Rabbit on video

 One last video of the rabbit. . . 

 

Home of the rabbit

I assumed the rabbit lived in one of the backyards adjacent to ours. If you look at our street, or most other streets around here, you'll see people's homes and in front of the homes there is a sidewalk on both sides of the street and an asphalt road running between the sidewalks (I am being simplistic but I want to make a point). It seems to be relentless city but there are backyards behind each of the houses, there are two backyards adjacent to each other; on some blocks this land is taken up with a lane (the lanes of NDG are a great place to take a walk) and some backyards have flower or vegetable gardens, some are just grass, some have a swimming pool, and most aren't used much. So, the rabbit and other urban wildlife have a lot of land to enjoy and a lot of places to live and places where food can be found. And then, looking at our backyard, my Canadian Cottage Garden, I saw the rabbits' footprints, his trail, and it led from where I leave carrots for him to a pile of branches and weeds, I left these in a pile at the rear of the garden not wanting to bag and discard this stuff, but also wanting to add to the diversity of what grows and what is present in the garden. There are flowers and bushes and there is a growing wild space, planned by me last summer, and part of this is a pile of green vegetation. Now I see the rabbit probably lives in this pile of vegetation, people say rabbits live underground, perhaps under the vegetation. Anyhow, I'm happy with his presence and I don't plan on growing vegetables, just flowers and hostas, hydrangeas, and so on, nothing he'll want to eat. 

Here are photographs, taken from the second floor bedroom window of our home, of the backyard in winter with the rabbit's path from where I leave carrots for him to where he possibly lives.

                    

Where the rabbit lives.

Where carrots are left for the rabbit.

The rabbits' home?

The rabbit's ears are burning, he knows someone is talking about him... 

Someone phoned yesterday, the first thing they asked was "how's the rabbit?"

I am now eating carrots and they're pretty good, not much taste but good.

Yesterday, around 6 p.m., I looked outside and there was the rabbit eating his carrots; he's really just a little guy. When he finished he ran off to a neighbour's backyard.

Note: Top photos were taken on 13 February 2026; other, bottom photos, taken in January 2026.

"World's Gone Wrong" by Lucinda Williams

 

Lucinda Williams

They get up every morning and they go to work
He sells cars and she's a nurse
Workin' long hours is the devil's curse
Things are gettin' tight, but it could be worse

She tries hard to ignore the news
Nothing makes sense and she gets confused
Between what is false and what is true
And she worries they won't get through

Come on, baby, we gotta be strong
Dark days are getting long
Looking for comfort in a song
Everybody knows the world's gone wrong
Everybody knows the world's gone wrong

They can see what's going down
Empty houses all over town
So many lost are never found
And bad, bad signs are all around

A lot of people being put on the street
It's gettin' harder to make ends meet
He comes home every night feelin' beat
And wonders how long he can take the heat

Come on, baby, we gotta be strong
Dark days are getting long
Looking for comfort in a song
Everybody knows the world's gone wrong
Everybody knows the world's gone wrong

She stares out the window and shakes her head
She can't believe the things she's read
She can't believe what's being said
Some days she can't get outta bed

She hopes this won't last forever
She needs to believe it's gonna get better
It's getting hard to keep it together
They need each other now more than ever

Come on, baby, we gotta be strong
Dark days are getting long
Looking for comfort in a song
Everybody knows the world's gone wrong
Everybody knows the world's gone wrong

She holds him tight and softly smiles
Says, "Baby, let's put on some Miles"
And dance barefoot across the tiles
And forget our troubles for a little while

Everybody knows the world's gone wrong
Everybody knows the world's gone wrong
Everybody knows the world's gone wrong
Baby, the world's gone wrong
Baby, the world's gone wrong
Everybody knows the world's gone wrong
Everybody knows the world's gone wrong
Everybody knows the world's gone wrong

Note: Above is Lucinda Williams performing her song.

Below: Lucinda Williams was interviewed on PBS's evening news, 7 p.m., February 19, 2026. It is worth watching and hearing what she says has to say; Lucinda Williams is a highly talented and intelligent person.

