1,167

2007-10-17T08:10:00.001-05:00

768

"What's it like, having a poet for a father?"

I’ve never had an answer for that question.

I don't know. What's it like to have your father for a father? Ask me what it’s like to breath air, to wear skin.

It was wonderful. It was terrible. It was all I ever knew.

I suppose some writers settle on a destination, strike out, and arrive precisely according to map and timetable.

I guess I'm not one of them.

A couple of months after coming back from the Ireland tour, a number of my essays from Notes to Self were picked up by the mother of all women's magazines. The Toronto Globe and Mail featured guest commentary from me for the second time this year. Things have been happening. Not as often or as consistently as I would like, but doors are opening to me on the prose front, and while I may not be much good at sticking to maps, I do have enough sense to walk through open doors.

I am hoping they eventually lead to a comfortable room where the bills are paid and I don't need to do anything else but write while the kids are in school. A column or a book deal. That's a fairly far-fetched notion, but not astronomically out of reach. So for the past six months, I've been pouring my energy into the vehicle that seems to have the greatest likelihood of taking me there, my prose.

Don't count me out yet, but it's possible that the Yale Younger Poets program (see sidebar) may have to soldier on without me (oh well, I was going to have to become a U.S. citizen to enter, anyway, and the contest regulations are daunting enough without bringing the INS into it).

Creativity is energy, and bound to the law of conservation. Nothing gets lost. While I haven't been writing poems recently, more and more poetry has been seeping into my prose. I began to notice that certain compositions of mine, both on- and offline were written in a very distinct voice, one that would be more familiar to my readers here, than at Notes. I also noticed that these pieces seemed to be excerpts of something, although I didn't know what.

About a month ago, I realized I was working on a memoir of my relationship with my father. It wasn't a decision; it was a revelation. In a second, I knew the title, the themes, the tone, and (very loosely) the structure. I was literally dizzy with it. I began pulling these "excerpts" together into one document, and saw that I actually began writing this book here, on this blog.

Again and again, I would sit down to write about my poetry, and find myself needing to talk about my father, about the disentangling of my voice from his, about the burden of his personal mythology as an artist, about my subversive and misdirected attempts to break into the fraternity of male artists that seemed to be the organizing principle around which my girlhood was centered, about my dangerous addiction to the role of muse.

About growing up as, and away from, the poet's daughter. About growing toward myself.

I thought these recollections and reflections would just be asides, background color. I didn't want to make it all about him. But there's a story in front of me, an open door, and I need to walk through.

2007-05-24T06:45:00.000-05:00

914

Visitors here must assume I have abandoned poetry. I haven't. It's just been a phase of expansion for my prose writing, and one of contraction for verse. Developments on that other front have demanded the greater portion of my creative attention recently, but I expect to be able to turn around and spend more time with my first love over the summer. I will write more about this see-saw act soon.

2007-04-05T12:55:00.000-05:00

963: Not Far Behind

My late grandmother Mary was a poet also, and a very great lady. My aunt, Katie Pittman, her daughter-law, recently wrote this remembrance of her for a Woman's Day event at which she spoke in St. John's. My cousin Erika posted it on her private blog, but I asked for Katie's permission to share it with the world, which she has generously granted.

I was very close to my grandmother, and have always been told I resemble her, physically and personally. I should be so lucky.—k.

Len Margaret was born Mary Margaret Leonard in St. Leonard’s, Placentia Bay in 1913, where her family had lived since the early 1700’s.

Although she left St. Leonard’s in her 20’s, her birthplace continued to be the creative and beloved source she drew on throughout her lifetime.

In 1980 she published her first and only book, Fish and Brewis, Toutons and Tales, in which, remarkably, she wove stories and poems recipes and recollections of St. Leonard’s.

As Ray Guy said in his introduction “ Fish and Brewis, Toutons and Tales, tells us about bright lamps, warm kitchens and full, contented people. It proves we not only endured but we also enjoyed”.

More remarkable, perhaps, was the map she drew showing each and every home and landmark in St. Leonards and the list she compiled of all who lived there. The book blended tales of ghosts and fairies that inhabited the place, along with the very real people who shared the magical landscape.

She writes in part: “a short distance from Lodore (a st. Leonard’s landmark) were the ruins of the old stone church where we were not ever supposed to go, but where we went anyway. We made sure we got out of there before the sun went down because of ghosts, especially the “two black dogs with no heads” that walked through the churchyard gate between daylight and dark, and vanished in front of your eyes. On the other hand, we would have welcomed the sound of the Sanctus bell that the old people said they had heard on Sunday morning for months after the church was destroyed by fire.”

When I met Len Margaret, I was fourteen, and she was Mary Pittman, a very sophisticated woman of 48. By this time, she had moved from St. Leonard’s to Bell Island to Corner Brook. She had taught school, helped her husband manage a hotel and a chicken farm, was still raising many of her eight children. Little did i know that five years later, she would become my reluctant mother-in-law and that for the next 35 years she would be a huge part of my life and the life of my family.

During the years of raising her children, Mary’s writing took a secondary role, although following her death, scraps of scribbled paper tucked in every nook and cranny gave testament to the fact that she never abandoned her love of writing.

What she did do during those years was encourage her children in all aspects of the arts, supporting their every effort at writing, drawing or acting. Today that legacy lives on in her children, grandchildren and great grandchildren. Above all though, she passed on to all of them a deep curiosity about life.

In the 1970’s Mary’s son Al was beginning to achieve some notice as a poet and it was al who encouraged his mother to begin submitting work for publication. She chose not to use her married name partly, I think, so that her work would be seen for its own merit and partly in homage to her family name and birthplace. Soon, Len Margaret’s poems began to appear in publications. At this same time, Mary was teaching adult education in Corner Brook and this experience inspired one of her earliest published poems and what i think may well be her best poem – Night School - in which she describes several of her adult students and maybe herself as well. I’ll read it for you though I can hardly ever do so without crying.

Night school.
By Len Margaret
(published in Scruncheons, Sept. 1973)

1. (Ernest Hearley)

i hear the teacher’s
heels clicking
on the stone floor

i smile good night
pretending i’m brave

i sit in the back
so that she
won’t see me
watching her

she catches my eye
and
i look at the wall

she comes down through
rows of desks
and takes my
hand

three gold rings
and herring scales.

