Colin Dardis : First Real Poet: Mark Madden

 

 

 

 

Quite possibly, the first poet I met was some local scribe, now made anonymous through the erasing power of time and memory, drafted in by my primary school to spend an hour or two showing disinterested children the magic of words, the kind of work I now find myself occasionally doing. If this even did happen - and it's the kind of thing we do a lot of here in Ireland, because we have a lot of poets desperate for freelance work, and in my experience, teachers will happy push the school to pay for anything that allows them precious time away from their class – I have no recollection of it. We certainly studying poetry, but in primary school, this mainly involved getting the class to paint pictures of scenes from the poems. However, it taught us that words could rhyme with each other, and that was my gateway into poetry, writing silly verse to amuse my friends in class.

It wasn't until my early twenties, a year or two in to university and years removed from nonsense rhyme but still churning out juvenilia, that I even considered seeking out the company of other poets. Poetry was something people wrote in their bedrooms: once in a while you might venture to reveal a page to a friend and seek their opinion, but otherwise, it was a solitary pursuit. Yet somehow, I got wind of a poetry night happening in the city centre. Culturally, poetry didn't exist in Belfast outside of the universities. The idea of a cafe hosting a poetry night, and that people might consider this as a viable form of entertainment for a Friday night, was a radical idea.

Arcadia Coffeehouse existed in a now burnt-out small shopping arcade in the city's Cathedral Quarter, nestled amidst a rotating menagerie of enterprises; tattoo parlour, a second-hand record store, a local crafts shop, the offices of a film festival, and other vaguely bohemian ventures. All small-time operations, all surviving month by month. To get in, we have to bang on the shutter at the back entrance of the arcade. It is not long into the new millennium, but most of Belfast has yet to figure out a thriving nightlife. All the other businesses nearby are shut up for the weekend. Stepping into the coffeehouse however feels homely: Arcadia wasn't like the clinical, mass produced coffee chains we experience how; it had tables with hand-painted designs, mismatched chairs, local art on the walls instead of prints from Ikea, yellow walls that gave the impression of a beach hut rather than an eating establishment.

This is the first time I've ever been to any kind of poetry night, so I have no frame of reference to how it works, what I'm supposed to do, or what people expect. We sit on a sofa that faces out towards the mall passage, and spend the night with our heads turned round, looking over the back at the sofa to the readers, who stand up to read near the counter. The host is Mark Madden, who runs the place with his Canadian wife, Debbie. Immediately, I can see he is everything I how know a host should be: enthusiastic, welcoming, talented, and just a bit mad. At times, his delight in being able to share this space with fellow poets makes his eyes shine, and I can almost imagine him foaming at the mouth in frenzied pleasure. He is my first live experience of a poet in the flesh, and will become a template for my own emceeing aspirations.

When it comes my turn to read, I am nervous: having have a childhood speech impediment, and attended speech therapy classes all throughout primary school, I do not enjoy public speaking. In fact, I hated having to stand up in front of a class in school. So why am I here now? Because poetry somehow has driven me here. I read out my poems from the comfort of the sofa; I face the audience, but I don't get up from my seat – nerves have pinned me down. I read three or four poems, and am thanked by Mark. Afterwards, someone comments that their enjoyed my work, and hoped that I would come back. It is that small compliment that is enough to ensure this new love affair will continue.

I don't remember much about who else read, but patching together dates and memories from other poets, we can identify that poets I still know today, over twenty years later, were in the room that night. So meeting my first poet immediately led to meeting other poets. The next month, I return and read, and Mark generously invites the unknown entity of me to submit to a poster poster project that he is putting together, to be launched at the first ever Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival. I am invited also to read at the festival. Somehow, I am now a public poet. Thank you, Mark.

