Last days of October

This has been a spectacular October, the autumn leaves have never been more colourful, tree lined streets with yellow or red leaves, and it's been mild, +24 C earlier this week. Who could ask for better than that? And birds love this mild weather. I guess they were mostly young robins hanging out at the bird bath, jostling each other for a position, acting like adolescents, that were here a few weeks ago. The younger robins seem to have migrated, but the older robins are still here and not as eager to leave since the weather has been so good. Robins, blue jays, cardinals, and other birds, visiting the bird bath; and one has a feeling of affection for them and happy I could do something for the birds, provide this bird bath and keep it filled with clean water. They give me more than they take, a bird bath and some clean water. You get the idea of the back yard and the birds from these photographs, taken from our dining room window.

This is a second bird bath, it's the pedestal of an old bird bath with
a plastic plate glued onto it to hold about a two inch deep amount of water. 
Not very elegant but it works... 

Where poems come from

 

For the most part, poets don't choose what they write about; a poem is given to us, it comes from deep within the psyche. Of course, everything takes a lot of work; poets need a foundation on which to write their poems, this includes reading, education, and years of commitment to poetry and writing. As all poets know, when a poem is given to them it has to be listened to; some poets get up in the middle of the night to write down a poem before it is forgotten. The most famous example of losing the thread of a poem when the writing is interrupted is Coleridge's anecdote of the "visitor from Porlock"; because of this interruption Coleridge felt that one of his most famous poems, "Kubla Khan", was never fully completed.

What a poet writes is an expression of deeply felt psychic issues. The soul deciphers what it perceives and begins writing (or dictating) a poem. Over time the writing will change, but what doesn't change is the need to write poems. Poetry is one of the places in life where we see the surrender of conscious choice; it is a demand on us by the soul, a demand that we listen, a demand to write our poems as they are given to us, and a demand to be faithful to writing poetry over a lifetime.

We poets were once a tribe, as Margaret Laurence described the community of writers back in the 1960s; but the tribe has broken up, it has dispersed, it has been fragmented. Nevertheless, what we write about doesn't really change; perennial themes supersede what is newly fashionable or entertaining. What has importance is our creativity and depth of perception, our visceral need to write poetry, and our knowledge that after everything else has disappeared from life, it is poetry that will still be there. This is my experience.

 

"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.

Spider web outside a church

When I noticed these spider webs outside of St. Philip's Anglican Church, I thought they were a Halloween decoration. But they are actual spider webs, I think made more visible by moisture on the filaments. There they hang where a spider made them, ponderous and visible. 

Morning at the hidden trail

In the air, the smell of wood smoke; passing just below the ridge, a train, a freight train. A few birds singing. No one else out walking here today. Morning of October 19th in Montreal. 

Live stream, an oasis in Namibia and fat bears having lunch

Some of my favourite videos on YouTube are live streams; for instance, here is a desert oasis located in Namibia, in South Africa, and you can see different animals and birds visiting this oasis at any time of the day the animals are peaceful, they come and go and they don't bother each other. It's actually quite interesting.

Another Live Stream are of the fat bears, grabbing a salmon for supper and preparing for months of hibernation. BTW, they are actually referred to as "fat bears", they will soon hibernate and need all the fat they can put on. Here is a sample of the fat bears:

Live stream is a stationary video camera aimed at a specific site and what you are seeing is what is currently happening at that site. Sorry to be simplistic but this may be new to some people. If nothing is happening on screen you can go back about twenty-four hours by moving the red time line at the bottom of the screen to when something is happening.

Something I realized when watching the Namibia live stream is that a bird bath is a small oasis for birds; the birds come to drink some water, wash, preen, and socialize. It's a meeting place for birds. 

My first experience with live stream was in January 2021 when the truckers' convoy arrived in Ottawa where they stayed for about three weeks, ending with Justin Trudeau's invoking of the Emergency Act. I'll discuss the Ottawa live stream event another time.  

Louis Dudek in Paradise

I began writing this poem back in 2001 and completed it in 2012, and just found it in my archives. 

A winter afternoon at Mount Royal Cemetery

1)  Homage to Louis Dudek

A cold wind sweeps down

from Mount Royal
to the city below;
this bitter winter
ending with a death.
When a poet dies
a light goes out,
a bit of brilliance

is extinguished,

although poets know

no death is greater than another,

the homeless man surrounded

by plastic garbage bags,

or the former prime minister,

his body carried by a train

slowing at each station.

At the funeral, I listen to Louis' poems

being read, each reader celebrating Louis' life

with anecdotes and poems, a life

dedicated to poetry and teaching.

