six poems from a new project : The book of questions,

In case you hadn’t seen, I’ve been working all month on a new poetry project, specifically prompted by the Tupelo Press 30/30 fundraiser, composing and posting a new poem daily all month to help raise money for their ongoing publishing. I mean, who doesn’t love a good prompt? I’d already re-posted a handful of poems from such as part of my substack, but thought it would be worth (given the poems are appearing online daily over here) to re-post a bunch of them over here as well. And there’s still time to donate to the project! Where else might the month go?

 

August, Prince Edward Island,

Gulls, aplenty. Green gables, white. Of small beginnings. Cows, abstractions. Towels. Grab your bathing suit. By the waters of North Rustico, harbour. Sea glass. By the sandstone, smooth on the beach. From away, then. To rearrange the rules. Acadian fisherman, just off the shore. Seawalk Park, such intelligence. Lobster traps, stacked. What if it stood. The same function holds. A vista of rippled hills, these coded, free roads. Paved, and unvarnished. Iron-rich. Full-fathom deep, boats and nets and traps. These wayward hopes. Pelagic, abyssal. A crest is formed. Flags, a thread of fine vintage. What people, always. This line in red sand.

 

Mark Goldstein, Roblin Lake,

Left behind by glaciers. Soluble, water-logged. Game, to recognize game. This handmade quality of syntax. A flourish, of hardscrabble. Hewn logs, by the boundaries. Hammer, hold. This widespread mortality. Lake, a loon’s call. Ethos, each structural division. Of going on, without one’s knowledge. An outhouse, closed. This grey shape, framed by leaves. Little point of land. A can of beer, on sun-drenched deck. To ask this of poetry, sport. The local library. Remembering the world. His world, specifically. Al Purdy’s Ameliasburgh; such calm, warm water. A fossil lake, which corresponds to this sentence.

 

Cover art by Jack Kirby,

Pencils, a window. One can look into. Look out. A layering of buildings. Swings, an arm. Stand, firm and tall. Proclaims! Any technique, to be useful. Kurtzberg, the Lower East Side. Rewrite history, story. How the gods died, reborn. Punching out Nazis. Widescreen energy and motion. King, always. Young Romance, New Gods. I can’t keep them separate. Slippery, Providence. To leap off the page. Soon, soon. Not soon enough. Dynamic. This architect of the imagination. What we talk about Selkirk. Put a post on a website. Unfollow.

 

How to be a poet,

Forget everything, words. Nothing much to expect. Forget speech. Hold on to the hollow. One simple question, repeated. Wrap, your fingers. The magic of water. It falls.

 

For Claudia Lapp,

Oregon, trails. Sometimes the oldest, history. Abstraction. Arm to shoulder, leapt into the world. In the Atwater Station. To be attracted, to revelation. Doctors, and durability. Concurs. A Greek phrasebook, begins. Mediterranean, honey. Pixieish ecstasies, what the stars might reveal. Description, description. L, as in Lapp. The old woman in anyone. Full of Jungian dreams, a white stallion. John Abbott. A web full of wanting. Of home, kin. What afternoon light. Beneath your smile, this blue ceiling. A way through the winter. To use the right words. A long silence, indeed.

 

The Marvel Universe,

Excelsior! For the endless, resurrected. Dime-store models, pulp. Those scrappy kids. Celestials, eternity, infinity. A cluster, stones. Behold! Creating history, continued. Continuity. The streets of Brooklyn. What the in-crowd, spoke. In whispers, secret. Chosen, many. Stringbean, puny, stretch. Big brain. These gods of thunder, hammers, patience. To still, get up. A method, marvels. Let, the perfect storm. To me, my Kirbyesque. When comics, woke. The war-time Captain, punched out Hitler. Great responsibility. My word, these hopes. My stars and garters. Exceptions, vary. The needs of the few. Amazed, we soapbox, are. We are still speaking.

 

National Poetry Month 2026 : Chaudiere Books blog,

In case you weren't aware, I've been posting daily poems all April for National Poetry Month over at the Chaudiere Books blog by an array of poets from Canada and beyond, with the entire 2026 series now available online. This is the thirteenth year I've been curating poems for same, and you can catch links for the entire series over here. 

Here are the poets with new work posted for 2026: enjoy!

