Kim Fahner : She, by Kirby

She, Kirby
Knife Fork Book, 2024

 

 

 

Kirby’s newest collection, She, documents the strange ways in which time passes. Each poem is a snapshot of a specific moment, the way a morning might be “gray full of dread” with “Nothing pretty on the corner,” or how a writer’s desk inspires with its “Violet buttercups periwinkle,/fiesta bud vase pink lemonade/frames purple love chunk…fuchsia/glass pickle ornament Dior #753/Suzanne’s owl pendant.” In “Where did the car go?”, the speaker notes the “basil mint thyme balcony/gone to flower clutter constant dread/fresh crisp salad or a pasta with/greens olives.” The poet also conveys a clear sense of place, writing of the “Row of ‘cottages’ along St. Nicholas/one of their favourite streets between/Irwin and St. Mary’s” and marvelling about “how such/quaintness exists but a block off Yonge.” By using such detail, by creating such a strong list of images, memories, and moments, Kirby immerses the reader in the world of She.

The pandemic plays a role in this grouping of poems, and it’s refreshing to see a poet who doesn’t simply avoid writing about it. After all, the pandemic happened, rife with its lockdowns and increased isolation, and affected all of us in terms of how we all move through the world. That period of time has refashioned us all, whether we are brave enough to formally acknowledge it or not. In “26 February 2021,” there’s a reflection on politics: “Government response/to COVID. Am I bitter?/ No. Like yourself, observant.” In “Give me a minute,” the speaker says, “Mask breathing becomes laborious/pause lower it so their nostrils have/direct air only to remember when her/mother had to do the same.” That sense of time blurring during the pandemic is also present in “Weekends never used to be,” as days slide into one other without a necessary calendared boundary.

The way time, and society, changes is also addressed artfully in She. In one poem, the title blends into the start of the piece: “She misses//future thinking/her pre-internet brain.” In “How we got [now] here” and in “To the Newly Certified Grief Counsellor Who Thought My Mother’s Visitation Was Their High School Reunion,” the speaker ponders the inane and illusionary nature of social media. This notion is further emphasized in “Last Licks,” when Kirby writes: “Everything an Event./An insta spot.” Better, She suggests, to take greater care in noting the details of the life we are living each moment—not to dull its ebbs and flows—than to worry so much about producing superficial and highly edited posts and reels. If everything these days on social media is about producing content, then what is being missed is the fleeting nature of life (and time) itself.

She is about managing to get up in the morning, to be strong enough to face the pitfalls and disappointments—to be open, fragile, but to also be tenacious and persistent. To survive. In “What’s that?” a tea bag is compared to a tumor, something bigger than what was expected, a notation to remind us of life’s very temporary nature. In “Kindness,” there is a reflection on wrongly identifying and misgendering someone who has slipped under a bus. Checked on after a fall, the speaker notes a “stranger politely mistaking me for sir.” Then, in poems like “Sun-brewed,” “Middle of nowhere [Ohio],” and again in “Last Licks,” there are references to childhood, to memories and losses that are further underlined by the death of a parent. Time loops backwards and forwards in an ancestral fashion, a vortex of grief and mindfulness—and of our own mortality, as well.

Kirby refines some of the themes and philosophical questions found in previous collections, including thoughts around searching for identity, growing into oneself, the too quick passage of time itself, as well as the desire for connection in a time that often seems so disconnected. What stands out, though—always—is the idea that we should marinate in our experiences, taking note of what makes them bright and brilliant, even through the rougher times in our lives. These poems sing not just of basic survival, but of a flourishing and kind of blooming, too, and that makes She a must-read book of poems.

 

 

 

 

Kim Fahner lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario. Her latest full collection of poems is Emptying the Ocean (Frontenac House, 2022) and she's just published a poetry chapbook, Fault Lines and Shatter Cones (Emergency Flash Mob Press, 2023). She is the First Vice-Chair for The Writers' Union of Canada (2023-25), a member of the League of Canadian Poets, and a supporting member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada. Kim's first novel, The Donoghue Girl, will be published by Latitude 46 Publishing in Fall 2024. She may be reached via her author website at www.kimfahner.com

Shane Schick : The Dark Unwind, by Paola Ferrante and :), by Derek Beaulieu

The Dark Unwind, Paola Ferrante
Knife|Fork|Book, 2022

:), Derek Beaulieu
Anstruther Press, 2023

 

 

 

Give someone who normally doesn’t read much poetry a chapbook. The first question they might ask – either aloud or to themselves – is, are they happy poems, or sad poems? As Paola Ferrante’s ‘The Dark Unwind,’ (Knife|Fork|Book) and Derek Beaulieu’s 😊 (Anstruther Press) make clear, the best work doesn’t usually offer a simple answer.  

