I've been a bad blogger....

I broke all the rules and didn't write or add anything for a month. I was supposed to be excelling at English Literature and learning French instead. But I was not doing those things either. I could blame facebook, but that's a cop out - and everyone knows I hate de pigs.

So...

I've been hiding out in anxiety disorder land, laying about fatigued from stupid MS, watching my typing deteriorate because of stupid MS, (this would cause anxiety in a writer, no?) and covetting electronic gadgets I don't need but really, really want. Like a digital camera I can really work with. Even my old SLRs are pieces of crap, broken, hand me downs, the usual crud of working class existence. Two of my friends got brand new MACs and I got this ancient crappy one, so I end up using Diann'es PC anyway. I could harumph all day about how hard done by I am with my substandard equipment - one last whine - an artist needs this shit! - okay that's done.

Really, the problem is anxiety. Fine, I admit it, I'm a basketcase. I throw great parties though... just like a desperate housewife, I am. (not the sort on TV, more like my working class mom...) sigh...

okay, enough. blah. blah. out, out, damn spot!

confessionals suck....

next!

okay here's something to enjoy and savour: Fag bug!

This is a most excellent activist called Erin Davis, who everyone should support!

Some arseholes wrote 'fag' on her car and instead of wiping it off, she got even by keeping it that way and becoming a transcontinental activist. She was in the Pride Parade in Vancouver and is apparently off to Laramie to meet Matthew Sheppard's parents. She is trying for a gig on L-word too - if you read my blog and got a connection, contact her through the website below and let her know. Apparently, she had a line on "Shane" - Apparently "Shane" goes to the same Blenz every day. RUFK Me? Which Blenz, I ask? There are like 50 of them in this city... Sigh... "Shane"

oh... right... back to activism...

here's the link: http://www.fagbug.com/

make a donation, grab a sticker from her, put it on your car: help her get one million cars designated as fag bugs!

My car is a fag bug - is yours?

peace.

Sue Goyette is this week's poet

I picked this book of poetry up cheap and it is a wee gift, indeed. A big one actually. If you find it, pay full price for it, or send her the difference or something. Working poets need us to read their work and buy their books.

Sue Goyette
Undone
2004, Brick Books

http://www.brickbooks.ca/BL-Goyette.htm

BTW: Brick Books is a great Canadian small press, producing amazing and beautiful books. Buy their books!

Here is an interview and a poem, Three Tulips, reposted from Contemporary Verse 2 (which you shold subscribe to. (hint: buy Canadian literature in all its forms.))

http://www.contemporaryverse2.ca/vol27_3excerpts.htm#poet_goyette

enjoy.

a new old obsession...

good day all.
poetry today.
Monsieur Leonard Cohen.

THE PARTY WAS OVER THEN TOO

When I was about fifteen
I followed a beautiful girl
into the Communist Party of Canada.
There were secret meetings
and you got yelled at
if you were a minute late.
We studied the McCarran Act
passed by the stooges in Washington,
and the Padlock Law
passed by their lackeys in Quebec,
and they said nasty shit
about my family
and how we got our money.
They wanted to overthrow
the country that I loved
(and served, as a Sea Scout).
And even the good people
who wanted to change things,
they hated them too
and called them social fascists.
They had plans for criminals
like my uncles and aunties
and they even had plans
for my poor little mother
who had slipped out of Lithuania
with two frozen apples
and a bandanna full of monopoly
money.
They never let me get near the girl
and the girl never let me get near the girl.
She became more and more beautiful
until she married a lawyer
and became a social fascist herself
and very likely a criminal too.
But I admired the Communists
for their pig-headed devotion
to something absolutely wrong.
It was years before I found something
comparable for myself:
I joined a tiny band of steel-jawed
zealots
who considered themselves
the Marines of the spiritual world. It's
just a matter of time:
we'll be landing this raft
on the Other Shore,
we'll be taking that beach
on the Other Shore.

Copyright © by Leonard Cohen. Mt Baldy, May 1997.
Reprinted with permission. Any other use forbidden.
http://www.leonardcohenfiles.com/


here are some youtube vids... enjoy...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rf36v0epfmI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocq_noEO2uU&mode=related&search=

this was my intro to him: (i'm a child of the video age...what can I say?)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrPEM2qc-j8&mode=related&search=

there's a bunch more in the middle navigation bar.

A great thing about Cohen: he embraces other media. This transforms the poetry. Read Suzanne off the page. Then listen to him sing the poem.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czQoGSYBeHU&mode=related&search=


namaste

you just can't make this stuff up

Here's a link:
http://cbs5.com/topstories/local_story_159222541.html

When I worked a student newspaper we sat around cracking ourselves up with stupid story ideas and ridiculous headlines, mostly too high on sugar to know that we were not very funny, and very embarassed by some of what we saw in print with the light of day.

We, however were not strategizing to save the free world, and we were not on crack!

The real reason they scrapped this "idea:"
All those bombed gay insurgents would want to get gay married next of course. This would for sure destroy the last of the carefully build infrastructure the US has so carefully put in place and been protecing. It would particularly undermine the high priority the US government and military leadership places on the preservation of the traditional Iraqui family unit.

