Patrick White (September 15, 1948-March 1, 2014)

The third and (so far) final Poet Laureate of Ottawa (1987-1990), Patrick White, has died after an extended battle with cancer. This note appeared yesterday from Patrick's daughter, Jody:

Hello All... By the time most of you see this message, my father Patrick will have left us and finally be out of pain. As you all know, from the moment he found out he had cancer, he fought it. He never wavered and I truly believe his final goal was to make his last poetry reading in Ottawa last week, and he made it. His true passion in life was his painting and his poetry, and I would like to be able to say something moving and poetic, but unfortunately, it was not a gift that was passed on to me. So, let me thank you instead, on his behalf, for the support, the encouragement, the kind words, and for being there. Always. Whenever he needed you.
A celebration of Patrick's life is in the very early planning stages. This information will be passed on as soon as there is more info to give.
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In recent times, Patrick lived in Perth, Ontario. Many of us came to know him as Poet Laureate of Ottawa (1987-1990).

A bio for a 2011 reading he did for Ottawa's AB Series reads:

Patrick White is former Poet Laureate of Ottawa. He is the author of eight books of poetry: Poems (Soft Press), God in the Rafters (Borealis), Stations (Commoner’s Books), Homage to Victor Jara (Steel Rail Press), Seventeen Odes (Fiddlehead Books), Orpheus on Highbeam (Anthos Books), Habitable Planets, New and Selected Poems (Cormorant Books), and The Benjamin Chee Chee Elegies (General Store Publishing).

Winner of the Archibald Lampman Award, Canadian Literature Award, Benny Nicholas Award for Creative Writing, he was also a runner-up for the Milton Acorn People’s Poet Award. He is founding editor and publisher of Anthos, a Journal of the Arts, Anthos Books, and producer-host of Radio Anthos, a popular literary radio show.

George Woodcock wrote of his Selected Poems in the Ottawa Citizen: "He promises to be one our best and best respected poets." Sharon Drache, in the Kingston Whig Standard: "He might well win the Nobel Prize one day in his own inimitable way." And Orbis (London, England), has said of his work: "His images are strong, lyrical, moving. He dares and achieves."

Some have suggested that he was best known as Poet Laureate, but he contributed a great deal as a literary provocateur, including as founding editor/publisher of Ottawa poetry publisher Anthos Books and Anthos Magazine throughout the 1970s and into the 80s (publishing early collections by a number of Ottawa writers), as well as long-time host of Anthos Radio at CKCU. He was also well known in and around Ottawa for his own poetry collections, before disappearing from local literary life to Perth, Ontario in 1990. His ninth poetry collection, RedShift (ekstasis editions, 2013), was launched barely two weeks before he died, at Beechwood Books on February 16, 2014.

Laura Farina's This Woman Alphabetical & Terry Ann Carter's Transplanted

Until Laura Farina won the 2006 Archibald Lampman Award for Best Book of Poetry in Ottawa for her collection This Woman Alphabetical (Toronto ON: Pedlar Press, 2005), I have to admit I had no idea who she was. Since then, I have discovered a few things, including the fact that she is an Ottawa poet, was born in 1980, attended Canterbury High School, was briefly an associate editor of Arc magazine, and was one of the editors of Under The Poet Tree: A Centauri Anthology (Toronto ON: Pedlar Press, 2004). Is there any particular reason why this is a poet in town that hasn’t been reading in any of the open sets or featured readings that I've seen or heard of? Is there any particular reason why she has been hiding out?

great pan is dead

A pie maker
is a keeper of secrets.

Juice flesh
under flakes
like the snowy months
when neighbours tie scarves
and grow fatter.

A circle eats its own tail
as summer bakes
under a pie plate moon.

This is seasons of forgetfulness.

So hard to think sweat
with goosebumped arms.
So hard to think forest
when only knife branches
and nowhere sky remain.

A pie maker
whispers the promise
of rising to blackbirds
and they have marble in their stomachs.
Cat's eyes peering out
the windpipe of a bird.

Difficult to fly while digesting clocks.

In spring we hear
Pan is dead
and there is
a new cat king.

He cuts through
pale pie maker palms
and blood pours out
like gravy. (pp 11-2)

What I like about these pieces is the deceptive quality; deceptive in its sheer simplicity. It doesn’t work for every piece, but when it does, there is a nice quality of grace to what Farina works in her poems, bouncing idea off idea off idea, even while working the structure of an otherwise-narrative, such as this fragment from the poem "neighbourhood" (pp 41-4) that ends the collection, writing:

Our house is owned
by Karen Elizabeth MacQuarrie
who is a teacher and an editor,
who is my aunt.

I wish the drunks would stop
leaving garbage on my lawn. (p 42)

Farina seems very much to live on that line between writing deceptively simple poems and writing actual simple poems, and in this collection she seems to fall on either side. She even writes a poem for simplicity itself, which is interesting, but not one of the strongest pieces in the collection. I am interested, though, in seeing what else Farina might do, down the road. Perhaps we might not even hear from her again until another book appears…

in praise of simplicity

Today I praise only what is simple.
A white bowl full of white milk.
The weight of a hand full of river stones.
Feet and the creak of hardwood floors.
The last of this summer's ripe tomatoes.

