My Amazing Poetry Week

   Kind of an amazing week!
   I spent last weekend working on this year's entry in the "2 Day Poem Contest", sponsored by Contemporary Verse 2, a Canadian literary magazine published out of Winnipeg. This is a contest wherein you are given 48 hours to write a poem which must be 48 lines or less. Seems easy? Well, here's the tricky part...they also provide you with ten words of their own choosing which you then must use in your poem. The words are all random and dis-connected and fairly straightforward. The contest organizers do, however, take some sadistic glee in tossing in two or three words you quite likely have never heard of! 
   As strange as this may seem, it is part of the great attraction of this contest. Here are this year's words!

   The words "carapace", "octothorpe", and "peristeronic" required looking up. If you're not sure what they are, then please feel free to look them up yourself, no reason why you shouldn't be doing some of the work here....
   Anyway, it's always one of my favourite weekends of the year. You receive the words via e-mail at midnight CDT time, when Friday turns into Saturday. You then have forty-eight hours. Unfortunately, midnight CDT time is 1:00 a.m. in Ontario so it feels like we need to stay up later but then it also feels like we get an extra hour at the end. Mind games.
   My normal procedure (this is my fourth or fifth year doing this) is to take a look at the words when they come in, look them up if necessary (it always has been), write them out, and then head for bed with the words swimming about. Then, the following day, I get started.
   There always seems to be a word or two which provide you with some grain of inspiration and then the job becomes getting the rest of them to fall in line somehow. Sometimes, this happens miraculously. Sometimes, it is an ignoble failure. The words all do get used, one way or the other though, so it is no small feat when that poem gets sent off.
   In past years, I have been happy with pretty well all the poems I've entered, feeling they were sure winners. The fact that you have never heard me talk about this contest before is, however, indicative if the success I've had with it.
   But here's the thing---for that forty-eight hours, you are totally immersed in one of the things you love the most and that thing is writing poetry. The reason and the inspiration for writing the poem may have arrived at your doorstep as a strange, almost-uninvited house-guest that you possibly wish you could send on their way but once you have invited them in, fed them and made them comfortable, you are then regaled with all the new and strange places they take you. 
   This is what last weekend was like for me, trying to make strained connections with absurdly incongruous words. It was wonderful!
   My crazy week then continued!
   A couple of months ago, I entered a poetry contest run by Poetry London (London, Ontario, Canada for those of you perhaps less familiar with me). The aim of Poetry London is to try and provide an outlet for local poets to share, enjoy and work at their craft. They do this by hosting regular readings and workshops here in the city. This was their annual contest where you get to send in one poem on any theme and in any style. This was a new contest for me so I wasn't quite sure what to expect. I picked a poem I'd written recently, sent it off, and then forgot about it. I try and do this with any contest or submission I get involved with, it's just easier to send things off and then forget about them, the same way the whole "boiling pot" thing works.

   So, as it happened, this past Tuesday morning rolls around and I have to get up before anyone else and head to work. I turn on my phone to see what's new in the world and find there's an e-mail for me from David Barrick of Poetry London saying that Lucas Crawford, the contest judge, had picked my poem for first prize! Amazing and totally unexpected, all at the same time! Please feel free to head on over to Poetry London's website right here and read not only my poem but the other two winners' poems as well. There is nothing more subjective than "judging" poetry and you could very well find yourselves enjoying the other poems just as much (or more!)
   Yes, a crazy week for me. Apart from the odd poetry contest giving me some incentive to write lately, I have not really fully immersed myself in the poetry world for the last thirty years. I am, however, now feeling rejuvenated, almost like everything is a poem again!
   

