League of Canadian Poets' AGM in June 2007

Yvonne Blomer's reading at the League of Canadian Poets' AGM, June 9, 2007 -

short-listed for the 2007 Gerald Lampert Award

Yvonne & Andrea Yvonne & fellow poet Kate Braid

Writing on Week Fifteen

Poetry is everywhere. It is on everyone's lips and sometimes in the most unexpected places. I work in government and, for employee morale and just for fun, there is a whiteboard in the stairwell for people to write down their thoughts, draw goofy pictures or solicit opinions. I saw a written comment "There is no money in poetry, but then there is little poetry in money." Someone else had come along and written "there is money in poetry, if you know how to find it." I wrote a simple "Cheers!" beside it.
The fact is, I've been able to turn my work cubicle into a mini poetry booth, and sold five copies of my book by displaying it on my file cabinet. No supervisors have shut me down, yet! People have a leaning towards the arts; it is part of our human make-up. One colleague of mine was generous enough to share a poem he had memorized in University, and I was treated to both the Greek and English translation.
Even those who swear up and down that they don't like poetry and never understood it - read them a good, accessible poem and they could change their minds right in front of you. I will be participating in the annual Random Acts of Poetry event in October 2007, and am feeling more encouraged about it. In the past, the thought of approaching strangers and ambushing them with a poem had scared me to death. I thought I might be verbally abused or shoved to the side, but then I look at the buskers belting out their creativity every day, all over town. Perhaps not everyone throws a coin into their hat, but I think we all secretly applaud them. The proof is in the pudding - and I've been given support and praise at my work for my efforts. People understand the importance of the arts, and it is warming to witness.

A Memoir

I was conceived by the hopes of strangers who would become my parents by a written signature. Little did they know what they were taking home - what to do with me when I danced out of control, drew pictures on any blank surface, except the walls, and wrote down words. I stood alone on stages and danced for darkened audiences, sang in the backseat loudly, yelled at my sister when I tried to teach her how to write full sentences when she was three. My red-faced pupil shrinking in her chair as I bleated, "No, no, no!"
To this day, she refuses to know how to spell. I smiled for pictures, showing my top teeth or my bottom jaw, or both. I roared down black diamond ski hills when I was eight. My dad calling behind him, "meet you at the bottom!" I hung out of roller coasters and gondolas, wanting to see the distance from earth and my rush to the ground. I wrote bottomless pages, willing myself into a tailspin, to the point of forgetting how I began. Going further down.
I fell into men who like to decide for me at the flip of a coin. Will I love her or not? I stepped on the coin. Kept walking, only after a lifetime.
I fell into women who poured me into bottomless glasses of booze and said, "who needs men?" and we danced on night club speakers, kissed strangers, fell into taxicabs and tailspin beds.
I put one foot down to make the room stop. I lived alone, packed my life full, quarrelled, wrote, walked around in the dark. I went to funerals. Too many funerals, but not so many as some. Still, I grappled with loss. I clung to loss, fell into men I couldn't touch, couldn't touch me, who made love to me through computers and phonelines. Men who could let go when they wanted to, at the drop of a dime.
I watched a broken clock on the wall, only for a lifetime. I put in a new battery, drove forward, threw myself into time - papers, textbooks, teachers and bosses.
I learned instruction. I learned to be happy. I learned the pain of submission. I learned to fall into myself. Eventually, I fell into a man who I decided could love me.

Writing On Week Fourteen

The power of memory - how we cover events, or let them dance somewhere far in the background - it takes courage to bring them to the front again, center stage. Last weekend I participated in a one-day memoir writing course with Yvonne Blomer. Throughout the day, we were given prompts to reactivate our memory cells and take us into other, long forgotten places - or places and events that have always been close to the surface, still sitting on our shoulders and directing our current paths.
We were asked to write about the following, with time constraints: the story of our life, a meditation on our name, a phrase in another language, a cab ride, our hands, a fa vourite movie, a personal event linked with a world or pivotal event, a favourite book, and a childhood photograph.
We were given the opportunity to share our writings and, as with any piece of writing, a part of ourselves. There were a few passes, which is not unusual with such intimate parts of our being. When we are asked to let anything come from the recesses of the past, often everything does come - raw and uncensored. For me, it was a surreal memory from my childhood that I still can't quite sort out, from a time when everything seemed strange and confusing and I wasn't in the pilot's seat. Then there were pleasant, interesting memories that I was more willing to dissect and take another close look. Funny how we remember different events differently, and how we can take a new perspective looking back. Sometimes more compassionately of another person's perspective from the same memory.
There is often a sense that we don't quite have the right to attempt writing a memoir because we feel we need to be at the end of our life, or have led a wildly interesting life to validate writing about ourselves. Not true, as we learned in Blomer's course - we each have a valid story to tell. One woman in the course made a comment about how she prefers to take a real memory and embellish it, make it something more or something else and drift away from the truth. So, instead, she uses her memories as springboards for other creative ideas. A memoir can take so many directions, inwards and outwards, back and forth into so many new and forgotten discoveries.

Morning Couplets

Waking before light and slow numbers on the bedside clock;
the soft thud of newspaper, the world begins again.

A calling of purpose to rise from warm, flannel sheets,
the last day of the week; a day to be ready.

The early morning birds sing me awake, while I dream
of traffic routes, movement, speech - the tests of today.

The urgency of Sunday, church chimes float through
my heathen space, my heart belongs to this pen - a creative, unbuilt worlds.

A deceptive spring peeks in my blinds, bright
icy air beckons, while my love blows a kiss, and breezes out the back.

A red room, blue sky, white dreams -
a new day - how can I choose my colours?

An alarm clock spills the world into my room, chaos of political strife,
ticking bombs, dividers - I find safety next to a warm body, unclenched hands.

Tea for one, an unfinished book, still morning;
an early international call. A warm breeze off the sea.

I wake, on the other side of strong cross-currents, in this place -
a table of poets, a lofty bed, soft light through bay windows and no bay.

Four walls and a cup of tea greet me, a sense of somewhere
and the hours roll out before me like curled receipts.