Stan Rogal : Ars Poetica : Notes from the field

 

 

 

 

Horace’s “Ars Poetica” (or “horse’s arse” poetica, as some certain academic wits and half-wits have joked over the centuries, and who can blame them, poetry often needing a good kick in the pants to lighten up a bit) is a poem about poetry itself, where the poet reflects on their craft and answers the questions of what, how and why. I am making a similar attempt in this short article, though where Horace spoke of poetry’s affiliation with drama, I concern myself with poetry’s affiliation with music, most specifically, song writing.

In 2025 I had a collection of poems published by ECW Editions (a Misfit book) titled …more songs the radio won’t play… (the title inspired by Canadian singer-song writer Kathleen Edwards’ tune, “One More Song the Radio Won’t Like,” which got me to thinking, yeah, it’s one thing for an artist of any description to create a work, quite another to figure out how to get it out into the world and market it) in which I took popular songs from varying genres and through a series of techniques, i.e.: mixed discourse (including allusions and verbiage from the arts and sciences, philosophy, pop culture, literary theory), plus self-referentiality, plus the insertion and bending of biographical and historical facts (both of the songs and the performers) and tried to alter the lyrics so as to make the recycled songs outwardly unrecognizable while retaining some lingering sense or ‘feel’ of the original. Whether I succeeded or not on any substantive level is up to each individual reader, if and where there are any. What I did accomplish (I think) was to create pieces that were virtually impossible to exist as radio-playable songs. And if it all sounds too heavy and formalistic, I assure you, it isn’t. Wasn’t. It was a joy for me, with often humorous results.

Fine, I won’t bore you with examples. Suffice to say, I put my poetry writing hat back on the hook until I stumbled upon a Molly Johnson CD, titled Molly, where I noticed that the songs in the liner notes were written in block form as opposed to the usual stanza/chorus fashion that I was used to. Later still, I found that the group Chumbawamba had done the same thing with their CD, WYSIWYG, though adding side-note anti-establishment commentary rants alongside their already anti-establishment lyrics aimed at consumer society, vanity culture, corrupt politics and the soul-less entertainment industry: “all dressed up in drag inside a Gucci body bag,” as they so sweetly put it. Very cool, I thought. The songs were written more prose-poem-like, which made me imagine it might be fun to write my own prose poems, but use some song lyric techniques, such as including obvious hooks, bridges, rhythms, and nonsense phrases like “sha-na-na,” “oh me, oh my,” and “hey, hey, yeah, yeah, yeah…” in the mix. I proceeded to write seventy pieces (to date) under the title Borderblur Songspiel, “borderblur” issuing from the notion that I’m blurring the line between fiction, poetry and song, “songspiel” issuing from the Brechtian practice of using actors rather than trained singers to deliver stage songs in a manner more spoken than sung.

The manuscript is currently out in the ether, knock, knock, knocking on publisher’s doors. Wish me (and the manuscript) luck.

Now, most recently, I happened to be watching the local news where two broadcasters discussed using an AI generator program that enabled them to take their words (or lyrics) and by pasting and hitting a few choice buttons as to genre, mood, and gender, the program spat out a song, no knowledge or expertise of musical notation or instrumentation required. Which was perfect for me, since even though I enjoy listening to music, I have no professional training nor natural gift for the category. To wit, I recall having taken ballroom dance lessons with my ex-wife and still had to ask: Is this a fox trot or what? I still had to count the steps in my head. The concepts of 4/4 time and just ‘feel’ the music and let it move you were alien to me. I don’t hear the beat nor does the beat have any dance-like influence on my body, especially my two left feet. Needless to say, the only musical instrument I’ve ever been able to play with any sort of proficiency is the radio. But, I digress. At any rate, it struck me that maybe I could take some of my latest songspiel prose poems and convert them to actual songs. I searched for a program — the simplest I could find, natch, me being a confirmed Luddite — paid my money, and got down to business.