2. (Jack Brewer)

i’m late because
i had to wash up good
on account of i was
clearing the storm sewer

the kids got
at my scribbler and
tore the leaves out

anyways
i’m so goddamn stun’d
i forget from one night
to the other

you’re looking good
yourself
miss.

3. (Noel Slaney)

i’m 56
and tired
of taking orders
from people
who don’t give a damn
that i’m dying
shift by sweaty shift

when i’m done
what will they do
give me a pick and shovel
and tell me to dig
myself in

let me sit here
a while miss
where i won’t hear
the rocks falling on my grave.

4. (Phonse Decker)

how can i learn
to write
when the pencil
takes crazy steps across
the page and my
hand shivers
i can swing the sledgehammer
and it
goes where i want
but the pencil
won’t stay with me

maybe i could do better if
my hands wouldn’t
sweat

5. (Billy Hynes)

they say i’m crazy
because
i go to night school
but today i could read
all the names on all
the bloody cartons stacked
on the truck

i sat beside the driver
and smiled.

6. (Miss Crowley)

how can I tell Ton Chung
that his skin is
the color of
summer hay
his eyes like
brown spring pools
and when he speaks
I see butterflies
hovering over plum blossoms
in a tea garden

Other publications followed and although she was proud of her achievements, unless someone else mentioned it – she never did.

Except for a couple of years in the 1960s when the family lived in Labrador City, Corner Brook was home. Mary, in her own words, loved every minute of living in Corner Brook but when the opportunity came in the 1970’s to move with her family to a little cottage on the Humber River, she jumped at the chance. As she said in a family letter:

“…the river became my school, my church and my line of communication with birds and beasts.”

Here she reveled in the outdoors and spent many evenings in her boat fishing in the quiet water of the river. In a poem dedicated to the late Dermot O’Reilly, she wrote about this love of her place in the Humber Valley.

Poem For Dermot O’Reilly
(published in 31 Newfoundland Poets 1979)

1.
Since I came
to this quiet valley
how many dawns
have I seen stealing
over the river
blushing the mountain tops
like candle flames
on a high altar
and how many nights
with the candles blown
have I listened
to the sounds
of flowing!

2.
Some day soon I suppose
I will have to sit
And tat lace edges on pillow cases
To show my usefulness

In this late year
however I’m afraid
I would rather lie
on soft leaves left
by last fall’s heavy breathing
and flirt with a sparrow
whose only purpose
is to keep a tree
between me
and him.

After her husband died, Mary had to move once more. This time to Grand Falls where she would be closer to family. We all worried about her leaving the place on the Humber she called “Innisfree.”

A few years after leaving the Humber she wrote:

“I thought I would die the evening I left to live in Grand Falls, it was in late fall. The valley was bursting with color. Time to pick autumn leaves to press and place them in the big brown jar in front of the fireplace. I had given the hens and rooster away. Freckles was on the back seat of the car, wagging his tail and in his dog’s mind thought it was another great adventure like crossing the river in the canoe or scattering ducklings from their nest in the reeds. I went back to spend three summers on the river after that. It was different.

One learns to deal with the past in his or her own way. There’s no way to describe that.”

And deal with it, she did.

After a year or two in Grand Falls, Mary jumped into action. She became the driving force of the senior citizen’s association. She lobbied government, she organized learning events for seniors, she oversaw the building of a senior citizen club house, she supervised community service for young offenders, and she spoke to school groups about her writing. For all of this, one year, she was made Grand Falls Senior Citizen of the Year.

As with every place she had lived, she made that place home and established life long friendships. Her home was always open to visitors and you would be welcome to stay five minutes or five days. She always had interesting things to tell you and an interest in what you had to say. Everyone was welcome as long as they behaved themselves – and I do mean everyone. There is an often told story how she received visits each summer from members of a motorcycle gang – this after she had taught “those nice boys” to cook a jiggs dinner.

Whether Mary was writing as Len Margaret for publication or as Mary Pittman in letters just for you, she wrote about the things she loved. She wrote about people, about plants and trees, about birds and seasons changing and trout fishing and she told stories that wove the past and present together and made it real to the reader. Every line she wrote told so much about her and her optimism about life.

I’ll leave you by paraphrasing the close of a letter she wrote to us late in her life from Grand Falls because it seems appropriate for today:

“Another week or so and March will be over. The worst is done. March may be blustery, lean and hungry but April is not far behind.”

Written by Katie Pittman, reprinted with permission.

2007-03-21T10:45:00.000-05:00

978

Two weeks since I left Ireland. In dreams I am still there.

Every single night.

2007-03-10T07:06:00.000-06:00

990

On Sunday, the program had us in a Dublin neighbourhood pub for back to back music sessions from three in the afternoon 'til close, which was more than most of us could face without breaking down and crying. (Incidentally, it was the over-50 crowd who were the die-hards among us, while the rest would be standing by the venue exit each night ready to board the coach and get to bed.)

Consequently, the majority passed on the afternoon country & bluegrass music session, which was a pity, because by all reports it was excellent. It would have been my session of choice, but the pub was across town, and I would have been in for the long haul. After some hemming and hawing in the lobby, Patrick decided to catch a nap and I went for a walk. We had supper at a pizza joint in Temple Bar, where management seemed to feel quite strongly that corn kernels are what's been missing from pizza all this time.

We caught a cab to the pub for the late session, which featured local traditional musicians. There were several fiddlers, a couple of guitars, accordian, uillean pipes, and a bodhran. The music was great. Pamela Morgan paid tribute to our recently deceased Dermot O'Reilly, which caught me off guard and made me cry. About that time, I noticed an older man come in who reminded me both of Dermot and my father a little. We ended up in the same cab together at the end of the evening. He was Sligo poet Dermot Healey, who was to be on the program with us at Dun Laoghaire the following evening.

