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.

Cypress Planting with Barbara Klar

Barbara Klar is intimate with trees. The poet spent nearly a decade planting them, and it’s clear from Cypress, her latest poetry collection from Brick Books, that she communes with the sacred through them. While there are millions of symbols of the natural world, from the salamander to the star, it is the tree on which we are dependent for oxygen, for materials for our shelters, even for the cross- and especially, for the book itself. The absence of the tree also reveals something: our greed as a species, our blatant lack of concern for the future, for the earth and its inhabitants.

Documenting the natural world, carefully recording or imitating its gifts, is an ancient tradition that yielded the earliest arts and the earliest religions. Even Judeo-Christian mythology harks back to Eden, a paradise garden strangely devoid of storms and plagues. Our absolute dependency on nature for food and shelter and safety has put as at her mercy, a theme paralleled in pagan and monotheistic theology, where we are always at its mercy. There is little that could inspire such devotion and awe as an ocean or a glacier or a tree. This time-honoured tradition of using art and poetry to observe the landscape and its meaning is also a very Canadian practice. From the Group of Seven to Emily Carr to Duncan Campbell Scott, Canadian artistry has been dependent since the beginning- making sense of our vast and majestic landscapes.

The author’s vision quest takes place in her home province of Saskatchewan, in Cypress Hills. She notes that there are no cypress trees there- the Métis called pine varieties ‘cypres’. The cypress tree, nonetheless, by its ghostly absence, is a potent symbol, for cemeteries throughout the Mediterranean and Middle East are abundant with this tree, a symbol of death and the afterlife. The ritualistic burial of the dead in cypress coffins and the planting of cypress trees near graves may have simply been a matter of perfumery- the fragrant tree helped improve the scent of the cemetery. But it has taken on the powerful role of watching over the dead and representing new life.

Barbara Klar carves eternal images from her trees, divining from her forests history, life and death’s endless cycle, the blood and the breath these grounds have witnessed. Sometimes, the poet’s wordiness- or worship- is too dense, like underbrush, forcing the hiker to turn back instead of going in. While her images are often captivating, the reader feels left out of the poet’s love affair with the forest- in a sense, uninvited. At times, it’s even worse- tagging along, but bored.

Still, it is a beautiful irony, a sacred ritual in and of itself, that we consume the tree in the very act or reading her history and her epitaph.

Cypress
Barbara Klar
Brick Books, 2008

Lorette C. Luzajic is the author of The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos, from Handymaiden Editions. Her poetry has been widely published, in anthologies, and in journals including Quarry, Kairos, Rattle, Grain, The Fiddlehead, Geez, Spillway, White Wall Review, New Toronto Quarterly, and Modern Poetry. Visit her at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.

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Katia Grubisic’s What if Red Ran Out

How beautiful our children would have been, though poor at pool, Katia Grubisic laments. Just why this catches me so, I cannot say, but her book of What if Red Ran Out is filled with such what ifs and were nevers. Forget about hopes of grandiosity or words tangled up to make themselves unreadable to all but the chosen few academes who must translate them for us: Katia’s world is here on earth, here with strawberry jam and moths and “cardboard eclipse thingies.”

Katia’s work has appeared in all the mandatory Canadian literati publications like Grain and The Fiddlehead and Taddle Creek. But all of this is just a disguise. Sure, she can wrestle the big themes with the best of them, or slip images into your mind that will never leave it. She can use words like ‘concupiscence’ and ‘montivagant’ and ‘convivial,’ and drop names like Seamus and Camus like she means it.

But, Katia assures us, not to worry about all of that. “Don’t worry, this is a poem/entirely without grace,” she writes. Words are important to her, but the real concerns are more along the lines of “what if red ran out?” and about the laundry. Life, however tragic or rare, is also silly. In the world Katia sees, “Eros and Thanatos have gone to the mall.” If red does not run out, she will ‘exist on raspberries” like “others who have successfully lost their minds.”

All this suggests that what’s ahead for Katia’s writing will be witty, realistic vignettes, with sweeping metaphors and astute observations, rendered with cleverness and distinction. For now, there’s still that sense of a poet trying too hard, pushing words together to make a cellist appear under a tree, for example, without any real reason why she should be there. Poetry would do well to avoid more volumes in the archives with phrases like “missing the filigreed metacarpals’ infinite division.” You can feel the earth, though, if you toss away this heavy-handed surrealism. You can feel the pulse of a very funny, very unusual, very vivid woman, and you want to get rid of those unnecessary layers, to see her naked.

What if red ran out
Katia Grubisic
Goose Lane Editions, New Brunswick, 2008.

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

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In Which the Author Discovers Erin Knight’s The Sweet Fuels

I could spend blissful years stirring academic poetic discourse around a classroom, exchanging highlighted notes and chewing on turns of phrase, but I must keep a promise I once made. I vowed to never frighten a person away from poetry, which has few enough readers, and to let more readers discover its joy. And how could I possibly do so besides sharing my own work with ‘the people?’ Well, I refuse to get caught up in the delicious word-twisting discussions of poetry that render it squashed and meaningless to anyone born after 1857, in the end.