Rabbit time, u can't touch this

Today’s carrot purchase.

Our resident rabbit with carrots.

At the IGA today, two pound bags of carrots were selling for 87 cents a bag, of course I bought three bags for our resident rabbit; that’s $3.00 for six pounds of carrots while five pounds of carrots is usually $5.00. This should last me over a month or so of daily feeding the rabbit. Yesterday, I saw the rabbit running across the backyard, the days are getting longer and the crepuscular light he favours is later in the day. This morning, after I finished shovelling last night’s snow, I saw what looked like a small dog running along the sidewalk on the other side of the street; then I realized it was the rabbit. He’s a busy little fellow! He's also avoiding the crows who would love to swoop down and fly away with a rabbit; however, I suspect he's too heavy for that.

"The Great Year"

Walking to Meadowbrook Golf Course, 27 March 2020

I wrote "The Great Year" in the mid- to late- 1990s. Here is the complete, edited, version available on the internet archive.

The Great Year is a collection of poems that celebrate a period of time that lasts 25,868 years during which Earth passes through the twelve zodiacal signs, and the Great Months, each lasting approximately 2,500 solar years. Poetry is the voice of the human soul, and like astrology and mythology, it is also the language of the unconscious mind, of dreams, symbolism, irrationality, and intuition. 

Commentary on Continuation III, Introduction (Edited)

 

Downtown Montreal, 1960s

This third book, really never more than a proposed book, by Louis Dudek, and continuing his Continuation project, was meant to be his final Continuation statement; the incomplete and unassembled nature of this text coincides with the incomplete nature of the whole project. There isn’t a completed book titled Continuation III; there are bits and pieces, an assemblage of fragments that are significant. Continuation III is the deconstruction of Continuation I and II. It is the intervention of life over art, the separation of artifice and authenticity. The triumph of truth over poetry’s facsimile of authenticity. It is where poetry ends and the last words and absolution begin.

Final lines in Continuation III:

Stand there and remember

the paltriness of worldly claims

and the immensity

that is always now.

--The Surface of Time (2000), p. 84

-o-

The content of Continuation III was published in two installments by Sonja Skarstedt’s Empyreal Press. “Continuation III [Fragment]” and “Bits & Pieces [A Recitation]” both appear in The Caged Tiger (Empyreal Press, Montreal, 1997). “Bits & Pieces [A Recitation]” is the only section of all three "Continuation" that deviates from the style, use of epigrams, and line breaks found in the previous two books. The final poems are in Dudek’s last book, The Surface of Time (2000).

There is no single volume or completed series of poems called Continuation III but there are fragments, and completed sections, of what might have been the text of this non-existent third book. In Dudek's The Caged Tiger (1997) there is "Continuation III (Fragment)"; it has four sections and the fourth section emphasizes the importance of poetry; this is followed by "Notes for Ken" (Norris), these are page numbers and notes explaining some of the references and meaning of this section. Then, Dudek published Surface of Time (2000) and the final Continuation III poems are included here, "Sequence from "Continuation III". This is the conclusion to the Continuation project; it emphasizes the importance, value, and journey of Dudek’s poetry, both writing poetry and reading poetry; in addition to poetry the other topic in the Continuation texts is God, the divine presence, and there are references to both God and poetry throughout all three Continuation books. Suddenly, the poem ends, not in mid-sentence but it ends (as life ends), the various fragments have ended but it still has the feeling of continuation; it might serve as Dudek's literary “last will and testament": it's the gift of the importance of poetry. But it is also a failed completion of the Continuation project and proves my belief that most long, multi-volume poems end in failure, not in completion, and, as Pound said of his Cantos, it does not cohere. 

These two books in which the Continuation III poems appear contain other short poems, and this might suggest that the energy for completing Continuation had run out, I suspect that this is the case; perhaps poetry is a young person’s activity, it requires energy the old don’t have; but Dudek might have asked himself why write short poems when the larger and more consequential Continuation project needs to be completed? The obvious answer is that he no longer had the energy or strength, or vision, to sustain a longer poem.