Ferrante, for example – whose bio describes her as a writer living with depression – makes clear from the outset that she is ready to confront every kind of low. Titles like “When the Reason For Down Is In Your Nature” and “Bogeyman” practically speak for themselves, but part of the poems’ power is in how they evoke fear and dread of potential darkness as much as they illustrate more palpable sources of misery.

“I worry whether I’ve swallowed a cloud,” she writes in “Monophoba Is Not A Fear Of Flying.” Elsewhere, in “Over 35,” she asks, “If I am a witch, will you drown me?”

The Dark Unwind also captures feelings of helplessness amid depression, the continual cajoling and efforts to dismiss the pain, the uncertainty around the future when you’re in the midst of depression and the attempt to simply survive it. The chapbook also underscores the role of poetry in the latter task, such as this passage from “The Sun’s Setting Soon”:

. . . I bite into a crisp apple. Here’s
a flower. I breathe
in. Breathe out. Smell the harsh

Soil without my glasses my skin
came alive, filtered
through waterfalls. Maybe senses
are all we’ve got . . .

It befits these poems that they are so clearly narrated by what feels like a consistent “I,” whether the speaker is actually intended to be Ferrante or not. 

In Beaulieu’s work, meanwhile, we zoom out from the intimately personal into what feels like a curated history of the smiley face. This includes a possible origin story involving researchers from NASA, appearances in Banksy’s graffiti artworks and even some repurposing by Nirvana for some concert merch.

This chapbook is not explicitly labelled as poetry, and while Beaulieu has a long track record in the field as the past Poet Laurette of Calgary and Banff, they don’t even come across as prose poems. Instead, it’s more the way the series of paragraphs are organized and details juxtaposed that makes them feel like something greater than a historical record that might have been published in a traditional essay form.

Then there are the moments where the language simply sings, such as when Beaulieu describes the smiley face sonically as a “dit-dit-dah,” and when he notes the time programmers began allowing them to be rendered on a computer:

The galaxial greeting continues to transmit through the keys that we type.

A recurring thread through Beaulieu’s chapbook is the fact that smiley faces have often been used to communicate or represent something far different than happiness. There is the Smiley Face Gang, believed to be responsible for the deaths of 45 young men. There is Boss Smiley, the head of a right-wing militia in a comic book. Appearances – even of a familiar symbol – are often other than what they appear.

This is just as true in Ferrante’s chapbook, which, without directly naming it, conjures a smiley face in her poem “But You’re Okay By Schmidt’s Pain Scale.” Here she records a litany of advice, apparently from well-wishers who tell the speaker they should cheer up, get out of bed or take a bath (though all of these pick-me-up activities quickly take a menacing turn). The smiley face masks onlookers who just want the speaker to get over it already.

In “After Midnight,” Ferrante evokes the title of her chapbook, writing about how she has “danced with the wolf, a slow waltz into the dark unwind.” It’s worth pointing out that dancing, traditionally, is a happy activity, with waltzing in particular the kind of dance you might do bearing . . . a smiley face.

Over the past number of years there have been a number of anthologies and collections that deliberately select poems based on their positioning on the happy-or-sad spectrum. The most marketable are obviously those on the positive side, such as The Path To Kindness, edited by James Crews. For poems dealing with depression, the options feel nearly infinite.

When you read both of these chapbooks in conjunction, however, you begin to realize how well they demonstrate the poetic opportunity to explore the extreme ends of emotion – and that a sign of great writing is how well it allows you to traverse the many intersections between them.

 

 

 

 

 

Shane Schick’s poems have been published in Juniper: A Poetry Journal, Paddler Press and many other publications. He lives with his family in Whitby, Ont. More: ShaneSchick.com/poetry. Twitter/X: @ShaneSchick

Michael Sikkema : An interview with Michael Flatt

Small Press Intravues:
Occasional Interviews with writers working and publishing in the small press ecosystem

Interview #15: Michael Flatt is the author of I Can Focus If I Try (Knife Fork Book, 2023), Absent Receiver (SpringGun Press, 2013), and with derrick mund, Chlorosis (The Operating System, 2018). His poetry has recently appeared in Seneca Review, Cleveland Review of Books, and Denver Quarterly, and his critical work has been published by Annulet Poetics, Configurations, Polygraph, and Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui. He is the founder of Low Frequency Press, which publishes book-like objects of marginal aesthetics, and Threadsuns, a teaching press at High Point University, where he is an assistant professor of English.

