"'dilly dilly,' calls the loft hawk, 'Come and be killed...'" Dylan Thomas

 

Currently reading Michael Longley's The Slain Birds...  

 

No state-sanctioned death should be forgotten. No injustice should remain unnamed. 

 

Beware the hawks. 

 

From his "Quatrains"

 

III

 

The deadly smoke belching night and day

And screams from the tortured and dying

Meant the birds stopped singing at Auschwitz.

Sanity was remembering their names. 

rescued from the middenheap

 

     How beautiful,

After the autumn storm,

     The red pepper.

                           Buson

Music and News

I've finally posted the piece of music by my second born (they identify as they/them now). Sorry I never did post their original piece but you can find their cover here (with a piece of surprising news about Blue)! Gosh darn I love their version of the song, "If I Died On You" (originally by Karl Blau). The hair stands on my arms.

the thusness of small things

 

rowan berries burning, even in winter

 

With a red brush

The mountain-ash burned:

The leaves were falling

And I was born.

From a short three verse poem by Marina Tsvetaeva. (I would like to find a published English translation of this rowan berry poem. If anyone has a source, I'd be grateful to be made aware.)

"Saving Lives," from Blue

Blue

One day away from the official launch of Blue. We will visit with our children for Canadian Thanksgiving. Thanks indeed.

 

 

Blue

 

 

My second poetry collection, Blue, is now available! A collection about depression, grief and the transformative power of art. 

 

My deepest gratitude to everyone who has helped in the creation of this collection, especially my two children.

 

 

 

 

[Writing this book was a dangerous and vulnerable venture (for both myself and my son), so why did I write it? 1. As Rilke wrote to his Polish translator, Witold von Hulewicz, “...our task is to stamp this provisional, perishing earth into ourselves so deeply, so painfully and passionately, that its being may rise again, 'invisibly,' in us.” 2. To prove to myself that value can come from grief, from sorrow. 3. To prove to my children that value can come from grief, from sorrow. 4. Celan: “Your mother's soul hovers ahead. / Your mother's soul helps to navigate night, reef after reef. / Your mother's soul whips on the sharks at the bow...” To try to be the mother's soul. 5. As a way of touching, being together, an intimacy, a solace. Yannis Ritsos, “I hide beyond simple things so you'll find me; / if you don't find me, you'll find the things, / you'll touch what my hand has touched, / our hand-prints will merge.” 6. To create a record, one version. To understand. To preserve. 7. Probably, also, to seal off—to create a new beginning point for myself, my children. 8. Perhaps to offer something of value to others. 9. Selfishly, to survive. 10. To strengthen my bravery, so that I (and we) might move forward.]

A Second Poetry Collection, Blue

 

I've written a book. My second. And in a way, the writing of a book is easier for me than asking for anyone to read or buy it. However, a great deal of energy goes into the making of a book and not all of the energy is mine.

To honour those people who are the subjects of the writing, to honour those who are affected directly by the writing, to honour others who suffer from depression or who love and support those who suffer from depression, to honour the writers who have already spent time with the book and endorsed it (Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, John Sibley Williams, Emily Tristan Jones and Barton Smock), and to honour my publisher (Jean Huets) who has believed in this work, I take this moment to share with you this newest poetry collection that is forthcoming in October of this year from Circling Rivers, Blue.

Blue is a journey of grief and healing, hope and determination. It is the record of a child (my son) moving through depression toward adulthood, and a mother's love, her need to redeem that which wounds.

Closer to publication, I hope to share some audio of the poems with you and perhaps (I hope hope hope) a piece of music written by my son with the collection Blue in mind.

If you purchase (pre-order available now in the U.S. and Canada) the book, thank you. If you read the book, thank you. If you hear the book, receive the book, my deepest gratitude and tenderest understanding — in this way, we are not alone.

  

(*Cover art, Blue Heart, Kathleen Loe. If you'd like to touch base, you can reach me at thetinyleaf@gmail.com)

thinking silence

 "When everything happens at once, no conflicts can occur."

from Hayden Carruth's "Of Distress Being Humiliated by the Classical Chinese Poets"

thinking of Morandi's bottles (and Charles Wright)

"Our lives, it turns out, are still-lifes, glass bottles and fruit,

Dead animals, flowers, 

  

                                the edges of this and that

Which drop off, most often, to indeterminate vacancy.

We're beautiful, and hung up to dry...

 

We don't know what counts—

It's as simple as that, isn't it,

                                             we just don't know what counts."

