Reading Reading the Bible Backwards Backwards

There were a lot of surreal things about the Robert Priest reading at the Dora Keogh last night. Not the least of which, the pub did not stock Bombay Sapphire.

I had to settle for Tanqueray. Women of a certain age can be rather fussy about their gin, darling, though I admit it’s unlikely I’d do well in a blind taste test. Still, there’s a great deal  to be said for blue.

On the other hand, there’s much to be said for those occasions where none of it is your agenda, and you get to try new things and meet new people. How did I end up going to a book launch for poet Robert Priest? Why from Facebook, of course.

This invite sold me in two seconds flat. I tend to get rather excited about flippant Catholic imagery, being a child of the Madonna generation. The cover of his book, Reading the Bible Backwards, featured the Madonna herself as the centre of a vinyl record. I mean, how cool was that?

Robert Priest, not to be confused with Judas Priest, is also known as Dr. Poetry. He writes poems for children, adults, and those who aren’t so sure. His numerous children’s books are beloved by CBC, Today’s Parent Magazine, and kiddies from sea to shining sea. But the good doctor is also playwright and novelist and journalist and songwriter. He also has big hair, always has, according to a quick scan on Google. He wrote a hit song for Alanis Morissette, and snippets for the Farmer’s Almanac. He writes for Now Magazine, Toronto’s progressive weekly, and consistently wins cool awards.  But best of all, in my mind, he says fascinating things about writing: “As a Priest, it is also my job to let the light in, to be a reflector, to open up curtains.”

Now, Priest is the kind of clever wordsmith I envy, the kind who never runs out of great titles like A Terrible Case of the Stars and Reading the Bible Backwards. Like the titles, there is an edge of razor wit and a tinge of droll morbidity throughout the poet’s wordscapes. Robert read a handful to a roomful of admirers, including a poem about that topic most neglected in poetry: the humble anus. Like I said, there were a few surreal things, and that was one of them, considering it was an excellent poem.

Now ECW Press editor Michael Holmes was certainly not shy in expressing how he felt about Robert’s new book. “Wonderful, powerful, funny,” he told us. “It’s my favourite book of Canadian poetry that I’ve read in years.”

I read the book cover-to-cover- back cover to front cover, that is- in honour of the title theme. (Another wonderful touch to the underlying Suessianism of an over-35 event: in devotion to the poet, one fellow wore his tie and sweater vest backwards.) We started with a cheerful love poem, and laughed our way through the mundane and hilarious emblems of this world. Sometimes I felt the spirit of e.e. cummings and even George Carlin, who was remembered in the book’s acknowledgements.

Along the way, I memed and spliced. Words danced. I encountered chicken physics, the trickster’s trickstress, and Frequently Unasked Questions. I looked up metazoan in the dictionary, and plowed right on through until I had read Reading the Bible Backwards back to front.

And all this is how it came to me, a small but curious discovery:

The Bible is not a palindrome, and if we all read Revelations first, we’d then know how insane it is to take it too literally. Which would mean that along the way, its poetry would not get lost in wars of literalism the way it has always gotten lost throughout its bloody history.

Visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.

Reading S.E. Venart’s Woodshedding

You aren’t expecting the poet to talk about Peaches, known for such musical subtleties as Fuck the Pain Away. You aren’t expecting to go outdoors, leaping with goats, like Heidi, or to be hallowed by hope.

You aren’t expecting most of S.E. Venart’s surprises. They are as startling and stunning as fresh, crisp autumn apples.

It took me a few months to get to my commentary, and I felt guilty for taking my time with the poet’s first collection, from Brick Books, called Woodshedding. But I suspect she wouldn’t want me to hurry. Woodshedding is many things to the poet, including the solitary and arduous practice of jazz musicians, their spontaneous singing. It is also about writing alone, in a “Waldenesque environment,” the author says on her website, woodshedding.org. And so I imagine my reading was as the writer intended it to be, after all is said and done, flipping to random pages during rare solitude, carefully brewing ginger tea and sipping it from tiny goblets.