Louis has moved from temporal

to eternal, from flesh to word;

no more poems will be written by him,

no more meetings in restaurants

to discuss books and art and ideas.

A final grief, a final salute:

the old poet is dead,

the books are written,

the poems recited,

discussions into the evening

come to an end

and we prepare to go home.

We linger at the door

and say "Louis' life

was lived for love of others,

his poems were written out of love."

Outside the March day has turned to night,

we return to our usual lives

feeling diminished by his death

and the world seems

a lesser place.

2) that was then, this is now

The older poets

had a sense of their mission,

it was a lineage of poets,

not a competition

but a place in making

a national literature, the importance

of this in nation building;

now, the nation

is built, but we’ve

lost the propriety of things;

no one was concerned

with “award winning poets”

that was never why we wrote,

it was the obsession with writing poems,

the excitement of discovering a new poet,

and with being a community of poets;

the older poets welcomed the young;

that was when

in the whole country

we had ten or fifteen poets,

not fifteen poets times three hundred,  

not everyone writing their poems

and few reading what was written;

to be a poet was to be the exception,

not a commonplace, it was earned by writing,

not one or two poems, but a lifetime

of work, of building a body of work,

because the words came to you, not just

the mundane, but a vision in the work

an obsession for writing and love

for poetry; eccentricity (which is never

politically correct) was not despised,

it was expected; the tyranny of conformity 

had no place among poets,

it was the writing that mattered;

the courtesy of older poets to the young,

as that day, at McGill’s Arts Building,

I was a graduate student that year

in Dudek’s seminar, discussing Pound,

Yeats, Joyce and Ford Madox Ford,

that year in Louis’s office, when being

with an older poet was a privilege—

The Morrice family monument at 
Mount Royal Cemetery, including
a plaque for James Wilson Morrice

3) James Wilson Morrice

James Wilson Morrice

had to go to Paris

to be an artist

(as years later

John Glassco followed)

leaving the family mansion

(now torn down) on Redpath Street, 

a block from

The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts,

where his paintings

are on permanent display— 

William Van Horn, president of the CPR,

who collected art as a hobby, told Morrice’s father

to let him study art abroad after seeing

some of the son’s paintings;

at Mount Royal Cemetery

on one side of the Morrice family’s monument,

James Wilson Morrice’s name and dates (1865-1924)

and place of burial, in Tunis; this is the man Louis Dudek said

“painted grey snow”: “he is a Canadian on his travels.

His destination is one he never reaches,

though others may reach it after him — it is Canada.”

That destination is paradise, to live with summer

year round, not in Montreal, the “Metropolis”, that Morrice rarely

visited after he left, where winter is six months of the year,

the other six divided between summer, fall and spring—

Meanwhile, the Beaver Hall artists, their studio space and gallery

located a block east of St. Patrick’s Church,

held two exhibitions, in 1921 and 1922.

And what about that forgotten Beaver Hall artist,
Darrell Morrisey? She was erased as an artist,
her work discarded by her family after her death, at age 33,

in 1930, it soon became as though she never existed;

and Morrice, the warm ocean breeze and sleeping

on a rooftop in Tunis under the stars—the choreography

of his life, and our life-long work as poets,
the vision of art, the act of creation,
the company of poets—

4) in the company of artists and poets

In the company of artists and poets:

John Cage chatting with Arnold Shöenberg

while Glenn Gould eats supper

with Bach; there’s Jackson Pollock listening

as Artie Gold reads his poem about Bucks County,

and later someone plays Charles Ives’ 2^nd Piano Concerto;

Jack Shadbolt meets Emily Carr meeting Nellie McClung

(the granddaughter poet of the better known Nellie),

and HD talks with Virginia Woolf who celebrates

her birthday with James Joyce; Yeats and Jeffers

are in their towers; Jack Kerouac and John Lennon

discuss religion and listen to “Imagine” (which Kerouac hates);

Van Gogh argues with Gauguin; Strindberg and Arthur Miller,

watch Marilyn Monroe holding down her skirt around her knees;

Charlie Chaplin’s silhouette walking into the sunset;

we’re in the eternal, art and music, we’re in Paradise,

where artists and poets create our age,

hard cover books on shelves, abstract paintings on walls,

and just last week lying awake in bed at 5 a.m.,

some kid at a university radio station (in Edmonton) 

playing jazz, Charles Mingus, Dizzy Gillespie, 

and John Coltrane, with no idea where this music came from,

only knowing that he likes what he’s listening to,

this art, that it speaks to him—

5) all art is vision (or it's just a repetition of the past)

All art is vision—

in the great museums and concert halls,

what returns us to Spirit is art,

poems sustaining us

over a lifetime,

paintings by the Great Masters

drawings on Lascaux’s

cave walls, hieroglyphics

and Inuit art,

sculpture and pottery,

movies and dance—

all the great art of civilization

returns us to God—

all art is vision

all poetry requires vision

to express the poet’s psyche,

if the soul

is filled with lies 

how can the poetry

not also lie? if the poet

censors the poem,

what is created

but a censored poem?