You know what I’m talking about. Pick up an expensive art magazine, for example. You’ll hear it in the way the writers talk about a giant painting of bubbles. “The lines of the painting vivisect at terminal vertical intervals suggesting the death and excavation of history’s muse. To grasp the brushstroke with this painterly torture in mind, one must submerge all faculties in the absence of the artist’s intention.” Then they cheerfully tell you the painting, which to you seems to be a joyous and colourful celebration of gardens or something or other spring, is about the holocaust or Central American hostage holding and it costs four point seven million dollars.

And while I wholeheartedly believe we would all do well to do a few literary gymnastics, to read some old poetry and a few classics, to brush up on what’s currently on the prize lists or new in Canadian verse, it’s best that we recover honest expressions of our impressions. Remember when Kramer embarrasses the whole group by telling the girl with the Cyrano nose that she’s as pretty as any New Yorker? She ‘just needs a nose job,’ he tells her plainly. In the end, who gets the girl?

The tightly knit academic circles will forever bustle in their wordy, toothy circles. Like a bunch of heart surgeons discussing various valve suturing techniques, they will never lend a hand to the lay public to give their passion a wider audience. I vowed to be more like Kramer, to read a book as a smart and lively girl, tell it if it needs a nose job, and praise the beauty it already possesses.

Now, any number of literature professors or old-school editors would ask what the decidedly un-poetic New York television show Seinfeld has to do with Canadian poet Erin Knight’s debut, The Sweet Fuels.

Nothing, if poetry is only a Donne and Milton and Coleridge and never about the sweet plums in the icebox or Bob Dylan or about how even the rain has such small hands.

If you listen carefully to Kramer’s script, he’s a poet in every episode. Like William Carlos Williams, the K-Man waxes especially poetic about fruits. There’s the cantaloupe, there’s the avocado, and there’s the Mackinaw peaches, only available for two weeks of the year.

“The Mackinaw peaches, Jerry… I waited all year for this. Oooh, this is fantastic. Makes your taste buds come alive. It’s like having a circus in your mouth…Jerry, this is a miracle of nature that exists for a brief period. It’s like the Aurora Borealis.”

Don’t always run away from poetry because you don’t know ‘how to read poetry’ or ‘don’t get it.’ Just pick up the peach and savour it.

In Diamond, Knight writes: “Why write only if? Why not write if sunlight/strikes the dust motes in the room, if a splinter/wedges beneath your nail, if you fall/in love, if you fall? Write the nub of graphite/in your palm, pure carbon, memory/of a long-ago word- so many of us have it/lodged beneath the skin…”

Listen:

“Take the small maps on your knees. Grasses
traced routes there as you took back your wind,
while backstory spin in the bicycle tires.
When you stand, can you still read the legend
creased in the skin, is this your quietest scar?”

Listen:

“There’s a gnosis in the undersides of leaves,
silver edges turned up before a storm.”

I have no doubt that Knight’s work will stand up to the scrutiny of the higher hallways. Imagery, metaphor, “continuous engagement with our points of reference.” Check, check, check. But more importantly, this is the kind of book that talks about making tea, about making bread, about leaving the prairies, about searching maps for clues of our past. It is the kind of book that can earn the trust of the pedestrian audience, let us giggle, let us cry, move our ordinary experiences into the divinity of that diamond dust mote.

It can keep a person going through the endless and trivial travails. It is delicious, tender, redolent, and fleeting- like those fabled Mackinaw peaches, sweet fuel.

The Sweet Fuels, by Erin Knight.Goose Lane Editions, 2007.

Visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net. She is the author of The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos, a Handymaiden Edition, 2006. Look for it on Indigo or Amazon. Her poetry has also been published widely in journals like Spillway, Rattle, Modern Poetry, The Fiddlehead, Grain, Quarry, White Wall Review, and more.

Please help me by purchasing the books I talk about, my book, or any other books at chapters.indigo.ca

In Which the Author Reads Some Poetry: Daughters of Men by Brenda Leifso

The gods infuse everything, from history to popular culture, but the last thing anybody wants is yet another book of quasi-intellectual mythology-based poems. Or, like the blurb warns, another book of ‘unflinching honesty’ where the ‘mundane becomes mythic…the ordinary, extraordinary.’ And while the editor slash professor circles may wonder what a plebian like myself could know of scholarly poetry, I stand firmly half ‘of the people’ and half well-read, adequately educated poet, knowing my voice actually counts for a great deal more than the dusty, dismal, dismissed volumes of poetry no one ever read. Or ever will.

For all these reasons, I cringe when picking up Daughters of Men, by Brenda Leifso, a Calgary poet who worked as executive editor of PRISM international. The titles promise me the kind of convoluted mythology I’m hoping to avoid: Dionysus’ Seduces Pentheus and Sends Him in the Guise of a Woman to Hunt Agave. But flipping through, as the words begin to reach through my defenses, I begin softening. What other language but the stories of the gods can we use to talk about incest? How else but through the imagery of other women silenced can a soul unveil the broken wings that it is made of?

I found some of the language stunning: “a dark panic of wings,” “summer ochre in his hair.” I found some of the revelations astute: “I’m getting tired of blaming my mother./It seems I can’t write a poem without lying.” Then there’s the symbolic invention of Silenae, a character in Leifso’s interpretative The Theban Women, a long poem central to Daughters of Men. I’m connecting the name of this character, who did not officially occur in Euripides’ The Bacchae, to the word “silence,” interpreting it as a character for the silenced ones. Leifso writes that in early Greek society, baby daughters were carried into the hills to die. She envisions Silenae this way: “What might happen to one, a wild creature, who managed to live?”