Michael Sikkema: I want to talk a little about your book I Can Focus If I Try from Knife Fork Book.

How did the form of this manuscript come to be? It's pretty central to how a reader understands the content, more so I'd argue than a traditional form, because the reader has to make sense of it as they go along, and then they realize that they are inside of it. Sonnets don't have that effect, I'd argue. How did this form find you? 

Michael Flatt: I've always felt most interested in form at the level of the page and the book. I think it had something to do with growing up on people like Eigner and Duncan, where form is very plastic but also central to meaning-making. My first book, Absent Receiver, featured pages split into columns with poems moving apart and together gradually through the text. My second, a collaboration with derrick mund, was a bit simpler, but moved from long prose blocks to shorter and sparser verse as once moves through it. For I Can Focus If I Try, I first conceived of a book-length form: On the recto pages, the lines would accrue one by one to gradually fill a 31-line prose block. The number of lines would then retract to a single line on the last page of the book. On the verso pages, the text would gradually snake around the page’s main text box until the book’s mid-point, where the rectangle would gradually break apart. The center spread would show a solid text block on the right and a text box rung around with text, like a slip-cover box and its lid that would fold out of and into one another when the book was opened and closed. The manuscript’s organization has since been modified, but this was the project’s genesis.

I decided the subject matter for a book driven by what happens in and outside of the text box would be the mediation of our inner and outer lives by the senses, particularly vision. The ways in which our interpretation of the world is further mediated by digital tools features prominently in the manuscript, as does the way we experience reality more directly, in the tenderness of human contact and the violent ways that contact is often removed. The complex and recursive interplay of bodily and digital mediations and traumatic or healing events in our lives is the source of the manuscript’s spiraling energy.

Its form—now broken into four sections to allow for more manipulations of the text box and page as signifying tools—calls attention to the content of the poems, linking the visual patterns of the pages and sections to the codex structure of the book itself. The question of how what we see is perceived according to the way we position ourselves in relation to the seen object becomes tangible as the reader is forced to turn the book to read vertical and inverted lines of text. This movement brought me to the manuscript’s title, Parallaxis, which could be read as the axis around which a mobile perspective moves, or as a kind of infection brought on by the transition between two points of view.

Sikkema: Are you familiar with the exercise that Paul Klee used to generate motion on some of his canvases? Using a line and a circle and then morphing both until there were no proper lines or circles resulted in some amazing poem paintings and painted prayers. The tone of your work is completely different from Klee's but the process strikes me as very similar and equally powerful. Were you thinking about Klee or am I just connecting nonexistent dots?

Flatt: While I hadn't thought of Klee's work or process in relation to my own, I can certainly see where you're coming from. His famous quote, "Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible," speaks directly to what I hoped to create in ICFIIT: a poetic work about vision that makes seeing itself visible, even palpable.

I see some resonance as well in the interest in archetypal forms: the line and the circle in his painting and the text box and the codex in my writing. Like Klee, I'm trying to reimagine my relationship to these forms, to explore and at times obscure them, at times subvert them. In my case, I have to admit I'm not exactly ahead of the curve. Shaped poetry goes back to Simias of Rhodes through George Herbert, Mallarmé, Apollinaire, and the explosion of visual poetry in the twentieth century (to say nothing of the centuries of "pattern poetry" that was written across the globe as described by Dick Higgins). Even as recently as in the last five or six years, square poems by Layli Long Soldier and Anselm Berrigan have been published that look a lot like those in the last section of ICFIIT. So while I love the comparison with Klee, I would never consider my work as novel as his was (not that this was your assertion).

But there is one more similarity I'd love to discuss, which is Klee's interest in collage. I've started calling my approach to content "notebook collage," in an attempt to capture both a commitment to dailiness and messiness (over so-called "craft" and attempts at mastery) and a disjunctiveness that comes from my desire to imitate Ashbery (shared, I would argue, by most "experimental lyric" poets). 

