These opening lines have been ringing in my head the last few weeks, from Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities:
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way –
As we get another late-for-Victoria light dusting of snow, I am aware that we humans probably feel that each moment in time is the best, or worst, or both. My obsessions in this current time spin in the air like a dozen tossed coins, so many possible sides: my son’s future, global warming, pandemic, species extinction, convoy of truckers, culling of wolves, rising white nationalism, acidification and warming of oceans, Indigenous rights and water, war in the Ukraine. Tensions. Such tensions. Horrors, really.
And then, in amongst all of this, I have a new book out in the world. A book that contemplates this being The Last Show on Earth, for humans at least. It considers neurodiversity through poems of my son who has Autism and Prader-Willi Syndrome, and my mother who had dementia. It considers racism and my own white colonial heritage and privilege. It considers animals, love, and loss.
A new book, of course, means online book launches, and all the hope one places in such things – that it will reach readers, that it will communicate and be heard and read among all the other noise. In contrast, here is a quiet poem, where perhaps the owl finds me simply another source of noise:
Spotted Owl as Desire
After Robert Bateman’s Mossy branches, Spotted Owl
True owl. Old-growth owl. Nocturnal
owl. The clock turns by you.
Barking owl. Whistling.
Hooted notes fall from mossed trees.
Old-man moss. Knight’s Plume moss. Creeping-
feather moss. Nothing human here
except me.
Your eyes a lure. Shoulder-
-hunched owl. Padded in your brown
mottled cloak, what are you
tracking? Fogged-in owl, muffle-
feathered owl, patience is
your domain. Bone-lichen
feathered. Lour-browed.
Old strix. What are you
making me into?
Indeed, it is a strange time to produce another tangible human artifact. But I am a strong believer in poetry. It is the kind of artifact I want humans to leave behind. It speaks differently to prose – it enters readers in alternate ways – image, line, metaphor – and so has power to create new ways of thinking, at least for a moment.
As I write in “After the eye, the butterfly” inspired by P.K. Page’s poem “After Reading Albino Pheasants” where I address Patrick Lane and P.K. page:
…
I thought we’d go down differently, you know.
Thought you, the great writers, would live
through everything, like Hemingway and
Fitzgerald, distant-drinking in some villa. Survivors
of influenza and each other. Where are you?
Here, we’ve stepped too close to the wild, pressed
our thumb to the scaled wing, flattened everything,
swallowed the moon. And in all of it, poetry persists, your
songs
run rampant in this suddenly silver world.
Poetry persists. It must. Look at all the poems being shared on social media these days recalling other wars and other horrors to remind, to bring us together, speak truth, and raise our thinking as Ukraine is attacked and its civilians take up weapons.
The following poem was posted to Facebook on February 25:
Epitaph on a Tyrant
by W.H. Auden
Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.
*
When I became the city of Victoria’s poet laureate in 2015, I had the intent of raising awareness about the plight of the Pacific Ocean. I felt certain that this political role of laureate would somehow enable the work of poetry and ecology to come into better focus, to be seen, read, and heard. It's not that I think I failed, but that poetry’s effect is unmeasurable.
Certainly, the creation of the anthology Refugium: Poems for the Pacific brought the ocean into focus and created moments of beauty and grief for those engaged in the conversation. In the meantime, sea stars returned, Victoria built a proper sewage facility, plastic bags were banned in many cities, and NGOs began cleaning oceans of plastic. The book didn’t create these actions, of course, in fact it is impossible to measure the effects of poetry, but perhaps it was a part of the change. Refugium led to Sweetwater: Poems for the Watersheds which brought together poets who are interested in fresh water and how to protect waterways, shorelines, and all the ecologies that exist in those spaces – forests, birds, amphibians, and even humans and cities.
Perhaps it is possible that poetry can inspire by creating a growing web of conversations, like algae spreads, millions and millions of spores blowing in wind.
The Last Show on Earth is my first full collection since 2014 when As if A Raven was released with Palimpsest Press. It seems an awfully long time, though two anthologies reflects how busy I kept. I launched the new book on February 24th, the day after Russia’s Putin declared war on Ukraine. I read two poems inspired by two poets from Odessa in Ukraine, Ilya Kaminsky and Anna Akhmatova. The poem “Washing Dishes: Reading Anna Akhmatova” was set several years ago when I visited Lithuania, but suddenly the content of the poem shifted to be saying something about the current war. I recall with utter clarity the T.S. Eliot award night when my then professor, George Szirtes read his poem “Water” shortly after the massive Tsunami hit Southeast Asia in 2004. The poem was inspired by a photograph of water being flung overhead, but the poem also captures “The hard beautiful rules of water,” as houses and beaches and people were devastated by water.
I am a believer in George Orwell’s notion that a writer must implicate themselves in their writing, show their faults and errors. The Last Show on Earth is full of human error, and personal truths – my mother’s illness and death, my son’s special needs and growth, a long marriage, occasional breakdowns, and climate change – all holding hands and spinning around under the great and decaying circus tent. I don’t want to say we are all like circus characters – fragile strange beings – but also, I am saying that.
The work of poetry and literature is the author’s focused thinking, the act of writing, line, metaphor, image enacting communication. The personal, the political, the global, and the historical. Poetry is about living in a moment that is not the best nor the worst but is hard, frustrating, and slow to change.
To write poems is to hold grief and hope on the same side of one or many of those spinning coins I spoke about above. It is to witness, to write, edit, curate, and create. It is to hold multiple moments at once: that all will burn and that the small squirrel will hold.
Sad sonnet with extra couplet
Sad simple sonnet
I do not want to write you—
scrap paper with bird scat on it.
Silence is a plucked duck and a screwed
world of stink and yellow skunk weed.
April a month to love or die doing it.
Windblown hair, tangled reeds,
mud trails, tramped voles and biting
ticks:
sad all year, we are sadder yet here—
April—what hungers, what sprouts to grow
every scented thing from last year,
damp from a winter of whine and woe.
Crucified trees show beauty’s hunger:
a river cut off where the dead slumber.
Ah,
but a sonnet must have a turn.
Not
to worry, everything here will burn.
and
Stillness: year’s end
after Mats Anderson’s photograph, Winter Pause
Even the snow stills
as colour fades, thins to silver
whispered in frost. Movement
is movement held. Motion is breath
as the small squirrel stands—
wind and dust and shadow—closes its eyes.
Its small necktie of white,
its eyes lined in moon and rime,
paws held, hold still.
It twitches neither in nose nor whisker,
lets breeze on rose-tipped ears flutter,
lets sound travel on the steps of light.
Hold still. The year turns.
Its turning is this quiet.
all poems here are from The Last Show on Earth, Caitlin Press, 2022 by Yvonne Blomer
