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Sunday, October 02, 2022
Friday, September 16, 2022
Memories of Havana Cuba
I found these photos in an old phone's camera roll. They are of buildings in Havana, Cuba, taken in 2016. The bottom photo is the National Ballet building.
Friday, August 19, 2022
A Dispatch from Yemen: Guest Writer Aiman Altawili
Living in Yemen is to worry about everything; there’s no stability. We struggle to get even the basic living essentials such as electricity, water and gas. Everyday we are living on the brink of famine, not knowing how and when we will next eat. We are also constantly in danger of cholera and diphtheria and poor mental health, as everyday living requires so much strength and energy. We have to keep it together because there’s people we need to serve, who can’t help themselves, but it is very difficult to remain positive. It hurts to wonder why the richest nations of the Middle East are ganging up on us, destroying the poorest people who have nothing. Is it all to flatten the land? Is that the worth of a human life? I put my dreams on hold as every day life is harsh and getting through each day is a challenge in itself. But nothing stays the same forever and I wait for better days to come. I live in hope.
I want to raise money to buy a minibus to work in the field of passenger transport, like as a taxi driver, to cover the costs of food for me, my family, and the children of my neighbors. To work non-stop is difficult. My work equipment for cleaning cars was confiscated, and I am now unemployed because of this. To donate to my efforts, you can find me on twitter
@Aiman_AltawilFrom Yemen,
Aiman Altawili
Wednesday, July 27, 2022
RIP to James Lovelock, and Best Wishes to the Indigenous people of Canada during this difficult time
James Lovelock was among the pioneers of an idea that actually has ancient and living precedents everywhere. His Gaia hypothesis -- the idea that the earth itself is a giant organism, albeit non-sentient -- has been enormously influential in the way that ecologists deal with problems. It's no secret, however, that many animistic cultures have long harboured similar ideas with regards to the interconnectedness of things such as wind, ocean currents, soil, and plant and animal life. I would be remiss to write an RIP message without acknowledging the deep pool of Indigenous knowledge that implies the Gaia hypothesis.
That said, the world has lost one of the only people brave enough to acknowledge the scientific validity of Indigenous knowledge in the sense that his own theory is ideologically compatible and continuous with this knowledge. It is perhaps a sign of things to come that he dies, aged 103, as the Pope visits Canada in order to apologize for the Catholic Church's role in the country's ongoing genocide of its Indigenous population? An integral part of this genocide is negating and discounting Indigenous knowledge. A sign of what, though? Healing? The death of big ideas? Who knows.
RIP to all the children who died in Canada's Residential School system. RIP James Lovelock. May the earth do what it needs to now to preserve its living system against what endangers it.
Sunday, June 26, 2022
Saturday, May 21, 2022
Wednesday, April 27, 2022
A Review of Kenneth Lumpkin's "Song of Ramapough"
I first encountered Kenneth Lumpkin on Twitter, through the
hashtag #WritingCommunity. He posted a few poems of his that I found simple,
elegant, direct, and beautiful in the tradition of William Carlos Williams. After
a few friendly interactions, I asked him to recommend one of his books, as I
had finally come into some extracurricular fiduciary spice (money), he
recommended his most recent. But when I browsed his Amazon author page, I found
he had written a book called “Song of Ramapough: A Poetics of Place.” My
antennae bristled.
I wrote my PhD dissertation on the ideological representations
of white trash in different cultural products including literature, photography,
film, television, fashion, and journalism, in high culture and popular culture.
This is an eggheady way of saying I explored how the social categories of race
and class interact in the meanings made by these representations. For the reason
of ever-disappearing horizons of space and time, I had to cut a few of my
planned chapters, one of which was an analysis of the film Out of the
Furnace, starring Christian Bale, Woody Harrelson and Casey Affleck, which
featured a controversial representation of the Ramapough Mountain People, who
sued the filmmakers. They are portrayed in the film as brutal meth-addled outlaws.
In fact, the history of the Ramapough Mountain People is
fascinating. They are what is known as a tri-racial isolate community. What
that means is that in the early colonial history of America, runaway and freed
slaves often intermarried with poor whites (sometimes newly released indentured
labourers) and Indigenous people driven to remote areas by the process of
colonization. While the Bureau of Indian Affairs of the US does not officially recognize
the Ramapough Mountain Indians as a federal tribe, the state of New Jersey did
recognize them as a tribe descended from the Lenape Delaware, an Algonquin
speaking Indigenous group. The Ramapough Mountains consist of a few ridges and valleys
on the border of New Jersey and New York, about 40 km from New York City.
