Forgive the long hiatus, I’ve been packing up and leaving
becoming a colony of vicious greedheads, evicting cancer patients in the
summer to rent weekly summer accomodations to tourists for three times
what I paid for a month. Then unpacking and settling in to a geezer pen in
Sechelt which isn’t half as bad as I imagined it would be. I miss my friends but
I was getting lonelier on Hornby because a few of them have begun dwelling
in the dirt. As I will probably too soooner than later(still dealing with the cancer
regime) in the meantime I’m going to make the best of it and pass along a
few of my pleasures, progress, and disappointments, though I’ve almost
never written about arts I don’t like, agreeing with Louis b. Mayer i.e., any
publicity is good publicity as long as they spell your name write which in
the extreme leads to my believe that murderers should be deprived of the
right to a name since so many of whom are thrilled to see their names in
the headlines. My proposal would be that all rapists and murderers be
required to be called The Shit even after they’ve “served their time” so
the public would be warned and if they tried to assume an alias they should
be returned to jail or better yet banished to
The Sechelt Festival of the Written Arts took place about a week after I
arrived, it was good to hear my friend
award winner. Before he began reading he let us know of the passing of
Margaret Avison who I’d hoped would be the canadian nominee for the
nobel prize since Sheila Watson and Anne Hebert both died before they
were nominated. John is a relaxed charming and humble reader, he read
from the powerful
Stumbling In The Bloom. as well as several enchanting more domestic
poems though he didn’t read this:
Insignificance
What is your neglect of me
to me, my voluble compeers, dumb countrymen?
Whole mountain ranges have overlooked me.
Great rivers pass me by with no glint of recognition.
through their green lenses unidentified all spring.
Past vistas. Sometimes even my wife ignores me.
But at the margins’ summit, citizenship!
I have been citizen always
of Greater Insignificance, gulping
in every deaf/blind grateful face-full
of cunt or sea-air or succulent
asparagus, immensities,
the poems first oxygen, oblivion:
your eventual reading assignment.
one of my favourites. After the reading John and his wife,
the poet novelist Teresa Kishkan wisked me off to Andreas
Schroeder’s for a quick dindins, then rapidly returning to
Rockwood for a mob reading hastily arranged to replace
the unavailable Wayne Johnson.
