Shannon Stewart/Phil Hall

A ROSE BY ANY OTHER NAME

I. Cow

Under a Holstein coat
teats drip
perpetual maternity.
In other lands
I am worshipped,
painted, wrapped in silk.
Not stupid at all,
but Bovine –
Mother of Milk.

II. Slut

Because I fuck
and fuck well.
Because one
is never enough.
Because I prefer not
to wear undergarments
or keep the prim
protocols of
ladyhood. Yeah,
I’m a slut. No
if, and or –
Nice butt!

III. Cunt

This grunt
of a word
you cast
at the end
of your line.
Look what
comes up
from the sea;
purple, wet
and manifold.
Get down
on your knees
and kiss it
better.

IV. Bitch

If she’s strong,
smart, thin,
vocal, rich –
she turns canine,
all paws and itch.
Not so long ago,
burned as a witch.

V. Whore

You tell me
what isn’t for sale.
I’m one letter
away from whole.
Take that R and rent
yourself a rope.
See what’s happy
when life’s
lost hope.

-- Shannon Stewart, Penny Dreadful




Me & Morisseau were both abused as kids
both ran by rotgut then sang by hand
of a Canada that deplorably survives
high in the clawed glistening air

our giant muskrat soul kept falling apart
into butchered townships aflame with primal colour
& the spit of the grease was the shared song
of the brush & the pen slicing through forgiveness

-- Phil Hall, from White Porcupine


Norval Morisseau is one of Canada's great aboriginal artists... for more on his art, here's a link.

NB, this is supplementary material for a review of Shannon Stewart's Penny Dreadful and Phil Hall's White Porcupine, soon to be posted in The Rover. My compliments to Shannon Stewart and Signal Editions (imprint of Véhicule Press), and Phil Hall and Book Thug.

Shannon Stewart

PICKTON PIG FARM
953 Dominion Avenue

He had dirty hands, sat
for hours, saying nothing.
Patrolled his yard with
a boar trained to attack.
Trailers filled with purses,
i.d.’s, girlie bric-a-brac.
Drove a bus with tinted
windows, asked the girls
how they wanted to be
paid. Repeatedly stabbed
a prostitute but charges
were, inexplicably,
stayed. Some knew what he
was up to, but didn’t speak.
Those women were poor,
life wasn’t fair. He was
a decent neighbour,
a quiet man,
impossible,
a millionaire.




NB, this is supplementary material for a review of Shannon Stewart's Penny Dreadful and Phil Hall's White Porcupine, soon to be posted in The Rover. Compliments to Shannon Stewart and Signal Editions (imprint of Véhicule Press).

From Early Hours of Sky, via Peter Pereira:

Apparently, the BBC reckons that most people have only read about 6 books from the following list.

Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read.
2) Add a '+' to the ones you LOVE.
3) Star (*) those you plan on reading.
4) Tally your total at the bottom.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen x
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee x
6 The Bible- x
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte x
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell x
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens x
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy x
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare x
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger x
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot x
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald x
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy x
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky x
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck x
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll x
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy *
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens *
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis x
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini x
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell x
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown x
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez x++
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding x
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel x
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth x
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley x
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon x*
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez x+
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck x
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov *
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas *
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac x+
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy *
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville x+
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce x+
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath x+
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt x
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens x
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert x+
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White x
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Alborn
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad x
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery x+
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole x+
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare x
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Looks like I've read 38 of the 100. It's a bizarre list.

Creative writing prompts: are they a crock?

In Introspections: American Poets on One of their Own Poems, Chase Twichell, poet of some renown and co-editor of the even more renowned The Practice of Poetry, makes a startling admission:

About a year ago, I did something dramatic: I impulsively destroyed fifteen months’ work. One morning I sat down at my desk and looked at the poems I’d written since the Ghost of Eden, and realized they disappointed me. Way up here in the mountains, we have to pay for our trash disposal by the pound, so everyone burns their nonrecyclable paper. In the yard, my husband was burning ours. With the thrill of rashness, I dumped the sheaf of poems into the barrel, then erased them from the floppy disk and hard drive. All this took less than two minutes. I actually broke into a light sweat, but it was the sweat of exhilaration, of freedom – I was back at the blank page, the threshold of the unknown. Since I hadn’t yet articulated what it was I next wanted to know, I’d been writing poems that hadn’t taught me anything and that ultimately bored me. So I burned them, and never thought about them again.