You know, they should have dropped the gay bomb - then they could blame the outcome of the war on gay people, just like everything else they blame homosexual blasphemers for.
It is ok, we can carry the load. We're used to it by now.

peace

poetry promised

Hi,
I promised poetry and politics but the anti-choicers took up sooo much of my time and so did the existential angst about the BFA program (and okay, okay, I admit it - facebook too.) But enough of that I say - be banished and gone, all distractions from poesy.

I will post at least a link about a poet accompanied by a copy of their already published poem or other writerly contributions at least once a week.

to start us off... a little of the Margaret Atwood herself. Some story telling about becoming a poet. (note: upon re-reading I realize bits of this speech have been recycled in others, most recently the speech she gave for the Margaret Laurence Memorial Lecture for the Writer's Union, here in Vancouver this past May...it doesn't matter.)

http://www.web.net/owtoad/lecture.html

http://www.owtoad.com/ ~Margaret Atwood's official site.

I am beginning to see there is a long history of poetry writers writing about poetry and being a poet. Open the Norton Anthology of the Major English Writers and see for yourself...

If you surf the net and find a poem from Margaret A. or you are ambitious and want to transcribe it, please post in the comments section below. Make sure to give credit info. No plagarism (wagging finger!)

Here's a poem, to get us started!

In the Secular Night

In the secular night you wander around
alone in your house. It's two-thirty.
Everyone has deserted you,
or this is your story;
you remember it from being sixteen,
when the others were out somewhere, having a good time,
or so you suspected,
and you had to baby-sit.
You took a large scoop of vanilla ice-cream
and filled up the glass with grapejuice
and ginger ale, and put on Glenn Miller
with his big-band sound,
and lit a cigarette and blew the smoke up the chimney,
and cried for a while because you were not dancing,
and then danced, by yourself, your mouth circled with purple.

Now, forty years later, things have changed,
and it's baby lima beans.
It's necessary to reserve a secret vice.
This is what comes from forgetting to eat
at the stated mealtimes. You simmer them carefully,
drain, add cream and pepper,
and amble up and down the stairs,
scooping them up with your fingers right out of the bowl,
talking to yourself out loud.You'd be surprised if you got an answer,
but that part will come later.

There is so much silence between the words,
you say. You say, The sensed absence
of God and the sensed presence
amount to much the same thing,
only in reverse.
You say, I have too much white clothing.
You start to hum.
Several hundred years ago
this could have been mysticism
or heresy. It isn't now.
Outside there are sirens.
Someone's been run over.
The century grinds on.

– By Margaret Atwood,
Copyright © O.W. Toad Ltd. 1995.
Originally published in Morning in the Burned House
(McClelland & Stewart, Houghton Mifflin, Virago, 1995)

sweet relief...now what?...oh yeah, global patriarchy awaits

So I got the news and it wasn't good... sigh... at least I am no longer in stasis. UBC does not want to give me the opportunity to write for two years and end up with a BFA. Fine. Fine then. (I am being passive aggressive...ha! crackin' myself up...) I am of course quite capable of rerouting myself to a poets life without them. Hmpphf!

So then there is the CBC hosting a "5 wishes for Canada" thing on facebook for the kids. The whole thing is now overrun with anti-choicers.... here's what I posted to the CBC blog, Editorial #1 on topic:

I am a bit shocked that the discussion about abortion came up this way in a forum that is essentially nationalist. I believe stongly in all that I do, but it seems this little project has been hijacked... Abortion has nothing to do with our nationhood, although how each state chooses to deal with abortion medically and legally might be said to define the nation in some way.

We in Canada have a Supreme Court and a Charter of Rights and Freedoms. In 1988 it was decided that legal sanctions by the state against the provision of abortion is a violation of women's equality rights under the Charter.

If the 'wish' for Canada' is in fact a return to a legal situation where any person participating in abortion (mother and doctor/other medical staff in particular) can be criminalized, then this wish, should it be acted upon, would be a return to this version of women's legal inequality with men.

If the 'wish for Canada' is really 'abolish abortion' and it is meant to be taken outside of the legal relationship between the state and each Canadian, and perhaps is a call to the wider social contract, there are some basics that are required:

1) A Guaranteed Annual Income for all. We have raised generations and generations of children in poverty, but there is no need to continue this. Several governments have come to power in Canada promising to alleviate the poverty of children. Give their parents and potential parents money and the children will not be poor. Give a woman some money in her own name and she will be able to decide what to do about her pregnancy without the worry about feeding, clothing, and sheltering the child after birth

2) Proper and thorough and yes, culturally and religiously sensitive, health and sexuality instruction. Too many people become sexually active as adolescents and as adults without an understanding of the mechanics of their bodies, how to behave sexually with self-respect and how to deal with the bombardments of crass and sexist messages about proper sexual behaviour for men and women.