Indeed, despite every effort, “we still can’t save each other/ instead, we drink pot after pot of tea,” Venart muses. These small rituals, the pouring of hot water, the sounding out of words, make scars from wounds, and ordinary, specific joys out of chaos and upheaval.

Try this morsel, from Postcard to You.

Since I came back, my days
so thin, barely there: Peaches,
the burlesque queen of techno-
punk’s in town. Tonight,
I could go see her but the urge
is just a tip
of all that’s wrong with me.

Forget all the poetry you’ve read before, either to bored tears for its stuffy irrelevance, or to the head-scratching disbelief over greeting card schmaltz. Venart’s gift at conveying the quiet textures of everyday life with the magic of words is quite different from anyone else. The poems, and the playful exploration of the theme of ‘woodshedding,’ evoke all the surprise and pleasure at words found in e. e. cummings, or indeed, in fridge magnet poetry, yet they are honed, with chance a kind of chosen element, hardly random.  They have a playful feeling of discovery, yet they mirror our deepest emotions, pull up the fragmented parts or our lives we’ve never found the words for ourselves.

Anyone who has grieved will find resonance in Edison, in following Venart through her kitchen, “not wanting hunger, but faced all the same with its pain.” A pear, half an orange, a graying fig become a detailed landscape where the emptiness is shiny and stark. “It was hope with a twist. I wanted you not gone./ I imagined you netted, pulled back from ether or domed/ In still life, caught in the grid-work of clouds.”
Then the poet steers us deep into childhood, making jam and wax handprints with Mom. “We don’t talk about the days you didn’t get up,” she begins. Then later in the poem, celebrates the wax, “preserving our smallness to hang on strings, now fading in the kitchen window.” She surmises that throughout these days on Varsity Drive, “Sometimes we were good enough to trick you out of sadness.”

But as in William Carlos’ Williams ice cold plums, it is in the kitchen where my favourite piece by this poet takes place. Each of us has likely experienced firsthand the traumatic consequences of doing the dishes, whether we have been the martyred dish-doer, rightfully nagging for a bit of effing help at the sink, or the one who rushes off after filling her stomach, forgetting that sustenance and pleasure require some sacrifice from somebody. Nothing, not adultery or dirty laundry has as much volatility as the damn dishes do, and yet until this day I know of no one who could capture the essence of this quotidian drama in a perfect poem. “I missed my chance to be graceful,” the narrator laments in Escape. “Instead, I left you with the dishes.” Roaming outdoors, searching for the goat “who’d eloped into the clover,” she frolics with Timothy in the “lofty dusk” against a landscape of jagged pines. As the  “first stars pricked their sharp time into mine,” the poet recalls the task she has abandoned.

Finally, it must be noted that there are little windows behind the details. Like the continual resurfacing of the title’s random complexities, each detail has more than one face. Take the opening quote by Ernest Oberholtzer, an American conservationist, as a tour guide through Venart’s stories. “I want to see everything,” he says. “I don’t care how hard it is.”

Visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.

Dirty Laundry: Life with my Brother Christopher Ciccone

I’m not the only one who eagerly anticipated the inside scoop by Christopher Ciccone, Her Madjesty’s brother. I held a shred of hope that he might be a very insightful person, in addition to being her brother, and that I’d be closer somehow.

There’s not much I admire more than manic creativity, and few, ever, have had as much as she has of this elusive gift. I’m most powerful when I’m creating, but to point out that my productivity is a teeny weenie fraction of hers would be kicking a bitch while she’s down.

So yeah, I’m guessing that what you’re feeling is that Madonna, like, so acts like she’s queen of the world, dear brother. Huh? Because she IS, hello?

I’m sympathetic, believe me. To be an art fag in a small town, and be sure that life will be surprising and vivid. Then, your sister just happens to be way bigger than the president. She’s president of the world. She’ s LOADED. She’s loaded with wildfire. She is a machine. She is staring at you, sometimes naked, from everywhere you look. You hear her zillion hits everywhere you go. There are cameras poking and prodding all the time. You just landed on planet Madonna.