 

 

 

 

Colin Dardis is a neurodivergent poet, editor and sound artist. His latest collection is What We Look Like in the Future (Red Wolf Editions, 2022). A pamphlet, With The Lakes, is forthcoming with above/ground press. His latest album is Funerealism (Inner Demons Records, 2022)  www.colindardispoet.co.uk

Catriona Strang : Mothertongue : #FirstRealPoet

 

 

 

 

 

My first experience with poetry, and by extension with poets, was at or on my mother’s knee. Mum read to me at least twice daily during my early years, and at bedtime for years after that, with a happy attention that was otherwise diffused (I’m the youngest of five, and our mum was most often occupied either with housework and otherwise fulfilling the endless needs of others or away at work). Books offered not an alternate reality, but what I understood to be reality itself: a shared joyous connection, my mother’s full attention, made available in language, through collaborative reading. Because our reading and our pleasure was collaborative – we would discuss the books we read together, expand on them, laugh about them, I would add as she read; they infused our lives (years later, I was to experience this same glorious mutual immersion reading to my own kids).

I grew up steeped in language, in the rhythm and cadence of nursery rhymes and lullabies, in silly, joyous wordplay, in the kids’ books and folk tales (not to mention the snippets of songs, shards of Shakespeare, and strange British sayings I didn’t understand) that are inextricably entwined for me, within me, with my mother’s voice (my father rarely read to me, although he did share our pleasure in language). From infancy, I experienced language and maternal caring as fully enmeshed. I mean this literally – I experienced the sharing of books, of language, as a foundational caring act and one of the richest expressions of love, that deep well of parental love where I was fortunate enough to dwell in my youngest years; consequently, language is still awash with love for me, no matter how harsh, angry, or despairing.

To state this is not to idealize the mother-daughter relationship, nor the English language and its violences, for the contradictions both present are woven into the fabric of the linguistic connection my mother and I fostered, as they were into our relationship in general. Perhaps the most fruitful of these contradictions for me was a strong thread of resistance. For the repressive patriarchal and often colonial instruction carried in so much of our reading was actively subverted by my experience of maternal power, by my mother’s voice undercutting, in the very act and conditions of her delivery, the message she ostensibly conveyed. So that while I experienced in our shared reading the bliss of maternal care, I also absorbed an understanding of the layered complexities always present in language and the rich possibilities those nuances present for resistance from within – possibilities my mother did not articulate, but clearly demonstrated.

 

 

 

 

 

A founding member of the Institute for Domestic Research, Catriona Strang [photo credit: Spencer Williams] is the author of Low Fancy, Corked, Reveries of a Solitary Biker, and Unfuckable Lardass and co-author of Busted, Cold Trip, and Light Sweet Crude with the late Nancy Shaw, whose selected works, The Gorge, she edited.

She frequently collaborates with composer Jacqueline Leggatt, and lives with her two grown kids on unceded xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səl̓ilwətaɁɬ Lands.

Stan Rogal : POETIC IMPRINT : #FirstRealPoet

 

                               …I wander around the house like a sewing machine
                               that’s just finished sewing a turd to a garbage can lid.
                                                         — Richard Brautigan

 

 

Let’s begin way back in the wild and woolly ‘60s, Vancouver, Fourth Avenue and Kitsilano Beach being a Mecca for young people high on The Age of Aquarius, free love and loco weed. It was during a grade eleven English class that we were descended upon by a student teacher who was the perfect TV image of those hippy-dippy days: young, slim, blonde, blue-eyed, tanned, gorgeous west coast type wearing one of those loose-fitting, scooped-neck, tie-dyed cotton muumuus and beads and sandals and recently met with a bummer broken leg accident on a Whistler ski trip, so sporting a hip-high plaster cast covered with gaudy coloured flowers, peace signs, paisleys, and goofy well-wishes and florid signatures from friends and family. All the boys in the room were immediately smitten, and if not in love, at least, in lust. All the girls were, in their own way, equally intrigued.

It was this young student teacher who dropped a vinyl album on a portable record player and explained to us the close relationship between song and poetry and how this was epitomized in the works of a certain Mr. Leonard Cohen.

And how could I not identify her with Suzanne and how could I not place my hand upon the thigh of poetry and not feel the thrill?

