Home Sweet Saccharine Home

 

http://youtu.be/3WAZ60xA9wo

 

After a month of reading poetry across the country, I’m back in Vancouver. After two years of living in a building undergoing restorations and therefore living under tarps, my partner and I now have a view. I’ve been waiting for these mountains for ages. I want to write a poem that starts:

 

The mountains are a sequence of hunches:

 

Vancouver is shaped by shimmering water, the weight of mountains, and a green lushness from an overabundance of rain. My tour has allowed me glimpses into other cities: the CN tower is a giant sundial for the hectic pace of Toronto, Mount Royal presides over linguistic divisions in Montreal, the Church of Our Lady watches over university pub-crawls in Guelph, and other cities like Calgary, Saskatoon and Winnipeg have rivers that seem to be essential to the (pardon the pun) flow of city life. Geography grabs our imaginations by the lapels and says, “Look at me!”

In “Body Music” Dennis Lee writes that, “The voice gets generated … by the torque and drift and tensions of each new place you move to.” He’s writing about poetry, using “place” in the sense of lines on the page, but this can also refer to geographical place and the desire to voice a response to a new landscape or cityscape. There are the obvious features of a place and then the particulars – a tourist staring between her unlaced shoes through the glass floor of the CN tower, the smear of saskatoon berries on the round cheeks of a toddler, a child running a greasy finger over a Motley Crue video on a smart phone at a McDonald’s in Montreal. Writing is a choreography of particulars. What does the dirt in the middle of those mountains taste like?

And a second line comes to me:

 

children don’t always touch what they see,

 

Yes, like House of Pain, I too jump around. While I’m confident in my ability to exist on a random setting, I fear I’m too complacent in my day to day routine in Vancouver. Lotus-land is a place of sweet forgetfulness not only for people who’ve moved here from across the province or country, but also its life-long residents. This amnesia overlooks the old, which is torn down with alarming regularity to make way for the shimmering new. But there’s a double-amnesia at play in Vancouver because everyone tends to overlook the familiar. We start to see things as summaries of our thousand-plus viewings. Our sight slips from the objects we think we’re looking at.

 

sight is an avalanche slipping us away

 

This might be too didactic to work as a poem. Dennis Lee would ask, “Does it state more than enact the consciousness of the poem?”

I’ve written a whack of poetry across the country this past month. In some sense, it doesn’t matter whether I look at Vancouver with fresh eyes or not. At this stage, my job is to edit and revise as I listen to the cadence of voices in each work. “So you suss out how the grain of the energy flows in each new piece you start. And you let the poem flow with it, till the voice gets inflected by every whorl and spurt and flicker along the way,” writes Dennis Lee.

So I’ll get to work on that Vancouver poem (with the poetics of Stuart Ross, Pearl Pirie, Laura Broadbent, Tim Lilburn, Fionncara MacEoin and others at the back of my mind. I sold almost all my chapbooks on my tour, but picked up an equally weighty collection.) My job through all of this is to be honest about my process and experiences and I thank you so much for your precious attention as I hope you’ve seen the generosity and wealth of people and poets across this country.

This afternoon I have a reading with Jillian Christmas at Gorilla Food and then tomorrow is my last “marathon” day of ten readings through the city. I’ll be poetry-crawling with Taryn Hubbard, Jennifer Zilm, Kevin Rowe, Matea Kulic, Shannon Rayne, Mariner Janes, Jordan Abel, Andrew McEwan, Ray Hsu, Andrea Bennet, Leanne Dunic, Anne Hopkins, Henry Doyle, Ben Rawluk, Margaret Bollerup, Raoul Fernandes and Cecily Nicholson. If you’re in Vancouver, I hope you can come out.

Maybe I’ll have my mountain poem ready for you. Maybe there’ll be some Motley Crue slipped in. Maybe I’ll sing a Dennis Lee poem to the tune of “Shout at the Devil”. Maybe I’ll pour sugar into my mouth while I sing “Home Sweet Home.” Maybe I’ll remix my interview with R.C. Weslowski on Wax Poetics. In any case, I’ll see you at the Paper Hound Saturday night at seven.