cover story: Rutting Season

cover story: Guidelines

One night in June

An evening of poetry with Sharon Caseburg & Ariel Gordon
Where: Aqua Books, 274 Garry Street
When: Thursday, June 4, 7:00 pm


Please join Sharon & Ariel and their guests Tim Schouten and Neil Besner as they launch chapbooks from presses in Edmonton, Saskatoon, and Montreal.

In addition to the readings, the event will feature visual art by Tim Schouten [whose artwork "Untitled #117 (In the Absence of Horses)" is the cover of Guidelines] and Debbie Caseburg Tyson.

There will ALSO be one of EAT! Bistro's splendid cakes and refreshments!

* * *

The Books

Ariel Gordon’s Guidelines: Malaysia & Indonesia, 1999 (Rubicon Press), explores what it means to ground oneself in landscape and family. These prose poems vividly chronicle the journey undertaken by two sisters to reconcile with their family’s past, and, over the course of their travels, with each other. A truly beautiful collection by a talented writer, this chapbook strikes a delicate balance between understanding the past and moving forward with strength into the future.

sleepwalking - poetry by Sharon Caseburg, jacket design and handwork by Debbie Caseburg Tyson - is a long elegy, elegant and other-worldly, wrapped in silk. With care and caution, sleepwalking considers what’s left when one is left behind. Published by JackPine Press.

Rutting Season, published by Montreal’s Buffalo Runs Press, is an engaging and accessible mini-anthology that features the poetry of three fresh voices in Canadian poetry and places these poets into a critical conversation with each other. Ariel Gordon, Michael Lithgow, and Linda Besner put their heads together in this unique collection.

* * *

Poet Biographies

Sharon Caseburg is a Winnipeg-based writer, editor and book designer who splits her time between producing other people’s books and writing her own. Her poetry and critical writing have appeared in numerous Canadian publications.

Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg-based writer and editor. Her poetry has recently appeared in fine lit mags such as Carousel, QWERTY, and PRISM International and even circulated on buses in Manitoba and Alberta. After a handmade limited-edition chapbook with Kingsville’s Palimpsest Press sold out in fall 2008, Ariel's first full collection of poetry, Hump, is slated for publication with Palimpsest in spring 2010.

* * *

Artist Biographies

Debbie Caseburg Tyson is an Edmonton-based fibre artist and instructor who indulges her passion for colour and texture in both contemporary quilt art and embroidery disciplines. Her work resides nationally in both private and public collections.

Tim Schouten is a Winnipeg-based artist who maintains a studio on his ranch near Petersfield, Manitoba where he lives with his wife, dogs and five horses. He has shown his work in solo and group exhibitions in Canada and the U.S. and his work can be found in private, corporate and public collections.

How to Write a Poem

“Step #12: Get opinions. It can be hard to critique your own work, so after you've done an initial edit, try to get some friends or a poetry group (there are plenty online) to look at your poem for you.” – wikiHow, How to Write a Poem.

1.
Write about what terrifies you but, um, wait until mum or dad is dead to do it. For the family’s sake…

2.
Take all the punctuation out of your poem

3.
Your lover should be your first reader and your subject, but know this: having good sex is hard. Writing good sex is harder. Believing someone who just had their head between your legs – even if they’re a hardcore critic – impossible.

4.
No one needs your next poem.
(Everyone needs your next goddamn poem.)

5.
If writing rhyming poetry about God from jail, realize you’ve hit the trifecta. Celebrate by centering everything on the hard drive that's not porn.

6.
capital letters are for suckers. seersuckers. sapsuckers.

7.
Also: use the page. Engage the ear. Allude to classical texts, sneak in a few impeccable pop culture references. Break the line. Break a leg. Have a firm grasp of grammar and syntax but also have something on the side with the fragment. Form should follow content but, hopefully, not breathing heavily.

8.
Put the punctuation back in.

9.
Don’t write poems about writing poems.
Oh. Shit.

* * *

I'm about a week off on my stated goal of writing a poem a day for the May Day Poetry Project.

After five years of May Day-ing, I know not to worry too much about missing a day.

My real goal, which I always know, no matter what number I set myself (which is why I don't bother with resolutions either...) is to come away from May Day with a clutch of poems I'm happy with.

Though we're barely halfway through the month, I think I'm doing okay.

But I'm an awful blowhard, so...

tripped

puffed

split

All photos taken along Maskwa Road, Rm of East St. Georges. May 12, 2009.

* * *

Though I was born/raised in Winnipeg, I spent long chunks of my summers at our cabin in NW Ontario. Which is to say that I left childhood with two landscapes: Winnipeg's trimmed municipal parks and Canadian shield.

Over the last decade, I've been cramming Assiniboine Forest's aspen parkland into my head, so now Canadian shield now seems...strange.

And so, while M and I strolled down a 'trail' to Rapid Five (ATV people and hikers do NOT mean the same thing when they say trail...), I looked at the pine and birch, the moss and lichen suspiciously.