   

The "Buried-In-Common-Ground Blues" And My Left Arm

   This is where I tell you a little bit about my mother and a little bit about something I had done to my left arm.
   My mother passed away on April 6, 1973. She did this as a result of having ingested a couple of weeks worth of anti-depressants and painkillers all at once. Hard to know, with several years of mental health issues and a growing proclivity toward alcohol abuse, whether this had been something she had planned or whether it was merely an accident. It was not the first time she had overdosed, it was simply the last.
   What she left behind was a house full of dysfunctional  males who then were tasked with going on without her, and all that entailed. I could write a long post about that but for the moment I am taking the long way around toward what happened to my left arm. 
   After she passed, my mum was cremated and we had a memorial service. Things returned to a newer version of normal and for the next almost thirty years I had this funny little idea that my mum's cremated remains were tucked away in some kind of a receptacle in a building in Mt. Pleasant Cemetery here in London, Ontario. I drove past this building pretty constantly and I would always glance over at it and it and think to myself "yup, my mum's in there somewhere."
   Then one day, about thirty years later, I happened to be in the cemetery office with a friend, who was looking for the grave site of someone we both knew. On a whim, I asked the lady in the office for information on the whereabouts of my mum's remains 
   She checked her records and told me that my mum's ashes had been buried in common ground. She was able to show me on a map where common ground was and, with a few specific directions, I was able to locate where in that section they were. 
   This new knowledge completely altered everything I thought I had known about the disposition of my mother's remains and, as significantly, laid bare my own grotesque dis-function---how can you go for thirty years and not really know where your mum's buried?
   This preyed on me for some time. 
   I found that it pre-occupied me the most when I was driving and able to have time to myself. I am a bit of a poet by nature and, after awhile, all the questions and observations I had about this discovery slowly took the form of a poem and the poem then slowly took the form of a song. It came out of me in a slightly irreverent, bluesy sort of way and, for the lack of a better title, I called it "The Buried-In-Common-Ground Blues". 
   Not that anyone has heard it.
   No-one has heard it, unless perhaps they were paying very close attention to a song I was quietly singing while I was washing the dishes the odd time. And it could be that no-one will hear it except that, now that I've told everyone about it, maybe someone should hear it...
   Anyway, about my left arm.
   I have tattoos on both arms. My right arm has sports-related tats and my left arm has literary tats. I don't think I really planned it this way, it just kinda morphed like that. My left arm was due for a tat and I had been pondering what to put on there. I had been leaning toward quotes from people I admired (this arm already has a pic of Leonard Cohen on it and one of my favourite quotes of his) but then the idea of putting something of my own on there took hold.
   Subsequently, I remembered the song I'd written about my mum.
   I found that the more I thought about it, the more it felt like it was the thing I wanted to do. I knew I didn't have room for the whole song on my arm so I picked the last few lines of the final verse---they tie pretty well everything together and, as importantly, they throw in a connection between my mother and the grandchildren she never had the opportunity to meet and love.
   Most of my tattoo work has been done by Anthony Veilleux of True Love Tattoo, here in London. I happened to be there one evening, picking up a gift card, and talked to him about this idea. I then talked to the receptionist about setting an appointment. She got on the computer and shortly after came up with a random date---February 26. My mother's birthday! I got chills up my spine, the good kind, when you know something was meant to be!
   I met with Anthony on that day and we talked about fonts and placement and punctuation and then he started to work. Tattoos are not always the most fun thing to do to your body---they are, after all, a needle penetrating your skin an untold number of times. As I mentioned, I am not a stranger to tattoos but this one hurt much more than any of the others. Maybe just one more thing that was meant to be.

The tattoo, as it stands at the moment. The plan is to add a whirling nebula on the other side of the arm, tendrils of which will hopefully creep up into the verse.

 

   

   
   

Poems

   It occurred to me today, as I was on a step-stool, re-organizing all my books on their shelves, that it was thirty years ago this summer that I published my first poem. I had previously attended a couple of creative writing sessions at Fanshawe College, here in London, as I'd been interested in writing short stories but along the way we also briefly discussed poetry and I found that something had been re-kindled in me. I continued on with all the other creative writing exercises but I also continued to write poetry, on my own.

My poetry collection. Almost totally (and un-abashedly) Canadian.