This brings vivid life to girls and women who have suffered incredible atrocities, those who have not been able to speak. Wives, sisters, and daughters of men. I recall a heartbreaking conversation, years ago, with a woman who had been sexually abused by her stepfather. She said that while her childhood was traumatic, she couldn’t really dwell on it, that sexual abuse was so commonplace that it was practically a ‘rite of passage for girls.’ Indeed, it seems far more taboo to speak about it than to do it, as if we should protect the perpetrators and shroud them in secrecy. Then we act as if the victim, too, has something to hide.

Here, Leifso, who has a few poetry awards under her belt, including the Bliss Carman Banff Centre Award For Poetry, refuses this silence. Leifso writes eloquently on behalf of daughters of men, yesterday and today, who have suffered in silence. I found that at times the poetry sounded forced and self-conscious, like it was trying too hard. But the poems also ignite the imagination and recover for daughters everywhere a small sliver of lost light.

Daughters of Men
Brenda Leifso
Brick Books, 2008

Visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net. Lorette is the author of The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos. Her work has appeared in White Wall Review, Quarry, The Fiddlehead, Grain, Rattle, Modern Poetry, Book Slut, and more.

Sheri Benning’s Thin Moon Psalm

“The trick of May is to believe with empty hands,” Sheri Benning writes in Thin Moon Psalm. It is these perfectly pure phrases that make her prairie psalm a special gift. This poetry volume is that rare moment of silence in a bustling world, taking us back to the enchantment of the open sky, the moon, the things of magic and wonder that could once soothe even the most broken of hearts or skinned of elbows. “…always, after we fail at faith, small-fires of crocus or bluebell snag the eye.”

Thin Moon Psalm is Benning’s second book, following up Earth After Rain. The manuscript won the Alfred G. Bailey Prize. Her first book won two awards, also, and she won the Saskatchewan Lieutenant Governor’s Award for achievement in the arts.

That may all validate the $18 you should spend on this book, but the real reason? these small snags of bluebell:

“You make tea for a man who was your lover./Where once there was desire, now a  palm-sized heartbeat,/ pleasant to hold.”

“Night moved across you like a glacier and you woke here, bone-broken, far from where you thought you would be. If you could tie a string to your what-ifs, this is what you would weave- a hydra-nest of jackpine.”

“Listening has made your heart a bruise, a dark pearl of gravity.”

In each selection, the thin moon illuminates outlines, suggests the meanings, leaves secrets dancing in shadows. These thoughts, unsent letters, dreams, private despairs, give depth to shared experiences that we may gloss over as ordinary. Love and loss will always be the dominating themes of literature, from mythology to the Bible to Canadian poets. They are the deepest, darkest and most beautiful themes in the human experience.

Thin Moon Psalm
Sheri Benning,
Brick Books, London
2007.

Visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net. Her poetry book is available through her site, or through indigo.ca.

The Full Monty: Monty Reid, Phlip Arima, and Yannick Marshall read for the Art Bar Poetry Series

There among the new and the true walnut/bean-ball pastry shops, other Korean restaurants, and lingerie depots, nestles Toronto’s perfect dive, Clinton‘s Tavern. This humble palace, at 693 Bloor Street W, near Christie, has hosted more than its share of cool bands and given roof to creative roots of every ilk. The sunny patio, dank back room, and front saloon draw all manner of melancholy poets, tattooed vegetarians, wrist-cutters, salty old-timers, Susie-the-braless-wonders, bearded intellectuals straying far from the U of T grounds, surly not-yet rock stars, rippling rip-jeaned demigods, dreadlocked Rastas, coked out sous-chefs, and other assorted characters that form the backbone of anything interesting in this city.

Resplendent with necessary orange floral rec-room sofas, mismatched chairs, and Converse’d feet, the Clinton’s vibe is familiar and welcoming. There’s no better place for a burgie and a beer on a hot day.

Now, the Art Bar Poetry Series has been running for 17 years, the longest running poetry reading in Canada, and they’ve moved to a number of venues, finally landing perfectly off-centre where they belong. The weekly get-together for poetry lovers, entirely volunteer-driven, has shown persistence and patience and it’s paid off. I applaud the series for consistency and longevity, two true hallmarks or conviction and passion. Over the years, the little poetry-reading-that-could has become the mainstay of the Toronto literary scene, showcasing a wide variety of published poets and an open mic each Tuesday night. Currently, the very funny red-haired spitfire Cynthia Gould hosts.

It’s June 10, 2008 and the line-up of the evening includes Phlip Arima, Monty Reid, and Yannick Marshall.

Now, Phlip’s a former director of the series, and he’s infamous for his unusual performance style. He seems like an interesting fella with some great material, but I admit I’m a little intimidated by his strange style of reading. Words fail me – I honestly can’t describe it. It’s not rap, it’s not slam, it’s more performance art, a way of speeding the words up and down and pushing them out. I suspect the effect he’s aiming for is to have them pile on top one another and push the barriers of a staid reading, and his performances are certainly popular, but I must confess I preferred the work that he read more conventionally. His latest work, Breathe Now, is available from Bushchek Books. And bonus, there’s a full-frontal nude male on the cover, still a rarity and always cause for celebration! (I think it’s Phlip himself but I’m too shy to ask!)

