Lovers & Clairvoyants, Despairers & Thieves, 2015

Tags

#bringingbacktheglosa, Canadian poet, Elaine Stirling, glosa, narrative poem, New Year's Eve prophecies, Silvina Ocampo, Spanish medieval fixed verse

Last year on this day, December 31, I danced a glosa, “there are no lost amigos”, with Jack Kerouac from his Book of Sketches. The poem still reads well, and much of it came true—as poems ought to, on this most prophetic occasion. This year, two female poets blend their say with mine. The first is Silvina Ocampo, an Argentine contemporary of Jorge Luis Borges. “The range of her spirit is much greater than my own,” says Borges generously of his friend in a preface to her short story collection, Thus Were Their Faces. Ocampo was also a clairvoyant, which makes the writing of this New Year’s Eve glosa all the more enchanting.

~~~

I have received it all. Oh, nothing, nothing is mine.
I am like the reflections of a gloomy lake
or the echo of voices at the bottom of a blue
well when it has rained.

—from “Song” by Silvina Ocampo, translated by Jason Weiss

I wonder if you’ve noticed, says the tall
thin man to me at the bar, that far less
oxygen is breathed globally on New Year’s
Eve than any other night—until the sex,
of course. They’ve measured it. We
suspend respiration from a fear of time
passing. Brain cells die from forced inebriation.
We greet the new year stupider. That’s why
I only drink soda and thousand dollar red wine.
I have received it all. Oh, nothing, nothing is mine.

He doesn’t know I came with you. You’re mingling
somewhere so I listen to his hypotheses.
They ramble from a scorched dead Earth
to why his mother shelled her peas
to Patsy Cline and BBC, no other.
He grabs my arm. Oh, look, the flake
is here! Comes every year, tells fortunes
by your posture. Snap! I straighten,
nearly wrench a shoulder. Great.
I am like the reflections of a gloomy lake,

deep, and only vaguely fascinating. I sidle
over, do not catch her name. She’s Kola Sami,
Lapp, born on some Arctic fjord. You’re bored
too easily, she says. All that you once could see,
that saw you back, you’ve stopped believing.
Wait around for others to establish what is true,
and then you preach it, divide yourselves
between the ones who drink and screw and those
who wish they could. If you don’t dissolve the glue
or the echo of voices at the bottom of a blue

mood, nothing will ever arrive to improve.
She vanishes into the crowd with a whiff
of salt spray and spruce. A Canada goose
calls to her mate from the head of a V
in the moment you appear. Let’s get out of here!
We drive through empty streets until nothing remains
of old anxieties. Above the lake stir Northern Lights,
phosphorescent green. You are lovers, I hear the Sami
say. Be that, no other, as an overflowing, unrestrained
well, when it has rained.

~~~

© Elaine Stirling, 2015

Advertisement

New Habitants

Tags

#bringingbacktheglosa, #CanadianPoet, Elaine Stirling, glosa, medieval Spanish fixed verse, PM Justin Trudeau, poetry

~~a glosa~~

Free thinker! Do you think you are the only thinker
on this earth in which life blazes inside all things?
Your liberty does what it wishes with the power it controls,
but when you gather to plan, the universe is not there.

—from “Golden Lines”, Gérard de Nerval, 1854,
translated by Robert Bly

~~~

I have a shelf in a quiet corner
of my house where books appear,
where spines with startling titles
wink like coin upon a beach
you think, at first, is crumpled foil.
I move in close. You little stinker,
where’d you come from? Didn’t I just
dust here yesterday? Three Bly collections,
now there’s four! Best not to blink or—
free thinker! Do you think you are the only thinker?

Laughter of the cynical sounds hardy
like a whack across the shoulder blades.
Well met, friend! One scarcely hears
the swallowed—gullible—or feels
the poisoned tip of reason penetrate.
The spy pretends to care. He brings
his little eye of mean intelligence,
then shrinks. He’s leather in the rain.
I know him well. I know he stings
on this earth in which life blazes inside all things.

Meanwhile, this new-found book,
the fourth or maybe fifth this year
falls open as do all things freshly
manifest, and from its novel pages
pour like immigrants through Ellis
and old Halifax onto these shoals
new habitants, thoughts never known.
Tides reverse. My salty backward-facing pillars
burble, angry, smash their begging bowls.
Your liberty does what it wishes with the power it controls,

The pale brittle shell of politics is broken.
Newborn patriots stand blinking in a sun
that’s never shone like this till now.
The rush of sea, the boats well laden
with supplies will dry all eyes
once sorrowful. You who swear
the age of miracles is dead, you’ll find your proofs.
Who negates life for afterlife, division
as your goal, we too will meet somewhere.
But when you gather to plan, the Universe is not there.

~~~

It’s been a while since I’ve written a glosa, but even longer since I’ve felt proud of my nation and government down to the cellular level. There’s been a sea change in Canada since the election of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. I see young people politically engaged for the first time. American friends post videos of our PM greeting new arrivals and say they feel the shift too, even through all their media clamour.

If glosas and form poetry appeal to you, please visit my website where you can learn more–and perhaps buy a book or two.

© Elaine Stirling, 2015
Robert Bly’s scintillating translation of Nerval comes from News of the Universe: poems of twofold consciousness, published in 1980.

Happy Birthday, Beethoven!

Tags

#CanadianPoet, Beethoven's birthsay, Elaine Stirling, poetry, sonnet

Happy birthday, Beethoven, dear Ludwig!
Your season is here, your pure reason for
being. This blue spinning globe needs you more
every day as we plummet and soar, big
movements colliding with pockets of fear,
deafening hearts that seek to even some
score—what bores, pounding upon off-pitch drums.
You, though, never gave a ripe fig to fear.
You rose to odes of joy so we could hear
your ninth proclaims universal welcome,
encompassing all who have passed and come
again, naked and howling. With good cheer,
we shall compose beneath the moonlit tree,
and prove to be your greatest symphony.

~~~

If you like the framed photo of Beethoven as much as the music teacher who bought it, then you’ll love the gifts at Past Perfect Antiquity.

© Elaine Stirling, 2015

Writer Uses Methinks in a Sentence

Tags

Elaine Stirling, poetry, the myth of writer's block

Too much is made, methinks, of the loneliness
of a writer’s life, of the chilly, slow, grim ascent
to swift success—or none—as though the fickle
muses take delight in luring button-eyed fiddlers
of the word from out their feathery nests or garrets
creaky and ill lit, only to drop them to the rocks
below as the eagle drops the clam.

The writer who believes herself alone
while at her task, feeling listless, even envious
when jostling midst the rabble and the starry-
eyed—their gazes always elsewhere—
the writer who can’t find his purchase
on some storyline is not, in that dilemma,
anything at all; he is a wedge, jammed
and dangling between demi-worlds
of reason with their madly shifting
compromise and That! the infinitely
grand, where any slightest flicker
of the notion of aloneness is a flea
on the fur of a dreaming Cerberus.

If you would write
and write abundantly,
they have assured me there,
turn squarely and with bold
imagination face abundance,
even in its crudest state. Desist
from your deploring and false
sympathies. All is grist, and all
is richness in the process of
becoming more. To that which
you would view as Paradise, hold
fast your gaze, and when you feel
the first arrivals of the best who went
before and better yet, the ones who’ll
follow you, audacious in their eagerness
to help, pick up your pen for you,
in that holy instant, form the center
of Creation known as writing.

~~~

© Elaine Stirling, 2015