The Practice of Poetry is, as anyone in the know will tell you, one of the workshop bibles. Basically it's a compendium of poetry writing prompts -- jumpstarts to overcome dreaded writer's block and get you going -- by some of the most famous teachers in the business. Yet I find it particularly telling that the editor of this same book can fall into the funk of writing poems over a long period that, as she put it, "hadn't taught me anything and that ultimately bored me." Are these creative writing prompts all that they're cracked up to be? Of course, no one ever claimed guarantees. Maybe doing something as radical as jettisoning over a year's work will make it into the next edition.

I myself have found The Practice of Poetry quite useful -- the first exercise, Thomas Lux's "Not-So-Automatic Automatic Writing Exercise", spurred me to riff out not a few of my best prose poems, although I never, beyond numerous drafts, got to Lux's winnowing Not-So-Automatic part. Frankly, though, I've never really gotten past that first exercise. Everything else I've tried in that book, "ultimately bored me". Maybe this is from lack of trying -- but it always strikes me with these prompts that a crucial element is missing: should I call it fire? Reams and reams of so-called poetry may get cranked out in the writing workshop industry, but nothing, it seems, will take away from the rarity of the truly inspired poem.

Prompts

When Kim Addonizio and Doriane Laux's The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry arrived in the mail a couple of years ago, I was riding a wave -- writing almost every day, mostly poems in my forthcoming collection -- and just couldn't get into it. Structured around old maxims like, "Write about what you know", it seemed too low level; like The Artist's Way, aimed more at novices -- or the workshop leaders obliged to prompt them -- than experienced writers like me, in the thick of writing already. But now that I'm going through a bit a dry phase -- haven't written a poem yet this year, and last year was mostly devoted to editing and refining -- I find the book actually refreshing. In the first chapter, "Writing and Knowing",

Few of us begin to write a poem about "death" or "desire". In fact, most of us begin by either looking outward: that blue bowl, those shoes, these three white clouds. Or inward: I remember, I imagine, I wish, I wonder, I want... the trick is to find out what we know, challenge what we know, own what we know, and then give it away in language: I love my brother, I hate winter, I always lose my keys.

Of course... but a good reminder. Featuring well-written chapters on creative subjects like The Family, Death and Grief, Writing the Erotic, Witnessing, Poetry of place, and including fine exemplary poems by the likes of Li Young Lee, Philip Levine and Susan Mitchell -- plus of course all those intriguing writing prompts -- it shows once again that there's always lots of ground to cover, and gives valuable clues as to how to approach that ground. In a world flush to the gills with how-to books on writing, this one distinguishes itself.

Clever, indeed

Here's a delightful video about crows adapting to an urban environment and even learning to use pedestrian crossings — for their own purposes. Clever birds, indeed.

----
And here, thanks to Huffington Post, an amazing video of a fish being caught by a bird -- from (more or less) the fish's perspective, the bird swoops out of nowhere and up the fish is snatched into the unknown...

Maybe this blog is going to the birds faster than I think.

I'm League Rep Again

It seems I'm Quebec Rep on the League of Canadian Poets' National Council once again. Angela Leuck, the poet who took over the reins from me last June, asked me to take them back. Some personal obstacles indisposed her from carrying out the duties of this volunteer position. Taking over doesn't particularly bother me. Duties include participating in monthly teleconferences and the meeting at the League Festival and Conference (formerly AGM), setting up a fundraising event, answering inquiries and passing on info to fellow members. At the last general meeting, I actually proposed (a motion that's since passed) that the term of League Reps be increased from two years to three -- just because there's a learning curve (familiarity curve?) that's barely completed after two years.

Starving Artists' Report

Just got this from the League of Canadian Poets. I wonder if Hill Strategies employed artists to do their surveys for them? Wouldn't have skewed the results. I remember working for Environics Research Group many years ago, surrounded by a motely crew of actors, writers, artists, etc.., all manning the phones for near minimum wage, of course.

New report reveals 10 key facts about the working lives of artists in Canada

February 4, 2008

A Statistical Profile of Artists in Canada Based on the 2006 Census, the 26th report in the Statistical Insights on the Arts series from Hill Strategies Research, shows that there are 140,000 artists in Canada who spent more time at their art than at any other occupation in May 2006. Artists include actors, choreographers, craftspeople, composers, conductors, dancers, directors, musicians, producers, singers and visual artists.

The number of artists is slightly larger than the number of Canadians directly employed in the automotive industry (135,000).