Sikkema: Do you think this manuscript/you practice a poetics of gesture? I thought of Stein when your speaker says, "“This is the everyday order of things: the line necessarily denotes movement, the block denotes a structure, which can accrete or erode, sometimes both.” and "consider yourself beheld, though I’m seeing not objects but sight.”  Specifically I think of Tender Buttons and "A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing. All this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling. The difference is spreading."  Both your manuscript and Stein's teach us how to read them as we go along, and what the texts are DOING ends up being what the texts are SAYING. I would argue that Berssenbrugge's poetry works similarly and it occupies a space as epigraph in the manuscript. Is the poetics of gesture important to you?

Flatt:  I think this brings us back to Klee, in a way. The Mei-Mei Bersenbrugge quote, "I sense structure spontaneously form as when crossing a room to greet you, what I say forms," feels a bit like art's making visible rather than being visible. Readers of poetry necessarily find discussion of form and structure self-referential, and Stein is interested in the poem/word as an object that exists both in and outside of its referentiality. If there's a gesture in common between my work and Stein's, maybe it's pointing around to the other side of the word, in her case, and the page in mine. It's not so much a finger pointing at the moon, but a hand leading you behind it, to see an eclipse. In my case, the goal is to make the body-object of the book feel palpable in the reader's hands. I've always loved the little semiotic flip that occurs when reading concrete or digital poetry, when the medium emerges as the message, and while my work is clearly not concrete poetry, my hope was to incorporate that element in the book's formal constraint. 

Sikkema: I appreciate that you point towards the super interesting history of visual and concrete poetry. In my walking around definition, I include all the folks you mention and also William Blake, many comics and graffiti artists and on back to whoever made all the cave art that we're still lucky enough to enjoy (from a distance). Some other writers' names popped in to my head as I was rereading your manuscript and checking out your answers: Jen Bervin, and Inger Christensen, as well as Ron Silliman. I was thinking mostly about Bervin's Silk Poems, and Silliman's and Chistensten's use of the Fibonacci sequence. 

Rather than the at-a-flash reading experience of some concrete poetry, I experience a slower realization that your project is alive and constructing itself as I read it. I should mention that autocorrect changed that to constricting. 

Can you say more about the "notebook collage" approach? Is it a way of getting away from your usual approaches? Of getting away from a narrow set of intentions? 

Flatt: I would definitely include Blake and some collage and comics artists in the discussion of visual poetics. The line gets a bit blurry (and arbitrary), of course, but the work that Bianca Stone and Sommer Browning (and you! Tonic!) are doing in the poetry comics genre is brilliant, and there are people like Lynda Barry, David Shrigley who don't use that moniker but I would argue fit in the discussion for the ways they involve the reader in meaning-making. 

And definitely, the formal gestures of ICFIIT are distinct from those of concrete poetry, which is why I would use the broader, more capacious category of visual poetry. Perhaps it's a bit of a misnomer if you can't always see anything visually compelling on a single page, but oh well. I like that the project falls between the cracks of these definitions.

Notebook collage is just a name I've given to my approach of assembling poems from fragments in my notebook. Sometimes poems come out fully formed, but it's unusual for me to create anything that feels worth reading that way. I love cohesive, thematically driven poems when other people write them, but often, if I make an effort to do so, I become heavy-handed. By cherry-picking lines and placing them beside lines from other writing sessions, I can do a better job of varying tone, diction, types of imagery. Of course, one of the pitfalls is that a longer project can start to feel arbitrarily composed, so I kind of have to mix in something a bit more narrative or discursive at times, so that the reader can feel there's at least a touch of cohesion.

Sikkema: Also you've done a great job of laying out some of your influences and interests, but can we go deeper there? For me, the notecard based chance operations of Jackson Mac Low are equally important to my idea of Poetics as my creative reading of the Sunday comics before I was literate. I noticed that if you understood punctuation to some extent, you got the "story," even without the words. Can you tell us about influences both early and more recent? 

Flatt: Early influences! Oh man. Well, comics were big for me as well. I was and am an ardent reader of Calvin and Hobbes. I was big into Marvel comics in the early and mid-1990s. I've kept up with that interest a bit, dipping my toes into graphic novels and even some manga (Berserk!) every so often. I'm teaching a course on what I'm calling graphic texts which uses a lot of comics and graphic novels, but then leaps off into visual texts like Blake, bpNichol and digital poetry. The discussions around form and content are very similar. 

