WomanWyrds

Congratulations...

to Ascent Aspirations, edited by David Fraser. I received my copy of their newest print edition, AguaTerra, in the mail today, and am enjoying the poems within. One is mine! Yet part of the enjoyment of subscribing to various literary magazines, receiving chapbooks, attending workshops and retreats is the opportunity to hear, and read, the poems being offered by poets known and unknown across the country and in other lands. I commend this magazine to you: support poetry and order one from them. They are worth the read...

also, delighted to hear from Amanda Earl today. She is the really terrific editor of bywords, and I am glad to know that one of my poems will be online with them for the December edition. Look for it after December 15.

I have spent the last couple of days downloading and sorting pictures from my journey. I thought you might like to have a glance at the one above, taken at Glenairley: our mentor, Patrick Lane, relaxed, his foot partially obscuring poet and prolific professor, David Pimm.

It was a very good time.

posted by Heather Cardin @ 6:46 PM 0 comments

Glenairley

Glenairley: seventeen poets gather under the tutelage of Patrick Lane. One of the first to welcome me is Pamela Porter, whose poem/novel, Crazy Man, has recently won the Governor General's literary award. She is also the only one missing from the group shot I share with you: she had to depart immediately at noon on the day we completed our retreat. I call this photo, "missing Pam". There are many entries if you google her...I share the one from Coteau Books:

Porter, Pamela

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Pamela Paige Porter is an award-winning poet and juvenile fiction author. Stones Call Out is her first poetry book publication. Her free-verse children's book The Crazy Man received the 2005 Governor General's Award for Children's Literature. Born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Pamela Porter has also lived in Texas, Louisiana, Washington, and Montana. Her husband's family has also operated a family farm near Weyburn, Saskatchewan for generations. She obtained her undergraduate English degree from Southern Methodist University in Dallas, and received her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Montana. She currently lives in Sidney, British Columbia.

I want you to go and buy her books...here is a poet whose words bring joy and tears, sometimes without turning a page. It was an honour to listen to her work. In fact, I found myself a member of one of the finest circles I have ever joined. Nevermind the natural beauty of the place (which was lovely and reminiscent of a summer school I used to attend in an old house in the Laurentians, known as Beaulac). Nevermind the convivial camaraderie of meals prepared for everyone by the irrepressible and audacious Wendy Morton, our hostess, Westjet's "Poet of the Skies" and the author of a variety of books well worth the reading...

Nevermind the running jokes about dogs, brought about via conversations with the warm and incredibly talented Dorothy Mahoney, nor the fun of listening to David Pimm's English accent (now there's a man who knows culture)...nor the pleasure of hearing young poet Andrea McKenzie (buy her book too!)...

Nevermind the warm fire in the living area, the endless cups of organic tea (did I really drink all that honey, she asks)...the photographs of moss and the small statue of the Buddha which oversaw my walk towards the water and the quiet of my cabin each day...

I found myself in a space with writers, all of us talking the same language, delighting in the sharing of works and words past and present (I chose a Jan Zwicky poem to read on the evening where we spoke poems we liked, but I could have chosen from others). It was very interesting having exercises (set by Patrick) and pursuing them and finding out, the next day, how each of us had taken the same concept and turned it into something of individual beauty. We found our voices again and again in a time capsule, away from the madding crowd indeed, and ate a lot of the best shortbread cookies (made by poet Grace Cockburn) that I've ever eaten.

I feel...very full. Watch for the chapbook which will come out, in the spring, edited by Patrick, from Leaf Press...and watch for the names of poets whom it has been my pleasure and honour to meet and to learn from. This was a very rich experience for me, gathering at Glenairley with many poets from B.C., a couple from Alberta, one from Ontario; I think they were glad to have me there, representing the Ottawa Valley (bienvenue à Québec) and I will share with you one poem which I wrote in the Victoria airport, en route.

duty free

moving from rain to snow
island to midland
ocean to prairie:
the same.

moving from November
to memory,
another gate after an initial spin:
surprise.

a lineup forms beside
artificial trees, beneath fluorescents
and a tournament of glass.

alone, i take an aisle seat,
no need for a window,

nothing to declare.

posted by Heather Cardin @ 6:44 PM 0 comments

Any Americans out there?

This morning I am searching for links to American poetry magazines, or literary magazines in general, who invite submissions from new, and young, poets. One of my former students has sent me several of her poems and they are quite brilliant. She is not yet 25 and she writes amazing stuff. I just don't know enough about the American periodicals to know whom I should recommend that she submit to. I can send her some Canadian links but I would sure appreciate it if any of you have some recommendations in this regard.