   Our teacher at the time, a published writer named Pam Tikalsky, had been very supportive of all my writing and had encouraged me to start sending things out. I started mailing batches of poems to literary journals here in Canada and the U.S. and soon started receiving back pretty well the same number of rejection slips. I was told to expect this, however, and so I continued to re-organize my batches of poems and sending them out to different magazines and journals. After awhile the steady stream of rejection notices began to take their toll and I was truly on the verge of calling it a day, poetically-speaking, when what seemed like the improbable happened. A Canadian magazine called Canadian Author and Bookman accepted a poem! 
   As you can imagine, I was beyond thrilled. I was so used to all the rejection language I'd been seeing that I actually had to re-read the notice they sent me to affirm that it was, in fact, an acceptance. Now it just so happened that the poetry editor of C.A.& B. was a lady from London named Sheila Martindale and I think she likely was inclined to favour London authors so I may have had an "in" there, who knows?
   At any rate, I had been published and this somewhat sustained me over the next long drought and all the accompanying rejection slips.
   Then, just about the time I was starting to give up hope again, another acceptance showed up at my door, this time from the University of Windsor Review. They had no such inclination to publish Londoners and this acceptance helped validate my writing. After this, more poems appeared in such well-respected places as The Lyric, The Antigonish Review and Dandelion.

If you look inside, you will find
some of my words...

   I also started entering poetry contests back in those days. There was a new magazine in London back in those days called Tabula Rasa and they ran something called the Forest City Poetry Contest. I entered three poems in the first contest and ended up being one of the honourable mentions. I should have been happy with this but, when I compared my poems to the ones which won, I liked mine better. I more or less decided at that point that the vagaries of having poems judged by total strangers was not for me. The following year, however, the same magazine ran the same contest again and when I looked at who the judge was that year I realized that his writing style was quite similar to my own and, for this reason, I entered the contest again. I was sitting there in the audience as they announced the prize winners and, sure as shooting, I got another honourable mention. I remember thinking to myself, as I went onstage to get my certificate and then headed back to my seat, that I had just fallen for it again and was extremely disappointed. I sat there as they went through the rest of the honourable mentions and the third prize winner. When it came time for the second place winner, my name was announced! I was shocked! All of the sudden, I didn't feel quite so bad about the experience. I was actually walking off the stage to return to my seat when the announcer stopped me because I was also the first prize winner! At this point I was almost dizzy!
   This was a high which lasted quite awhile and, truthfully, it still has the ability to lighten up a day. Around about this time, however, I stopped writing poetry. I have never totally been sure why I did this. I think at some point it felt as though I had run out of things to write about. I had just gone through a two or three year phase when it seemed as though everything I saw was a potential poem---so I wrote about it. I think I then stopped seeing things that seemed to require writing about them. 
   On top of all this, I became interested in composing music. All the time I used to spend writing poems was now being spent down in the "dungeon"---my basement---on my portable keyboard. Then as commonly happens, life got in the way and even this stopped, for the most part.
   Which brings me to the present.
   I feel like writing poetry again. It feels as though I am back in that space where things seem to need writing about and would be worthy subjects. 
   I have even entered contests again. For the last three years, I have entered the CV2 (Contemporary Verse 2) Two-Day Poetry Contest. They give you two days to write a poem but you must incorporate ten words that they give you. Some of the words are pretty innocuous, like "bunk" or "ham". Others are words I actually had to go and look up, such as last year's year's "furuncle" and this year's "absquatulated" (both of which I just now had to add to my laptop's dictionary...). The process is both daunting and fun at the same time and people are actually able to come up with awesome poems. I have liked the three poems I came up with but they were not winners--it is, after all, a very subjective kind of thing and the fact that I don't win is very secondary to the fun I had. And you get a subscription to CV2 for entering so it's kind of win-win!

...and so I did!

   So I will write more poems, just for myself and with my own words. Maybe I'll submit them places, maybe I won't but it will still be the same exercise in self-discovery it always has been and that's why I think most poets do it!