The report also notes that the broader cultural sector has about 609,000 workers and comprises 3.3% of the overall labour force in Canada. One in every 30 people in Canada has a cultural occupation.This is about double the level of employment in the forestry sector in Canada (300,000) and more than double the level of employment in Canadian banks (257,000).

The report highlights 10 key facts about artists in Canada:

1. The average earnings of artists are very low.

• The average earnings of artists are $22,700, compared with an average of $36,300 for all Canadian workers.
• The gap between artists' average earnings and overall labour force earnings is 37%.
• To bridge the earnings gap and bring the average earnings of artists up to the same level as the overall labour force would require an additional $1.9 billion in earnings for artists.
• The average earnings of artists are only 9% higher than Statistics Canada's low-income cutoff for a single person living in a community of 500,000 people or more ($20,800).
• 62% of artists earn less than $20,000, compared with 41% of the overall labour force.
• Six of the nine arts occupations have average earnings that are less than Statistics Canada's low-income cutoff for a single person living in a community of 500,000 people or more ($20,800).

2. A typical artist in Canada earns less than half the typical earnings of all Canadian workers.

Note: The median is a measure of the earnings of a "typical" worker in various occupations. Half of individuals have earnings that are less than the median value, while the other half has earnings greater than the median.

• For artists, median earnings are only $12,900.
• A typical artist in Canada earns less than half the typical earnings of all Canadian workers (median earnings of $26,900).
• A typical artist, on their own, lives in a situation of extreme low income: the median earnings of artists are 38% below the low-income cutoff for larger urban areas ($20,800).
• In six arts occupations, median earnings are less than or about equal to $10,000. This means that a typical actor, artisan, dancer, musician or singer, other performer or visual artist earns only about $10,000 or less.

3. Artists' earnings decreased, even before the current recession.

• Between 1990 and 2005, the average earnings of artists decreased by 11% (after adjusting for inflation).
• In the overall labour force, average earnings grew by 9% during the same timeframe (after adjusting for inflation).
• The 11% decrease in the average earnings of artists between 1990 and 2005 is due to a 14% decrease between 2000 and 2005, after adjusting for inflation. Even without an inflation adjustment, artists' average earnings decreased by 3% between 2000 and 2005.
• All nine arts occupations saw substantial decreases in average earnings between 2000 and 2005, which contributed to a decrease for all nine occupations over the longer timeframe (1990 to 2005).
• The earnings gap between artists and the overall labour force increased from 23% in 1990 to 37% in 2005.

4. There are more female than male artists, yet women artists earn much less than men.

• The 74,000 female artists represent 53% of artists. In the overall labour force, 48% of workers are women.
• On average, female artists earn $19,200, 28% less than the average earnings of male artists ($26,700).

5. Aboriginal and visible minority artists have particularly low earnings.

• Aboriginal artists have particularly low average earnings ($15,900), a 39% gap when compared with all Aboriginal workers in the Canadian labour force. The average earnings of Aboriginal artists are 30% lower than the average for all artists.
• With average earnings of $18,800, visible minority artists earn 38% less than the average earnings of all visible minority workers in Canada.

6. Economic returns to higher education are much lower for artists than for other workers.

• University-educated artists earn 38% more than artists with a high school education. In the overall labour force, those with a university education earn more than double the average earnings of those with a high school education.
• The percentage of artists with a bachelor's degree of higher (39%) is nearly double the rate in the overall labour force (21%).
• Artists with university credentials at or above the bachelor's level earn $26,800, which is 53% less than the average earnings of workers with the same education in the overall labour force ($57,500). In fact, the average earnings of university-educated artists ($26,800) are less than the average earnings of overall labour force workers with a high school diploma ($28,000).

7. Many artists are self-employed.

• At 42%, the percentage of artists who are self-employed is six times the self-employment rate in the overall labour force (7%).
• The average earnings of self-employed artists ($15,200) are 51% less than the average earnings of all self-employed workers in Canada ($31,000).

8. There are relatively few opportunities for full-time work in the arts.

• Nearly twice as many artists as other workers (42% vs. 22%) indicated that they worked part-time in 2005.
• Artists are employed for fewer weeks per year than other workers. In 2005, 68% of artists worked most of the year (40 to 52 weeks) compared with 77% of the overall labour force.

9. There has been substantial growth in the number of artists since 1971, but the rate of growth is decreasing.

• The number of artists in Canada grew much more quickly than the overall labour force between 1971 and 2006. There were three-and-a-half times as many artists in 2006 as in 1971. This is a much higher increase than the doubling of the overall labour force.
• The rate of growth in the number of artists has decreased during every period since 1971: 85% in the 1970s, 40% in the 1980s, 29% in the 1990s, and 7% in the shorter period of 2001 to 2006.
• The number of artists grew by much more than the overall labour force between 1971 and 2001 but less than the overall labour force between 2001 and 2006.