That was to be our last gig in Ireland. We shared an inflated and convoluted cab ride down the coast to Dun Laoghaire early in the day, hoping to catch the student March Hare at the local college. But our cabbie couldn't find the place and by that time we hated him too much to hand him one more Euro than we were already into him for, so we abandoned the quest and had him drop us straight at the reading venue. We had a few pints and waited for the rest of our group to trickle in.

The evening was great. Everyone's energy was high. The local performers were terrific, especially the Shannon Colleens, a singing duo who did a biting satire about American soldiers who stopover in Ireland on their way to Iraq. It was a great night to go out on. The Newfoundlanders had an early morning flight back to Canada, so we didn't linger long after the show, although several of us gathered in the hotel pub for tea and farewell.

It was lonely the next day after they'd all left. We spent a quiet day in the city, Patrick working out of the hotel pub and me walking across the Liffey to the Writer's Museum. We splurged that night on the early prix fixe menu at a French restaurant off St. Stephen's Green, and reviewed all the ways in which we'd fallen in love with our travelling companions and with Ireland. Neither of those two threads feels like it ends here.

2007-03-07T04:30:00.000-06:00

993

Curious about some of the folks I've been rambling around Ireland with? Here's a link to audio performances by several of them:

Rattling Books on MySpace

Also check out the bios for

Joel
Lisa
Michael

More later on the rest.

2007-03-05T04:28:00.000-06:00

995

Sunday, 4 March Dublin

Sitting in a (sigh) pub in Dublin with a cappucino, waiting to be checked in. It looks like it might take a while. Grey and raining day here, and not nearly enough sleep last night.

Yesterday morning was our last in Waterford City, and I was sad to say goodbye. It was a bright beautiful morning, and Patrick and I set out after breakfast to walk up and down the cobbled square, which was full of Saturday morning market stalls and buskers. A saxophonist burst into ABBA at which point we had to come to a complete halt, me grinning hugely at Patrick. “This is the happiest day of my life,” I sighed.

We had a quick tour of Waterford’s great museum, which has installed a Newfoundland exhibit since I last visited four years ago. Then a sublime lunch in the sunny, modern café: panninis of melted cheese and Irish ham with a glass of shiraz and a ginger-pear cake for dessert. That’s what passes for cafeteria food in Europe. We talked earnestly about moving there with the children, which is an obligatory point in any really worthwhile vacation. I wish it was mandatory for every American citizen to spend time abroad, just to confront the reality that people all over the world are enjoying life, liberty and pursuing happiness without the benefit of the so-called American values that some think need to be exported at the end of a tank.

I realize being on vacation is not a true measure of day to day living in a foreign country, but it seems fair to observe that the baseline asthetic is higher here. Even mass-produced items are beautiful. The attention to quality seems to require that life be lived more mindfully. You go to the butcher for your fresh meat, the greengrocer for your produce, the bakers for your bread. The carrots have dirt on them that needs to be washed off. It all seems more natural, and makes you wonder what on earth we are doing with all the time we are supposedly saving with convenience items in America. More time for tv? More time to rush to the next thing to distract us from living life?

We boarded the coach at two for our gig in Enniscorthy, the high point of which was a private tour of the town castle. It has just been turned over to the national trust, having been run locally for years. It had become a kind of wonderfully eclectic storage shed, with people donating family antiques, from penny farthing bicycles to woolen socks worn in the Easter Uprising of ’16. It had a tiny dank dungeon, to which we applied our clown car routine, clambering one after another down a tiny staircase into a cave with barely room to turn around and get the hell out.

We had dinner with our hosts at the venue, an American-style pub/restaurant. The reading itself was in a dedicated area with a stage. I went up first. The sound was problematic, but the room was filled and the audience was warm and responsive. Unfortunately, there was some miscommunication about time slots and it became a marathon. Our energy was pretty low by the time we piled on the bus. I thought the atmosphere was summed up perfectly by the kind of anecdotes our coach driver was telling: a few nights before he had entertained us on the way home with heartwarming tales about his Jack Russell terrier; on this night he was pointing out points along the way where pedestrians got killed in horrible traffic accidents. It was grim all around.

We did have a clear view of the lunar eclipse from the pub parking lot. We snuck out the back door one and two at a time, to smoke cigarettes and curse the long-winded; to crane our necks to the sky and watch our own shadow.

2007-03-02T16:05:00.000-06:00

997

When Patrick and I lived in Mexico, we had a running joke over the daily decision of what to eat for supper. “I know!” one of us would say. “What about some sort of spicy meat, wrapped in some sort of flat bread—say, I don’t know, a corn tortilla— and maybe some cheese melted over it?

“Hmmm,” the other would say, as if pondering a bold culinary excursion where no tourista had gone before. “And what if there were some beans on the side?”

We have launched a reprisal of this routine in Ireland. “So, what’s happening tonight?” one of us will ask.

“I’m not sure, but I believe there will be people gathering in a pub. And that there might be alcohol served in large pint glasses.”

“And might there be some instruments, and perhaps some singing, involved?”

“Why, yes, Yes, I believe there might.”

In fact, I am composing this from a pub, and have just consumed a pint.

We spent our first really wretched day traipsing around Wexford County in the driving rain, throwing money at various transportation workers. It was a day off from performing, and instead of doing the sane thing and hanging around in bed all day, drinking hot tea and watching Spongebob in Gaelic on the Irish language channel ( which, next to the mummified cat and rat in Christ Church Cathedral is the most amazing thing I’ve seen in Ireland), I insisted we grab a bus and try to find a famine museum that turned out not to be open. After missing several buses and taxis, we then took a cab for ten euros to an outdoor interpretive exhibit of Stone Age culture, where we had a coffee and decided from the glassed-in café that the early Celts could have it, and took another ten euro cab back to a bus shelter to wait for the next bus back to Waterford.

We must have spent 70 euros, and on absolutely nothing. You’d think I’d have learned my lesson after I changed my mind the other night about going to Cork and caught a late afternoon bus, only to start violently vomiting in the public toilet as soon as I arrived at the theatre, and spent a miserable evening on the lobby sofa, listening to the applause within. All because I was afraid to miss out on anything.

Of course there was a pub session immediately following.