But the real full Monty is Monty Reid, a paleontologist with three Governor General’s Award nominations and three Stephan G. Stephansson awards for his poetry. He’s got fourteen books out, but the new one, from Brick Books, is The Luskville Reductions. I can’t resist picking up a copy and you should, too. Luskville is the chance locale where the dissolution of Reid’s marriage took place, a French town near the Ottawa valley. Reid is a man of few words. The pages of this book are certainly reductions- a few carefully selected words in which to say it all.  Though the book is actually one long poem, it doesn’t matter if you open and turn to a phrase or verse at random, and this is how Reid reads for us.

Yannick Marshall celebrates his first book from Kellom Books, called Old Friend, We Made This For You. He’s a very handsome young man, of Jamaican and St. Lucian descent, with a magical and sultry voice that really lets the history he writes about show through. The works he reads are evocative of slavery days we’ve swept under the rug. Instead of feeling accusatory or overly political, his poetry simply transports us to a place we may not have been to, shows us the spirited life inside a senseless captivity.

Each Art Bar session concludes with ten readers from the audience, short takes of three minutes or less. Tonight there is a range of profound and astonishing oeuvres, and I get the feeling it’s this way all the time. There are one or two lady poets, but tonight was mostly the men baring their souls, getting naked for us in the backroom of Clinton’s. Cynthia Gould calls it “thought-provoking male voices night” and so it was. I take Reid’s book home with me and read it cover to cover before I fall into weird dreams of a nude stranger on the front lawn of my apartment building. He’s waving a fistful of chapbooks at passing cars.

www.artbar.org
Tuesdays at 8 pm
pay what you can, no pressure
Clinton’s, 693 Bloor St. W.
Visit the writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net. You can order her poetry collection, The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos through her site, indigo, or amazon online.

The Secret in the Old Attic: Anne Szumigalski’s Ghost

When Earth Leaps Up
Anne Szumigalski
Brick Books, 2006

Browsing through When Earth Leaps Up feels like one of those afternoons spent rifling through mementoes in a dusty attic, sun streaming through cracked windows. But it’s not my attic and I feel like I’m ferreting someone else’s secrets, prying open private papers. They are so compelling that I’m unable to put these mesmerizing discoveries down even as I hear footprints coming up the old stairs.

Alas, it’s just Anne Szumigalski’s ghost creeping into the shadows as I snoop through her things. She may be a little restless about When Earth Leaps Up- the posthumous volume is something of a scrapbook put together from loose papers and thoughts left behind in her personal effects. She did not order them, select them, polish them or finish them, and indeed they have an uncensored, unfinished, private feel. Without the poet’s hands-on control, I suspect I’m eavesdropping on revelations and sentiments unintended for me, and this makes this volume extraordinary.

Mark Abley, a dear friend of the poet, and a Canadian literary staple, is responsible for compiling from her files and notebooks what fills When Earth Leaps Up. He confesses to his “trepidation” at some selections in the afterword, wondering whether he’s giving up the equivalent of a journal to the public, or if he is allowing beloved scribbles to be immortalized. He acknowledges the trickiness of the whole process, not just out of privacy concerns, but also whether the poet would have felt a piece was ready, or intended at all for the public. After all, not every note a person makes is destined for completion- we scribble random ideas and poetic thoughts that later hit the paper shredder.

“I need to come clean, and state that the book you are holding is not the book that Anne would have sent out for publication, had she lived another year or two,” Abley admits. “Apart from correcting a few obvious typos, I did not alter any of her words or play with her line breaks.” Most of the pieces weren’t first drafts, he says, but then, they weren’t edited either, and Anne liked to revise her work until it felt perfect.

The resulting collection feels like a bundle of letters with a ribbon slipping out of place. It couldn’t be any more beautiful- perhaps poets need a trusted friend to keep them from overworking or hiding, another poet to coax delicate secrets from the shadows. It’s not that Anne would ever shrink from self-revelation- she rather basked in the nakedness of poetry. It’s just that here the nakedness feels more chanced, less planned. The work is as stunning, exquisite, gorgeous as always, maybe more so. The usual themes of death and change and human longing are all present, and still infused with a ribald, humourous undertone.

The title poem opens:

when earth leaps up
and heaven descends
and the two meet like lovers
then the question is
could these flowers be stars

and is dust nothing
more than the handful
I sprinkled on your face
as you went down into the dirt
(47)

Graves and skulls and bones and the anthropologies of the human condition have long been staples of Anne’s work- what greater themes could poets ponder than love or death? An early memory of my childhood centres around one of Anne’s stunning, eerie passions. I was perhaps far too young to be voraciously reading through each Canadian poet on those musty beanbag chairs at the little library, but precociously I already identified myself as a poet and knew instinctively that to write poetry, I must read it. And I came upon Sitting Under Death’s Rich Shade, where Anne ponders the skeletal remains of a man she called Frans. I couldn’t have been more than eight years old, and knew nothing of either love or death. But when Anne wrote, “ a bit/ of me is broken/because of your memory” I knew with spooky certainty that one day it would be clear. Anne closed her poem with “damn you, I cry out/you would not take me/when I was fifteen and dangerous.” (from On Glassy Wings, 117)

How I wanted to be fifteen and dangerous: to love so freely and lose so tragically. What Anne’s poems have always shown is how time waits for no one, and now it’s poignant and painful, almost a personal loss, to shuffle through Anne’s private papers as her spectre roams, eager to divulge but censored by the gods from what the living cannot know. It seems a terrible irony that the same ‘fifteen and dangerous’ for which I waited so impatiently has come and gone two decades plus ago, as have a sadly lengthy line-up of my own Frans-ian tragedies.