Needless to say, I had to buy the book. In the foreword,
Kenneth discusses how writing the book was inspired by the place-centred poetry
of William Carlos Williams’ brilliant book Paterson and the Maximus poems
of Charles Olsen. The foreword, written by Flavia Alaya draws the same
comparisons, although my opinion of Lumpkin’s work differs from hers. While she
sees more Olsen in Lumpkin, I see an absence of the endearing confusion of
Olsen’s poetry, and more the crystalline clarity of Williams’ verse. Lumpkin
figures that through a poetic exploration of place, through lenses such as
geology, history, and high Romantic wanderings through the wilds of the
mountains, he might better come to know the earth itself, a mission I
wholeheartedly endorse and aspire to myself. After all, the book is published
by Hug the Earth Publishing.
I was eager to read and savour this one because Paterson
is my favourite book-length poem aside from Byron’s Don Juan (which I
must admit I haven’t read all the way through yet – some day), Shakespeare’s
plays, and Anne Carson’s The Autobiography of Red. In it, Williams
polished a uniquely polyvocal and American idiom. Song of Ramapough
hews closely to these influences, but one can also detect the influence of the
encyclopedic-style chapters of Melville’s masterpiece Moby Dick,
especially in the parts near the end that rather factually guide the reader
through the geological composition and history of the place.
While there are some moments that gave me pause, such as
when he discusses the Haudensaunee (the Indigenous group that includes the Six
Nations of the Confederacy, whose political structure influenced the United
States’ own) stripping all political authority of the women. This contradicts
the important role that women played in the politics of the Haudensaunee as
caretakers of not only children and the home, but of the land itself. It is
possible that Lumpkin is referring to Haudensaunee-Lenape relations that I’m
ignorant of, however. There are charming moments in the book, alternating a
newspaper’s account of a robbery of a woman homesteader in the area in 1790
with the first buzzing of a yellow jacket experienced by the poet on the next
page.
I particularly loved poem 6, which I will reproduce here in
full to discuss:
No more
a mountain
stronghold
or fortress
around
me, but lighted
oak is my
home
flames
whisper the dying
secret
of the wood,
forgotten
grandfathers
are my
company
teaching
me the songs
of the
wind, warming the Earth
while
speaking the oldest
of
languages.
The
bracing enjambement of this poem draws the reader along its thread, and the
line break between the first and second stanza really teases out the doubled
meaning of “lighted/oak is my home.” One thinks of a wooded mountain side in
the tradition of Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” being pierced by straight-lined
shafts of evening light. However, the second stanza transforms the “lighted”
wood from dappled sunlight to campfire burning. Alternating all the historical
data of the book with a phrase like “forgotten grandfathers are my company”
really lends the next lines some gravitas in the spirit of receiving
wisdom from ancestors. The oldest of languages is of course the interpretation
of the earth itself, its animal trails, its grumbles, its tree rings, its soil,
where to find water and food, etc.
Kenneth
Lumpkin now lives in London, Ontario. I highly recommend his work if you love the
poetry of the English or American Romantics such as Whitman, or if you love the
work of Olsen and especially Williams. His latest book, available on Amazon, is
Possum: Tales of the Wood. He has a total of five books available for
sale there. Here is a link: Amazon.ca
: Kenneth Lumpkin
Thursday, March 31, 2022
Funny Cat
We have returned to funny cat pictures, in this case digitally manipulated, in this cycle of The Invisible Truth.
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Monday, March 14, 2022
Thursday, March 10, 2022
An Excerpt from one of my long, difficult poems (Poetry) (Trevor Cunnington)
E-stim
helmets
bear the grim news that we win
every
single time we play
the
grim reaper’s anthem unto the day
four
horses meet up and draw-and-quarter
the
dead-eyed dog of a reporter
barking
into the assimilated mortar;
shells
are shot into the Mariana trench
while
we’re on social media judging from them benches.
and
we find that no matter the dopamine trigger
scatter
those picket fences in the diagonals
uprooted
and re-booted until the narrative
world
vanishes, tarnishing a record comparative
of
three oddly off-centre orthogonals
clashing
in the daylight wearing Sheraton™
paraphernalia.
A sprig of Queen Anne’s lace,
An
evening of saturnalia without disgrace
I’ll
be there when the wind blows and the earth quakes
Before
all the other times that my senses shake
With
ripples like a pebble, thrown in a pond
Whatever
those feelings bode, they come from beyond
The
bounds of your skin, as soon as light creeps in
We
become evacuated of all yonder qualms
Under
homilies with unexpected invective; receipts dim –
The
sublime art of ink fading, collecting alms
Afterwards
and being grateful for the jeremiad,
Talking
to the people in the crowd, jeering mad
With
the Athabasca lustre,
An
icy morning to beat around the bush with bluster
Burghers
by the boat-load, some of whom will usher
In
a new age of overloaded senses with crop duster
Chem
trails, crop circles outside the temple
The
paranoia is familiar, an all-seeing eye in the sky,
Isn’t
that what a satellite is like? Or is it all mental?
When
was the last time a child asked you why
The
sea in pencil sounds like an es, and we use utensils?