Phinder Dulai : Gaza

 

 

 

 

Carpet …

Rebar twisted up from the broken blocks of cement
against the pock marked road
jagged edge and broken brick
a neighbourhood tumbles
once full with emergent eyes

estuaries dry for a millennia

Silted into the moment
blood for water
Crimson hands pull life from broken slabs

Another explosion
Of the heart
Another pale phosphorus cloud
Sending streaks downwards
Multiplies outwards
Igniting bodies
Its edges of sand and debris aflame
Quietly drifts above the sheltering tents
While the sky smiles with sunshine
Another loved one pulled from a hole
large enough to move a baby through

Dirt lanes replace the roads
These webs of movement carry
The dead eyes of the living
Hills of devastation where homes were
Fragments of glass and metal
Where the shop window of the local grocer
Lie on the ground and are embedded
In bodies that move no more

Amidst these grey hills of refuse and debris
The ones who remain continue their broken walk
Moving south, forced south east, forced to coastal beaches
Forced south east and landing in Rafah

that yawns over the unliving
Who haunt those they have left behind

It starts and continues
Like the rain that rivers
through into pools of clay water
Every day, day in and day out
Moving those who remain
to seek shelter
In battered hospital compounds

And yet
A child’s fingers carry the kites to the top of the concrete hill
Or the sand hill close to the sea
Threads reach upward into the sky
Triangular blues, crimsons, and pinks
Paint the sky a beautiful wave
And the children play in the summer sand
Knowing they have lost everything
And yet… even now they smile
the smile of hope

And if a child were to ask the sky why here?
The sky will tell you
Because you exist.

 

 

 

 

 

Phinder Dulai is the author of three poetry books: dream/arteries (Talon Books) and two previous books of poetry: Ragas from the Periphery (Arsenal Pulp Press, 1995) and Basmati Brown (Nightwood Editions, 2000). Phinder toured dream / arteries extensively in Canada and the USA. He read from dream / arteries at the Asian American Writers Workshop in New York City in 2015. In 2024 he was commissioned by the Surrey Art Gallery to write a series of ekphrastic poems for the Ghost In The Field exhibit by visual artist Jagdeep Raina. His work has appeared in Canadian Literature, Cue Books Anthology, Ankur, Matrix, Memewar Magazine, Rungh, The Capilano Review, Canadian Ethnic Studies, Toronto South Asian Review, subTerrain, and West Coast LINE. He regularly review books for Rungh Magazine and currently serves as the Poetry Editor for Canadian Literature Journal. He lives in Surrey, BC.

Stan Rogal : How Does a Poem Begin?

How does a poem begin?

 

 

 

 

 

How does a poem begin? Wait a second here: what actually is a goddamn poem? I mean, really? The Cegast Academy offers: Poetry is a form of literary expression that uses language and literary devices to evoke emotions, convey ideas, and create aesthetic experiences in the audience. Popular features of poetry are diction and imagery, figurative expression, condensed use of language, deliberate use of words and expressions, rhyme, rhythm and sound devices.
          Hm, seems like much of this is also used in prose, by many writers, while certain poets avoid many of these same devices as being too formal and chi-chi literary. Jack Spicer said “a really perfect poem has an infinitely small vocabulary.” Aram Saroyan has a one-word poem: “lighght.” Then, of course, there are the concrete and visual poets who tend to eliminate the written word altogether. And the hybrid form. Phil Hall snagged a GG with his book, Killdeer, a collection he labeled ‘essay-poems.’ Michael Ondaatje’s book, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid is a mix of poetry and prose, the total of which was listed as poetry. Same for W.C. Williams’ Patterson. Then there’s the tricky prose poem. Don’t get me started.
          Particular songwriters have been called poets: Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Patti Smith, Leonard Cohen…in a manner which seems to infer an elevation in artistry, whereas we know that there is much poetry produced which is regarded with disdain by the literati, that of the Hallmark Greeting Card or Cowboy variety. When Chaucer wasn’t writing his literary masterpiece, The Canterbury Tales, he relaxed writing dirty limericks: poetry, or no?
          Here are a few words from the wise:
— Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought [Audre Lorde]
— Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads. [Marianne Moore]
— Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful. [Rita Dove]
— Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own. [Salvatore Quasimodo]
— Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility. [William Wordsworth]
— Poetry is ordinary language raised to the nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words. [Paul Engle]
— Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. [Carl Sandburg]
— Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. [T.S. Eliot]
          Heavy, if not slightly confusing, even contradictory, though I tend to lean toward Eliot, personally. I remember reading something by someone — sorry, the specifics elude me — who said that a postmodernist text is a text in which the term “postmodernist” is used. It seems to me that, in a similar fashion, a poem is anything anyone calls a poem.
          Bottom line, if anything can pass for a poem these days, then any subject — no matter how grand, fabulous, or trivial, from a war in the Middle East to the contemplation of one’s navel — can be used as grist for the poetry mill, and it’s really up to the inclination and caprice, often, of the particular creator. Now, whether or not that once-finished poem finds an accepting and positive responding audience, is a whole other kettle of fish fry.
          Roses are red, violets are purple…
          There, I’ve begun. Go ahead, you take it from here.

 

 

 

 

Stan Rogal lives and writes in Toronto along with his artist partner Jacquie Jacobs and their pet jackabee. His work has appeared almost magically in numerous magazines and anthologies. The author of several books, plus a handful of chapbooks, a 13th poetry collection will be published in March 2025 with ecw press. Co-founder of Bald Ego Theatre and former coordinator of the popular Idler Pub Reading Series.

Jacob Braun : on free jazz

 

 

 

 

 

Some who listen to jazz say “listen to the notes they’re not playing” and I never know how to do that. It is like Pierre in Sartre’s famous café scene, where the man rushes into the café looking for Pierre but Pierre is not there. Suddenly there’s an absence in the café, but the absence doesn’t happen to Pierre, it only happens to the man looking for Pierre. Pierre experiences no absence. Pierre is where he is. I’m always looking for Pierre when I listen to jazz.

Instead of Pierre I thought of looking at jazz visually as intaglio. In intaglio part of a substrate is cut away to hold ink which then creates an image on paper. Absence allows the image. It is the opposite of sculpture where something comes out at you. Some jazz comes out at you but often jazz is like intaglio, carved out of the unmusical unity of notes, a cut-away you look into with your ears.

Then there’s free jazz. In free jazz all of the notes are permitted. How can I listen to the absent notes when all of the notes are permitted? How can I write the feeling of not being able to hear the absent notes? How to “outline” absence? One way would be to write a word by writing every other word except the word. I’m not sure anyone would publish that and I know no one would read it. Not with words, then, but letters—each word a series of letters intaglio’d out of the alphabet. So, to spell a word in “free jazz” I use every letter other than the letter that it is.

Now how does that all sound?

 

 

 

 

 

Jacob Braun is from Thorold, ON. He writes both experimental and traditional poetry. His debut chapbook Tryangles (Trainwreck Press, 2020) is a history of philosophy in trilingual anagrams. Other writings have appeared in The Antigonish Review, The Malahat Review, filling Station, Brittle Star and elsewhere. He is working towards his first book.