Light of Love

Joy stayed with me a night –
Young and free and fair –
And in the morning light
He left me there.

Then Sorrow came to stay,
And lay upon my breast
He walked with me in the day.
And knew me best.

I’ll never be a bride,
Nor yet celibate,
So I’m living now with Pride –
A cold bedmate.

He must not hear nor see,
Nor could he forgive
That Sorrow still visits me
Each day I live.

a day in the life of a writer

October 28, 2009

–that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s so glorious and grand and so, it is glorious and grand–

Recently, my poetry was compared to Ezra Pound in Venice when he went mad. And tonight, a classmate told me a line of mine reminded her of TS. Eliot. I don’t have the line…um, I’ll post it later.

I never thought that it would come to this. I never thought it would mean being called ‘abusive’ or being  cast out from a group of friends. I never thought I’d have to wait to write that infamous chekovian piece  about my beloved Canadian Landscape at 35. 20 years from the time I knew I was a writer – 15 years old. I never thought I’d end up stuck in Canada for so many years when I was, at one time, just a mere 50 miles outside of UCLA’s campus and living in 1990 Orange County, CA. I never thought. I never dreamed that it would be this existential; this riveting; this glorious and this cracking. David Mamet…oh, psshaw! I’ve got stories too. All of us writers, we all do. I’m littered with witchcraft, the daemonic in the closet and skeletons shackled to my bed both day and night. It’s so much fun. Enticing really and so self-self-self agrandizing; it’s sickening and boring after a while. Ah, but alas, that’s the dichotomy, the paradox of it, so glorious it’s humiliating, so grand it’s petty and pathetic…Ohhh…this work of myself, this work of words. Do we not know when to clear the spaces? I haven’t even begun yet and already I am so empty and so full.

I feel I am more than shaking hands with Virginia Woolf. I rather feel I hear her telling me, ahh, it just ain’t worth it lady. Write. Write. Write. Ahh, but the penultimate is to drown yourself while your at it too! And she’s there laughing at me. Or when this madness ceases she’s there not laughing but silent and pleased at the fact that it is really exactly a century later and glad to see that her predilictions on what words are there for women to speak are plenty and overflowing, so much so, that it is now irrelevant what sex is what and when and how and who? It is 2010 in just a few months and she was writing herself and assisting the Oh so respected modernist movement a century ago. Yes, how to love our predecessors and see how our own folly is their word over ours. I don’t really know what the F***

I’m doing. I’m ‘just a writer now’ because I said I was going to be. I’ll be 35 in just a few days.

Oh yes, I worship the craft. I love it so much I’ll destroy everything else for it. What a grand thing to be! What a grand thing to do. Give up children, matrimony, whatever that means, become poor. Live in affordable government housing. Keep yourself holed up in isolation and only frequent readings and socialize with other like-minded opinionated and self-absorbed assholes. Ah, Artistes! Gotta love ‘em.

I’m a Poet. I’m a Playwright. I’m a Journalist. I’m a writer. I write everything. I feed words. I eat words. I die in words. This is my life and I am so much in love with it that I absolutely despise it; I hate it. I just loathe it. It is arsenic and pneumonia all poured into one lovely glass of coffee in the morning as I enter the next phase, the next stage of this written word.

It’s wonderful that it should come to this. Marvelous. I am alone. Solidarity and Solitary is the writer’s place and yet, I hate it. I just absolutely hate it. The rewrites. The time consumption. Ugh! Where is that glamour that I was seeking out at 15? It’s 20 years later. I suppose another 20 years in the making and it will all come to pass. How ironic. How interesting. How insane. Do you know? Do you know that I am so glad I’ve managed to get to this place. No husband. No child. No money—I’m bankrupt.

I’ve had a series of 3 major abusive relationships with men and I’m currently in the middle of an incredibly important ambitious undertaking and so stressed out! I’m writing my very first ever play and I’m incredibly proud of it. I love the idea. I love the premise. The story etc. I know it can be as good as Chekov’s The Cherry Orchard. Will it be produced? Will it ever generate funds. Ah, that remains to be seen or it will just turn into a pitiful Remains of the Day (not the book, just the expression) and I will have to resort to, should I be so lucky, teaching. I’m currently working on my Master of Fine Art through the University of British Columbia and I’m incredibly proud of it. It is forcing me to work. I’m thrust into spending a multitude of coin that is part of the family heirloom and well earned over many years of work. I often question if rather I should be investing in a fucking home as opposed to a writing career that gives me credentials and letters to say that I’m a writer by trade.