Oh well, they can’t all be An Rinn and Kilkenny, which were fantastic venues, although very different from one another, the first being in the village pub and the latter being in the tower room of Kilkenny Castle. Both were superb. We had most of yesterday afternoon to wander around Kilkenny, which is a gorgeous medieval city. I found the Irish counterpart to Wal-mart, Dunne’s, and bought lingerie and cookies. Had a great meal of roast pork in (wait for it) the pub. Picked up some lovely linen handkerchiefs too.

There were some fantastic highpoints in the Kilkenny show, which was a night off for me. Lisa Moore read from her novel Alligator. Nick Avis had the audience in the palm of his hand. Ron Hynes did his magic. A local poet, Mark Roper, almost took my breath away. I was determined to meet him before we left the building for (guess) the pub, and practically bowled him over where he stood, the poor man. Anyway, he was very sweet and gracious and he and I and his lovely wife Jane all had a drink together. Do look up his work. I thought it was outstanding.

It was a great day and night, and I’d be hard pressed to single out favorite moments, but some that come to mind are cappuccino and encouragement from Lisa, a wee, white haired man in the local pub standing up to sing us a song, standing in a phone booth in Kilkenny talking to Georgia back in Little Rock, because I had to tell her I was eating a Cadbury bar.

In An Rinn, we were blown away by a group of young local musicians, and an Irish poet by the the name of Áine Uí Fhoghlú, who writes in Irish and with whom I got to chatting later and hope to stay in touch.

Two funny moments from the An Rinn pub stand out and beg to be memorialized. To set up the first, I need to tell you that when we got to the pub, we thought at first there had been a mix up with the time—there was hardly a soul in the place. Then it was explained to us that, as it was a Wednesday night in the season of Lent, most of the villagers were still in Mass, and would be along shortly. Well, after church let out, they all filed in, among them an older woman who took her seat at the bar with an air of seniority and welcomed us all like a dowager queen. She was beaming and nodding and singing along from her throne right up until Joel Hynes took the stage and dropped some particularly colourful language.

The poor woman's eyes nearly popped out of her head. Her jaw dropped and she slid off the stool. She stood up and staggered around in circles, as if she had somehow slipped into a deviant parallel universe and could not now find the portal out. I imagine she took to her bed for three days. I wonder if she has recovered yet. Joel and the ladies.

The second cirque-de-hare act had the local master of ceremonies grabbing the microphone out from in front of Michael Crummey mid-reading to admonish the audience to stop talking, as it was distracting for the performers. Michael, considerably distracted, looked on with very nearly the same expression as the dear old lady above. It was hysterical. I don't know how he recovered his composure, but he went back to the beginning and saw it through. A pro, through and through.

It is all too much too keep abreast of, and in the middle of it, my digital camera has come down with its own version of Montezuma’s revenge, refusing to accept local batteries. I hope to sort this out before we move on tomorrow. I would hate to run into any more mummified animals and be caught without my camera.

2007-03-01T05:00:00.000-06:00

998

Thursday morning, March 01

We leave for Kilkenny in an hour. Tonight's reading is in the castle there, which sounds like a 180 degree swing from last night's venue, the local pub in the fishing village of An Rinn (Ring), nestled in the Gaeltacht, where Irish is the first language.

Liam Rellis and I were having a chat about the Irish language just before I was due to go on and open the show. "Ah," says Liam, "the proper thing for you to say up there would be (insert unintelligible Gaelic phrase here)."

"Oh," says I, wide-eyed and earnest. "Okay. Tell me again, slowly."

Liam and I proceed to spend the next few minutes rehearsing my opening statement in Irish. Thank god, from the corner of my eye, I thought I saw a bystander smirk behind his pint.

I squinted at Liam. "What exactly does this phrase mean?"

Liam turned red all over, I think more with merriment than chagrin. "Ah, I don't think I could tell ye, Kyran. I'd have to show ye."

Note to self: don't trust the Irish.

I'm about to time out of my wildly expensive pay-by-the-hour internet connection (Patrick calls the local practice of charging for everything from packets of ketchup to coffee refills "death by a thousand cuts"). I want to share much more about our fantastic night in An Rinn and my miserable night in Cork (I changed my mind and caught a late bus), but it will have to wait.

2007-02-27T05:42:00.001-06:00

1,001

Tuesday morning, February 27

The bus is leaving for Cork in twenty minutes, and I am going to let it go without me. I’m not on the program tonight, and while Cork was my favorite stop last time around, I’m feeling the need for a time out.

Things kicked off yesterday with a meet and greet at Waterford City Hall. The usual formalities from the usual dignitaries, enlivened by the occasional spark off a live wire. I read Dad’s poem, Rites of Passage, which appears at the front of the new anthology. It’s not a piece I was familiar with, but I enjoyed reading it. I told somebody yesterday that I have put a lot of miles and a lot of years between myself and my father’s name— for this week, I am going to give myself permission to lean into it. For the Dome reading, I lead with another poem of his, A River Runs Through Her. Then four of my own: Launch, Jars of Clay, Vertigo and Catching Up to Her At Last.

There were ten performances in all. Everybody was great, but the energy of the second half ran especially high, starting with poems from Michael Crummey and finishing with Ron Hynes, who brought the house down with “Sonny’s Dream” and “Dublin with Love”. Joel Hynes was also electrifying.

We had a mad bus ride back to the hotel pub. Imagine fifty or so Irish and Newfoundland writers, musicians and entourage barreling down the twisting road together. It was the Mad Hatter’s tea party on wheels. In fact, when Patrick and I were debating over breakfast the pros and cons of heading to Cork today, the thought of a two-hour or longer reprise of last night’s commute was a moment for serious second thought! Fifteen minutes was a great bit of craic. Fifteen minutes more would probably have me hitching it on the side of the road.

Back at the pub, a music session got underway. I felt about six years old, wanting to stay awake for the music so badly, but falling out of my chair with sleepiness. My coach was about to turn into a pumpkin. I called it a night, and was glad for it this morning. The crowd went on well into the wee hours. I heard they even hauled out “Danny Boy” in the end, which you know is the beginning of a downward spiral.

At that point, “even Des went to bed,” someone reported. Far gone, for sure.