10. Artists, as a group, are becoming more diverse, older and better educated.

• Artists from visible minority groups more than doubled in number between 1991 and 2006 (123% growth).
• Artists 45 or older more than doubled in number between 1991 and 2006 (121% growth).
• There were 90% more artists with a university certificate, diploma or degree in 2006 than in 1991.
• There were 61% more artists with a college certificate or diploma in 2006 than in 1991.
• In comparison, there were 38% more artists and 22% more workers in the overall labour force in 2006 than in 1991.

Methodological notes

Individuals are classified in the occupation in which they worked the most hours between May 7 and 13, 2006 (the census reference week).

The earnings statistics include an individual's wages and salaries as well as net self-employment income. Other income sources, such as income from government programs, pensions or investments, are excluded from the earnings statistics. The earnings statistics include amounts received from all employment and self-employment positions in 2005, not just the position at which the respondent worked the most hours during the census reference week.

For more information

The full report, funded by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Department of Canadian Heritage and the Ontario Arts Council, is available free of charge on the Hill Strategies Research website (http://www.hillstrategies.com) and the websites of the funding organizations.

Evergreen

A prose poem of mine was just accepted by Evergreen Review, the online incarnation of the famous print review edited by Barney Rosset, founder of Grove Press; Rosset, at 87, is still its Editor In Chief. (The prose poem, by the way, is also forthcoming in my collection, Passenger Flight.) It will appear the March #118 issue.

According to this Wikipedia article, the original Evergreen Review, published between 1957 and 1973, debuted pivotal works by Samuel Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges, William Burroughs, Marguerite Duras, Jean Genet, Allen Ginsberg, Gunter Grass, Jack Kerouac, Norman Mailer, Henry Miller, Pablo Neruda, Vladimir Nabokov, Frank O'Hara, Kenzaburo Oi, Octavio Paz, Harold Pinter, Susan Sontag, Tom Stoppard, Derek Walcott and Malcolm X.

The people in the online version are mostly relative unknowns, as I suppose many of those august names were at that time; but from what I've read, the actual writing in the current Evergreen is no better nor worse than any of a plethora of other fair/middling reviews on the market today. Clearly Rosset isn't able to draw on the same kind of pool of concentrated calibre he could then. Oh well. I liked some of what I saw, and there's an edgier flavour here than what we typically find in Canada -- could we imagine, say, RW Watkin's Jesuits in Fiddlehead? (it was Watkins, a frequent commenter on this blog, who first drew my attention to this review) -- so I sent what I imagined they might like, to see how I would do.

This, incidentally, is the longest wait for an acceptance yet. The poem was part of a handful originally submitted on Dec. 28, 2007; a letter of inquiry last June went unanswered, and I started sending the poems elsewhere (they came back). Then a couple of weeks ago, I got an e-mail requesting me to resubmit my poems, et voila!

Notes

This week I decided to take a little holiday from screen-based activities. I also had a good deal of extra teaching, including two seven-hour days on a split shift (morning, evening) that involved a lot of stressful driving through snow storms. When spare time has allowed, I've been reading delicious prose: Anne Marie MacDonald's Fall Down On Your Knees, a haunting, beautifully written Canadian masterpiece about incest and the stories woven through three generations to both cover up the trauma and, unconsciously, deal with it; and now, Barack Obama's The Audacity of Hope.

Judging from this book, Americans can rest assured, I think, that they've elected a man of solid, well-thought-out values and integrity: while he has shown perhaps too much willingness in his appointments and tax breaks to bend towards the thoroughly discredited Right, much of what he said in his inauguration speech about making tough and responsible choices could have been lifted from this text published in 2006, when the current financial debacle was but an uncertain cloud on the horizon. In his first days of office he has been following through commitments outlined here on closing Guantanamo Bay, reasserting habeas corpus rights, labour rights, environmental legislation, etc. I especially like his candid discussion of the kinds of pressures that lead a politician down the all-too-easy path of two-faced manipulation: Obama may well prove to be the most conscious as well as conscientious Presidents in living memory. I highly recommend this book, if you want to get a stronger sense of what's coming. What a relief, after Bush! And so far, in these first days -- a somewhat guarded Bravo.

Now, a backlog of e-mails to attend to.