-o-

Continuation III is preoccupied with and describes what it’s like to be old. It has a quality of increasing fragmentation, the body is collapsing, it's closing down,, it is beginning to reach its end.

It is possible some parts of Continuation III were written much earlier and then recycled into the final book. I have tried to indicate both the movement of time and the various insights in these three books; dates for composition remain approximate, for instance, the embryo of Continuation III was in 1990.

-o-

"Continuation III" (this section is found at the end of The Caged Tiger) is divided into four sections with an additional section, “Bits & Pieces [A Recitation]” at the very end of the book. Between these two sections is “Notes for Ken [Norris]”, that briefly elaborate Dudek’s vision in personal terms, not abstract ideas but poetry. This writing is Dudek in his old age, in which the theme of youth vs. (old) age is further developed. This is a poem of summation of the important points in Continuation I and II. The fragmentary nature, writing in fragments, is important here. It seems that in old age all there is are fragments; indeed, one doesn’t have the strength to write a long poem without relying on the fragmentary nature of the poem. In old age this is all that’s left of the individual; it’s fragments, not much else but fragments and inevitable death. And death, meditations on death, run throughout this poem. While this is the weakest of the three books—because it is incomplete and published in two separate volumes— it might also be the most moving, written directly from Dudek’s profound experience when he wrote this section.

-o-

The most difficult time in a person’s life is when they are at their weakest, it is when we are old. If one is a sensitive or intelligent person old age is a time of physical, emotional, spiritual, and intellectual decline to inevitable death. As one grows old the body wears out, just as the body of an old car rusts, parts wear out and have to be replaced, and nothing works as well as it used to. After a lifetime of stress one’s ability to handle emotional conflict is at its lowest; we’ve survived death, divorce, betrayal, but there isn’t much left to us, our nerves are shot... The brain is also wearing out, thought processes are not as fast as they used to be, there is the possibility of dementia and senility. As well, one wonders if the spirituality that was once a support is now viable, facing the end one might wonder if religion was never more than a fairy tale; or, one’s spirituality is strengthened by the circumstances of one’s life. Around you, all of your old friends and family members are dying, you are more and more alone, and you must face your own inevitable death. There is the chance that one’s family, one’s own children, have turned on you and invented a rift, the very people you loved the most have become the biggest disappointment of your life. Do they care? Perhaps not at all. This is a dismal picture of old age. This is what Dudek is writing about when he says that old people are either always smiling or always scowling; that the older one gets the more one looks like a corpse. Some old people are strong and resilient, they have the support of loving families and have a positive outlook on life; however, many others become bitter as they grow old, and some become insane, gags, with their inability to handle the terrible final demands of their existence.

-o-

Note the fragmentary nature of Continuation III, note that it is a fragment in a fragment. Life has dissolved into its separate parts, there isn’t the energy to work on a larger manuscript.

-o-

There is still poetry and “shining”, what is brilliant, mysterious, against the world of appearance, is a counterpoint to the world of appearance and possible illusion. The infinite, one of Dudek’s favourite words, seems to be a part of life, for those able to perceive it, as well as the experience of poetry. Some excerpts:

We are tied to a chariot called time

and dragged along the road

(58)

Well, you’re old only once

Something to be said for that



And thanks to the collection of manuscripts

we now know, before we die

what our friends really thought of us

(59)



Against this, he writes:



There are days when

whatever is is bright



(63)



An Appearance Erscheinung

not “mere appearance”

but a shining

EPIPHANEIA

(64)



Why should I bow to authority?

The poem is my authority

if I want truth.



(65)



-o-

Tragi-comedy, comic-tragedy

Let’s see how you will laugh

when your time comes.

(69)



And accept everything that is given—

pain, darkness, death.

So I am living it

for the last time

like the young

who are living it

for the first time

Ah!

The lilacs falling over themselves

on the garage roof,

and the trellis of trees, making their leaves

for a new summer.



(70-71)

-o-

the one you lie to is the one you love.