2007-02-27T05:39:00.000-06:00

1,000

Monday, February 26

This is my fourth day in Ireland, the first day of the official program. It seems like I’ve been here a month already. We took the coach from our B&B to Dublin airport yesterday morning to meet the Newfoundland contingent, who launched the tour in Toronto on Friday night. When their flight came in, it was like the clown car act in the circus, or maybe The 35 People you Meet in Heaven. One familiar face after the other.

We were herded onto a charter bus for the drive to Waterford, where we will be based for the next several days, traveling out into the countryside to various performance venues, which range from concert halls to pubs. It is an eclectic group, as the March Hare roster has always been. The program features the famous, the almost-famous, the infamous and the as-yet unknown. There is a film crew and a radio reporter. And then there are those who are simply along for the ride.

I am so glad that Patrick is here. It was overwhelming on the bus, where my father’s name seemed to be everyone’s every other word. The printed program acknowledges him very beautifully, and the March Hare Anthology, hot off the press, is full of tributes to him as well. I was glad to have my husband’s shoulder to hide out in when I needed to. Also his elbow to nudge me later at the pub when it was time to call it a night. In our daily lives I am generally the activity director, but here, where I need to be free to float in the creative current, it is nice to let him do the “driving”. I have been referring to him as my handler. You'd have to know us to appreciate the irony. Consider the tiger, and its tail.

We did get good rest in Dublin, but last night I tossed and turned in our new hotel bed, and am feeling pretty fuzzy right now. I have to figure out what I am reading tonight, and I’m finding it hard to focus. There has been a tug of war going on my soul between the mother and the poet. The mother is finding it hard to turn it over.

The sun has broken through. Maybe I’ll go for a walk along the quay.

2007-02-01T18:03:00.000-06:00

1,026

My Irish itinerary was faxed to me this afternoon. Here is where and when I am scheduled to read:

26 February, 8 p.m., Waterford Dome
28 February, 8 p.m., Mooney's, An Rinn
03 March, 8 p.m., The Bailey, Enniscorthy
05 March, 8 p.m., Purty Loft, Dun Laoghaire

These are four out of eighteen stops on the March Hare 2007 tour, which begins in Toronto at the Brass Taps on February 23 at 8 p.m. (I'm told to tell you to book early), and ends in Corner Brook, Newfoundland on March 11. I will just be on board for the Irish segment. Hopefully I will have learned how to pronounce the above place names by then.

I will be bringing the iBook and camera, and am planning to post tour highlights here. But if you happen to be in or near any of those neighbourhoods, I hope you will drop by in person.

2007-01-24T14:16:00.000-06:00

1,034

If He Were to Ask What She is Thinking

I have been here before. At midwinter
weary of dimmed restaurants and shaded windows
we came along backroads to this very place. The trees
were bare then and it seemed my eye could cut
an infinite path between them, the forest floor
etched out in stark precision, veiled now
by the blind of green that shimmers diffuse
in the pollen drenched rays of this spring afternoon.
But that day the light was low and piercing
and I ached with the nakedness of it all
like ice caught in my throat and melting slowly.
And now that I think of it, that was the last good day
we had together. See how everything has grown in.

Kyran Pittman

Published in New Century North American Poets. All rights reserved.

2007-01-18T16:38:00.001-06:00

1,040

Several years ago, I made a conscious decision to overhaul my belief system about living the creative life. I threw out the old tapes, and adopted two basic tenets:

One, I decided that being an artist and being sane, sober, and faithful in marriage did not have to be mutually exclusive conditions. At the time, this was repudiated by almost every role model I ever had, but if no one had ever done it in the history of the world, I would invent it. It was just going to have to be.

Two, I decided that there was plenty of talent, energy, inspiration and luck to go around, and that it wasn't necessary for me or anyone else to cower in the corner, hoarding our meager ration of it.

You can guess what happened. As I bought into these ideas, I started encountering more and more evidence to support them. They manifest themselves almost daily now.

Turns out I didn't have to invent the healthy artist. Today I know all kinds of them. I make it a point to know them. I don't mean they aren't complex people who struggle. Just that they are dealing with their demons, not being ridden by them.

And about there being enough of the good stuff? More like a surplus. It overflows and sloshes onto me. Like yesterday, when I was fighting with the baby over the remote control, and I happened across the tail end of a Q & A session with Michael Chabon, where he talked about how much he dreads going to sit down and write, the way people dread going to the gym, but how if he doesn't do it—if he indulges his desire to watch a ball game instead, for example—he feels unwell. He knows it will ail his soul not to write, and so, five days a week, he drags his ass to his chair and he writes. Then he talked about how hapless he feels in general; how it never seems like he is doing a good enough job in all the other areas of his life.

It was such a kind and generous thing to share. I wanted to jump up and kiss the screen (except it is so grody with grubby fingerprints my lips would probably stick to it). See, if Chabon were hoarding his talent, he would be too afraid to share those vulnerabilities. He would just swagger around, hoping you couldn't see through the swagger to the terror, and I would go on thinking there was no hope for me, because real writers must wake up with a burning desire to get to their desks and are above being troubled by the kids not having their homework signed or bouncing a check or not being the kind of person who brings casseroles to sick friends.

No hope for me, and no cure for what ailed me, who lived with that unwell feeling for so long, I almost couldn't feel it anymore. And that, my friends, is terminal, stage IV creative blockage. You know people who are living—dying—with it. You've seen it.

Then I had an email from a dear friend of mine who has published several books, fiction and non-fiction. She wrote me to say she had sat down over the holidays and had caught up with several months worth of writing on both blogs, and had lots of nice and encouraging things to say about them (I keep a folder on my computer called Moral Support, and this is where that sort of thing gets filed, against the days I am most starved for it). But the best was when she confided how anticlimatic it always feels when a book gets published, and all your friends and family say is, "It was great!" or "I liked your book" when you've spent years of your life toiling and sweating over each turn of phrase. Again, it means hope for someone like me, to know that the hunger for praise, for notice, doesn't go away with publication. That it, like the dread of going to one's desk, is just a condition you learn to work around.

