Rock Dove Chronicle, Part Two

Let the fun begin. Just now down at the Freehouse I had a couple of beer and a grilled pork sandwich with fries, met with Nik and Deborah from Coteau, touched base about the forthcoming "Happy Hour with My Human Comedy" (more on that later), had one more beer, wrote another verse of the rock dove song I'm going to sing in April (also at the Freehouse) and picked up some bacon on the way home so I can have a BLT for breakfast, if only I had a tomato.

That's right, happy hour with My Human Comedy, a come-and-go launch, with me reading every 20 minutes or so, otherwise your regular happy hour. I'm going to burn a disc or two of my favourite music to keep us company.

Might as well have fun with it, because soon enough the work will seem stale, the book will be more or less abandoned (although never, I hope, lacking in interest) and left behind for the new.

You're all invited to the launch. April 17, 5:00-7:00, at Le Bistro, 3850 Hillsdale Street in Regina.

For the rock dove:

one too many species in the bird world
one too many feathers in my trap
one too many wing-ed adversaries
one too many rocks doves taking a crap

Rock Dove Chronicle, Part One

Watch me snuff out the rock doves along my west side. (Here picture me with a water pistol, old beach towel, flyswatter, barbecue skewer.)

I'll start by reading them some crappy poems, some of my out-takes. If that doesn't stop the pigeons from roosting, I'll set out copies of the Leader-Post, or line my windowledges with dirty socks. I'll hire schoolchildren with extra-long scissors--whatever it takes.

You can enjoy "Song for the Rock Dove" in My Human Comedy, forthcoming from Coteau, but after that say good-bye (to the rock doves, that is).

One way of looking at this afternoon's English class

I have often told my students that I love the sight of them writing, a sight I saw again today.

One hand to steady the page, the other to move the pen. The writers lean forward, their eyes watching their hand. Innocent as children sleeping.

Who they are narrows for a moment (especially in this case, a midterm exam).

Maybe the simplest way to say what I try to achieve with my students is this: to open that range back up again. Use writing to do it.

Either that, or I've been watching too many classic movies

Survivor: Love Island

After some Survivor-style foolery, in which four love poems were voted off the island by my first-year English class, the winner was Burns' "A Red, Red Rose" in a close vote over Kim Addonizio's lusty contemporary sonnet (its title escapes me at the moment) about kissing your tattoo. (The other poems were an E.B.Browning sonnet, a Sharon Olds lyric, and one of C.Bok's letterplay pieces.) All along, as we read and talked about the poems, my students claimed the Burns poem was too "cheesy", but in the end it won.

Today in another class, given fifteen key words on which to produce as many "short talks"--quick hits--as possible, the two words least used were "sexuality" and "mourning".

In both cases, then, the safest choices were made. This tendency toward safe readerly/writerly choices is the largest single impediment to effective teaching of literature and writing, in my opinion.

Tomorrow I'm heading up to St. Peter's Abbey for a week of writing. Unsafe writing, I hope.

Meanwhile, love-wise

In the very spot we'd touched for the first time, we touch for the last, memories already.

The winds'll do ya, someone must have sung.

Bring on the anger and humiliation, and a set of essays.

"Homesick"

I'm thinking of getting a gizmo that provides about two or three octaves of piano keyboard. Just to lay down some bass lines.

Writing a song right now. Or would, if I could shake that Tom Waits snarly blues tune "got the push, got the shove".

Mine goes something like this so far: Got the switch, got the fan. Got the sunlight, got the tan--homesick. That's what I call it, homesick. Or, backing up a page or two: Got the room, got the shovel. In times of doom, I use a shovel--homesick, etc.

My friend Regan was telling me about the new system he bought. Can lay down multiple tracks, vocal or instrumental or electronic, cut a cd just like that.

You'll know I'm serious about the songwriting thing when you hear me do "Stan Still's 5/4 Blues for Brenda Brown" with only my only voice for instrumentation, beginning with a bass line groove.

The Forecast

Today old friends will be seeing winter sunshine for the first time in months. They're writing at St. Peter's Abbey, a Saskatchewan Writers/Artists Colony at the southeast edge of Muenster, Sask.

I'm just kidding about the sunshine, but they'll love it anyway for how cold it is, how jewel-like and colder yet.

In two weeks I'll be up there as well. A good day to be writing, for sure.