The reading is free and all are welcome.  For more information see www.merton.ca

– from the Portal Magazine website:
The PORTAL 2010 launch will be held in the Royal Arbutus Room at VIUs Nanaimo campus, 2-5 p.m. Special guest poet Kate Braid, sponsored by the Canada Council for the Arts, will read from her new work.

Goodbye Blue Monday
1087 Broadway (corner of Dodworth St)
Brooklyn, NY 11221-3013
(718) 453-6343

https://stainofpoetry.com/

“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.”

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.”

”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

Spy

I parachute into man’s country,
hoist my beer in the bar as if native.

Cool, I talk shop, stand as they stand,
not quite sure
of the cocky swing of hips,
lift of the glass in a loud bass,
confidence laughing.

This is the world of the knowing.
It’s only a small slip into a minor key
when I turn left to go to the Ladies.

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

#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.

Hamilton, Ontario:

Reading sponsored by the Hamilton Poetry Centre’s LiT LiVe series.

June 7, 2009, 7:30 p.m.

Sky Dragon Centre
27 King William Street in downtown Hamilton between Janus Street North and Hughson Street https://www.skydragon.org/html/about.html   

For more information, contact: Susan Evans Shaw
Email: susan@nas.net