Archive for the 'bookworming' category

Scar Poems

Apr 08 2009 Published by under bookworming, historical notes

The man who introduced me to the poetry of Michael Ondaatje drank 75 cans of Sprite during the month of October 1997 to win a bet. To celebrate his victory, I wallpapered the corkboard in my dorm room with flattened Sprite boxes. This same man once told me I had skin that a seventeenth century poet would die for. He didn’t know that I wrote poetry until long after we had explored the impossibility between us, but after reading the first piece I sent him, he told me my writing reminded him of Ondaatje.

The man who introduced me to the poetry of Ondaatje became a catalyst in my writing. Not an influence directly. We never wrote in the same way — he loved structure and I just wanted the words to flood the page with images — but we shared this love of one poet in a particular intersection of our lives.

As I remember it, Ondaatje’s The Time Around Scars was his favourite poem at the time.

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Kicking off Poetry Month

Apr 01 2009 Published by under author's notes, bookworming

Every year, poets.org celebrates poetry for a month. So I’m starting it off this way.

Walt Whitman caught me accidentally. I found a copy of Leaves of Grass and other collected poems in the bookstore bargain bin about nine years ago. I might have paid $4 for the cloth-bound, embossed volume that I bought more for looks than for content. But then, I discovered the roaring soul of Whitman’s words echoing through my body. The tangible shudder of phrases forming images both concrete and ephemeral. I think I love him more because of the accident of our meeting. But he is also like the ocean to me. Vast and crashing and and unpossessable and so intimately interstitial. He is my going home to a place I never lived.

A noiseless patient spider
by Walt Whitman

A noiseless patient spider,
I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.

via poets.org

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The Ground Beneath Her Feet

Jul 23 2008 Published by under bookworming, intransitive verbiage

Look look look. The otherness you created. The world of earthquakes and out-of-sync and unfulfillment. Pulling apart like strings of denatured protein between unseeable teeth. You made a world that chewed-spat-swallowed. Me. And I wanted to crawl back into the belly of your fictions. Where things are more right. Less strange. Less coherent and more comprehensible. The story was done, but the world stayed. And was. And is. And I am ten years too late for this. But it never matters with words. My skin will still stretch white under hours of sun. I will lay unsettled/unsettleable because I can’t spend all day every day. Inside-out.

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Tag, I’m it!

Apr 28 2008 Published by under bookworming

The illustrious Ariel has tagged me in a reading meme. I haven’t hopped on a meme in a long time, but I like this one. Like Ariel, I find books irresistible, though, unlike Ariel, I have never given up food for the sake of a book (unless you count forgetting to eat because you’re submerged in narrative. I’ve done that). Anyway, here’s what she tagged me to tell you.

1. Pick up the nearest book.
The nearest book was in my purse and is my current reading selection from The Reading List – The Tin Flute by Gabrielle Roy.

2. Open to page 123.
The second page of Chapter 10.

3. Find the fifth sentence.
Emmanuel opened the door.

4. Post the next three sentences.
He was in his uniform, as he had been on the day she met him at the Five and Ten. He stood on the threshold and his vague smile sought her in the shadow into which she had withdrawn. Then he recognized her and the smile grew real.

My bookmark rests 14 pages ahead of this spot. This book is a lot easier to take than some of the other books on the list (and I haven’t bothered to review many of them for that reason), but I will reserve judgment until the end. Sure, I’m enjoying it now, but Ms. Roy may have a proclivity for inconsistent, internally illogical endings. And I hate that.

5. Tag five people.
This is a tough one. I would like to know what’s on page 123 of the book within arms reach of the Unreliable Witness, Signora Imogenius, Mistress Ani, the effervescent Vesper de vil, and the man with more books on his reading list than I have, my erstwhile arch-nemesis of the Kingdom of Blog, Brad.

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