What we're doing to stay afloat--the book!!

Yes, it is true, by the end of October 2015, What we're doing to stay afloat will be available in book form. 

The end of September and it was all done: the pages checked and double-checked and the cover proofed in emails and phone calls back and forth between publisher, designers, copy-editor and me. Ten days earlier the version I'd corrected vanished from the book designer's in-box; for some reason her email server would not accept messages from any of my accounts. We waded through the details on the phone and I sent my marked-up copy from my partner's email account. Success! One more version to proof, which we did, and then everything was sent off to the printer. Now we wait, and sometime towards the end of October there will be a book, a tangible object to touch and to hold, to open, to leaf through, to read.

Where can you get a copy? You can email me, leave me a message in the comments section of this blog or via facebook messenger, or order a copy directly from Indigo Books here  https://www.chapters.indigo.ca/en-ca/books/what-were-doing-to-stay/9781897426753-item.html
or Nimbus Publishing here http://www.nimbus.ca/What-Were-Doing-to-Stay-Afloat-P7335.aspx

Meanwhile, I'm also planning, building a website for, and soon will be installing my first solo video installation, entitled Flows (Given Water).  The show features video haikus of meltwater, looped projections of shifting inter-tidal zones, and enormous silent projections of moon jellies propelling themselves through deep green seawater. The weather turns rainy, and my dreams, too, are submerged in water greens and dim anxieties: is any of it good enough? Have I worked through my ideas fully enough? Will others see what I see, or wish to stop and muse in these spaces of drift and damp? I hope, and will know more in time.

https://givenwater.wordpress.com/

Water, water everywhere--and yes, at the show, I'll be offering water (locally sourced, of course,) to drink!

Fragments for a windowpane (Second Act of a virtual love story)

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III.  Like a moth in love and months

We flicker

at the edge of light, separate

and not.

Onscreen you write,

            I write,             we

are

somnolent, alight.

We are

swept up, swept under,

here and there and

nowhere, which is to say,

spark gapping,

everywhere:

propiniquitous in our

distance.

Again and again,

(my beloved, my one, all of my heart)

we say

we miss

us.

IV. Change it should stop with not.

 Every story has more than one version.

Do not believe what I tell you do not

Once there were three. No

more—if me and thee and he,

then she.  And she. And

deception. And

daring. (And there would be

exhilaration, if not

expiation, or simple

filiation, or....)

(Please here do not state such mistakes.)

I cannot

settle

these odds: 

How can you be

beside me, when you are

so far away?

How can she be

so far away, when she

is beside me?

Proximity--it's

not always what

it’s cracked up to be--

(that's when the dog barks).

Property

2 April 2013 

Sometimes the line
between one thing and another
is so carefully defined.

NOTES
I took both of these photos one afternoon in Halifax, Nova Scotia. They are part of a photographic project that tracks how boundaries are visually marked and patrolled.

On Not Reading

A couple of weeks ago I tried an experiment--not to read for a week.  I didn't think of this on my own; I was under the influence of some ideas popularized by Julia Cameron in her famous (or infamous, depending upon how you look at it) program, The Artist's Way.

At first the idea struck me--as it will no doubt strike you--as ludicrous.  Give up reading?! For a week?  During the teaching semester?! IMPOSSIBLE. But then I remembered that over the summer, while on the boat and in the throes of repairs, though I felt terribly guilty about it, I'd sometimes gone days without reading.  I knew I could do it, so I decided to try.  The week before the week I was going to give up reading, I read relentlessly.  There were classes to prepare, things to find out, a sort of bottomless well to fill up before I ceased moving my eyes across print. 

And then, suddenly, there I was, in my week.  I resisted the urge to look at the paper in the morning, to log online and cruise the pages of the internet.  I avoided facebook, long letters, magazines, and peering over the corners of others' desks at the publications scattered there.  And with each gesture of "resistance" to the thrall of print, I became more settled and more relieved.  I sat and just listened to what others were saying around, their stories and jokes and worries and tantrums.  Sometimes I laughed, as if to myself.