Still, as somber as death may be, there is buoyancy in these poems that transcends the morbid subject matter. Perhaps Anne glimpsed prophetically a comfort that she reveals from before she went beyond: penning her thoughts, which included the admission that “for the living/ there is nothing worse than death”, she writes: “When I think of him I say/’He is lost to me.’/I should say perhaps/’He is found to himself.’”(Untitled, 48)

The poems here are so stirring because Anne is no longer metaphorically Sitting Under Death’s Rich Shade, but actually buried in it. The ghostly feeling is nothing more than the fulfillment of Anne’s poetry. For all her life, she wrote carefully the questions that haunt the human heart, poetic longings for the dead, for those left here, for what we may encounter after. Now that she has slid into forever, she would have to revise this and every other volume with the answers she has found. But the human plight remains that we must wait out our own curiosities and see for ourselves this mystery. No one states this more beautifully than Anne herself in To a Friend Dying:

“this is only the beginning
of change” I shall say
as I bury your pupa
into its mound of dirt

“on the day of wings
something shall certainly emerge
perhaps not flesh
perhaps not what you expect.”
(54)

Visit the writer Lorette C. Luzajic at her web site, www.thegirlcanwrite.net.
Her poetry collection The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos is available on her site, or through Indigo or Amazon online. You should order it: it’s a damn good read!
xo Lorette

Shameless Self-Promotion: The Astronaut’s Wife by Lorette C. Luzajic

A wise man once said that the only certainties in life were death and taxes. I figured it would be incredibly boring to write a poetry collection about taxes, so I went right for the jugular. I tempered the morbidity with love, that other madness. What kind of poet doesn’t include a few love poems?

This was the official marketing blurb: Love and death have been on this poet’s mind for some time. This poetry maps a few of her most intense experiences, accentuating the positive, the unusual, and the lost. With a unique voice and lively wit, a sardonic twist, strength, and a peculiar resolve through melancholy, these words lay bare her soul. Luzajic believes in exploring the frontiers of the universe, its chaos, its beauty, its small kindnesses, its remarkable spirit. Along the way on these adventures, you sometimes have to say goodbye.

If you are one of those rare gems who constantly reads poetry, you won’t want to miss the “rapier wit” in these poems that ring with “authenticity and truth”. (Hey, I didn’t say it! Those are two of hundreds of positive comments. Not all were positive. Some called my work self-indulgent. But Thomas Moore, author of Care of the Soul, called them “imaginative, witty, and profound.” You decide!) Many of these poems were published in literary magazines like Modern Poetry, Caffeine, White Wall Review, Rattle, Grain, The Fiddlehead and so on. On top of all this, the book looks damn cool, too, thanks to the unbelievable artwork of Iaian Greenson (www.iaiangreenson.com).

If you never read poetry, take a chance on me and treat yourself to The Astronaut’s Wife. Join me in surprising adventures, and meet some characters you won’t forget. But hey, don’t take my word for it: here’s what other people have to say!

I get poetry from readers once in a while, but I never want to read it. Your book of poems is wonderful. I like the style very much. Imaginative, witty, blessedly free of normal logic, surprising, profound, very human, touching, sassy. I like them and thank you for sending them. Looking forward to the next book.

Thomas Moore, bestselling author of Care of the Soul, Dark Nights of the Soul, and Soul Mates

“This Girl Can Write indeed! The Astronaut’s Wife – Poems of Eros and Thanatos establishes Lorette Luzajic as a rising, multi-talented poet on the Canadian scene. Her insights into the heights and depths of our common human struggle to live out our own often-buried divinity hold the ring of authenticity and truth. Weep, laugh, enjoy!”

Tom Harpur, bestselling author of The Pagan Christ and Would You Believe?

ORDERING INFORMATION: The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos by Lorette C. Luzajic through www.indigo.ca, www.amazon.com, or www.thegirlcanwrite.net.

We got the book. Thanks. I don’t know how to properly reciprocate when a writer puts that much of herself on the page. I’m not sure how to honour that. The book treads holy ground, sometimes with a holy rawness and sometimes with unholy eloquence. The last two stanzas enter a whole other realm.

Will Braun, editor, Geez Magazine, Winnipeg

Each time I feel that I’ve found a favourite poem, I turn the page to find myself tempted by another. Valium for Breakfast, A Poem for B and November keep on drawing me back for another read. Wonderful…powerful…thoughts that make me gasp out loud, laugh or blink back tears, all in a few words or stanzas. Thank you for sharing this beautiful gift with me.

Bonnie Staring, editor, www.womencandoanything.com

I am a great fan of your work. My friend used to go on and on about a line from one of your poems “the quiet raging ocean of my messed up heart” before I’d ever read it. He was actually the one that gave me your book. But I found so much beauty in your words, and I felt so inspired no matter how many times I read it. I appreciate so much what you’ve done and the way you felt…The depth in which you write is so amazing, it’s so much more than anything out there.