3)Free and widely available contraception of all sorts. Why do we have to pay for the pill? for ECP? for condoms, male and female alike? Why are young men and women who go to doctors looking for tubiligations and vasectomies discouraged and put-off? If you don't want to have a baby, you don't want to have a baby. Why are the people who don't want women to have abortions often the same ones that refuse to respect someone choosing to take responsibility for themselves and their sexuality by using contraception?

4)Discuss parenting early with young people. Why do they value raising children? What tools and supports will they need to do so? If they think they do not want to parent, why not? How can each person's decision be valued before the crisis of an unplanned abortion?

5) The End of Violence Against Women. If men who rape stop doing so, if men who batter stop doing so, raped and battered women will not be in the position of having to deal with the after effects of rape and violence, which sometimes includes pregnancy and abortion.

There is probably more, but this is a start. I am pro-choice, pro-abortion even, and I heartily agree that I would like to live in a world where pregnancies are welcome and women are free to birth and parent, (with or without a partner to parent alongside them.) I hope that world will also have room for the people who don't want to have children, and that all of us will have the tools and wherewithal to prevent a pregnancy or to get pregnant without the moral judgements of others interfering with our ability to do so. In this world, perhaps abortion won't be abolished, it will only become a mostly unnecessary and very occasionally used medical procedure, offered by those who are trained to provide the best and most respectful health care.

*************************
You can find the whole thing on facebook, look here:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2392827649
join the facebook group and then support progressive wishes, make up your own.

And the CBC site is here: http://www.cbc.ca/wish/2007/06/editorial_1.html
and here: http://www.cbc.ca/wish/2007/06/editorial_2.html
(editorial 1 is where all the action is...but support 2!)

as an aside: I'm on facebook now, I gave in, its a good distraction on a day like today...

peace.

waiting....

Waiting for information about anything is difficult. Waiting to know if you 'passed' the test, the necessary hurdles, &c is worse. Triple that if you are an anxious anxious worrying anxious person. Who can sleep?

I understand that patience is a virtue but the perpetual "Am I good enough?" button is firmly and repeatedly getting pushed. I shoud know better, and stay away from competition of all kinds, I am not laid back, and it does mean something, at least to me, if I do not make the cut. I did not overthrow my entire life to participate in competitive crap, especially as a poet. Am I taunting the Olympian gods by trying my luck once more after winning the first round? Are my offerings good enough? See, I intend to be 'Great,' but these times of enforced waiting encourage one to beg for smaller portions: 'good enough. '

I just want to get in. Buy a bit more time to write, think, write, think. Write.

I know it has nothing to do with Karma or Gods or Goddesses or God. I am not praying, but all this hoping is getting to be a bit like it. Striking bargains like a good catholic, but with the fates, not an higher power. My muse is very sluttish when it comes to getting her way. For instance, I wrote a very slutty sonnet (indeed) as an Ode to Poetry the other day. Not publishing it here, as then I can't get it published elsewhere...you'll have to wait for my chapbooks dear readers...which will arrive shortly...

Maybe, by day's end, I will have some news to report. She's licking her lips in anticipation. I'm fretting.

fingers & legs crossed!

Dixie Chicks rock

Two months after the Grammy blah blah hoopla crap, relistening to the last Dixie Chicks album, Taking the Long Way, you gotta admit this is a great album. One the best made by the mainstream these days: love, politics, home, protest, great musicianship, song writing, and arrangments. I laugh, I cry, I bellow (er, sing.)

I watched them at the Grammies and thought they weren't ready for all the hoopla, and so didn't do themselves justice. And they clearly thought it was political only, the reasons that they won. It was political of course, a great big mea culpa pretending that sexism in the industry is non-existant and they didn't have to stand up for themselves through music and movies. They had to fight back hard, and they won. I just hope the music stands on its own and they and everyone else get it as a whole: they deserved the win for the music as well as for the fight back.

Art and politics and women's lives...

ya, sometimes it comes together...

(now on to Indigo Girls - more southern women doin' more than kickin' the dirt...sing it Amy and Emily!... (album: Become You))

Tamara

Cookie Cookie Cookie starts with 'C'

Here's the poetry post for today...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCsMWx8Re4A

This explains me+Kermit, me+poetry, me+cookie monster, me+COOKIES!!!

mmhmm ummunn nnunnmm nummm

me love poetry too!

peace.

Here's an article I wrote...

http://www.feminist-reprise.org/docs/gorin.htm

This is an article I published in Rain and Thunder in 2002 about lesbians, romanticism, legal marriage.

I am fairly pleased to find it posted and though I cringe at some of the sentence structure (ack!) I am glad to see it holds up over the 5 years since I wrote it.

What has changed since then: Gay marriage is legal in Canada, L-word & Ellen are on the tele, I am in a new long-term relationship where we are planning some sort of non-legal, public-in community celebration, (finding this at feminist-reprise helps me get my head around what we are trying to do, so thanx again for posting it Amy!) I left the Vancouver Rape Relief collective in June 2005, and my kid is now 17.

I spell 'honour' with a 'u' BTW - they must have edited for american spelling. All is forgiven between sisters in the struggle, though...and honor is honour afterall...

peace