Peculiarly enough, the week that I was to give up reading, I was also to go to Ohio, to celebrate my mother's 70th birthday.  That meant that I would spend long hours in flight and transit lounges (there's a euphemism--uncomfortable places where loudspeakers exhort you, repeatedly, to watch your bags, report suspicious behaviour, step carefully onto the moving sidewalk and other inanities) without print to distract me.  What was I going to do? 

I walked.  I looked at things.  I spoke to people.  I listened to more conversations.  And I did, I'll confess, grade my papers (all of them!)--something I'd already decided wasn't quite reading, but more like accounting (ah the flexibilities of redefinition!) Once in the bosom of my family, I resisted the thousands of books stacked and shelved and lying about the house. I sat quietly, sometimes, or took photographs, or talked with my parents and siblings and their spouses and children.  And I learned a few things--

Among them, that reading is often, for me and others in my birth family, a compulsive act of abstraction, a determined flight from the discomforts and disagreements so close at hand between us.  I also realized that if I had a bar against reading, then I wasn't compelled to read whatever was set before me...the airline magazine say, or other books lying about, the "extra" and never finished supplements to my classes, or one research project or another....I permitted myself, thanks to the fact that I wasn't reading, to imagine or observe other things while I was waiting, or sitting for a moment, or eating breakfast or dinner alone.  (Imagine simply eating! No words!)

I found I was happier, more at ease; I didn't feel guilty all of the time.  I wasn't forever accompanied by that awful incompleteness that reading seems to deliver, the threat or the promise of the forever more, the feeling of being out of time, out of step with myself, forever behind.

I'm going to try this experiment again sometime--as soon as I can get through this stack of books and articles and magazines on and beside my desk, the bed, beside the bath, on my other desk, the floor....

On Works in Progress

I. The Futility of Plans

...stumbling on the unforeseen and...unforeseeable.
Robert Lowell, 1977

Fog, then it clears, then cloud, and always high tide. Or is it that I'm getting up an hour later each day? It is hot and the bugs are fierce--we wait longingly for the wind to rise.

Last night after supper Marike and I walked up the road. Our neighbours, Phil and Susan, were sitting on their porch with the two dogs, watching dusk slip into the cove. A loon crying over by Port Dufferin. No fireflies, just blackflies.

They have a new pet, a little black duck their son Mitchell rescued his last day lobster fishing. Mother and young had all gotten split up and seagulls were carrying away the ducklings. Mitchell found this one all alone near a rocky island and brought it home. Phillip tucks it in the neck of his shirt to keep it warm; it chirps and nestles against his chest. Once it warms up it begins to preen. They feed it mussels and periwinkles live, just cracked from their shells and dropped in a small container of water. The duck swallows greedily then falls into a stupor. It is still covered in down, has short stubby black wings and huge webbed feet. It can run quickly and paddles about on the floor chirping loudly when it's hungry.

They have two cages for the duck, one indoors and one outdoors. Both contain little duck "ponds"--an old bread pan filled with water does the trick in the indoor cage.

Booboo the dachshund has fallen in love with this wondrous little creature--the only one in the house as close to the ground as she is. (The other dog, Nelson, is a handsome and utterly enormous Shepherd, far larger than I am.) Booboo cuddles the duck in her bed and chases off the cat. No one is quite sure what the cat will do so this is a good thing. Everyone guards the duck so vigilantly that the cat appears to be afraid of the duck now. Usually called Memphis, this spring the cat has been on such a killing spree--birds, mice, rabbits, squirrels, moles--the family has taken to calling him "Lector."

When the duck pooped in the bed, Booboo set about trying to tidy things up, nosing over the cushion--and the duck--so that the poop was out of sight. This made Susan, who's back to changing diapers with her grandson, laugh. It never ends Booboo I'm telling you, she says.