Maleea Acker ; Junie Désil ; Jordan Davis ; Cole Swensen ; Chris Johnson ; Catriona Strang ; Noah Sparrow ; Eve Luckring ; Conor Mc Donnell ; Stephen Brockwell ; Han VanderHart ; Rahat Kurd ; Nancy Huggett ; Emily Shafer ; Jon Cone ; Laura Farina ; Jen Tynes ; Jason Christie ; Jane Shi ; Jed Munson ; Pearl Pirie ; Michael Goodfellow ; Charlie Petch ; Daphne Marlatt ; Andy Weaver ; Jessi MacEachern ; Carla Harris ; Melissa Powless Day ; Zane Koss ;

the green notebook : , regarding a snow day,

Today is a snow day, with school buses cancelled for both children, as well as Rose’s basketball tournament. Her team was scheduled to land at Ashbury College, a private school in Rockcliffe Park. The late Matthew Perry (1969-2023) went there, you know, as did Ottawa poet Max Middle (pseudonym of Mark Robertson). Up to 10cm today, online sources suggest. I should probably move the car up the driveway, for the sake of the snowplow.

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.

 

from Fair bodies of unseen prose,

 

, point you toward the entrance of a house or a jagged stone wall.

How close we are. Surfaces. The difference of clocks. Shoulders, curved in the light. In which blood flows. And from this day, earth. All electrons. I begun my education with redundancies. Pattern recognition, charred residue. Sequels, reboot. Recalculating. Inverted time, a cramped bed for two. My own disruptiveness. Absolute integrity. Words, itch. Noisily. To talk against wishes, false in the mouth. Repetitions. Walk, a bit. The water’s edge. Doomed, to consequence. Into the air. This sparkling mist.

 

, or locked away in the nonsense of lungs.

Slated, never in our selves. The missing stone, water. Determining practice. You do not wish to change geometry. Is there love on Mars? Am I unavailable? The way a beat so casually, drops. The temperature, across red sands. The moon’s influence. How intrepid. The ear, you lend. Be clear about instructions, what. Or flows, a fortress. Tears. My only elsewhere.

 

We are relational forms unseen, linings becoming more porous with time.

How visible, this song of words. How rational, relational. Row upon, the body’s memory. This mishmash, practice. This loss, arising. To disrupt weather patterns. No sound is, less. A logical objection. One wishes to outlive. I descend some steps.

 

Rose finally gets a fish

 

1.

Her months of drawings, pressure                   ; reminders
to our whispered ears, to

plastering the fridge with several clones

of her single magnet-held artwork: “fish,” she writes, above
each sketch of same, “I want one.” I, for one,

hesitate to introduce a new character

into this household menagerie, with the increased risk
of cancelling the whole business. Richie’s brother Chuck

from Happy Days’ first season, or to simply

jump the shark.

 

2.

She wants a fish.                      Demands: a pet of her own,
to share with younger sister,

since I refuse to entertain a dog           ; our cat
would tarnish, and my difficulty with lack

of unaccompanied urban territory. A dog

requires an excess                    unavailable. I originated
from a farm                 , after all, where dogs

possess the amplitude
to roam.                       Preferring, also, not

a defecated yard. Rose              wants a fish, she
wants a fish, she wants a fish. In case

the message was unclear. She offers
promises of pet care and routine,

hoping someone will believe her.

 

3.

Bellwether, prep; to establish and assemble her aquarium

before any fish might land. Rose plucks

a castle, mermaid                     , small plastic greenery; harvests
two small bags of coloured gravel. Her bearing, shifts,

she vibrates, crosswise; strums                         PetSmart shelves.
Each step

a stop, a break                          in linearity. She laughs,

ahead of her own debate. With fresh tank sidelining
her seasonal e-learning retreat

of former dining room, she holds: the soon-keeper

of the sacred fish.

 

4.

This biological                         filter media. Her fishless
ten-gallon vessel, which will be,

soon enough. How water catches sound
in motion, motion. Apparently boundless. This approximation

of a single misstep, stanza,

verset, word. Once home, and set                    , she stares, across

this dimpled glow                    of light-emitting diode
into oxygenating water.

 

 

from Fair bodies of unseen prose,

 

A comfortable place in the unconscious

Can one dream while lying awake? This proximity of cloud. Consensus, the end of parenthetical. Draws curtains, threat. This pragmatism: my mother gave birth to it. Melancholy, melancholy. Ask anything you want. What measure, propositions. Withdraw. Jolting, epiphanic effect. This sentence, shadows; these missives on death. Slammed door, sliver lining. Declarative: I would have liked to move the earth. Imagine, the desire for mute prose. Liquid. This body or death. This end of text.