James Lindsay : on Labour Day

 

 

 

It started as something to do while I waited in airports.

Which, as I write this, after more than a year of barely leaving the city I live in due to the pandemic, seems a very long time ago.

At the time I started to write these poems I was a new father and had also just started a new job, so I had little time to write. I was looking for ways to eke out time whenever I could. I was also thinking a lot about two books I had been reading by Bernadette Mayer and Joshua Beckman. Mayer’s poetry/prose hybrid, Memory, gives an occasional entry for every day in July, 1971, and in Beckman’s Lives of the Poems lecture he discusses poetry as not only a daily practice, but of the everyday as something worthy of an occasional poem.

An airport seemed like the ideal place to start trying to write again as airports are places where everyday is occasional. For the workers that service the space, it’s a day like every other, but to so many of the people who visit the airport, it’s an occasion. They are going to fly in an airplane! This is a special day. There’s also a lot of waiting in sitting in airports, which are both good conductors for writing.

So the fist few poems were travel poems as I moved westward through Canada for work, in a bright, chilly spring, with a stop in New York City on the way home. Then, after I got back, the poems became about going to galleries, visiting friends, the summer, and my neighbourhood in Toronto. At least that’s how I thought about them at the time.

Now, looking at this chapbook, I like to think of this as a sequence of suspicious pastoral poems. Pastoral in that I was consciously thinking a lot about nature, flowers, rabbits, clouds, and water. But suspicious because these things became their own characters, untrusting of one another, and I of them. Suspicious in that unconsciously I was dealing with the anxiety of being a new parent and trying to work full-time, and, as the sequence moved along, the accountability I acknowledge as a settler on the land I was objectifying in these poems. And pastoral because I was very tired and wanted to let the surface and its glamour be the one to do the explaining without me have take a chance and gaze deeper, longer.  Let the pretty parts do the heavy lifting; I was been up half the night with a teething toddler.

In the end, the razzle-dazzle of the surface actually goes deeper than I thought it would. These poems became more honest than I intended them to be.

 

 

 

 

James Lindsay is the author of the poetry collections Our Inland Sea, Double Self-Portrait, and the chapbook Ekphrasis! Ekphrasis!. He is owner of the record label Pleasence Records and works in publishing.

James Lindsay, Dennis Cooley, Gerald Hill, Paul Pearson + Carrie Hunter : virtual reading series #21

a series of video recordings of contemporary poets reading from their work, prompted by the Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent cancellations, shut-downs and isolations; a reading series you can enjoy in the safety of your own protected space,

James Lindsay : “Tinnitus”

James Lindsay is the author of Our Inland Sea, the chapbook Ekphrasis! Ekphrasis!, and Double Self-Portrait. He is the co-founder of Pleasence Records and works in book publishing. He lives in Toronto.

Dennis Cooley : “the prairie muse explains her role :” from The Muse Sings (2020)

Dennis Cooley was born in Estevan, Saskatchewan, and has lived most of his life in Winnipeg, where he has been active in many parts of its literary life. Latest books include departures, the muse sings, the bestiary, and coldpress moon.

Gerald Hill : “Brother B., Order of St. Benedict, Monk,” “Page of Train” and “When I Become Poet Laureate, Part the Last”

Gerald Hill just published his 7th poetry collection, Crooked at the Far End, from Radiant Press. A two-time winner of the Saskatchewan Book Award for Poetry, he was Poet Laureate of Saskatchewan in 2016.

Paul Pearson : “The Assayer” and “Discourses and Mathematical Demonstrations Relating to Two New Sciences”

Paul Pearson is the co-founding editor and chapbook designer for the Olive Reading Series. His poems have appeared in Descant and Event, and the anthology Writing the Land: Alberta Through Its Poets from House of Blue Skies. Raised in a mining town in the mountainous back-country of southeastern British Columbia, Paul has since relocated to Edmonton where he lives and writes with his wife and two children. Lunatic Engine is his debut collection.

Carrie Hunter : 3 poems from Vibratory Milieu.

Carrie Hunter received her MFA/MA in the Poetics program at New College of California, edited the chapbook press, ypolita press, and was on the editorial board of Black Radish Books. Her forthcoming book, Vibratory Milieu, comes out January 2021 with Nightboat books, and she has two previous full-length collections, The Incompossible, and Orphan Machines, both with Black Radish Books. She lives in San Francisco and teaches ESL.