Figure of a Skater Tending to Move Towards a Centre

The contrast is set up between those seeking warmth, a multitude, and the skater, a lone figure.

Coffee drinkers fill the hut with steam;
They warm themselves within against the cold
That creaks without and circumvents the light,
While Mr. Murple, in a cloud of frost
Centripetal,
Turns on his pivot skates the captive sky.

And the crowded alliteration binds the turning figure to the elements: cloud/frost/centripetal and skates/captive/sky. Apt for the creaking cold.

"Ice At Last" in Endeared by Dark: The Collected Poems of George Johnston.

And so for day 2230
20.01.2013

Guttural From the Throat

From a villanelle by Liz Howard ("A Wake" in Infinite Citizen fo the Shaking Tent) come these lines which remind one of a wholly erotic power.

If I moan from an animal throat it is in hope you
will return to me what I lost learning to speak.

From Phil Hall two lines out of An Oak Hunch:

  BETWEEN THE BODY & LANGUAGE
a ravine of call & response

Return. Gap.

And so for day 2229
19.01.2013

Praise Poem & Occasional Poetry

Ever wonder how best to celebrate the character and accomplishments of a great literary figure?

Here is a praise poem for Northrop Frye found in Endeared by Dark: The Collected Poems of George Johnston. It was written on the occasion of a conference in Moncton. Its title: "A Celebration For Northrop Frye, May 28, 1980". And here are its concluding stanzas:

How do we honour one
already in the fane
    of honour,
    how bear

our messages of praise
before his critic's eyes?
    Well, anyhow,
    we do

confident of his smile
and knowing that we dwell
    this hour
    together
    in Eden's bower.

Ending thus on an image of conviviality is superlative: not only praised the man but also marked the occasion with fine wit.

And so for day 2228
18.01.2013

Two Views of Tipping Fountain

First an observation on space

Scrivener Public Square

Designed by Toronto architect Stephen Teeple and named after the late MPP Margaret Scrivener, it includes a 'tipping fountain' by artist Robert Fones and a series of small, angular streams and ponds that are refreshingly free of the unnecessary safety barriers that too often ruin good urban design.

Shawn Micallef
Stroll: Psychogeographic Walking Tours of Toronto

Second an observation on time

Working with public artist Robert Fones, the team proposed to install a Japanese Tipping Fountain that relates directly to the original clock tower on the station building. The result is a physical representation of passing time.

From the Teeple website
http://www.teeplearch.com/portfolio/scrivener-public-square

And so for day 2227
17.01.2013

Cognitive Decline and the Beauty of Delay

I would perhaps not have been so sensitive to these lines by George Johnston if I was not aware of the work of Marlene Goldman on dementia and stigma, Forgotten: Narratives of Age-Related Dementia and Alzheimer’s Disease in Canada.

[...]

we come to our beauty,
     terrified or serene
or beyond both, more likely,
     knowing even as also we are known.

I guess I shall not again
     see him, as we leave his room;
his wits are gone
     and he is as though at home

yonder. He smiles from a distance;
     and he is, as you say, beautiful
for all his ambience
     of tubes and bottles, the whole

apparatus of delay
     that keeps some good things on,
his courtesy, and the play
     of his Irish sense of fun

[...]

George Johnston "Goodbye Margaret" in Endeared by Dark: The Collected Poems

And so for day 2226
16.01.2013

Another Puddle, Another Moon

Moon in puddle Zen trope is here at play, I believe, in the very reflective white space between stanzas. But here the moon is pluralized — each moment of perception offering its own.

I will not refuse the moons
you show me

caught in the gutter water

Liz Howard "Bingo Riot" in Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent

And so for day 2225
15.01.2013

Conditionals

If you are entitled to one line to ponder for a day ...

what else is a river but the promise of a text

Liz Howard "Foramen Magnum" in Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent

And so for day 2224
14.01.2013

Sins and Sinners

This set could be extended in imitation of Erasmus's De Copia. But it's power comes from its limited triplicate form and the tactical placement of line breaks.

Love the person not the police report.
The wrists not the weapon, the grievers
not the tears.

The metonymy of "wrists" adds to the sensation of compression — a poetic grenade about to go off.

Priscilla Uppal "Try Not to Romanticize" in Live Courage.

And so for day 2223
13.01.2013

Perfectly Saying

I am wondering if the ending of this poem is what is called in French "finir en queue de poisson" or in German "im Sand verlaufen" — a fish tale in the sand. The lines allows the poem to disintegrate gently.

[...]
could be the face I put on everything,
or it could be my way of saying
nothing and saying it perfectly.

The end from Philip Levine "Picture Postcard from the Other World" in A Walk With Tom Jefferson.

And so for day 2222
12.01.2013

Epic Repeater

In Live Courage, using the footer section of the pages, Priscilla Uppal constructs the emulation of a news crawl in which she threads excerpts from Homer's Odyssey translated by Richard Lattimore with various online and print news sources.

The effect relies as much on page breaks [pb] as continuation.

[...] mistake and release his son / And once the spirit has left the white bones, all the rest of the body [pb] is made subject to the fire's strong fury, but the soul flitters out / Floods caused by pounding mon- [pb] soon rains have left some 77 people dead in Bangladesh and India and marooned almost two [pb] million / Poor fools, and they had not yet realized how over all of them the terms of death were [...]

The page turning brings an additional dimension to the play of juxtaposition.

And so for day 2221
11.01.2013