Loyola campus of Concordia University

 

Vanier Library 

The former Village Shopping Plaza

 Photos taken morning of 19 October 2024.

The end of the Village Shopping Plaza

 16 October 2024; the end of the Village Shopping Plaza.

Honey bees in asters, early October 2024

Asters are the honey bees last collection of pollen and nectar before everything seems to close down in the garden. There is a long winter ahead of us and this is a short reprieve of still mild weather before the cold, snow, and short days and long nights. 

 

The garden, 16 October 2024

 Looking out of a basement window, seeing several robins in the bird bath and, a few feet away, a squirrel drinking water from a dish. For a while during Covid we had a quarantine, you would be fined if caught outside after eight p.m. except if you were walking your dog (you can’t make up this stuff); I remember standing by this same basement window, looking outside, and thinking how lovely and quiet it was. Do other people look back on Covid and question the whole thing?

Alexis Nihon Plaza, 20 October 2011

This reminds me, when my mother worked at the Sir George Williams University library 
(Concordia University as of 1974), she used to stop on her way home and have something to eat
at this snack bar; strange irrelevant memories that return to one 

Lots of people still miss Zellers, a discount shopping store; they always had
quality items; that era is gone now although The Bay, that now owns Zellers,
has made part of some of their stores "Zellers"

 

The journey, underpass

 

Located on Cote-St-Luc Road near Connaught. I’ve walked through this underpass for years; it is noisey from trucks and buses passing just below where one walks. But I also think of the archetypal passage, all concrete, antiseptic, disembodied and the journey that we are all on.

Finding one’s voice in poetry

4 October 2024

All poets need to find their voice, this requires talent, perseverance, and commitment to writing. From when I began writing poetry, in 1965, I knew I had to find my voice, I knew I had to write poems that I could stand behind --poems that were true to my inner self-- and those poems would accurately express the experiences that had formed or created my life. For me, the discovery of my voice in poetry was an important development in my work as a poet; I knew this instinctively, and I spent years writing every night until I finally wrote a "real" poem. 

 _______

The journey to being a poet includes writing, study, reading, and having a few poet friends; it's a journey in that you don't know where you are going until you get there, and you never know if you will write a genuine poem until you write one. Discovering my voice in poetry was a breakthrough in my writing. In my early twenties I had written poems, for instance “there are seashells and cats”, and this was my true voice. This discovery of my true voice is shown in the poems in my first book, The Trees of Unknowing (Vehicule Press,1978); these were my first poems that I felt were genuine poems, poems that I could stand behind. Finding one's voice in poetry doesn't mean that you will stay writing the same way, what you say changes and how you say it changes, but that is only after you find your voice; another important poem, in my body of work, is “Divisions”, it was written over three days in April 1977.

_________

 

Writing Divisions (Coach House Press, 1983) happened during a period of emotional conflict, of unhappiness, of catharsis. Did Matthew Arnold say that poetry is our religion? This is a shared experience between poet and reader because the poet gives expression to spirit, soul, and psyche and the reader recognizes these important qualities in themselves. What one says in poetry changes as one gets older; nothing is permanent and content is also subject to change, but there is an ineffable quality to voice that doesn’t change; voice is the vehicle for the human soul and what it is experiencing, observing, and moved by, this becomes content, and it needs to be true to one’s inner being.

__________________________          

November 2012 – June 2013

Revised October 2024

Montreal

"Poets" by The Tragically Hip

 

January 2021

Spring starts when a heartbeat's pounding

When the birds can be heard above the reckoning carts doing some final accounting

Lava flowing in Superfarmer's direction

He's been getting reprieve from the heat in the frozen-food section

Don't tell me what the poets are doing

Don't tell me that they're talking tough

Don't tell me that they're anti-social

Somehow not anti-social enough

And porn speaks to its splintered legions

To the pink amid the withered cornstalks in them winter regions

While aiming at the archetypal father

He says with such broad and tentative swipes "Why do you even bother?"

Don't tell me what the poets are doing

Don't tell me that they're talking tough

Don't tell me that they're anti-social

Somehow not anti-social enough

Don't tell me what the poets are doing

On the street and the epitome of vague

Don't tell me how the universe is altered

When you find out how he gets paid

If there's nothing more that you need now

Lawn cut by bare-breasted women

Beach bleached, towels within reach for the women gotta make it

That'll make it by swimming