Today I praise only what is simple.
A spill falling like white silk.
The weight of silence broken by the phone.
Suitcase and a slamming door.
An empty room and an open window. (p 18)

I remember being very taken with what Ottawa poet Terry Ann Carter read last year at a TREE Reading Series open set; I've been aware of Carter's work since the early 1990s, and even published some of it in The Free Verse Anthology (Ottawa ON: above/ground press, 1993) about a million years ago. Always a capable writer, there was something about the work she read then that went beyond what she had previously accomplished, now in trade form in her collection Transplanted (Ottawa ON: Borealis Press, 2006), a collection I was only able to get my hands on at the recent League of Canadian Poets AGM in Ottawa. A retired high school teacher, Carter has served as The League of Canadian Poets' Education Chair, Vice President of Haiku Canada, and is a member of the Haiku Society of America and the Canadian Authors Association.

Red

Miranda welcomes us to her workshop.
We begin our warm-ups

like butterflies charging jacaranda bushes.
Our legs swinging, flesh tucked

beneath the bony ridge. She explains
chakra, the significance of colour,

how the strong delicate shell
of body rises like music

our shoulder arched
in warmth, in waves.

Here we breathe out of crimson lips
feel love against our skin. (p 36)

The poems that feel the most effective in this collection are the simpler poems, the poems that don’t work to try to retell a story, but instead recreate a series of moments. She works well within these small moments, and holds her poems at their finest when she grasps them; but should a poetry be something more? I am looking forward to when Carter moves beyond these small moments and out into something larger, and beyond herself; reading these pieces in Transplanted make me hopeful for a poetry that can eventually transcend.

Plain Song

God is a technician reading X-ray charts
a mouth shaping words.

An airline pilot
with the voice of a radio announcer

advising us by cell phone not to worry.
The ambulance driver

waiting by the side of the road.
This is thin ice, getting thinner

the blue flame of a match
just struck.

We take it all
on trust. (p 4)

drinking red wine in glengarry county

me + my lovely daughter Kate

It’s most of what I’ve been doing since coming out to my parents farm on December 23rd, just five miles west of Maxville, Ontario (home of the largest Highland Games in North America); that, and posting bits I wrote before I left Ottawa. Spending time with parents on the homestead, and my sister, her partner Corey and their daughter Emma (who just turned 2 years old; Kate and I take turns teaching her strange phrases to repeat very loudly) who live in the log house across the road (we’ve been on the same road since 1845). The poet Nicholas Lea is about two miles away on Norman Drive with his family, doing whatever it is they do.

I spent much of Christmas Eve reading a badly written book about Paul Chartier, who tried, unsuccessfully, to blow up Canada’s own Parliament in May 1966 (our own Guy Fawkes!'; see the related blog entry here). All he managed to do was accidentally kill himself, but only because he had no idea what he was doing. Reading the book, it’s actually rather frightening how close he came, failing only due to his own incompetence. The book, The Mad Bomber of Parliament (Nepean ON: Borealis Books, 2005) by James Fontana, seems to be well-researched enough, and Fontana was even on the front lines as a young lawyer (assistant Crown prosecutor in Ottawa), but really isn’t that well-written or compelling, despite the material, and presumes that the reader knows as many facts as the author does, such as mentioning the bus station on Albert Street (someone should tell him that it has long since moved; I have no recollection of it ever being there. Isn’t this something the author should be mentioning?).

Otherwise, I’ve been watching plenty of documentaries (The Real Da Vinci Code and Worst Jobs in History, both hosted by Tony Robinson, who seems to host a multitude of extremely interesting docs through BBC, and was Baldrick on Black Adder...), and episodes I missed of the past few months of Smallville (while waiting impatiently for the summer movie).

Yesterday, I went back to collect my daughter Kate (who turns 15 on January 4th; does that mean I'm an old guy?). We spent today wandering parts of Alexandria and Cornwall, doing nothing in particular (while listening to the mixed CD she made me for Christmas, with songs by Death Cab for Cutie, The Donnas, Air, The Bloodhound Gang, Coldplay and plenty of others; extremely cool). Our usual stops always include the Dairy Queen in Alexandria (I liked the building better, before the fire a few years ago; when on the farm without her, I spend most afternoons in there writing...) and the new/used bookstore on Main Street, where I usually leave handouts and pick up books on Glengarry history (if I can; most of them are bloody expensive). This time around I found The Scottish Pioneers of Upper Canada, 1784-1855: Glengarry and Beyond by (Toronto ON:Natural Heritage Books, 2005). Hopefully they'll be nice enough to send me a review copy if I ask all nice?

We return to Ottawa tomorrow, for whatever it is we do in the Capital. She’s been reading through the books I gave her, including Les Miserables (she requested it; she's actually a huge fan of musicals...) and The Astonishing X-Men: Volume Two, collecting the last six issues of the year long run of The Astonishing X-Men written by Josh Whedon (the guy who invented Buffy[I much preferred the movie], Angel and Firefly; I am very much hoping his run continues). In the kitchen, my father is currently working on his train (a lego-type huge model he got yesterday from Uncle Bob with nearly 1,000 pieces; he’s always been a big fan of puzzles, and other such things you have to figure out; far better than the 1980s, when he was the only one who played with my Rubic’s Cube by taking it apart and putting it back together in the right order, or the 1990s, when he would spend entire winters playing and solving the King’s Quest games, annually for the first three versions).

I was hoping to get a group photo of the whole bunch of us -- parents, sister, etc --but that doesn’t seem to have happened, again (couldn’t get one during the August long weekend either, during my sister’s third annual pig roast). At least something to show season (I'll just have to remember what they look like between now and March, when Kate and I come back here for March Break + my 36th birthday). Once I’m back at my desk, I’ll be producing smarter blog entries in no time. But one wonders, why?