What discoveries did I make, you might ask? Well, to begin, I learned that much of my language — which I felt was perfectly adequate, interesting and presentable in its poetic state — often came across as too highfalutin and pretentious as a song. Add to this the fact that the AI generator had its own limitations, such as difficulty pronouncing certain proper names (‘Ingeborg’ with a soft rather than a hard first ‘g’), difficulty with long words (‘technological’ as one example, which was more-or-less slurred in some versions), a censor that made it unable to generate a particular text, though no reason given (I had to re-read a piece to see if I could discover what might be causing the difficulty and thought maybe the fact I’d used ‘fag’ instead of ‘cigarette’ might be the guilty culprit, and, sure enough, when I made the switch, everything was fine), and most obvious, I could tell that the program didn’t always understand the text’s meaning or intent, so sections became a wash, the program more concerned with making a line scan according to a built-in algorithm as opposed to having the line (or lines) make logical  (never mind emotional) sense: the program didn’t really understand or feel the lyrics to any great degree. All of this suggesting in no uncertain terms that I had to edit my work both to suit the generator’s programming as well as to meet my own needs. And let’s be honest here, I mainly wanted to hear my words come out of someone else’s mouth as a song, so I was willing to compromise and even sacrifice a level (or two) of poetic erudition and creativity. As for the question, “to rhyme or not to rhyme,” there really wasn’t much argument from me: Make it so, number one!

Bottom line, it’s been kind of a fun experiment and I’ve now managed to generate a couple of songs that I’m reasonably happy with. Sure, the music itself is generally simplistic and recognizable, though, at the same time, I was sometimes pleasantly surprised by the inclusion of back-up vocals and instrumental riffs as a sort-of bonus. Anyway, beyond the music, I appear to have come full-circle with this endeavour, first mutilating songs to become poems, secondly mutilating poems to become songs, to the point where now I’m unsure where one form ends and the other begins.

Thanks to Kathleen Edwards, Molly Johnson, and Chumbawamba for their inspiration, albeit unaware. And if all I’ve ended up with is “one more song the radio won’t like,” nothing new there! It isn’t the first time for me and I’m sure it won’t be the last, so, I’ll just continue to futz about and play happily alone in my own little sand box. Rock on!

 

 

 

 

Stan Rogal lives and writes in Toronto along with his artist partner Jacquie Jacobs. 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 was published in March 2025 with ecw press. Co-founder of Bald Ego Theatre and former coordinator of the popular Idler Pub Reading Series.

Kelly Terwilliger : Notes from the Field: Eugene, Oregon

 

 

 

There’s one outside my door, a field,

because I don’t mow it.

Not until later, after the daisies. And the fawns.

 

The daisies come first. Then the fawns around the first of June, speckled white, as if daisy-strewn.

 

It’s late May now: Oxeyes in their glory. Wild iris just gone. Wild roses, full on: small fragile ones.  Invasive stinky geranium on the rampage, and poison oak, profuse, more confident, complacent each dry year we come through.

 

And the grasses: high and plumy, sending off their pollen. (Today the pollen count was 1005. Low is 0-4; moderate 5-19; high 20-199, and very high 200+.

This world! We need a new word.)

 

But it won’t be long until strawberries.

And the end of school, and the migration

of students, all ages, into other ways and places of life.

 

And poetry? Where is poetry in Eugene in June?
 

Summer’s pause is fast upon us:

Windfall’s monthly reading at the library ends in May

Studio 7 won’t host poets again until September

Wordcrafter’s open mic concludes in June

University sponsored readings, done for now

 

Poet Laureate Ada Limon’s praise of poetry and paying attention has come and gone. Kindergarten has concluded the monthly chant of Chicken Soup with Rice.

In May                                                  

I truly think it best                         

to be a robin                                  

lightly dressed                      

concocting soup                     

inside my nest.

 

Now: Hiatus.