I’m really quite happy I’m enrolled in this progam. I get to work with awesome inspiring talent and people who are doing it ‘ASS IN CHAIR’ as Dave Chilton says…who got that from another Gobe and Mail journalist. Oh, lovely! It is an exciting thing though I question whether or not I’m truly up for this ambitious plight I’ve thrown myself into after so many years of madness, abuse, horrible living situations and conditions and relationships. Oh. God. Of course, writers, like myself are known to be diagnosed with that famous personality disorder that just makes us adorable, a borderline personality…there it is. I’m frankly, quite tired of categories. I’m not hacking heads off. I’m self-absorbed. There I said it. Simple.

Stardust

Gone are the days of writing with/for and after Kafka – we have all morphed into some insect. Beyond post-modernism, we’ve got to replenish the cottages from you tube delirium, vampire delights, digital brain damage and wireless stardust and even then, even then, there will be telepathy. This is the problem with tech wording, writing; they morph. I can’t keep one status update & another elsewhere–Star Trek transporters via wireless interfaces

“I have an empty head on Love in general…” Jacques Derrida

A few days prior to my leaving for my two dot five weeks in Vancouver at UBC for the Poetry Summer Residency initiating my first installment for the Creative Writing MFA program, I had a lovely dinner with a few friends to celebrate the beginning of a new cycle, a dear friend of mine, Carri (who, after assisting me and reading my preparations for the presentation I had decided on making in the workshop: Love poetry as I had chosen that as part of my presentation for the course. Susan Musgrave requested students of the workshop choose a topic listed among a dozen or so in the course outline, some being Revision, Accessible Poetry, Prose poetry, Form in Poetry etc. I chose Love Poetry) knowing I had already studied the Love Poetry and Literature of the Ancient Near East, Ezra Pounds translations as well as the Papyrus Chester Beatty translations of the Love Poems of Ancient Egypt, and the Song of Songs that were commissioned by Solomon to write for Ancient Isreal, Carri not only suggested but insisted I devote myself to specializing specifically in holding workshops on Love Poetry and Erotic Poetry. No hesitation on my part as these works fascinate me. They indicate to me, the expertees and the superior intelligence that a civilization epochs before ours with scribes whom already had claimed within their grasp the marriage between musicality, language and communication something that we continue to do today however; poetry is not in this present day space time continuum, which boggles my mind a bit but save that conversation for another rainy day, a mainstream form of communication or a ritualistic performance made at a weekly ceremonies that celebrate sexuality and/or deities. It is a sub-culture that remains at its core or attempts to remain avant-garde. As I said earlier, Carri suggested I teach Love poetry or specialize in that aspect of poetic form by running workshops and I’m actually going to pursue the idea, hopefully soon, because, once I did my presentation at the residency the specialization of Love Poetry and once I handed out my 12 page essay from 2004 on Ancient Egyptian Love poems and literature of the Ancient Near East as well as my power point presentation on the topic, I was aglow! Now, tonight, after watching the YouTube video of Derrida’s comment of ‘empty head’ on Love ‘in general’ I couldn’t help but laugh at the satirical nature of his intense, passionate, yet genuine words while put on the spot by two women interviewers and made to discuss …”tell us about Love”… What he said was he simply could not just talk about Love without being given a particular context and inevitably he blurted out “I have an empty head on love in general…” Hahaha! How cute. How perfectly apt and sweet! Well, I think I could have been a lot less neurotic if it were me but, that’ just my ego talking. ; ) By the end of our 10 days in workshop at UBC, Susan Musgrave thoughtfully, kindly and sweetly presented each of us students with a wonderful gift: A special book. The one I received, I shall treasure forever, Oriental Love Poems by Michelle Lovric. Thank you Susan! for taking me back home to where it matters most. I hope to be writing more of this soon in the coming weeks!

When I wake up alone

At dead of night,

And muse on verse-making,

Even I am a god.

Ochi-ai Naobumi, 1861-1903 Japan 

translated by Miyamori Asataro

Oriental Love Poems, Michelle Lovric

Nonno or That man

 

When he died, he rose.

He rose and rose and rose and rose and rose,

ephemeral since his inception,

he rose high, up up up and farther up

he became some other

part of this universe, the vast beyond,

that he was everything, the perpendicular, the lateral, the parallel,

that he was everywhere and all at once was in me and outside.

the cataclysm of it 

the expansion of what was him

The day after, a week later

four weeks after, four months later

A year to the day

5 years, 5 years 22 days

it is because we forget, I forget, you forget, 

they forgot how

that great lift; unnameable

it cannot be tied to a name or thing or thought

or or or 

Poverty

after Fernando Pessoa

“Wise is he who enjoys the show offered by the world.”

