Poetry Accolade of sorts: Pleased to be on the prize list for a very interesting poetry initiative with roots in Vancouver’s downtown eastside.
I was selected as the “random” prize which i suppose isn’t flowered with prestige but that’s not the reason i write and share poetry anyhow. Thanks to Muriel’s Journey 2021 And Beyond (FB) for including me.
My poem “Alchemists Confer with Hypnotists” (below) comes from my fcked up #MECFS medical journey of conundrums and unintended reinvention which took me around the world seeking ways to re-create neural pathways and myself as an existing sentient creature. The poem will be included in a chapbook and reading at some juncture.
Anyhow, congratulations to those acknowledged, those who write, submit, deal with illness and also to the memory of namesake Muriel and the organizers of the campaign, especially Isabella J Mori.
{The prize booty is stashed in a Canadian bank account for Ichiro for when the opportunity comes for him to visit his ancestral homeland of sorts.}
Poetry is everything, distilled.
A note about Muriel:
“Muriel was a social justice activist, poet, and spoken word artist of Indigenous heritage from the Gitxsan nation’s Owl Clan who spent a lot of time in the Downtown Eastside. In her work, she always explored new ways of expressing herself, always talked and wrote about what’s urgent and important. Her energy was like fireworks, and her hugs legendary.”
bizen yaki kiln, forging clay into treasure
Alchemists Confer with Hypnotists
Varying days
of bliss and malaise
I'm busy these days
chasing dubbies away
When the ache nears
the break comes and
light becomes a haze
your soul is so faded,
no hiding, so worn
The alchemists confer
and deny the hypnotists’
clinical opinions.
Retorting,
“He simply needs
more magnesium
injected directly into his bones”
The past-life regression
of painters and pirates
offered no evidence
only barroom stories when
posted up envisioning
a distant yourself
Generate kinetic watts
from my broken soul,
frantic heart and coiled brain
anxiety - I've plenty to power
all of Iowa - roller rinks and all
Please won't you deplete me
save me from me and help me
tell me, to sleep? And you’ll
insist on my compliance,
fading into ease.
note: dubbies is a Jamaican word for ghosts
Update from Muriel’s Journey selection committee:
Thanks for posting this. The randomness is important. Judging poetry (or anything literature) has an element of personal taste and is, therefore, biased. When we first receive poems, Kyle Hawke and I pre”judge” them so that our judges don’t have to Wade through too many poems. Then we present the three judges with about 30 poems. This year the judges were Heidi Greco , WJ Kehewin , and Gilles Cyrenne . All the poems are judged blind – nobody knows the names of the authors. By introducing a random price we give the chance to someone who might have otherwise fallen through the cracks. So far, by chance, all the random prizes went to poets who were already in the preselection.
wrote a poem (in reply to the great singer songwriter Hawksley Workman who’s playing in #Saskatoon tonight)
boarding pass leaving Saskatoon to Calgary and onwards to Vancouver and Eugene Oregon as an infant (allegedly 10 days old)
Saskatoon I was born here but never lived there (left quickly on a 707) but obliged to print on application forms since– quite literally hundreds or possibly thousands there’s never enough room (especially in Japan) to write: b. Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Aug, 16 1970
Often, a poem comes out fully-formed, fiddling and remixing only dulls the knife, sometimes however, variations are eager to come out to shine light in another corner: Lonely, Joyful, Melancholy, Mysterious.
In this case, (my) familiar themes of un-confidential love letters on postcards mailed from foreign places and glanced by – or maybe sadly not glanced – by personnel along the way who (may) add their pathos to the journey.
One version of this (do you care to guess which?) will go on the reverse of the post box at Farmer Mac’s goat farm – Perhaps another painting will follow… and then a postcard a photograph of the painting mailed to the post box and so on. Always be remixing.
No pardons for redundancies, variations on a theme require riffs on the same blues.
Poem: Earliest Recollections (Lansing, MI, 1973 with tornado)
Lansing Michigan, 1973 eating macaroni & cheese in a damp basement while adults whispered windows shivered radio crackled
and i wondered why the tornado was coming
and then my memory began
##
Note:
this is brother Bob’s (straight ahead) birthday March 1973 so i (front right) was 2.5 years old / for years i recalled this photo somehow and then going through my dear late Mom’s slides, found this and *knew it* instantly / that screened in porch, the sun, and everything.
Aside:
this memory was described elsewhere in a riff…
“A brief stint in Lansing Michigan is where I remember my first thoughts, hunkered in the basement easting macaroni and cheese during a tornado, sitting in a big screened-in porch eating birthday cake with my glasses on.”