Yesterday morning I did sit at my desk, dreading and procrastinating all the way. It is much harder for me to settle into the writing of poetry than prose, because it so much more jarring for me to have to resurface. As I have described before, I get the bends. But I really want to have new material to read next month in Ireland, so I forced myself. I began by grumpily sorting through my manila file folders: published, unpublished, drafts closed, drafts open. An envelope fell out into my lap. It was a review of one of my poems that someone anonymously sent me after it was published. Someone actually went to the trouble to find my address, copy the review, buy a stamp, and mail it to me. Several months before that, someone else—another poet—had gone to the trouble to tell me about the anthology, send me the submissions information, and bug me until I mailed some stuff in. I will never forget getting the letter in the mail that said they were accepting nearly all of the poems I'd sent. Or getting the book when it came and seeing them in print alongside other poets I admired.

None of that happened because people were worried my coming to the table would mean less for them. Everybody just schooched over and passed the bread.

2007-01-16T06:57:00.000-06:00

1,042

One of you asked me to share the biographical sketch I am using for the upcoming Irish trip. It references my father and family more than I would in a normal bio (like a hundred per cent more), but this particular event is connected to his legacy, so I am unofficially representing him, as well as my own work. Some of it is derived from earlier musings here about my own cultural and artistic identity.

Kyran Pittman was born in 1969, into a Newfoundland family notable for its artistic and literary contributions to the island culture. Her grandmother, Mary Pittman, published poems and stories under the pseudonym Len Margaret. Her father, Al Pittman, was a poet, playwright and author of short fiction and children's books. At the time of Kyran's birth, Al and his contemporaries--children when the Dominion of Newfoundland became a province of Canada in 1949 --were coming of age; asserting their cultural identity in a movement that became known as Newfoundland's creative "rennaissance." Kyran was raised in Corner Brook, on the west coast of the island, in a home that was frequented by musicians, poets, academics, visual artists and actors.

Today Kyran is a poet and essayist, living in the American south since 1996. She describes herself as a Newfoundlander with a Canadian passport and an American green card, but belonging to no country. Her writing draws deeply from the perspective of the outsider. Her poems and essays are dispatches from life's limbic places: the emotional, cultural and geographic borderlands where she ranges.

Kyran's work has appeared in TickleAce, New Century North American Poets, and the Toronto Globe and Mail. She performed throughout Ireland in 2003 for the launch of However Blow the Winds and is very happy to return to help launch __________, the anthology in honor of the March Hare literary festival which her father founded.

2006-12-13T09:26:00.000-06:00

1,076

Boy Waiting for Snow
(a painting by Johnny, age six)

It could come
out of the blue
spontaneous sky
the fleckless firmament
that saturates the paper
with cerulean possibility.
It could come, falling
flakes like starry cobwebs
no two alike, not ever.
Boy’s tongue poised to tell
each from each.
Boy’s face
(circle, line, dot)
shining certitude.
Boy’s round head transcendent
buoyant as a balloon bobbing at last
into the stratosphere.
Anything could happen from here.

by Kyran Pittman, all rights reserved.
Published in New Century North American Poets, 2002

2006-12-07T14:15:00.000-06:00

1,082

I am back. And preparing for the poetry readings in Ireland. I was asked to provide a long biographical sketch/statement for publicity purposes. I hate doing those things. But since I am working toward a manuscript with a specific theme in mind, it is suddenly helpful for me to articulate where I am coming from. I don't know if the following will prove at all useful for the purposes of promoting the tour, but it at least belongs here.

If countries and cultures had an equivalent of an imaginary median--a sort of Greenwich Mean Line--that is my homeland. Although my passport cover says Canada, and that is officially my government, I literally have no nation. I was raised on my father's island, and lived there until I was twenty-six years old, so that is home to me in terms of cultural origin. But although my father's lineage runs deeply there, my mother is from the mainland, which dilutes my legitimacy, as island people everywhere would define it.

To be from Newfoundland is to belong to no man's land. The island became a reluctant province of Canada in my father's lifetime. The Dominion of Newfoundland, which had only existed for a generation prior, ceased to be in 1949. When I was born twenty years later, there was, and continues to be, a great deal of ambivalence and resentment over the Confederation with (more aptly, into) Canada. A kind of wistful revisionist history has sprung up over the years that would have one believing there was a golden age of Newfoundland independence, when the pink, green and white flag flew from every rooftop, but the Dominion was short-lived and collapsed ingloriously. Hardly a shining epoch. The unromantic truth is that Newfoundland has ever been used and passed around by distant powers, with its own merchant class acting in collusion.

Ten years ago, I took my Canadian passport and moved to another kind of island, the American south. Here I am also the outsider, although my status as a foreigner places me several notches above a Yankee, and affords me slightly more indulgence. Like Newfoundland, the South has a mythic sense of itself, telling itself stories to keep from being crushed with shame. The real histories of both places are ignomious, stained with poverty, defeat, and crimes of the landed class against the people. In addition to telltale accents, old music and strong drink, they have paradoxical sets of characteristics in common: entrenched obstinacy and almost servile insecurity, irrevocable suspicion of outsiders and exaggerated pride in their own hospitality. Both peoples seem to exist in two overlapping dimensions: the mythological and the real. They straddle the borderlands, the thin place. Where as a writer, I may range, but never settle. Never belong.

2006-10-18T09:52:00.000-05:00

1,132

I have violated three Wednesdays in a row in the name of business. The first was a freelance pr piece, because I needed the money. The second was a make-up day with my regular client, because I needed the money. Last Wednesday started out with a round of essay submissions to various editors, and working on the new banner design for my non-fiction prose blog, Notes to Self.

I woke up this morning with a grim determination to Write Poems. Then I popped over to Keri's place on a recommendation from friend, and was reminded that it doesn't work that way. My poetself is sick and starving at the moment. You can count her rib bones. I could probably wring something out of her with the sweatshop approach, but she'd eventually collapse, escape or stage a mutiny.

