Poets All Types

                     

              

                                                            Hark, hark! the dogs do bark,
                                                            The poets are coming to town.
                                                            Some in rags, some in jags,
                                                            And some in velvet gowns.

Poetry and art is our refuge from darkness.

It is not up to poets to affirm anything. What we need is negative thinking; don't accept what people say; don't believe anything; give up trying to be a somebody.

My life was so small as to almost not exist; I avoided people, lived quietly, and never felt at home anywhere: I had become a permanent resident of Inner Space.

The poets were magnanimous, no cause was too small if it included getting published or a reading; they were garrulous and self-conscious, they were almost imposing.

She was published in dozens of online zines; when the zines went offline it was as though she never existed.

They wanted to be poets but what they wrote lacked meaning and authenticity. They refused to enter Inner Space.

Hard days at the poetry factory when production exceeds demand.

We used to laugh at creative writing courses, now no one gets the joke.


When a great poet dies the world is a darker place, we grieve their loss, they are not forgotten by us.

A prick without talent is just a prick.


He won many awards for his poetry, but no one remembers the poems, no one even remembers what the awards were all about.

This poet said she was a star; she hung out at bars, she had affairs with other poets, she was a poet until she joined AA, then she quit poetry.

It's the Great Decline, the end of history, the end of time, the river polluted, the old abandoned.

The first people we threw out of Inner Space were the poets. Plato made us do it.


Among poets I am looking for good people, loving people, who put the other person first; that means as much to me as what they write.

It is a sad day when a friend dies and you realize you were writing with him in mind, he was your audience and now you've lost both a friend and your audience.

These poets were all bigger than life, I was smaller than life.

Years of life elegiac; years of life spent remembering.

They were aggressively ambitious, but ambition without talent and hard work isn't worth anything.

If they don't have the talent to be eccentric poets, they should just be nice people.

           

The synchronicity of dates

It's mid-January 2020 and winter has set in, it's -18 C today. So far, the winter hasn't been all that bad, meaning that while we've had some snow the temperature has hovered around -5 C to + 2 or 3 C. That has now ended... 

In my experience important events happen in clusters of dates, these are meaningful for specific people; there is a synchronicity of dates. For instance, two friends were born on January 15; they are Audrey Keyes (Veeto) who died last October, she was my first friend in life, someone I knew from age four or five. The second friend was Artie Gold who I met in the early 1970s, Artie was my first poet friend. Artie died in February 2007. A third friend, Paul Leblond, was born on January 16; he died suddenly in 2015. My friend Pat McCarty, with whom I traveled the length of California and down into Baha California in April 1976, died eleven years ago, on January 18, 2007. Pat was a truly lovely person and I still miss him. Note added on 31 August, 2022: I've just learned that Pat McCarty's birthday is January 21 (not sure of the year, possibly 1947); this is the same date as my wife's birthday, she was born on 21 January. A final date, January 14, 1965 is when I began keeping a diary, something I have done on a daily basis since then, it has changed my life, it has helped to fulfill my life. All of these significant occurrences are clustered around the mid-January dates. 

And now we turn to winter! Mid-January winter photographs. 

Here are photos taken yesterday, on Greene Avenue in Westmount and then on the drive home along Cote St. Antoine Road.

Pinocchio outside the old Nicholas Hoare Bookstore on Greene Avenue

Walking along Greene Avenue

The Bistro on the Avenue is gone; we had many happy times there over the years, dinners with friends and family and with fellow members of the C.G. Jung Society of Montreal

Years ago the old Westmount post office, on the corner of Greene Avenue and Blvd. de Maisonneuve  was closed and then made into boutiques, stores

This is Congregation Shaar Hashomayim, Leonard Cohen's family synagogue; it is where
his song "You Want it Darker" was recorded

Murray Hill Park; I suppose the green snow fencing is intended to keep people
from tobogganing down the hill

Fire Station/Caserne 34 between Decarie and Girouard

That's St. Augustine Catholic Church on the right, just after Girouard Avenue;
the church closed and it is now River Side Church 

That's the Loyola Campus of Concordia University, almost at the end of
Sherbrooke Street West, almost home