Well, things were not quite that simple. At least, not yet.

I recalled part of a poem I had memorized as an assignment in primary school that went: “In the seaport of Saint Malo ‘twas a smiling morn in May, when the Commodore Jacques Cartier to the westward sailed away. In the crowded old cathedral all the town were on their knees, for the safe return of kinsmen from the undiscovered seas.” I caught myself wondering about the adjective “smiling”. Do morns in May ever “smile”? Or was it poetic license? Or had I made an error and exchanged one word for another? I couldn’t remember, just as I couldn’t remember either the name of the poem or the poet. At any rate, the poem certainly had a sing-song quality to it that probably made it more approachable and easier to memorize, but it (and Cohen’s), were a long way from the stuff that was on our current curriculum and I had a difficult time trying to imagine the poems of Coleridge or Wordsworth or Blake being put to music and sung, never mind being listened to by present-day teenagers.

I bought the album, enjoyed the songs, but stayed away from the poetry.

Years later, banging out short stories and having some success seeing them published in small mags, I registered at Simon Fraser University as a mature student where I took classes with leading poetic luminaries such as George Bowering, Lionel Kearns, Robin Blaser and Roy Miki. Stanley Cooperman, the only (reportedly) Jewish west coast Surrealist poet had already suicided, though his spirit and myth lingered among casual hallway and pub conversations.

Where were the female poets, you might ask? Teaching at UBC for the most part, or hanging out in the paradisal Gulf Islands with Susan Musgrave, eating raw oysters fresh from the beach, drinking dirty martinis (maybe), not frequenting the isolated scrabbled rock that was Burnaby Mountain.

That said, it was a minor poet, d.h. sullivan, the author of two slim volumes from Fiddlehead Books, who guided me toward poetry, telling me that applying myself to the compact form would help to tighten my prose. It made some sense. He also pointed out the books of Richard Brautigan as an example of a poet who was a master practitioner and whose work I might find both interesting and educational.

The strange thing is, I had run into the Brautiganesque style many years prior. My former wife and I had been vacationing, driving down the west coast toward Tijuana (another coincidence given that Brautigan had written a novel titled “The Abortion” that recounted a trip by his two protagonist lovers to Tijuana, though for a substantially different reason than carefree sightseeing), and stopped in San Francisco where she picked up a copy of “The Pill Versus the Springhill Mining Disaster” and began flipping through it. She read me I Feel Horrible, She Doesn’t and laughed. I like these, she said, they’re funny. And short. And sexy. And I can understand them. Like most of us, she had been raised on long, deadly-serious poetry replete with dense allusion, metaphorical significance and vague euphemisms used to blanket both genitalia and the sexual act itself.

Not that Brautigan’s poems are simplistic, because they aren’t. They’re generally loaded little gems that are finely crafted with a sharp mind and a deft hand. Pretty astounding given he was (by all accounts) a total fuck-up in his personal life, a social misfit, and an eventual suicide.

My ex read more poems aloud as we drifted further south. It was fun. After that, the book got stashed away somewhere (likely packed and disappeared along with her) and I forgot all about him. Now, here he was again, dug up and dusted off and set to lead me into the mysterious ways of poetry, grasshopper.

I had obviously hit my “critical period” of imprinting. I set out like the proverbial “duckling out of water” to put together a collection of my own, reading and researching other poets, other styles, other voices; imitating, borrowing and stealing as I went, in order to develop — perfect? — my own particular/peculiar version of the ars poetica.

And so it goes. And so it went.

Quack!

 

 

 

 

Stan Rogal — along with his artist partner and their pet jackabee — operates out of the small hamlet commonly known as Torawna, just west of The Hammer. He is the alleged author of a handful of books, plus several chapbooks (some of which were published by above/ground press, thanks!) An autodidactic intellectual classicist [reformed]. Speaks semi-fluent English and controversial French. Also: personal confessor, truth teller, and psychic investigator — no job too small, cheap rates, call now for a free estimate.