Through your writing I love the way you live, love the way you love, your heart is so truly unique. Reading your poems brings me the feeling I get on the days that I am in love with the world and I can feel everything.

My best friend in the entire world had the kind of beauty in his heart that I see in your poems, and it brings me back to the feeling that he gave me of someone who was meant for a better world. Unfortunately he died two years ago, and I think about your poems and other sorts of things that he would appreciate as well, and it’s so amazing. I haven’t been able to put it all into words. I would read your poems when I missed him or just felt like crying and it was sort of like a companionship like coffee and nicotine…..I don’t know if any of this makes sense, but I want to thank you for your inspiration.

Stephanie Nord, Georgia, x-ray technician

I n writing this book, the author has, like a rock through a mirror or a beer bottle on the sidewalk shattered her life. You read one of her poems and know exactly what she is writing about. Each is a part of the story of her existence.

She has experienced life like few others would dare. You picture the smells and sounds as well as the sights, but you do this shard by shard. The whole is made up of the shards, yet there is something both more and less to the ‘big picture’.

This is not really a book of poetry; it is more of a memoir. It sometimes uses a poetic form, but mostly not. A few of the poems are a little self-indulgent, but most of them have a brutal, scary honesty. I read this collection two months ago and only now understand what I think of it.

Alexander Burns, criminal lawyer, Burlington, Ontario

The Astronaut’s Wife is a complete lifetime of emotions all splashed helter-skelter across a few dozen pages by a woman who clearly understands them all. This clutch of lyrics seeks out your soul and enriches it with warm, peaceful feelings, and then rips it out with raw, unquenchable anguish. With mythic imagery and erotic undertone, the author carries you on a journey through her own experience of the unending pathos of life and death. Don’t miss it!

Stu Blyde, Threading Machine Set-up/Nipple Manufacturer, Zurich, Ontario

I knew when I was 20 years old that I was the best young writer in Canada, no – pardon me – the world. I felt this in my bones, in my marrow. I had a chip on my shoulder, greasy hair and a brand new Smith Corona on my desk. I even had a working title for the great Canadian novel I was about to write…

Suffice it to say that Lorette’s writing made me feel embarrassed by everything I had ever written. She was Jack Kerouac…I only had the cuffs of my jeans rolled up. Lorette was a blues record that I owned on CD… Novels, short stories, poetry…Lorette was the master of her domain…And I wouldn’t be lying if I told you that she was one of the people who taught me how to write.

Iaian Greenson, writer and artist, Toronto, Ontario

Few of us have had the horrid misfortune of experiencing the death of a multitude of friends, family and acquaintances at a young age. Even fewer have had the blessing and sometimes curse of encountering a lifetime of pivotal events by the time our odometer rolls past 30. Only one person has met and conquered both with the mastery, elegance and savoir-faire of the written word. This person is Lorette C. Luzajic. Lorette is of the most talented, diversified, and multi-faceted writers I have had the pleasure to read. The Astronaut’s Wife is a catharsis for all who have had to endure the loss of someone who has left this world too brave, too loved, and too young. This is a read for people like myself who often find ourselves having to ‘buck up’ when we really should be soaked in tears. It offers a confidant with whom you can find the emotions that need to be expressed, written in words that know you, sit beside you, and hold your hand as you move past pain. However, if you read closely, friends, you will find bits of rapier wit dancing below the surface of even the darkest lines. Also inside are poems that are an old friend reliving memories of times and places that perhaps you have also been to. If not before, Lorette takes you there now. Mainly, this is the kind of writing most aspire to, but never achieve. The Astronaut’s Wife reaches past heart and soul and into the place that you never reveal, sometimes even to yourself. I await Lorette’s next work and the further unveiling of this great talent to the world.

John Bennett, chef and restaurateur,Toronto

The author poignantly claims in one of these collected poems that she “looked straight into darkness to see a starry night.” Indeed, Lorette C. Luzajic has had some highs and lows and she bares them openly in The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos. Without lowering her gaze, she lets you look straight inside of her and you may flinch before she does.

The Astronaut’s Wife- a poetry book with one of the most amazing cover designs by painter Iaian Greenson – takes its title from a mediocre movie of the same title, but of appropriate melodrama and a good cast. Luzajic borrows to suit her whims frequently, not because she isn’t wholly original – she surely is – but because written, visual, musical and cinematic culture are mainstays of her palette in both her mixed media paintings and in her writing. Guest appearances from all walks of high and low culture may or may not be recognized by her readers, but add layers of depth at every turn. In this case, the title is a perfect fit in keeping with the poet’s grim and steady gaze into the dark skies in search of that Van Gogh-ian glory. Much of her work resonates with this balancing of dark and light, and here the intensity of irony and sorrow shines forth straight from the title. For the book is dedicated to her late husband, who lived the philosophy of psychonautism and then died from it. For the exploration of unknown frontiers can and does lead to death, but still the poet seeks in this collection to know them.

And if the borrowed cover title sums it all fittingly in the poet’s personal folklore, the last poem The Astronaut wraps it all up with a bit of an homage to Dylan Thomas. How dare you go so gently into that good night, she says last of all.

