Necromantic Serendipity or Serendipitous Necromancy

You can't say that I’m not generous given I’m letting you decide what the actual title of this piece is going to be.

Essentially, either title will describe what occurred for me today. I was busy at work doing my level best to make some kind of sense out of the mountains of paper that I can’t seem to get rid of. Seriously. Some of this stuff is years old and hasn’t seen the light of day from the oubliette that is my drawer in some time.

What do I find? I find three drafts, first drafts mind you, of poems that I wrote within the last six or seven years or so. The last poems I’ve written.

They’re not very good. Not too many poems, or anything that I write for that matter, are all that good at first blush. And I must confess to a certain eagerness to be finished with anything that I write, which is why the revision process, vital to the overall writing process, is something I spend some time on. More than some, but I expect less than most. Certainly far less than someone whose name might be familiar to you: Leonard Cohen. Mister Cohen, and he’s certainly Mister Cohen to me, is notorious for his predilection towards revision. I can’t say for sure, but I am not confident that he has actually finished any of the poems he’s created, despite having published several.

I’m not so sure that any poem is ever really truly finished. Maybe they’re dormant, awaiting the next nuance, the next slight adjustment just there that’ll make it resonate more accurately what’s in its creator’s braincase.

It’s difficult to not fiddle with what you’ve already written. There’s always a way to shorten it, lengthen it, make it better based on new experience, skills, desires – I do it all the time with older pieces I look at. Some are salvageable, some are not, and sometimes I fiddle the heart and soul right out of a poem.

That’s going too far, by the way.

Once you go too far with a poem, in my experience, it’s difficult to find your way back. It’s not like drinking Tequila, where it’s necessary to do your shots in pairs – one to go out, wherever out is, and one to come back. One of my colleagues from Northern Ontario gave me that advice years ago when I was in the army, and anytime I’ve followed that advice, I’ve had no problems, regardless of the quantities of pairs involved. If there’s a way to fiddle with a poem “in pairs”, I have yet to discover it.

But I digress.

These poems I find; like I say, they’re not very good. Poetry is not as well understood or as well appreciated by folks as it may once have been. I’m trying very hard not to have rose coloured glasses with respect to writing, and poetry specifically, which is why I won’t maintain that there was more readership and more appreciation of writing and poetry in the seventies. I want to assert that, but I clearly don’t have any proof. More importantly, I can’t be arsed to research it because, ultimately, it’s beside the point.

The point is that I don’t really believe that many Canadians today know how rich Canadian poetry really is. I can take that one step further and say that I also don’t think many Ottawans realize how rich the poetry scene has been in Ottawa.

Good gravy. Come to think of it, I’m not sure I know how to read poetry being written by folks today and I’m one of the people who like poetry. Conventions and styles change.

All I can tell you is if I like what I read. And that also applies to anything that I’ve written. When I first started transcribing one of my new found poems at lunch today from the manic illegible scribble that I discovered this morning to the current slightly less manic slightly less illegible scribble I'm typing off of, my first impressions were that it was absolutely horrid. A real stinker. A rotten tomato. Bad news.

You get the idea.

And then I worked my way through it, getting some help reading the old illegible scratchings by some folks that have to read my modern day illegible scratchings. In the process, I was surprised to discover profanity in it. While I am unbelievably profane in my casual conversation, I’ve generally, in the past, kept profanity and poetry separate. One surprise followed another: at the end of transcribing the poem, I didn’t think it was a total loss.

It might even be salvageable. I’ll need to work on it. And until the next iteration is worked through, I’m presenting it here, warts and all.

Warts and all, I say.

And I mean it, too. It’s really very demanding for me to actually do this, mainly because the damned thing is sub-par. But it’s an exercise I want to engage in – a public exercise to be sure, and I have no answer key that’ll help me find my way to the correct answer. If there’s a correct answer, because although I think there might be an actual bona fide poem in here, I can’t be sure until I hack at it a bit and revise it.

It’s been challenging to say the least to not touch it. There are obvious flaws with the piece, some techniques that I’ve done or attempted that clash, are awkward, embarrassing, pretentious and obviously stale. I’m leaving it as discovered, as written (no doubt in about ten minutes or so) so that any changes I make are transparent to one and all.

I expect to spend longer “fixing” the thing than I did actually writing it.

I’m not that good a handyman.

With that, we’re off to the races…..



Le Tombeau de M. Holliday

So hell
here I am in Glenwood Springs
for a wedding
so naturally I figure I’d visit
the grave site of Doc Holliday
it’s liable to be a once in a lifetime kind of thing.

Walking up that great fucking hill to the cemetery
along a right piece of shit path
I encounter
a lady walking her dog in the crisp blue sky morning.
I nod good morning but they keep their distance
not easy up there
and I amble on by.
They seem to relax and hurry on down
anyone can tell I ain’t no fucking dognapper.

It’s tidy his grave site in a cemetery
out of every western ever seen, read, held or heard
there’s even a deck of cards some thoughtful
has left,
but hey, no body.
Doc isn’t there and I’m getting a little riled
thinking what a gyp
looking around it’s just me and the cemetery trees
and I reckon it don’t make much never mind that he’s
there or not.

Same difference to the rest of us.