K.I. Press's Blog, page 24
October 5, 2011
Beginning of an essay I mean to finish some day
That summer I carried Sylvia Plath around with me. There are pictures and pictures of her and Ted Hughes camping, trying to get pregnant, getting pregnant, miscarrying, sometimes in Canada. In Algonquin Park. I've never been there.
Being from Alberta, I never really understood the Group of Seven, Margaret Atwood's woods, drowning in lakes, lakes at all, really. My landscape was a lot different. The trees were similar, perhaps, but rolling, not rocky, and with precious few bodies of water.
Wendy and Jonathan invited us to Wendy's family cottage that summer, for the Labour Day weekend. Everything was new to me. Adam was still new to me. So Wendy and Jonathan and Dominic and Suzanne, who would also be there for the weekend, were new to me. And so was the lake. Sitting on the dock looking at the cottage and the trees and water and rocks, I recognized what Ontario had been on about all these years. It was not superior to the landscape of my head, of my memory, but I recognized the landscape of theirs.
October 4, 2011
Excerpt from a work in progress:
I don't think she heard...
Excerpt from a work in progress:
I don't think she heard the giant Dylan room, that the first thing she heard
was a lacklustre rock concert.
But if her half-formed elven ears could not take it in
the deaf girl might have felt the rumblings
of those mumblings, soft bones
wobbling when the water waved
and formed waves in her brain.
Does it offset my decision
to skip last-chance Leonard Cohen, packing her along, one month old?
It will be another thing shared between us, a shared regret,
I hope, which sounds like a lyric:
we share skin, regrets, and lobeless ears,
hers still wrinkled and unfolding.
October 3, 2011
Excerpt from essay about a dear friend
The status of women and subversive feminist plots were generally the main topics of conversation. Much of the time, it was angry and dead serious. On weekend mornings she'd call from her dining room table, "Karen, have you read the paper?" Which of course I hadn't, because I was still asleep, but she'd read me the entire article on the phone to enlighten me, an article about extremist theocracies or female circumcision or anti-feminism-spouting television divas or the most recent bigoted remark by a Reform Party MP, and once we'd commiserated I'd of course be talked into coming over for a coffee, and since I'd just gotten up coffee would become breakfast (to be fair to myself I would often stop at the Tim Hortons which was conveniently located between our buildings, and pick up some assorted danish, which I usually ended up eating most of because, and she wouldn't say this either, she was watching her weight), the day would wane on and eventually she'd whip up some pasta and vegetables for "lupper", then the rum and coke would come out, and sometime after dark I'd wend my way home claiming I'd go to the library tomorrow (I never did finish my Ph.D.).
October 2, 2011
October 1, 2011
"On the side street the bus finds the dip where showers collect
& sprays coins of dirty water up..."
& sprays coins of dirty water up & down my legs.
Spring a currency none of us can spend"
- Ariel Gordon, "Nine months: swelling & swollen," from Hump
September 30, 2011
"Dying people can teach us this most directly. Often the attributes that define them drop..."
- Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird
September 28, 2011
September 27, 2011
The story goes that the last time Bob Dylan was here in...
The story goes that the last time Bob Dylan was here in Winnipeg, he went to visit Neil Young's childhood home. Only, it's not a museum, which surprised him. The guy who now lives there had a surprise too.
September 26, 2011
"Still after sharing a one-sheeted tight bed months
you doubted my motives for wanting photos of..."
you doubted my motives for wanting photos of us,
even full-clothed tourist shots in museums—"
- A.J. Levin, Monks' Fruit
