As midwinter shows the first hints of spring to come, I’m excitedly awaiting the premiere of Outer Space, Inner Light; I wrote the text in response to a choral score by the amazing Mari Alice Conrad, who wrote that score in response to a different poem, Book of Songs,* which was the title and text…
Tag: memoir
Stars
First published in 2017; tis the season to repost. Joy in the Journey* is one of the themes of Advent, which is a central part of the Catholic religion, to which my mom was faithful. For me, that thought always takes me back to a dark country road, under a green and white blanket, under…
For World Theatre Day: The Great Winfield Chicken Coop Disaster
https://alllitup.ca/Blog/2021/The-Great-Winfield-Chicken-Coop-Disaster Thrilled to have this little story published on All Lit Up. Names changed to protect the sensitive (if not innocent).
Day 5: unmarked
a brag, a middle finger at those ghost moments that, when she was dying burned again through her mind so many years, her birthday a crucible enduring, unpopular outcast youth; beauty seeking wings, and made cruel she sang at Carnegie Hall with grit built in backwoods honed in bully-yards defiant in second hand clothes we…
Morning
Originally posted on Prairiepomes:
Joy comes in the morning. – Psalm 30:5 Morning was always Mom’s time. In the winter on the farm, morning would begin with the sound of her rattling the kitchen stove, stoking up the fire. We heated the house via a mixed-fuel furnace in the basement, whom, for reasons that live…
Feeling Squeezed at the Grocery Store I Conclude that the Propensity to Ignore Pain is Not Necessarily Virtuous, but Continue Shopping and Gather the Ingredients for Ham Fried Rice because That’s What I Cook When My Wife is Out-of-Town and I’m Not in the Mood for Italian, and Dammit I’m Not Ill, Merely a Little Inconvenienced, and Hey, in the 70’s I Played Football in Texas and When the Going Gets Tough…
Originally posted on O at the Edges:
Feeling Squeezed at the Grocery Store I Conclude that the Propensity to Ignore Pain is Not Necessarily Virtuous, but Continue Shopping and Gather the Ingredients for Ham Fried Rice because That’s What I Cook When My Wife is Out-of-Town and I’m Not in the Mood for Italian, and…
2015: by the Light Given
2015 it’s a day in may we watch the election turn our province map orange on screen, tuned to cbc radio for the call. i feel at home for the first time, and for a long time knowing that this would have been worth living for dad, to see your grand daughter following the flow…
2013: Cranes
if you ask what i remember from my laureate days it is a thin, rare song. children i’d loved since infancy stretched out their voices to the sky, in the gym of the school that we saved in a song about whooping cranes singing again in the wind because we dared to say extinction…
2012: Wolf Work
it’s 2012 national arts council meets here to know the land they serve i am invited to a reception no poem commission, just to be face of our mayor’s personal commitment laureate memo: always carry poems are easy to conceal mind you, the law of theatre applies here; if you see a poet it…
2011: Uses of Poetry
it’s 2011 i’m the City’s Poet chosen to laud us to declaim us, to name us exhort us, inflame us actually, people often ask me what does a laureate do? it is not, i assure you a position designed to discover just how bitchy, back-stabbing and vain poets can really be, for how…
2010: Olympic
it’s 2010 i go to the olympic edition of talking stick festival in vancouver, i walk this is how to learn a city walk from dorothy’s up on coal harbour down to cambie to the roundhouse to the show i will never be a headliner i will never be on the podium i am…
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