The journey through love and death is harrowing but an amazing resilience shines through creatively as the poet takes you into her psyche. She reveals the kind of betrayals in love that many of us have endured, prying apart their layers with intuition and wisdom. In Prison Blues, she laments the fall-out of a beautiful relationship ruined by control issues. “And yes it’s easy on a Sunday to miss you,” she admits, “the lonely chill of frosty daylight feels sentimental, and does not recall how we wrung each other into total emptiness.” She expresses her fears, wondering if anyone will ever “reach for me the way you reach for me.” Without holding onto anger, she acknowledges the possibility that no one’s “intention is to hurt another – love simply longs to possess another, to keep them with a jailer’s hands.”

Other works show a more cynical and bitter edge toward love and its “quiet scars and gaping maw” (Valium for Breakfast) but the poet still retains in these furious expressions a sardonic sense of humour. “Since you asked,” she writes, “I’ll tell you what has become of me…I’m fat, and work as a cashier, just as Satan promised me on Highway 61.” (That’s a somewhat obscure reference, by the way, to the great Canadian film Highway 61 – there is a scene where Satan tells a poor little girl with big dreams that she isn’t going to be famous, she’s going to be fat and work as a cashier.) But just when it appears that Luzajic might be feeling sorry for herself, (forgivable, I think, for in matters of love we all have those moments) suddenly, she is tough and beautiful and reflective: in Damage she tells us she can’t be sure “he is prepared for the life of a poet, for the rain soaked rooms her soul hides.” And in Untitled for A. she says confidently that she has been many things, from starlet to ghost to artist to lover and that she “was never all those pieces you could not pick off the ground.”

Eros is perhaps a loose interpretation because while many of the poems are erotic or about romantic partners, some of the most powerful are about family, and in fact Luzajic has dedicated the book to her husband, father and brother, the men who have, she says, made her who she is. The most stunning pieces in Love are those that open and close that section. In my brother shows me easter, she turns looking at the moon through her brother’s telescope into a visionary experience we can all share. And the piece that closes the first part of the book is a ten-part poem about family experience, bridging the themes nicely with a last line that refers to love and life as a complicated thing that can easily be simplified – in the end, it is only ashes after all.

It would be unfair to give too much away from the Death section of Luzajic’s poetry. For here, the artist’s soul is tortured by loss, and it is expressed so beautifully that the reader can’t help but cry. The poetry seems to contemplate the dead in all ways with unbelievable eloquence. There’s murder and mayhem and methamphetamine, suicide and AIDS and cancer. Yet something of that starry night shines in each poem, words that comfort and heal even as they mourn. The poems are very personal and yet one gets the feeling that they are written on behalf of everyone, for death is the only truly reliable fact of life.

Melissa Hennessy, writer, Toronto, Ontario

ORDERING INFORMATION: The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos by Lorette C. Luzajic through www.indigo.ca, www.amazon.com, or www.thegirlcanwrite.net.

Year of the Rat (Rediscovering Queen Crosbie)

I’ll tell you a small detail about my madness. I’m obsessed with magical signs. I see them everywhere, and it is what I love most about my life. Without ethereal, impossible, beautiful synchronicity, life would be meaningless and cruel. It doesn’t matter to me if that’s ‘real’ or not. It is what I do to keep my psyche alive. And so, you see, I have ‘fun with fate’ games, small, pleasant, harmless rites that guide me along my discovery walks. These games of mine make connection out of random, disparate things.

So this is all how it came about that I’m rereading the amazing Lynn Crosbie’s Queen Rat. I noted that this is New Year’s Day for Year of the Rat. The Asian astrology system says we each have traits or lessons to be found in our year of birth’s animal, and by chance this year’s animal is the same as the year I was born.

My interest in astrology is fleeting and my knowledge limited, but like many curious, I check my magic signs and numbers to see what they have to say about me. I picked up Queen Rat to honour in some small, random way the New Year for my sign. There was no connection in this tiny ritual except the word “rat” but the way I roll is this: “in the beginning was the word.” I believe in incredible things.

It’s no small feat to write a book that Al Purdy calls the best that year. I will tell Lynn now that this was one of the books we yapped about over endless coffees or a hidden mickey of Silent Sam. It was the kind of text that made me jealous, but in a good way, the way this woman never ran out of the right words. And the book was filled with those favourite morsels I love- signs, details, ghosts of people I’ve lost and found, wandering the places we’ve been.

I recall an era where I sipped endless tea refills at the Golden Griddle in the middle of the night, sitting with the tired waitress and the tired drag queens. The days where we bent over a congealed cold plate of potato puffs and talked about the end of the world. Those were also the days we crawled Kensington Market, the days we walked miles from Queen and Niagara out past what is now trendy Leslieville. It’s the era where we would peer in dusty antiquarian bookshops and not have any idea in the world where we were heading. Those were the days of drumming circles and wimmin’s events and the peace camp and the fetish clubs and the LSD. The bygone days of dressing like Girl George and smoking like a chimney at vampire clubs.