Five times a day the duck must be fed. Susan heads out onto the bug-infested back porch and wrestles with periwinkles for half an hour, trying to crack out ten little bits of food. Then there's the matter of collecting duck's meals every day--Phil and Sue crawl about on the beach or head to the islands to pick periwinkles from the bladderwrack.

What do ducks eat in the wild, we ask, pretty sure they don't crack periwinkle shells.

I don't know, Mama Duck Phillip says. Mussels and periwinkles are all we have. He says this while he peels a shrimp and pops it into his own mouth. This disjunction between word and deed makes us laugh. But the duck won't eat frozen shrimp--they've already tried--it's live seafood or nothing. Concentrated cholesterol.

Phillip muses, as he watches over the furry, feathered bit of his chaotic brood: We thought we'd be getting away now and then now that our kids are grown up and have moved out. But here we are, in this recession, no demand for any of our businesses, with a house full of creatures they've brought home.

Life is never what you think it will be, he says. It goes in its own direction, no matter what you plan for.



II. Writing Poetry, or "another day of humiliations"

This morning I started to read Robert Lowell's Collected Poems (2003). My pleasure in what he writes--the soundness of his lines--startles me. I had not remembered this. The rhymed enjambed lines of his first poems really work; "Colloquy at Black Rock" with its repeated mud mud mud is marvelous. (Black Rock Connecticut, is where Lowell served his parole, after doing time in federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut for refusing to be drafted into the military in 1943--Quaker roots showing like skeletal remains through his "fiery" conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1940-41.)

I like some of the details too, from a brief introductory memoir by Frank Bidart, one of the editors of the collection. Lowell, by his own account spent "hundreds and hundreds of hours shaping, extending and changing....staring, crossing out, writing in, crossing out what was written in, again and again... In time, the fragmentary and scattered limbs become by a wild extended figure of speech, something living...a person" ("After Enjoying Six or Seven Essays on Me" Salmagundi (Spring 1977)). Such sorting of fragments can, however, be very discouraging in its middle and muddling stages. Bidart recounts that after a long day of work Lowell would sometimes say, "well it's been another day of humiliations" (vii), by which he meant another day of facing, wrestling with and never besting the problems thrown up by his own projects.

But there was no "end," no perfect revision he was striving for, just solutions to one conundrum or another. And where two versions with merit persisted or were published (for he mined and revised his own--and others'--work all his life), Lowell said, not this or that one is best, but "they both exist."

Lowell was likewise generous with his readers; for both poet and readers: "a poem changes with each inspection. Variablity is its public existence"("After Enjoying"). Nothing is static even when it is fixed on the page. As he remarks on the mutability of the past, of memory, (not knowing, surely, that he was writing his last essay and would be dead of heart failure in September 1977), "from year to year things remembered from the past change almost more than the present" ("After Enjoying").

A man of revisions but against the infinitely perfectible ideal--now that's wonderful! I love all of his "old china doorknobs," those "sad/slight useless things" his verses collect.

Here's how at one point he describes his effort to make poetry:

Time to grub up and junk the year's
output, a dead wood of dry verse:
dim confession, coy revelation,
liftings, listless self-imitation,
whole days when I could hardly speak
came plumming home unshaven, weak
and willing to read anyone
things done before and better done.

Fierce, fireless mind running downhill.....

Much of what I've cited here was "junked" verse from the first version of "Waking Early Sunday Morning," published in the New York Review of Books in 1965. (The second, better-known version opens Lowell's 1967 collection, Near the Ocean.) All the same, it still exists, and expresses well, not leaving out the agony, the struggle to undertake aesthetic acts, the moral, psychological, editorial, even physical wrangle behind each line.

Today ("willing to read anyone") I let him say it for me.

Images
half fog over Quoddy Bay
lilacs blooming in the kitchen