Is Poetry Political? 
Thursday, May 12, 2016, 07:22 PM - Poetry and Writing
For some reason, I've been giving this a lot of thought lately.

I like Adrienne Rich's answer to a similar question, "Can poetry affect social change?":

"Yes, where poetry is liberative language, connecting the fragments within us, connecting us to others like and unlike ourselves, replenishing our desire. . . . In poetry words can say more than they mean and mean more than they say. In a time of frontal assaults both on language and on human solidarity, poetry can remind us of all we are in danger of losing—disturb us, embolden us out of resignation."

Also Seamus Heaney crediting poetry with offering:

"a less binary and altogether less binding vocabulary"

The arresting and nuanced challenge positivist normative ways of thinking and moving in the world. Food for and voice of our authentic selves. What is more political than being completely in our skins?

Jean Baker Miller:

"Authenticity and subjugation are incompatible."





A Reading List on Loss, Death and Will 
Tuesday, June 9, 2015, 02:40 PM - Poetry and Writing
Nox, Anne Carson

One Crow Sorrow, Lisa Martin

As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner

Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

A Grief Observed, CS Lewis

Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre by Simone de Beauvoir

A Very Easy Death, by Simone de Beauvoir

H is for Hawk, Helen Macdonald

Goshawk, by TH Whyte

The Long Goodbye, Meahan O'Rourke

Freud, Beyond the Pleasure principle

Adam Philips, Darwin's Worms

Schopenhaur, The World as Will and Representation

Walter A. Davis, Deracination: Historicity, Hiroshima, and the Tragic Imperative

When Pain is the Doorway, Pema Chodron

Wave, Sonali Deraniyagala

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, Alison Bechdel

Bough Down, Karen Green

The Loved One, Evelyn Waugh



In Trust  
Saturday, June 6, 2015, 03:33 PM - Poetry and Writing
Waters shedding shifting
stretching from Five Island Lake
to Seabright offering emptying

into the Bay
the marshes
bogs below barrens

thick and wet with life
brackish dreams

as a child I remember
the roar of the Woodens

the stumps, blackest
scat piles

signs of eyes
of tracks

small followed by
bigger followed by
bigger still

tracks of fishers,
and hunters
of forests past

two old friends
trading tales
sharing bannock

like the
two first roads
mingling overlapping
awhile before
bursting into their own

Granite & root, root & rock
rock & river

Trails inspiring silence

but wait
I hear the year’s first insect buzz

The warbler’s
wind chimes

the Kinglets & Juncos

I see a Broad-winged Hawk
its slow circled trance

In the wild
we hear with our eyes,
green and rust,
a still lake.

we hear with our feet,
swoosh and glop
What's a little mud?

The forest is full of compensations

Moss cascades
canopies shade
and death nestles

under a
trembling
aspen

an elderly oak
or knobby-kneed beech

Specks of green
nub along branches of
slim tamaracks

The air so clear
you can see right through the rocks
breathe the granite in

Woods, you’re a
languid, lichen-draped
beguiling old man.

There are small creatures
clamouring at your ankles.

still some fern-flirting left in you.

Sunlight danced on the Bluff &
I felt the heartbeat of a birch

Roots, rocks carry me
Back to my sleeping self
Preverbal

Take me to the erratics
Remind me that this is life
We are residuals of history
and forces wild and errant
here in our bodies.

how I love the frog songs
the larch buds breaking
autumn blush of crowberry
spring velvet of the lady-slipper

dragonflies mating tale to neck

Black Felt Lichen sticks to granite
like bits of burned maps

tree roots muscle over muddy paths

Everything in proportion
and a space for us

On behalf of all the wild things that make this
land their home and with reverence for the First Peoples
who preserved this land before us, we dedicate
The Bluff Wilderness Hiking Trail to preservation.

We can do this
we will work together to
protect this sacred heritage
we

passionate volunteers
we trail runners who come weekly
we old friends making the four loop pilgrimage
we family of four plus two dogs
we Crew from England who will definitely be back
we friends from Quebec and BC and Spain and Minnesota
We 10 hiking babes
Troops of scouts and girl guides
We 2 fat guys doing our best

We couple reminding ourselves
what love looks like
outside of the city

we can camp, fish, hike
run, mess around,
collect wild edibles

we can do this

skinny dip in a lake
run the river
paddle full moons

we can take the kids
from screen to green
occupy the forest
keep her secrets

We can do this in trust
we can learn her deep beauty
delight in the wildness
in ourselves
that we share
with the earth and the water,
the spirits that inhabit us

We do this for all
that is teeming and wild
We do this forever
We do this in trust


This found poem was generated from
the monitoring books on the Bluff
Wilderness Trail and two poetry workshops
held on the trail. It is dedicated to Rich Campbell
whose vision and passion led the way.



Dear citizen 
Friday, June 27, 2014, 07:22 PM - Poetry and Writing
If economic security

I mean agency I mean

justice is not bred to

move in political realms

is it because the path is simply

one of snakes and ladders, spirals

because we don’t find the right

balance of love and power,

between growing trees and

navigating jungles or we chickegg

the poor thing into parts until

it’s stuck or dying

failed to watch

how it moved. Is it

because we miss in it

the moral power, the

imagination, intoxication,

the trust, the critical

intangible of the

townhouse, the gathering,

the dialogue, this dialogue,

our kite and our stars.



This found poem was generated from a forum that I participated in at the Coady Institute on the links between economic and political citizenship. For me, as I describe in my bio, the two have always been tied though political (in the broadest sense) agency cannot be assumed.


Moonwort 
Tuesday, June 26, 2012, 06:16 PM - Poetry and Writing
Black folds into fog into forest.
An arm shot bare. On her knees

in the sphagnum humming,
plunging knuckles numb.

One day as any other
you find you’re carrying death.

Lilith came long before Eve.
She led her.

She’s back breathing
night with the sleepless

plucking ferns
by the moon

before they unfurl
unshoe the coming horses.









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