Now we all run outside and shout poems into the    blackberry brambles and wind. Why not?

 

Because they keep coming, the poems. The Red Sofa Poets go on meeting and critiquing. I imagine their sofa: velveteen, a little worn, with ample, shapely arms. The Breakfast Poets nibble their morning fruit and write. Tough Crowd, Poetry 1, Haiku-a-go-go. The groups continue to gather. Solitary unnumbered others write and dream in their own secret places. R sings extemporaneous poems alone in their basement apartment; H makes poetry into songs and sings them later in back yard concerts with a back-up band.

 

A local literary magazine, pronounced dead in1992, revived this year: Emergency Horse, revenant, irreverent. Cantering, snorting, munching new grass.

 

The Northwest Review, too, has reinvented itself, online this time. Set to celebrate its first issue, maybe every issue, somewhere live.

  

The Hult Center for Performing Arts will have a second spoken word open mic this month. The first, in January, to rave response. Don’t bother signing up--all the folks left out last time have already filled the list.

 

More unfurling. Poetry happens here in galleries: Karin Clarke, White Lotus, Maude Kerns. The long-established Tsunami Books hosts readings galore, and Hodgepodge, the new bookstore/bar on East 14th, has a regular open mic and a Poetry Book Group meeting on their chalkboard of events. Poetry at The Wine Lab, among the workspaces of Whiteaker Printmakers. Poems performed at the once-church-turned-movie-theater-turned Art House.

People and poems meet in coffee shops (Theo’s, Vero’s, The Lovely Café, Perugino’s, Hideaway). 

At little free libraries perched on street corners, in front of houses.

Poems speak from park benches: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees/and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything/which is natural, which is infinite, which is yes (e.e. cummings)

Poems go for walks. On the name signs of each city park in Eugene:

In the spring at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt. (Margaret Atwood, Lafferty Park).

 

 

 

 

In times of joy, all of us wished we possessed a tail we could wag.
(W. H. Auden, Amazon Dog Park). 
 

(I have to admit: I don’t usually look at name signs in parks. I just arrive and tumble in—but see what I’ve missed? What I get to seek out? What you could too, if you came here? A treasure hunt of poetry all over town.) 

Poetry in a grocery store. On the walls above where anybody really looks. Mostly food and wit, not always poetry, but how about this—

what garlic is to food, insanity is to art

To read it, you have to look up from your grocery list, away from the carrots and beans and eggs and dogfood. Who interrupts an errand and does this?  It feels like stepping into poetry just to pause and look around.

Keep going—and pausing, and looking around—

On the 26 stops of the EmX bus line in West Eugene:

26 poems, engraved on steel.

In the Mahlon Sweet Airport, a self-serve kiosk at the top of the escalators: push a button and poem on a tongue of ticker-tape paper unrolls from a slot.

In the parking Garage on 10^th and Oak: poems, each level.

At the Eugene Saturday Market, a busker sets up a typewriter. Ask for a poem and he’ll type one for you while you wait.

A man at the corner today, needing money, holds up a piece of cardboard: Same problem. Different Day.

 

The trains hoot and ratchet their passing poems.

The shouts of kids in the park, the little hiss of bicycles.

And this week from the bark path through yet another field:

the crickets, chirping in verse.

The black-headed grosbeaks. The yellow warblers.

The pacific wrens in the woods.

At Fern Ridge Reservoir, a multi-vocal poem of toadsnore

and bittern gulping, redwing blackbird, marsh wren, goose, yellowthroat, swallow and purple martin

all reciting their lines above the grasses.

 

(Did you know—researchers have found that some

species of mice sing complex lines in response to each other? This occurs at frequencies beyond human hearing. Such poetry cannot therefore enter these notes with certainty. Let’s just say probably, and not just mice.)

 

Dead snake made a poem on the gravel road.

 

Broken glass another one.

 

And then brief rain descended this afternoon.

 

My friend laughs. There’s almost too much poetry

in Eugene.

