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Monday, June 25, 2007

New Canadian Poetry: Night and Day

Night and Day
by I.B. Iskov

A whole city of night
sprouts arms in all directions.
In the private landscape
stark and windswept,
hidden, light surfaces.

With the certainty of gravity
slices of sound
signal in the blue velvet,
anchor my senses.

I float in the gray cradle
with a feeling of lightness
as if my shadow could breathe,
I am free.

My feet follow long shades of caution
this craving for connection,
this desire for shine
rises with the sun,
transports my dream into the concrete.

In this noisy neighbourhood
I want to believe something,
trace the curve of clouds,
scratch beneath their surface,
fly beyond my vision,
be a star in daylight.

I.B. (Bunny) Iskov is the Founder of The Ontario Poetry Society. She is also the Literary Judge for Early Harvest, sponsored by Vaughan Public Libraries. Her work has been featured in many fine literary journals and anthologies, including Quills Canadian Poetry Magazine, Surface & Symbol, Henry's Creature - Poems and Stories of the Automobile (Black Moss Press) and in North America Maple. She has several published poetry collections. Bunny is currently working on her second full collection of poems. She is married and lives in Thornhill, Ontario in a lovely two story house on a dead end street.


Saturday, June 23, 2007

A New Chapter for The Invisible Truth

I've been in a little rut for writing lately. I know that a good cure for Writer's Block is to read. Then it struck me. If I opened this blog up as a platform for other writers to get some exposure, I would be reading good stuff, and getting unpublished good stuff out there for people like you to read. It's a win-win situation. I don't have to come up with as much content, I give other writer's exposure, and you get the variety of a literary journal rather than Trevor, Trevor, Trevor. Know that if you return, you will meet some new writers' quality material. It will spice things up around here.

P.S. Happy Pride Week everyone!

Wednesday, June 13, 2007

Just an idea for your neighbourhood park.




These city streets hover in a brown
grunge, hanging over the horizon, baby long the curse
gardens hung out in gorgeous azeleas
elora grand currents, bedside perched on a bluff

deserted pedestrian walkways
where there should, according to all common sense,
be a plethora of movement
waves of brown as the earth turns, whip-like
crowds throng, and they play the theremin
of each others' gesticulations.

The absent ones dance on the weekends
in an alcohol insect cloud,
buzzing in ear, the dowels of perturbation
no word-style is taboo,
present still in the bamboo harvest.
Artisanal trampolines.

Just an idea for your neighbourhood park.

Friday, June 08, 2007

Strange Customs


Parlour games recuperated the runoff, avoiding radiation from the metal detectors and Geiger hooligans tonight. To night, the ambassadors dedicated madrigals featuring bassoon solos to level-headed stock traders who have decided to let money into the country unhampered. Strange customs for the ne’er do well’s contumely exit.

Monday, June 04, 2007

Sunday, June 03, 2007

The out-of-control desire to win.

There is a big difference between being competitive and harbouring an out-of-control desire to win. Many people confuse the two. If you have a healthy competitive spirit, you can recognize where competition is appropriate and behave with a certain amount of decorum (that in sports we would call sportsmanship, but I prefer the word decorum as it is gender neutral, all PC paranoia aside). When you start to look at everything in your life as some kind of game that is won or lost, then you have sunk from healthy competition and you have been devoured by the out-of-control desire to win. Cheating is symptomatic of this desire, but not the only symptom. You can play by the rules all the time and still let this desire get the best of you.

I see this a lot on internet message boards, where people will pull all kinds of (psyche)logical trickery in order to appear to win debates. People trained in philosophy will accuse their opponents of obscure fallacies that might indeed be operational in the opponent's argument, but nevertheless their opponent is erring in the right. There is nothing so irksome as people who use these tricks thinking that because they can point such deficiencies out, they are right, which is sometimes not the case. And because they can point out such deficiencies out, people are more prone to call them right. When they are arguing for the wrong side, this kind of rightness so often devolves into evil. Also, using words in debates to attack the other person's credibility, words such as "ideology," "sophistry," or "rhetoric" in a pejorative sense is also a fairly contemptible tactic, as "ideology" and "rhetoric" are totalizing words like "nature." In other words, there is nothing said that exists outside of their realm of influence, including the words of the person using them pejoratively. While you can attack someone's argument for being too divorced from the practices of everyday life, in other words, too abstract, the sophists had a world view that goes beyond just playing with words to throw your opponent off their logic thread. Using the word "sophistry" pejoratively does an injustice to this world view. The fallacy people use the most that degrades everyone involved in the argument is the ad hominem fallacy: attacking the person making the argument, rather than the argument itself.

The out-of-control desire to win functions in interpersonal relationships as well. How many friendships or sexual relationships have ended or been damaged because of this desire? It manifests itself in a need to always control the way things happen. For instance, you have a friend who will only call you if you call them first, or will only enter into a social engagement if you go to their house, their "home field" so-to-speak. While this is not necessarily a desire to win, it exhibits evidence of a similar power dynamic. Balance is lost. Another example would be two lovers, involved in an ongoing argument that always seems to result in one or the other feeling disheartened and desolate. Love is not a game though, and neither is friendship. This desire, and the self's loss of control over the desire (expressed through a desire to control) is a major malaise of our society.

Friday, June 01, 2007

Death is something they made up to make you productive.


Death is something they made up to make you productive. A body is a community as it is also part of a community. Irritation from oyster self? Yeah, that's right, Alchemy. Every irritant that enters the bounds of the oyster’s self becomes a part of a pearl. Use the enemy's weapons wisely, and once your liquid mortality has seeped into the molecular arrangement of your Whole Self, which has in turn returned to earth, never the body in casket.