SPORED: Robert Kroetsch

From Robert Kroetsch's poem "Making an Impression" in his Too Bad: Sketches Toward a Self-Portrait (University of Alberta Press, 2010).

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So this is an ugly spore print, from last-chance mushrooms I found on the boulevard instead of in my precious forest. And I think it's right that it's ugly, sort of jagged and shapeless, because that's how this poem in particular makes me feel.

Because Kroetsch died by the side of the road, after an accident. And I'm still (selfishly) sad that he's dead, despite not having really known him.

So RIP Robert Kroetsch. And RIP Michael Van Rooy, whose face peered down from the wall at McNally Robinson when I was there for an event last week.

And RIP to M's grandmother and Aa's great-grandmother, Julia Onody, who died Thursday night, her daughters holding her arthritis-gnarled hands.