How you make us smile. How you make us live before dying. How you make us need to exchange for a piece of bread. How you make us survive in order to keep the breath. The inhale and release. How you make us turn to greed, the love of gold cows, contaminated goods.  This costs nothing. How you make us scuttle about for worth in this place. How you make us fear poverty—that indomitable crush of the human spirit. How you make us keep a ceaseless pace, one that can avenge innocence. How you make us dirty, unworthy, pathetic and disjointed. How can you be conquered? Like pain, you exist to make us all weary of ourselves. How can we  accept you? How you create murder summoned from the destitute and angry. How do you redeem yourself every time the division of goods remains unjust? How you advise us that there is never enough among the petty and fortuitous. They must have more.  How you cause the famines and disease to spread themselves like a virus over the most sacred temples of earth’s nature to make us weak and fragile. How you make us decay. There we are before you: hunched over, shoulders slumped, retreating from ourselves, destitute and tired of living. How you kill everything that was in place long before you arrived to take as much as you could so that you could inform us of how much we are missing. How there is so much more that we cannot have. How you lie to us. And your lies are so rich, so grand, so full of creamy coloured preserved butter and artificial honey. How you give us the missing pieces—the ones that know no caress of goodness. How it dwells—we so desperate for its sting. How you make us become immune to malice. How you leave it to us to see ourselves to sift like a snake on the ground without venom. How you make us smile.

 

 

 

Baby Denim

Baby Denim

you will live long enough to wear me—

out, on a Friday late night

torn threads, olive oil stains,

frayed cotton fringes

fascinating yourself

having outlived the six years of laundry,

the blue friends, the blue accidents,

that are

my learning.

 

UBC Summer Residency 2009 – Last day

Thursday July 16, 2009

I’m leaving early tomorrow am. Green College and the grounds are splendid. I had the opportunity to revel in my work and writing as a poet. The grounds here are so enchanting. Glad I got to take pictures. The work with Susan Musgrave has really created promise in my work and an individual poet. She’s such a great spiritual presence. Not only am I inspired but I also have more faith in my capabilities as a writer, as a poet and as an individual voice. I have much work to do. Much work in form, with words, making it new, using images and sound–rewrites and revision is so necessary but, I no longer see it as such a daunting task that I dread due to insecurity and a feeling of not ‘being enough’ around the Toronto community of poets. I can now work harder and grow as a writer and maintain a stronger sense of self. It is so rewarding to have become friends with Susan and know that there’s opportunity to be made here over the next four years. What a great gift.

Sunday, one week into the Summer residency UBC

First day off. Free day. Instead of hanging out with cousins, I’m moving to the UBC residence at Green College. I’ll have my own room and that’s important for the rest of my stay. I stayed with my cousins from July 1st to July 12th. (today) Love my cousins. They are so italian and so canadian. They love garlic, growing it in this part of the fertile earth and just about everything else! And when I write everything. I MEAN EVERYTHING!! SO MUCH. (well, I should say my father’s cousin who is originally from the Molise mountain region, all peasants and relatives from the village – Torella Del Sannio) They make wine, they run around all day chatting and walking Benson, they are so full of life and have so much passion for this fertile earth. Sandro and Luca are so much fun and so are their girlfriends Crystal and Romina. Its a unique bunch. This morning its pancakes with spelt ground fresh, fresh currants and blueberries (organic) and yesterday evening it was an entire salmon juicy, baked fresh! and ofcourse, Tina always makes a little bit of pasta for the group to share. I’m disappointed today as I’m overweight and not out running or swimming to get exercise but more importantly I’ve got to leave this lively fun bunch to head to Green College, which is a relief as I need to focus more on the Summer Residency as that’s more important than anything and why I am here.

“There are names for what Binds us”

Wings make us bound to what we love

so that we keep the labour of flying  

in a desperate moment–a jocular force that opposes us.

 

Each sunrise, each hour,

every moment, sifting the jericho grasslands

reaching far above our halos

hip replacements, surgical connectors, heart transplants

the woven patterns that only silkworms eat through 

breaking down the filth

fading with the twilight 

the nests that welcome our drowsy eyelids

command them to close

these dreams, unconscious names for what binds us.