 

But no, never—the field is raggedy and wild and full

of complicated life. To sing, to praise, to revel, to lust, to feel alive. To grieve, to rage, to suffer, to heal, to put to rest. To muse, unhitch the mind, to plumb down deep, to send us somewhere new. Why trim back, why limit, why mow too soon? Why should anyone miss the bit we’re briefly in? Because even when it’s hard it’s what we’ve got.

 

I’m still waiting for the fawns. I hope they come again. They might not. There’s always that chance. Things change, falter, die, transform.  But if they do arrive, I’d like to show you the poems the fawns make racing across this field. I wish you could feel them, hear them, these giddy just-born poems-with-legs. I wish you could, for a minute, be them. Here in Eugene, or wherever you are.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kelly Terwilliger lives near a field and a forest in Eugene, Oregon. She is the author of three collections of poetry, A Glimpse of Oranges; Riddle, Fishhook, Thorn, Key; and Night Maps. Her newest book, Endnotes, is a combination of poetry, prose, and paintings. Her work has appeared in journals and anthologies in the US, Canada, and Britain, including december magazine, The Baltimore Review, The Comstock Review and The Amsterdam Review, and she won first place in the Guernsey International Poetry Competition—which means her poetry has also adorned buses and an airport in the Channel Islands. In addition to writing, she teaches and performs as an oral storyteller and likes to swim in wild places whenever she can.

Stan Rogal : notes from the field : Launch of The Wren: poems by Al Moritz

The Wren, Al Moritz
Anansi, 2026

 

 

 

Al sent me an email invitation to attend the launch of his latest poetry collection, The Wren, out with Anansi Press. Al and I have known each other casually for several decades, though I’d say we’ve met up more so at different literary or art events in recent years, by ‘recent years’ meaning post-COVID shutdown, and certainly quite often at the newly established, informative and entertaining, Soluble Fish ‘all-things-art’ talk series organized by writers Beatriz Hausner and Russell Smith, usually at the Free Times Café, though also now occurring from time to time at the venerable Arts and Letters Club.

The launch took place Thursday April 9 at the Flying Books Bookstore on College Street, Toronto, an enterprising enterprise established by Martha Sharpe, formerly of Anansi Press and Simon & Schuster, that combines a bricks-and-mortar bookstore with writing workshops, a mentorship program and a publishing house. There were maybe twenty chairs arranged in the space, though it didn’t take long for those chairs to fill, so that a majority of the audience was standing room only, leaned against the bookshelves and gathered straight back to the store entrance. It was a mixed-age crowd that likely included friends, teaching and literary associates, and former students of Al. Fortunately, there was a functioning sound system in place enabling the speakers to be heard amid the shuffle of feet.

Michael Redhill acted as emcee. He explained that he and Al went back many years as friends as well as having had a teacher/student relationship. Michael was also the editor for Al’s latest collection, all of which added an air of informality and camaraderie to the occasion which extended to include members of the audience. While Michael pointed out Al as an award-winning poet, he also noted that the celebrated and award-winning author Michael Ondaatje was in attendance as well as Karen Solie, who had recently won the prestigious and lucrative Windham-Campbell Prize for poetry. Of course, Michael Redhill himself was a former Giller Prize recipient.

Al read in his usual concise and articulate manner, adding short anecdotes and his own brand of droll humour as he proceeded. He mentioned that he wanted to keep the reading relatively short since it was to be followed both by a Q&A with Michael, as well as by a surprise presentation, whether a surprise for Al or for the audience or both, I wasn’t sure. The reading concluded with much applause.

During the Q&A, banter was exchanged about the impetus for the book’s creation as well as inquiring about Al’s writing process. Michael mentioned that he was always amazed at Al’s ability to remember people and events from years past as well as able to recite poems (or parts of poems) from diverse sources. Al, ever self-effacing, joked that it only seemed that he remembered more than the next person because he tended to dominate the conversations. This tickled the audience, having probably gone through the experience of conversing with Al themselves and — despite his attempt to deflect — felt a similar gobsmacked admiration for his sense of recall.

