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Poem: "As the ice storm flags"

13 May 2013

May is a time of renewal. Let's renew our Icehouse Poetry series with a poem from Adrienne Barrett's new collection The house is still standing.

As the ice storm flags

Murky skin of a canned plum,

the sea. Six horses in a field, startled

into stillness. White globes cling

to the windshield. Dusty Sheen

of a pool slide remembers flesh, heart

steers itself out of my bundled chest,

Only a week before, this road

shot through gold-suffused air.

Now a blackbird flaps its wings and

time is slow.

I have never cared for birds. Sky,

what else have you got?

Wayne Curtis on the Miramichi

13 May 2013

Ever heard of the Miramichi? It's an area of New Brunswick famed for rich fishing, wondrous wildlife, and epic authors such as our own Wayne Curtis.

Speaking with Saltscapes, Curtis (Of Earthly and River Things)waxed on how growing up on the Miramichi affected him:

Local boys such as Wayne Curtis and David Adams Richards have gone on to pen award-winning books and short stories about the Miramichi, her history, her culture and her people.

Says Curtis: “After a family lives on the river for 200 years, as mine has, the river becomes part of our soul. The Miramichi is very sacred to us. It’s like an umbilical chord that keeps us all connected.”

Curtis has fished this river since he was shorter than a shovel. He lived on a farm that’s still in the family, and recalls haying during the summer, and how his father used to send him off to catch a fish for supper.

“I loved that, because I had allergies and suffered from hay fever, so I’d go to the river, and, by hook or by crook, I always brought a salmon home.”

Read the full article at the Saltscapes website.

The athletics of prose

13 May 2013

We've always known that Sharon McCartney (For and Against) is a world-class author. Now the UK knows it as well.

In an interview with The Oxonian Review, McCartney divulges her inspirations for many of her poems, her hobbies, and Little House on the Prairie:

What’s the longest you’ve ever worked on a single poem? What was the fastest poem you’ve ever finished?

Hmmm. There were poems in my first book that dated in earlier drafts to high school. That book was published in 1999 and I graduated from high school in 1977. But I wasn't working on those poems all that time! I tend to work poems over quite a bit, so they might be in various drafts for three or four years. But I can’t think of a single one that took longer than all of the others. And then sometimes after they’re published, you still want to make changes.

Fastest? I don’t know. There’s never been one that’s been fast. No one-draft wonders. For me, fast would be several weeks to a draft that I could walk away from.

You’ve worked as a legal editor, and you’ve got a ‘hobby’ (or maybe, given how long you’ve stuck with it, a passion) for body-building and cross-training. Which has more in common with your writing life: your athletics or your professional experience?

Oh, definitely athletics. Legal editing is utterly analytical. Some of the cases were compelling and even entertaining, but no poetry ever arose out of a legal decision for me. It’s just what I do for money. Now I’m working as a parliamentary editor producing Hansard, which is the journal of the debates in the legislature. There will be no poetry coming out of that either, believe me.

Athletics is another story. In the gym, you’re constantly pushing yourself, wrestling with yourself. That’s what you have to do in poetry too. So the two have a lot in common! For me, poetry is pushing myself to go deeper into the important questions: who am I? Why am I here? What do I love? What does it mean to love? Where am I going? In the gym, I’m pushing myself to go deeper into my body, to ask myself what I can do and how far I can challenge myself. They feed each other.

Read the full interview at the Oxonian Review website.

Monday poem: "The Primitive Streak"

6 May 2013

Let's face the new month of May with vigour and a taste for the adventurous, with Brent MacLaine's:

The Primitive Streak (from These fields were rivers)

The primitive streak, biologists have made it known,

is a kind of crease through the middle of the cell

that cuts its wholeness in half,

and folds upon itself;

thus, symmetry is born, and as far as I can tell,

that's why we have limbs in pairs and backbone.

Later, however, the heart appears,

and no doubt, that's what throws the whole thing off.

Tyler Trafford can't escape publicity

1 May 2013

Tyler Trafford's new memoir Almost a Great Escape was a labour of love on many fronts, both from his personal perspective and of the many characters he came across researching his mother's past.

Talking with the Calgary herald, Trafford recounts who his quest began:

In fact, it all started for Trafford after Alice Tyler’s Calgary funeral in 2004. Ever since he was 13, the two had maintained a distant relationship. Nevertheless, she left two items for her son. One was a writing desk. The other was an old Campbell’s Soup box full of secrets.

“I opened it up and on the top just stuff from my first 13 years with her — old report cards and photos,” says Trafford. “I thought ‘Oh, thanks mom, you kept something.’ Then I just stuck it under my desk and one day thought I’d have a look. I turned it over and this beautiful photo album fell out of the bottom.”

Monday poem: "Black Angus"

29 April 2013

The end of a cruel month for some, but hardly for us. But lest we forget the dark side of life, let's end on an unsettling note, with Joan Finnigan's:

Black Angus (from This Series Has Been Discontinued)

The Black Angus

move

across the far fields

reminders

that we are all eating

our way

into the slaughterhouse

happening