I have been immersing myself in a number of Canadian poets again, in preparation for my upcoming departure for the Glenairely Retreat. I find that I can't, or shouldn't, write poems myself immediately after reading one or another poet. I just get too derivative. This tricky question of voice is always a little frustrating, particularly in view of the fact that my propensity is towards philosophical, narrative poems. I like to think out loud, which of course is a cardinal sin with most current publishers. I had a very thoughtful reply from one poetry editor this week, at Grain magazine in my 'home' province of Saskatchewan. He (Gerry Hill) took the time to explain a little of why he wasn't accepting my poems...saying that he liked "the range of formal gestures in the poems, but on the whole the poems don't get quite far enough." The rest of his letter had to do with other and more personal issues (turns out that we are both CUSO P.N.G. veterans).

I am giving some thought to what this might mean. I remember maclennan saying that he had submitted to Grain something like fourteen times before an acceptance...and I've only been turned down by them three or four so far. I will keep sending, keep writing, and one of these days, hope for a "Yes!" from them, or Event, or Fiddlehead, or Prairie Fire, or CV2, or Descant, or Arc, Vallum, The Malahat Review, Geist, The Antigonish Review, This Magazine...or even a manuscript acceptance from someone would be rather exciting. I am very glad to have a poem coming up in Room of One's Own. Subscribe! Subscribe! No doubt there are many others...but these are bookmarked on my computer and I have subscriptions to most of them now. I also refer you, as always, to Leaf Press, Ascent, and bywords, in my links, for their encouragement of new Canadian poets.

As a poet, I do not always speak in the same voice. Sometimes I have a 'hard' tone...something of powerful import to me makes its way through my subconscious and it is almost as much of a surprise to me to read what I have written as it is, probably, to anyone else I share with. Other poems emerge from the soft spaces, from the places within myself that I rarely allow myself even to look at. It is not a world conducive to softness. Yet, there seems to be this post-modernist desire for angst, and I don't have so much! (knock on wood) I have a good life. I am grateful for this. But perhaps it leaves me more thoughtful than edgy...and magazines seem to want you to be more edgy than thoughtful.

Of course, there are exceptions. I find that the storytellers, if they are telling the story in language that draws you in enough, can find press (although this may be because of where they have come from rather than where they are going). I really enjoy, especially, the storytelling poems of Don McKay, for example. One just wonders..."go far enough". Where is far enough? I am not going to go and find my poems in a bottle, and Patrick Lane has written an eloquent memoir which touches on this subject. I am not going to find my poems from a life experience which I do not have, but I continue to believe that there is room for a poet whose life experience, whose reflections and stories, could be brought together in a way that has meaning for others, too.

So far, however, the general feeling seems to be 'too much philosophy, not enough angst'. Or, perhaps, it is just the language. There are times when I read someone's poem and just gasp with the sheer stunning words of it. There are also the debates between those who think that "poems should mean something" and those who seem to prefer "if there is too much meaning, there is too much poem." There are the poets-who-write-for-obscurity and the poets-who-write-for-laying-it-all-bare-from-the-guts. I tend not to enjoy either of these too much; I want a balance between having to figure out deep meaning, realizing there is no particular meaning, and wishing that the poet had not supplied quite so much information. And then, of course, there are the poets of Hallmark greeting cards and ditties...some of which are genuinely moving but many of which leave me running back to Wordsworth for a taste of a different kind of daffodil.

Let me give you an example of a poem that tries to accommodate to what I think magazines want, but which I will not submit again because it is not authentic voice from me. This poem is an experiment from my 'dark side', as distinct from my series of 'inner bitch' poems (which have some bite). I don't want to compromise like I did in this poem:

turpitude

those people
who think
they’re all that
cat’s meow shit don’t stink
the world’s plaintiffs

wonder why i
can’t weep at
Quentin Tarantino’s
funeral. suttee begins
to look more attractive

so build pyres
for someone seen those
flames. yawp for the old
imaginary (fucken)
apocalypse.

This poem gives you some of my cynicism (it is true) and language I don't usually use (although the gratuitous use of profanity still seems to me somewhat juvenile as an approach). And of course there are a couple of things you have to know in order to 'get' this poem: what is suttee, what is an apocalypse, and a nod to Whitman's use of 'yawp', among other elements. I assume that I don't have to explain Quentin Tarantino (who, incidentally, directed a couple of amazing segments of CSI, in which Nicky gets buried underground, a very fine piece of acting from George Eads). But.

This poem is attractively short (for magazines which prefer sound-byte poems) and decidedly acerbic (at least for me) but is it true? Is it an ironic feminist protest against? And if so, against what, or whom? I think that's where it came from, when I wrote it (quite some time ago) but as happens often, when a poem just 'comes', I'm really not sure where it came from inside. Maybe the subconscious carries more than I think. Of course it does.

Anyway, I will keep you posted on reflections from a poet coming back from Glenairely, at the end of this month. I am hopefully going to continue climbing this steep learning curve...and one of these days, maybe philosophical ruminations (in tight language) will find their day. Maybe I just need to write skinnier poems. I am a Rubenesque woman in an era of anorexics. Maybe I just need to throw up.

posted by Heather Cardin @ 7:01 AM 0 comments