Like many of us, I had trouble writing anything new during the pandemic and lockdown. I was able to read a lot (and sleep a lot) but didn’t feel like I wanted to textually record what I (and we all) was experiencing.
At the same time, I was greatly disturbed by the fascist occupation of Ottawa by the trucker convoy in the Winter of 2022 and followed the news there daily. There was also a lot of helplessness, and activism appeared futile. My partner did her best to disrupt the convoy’s attempt to occupy Toronto, whereas I would walk our neighbourhood removing and destroying fascist posters and propaganda.
By early Spring 2023 it started to feel that the tides were turning. Most reasonable people were realizing that the convoy was backed by American and other dark monies and was actually more about attempting to overthrow a moderate to (occasionally) progressive government than anything about vaccines or travel restrictions.
At this point enter Elon Musk with his hostile and politically-motivated takeover of Twitter. I had never been a huge user of social media (a proud abstainer from Facebook for more than 19 years) but I did enjoy using Twitter as a newsfeed and for keeping up with poetry publications. As each week passed, and changes were made to the algorithms and safety measures, and fascists returned to the platform (and were aggressively promoted) the app became more and more unusable. For a time I tried to challenge the right-wing discourse, but the trolls kept mushrooming faster that you could hit the block. So I decided to darken my account. It was time to kick Twitter.
Once that happened I felt a great lightness. I didn’t need the save the world (as if I ever could) but I still wanted to respond to events, and hopefully rally the forces of good. It was time to start writing poetry again! [insert “laughing until you cry” emoji here].
As usual I needed a constraint, and I went back to one that I had used as the opening sequence in American Standard/ Canada Dry— that of measuring by number of words (of any length) rather than by accent or syllable. So the aforementioned was 10 stanzas of 10 lines of 10 words, a form I thought I might have invented until Lisa Robertson told me that Zukofsky had used something similar in 80 Flowers.
For Mayday I decided, as there were 31 days in the month, to write one 31 word poem for each day of the month, reflecting on current events and on my life. So a daybook of sorts, but also a constrained autobiography as I approached my 53rd year.
The sequence opens with the death of Gordon Lightfoot on May 1st, and soon becomes a meditation on the use (and misuse) of nationalism. Other concerns include the aging male subject, and looking to Modernist moments of crisis as possible examples for resisting fascism (Surrealism vs. Celine for example). Some more obscure moments might be when I take on Eugen Gomringer’s sexist poem “avenidas” or when I rewrite a song by Big Dipper (the 1980s college rock band from Boston)—but hey, my tastes are nothing but catholic.
The poem ends with my 53rd birthday on the horizon. I happened to be listening to the first Ramones album and fixated on the atypical track “53rd and 3rd”—an intersection in New York where Dee Dee Ramone did sex work, but also a song where the exploited takes revenge on male predators . It’s strange moment of hope, where Dee Dee takes out his razorblade, but it somehow cheered me, and made me want to stick around on this planet for another year: “I’ll see you there.”
A final note on the poem’s title. May Day, as two separate words, signifies both the arrival of Spring, but also International Workers’ Day (with all its Marxist implications). When you lower the case and put the two words together it becomes the international signal for distress: mayday.
So let’s reverse that order, which is my intention for the poem: a call for help, a call to arms, a call for hope.
Stephen Cain lives, teaches, writes, & walks with gratitude in Tkaronto. His newest poetry collection, Walking & Stealing, is forthcoming from Book*hug Press.
Photo credit: Sharon Harris