Charles Wright

from "Body and Soul"

the gift

 

that which is small is not small

a persistence of colour

 

My intention in photographing the trillium was to get close to white on white, engage with a disappearance. And yet, here, with the trillium, a day after spending time with the works of Rothko, I can't help but be mesmerized by the ethereal nature, yet stubbornness of this colour.

“The recipe of a work of art – its ingredients – how to make it -the formula.

1. There must be a clear preoccupation with death – intimations of mortality…Tragic art, romantic art, etc., deals with the knowledge of death.
2. Sensuality. Our basis of being concrete about the world. it is a lustful relationship to things that exist.
3. Tension. Either conflict or curbed desire.
4. Irony. This is a modern ingredient – the self-effacement and examination by which a man for instant can go on to something else.
5. Wit and play…for the human element.
6. The ephemeral and chance…for the human element.
7. Hope.10% to make the tragic concept more endurable. I measure these ingredients very carefully when I paint a picture. It is always the form that follows these elements and the picture results from the proportions of these elements.”

M.Rothko’s „Address to Pratt Institute”, November, 1958.

Canadian "cherry blossoms"

 

perhaps not quite as intoxicating as cherry blossoms, but (this far north) maple flowers are worthy of praise and meditation 

against darkness

How It Got Dark by Don McKay

When the second stone

was cast, when Gatling

begat his gun, when to know

became to own—animals,

land, ideas, people;

when they piled the skulls

and posed for photographs, when

the fifth stone fell

like a schizophrenic star, like

an Airbus, like an angel

crashing into space-time;

when the red squirrel popped

out of the stew pot and

up a pine tree in a flash, then

paused to boast and scold us in that brash

staccato and I said that's it,

let's get the little bugger and picked

up the first stone.

a dictionary of all that is

 

From an interview with Stanley Kunitz (by Bill Moyers),

Let me tell you about a twelfth-century Chinese poet named Yang Wan-li, one of the four masters of Southern Sung poetry. One day he gathered his disciples around him and addressed them in this fashion: "Now, what is poetry? If you say it is simply a matter of words, I will say, 'A good poet gets rid of words.' If you say it is simply a matter of meaning, I will say, 'A good poet gets rid of meaning.' But, you say, if words and meaning are gotten rid of, where is the poetry? To this I reply, 'Get rid of words and meaning and there is still poetry.'"

Scholars have been wrestling with that test for centuries. I think that Yang is telling us that poetry is more than a product of human intelligence and craft. It is an intrinsic element of the beauty and mystery of existence, something we take in with the air we breathe. We take it in and then we give back some semblance of it in our art.

a strong desire for the power to see trees or stone

 

Letter to a Poet by Robert Hass

A mockingbird leans
from the walnut, bellies,
riffling white, accomplishes

his perch upon the eaves.
I witnessed this act of grace
in blind California

in the January sun
where families bicycle on Saturday
and the mother with high cheekbones

and coffee-colored iridescent
hair curses her child
in the language of Pushkin–

John, I am dull from
thinking of your pain,
this mimic world

which make us stupid
with the totem griefs
we hope will give us

power to look at trees,
at stones, one brute to another
like poems on a page.

What can I say, my friend?
There are tricks of animal grace,
poems in the mind

we survive on. It isn’t much.
You are 4,000 miles away &
this world did not invite us.

 

Naming for Love by Hayden Carruth

These are the proper names:
Limestone, tufa, coral rag,
Clint, beer stone, braystone,
Porphyry, gneiss, rhyolite,
Ironstone, cairngorm, circle stone,
Blue stone, chalk, box stone,
Sarsen, magnesia, brownstone,
Flint, aventurnine,
Soapstone, alabaster, basalt,
Slate, quartzite, ashlar,
Clunch, cob, gault, grit,
Buhrstone, dolomite,
Flagstone, freestone, sandstone,
Marble, shale, gabbro, clay,
Adamant, gravel, traprock,
And of course brimstone.

Some of the names are shapes:
Crag, scarp, moraine, esker,
Alp, hogback, ledge, tor,
Cliff, boulder, crater,
Gorge, and bedrock.

Some denote uses:
Keystone, capstone,
Hearthstone, whetstone,
And gravestone.

For women a painful stone called
Wombstone, which doctors say is
"A calculus formed in the uterus."
Gallstone and kidneystone hurt everyone.
Millstone is our blessing.

I will not say the names
Of the misnamed precious stones.

But a lovely name is gold,
A product of stone.

Underwards is magma;
May all who read this live long.

winter

the young, also flying

 

goodbye