It’s amazing to sift through a poem like James Joyce Pub: “we find an abandoned grocery cart and push Michael fast and let go.” Once in a laundromat in Kensington, Japey thought it would be funny and alarming to other patrons if he went into the dryer with half a dozen oranges. Just for a few turns. I don’t know why I’m thinking of this now, but now that he’s gone, I treasure every random memory of Japey. And following that poem that gave me that small, fragmented gift of recollection, is one called Kensington Market. In these poems, we are witnesses. Here, we witness this: “I stare him down; we gather her things, barrettes and beads, a little purse/chenille bedspread, /and look at her: the girl’s face is diamonded with bruises….” Then, “like cat’s teeth, tearing rotting flesh, to subsist; she turns to him/….opiates she knows are tender, hard, familiar with this alchemy…”

And so it is that I begin this new year astonished and inspired. The words flow so beautifully together that it’s torture, nearly. Listen to this one:

“Priscilla arched her back and hissed when I brought
him home, her black fur rising like garter snakes.
Two little ones are double trouble,
but when I saw them kids take a knife to him,
my hands flew into the air like I was catching a moonstone.
He trembled against me, and I told him, All your trials soon be over.
Singing it some: his tail beating like a little white scarf,
caught in some king’s fingers.”

Poem after poem transports me. Remember this? Amaryllis, which starts by taking your heart right out: “You can’t miss me, he said, And I waited for him at the long wooden table.” “The beauty that does not die at the centre of his terrible stories.” “The day he left, we looked at one-eyed fish in the leaden stream. The/air was sleepy, as sultry/as the silk-red amaryllis.”

Words really are magical, words in poems, words in songs, words like let there be light. From Allan Gardens, 1994: “He disliked Daniel’s fiction and I disagreed. He told me a photograph of/the two of them together had fallen from a book the week before he died, which troubled him.” Signs and portents are everywhere, see? Then, “The spring that silvers your bones” and “there is a frail banana tree” are two other nuggets among a hundred in this piece.

It’s no coincidence to me that the word “story” is scrambled inside the word “astrology.” The world is a puzzle- and the word “word” inside of “world” is a piece of that puzzle to madwomen like me.

Listen:

“Though the Western rat is reviled as little more than a bottom-dwelling disease carrier, this animal is viewed much differently in the East. The Eastern rat is revered for its quick wits and its ability to accrue and hold on to items of value; rats are considered a symbol of good luck and wealth in both China and Japan. Clever and quick-witted, the Rat of the Chinese Zodiac is utterly disarming to boot. Possessed of excellent taste, this Sign flaunts its style at every turn. Its natural charm and sharp, funny demeanor make it an appealing friend for almost anyone. The Rat likes to know who is on its side and will treat its most loyal friends with an extra measure of protection and generosity.” (Chinese.astrology.com)

The rat, a fascinating character who is part of the ‘the real world’ and part of the underbelly. See, the rat is nothing to fear- as his child, I never have. In 2008, we must all meet and mingle with the rat. It’s his year.

That rat wears a long, tailored coat, waisted, but masculine, Matrix-like. This maze is populated with real characters, for the underworld is in our midst and not all that “under” after all. These things are all real, folks,: cities of the broken and the fierce, nearly universal. If anything else, the rat does not pretend he is not a part of the maze. He does not dismiss the crazy and the downtrodden as if they don’t exist.

I’ve lived in squats in New Orleans with ruffians of every ilk, made love in the dirt and there was nothing like it. I’ve climbed strange landscapes in New Mexico. It was so cold when we got there that it was snowing. Some crazy turquoise-wearing white healer type sleazebags guided us, fancying themselves gurus, but maybe in a small way that day, they were. I’ve spent a fare share of time in the lowest of the low, literally, Canada’s poorest postal code. I drank beer in those sullen saloons, like every other nutbar hippy in Vancouver, and I might do it again. I sampled rice wine with a Native Canadian homeless addict named Joker, and we were ‘friends’ until he froze to death one winter, according to his pal. I’ve spent most of my dancing life in Madonna’s beat, and delighted in the brilliant madness of some crazy club kids. I’ve read the poets while in the gin mills of Atlanta, deciphered symbols, more signs that you would not even believe.

Rock stars, oil tycoons, graffiti lords, unheard of writers, ex-cons, old-school arcades bristling with truants, jazz singers, the brokenhearted… The rat is nothing sinister, after all: he simply exists in reality, which is always both fabulous and grim.

I’m not sure I could find the words to describe how it felt once upon a time to be young and wild and literary in Toronto, but Lynn Crosbie sure did. The world really is haunted. Only a fool can deny it. Crosbie has the rat’s ability to navigate dangerous places, and shares his fascination with the underbelly. Her poems are at home in a place of addicts and karaoke and the murky minds of serial killers and whores. It’s the vastness of human history’s ineffable longing. It’s the world where dangerous poets and painters drink whiskey in parks and describe angels and demons. And Lynn Crosbie, here in this guise, is absolutely their queen.

Queen Rat: New and Selected Poems
Lynn Crosbie
House of Anansi, 1998

If you enjoyed experiencing Lynn Crosbie with me, writer Lorette C. Luzajic, you may enjoy further reading at www.thegirlcanwrite.net. You may also enjoy my poetry, The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos. Famous writer Thomas Moore did: he said, “Your book of poems is wonderful. I like the style very much. Imaginative, witty, blessedly free of normal logic, surprising, profound, very human, touching, sassy.” You can order my book online through indigo or amazon, or read more about it at my site. xoxoxoxo

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