But then, I’m vacuumed dry from a brief trip in the mall. She’s got to have a massive core of strength to retain to renew that output. The emptiness that must be there inside when every tiny thought or action is magnified. The sheer insanity and awesome vanity of her world. She writes about these unique emotions we can’t really experience in her songs. She may rule us, but she also belongs to us. She is a very deep woman if her well has not run dry. And it hasn’t. Her work is just beginning.

All that fame, all that money, all that noise. That can’t be easy either. I would so not want that. I may act like I want it, but that’s just bravado, I assure you, just like you. But you could not possibly be Madonna and survive it if you were a doormat or a pushover or shy or something.

So, look Chris, she’s high strung, wants it her way, and insists you stop doing blow with supermodels while trying to decorate her house. What’s the issue here? I hear whining.

No, really, this memoir is only embarrassing for the brother; even though it’s clear Sister can be a meanie, that she spent a lot of her life thinking only about herself. Oh, gee, that’s right, she even wrote a song about that. The lyrics were “I was selfish.” Even more degrading in this book was the continual bellyaching over and over about mopping her sweat and doing her laundry when he worked as his newly famous sis’s dresser. There’re a million fags who would die to touch the fountain of life every night, I assure you. I can appreciate that her brother isn’t one of them, but the human machine woman runs and sweats and leaps on and off stage as do many athletes, performers, circus acts, musicians, and so on, and dressing a performer is the job where dirty laundry is going to happen. There are people who work in laundromats all over the world, and many mothers, who are just doing laundry for Joe Doe and not for Madonna. People clean up sweat. It happens all the time.

Oh, yeah, and also, Chris says Truth or Dare was a bit contrived. Quelle surprise. And yet fiction always illuminates the truth, non?

Could it be that WE get it, but he can’t see the empress for the empire? Give her a break, dude- her mistakes were/are made in public. She has a lot of balls to never look back. Look, little brother, I don’t want to hear another Madonna ‘my dead mother’ song ever again, either. But yo, she does have emotions, exhaustion, and unique challenges. If you need to work your shit out, do what you got to. But saying “I miss my mother” over and over is nowhere near as embarrassing as saying, over and over, “No, really, I only ever had miniscule key bumps when I was hanging out with Kate and Naomi and Donatella.” (Lord help her, what DID happen to that poor woman’s face? I really like her but it’s difficult looking at her.) No really, the smallest bumps you’ve ever seen. Besides, like Madonna charged me fifty cents for a joint when we were 16. Can you believe that? Smoking pot. It’s fine for her to experiment 20 years ago once or twice, but it’s not okay for me and my fruit flies to have a blow orgy beside her pool whiles she’s out working. What gives?

Finally, though I am the champion of everything good and gay in this world, at the front of the parade of the pink regime, I can’t stand mumbling and whining about endless perceived homophobia, not when there are people being executed or losing jobs or getting bashed. I’m not going to blame my every failure on misogyny. We live in the real world. We have to find a way to live among people who don’t value fags or women. We have to have energy available for real crises of homophobia for which there are plenty. But there are dozens of jabs, innuendoes, and victim-mongerings throughout Chris’s bio that had me rolling my eyes so frequently they nearly fell out of my skull. Warren Beatty was secure in his masculinity, coolio with the gay brother. Guy Ritchie- not so much. Kept using the word ‘twee,’ apparently, as Chris slaved over the design of hubby’s shoe closet. You know, I’ve been looking for a new word. As a usually-straight chick, ‘fag’ doesn’t quite go well on a t-shirt. “Queer” as in “queer sensibility” is as good as it gets, but reminds me way too much of all that time spent slogging through those dullsville books on gender polemics back when I was, well, more polemic. Twee…now that’s exactly right…

I’ve long awaited the Madonna biography that might really satisfy. Something deeply intelligent, informative, insightful. This was not it. What can be said that hasn’t been said about Madonna? I mean, you can take “Madonna” courses in university. She’s living history. Rainforests have disappeared to print what has been said about Madonna. But after reading every biography known to me written about my mother, I know there’s only one who can tell the story right, and I will wait until she tells it. I should have known all along.

Visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.

The Need and the Damage Done: A Review of Bazhe’s Damages

Here’s a review from the Idea Museum archives, of a biography of a very interesting fellow.