The surprise arrived with the introduction of four members of the Bengali community who were instrumental in starting up a newspaper-type magazine to include translations of the works of Canadian poets, Al being newly selected. He was, of course, delighted by the presentation. A woman read a poem in Bengali followed by Al’s recital in English. The evening ended with more applause and a line-up to purchase signed copies of The Wren.

It was a convivial, fun, and successful event. Warm congratulations to Al. I’d like to thank all those folks involved with the launch in particular. Big thanks and tip-of-the-hat as well going out to the other names I mentioned above — and to their projects — that keep poetry and the arts scene LIVE in Toronto.

 

 

 

Stan Rogal lives and writes in Toronto along with his artist partner Jacquie Jacobs. 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 was published in March 2025 with ecw press. Co-founder of Bald Ego Theatre and former coordinator of the popular Idler Pub Reading Series.

 

 

Bernie Kruchak : Rooster Town Poetry Shed — Displaying Poetry, Reconciling History

 

 

 

My name is Bernie Kruchak. I’m a Winnipeg poet and writer. Let me introduce you to Rooster Town Poetry Shed, my personal reconciliation project.

Rooster Town Poetry Shed is a streetside poetry box that displays works by Canadian and international poets while honouring the families of the historical Métis Road Allowance community of Rooster Town, who were forced from their south Winnipeg homes in the 1950s to make way for civic expansion. The Métis community had existed on the fringes of southwest Winnipeg from 1901 to 1959.

The shed is located in my front yard, which is a rooster’s crow away from the final shantytown site. For more information about Rooster Town, check out my website, www.roostertownpoetryshed.ca.

Rooster Town Poetry Shed launched in August, 2025, with an illuminated installation by Jennifer Still, Winnipeg's Poet Laureate. Since then, the shed has showcased poems by Susan Alexander, melanie brannagan frederiksen, Cendrine Marrouat, and others, including a series of successive poems by Melanie Dennis Unrau that demonstrate the poet’s process of writing and illustrating her poetry book, "goose.”

During Truth and Reconciliation Week in September, poems by Indigenous poets, Bethany Whiteknife and Terry Copenace (Kinew Gaabo), were presented. To commemorate the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, the shed displayed Cree-Métis poet Duncan Mercredi’s poem that bears witness to the 215 unmarked graves of Indigenous children discovered on the grounds of the Kamloops Indian Residential School in 2021.

I believe reconciliation is essential to a progressive society. I’ve been an Indigenous ally since 1963, the year that the public school in Sioux Lookout, Ontario, was integrated with children from Pelican Lake Indian Residential School. As an 11-year-old, I knew that what my Anishinaabe classmates were enduring before and after school in their residential setting was wrong. These experiences — theirs and mine — have been a guidepost in my allyship ever since.

To help move reconciliation forward, I want to showcase more magnificent and meaningful poetry by Indigenous and Métis poets. If you are an Indigenous or Métis poet living on Turtle Island who would like to display your work in Rooster Town Poetry Shed, I invite you to contact me, and together we can decide how best to display your poetry. Of course, I have one caveat: No pretendians allowed.

Email me at roostertownpoetryshed@gmail.com. Find out more about the shed at www.roostertownpoetryshed.ca. The shed is on Instagram @roostertownpoetry and Facebook @roostertownpoetryshed.

I’m looking forward to hearing from you.

 

 

 

 

Bernie Kruchak is a writer and poet living on Treaty 1 Territory in Winnipeg, Manitoba. He retired after 35 years as a professional writer to become a re-emerging poet, taking up the torch of literature he'd dropped on his career path. He is currently working on a series of concrete poems and a chapbook, subdivision: broken burb poems, that shines a light on the pretentiousness of suburbia.