folio : Forty-five Ottawa poets
(Lawren Harris’ “Autumn Forest Glaciated Bedrock, Georgian Bay, 1914-15”)
Through the painter’s eyes, a clearing
lets light in, a slab of rock is scraped bare,
tracks scored into stone. Curls of gold
fall onto this bare table of Precambrian rock.
Imagine the weight of ice as it slid over
the prone body of the earth. Scoured valleys
and hills, sowed generations of mosquito
and blackfly. Water pooled against the flanks
of glacial walls, sediments gathered in hollows.
In one such cavity, a jack pine began to finger
the granite with its shallow and twisted roots.
I haven’t been writing much poetry lately, as I’ve been feverously working on a collection of grotesque, horrific, and weird short stories. One of the shorter pieces, “On a Night Road West of Revelstoke,” will appear this summer in FreeFall Magazine. Other than that, I’ve also been revising a series of interlocked ekphrastic poems.
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DS Stymeist’s newest collection, Cluster Flux (Frontenac Press) was short-listed for the Archibald Lampman Poetry Award. His debut, The Bone Weir, was a finalist for the Canadian Author’s Association Poetry Award (2016). Alongside living with chronic disease (Crohn’s), he currently teaches creative writing at Carleton University. The author grew up as a white-settler member of a mixed heritage family on O-Pipon-Na-Piwin Cree Nation in northern Manitoba (Treaty 5). As former president of VERSe Ottawa, he helped organize VERSeFest, Ottawa’s international poetry festival.