When M suggested that we go through the trees to the return path, both of us wanting to take a breath of forest instead of jumping from rut to rut, automatically cataloging the garbage to either side, I agreed.

We found a few mushrooms and M only thought he heard a bear snorting once. (I leapt up from the ground when he casually asked me to come stand next to him...)

Today it gusted and rained. One or the other we could have handled, but both together made for a wretched day. But we tried, driving soupy back roads to the edge of the Gull Lake Wetland but giving it up when we saw how deep the puddles were. Then we drove to Patricia Beach, hoping to walk the dunes, but were nearly blown off our feet.

Finally, we attempted the North Star Trail in the Belair Provincial Forest. Which was more successful, even if I tripped on clearcut the one time we stopped and pitched over.

And I suppose M did look very manly when he gunned the truck over that washout.

(Really.)

A river house, borrowed.

M and I are spending a week up at a borrowed river house.

Yesterday we read and walked the beach opposite Elk Island and read and cooked a steak dinner and watched a movie and slept.

It's too early for mushrooms and I got no good pictures of the lake ice that kept me from the causeway connecting the beach and the island...but I scrawled half-a-poem on the way back to our borrowed river house.



I'm hoping to shake the rest out today or tomorrow. Or maybe even something better.

The best part of the day was watching M insert a screw into the cork keeping us from our bottle of wine then pry it out with pliers.

No, strike that. The best part was when he spotted a painted turtle out in the marsh and yelped his excitement while simultaneously raising his camera. The turtle stayed put but I almost peed myself at the sudden noise.



A few steps on, I spied a sky's worth of cloudy frogspawn to the other side of the path and we squatted down to see.

I'm not sure why, but it made me very happy to gently lift one clump from the water...

And one more...

top

bottom

All photos Assiniboine Forest, Winnipeg, MB. May 5, 2009.

* * *

Even though I am in debt, May Day-wise, I decided to go for a walk this morning instead of mewing myself up in my office.

It was a strange walk, the forest still sodden in spots and full up of people walking their dogs sans leash.

Since my goal when walking is silence and wildlife besides dog, I veered off the main path as soon as possible, taking a footpath that parallels the main one. And it was there that a dog came up behind me and leapt at me.

I don't think it touched me or was intending to hurt me, but it was big and it lunged at me and my stomach lurched...

When the dog's owner caught up to us, she muttered "Oh, sorry, I thought you had a dog with you."

I took several moments to contemplate this statement and also what M would have said had he been there...and then I just walked off.

Soon afterwards, my camera batteries died, but I knew from past experience that you can usually get a few more images out of dead batteries.

So I waited and walked and listened to the frogsong and tried to imagine the greenery grown up around the hateful new limestone path they put in last year.

And then I found this mushroom. As you can tell from the titles, I shot both the top and the underside with my dead batteries, surprised that the two images that resulted from this exercize could be so different.

Edisonia: the pains of a boy genius

1.
A boy worth his salt, having stayed
for a last weary swim, finds
himself at the bottom
of the canal.

Having not omitted this rite
of passage, his wish for a meaty fist
to grip his collar and heave him
out is translucent
in its purity.

Our boy retches and gasps
obligingly on shore when fished
out, blue-cheeked, sodden.

(A part of him wishing now
that he could measure how much
water he is puking up.)

2.
A boy feeling his oats investigates the levers
and shafts of the grain elevator and tips
into the stuff.

Having memorized the dusty slip
of wheat filling every fold,
he squeaks for help.

Chastised, our boy coughs
chaff for a week.

3.
A boy feeling flush offers to hold
a skate strap in need of a trim
while a narrow-footed friend hefts
his father’s axe, the rusty head nodding
even as it begins its downward arc.

All the way home, he cradles
the hand like it was a runt, like it was a pet
he’d begged for and trod on in the middle
of the night.

Our boy’s whorls and ridges soak
into the door’s hungry grain where he hesitates
before going in.

The kerchief full of blood
and clots? A butcher’s rough parcel,
soon burned.

4.
A boy feeling fiesty strikes
flint in a neighbour’s loft just to hear
the tongues of fire speak.

A barrel of oats being a powderkeg,
his handiwork soon lights
fuses all through the barn.

He screams almost as loud as the fire did climbing
the walls when, as a warning, he is whipped
in the town square
a week later.

His mother, watching, flinches
as though it was her being lashed.

That
hurts
most.

* * *

This is my third poem in three days over at May Day.

I'm not sure why I'm doing this, except that I'm excited (but also feeling pre-sentiments of pain) about doing a poem a day for the blog's fifth anniversary...

In other news, M and I will be retreating from May 10-17 in a lovely little house in St. Georges, MB, thanks to the kindness of a writer friend.

Plans include investigating the local sections of the La Verendrye trail and walking the dunes at Grand Beach. Also, sickening amounts of reading and thinking.

Unfortunately, you can steal wireless internet from the nearby library, so I'll have no excuse for not posting my (ulp!) daily poems.