“Santuzza, criedi mi!”

cries out Turridu

and died with the lie on his lips.



“Santuizza, credi me! Santuzza, credi me!”



If it’s the truth it fits like a glove,

but the one you lie to is the one you love.

. . . .

Where are the kind friends that used to pass,

and the lovers, with laughing loves—

where are they gone from this world of glass?

(71)

-o-

I am a hole in space,

empty as matter, hungry as death—

can eat up the universe in my maw.

I push into unknown infinite world...



(Came to the sun, came to the earth

and wedged into matter)



I am an interloper,

even now as I push my pencil in the dark

and write this poem.

(76-77)

-o-

His advice:

Keep pushing ahead

with all the language arts,

developing new brain cells

And the reader rubbing his bald pate

in irritation—

Canadian (or American)

“entreprenoors”

sipping their “kreem the menthe”

to their “déjà voo”—





Some of this is beautiful, simply exquisite writing. 

(I don’t remember what the event was all about but in the mid-1990s I was driving Louis and a few others to a Greek restaurant (on the corner of Northcliffe Avenue and Sherbrooke Street West), I remember Dudek correcting me on my pronunciation of “déjà vu”... it was the same restaurant where the poet Keitha MacIntosh used to spend hours correcting student papers and drinking tea. She lived across the street in the large apartment building on the northwest corner, on the corner next across the street from the restaurant. Alas, she, too, has departed (in August 2012) this veil of tears... this vale of soul-making.). Actually, I think Keitha may have been there when we entered the restaurant, but not sure about that.

-o-

Ah, the tears, the tears of forgetfulness

for all our sorrows

For all the good we leave behind

(Even you, my dear,

whom I love more than myself

—the self that I despise)

(82)

-o-

Back, for a minute, to epigrams:

The New Yorker has set a very high standard

for perfume advertising

So has “the Booker Prize”

for best-sellers.

(86)

-o-

Underlying the whole poem is the importance of poetry, but also of languages, of knowing several languages possibly in order to be a literate and educated individual. In his old age Dudek was translating Greek poetry using a bilingual dictionary; he told me, “it’s simple”, just follows the order of the words and look them up in a dictionary.

-o-

The second section in Continution III is “Bits & Pieces [A Recitation]”. This section is made up of “Bits & Pieces”, but it’s an interesting poem. It posits two voices of the same person speaking with some directions or instructions as to how it should be read (for instance, “cut here”, “pause”, “break”, “long pause”, and so on). The voice that is italicized could be Dudek’s thinking while the voice in plain type could be Dudek addressing an audience; there are other variations of this. Italics could indicate answers or responses the one speaking, the unconscious mind, the fragmentation of the speaker’s voice, and so on.


The world is always full

of the young.

(99)

The body breaks down. If one medicine fails

you try another.

In the end they all fail.

But you keep on trying.

Only youth

never fails.

(106)

-o-

“Sequence from Continuation III” appears in The Surface of Time (Empyreal Press, Montreal, 2000). This is the final “sequence” and conclusion of the poem. It is fragmentary, as thinking is fragmentary, moving from one thought to the next but always overshadowed with Dudek’s concerns: poetry, infinity, youth vs. age, and so on. Poetry seems to be one approach to an awareness of eternity:


Time and space are a construct,

we know it.

But before time and space, what was there?


Eternity is the surface of time.

(80)


What started things, what

was there before the creation

in unknowable to us.

But it shines

from a leaf, from a letter

on the perfect page.


Poetry is a wandering search

an escape from gravity—

a space-walk in the open.

(81)

-o-

And then we have a memory, an anecdote, regarding the “many funerals” Dudek attended as a child. It is the beginning of his sense of mortality, of the utter transience of life. It is the positioning of youth and age beside each other, of an awareness of temporality, an awareness of death. But with this awareness is also a more difficult awareness, it is of the magnificence of life, the multiplicity of existence, the “shining” features of life, the transcendence of temporality found on poetry and life.