We try to live  

true to our vision, our journey

of truth, our journey

in Paradise—

--------------------------

Note: "Homage to Louis Dudek", a section of this poem, was first published in Eternal Conversation, a tribute to Louis Dudek. 

The politically correct CBC is destroying Canadian culture; it's time to Defund the CBC. 

Fall leaves here in the West End

You can't get much further west than here in the West End of Montreal, we are adjacent to the Town of Montreal West. The leaves have changed colour or are in the process of changing colour and it's good having four distinct seasons, each season and each month in that season is a little or a lot different than the preceding season, and the next season coming up. 

At Loyola Park

On Fielding Avenue

Corner of Chester and Belmore

The garden in fall

The garden in fall is different than the garden in summer, in July, when the garden is at its best, flowers, hot days, bright sunlight, shade under the apple tree, a slight breeze, birds at the bird bath, lush grass. There is a special quality to a garden in fall, not a "fall garden", no one plants a garden for the fall. There is now a calm, the flowers have mostly died and only a few dead flowers and leaves remain; no new flowers until next spring or summer. It is a cliche, but there is a meditative calm to the garden now even though there is still fall work to be done, rake leaves, move a few perennials, tidy up the flower beds, prepare the garden for winter and for next spring, say goodbye. You sit there in the garden, it is the remnants of what was there a month ago, no longer lush, no longer young, it the seasonal old age of the garden and next will be the quiescence and conclusion of things which is winter.

These photos taken on 30 September 2022.

"October Song" by The Incredible String Band

 

Dividing and planting hostas

A perennial is like a daughter, you have her for life; an annual is like a son, you have him until he finds a wife. Not the greatest analogy but you get the idea, assuming you know the old adage, “A daughter is a daughter all of your life; a son is a son until he takes a wife.” Of course, some sons keep their old parents in mind, my uncles phoned their mother every weekend, some phoned everyday, and my Uncle Alex visited his mother every Sunday and took her for a drive. Had it been my uncle's father instead of his mother, maybe he wouldn't have visited as often. Mothers are the center of the family, fathers often peripheral. But fathers can have other relationships, a second or third wife, or a girlfriend, or friends or acquaintances, or a dog or cat or a goldfish. 

And in gardening we have perennial plants, they return every year. That is part of the beauty of perennials, you aren't planting a new garden every year, the old garden comes back to life in the spring. And when your perennials get big enough you might want to divide them and move some of them to other places in your garden. I have a really nice row of hostas in the back of the garden, divided and planted last fall, and they helped to pull the garden together. 

This hosta, in the photo, is in our front garden, and it had to be moved because I am planning to have some work done to the front of the house; this is how easy it is to dig up and divide hostas. It takes all of a minute or two to dig up the plant, it has a large root ball, and then divide it into three parts, that's what I did. And then I planted the three "new" hostas in different parts of the garden behind the house. After the work on the front of the house is done I have four other hostas I plan to divide and plant in an area that needs some upgrading... but that might have to wait until late October or even early November, still time enough to do this work, and other gardening, before winter comes in December.

Planning to divide these hostas next

"Sunlight on the Garden" by Louis Macneice

 

The sunlight on the garden
Hardens and grows cold,
We cannot cage the minute
Within its nets of gold;
When all is told
We cannot beg for pardon.

Our freedom as free lances
Advances towards its end;
The earth compels, upon it
Sonnets and birds descend;
And soon, my friend,
We shall have no time for dances.

The sky was good for flying
Defying the church bells
And every evil iron
Siren and what it tells:
The earth compels,
We are dying, Egypt, dying

And not expecting pardon,
Hardened in heart anew,
But glad to have sat under
Thunder and rain with you,
And grateful too
For sunlight on the garden.

(It's an interesting poem, a very good poem. We have four stanzas of six lines each. The last word of the first line rhymes with the first word of the second line; the last word of the second line rhymes with the first word of the fourth line; and the last word of the first line rhymes with the last word in the sixth line. Plus, stresses and feet of the poem are adhered to. And after all of that, the poem communicates with the reader.) 

