Ann Carter and the first of her two guest poetry blog posts. Her second post will feature the Ontario-based Canadian poet Claudia Coutu Radmore.

Terry Ann is no stranger to these pages. I have featured her in two blog posts in 2018 and 2022. To see those posts please click here and here. And she was featured in a post as a paper arts facilitator for my ten-day poetry retreat at the La Romita School of Art, scheduled for June 2020 but cancelled because of Covid. The good news: she is coming back with me to La Romita again to teach her paper arts magic in June 2024.
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Guest Poetry Blog # 12 – Pamela Porter Features Canadian Poet Wendy Donawa – Part Two of Two

April 18, 2023 – 3:52 pm

Canadian poet Wendy Donawa. Photo Credit: from her website.

(To see Part One of Pamela Porter’s two-part guest blog post please click here.)

PAMELA PORTER FEATURES CANADIAN POET WENDY DONAWA AND HER BOOK: our bodies’ unanswered questions

 

Wendy Donawa is a force. Her voice ranges from the tongue-in-cheek to calls for justice, to the careful attention required to describe two hawks mating high in the air. She recognizes the heart-stopping beauty of it all:

Kettle of Hawks

Hawks choose open fields, desert, the plunge and rend of prey,
though they can lie anywhere, even this canyon of condos.

I looked up from my book as hi lit on the balcony,
arm-length away. His yellow glare seized me.
what threw his flight path awry?

What of me did his vision inhale?
Detector of ultra-violet, of magnetic fields,
his fovea enlarge focus fourfold,
what poem might I write with his arsenal?

Perhaps he saw a poor bland creature,
mole-blind, without the four receptors
bringing him hues beyond our spectrum.
We don’t even have a word for them.

Perhaps his augmented focus on my jugular vein,
it’s blood-throb, evinced a brief interest.

My slow finger kept its place in the book
as he dismissed the mammal in its glass cage,
returned to kinetic memories, his kettle of hawks
wheeling and swirling on the thermals
circling up and up when mating
until they latch and free fall.

Who would not choose such ecstasy?

Wendy Donawa from our bodies’ unanswered questions, Frontenac House, 2021

Wendy Donawa has a prolific vocabulary. Words I haven’t heard in general speech
in decades. Words I have only read in much older editions of hardcover books, some of which I had to look up in the dictionary. But her vocabulary — the music of those words and phrases, lends authenticity to her work. She comes by it naturally. It’s who she is.

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