Today is a snow day. Each school sends an email, and Christine forwards, to make sure I saw. She is in Edmonton all this week running courses for work. Edmonton, far warmer than here, at least this week. Above zero, she says. Yesterday, we were minus twelve, which was an improvement over the prior few days. Once again, I pick up Etel Adnan, her Surge (2018):
I also hear the air flowing with it, its unbroken surface leading one’s imagination to more water, more destabilization, more wind.
Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve gone through four drafts of proofs for my collection Snow day (2025), a book out as soon as we clear all corrections. A sequence of sequences, held by the title sequence, one composed at the prompt of another snow day, back in 2019. The snow fell and it fell and both children remained home.
I’m all for a snow day. I’m tempted to return to the extended prose poem, as I did for the original “snow day” poem, six years ago. How different or similar I might play with the form. Where might this go.
Our young ladies in their corners, on their devices. They are eight and eleven years old. The snow, falls. Outside, the snowplow. If everything, seasons. The snowplow, attends. The ground, and the groundless. A stellar cold. For why, the lament. Alta Vista: snow descends in straight lines. These shadows, blue. The rules of the game. Nothing rests. What the tides don’t permit.
Yesterday, a cluster of birds.
Rose is attending a craft. If anyone, to witness. Can I have this box. I want to make something out of this box. Yes, you can have that box.
*
A temporality. Emails, from both of their schools, from the snowplow company. It is here, it is coming. Snow. How many words for it. Remain in your homes, they say. Our young ladies, relieved. Blizzard, onding. An outcrop of flurries.
The air, a crispness. A sharp edge. I brush layers from the car, abandon sentences. Return to the house.
Mid-morning, I tell the young ladies to put away their devices. They spend the rest of the day taking turns coming in to request things or register their complaints of the other. By early afternoon, a silence. They are in the dining room, quietly playing a card game.
As I wrote on social media, responding to another: my poems these days seem to be composed through me stepping directly into the middle of the poem and pushing out in every direction, until I am finally able to free myself.
I used to write poems that began at the beginning and moved their ways forward until finding the end. It seems I do something else, now.
*
Jeff Weingarten prods me via email, reminding me that I agreed to write a blurb for the collected letters of John Newlove, which he’s been working on for more years than he would probably wish to consider. Apparently the collection is due to land in print this year. After a few back-and-forths, we agree on this as my blurb for the back cover:
It is good to hear John’s voice again through these letters, back from those days when letters (well before the advent of emails, text messages) were a stronger means of communication between writers, between poets. As Weingarten offers in his detailed introduction, this is where battles were fought, shots were lobbied, generosities offered and questions answered, all of which John composed in thoughtful detail. Every gesture was for the sake of the work. Weingarten puts the spotlight on an important Canadian poet and the context in which he existed, across a wide-ranging literature.
Winnipeg poet and lawyer Chimwemwe Undi is announced as Canada’s 11th Parliamentary Poet Laureate. From her Scientific Marvel (2024): “All that distance, / built.”
*
The snowfall eases, drifts. By mid-afternoon, the streets and sidewalks plowed, some more than once. More than a few times. I convince the young ladies to get dressed, and we prepare to head out for Aoife’s ukulele lesson. Our first and only outing.
No comments:
Post a Comment