"The Shepherd's Calendar - October", by John Clare

Nature now spreads around in dreary hue
A pall to cover all that summer knew
Yet in the poets solitary way
Some pleasing objects for his praise delay
Somthing that makes him pause and turn again
As every trifle will his eye detain
The free horse rustling through the stubble land
And bawling herd boy with his motly band
Of hogs and sheep and cows who feed their fill
Oer cleard fields rambling where so ere they will
The geese flock gabbling in the splashy fields
And quaking ducks in pondweeds half conseald
Or seeking worms along the homclose sward
Right glad of freedom from the prison yard
While every cart rut dribbles its low tide
And every hollow splashing sports provide
The hedger stopping gaps wi pointed bough
Made by intruding horse and blundering cow
The milk maid tripping on her morning way
And fodderers oft tho early cutting hay
Dropping the littering forkfulls from his back
Side where the thorn fence circles round the stack
The cotter journying wi his noisev swine
Along the wood side where the brambles twine
Shaking from dinted cups the acorns brown
And from the hedges red awes dashing down
And nutters rustling in the yellow woods
Scaring from their snug lairs the pheasant broods
And squirrels secret toils oer winter dreams
Picking the brown nuts from the yellow beams
And hunters from the thickets avenue
In scarlet jackets startling on the view
Skiming a moment oer the russet plain
Then hiding in the colord woods again
The ploping guns sharp momentary shock
Which eccho bustles from her cave to mock
The sticking groups in many a ragged set
Brushing the woods their harmless loads to get
And gipseys camps in some snug shelterd nook
Where old lane hedges like the pasture brook
Run crooking as they will by wood and dell
In such lone spots these wild wood roamers dwell
On commons where no farmers claims appear
Nor tyrant justice rides to interfere
Such the abodes neath hedge or spreading oak
And but discovered by its curling smoak
Puffing and peeping up as wills the breeze
Between the branches of the colord trees
Such are the pictures that october yields
To please the poet as he walks the fields
Oft dames in faded cloak of red or grey
Loiters along the mornings dripping way
Wi wicker basket on their witherd arms
Searching the hedges of home close or farms
Where brashy elder trees to autum fade
Each cotters mossy hut and garden shade
Whose glossy berrys picturesquly weaves
Their swathy bunches mid the yellow leaves
Where the pert sparrow stains his little bill
And tutling robin picks his meals at will
Black ripening to the wan suns misty ray
Here the industrious huswives wend their way
Pulling the brittle branches carefull down
And hawking loads of berrys to the town
Wi unpretending skill yet half divine
To press and make their eldern berry wine
That bottld up becomes a rousing charm
To kindle winters icy bosom warm
That wi its merry partner nut brown beer
Makes up the peasants christmass keeping cheer
While nature like fair woman in decay
Which pale consumption hourly wastes away
Upon her waining features pale and chill
Wears dreams of beauty that seem lovely still
Among the heath furze still delights to dwell
Quaking as if with cold the harvest bell
The mushroom buttons each moist morning brings
Like spots of snow in the green tawney rings
And fuzz balls swelld like bladders in the grass
Which oft the merry laughing milking lass
Will stoop to gather in her sportive airs
And slive in mimickd fondness unawares
To smut the brown cheek of the teazing swain
Wi the black powder which their balls contain
Who feigns offence at first that love may speed
Then charms a kiss to recompence the deed
The flying clouds urged on in swiftest pace
Like living things as if they runned a race
The winds that oer each coming tempest broods
Waking like spirits in their startling moods
Fluttering the sear leaves on the blasting lea
That litters under every fading tree
And pausing oft as falls the pattering rain
Then gathering strength and twirling them again
The startld stockdove hurried wizzing bye
As the still hawk hangs oer him in the sky
Crows from the oak trees qawking as they spring
Dashing the acorns down wi beating wing
Waking the woodlands sleep in noises low
Pattring on crimpt brakes withering brown below
While from their hollow nest the squirrels (pop)
Adown the tree to pick them as they drop
The starnel crowds that dim the muddy light
The crows and jackdaws flapping home at night
And puddock circling round its lazy flight
Round the wild sweeing wood in motion slow
Before it perches on the oaks below
And huge black beetles reveling alone
In the dull evening with their heavy drone
Buzzing from barn door straw and hovel sides
Where fodderd cattle from the night abides
These pictures linger thro the shortning day
And cheer the lone bards melancholy way
And now and then a solitary boy
Journeying and muttering oer his dreams of joy