What To Do

I remember one of my teachers, Fred Wah, saying he'd have several projects on a go and he'd toss his language in the air and it would land on one of them. Starting tomorrow morning I'm going to act more single-minded: use the Farmer's Almanac to predict and/or report on the construction of a schoolhouse a hundred years ago. Until I come up with something more interesting, that description will have to do.
I'm trying to keep it a secret. Hint: shovel. Hint: put the shovel down and get inside.
I don't know how my many readers (that's you, Uncle Lou and Aunt Ise--don't worry about the Leafs, they were playing with house money) see the Almanac, but for me it's about story, not fact. And it's about detail. Apologists for the builders of the school house may exist. They make stake claims on the truth, but I'm going to make a verb of almanac and we'll see.
Hint: sod-turning May 30.

Buildings that Kill Downtown 1

I don't know whether to draw these or complain about them.

Now, in warmer weather, downtown should come alive. It tries, but half-block after half-block of frontage that doesn't admit or invite pedestrian traffic, other than to those who work there, kills downtown, yes kills it.
I'll shoot more of these.

Learning to Draw: Interstellar Space

If any subject requires no hurry, it's this one. I finish this post, play backgammon. I'll start at the nearest edge; that cloudish, getting-warmer sky will do. Having read somewhere that a bit of foreground detail best frames infinity beyond, I'll see what the trees in Victoria Park have to say, from my spot on a bench there. I'll take the F pencil, for FAR.

This Is What We Bought With That Hot September

I made it about 20 miles west of North Battleford and turned back. I'd slipped and headed for the ditch--driving snow, build-up in the passing lane, temperature 0 degrees--but managed to avoid it.
A couple of hours later I've selected the Roibas tea at Mc-Rob in Saskatoon. In a hurry to get on the internet, I passed everything but POETRY in the Mc-Rob stacks. The closest would be GROUND WRITING, if that's what I saw.
The damn highway. I took my snow tires off last week, knowing I'd rather drive the nearly 2,000 km to Edm and back on the summer tires.
Never thought of checking the weather or road conditions before leaving Regina at 4 am.

Furniture

I felt like sitting in outdoor furniture--recycled plastic deck chairs, swivels and gliders by Ratana. I imagined them indoors.
(I think we must pause here to wonder at indoors, at in with doors, at doors for the line we cross. The out-of-doors, the door saleman cracking wise: I'm out of doors.)
Seated in the glider, I told the woman the chair was pricey. Well it's quality she said. Five-year warranty.
An hour later, I'm still thinking about it--setting up the glider indoors, at my place. I'd have to move a cabinet to make room.
Question is--and here I'm asking my many readers (that's your cue, uncle Peach and aunt Pit)--would you sit there?

I'm Waiting to Eat My Orange (Though Once Eaten, It's Not Much Good)

Just now over at the Y, I finally added an apostrope to MENS outside our changeroom.
Pretty soon I'll get to what's in the archive of Archive of the Undressed. Thinking like the orange, I wonder if the book is about undressing, as in destabilizing yourself, as in leaving the changeroom changed.
Well never mind that last bit, but Playboy is not the point of the book, although Jeanette Lynes in her intro, an essay called "Begin the Slow Peel of Elbow Gloves", makes much of her fascination with vintage Playboys--their founder and style and readers and women (especially those lost) and personal resonance. What we take off, and how, and what we leave on--on our bodies, first and last of all--is what makes up the thematic heart of archive. Formally, this happens via all manner of voice, rhetorical dynamic, fragment, found language, autobio snippet and so on until, in the end, the book itself is the performance we've lived all this time.
Something along these lines is what I'll run by my students tomorrow. They're the ones who have to write the essay.

Plan

I plan to ask my students to find poems, as in found poem, as in look through these books I picked from a scrap heap to find language that might work in a new context--on your page, say, made into lines, retitled. (Mine's called "Floor Care", from a janitorial services company adspam that sneaks through the fax machine at Luther.)
When I'd sorted sorting through the books, someone asked me what I was looking for. I wasn't sure how to answer. But as I flipped the books, lifting piles in boxes, I began to see that any sort of classifying--of aircraft, mangement technique, biology, human behaviour, anything else--begged to be lifted and set down as new language. Captions for charts, reference systems, ordering--same thing. Lutheran ministerial manuals, I noticed, didn't work. Or science fiction novels.
John Geiger's account of uncovering the freeze-dried body of John Torrington, circa 1837 (the body, not the account), will prove fruitful for whoever slits through it this afternoon, I hope.
I may tell my students the story of finding a poem in an issue of Propellor Maintenance. I can't remember where or why I'd be reading that magazine, but the poem was called "Maintenance"--I don't have a copy on me at the moment. (Readers interested--good morning to you, Aunt Murphy and Uncle Jean--may consult the thin Gerald Hill segment (which I prefer to the fat Gerald Hill segment), in the U of R Archives.) Sub-headings included "Waxing the Tips" and "Leading Edge". The poem ended with a hearty "good luck!", which all propellor maintainers seem to need. I loved that poem because my poetic was built-in.
I did attempt to re-capture the machine moment when, over a succression of cold mornings at St. Peter's Abbey, I sat in the front seat of my Olds, a '89 Delta 88, I'd owned for a week. It was field work--sitting in the Olds, looking around--but the immediate task was to thumb through the Manual to read about some system or other on this Olds, which in '89 would have been best in its class by far, its innovations unimagined by my former wheels, a rusted-out Datsun pick-up. To make more of this story I'd claim that my poetic showed up here too, in the manual, for me to write down. "Getting to Know Your Oldsmobile" said the manual. That's all I needed.
While I'm at it with these books, this afternoon: cut-ups.