Blog #
129…May 2022
April was
poetry month and in case you missed it, I’m here to celebrate poets and
those lyrical forms that capture moods, feelings, sights and sounds
like nothing else can.
I’m forever grateful that our high school English class required memorizing 200 lines of poetry every year…and being randomly chosen to recite in front of our mates. I remember cringing as 13 year olds monotoned their way through Ode on a Grecian Urn, dreading my turn. I probably wasn’t much better but the snatches of Browning, Wordsworth, Shelley, Milton and many other British poets that float up all these years later give me immense pleasure. Rupert Brooke's nostalgia for home as war approaches " some corner of a foreign field that is forever England" still brings a lump to my throat.
In my twenties, thinking I was hip in my black stockings and turtlenecks, I loved the romance of Shakespeare’s Sonnet XXX with its lines on friendship,"But if the while I think on thee, dear friend/All losses are restored and sorrows end." I discovered that poetry could advance activism with Allen Ginsberg and confront racism with James Baldwin. I found Canadian poets - Irving Layton and Leonard Cohen. And women, Dorothy Livesay, Miriam Waddington, Karen Mulhallen.
Karen captures the anguish in our northern communities with these lines from her poem Pikangikum: "Ask ourselves, "our first world"/with no game for hunters/no food, no shelter for birds, fish, animals/no clean water, no elders with stories/children take their rite of passage/journey to adulthood, sniffing gas."
I read poets who experimented playfully with form, words, sound and humour. Ogden Nash delighted me with: "The turtle lives twixt plated decks/Which practically conceal its sex/I think it clever of the turtle/In such a fix to be so fertile.
I loved the acrid wit of Dorothy Parker "Oh life is a glorious cycle of song/A medley of extemporanea/And love is a thing that can never go wrong/And I am Marie of Roumania."
Today, on a somber note, Warsan Shire, a refugee herself - Somalian, born in Kenya, raised in London, now living in Los Angeles - is in a prime position to express her feelings in Home, a poem with achingly poignant lines:
" No one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear saying leave, run away from me now./I don’t know what I’ve become but I know that anywhere is safer than here. And... " You have to understand, that no one puts their children in a boat unless the water is safer than the land."
Poets show us how to hear - if we can bear to listen, they open our hearts and our brains to the joy and beauty, the tears and sorrow around us. Verlaine, Lorca, Rumi...and poetry can be found in the voices of the 90 million refugees displaced around the world. One who had lived in a camp for over 8 years was heard to say "My home is the people I live with now, the ones I wake up with, I have nowhere to go home to, home is not land but people."
And if you're in Toronto on Sunday May 15th, you're invited to meet four Canadian poets who collectively, have been challenging and delighting audiences for over two hundred years! The special guest of honour will be Arlene Lampert, first and founding executive secretary of the League of Canadian Poets (1971-1979) who continues to love and support poetry and poets in Canada.
Poetry on Markham Street
3pm, n/w corner of Markham and London Sts.
Featuring
bill bissett, Robert Priest, David Bateman and Honey Novick
Funded by the Canada Council for the Arts through the League of Canadian Poets Masks and distancing are suggested
Please keep yourself and those close to you safe and well, and remember how lucky we are to be able to stay home to be safe rather than have to leave.
See you back here in June