Keri writes, "Oh, how we pressure ourselves...Who would you be if you stopped trying so hard? Contemplate that just for a moment. Sit with it if you dare. What if you didn't produce a thing for the next while? "

Reading this, I felt like tipping my head to one side. I was like the dog in the old Gary Larson cartoon, "What Dogs Hear". "Blah blah blah Ginger. Blah blah Ginger. Blah blah." I could recognize my name in it, but the rest was foreign. Not produce? Like, intentionally, without guilt?

It might take me a while.

In the meantime, Keri's mention of filling her house with the smells of curry and incense inspired me. That I can do. And, come to think of it, need to do.

I have been struggling these past few months, with ego, ambition, expectations and desire. I'm not done struggling. I am going to clutch those things a little longer, maybe until my palms bleed. I don't know yet how to release them. I have felt terrible about it, too, because I "should" know better. (Apparently, the same sweatshop boss who runs my creative life doubles as my spiritual director). I castigate myself for coming down with this soulsickness, when what I need to do is nurture myself while it runs its course.

I can't heal it. But I can be healed.

So today I am invoking the kitchen gods. The curry is simmering. I have baked almond cookies. Sunshine is streaming over the sink. In a moment I will set the table for two, and invite Patrick to take a lunch break with me.

Then I might go for a long, long walk, with Keri's suggestion folded up carefully in my heart like a note from a schoolmate written in secret code.

2006-10-07T10:36:00.000-05:00

1,143
Has it really been ten days since my last post? God, I feel like I do when I realize I haven't fed the hermit crabs in days. Are any of you still there?

I have been far, far away, both geographically and internally, but I'm back now. I find I am starting to move into poetmind again, which involves a certain degree of drift. Bear with me. Eventually, I look up and follow the needle back north.

I have been sketching a little (see photographic evidence above). I am a very painterly poet in terms of my work habit. I like to start in freehand, preferably black felt tip ink. I jot down images and ideas in a very loose, barely legible scrawl, because I am not ready to commit to any one of them just yet. I like either a ruled, white pad or a folded piece of computer paper, but the backside of anything will do. The notes above are made on the back of another poem I had hanging around in my purse. When people learn I am a poet, they often bring me books of poems and fancy notebooks. I am grateful for the gesture, but actually both those items are terrible creative blocks for me. The poetry books because they pile up unread, and make me feel guilty. I do read other people's poetry, but I generally have to come to it in my own way. And the notebooks go likewise untouched, because they suggest a kind of permanance and importance that is like lead in my hand.

As the poem begins to take shape, I move to the word processor, where I still have fluidity, but the typed words are at arm's length, and I can edit and shape more objectively. The process is one of expansion and contraction, where I start with a lot of loose, raw material and then start distilling it down to the essence. What can be cut? What has to stay? What is asking coming into the foreground, and what needs to fade back? Most difficult and necessary of all, what must I sacrifice altogether? In my best poems, there is one line, one idea or image that I cling to for as long as possible before finally, painfully, cutting it loose. As with painting, there is a lot of layering that is not visible at the surface level, because I have overwritten it, but I believe it adds depth that is perceptible. At least when it works.

My poems need to work lyrically, so I do a lot of reading aloud as I go. Something that looks fine on paper doesn't necessarily succeed orally. In the final ajudacation, I go with mouth feel.

I will usually continue to tweak and nitpit for days after the so-called final draft. I will move a single word or punctuation mark around obsessively. I am a perfectionist, an afflicition which runs more rampantly over my prose. I am rarely completely satisfied with an essay. It could always be better. With the poems, however, there is a kind of alchemy that takes over. At some point the poem either takes breath and moves off away from me, or it doesn't. And even some of the poems that don't, just need some incubation time. My father used to tell me to never throw anything away; that some poems ripen in the darkness of your desk drawer. This has been very good advice. Even a few weeks ago, going through old files, I was surprised to find several old "works in progress" that had gone ahead and finished themselves in the privacy of their manila folders.

I haven't had any experience writing fiction, but this difference in my own ego-alignment with respect to the work seems to be the key contrast between writing poetry and prose. The essays require a kind of arrogance to get made. I have to believe, at least while I am writing them, that I have a point to get across. There is a sense of ownership, of attachment.

But poetry is different. I no more own them than I own my children. Both simply pass through me to come here, on their way to their own lives.

2006-09-27T18:45:00.000-05:00

1,153

In dreams, my poet-self borrows the face of a long-ago lover. He appears always on the periphery, maddeningly aloof. Like a wild thing on the edge of the wood. Lupine.

I have learned over time, over hundreds and hundreds of these dreams, not to startle him away by coming on too strong, too eager, too desperate. This takes real exertion, because whenever he appears on the scene, or I sense he is near, my heart nearly bursts with longing and everything in me wants to run headlong at him. But it is best to remain oblique; self-contained. Sometimes, then, he will linger.

I have known him just shy of forever, was in love with him as a little girl. I went for him too soon. I was willful. I was reckless. I was indiscreet. I had no notion of self-protection or restraint. I was a child who wanted what she wanted and wanted it now. I was barely a young woman who hadn't begun to understand what she wanted.

I wanted to be adored. I wanted to be powerful. I wanted to be near my father.

I looked to my father to see what it was that I should love.

So I loved the poet and I made poetry. Always for others. See what I wrote for you. I gave it all away. I gave myself away.

Now he keeps to the edge of the dream, wary of me and my intentions. My elusive sauvage, my familiar. Come nearer. Stay longer.

2006-09-20T08:10:00.000-05:00

1,160

This is the very first poem I ever wrote, and my first published poem. It appeared in the poetry section of the Newfoundland Herald, a tv guide, where my father submitted it. It was 1979, and I was living in my grandmother's house in southern New Brunswick with my mother and sister because my parents had separated.

I clearly remember the decision to write this poem. I remember the import of that moment, not just in retrospect, but as it was happening. It was a very deliberate and conscious act, as if until that moment, poetry was just one of an infinite number of possibilities swirling formlessly around me until I called it out of the void. I remember being very quiet and focused and excited. I knew three things. One, I was going to write a poem. Two, my poem would not be a rhyming poem. Three, it was going to please my father, a poet.