I would also say popular music. I started writing "lyrics" for a band that I hoped to someday be a part of when I was 15. Then I finally started thinking of them as poems, and took a creative writing class in college. That class was with Myung Kim (I being the luckiest of duckies), and we pretty much started off with Oppen, and away I went. But as I was developing as a writer in college and even in the MFA, some of my biggest influences were lyricists in indie, metal, and hip-hop. I loved Pedro the Lion, Okkervil River, mewithoutYou, Every Time I Die, Aesop Rock, MF DOOM, and a host of others. I wrote poetry for a while like I was trying to come up with a good line to chant during a breakdown in a hardcore song. I think, for better or worse, that's still somewhere in my mind when I'm writing.

My poetic influences are in many ways not that unusual for experimental North American poets. Oppen and Niedekcer grounded me in a focus on the significance of the everyday. Ashbery serves as a model for balancing associative leaps and discursiveness. I fell in love with Celan and Vallejo thanks to my professor Sidney Goldfarb, who passed away this year. In terms of visual work, I feel more equipped to follow the example of Susan Howe, but Steve McCaffery's "Carnival" is always in mind. (The couple of pages excerpted in Poems for the Millenium first caught my eye when I was 19.)

Lately, though, I've been pretty obsessed with Lisa Robertson and Michael Palmer. This is a bit of a return to my roots, as I read both of them with Myung first. Robertson is so strong when it comes to sticking to an approach, "betting on herself," as they might say in sports radio. You can feel the depth of her research, the range and intensity of her reading and her general project feels like it exists outside of the contemporary trends. And Palmer is helping find faith in the lyric again. I also just got Nate Mackey's Double Trio for my birthday, so, I have the next couple years of reading blocked off. 

Sikkema: As a poet and a sometimes publisher, I find myself a little lost sometimes in the quickly changing literary landscape. On social media, I see magazines shut down fairly regularly, and I see A LOT of constant hustling to try to figure out how to fund the mag or find new readers. A lot of the free and easy web design that was around a while ago seems gone? Social media algorithms bury any non-premium Press posts, and straight up tell you that that's what they're doing. People seem to be buying less poetry while simultaneously thinking that they should be paid for all the poetry that they publish. Now, granted, I've been pretty out of the loop, and mostly chasing my three year old around playgroup and the parks, but that's my take from this POV. What are you seeing of the literary landscape from where you're standing? What is it like to be an editor for you right now?  

Lastly, can you drop links to recent work of your, recent work that you've published, or just recent work that you'd like to share? Our readers and I would appreciate it. 

Flatt: I hear those frustrations. I've been working to increase the footprint of my press Threadsuns, and it is difficult. There is no guarantee of finding your audience. We do the work on social media and through email marketing, but the best and most useful work is still done in person. Readings, festivals, even the dreaded conference-that-shall-not-be-named. It's the occasions for conversation that keep me coming back. At the moment, I have some institutional support for Threadsuns, but that is not guaranteed going forward, and so those other issues you raise are significant to me. You have to be savvy on all fronts, not just with editorial. Distribution is an ongoing dilemma. Marketing requires a set of skills I am still developing. These business considerations are of course odious to almost anyone who values poetry. I got into poetry in part because it exists outside the market. But while there's no way around the entanglements of capital, I do think there are more ethical and more interesting ways of navigating them. I think a lot about ways to come closer to the approaches Counterpath--where I used to work--and their community-center ethos and the DIY-without-sacrificing-scale approach of Ugly Duckling. I'm trying to embrace the idea of a semi-, or better yet, pseudo-professionalization in the name of creating a larger space for the kind of books I think are badly needed these days.

As for links: First, my book (if you're in Canada and if you're in the US). Here's my website's poetry page, with information about my previous books and online publications.

Here's Threadsuns (new book by Elizabeth Robinson out now!) and here's Low Frequency. 

Thanks again for dedicating your time to this interview. I know how valuable it is. It's the only thing we have!

 

 

 

 

Michael Sikkema is interested in poetries, mycology, gardening, drumming, music, and puppetry. He may want to collaborate. He certainly wants to go for a walk.

 

 

Kim Fahner : More Than One Homage, by Maureen Scott Harris

More Than One Homage, Maureen Scott Harris
KFB, 2022

 

 

 

 

Knife Fork Book always publishes beautiful poetry chapbooks. If you’re a Canadian poet, you’ll likely agree that they’re gorgeous to hold in your hands, and then open to read, because it’s about quality all around—inside and out. Read Maureen Harris’s More Than One Homage and slip into the found poetry of a farmer’s diaries. Harris has taken her source material from a dear great-uncle’s farm diary for the first part of the collection, and then continued with a series of poems that pay homage to Robert Kroetsch, Philip Whalen, Sei Shonagon, and Lyn Hejinian.