Then, he gives us another memory from childhood, “How you fumbled in class,/ how you failed in arithmetic” (83), and then the final, compelling and deeply moving words of this monument of poetry. For, as I remember thinking as we left Dudek’s funeral (on the side of Mount Royal, within walking distance of St. Joseph’s Oratory) that cold March day in 2001, we had greatness among us, we had a Colossus (as Henry Miller referred to a writer friend of his) among us, and now we are alone to face the demands of “savage modernity”:

Go out in the sun

some Sunday morning

when the clouds are melting

over St. Joseph’s,

look down from Mount Royal

to that other world.


It is far off and glorious—

at the heart of creation—

no tin-can world

of savage modernity,

but the everlasting

world of a present

where you stand

in the pale light of allness.


Stand there and remember

the paltriness of worldly claims,

and the immensity

that is always now.

(83-84)

-o-

Postscript: Just last night I was reading some comments on Dudek's poetry, written by another poet who was a fan of Dudek's poetry. This poet praised Atlantis and sections of his other long poems, but nobody (not even my poet contemporaries) will stand up for Continuation; one critic, who knew Dudek, didn't even have the correct title of the poem, throughout his discussion of the poem he refers to it as Continuations. My God, can't we even get the title right? Most critics disparage or ignore Continuation and yet, if you read interviews with Dudek, read what he said about the poem, the whole project took over forty years to write, it is meticulously written, and it is Dudek's longest piece of writing. Continuation should have been three books, and it should be republished as such but in one volume. It is Dudek's most experimental writing. And yet, it is ignored, it is treated as something critics wish had never been written, it's an embarrassment. My contention has always been that Continuation is a significant poem in Dudek's body of work. Well, times have changed and we've entered a very dark time in western civilization, not just in Canada but in the west; in Canadian poetry the (golden) days of Modernism, of Irving Layton, Al Purdy, include F.R. Scott in this short list, and others has ended and what we have today is the irrelevancy of poetry and poets; not one poet today has the public status of earlier poets, not one poet is a public personality or presence in the media, not one poet is listened to. It could be that one day people will read Continuation and understand exactly what Louis Dudek is saying, that's what happens with difficult literature, with time the educated public find what was formerly difficult fairly obvious in its meaning.  13/02/2026


Note: Written in 2012; revised October - November 2024, 2025. Thought: the best final statement is to put in writing what one is thinking, don't leave it up to chance or the possibility that someone might understand what you are saying. Suggestion for poets: be your own critic because the critics may never write about your work and you need to explain what you are doing.

Edited: 13 February 2026.

"Radio Ethiopia" by Patti Smith

 

Oh I'll send you a telegram
Oh I have some information for you
Oh I'll send you a telegram
Send it deep in the heart of you
Deep in the heart of your brain is a lever
Oh deep in the heart of your brain is a switch
Oh deep in the heart of your flesh you are clever
Oh honey you met your match in a b_tch

Deep in the heart of
Deep in the heart of

There will be no famine in my existence
I merge with the people of the hills
Oh people of Ethiopia
Your opiate is the air that you breathe
All those mint bushes around you
Are the perfect thing for your system
Aww clean clean it out
You must rid yourself from these, these animal fixations
You must release yourself
From the thickening blackmail of elephantiasis
You must divide the wheat from the rats
You must turn around [and look oh God]

When I see Brancusi
His eyes searching out the infinite abstract spaces
In the [radio] rude hands of sculptor
Now gripped around the neck of a [duosonic]

[I swear on your eyes no pretty words will sway me]

Oh look at me aah
cannot move ahh so much aahh everything I am
possible
Aah
Feel so f_cked up

much too
I know I know

tell him to get out of here
go down to the sea
if he would just tell me
he appreciates Brancusi's space
the sculptor's mallet has been taken in place

every time I see

Rabbit grabs carrot and runs!

When I get home, late afternoon, the first thing I do is put out a carrot, cut into pieces, for the wild rabbit. The other day the rabbit was already there and as soon as he saw me off he ran. It's lots of fun looking out of the dining room window and seeing the rabbit there, eating a carrot and then sitting for a while before leaving. Here is a short video of the rabbit.