I'm not sure why I chose artist Gerry Squires as the subject of my first composition, or why that particular image of the lighthouse he used to keep on the Ferryland Downs, where we visited and where I played with his daughters years before. Maybe it was a bit of foreshadowing or alchemy. Maybe I was unconsciously drawing down some of the qualities in Gerry, as a person and as an artist, that I would later come to identify with.

Gerry is a painter and sculptor in whom spirituality and mysticism seem to co-habitate very naturally with his art. He is not religious himself, but I think of him as belonging to the tribe of priests. That archetype is very strong in him. It is in me and my father too, but Dad's was a house divided against itself. Both men grew up in very fundamentalist expressions of Christianity, but Gerry's must have been filtered through a softer lens, or he is by nature more elastic. He gets the connective-- relagare--aspect of religion; the relating between heaven and earth. Somewhere along the line that ligament had been torn in my father.

Or maybe I analyze too much. Maybe it was simply a nine-year old's nostalgia and longing for a sleep where the grown ups kept watch and the ship sailed on through the night unwrecked.

Who knows where any of the poems come from.

It is Wednesday, and I have a vast, glorious, expanse of uninterrupted time in which to write, and a nearly full pot of coffee.

I have so much more I want to say about that first poem, and about the tangling and untangling of my poetry with my father's life, "through dooms of love." And about spirit and art. And about the manuscript I am gestating.

But I have 1,159 more days, so some of it can wait.

2006-09-14T10:05:00.000-05:00

1,166

Well, my bathroom is clean and the upstairs is vacuumed.

This is how it often goes with me. I sit down to write a poem, and suddenly the bookshelf must be alphabetized. I mean, how the hell is anybody supposed to get any work done with the book spines all helter-skelter? I have to be on guard against this tendency. Yesterday, after I had already spent way too much time trying to get my blog masthead just so, I thought, is this simply an elaborate avoidance manuever? Shouldn't I be writing the poems, instead of writing about writing them? (Don't answer that).

The trouble is, I am very extroverted, meaning I am energized by interacting with others. For an introvert, like my husband, having to engage with others is an expenditure. It costs them energy. I don't know why anyone would want to go and be that way, but they claim they are born like it. I can be dead-ass tired at the end of the day, and if you put me in a group of people, I will be recharged and rearing to go in five minutes. Leave me alone too long with nowhere to go and no one to talk to and I quickly become depressed and lethargic. I wilt.

As far as poetry goes, extoversion is both help and hindrance. I would hazard to say that most poets tend toward introversion. They seem to tolerate long periods of solitude and inactivity. The public, interactive side of the craft appears painful and costly to some, often requiring chemical support to get through it. Me, I love the public part. That is where I shine.

I cut my teeth reading poetry during the heyday of the Poetry Slam movement, and while I was not a slam-style poet myself, I learned a lot watching the best of them, those really dynamic performers who were able to engage people, who didn't stand there hiding behind the paper expecting the audience to do all the work. I feel strongly that a writer who is asking people to sit and listen owes the audience as much professionalism in the reading as they put into the writing. Heart and soul. I love to get behind the mike and pour everything I've got into making a connection with the people in front of it. I am giving away too much of myself in this confession, but I love that audience, whatever the venue, whatever the size. I will make them love me back, supposing it kills us all.

The downside of that particular orientation is that it's very hard for me to settle down and do the work. I practically need a windowless cell block with nothing in it but a piece of paper and a pen. That is far less true of my prose writing, for some reason, perhaps because it is more conversational and extroverted by nature. Sitting with the poem, staying with it, unravelling it, that's another matter. This is where I need the chemical support. I used to do a lot of smoking. Now I do a lot of pacing.

I hope I will find my salvation in routine and self-discipline. Wednesday is my day to write, and I intend to set aside half my Wednesdays for writing poems. In between, I will be keeping up this and my other blog, writing new essays, sending out magazine submissions and trying to divert my alphabetizing urges toward something more relevant, like a filing system for the zillion scraps of paper depicted in the masthead above. Or learning to compose acrostics.

2006-09-13T11:33:00.000-05:00

Welcome.

I am launching this journal eleven hundred and sixty seven days from my fortieth birthday.

I know, at face value forty is just a number, not inherently any more or less significant than 39 or 41. But it is a number charged with meaning all the same. In the story of the Great Flood, it rained for 40 days and 40 nights. The Israelites wandered 40 years in the desert. Christ spent 40 days in the wilderness. In the Judeo-Christian culture, anyway, forty seems to mark the end of soujourn, a time of deliverance and re-emergence. It is the number of retrospection, and of looking ahead to the next epoch. A time to collect oneself.

It seems to be a liminal number. Like the bordertime between day and night, the turn of a season, or the edge of the woods. One of the thin places. Look at all the nervous energy it provokes in people. "Lordy, lordy, look who's forty!" We sense the magic in the number, the sheerness of it. We bring to the occasion the same air of mockery and bravado with which we approach Halloween, another of the bordertimes.

And there it is, flickering, on my not so distant horizon.

If I have acquired any wisdom at all in the thirty-seven years it has taken me to get this far across the wilderness, it is that there is no telling what life will throw at me in the next 1,167 days. But for a long time, I have been saying that I want to have a book of poems completed by the time I am forty, and it has lately been dawning on me that I might have to actively particpate in that process.

There are so many reasons not to. I have three children. A part time job. Numerous other interest and commitments. Poetry can be hard and lonely work. And it scares me. To me it feels like mining, or deep-sea fishing. Sometimes I go in, and I don't know if I will come back up to the light of day.

This blog is a way of tying a line on. Of digging in, without getting lost. It is intended as a way to set a specific goal: a manuscript-length collection in 1,167 days; 36 poems in a little more than three years. I also hope it will be a means of accountability for myself, like telling the world I am quitting smoking, or losing ten pounds. You are witness to the intent.

It's a measure against the loneliness and the long silence that comes with writing sometimes. A place to test-drive poems, and a sketchpad for fleshing out ideas. A place to talk about the creative process. And being as narcissistic and needy as the next poet, I also hope it might be a source of feedback and encouragement.

Who knows what it or I will wind up being or doing?

But the journey of 1,167 days begins with a single step, and this is that step.

K.