Blog
Ice Man
The image of me out there – Ice Man –
it’s only image. I don’t want to show
how it all comes from the blood, from inside, you know?
I only tell you this now because I’m drunk on sound.
Tomorrow I will deny it.
Blood? What blood? I am Bach
Co-edited with Sandy Shreve
This exciting, comprehensive and groundbreaking anthology explores Canadian form poetry from the sixteenth century to the present day. The result is more than 40 forms and 175 poems that will appeal to poets and readers, teachers and students. A section for each form with a brief introduction, outline of how to write it, and examples, including variations, encourages readers to pick up a pen – or just enjoy.
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#44
Emily talks of Freud.
I hate him.
It was this new man, Freud,
who made them see only sex
in my paintings.
But Emily slows me down,
shows me
the flowering of ribs and pelvis I painted today.
Here is your desire, she says.
See how you have wished it upon paper.
It is a woman’s mind, a woman’s hand, a woman’s voice
and you didn’t even know.
See how it shines from the inside, out.
Untitled
These trees worked hard to get up here
one ring at a time. The prize is sky
and the freedom of birds.
Only three have reached the high blue dome
and now careen like honey bees
hover like hummingbirds one minute
soar like eagles the next.
These trees threaten to pull their own tops off
they stretch so hard, risking everything
to touch heaven.
These Hips
Some hips are made for bearing
children, built like stools
square and easy, right
for the passage of birth.
Others are built like mine.
A child’s head might never pass
but load me up with two-by-fours
and watch me
bear.
When the men carry sacks of concrete
they hold them high, like boys.
I bear mine low, like a girl
on small, strong hips
built for the birth
of buildings.
“The more isolated Emily felt from her family, the more she clung to the idea of painting. No doubt her sisters saw it as a mere hobby, a pastime. But Emily’s dream of becoming an artist was nurtured by the French painter C.A. de L’Aubinière and his English artist-wife, Georgina, who probably taught Emily briefly in 1886.
“She was in awe of them because they were the first ‘real’ artists she had met – but she was oddly disappointed when she saw their pictures. Their landscapes did not seem at all Canadian to her, though no one yet knew exactly what a ‘Canadian’ painting should look like. In the European tradition, landscapes were panoramas of peaceful meadows with the odd tree, a cow perhaps, beside a quiet stream. They didn’t look at all like the British Columbia Emily knew, where, just outside the city, endless acres of trees towered above an almost impenetrable undergrowth, and the cow was in her back yard.
“Nonetheless, the two Europeans sowed a seed that made Emily sling an old pair of shoes across her rafters. Now, every time she had a little money she pushed it into the shoes. She had a plan.”
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Written with Al King.
Al King was an organizer, Local 480 (Trail, British Columbia) president and eventually western Board member of the International Union of Mine-Mill & Smelterworkers, a trade union that was – depending on your point of view – a Communist hotbed or one of the most progressive unions in North American history. He tells a fascinating story, unrecorded elsewhere, of the growth and challenges to Mine-Mill from 1937 when he got his first job as a labourer at Consolidated Mining (now Cominco) in British Columbia, to the time when the union voted to merge with the Steelworkers Union and beyond.
“We had known they were planning to do something but this was astounding. Following the raiding actions, John Gordon…called a big meeting in the Legion Hall to decide what to do. When I left to go to the meeting Lillian said to me, ‘Please be careful.’ She knew feelings were running high and she was worried about fist fights.
“The usual turnout for a union meeting was twenty or thirty men but that night 600 showed up, many of them young veterans. There were so many, they couldn’t all fit in the hall. They filled up the building and overflowed outside, down the steps and into the street. When we saw those numbers, we knew we had a chance.”
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A collection of interviews of eight of British Columbia’s fishermen – including one fisherwoman – who in 2002 still worked in the rapidly disappearing fishing industry off British Columbia’s west coast.
”Meanwhile on the beach, the beach man had tied the net to a tree. I guess it was a good two-foot around. Just at the right time, the tide changed. Old Frankie says, ‘Now you’re gonna catch some fish.’ We’re straining against the tide when all of a sudden the tree the net’s tied to comes out of the ground. It flies up in the air and comes right down on top of the skiff. Now, there’s a fifty-foot tree across the skiff and it’s being towed away from shore. Both the skiff man and beach man are standing on the beach, helpless.
The skipper is embarrassed. Everybody’s laughing. All the seiners were blowing their horns. It looked like an absolute mess, our first set of the year.”
Dave Cochrane, interviewed by Robert Boyd
Read MoreIn this recording, Kate talks with Annabel Lyon and Thomas Trofimuk about putting words into the mouths of real characters.
In 2010, Kate was interviewed by Sheryl McKay for CBC Radio’s North by Northwest about A Well-Mannered Storm: The Glenn Gould Poems. You can hear the interview here.