The end of the first section in the chapbook finds a note which explains the context for the pieces which have just come before it. The first poem, “Will’s Diaries: how to begin,” is a primer for how to enter the collection. Harris writes: “Start where you find yourself,” “Begin with the traces,” and “Disturb the silence of/the blank page.” Start there. Then consider the thought-provoking question: “How do you grow a past?” Apply it to your own life and family history.

The poet continues with a factual list that describes Will: “born in 1891   grade 3 education.” Then, a pointed list of January 1^st dates that cover the New Year’s Eve turns of years from 1930 to 1936. Simple, ordinary jot notes of a life, really, with mention of chores, small dinners, and going to gather wood for a fire. Simple notes, but ones that would ensure survival in a time that was much harsher than the one in which we live  now.  Through this first piece, italicized bits of text are borrowed from Robert Kroetsch’s work as Harris creates a poetic waltz on the space of the page. There is a back and forth here, a call and response that has a sweet, nostalgically meditative tone to it.

The following two pieces of the initial poetic triptych are “Will’s Diaries: Wood (Winter)” and “Will’s Diaries: Clare’s black calf died, a Pastorale in 11 Months.” In the second of the three long poems, Harris diarizes Will’s life, using bits of found poetry to create her new homage to him. Each morning is a routine, an echo of previous ones, with nothing new. Here is a list of common chores that just need doing, no matter what else happens in the course of a day, from “fix stable” and “fetch hay” to “chop oats” and “fetch flour” to “kill pigs” and “fix hen house.” Reading the poems made me think of the infamous William Carlos Williams poem, “The Red Wheelbarrow” with its lines “So much depends upon…” On a farm, everything is dependent upon everything else. Nothing is ‘unto itself’ or in a silo. In an age of pandemics, there’s something comforting about that, the notion that—once upon a time—people seemed more aware of how cause and effect might work. They were not connected by the internet and social media, and perhaps were much better off as humans because of it.  

The second part of the chapbook is a series of poems that pay homage to Philip Whalen, Sei Shonagon, and Lyn Hejinian. Structurally, the first part of the collection is a call, perhaps, and the second part is a response, like a ‘Marco Polo’ call between two children in a summer outdoor pool. These last three pieces also use list of clear, sharp imagery. In “Go Ask Alice,” there is a visit to see the ballet. At the end of the evening, audience members spill out into the street as “the wind iced into us       we didn’t wait/for the light     clutching scarves hats scuttled/across the street in the pause between cars.” In “Signal to Babble: for Joe Burns, Audiologist,” there is an homage to sound, and to how our ears work, first in hearing, but also in how we listen carefully to what is said and unsaid—as all poets must. In “Small Homage to Sei Shonagon,” Harris pays tribute to the writings of a 990AD Japanese diarist who used lists in her own writings. Under the sub-heading of “things that circulate,” some references include: “the blood/gossip/newspapers and magazines/breath/money/high-flyers at a party/schoolchildren coming and going/words.” This list runs in a column up and down the page, so the reader’s eyes skip down it, feeling pulled further along into the poem.

The fine attention to detail continues in Harris’s last poem, which is an homage to Lyn Hejinian. The poet writes: “Walking to work this raw morning reading my life as if it were old tea leaves/scattered in a china cup, my mouth makes a silent O…my eyes falling—lighting—upon the large long-necked full-breasted bird flapping/silently past just above the treetops, goose.” The goose “seizes her eye,” carrying it “along the curve of its slow flight.” These are the patterns of the natural world that never stop, and Harris has written of how humans often forget this wonder, this beauty, all the while thinking that they’ll go on forever. They won’t, though, and that’s perhaps the irony of the human ego. In the meantime, we too often miss the beauty because we are too distracted to notice the tiny, most important things.

In its entirety, Maureen Scott Harris’s More Than One Homage is a thank you note to those writers who have come before, who have inspired and intrigued. her It is also a reminder to the reader to be more mindful, to think of how humans work within the grand scheme of things, and to take note of the fact that time passes much more quickly than we’d hope or imagine it does.

 

 

 

 

 

Kim Fahner lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario. Her latest book of poems is Emptying the Ocean (Frontenac House, 2022). She is the Ontario Representative for The Writers' Union of Canada (2020-24), a member of the League of Canadian Poets, and a supporting member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada. Kim's first novel, The Donoghue Girl, will be published by Latitude 46 Publishing in Spring 2024. She may be reached via her author website at www.kimfahner.com