The Need and the Damage Done

Everyone needs to be loved, and in return, to love, and Bazhe spent much of his life loving and caring for others while carrying with him the feeling that he belonged nowhere. His story is complicated; a vast series of political and personal tragedies, told to the reader as he tells the story to his biological mother over cigarettes while his adoptive mother suffers and dies of colon cancer.

For someone with such an unfortunate platform to begin life with, Bazhe strikes me through his story, our correspondence, and his art as a sensitive, caring, creative and intelligent person. Miss Macedonia, as he was fondly (and not so fondly) nicknamed was adopted by a gruff, powerful man who abused him, and a classy but helpless woman who gave him the love he never found with his biological mother. But living in former Yugoslavia and the Middle East, political unrest and terrorism didn’t mix very well with his gay identity or his talent for looking fantastic in women’s clothes.

Add to that the incredibly stressful process of immigrating to the United States, waiting with baited breath for freedom, even as the freedom there reveals its own hidden face of greed and exploitation. All of this was going on while the only person who ever loved him was suffering badly from the most degrading form of cancer.

It’s a story you won’t want to miss. As Bazhe states on his web site, truth is stranger than fiction. Bazhe reaches across with such intensity that it is impossible not to feel as if you are friends, that you know him. You almost feel you love him.

The book has five stars on Amazon. One reviewer, Diana, wrote on Amazon Books that “I fell in love with the main character while reading his true story and so many times wished I could reach out and hold him. This story is different from most true stories I have read. The author’s writing is full of passion and rich in description of his fight to find his true identity and freedom. He suffered incredible hardships yet still made it out alive and overcame the ignorance of the society.”

Searching for love and sexual healing through promiscuity, with the belief that men are sluts, constantly hunting, and never satisfied, he comes up unfulfilled. Betrayed by the men one loves for longer than a few minutes, who wouldn’t self destruct?

His dreams are fulfilled just like in a soap opera when a wealthy, intelligent, gorgeous soul mate falls in love with him. Here, Bazhe is introduced here to his lover’s desire to see his beauty in the guise of a woman. With emeralds and lavish nightclubs to showcase his new persona, he finds some happiness and acceptance, and enjoys the theatrics of this life and the resulting love. But then, his partner asks him for something unthinkable, and while he ponders it, he finds out more. This is when he runs away, realizing that every happiness is a mirage.

Bazhe’s struggle to make life comfortable for his dying mother will bring back happy and horrifying memories to anyone who has watched a loved one suffer from cancer, and his love towards her is unselfish and unrelenting. My admiration for his strength through these and many more tragedies is unyielding. Yet I must admit that I can’t comprehend his lifelong anger for the biological mother who deserted him, especially after he found her. I wasn’t orphaned myself and don’t suppose to put myself in his shoes, but there is so much anger toward her for giving him away. He is still asking her why she did it, and leaving it as a question for which he will never know the truth by the end of the book.

Yet she made it clear why, early in the book. Fifteen years old, in a country with no options, completely unequipped to support or love a child, and the conception was not out of youthful passion but force by an older Serbian man. It seems to me more than obvious why she made a painful but necessary decision, one that as a woman I see as an act of love. The only other alternative would have been to halt the child’s existence entirely, an option not safely available at that time, and morally questionable to many worldwide. It seems a blessing that she chose to carry and give birth to this lost young man, despite all of the pain and loss he endured. If Bazhe had not come into the world, we would never be touched by his art and his poetry. It is impossible to determine if his life would have been less tragic had his own mother kept him. It would have meant life without the woman who raised him, whom he loved deeply.

Don’t worry, I haven’t given the whole story away, and besides, the whole idea of a biography like this is that there is no need for secrets. We can mirror traces of our life in Bazhe’s search for meaning, and be supported by his strength and creativity, which get him through these incidents and a multitude more that you won’t believe could happen to one person. Order the book at www.bazhe.com.

And even as Bazhe asks the public to suspend judgement and acknowledge that behind his more questionable actions or situations is a story, I would ask him to find full peace by forgiving the ultimate abandoning. The peace he wishes on all around him in the world is something I hope he can find, finally and fully, for himself.

Visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www. thegirlcanwrite.net.