April is National Poetry Month

Something that seems to have gone virtually unreported here in Vancouver is the fact that it's currently National Poetry Month. For the tenth year in a row, the month of April has been designated by the League of Canadian Poets as our nation's official time to safely abandon all syntax. With dread-locked molskiners milking lattes from Kits to Commercial, it's surprising we haven't heard the phrase 'Poetry Month' more often in the local media. Although Vancouver may not be the poetry capital of Canada, BC Book & Magazine Week is around the corner, the Vancouver Poetry Slam's weekly events have established it as an underground staple, and April will feature a spattering of special poetry readings around the city.

The Parliamentary Poet Laureate John Steffler is offering a poem per week (typically humble next to the American quota of poem/day). I figured the least I could do for the readers of Beyond Robson was share my own love of verse, and I hope to offer a selection of great Vancouver writing as the month rolls on. Suggestions of writers and submissions of work are more than welcome if you've got a piece/person you'd like to see us feature here at Beyond Robson. For now, enjoy some poetry after the jump...

On Monday I plan on profiling a couple of younger local poets, including one who has a new collection being published next week. We'll also be taking a better look at a few of those readings that will be happening over the next month. However, I thought I'd get things started with two writers who are about as well known as locally-based poets get (i.e a small portion of Vancouverites might actually recognize their names...)

I don't just like Earl Birney because he's a fellow Calgarian who ran for the green grass of UBC, he's also one of the first writers I studied in highschool who really connected, showing me what something as seemingly simple as a poem can really accomplish. Birney has been a staple of the Canadian canon for awhile; at the time of his birth Calgary was still part of the Northwest Territories, and he received his English degree here in Vancouver in the '20s. After time abroad, he returned to UBC and helped found the Creative Writing program in 1946, a "legendary" teacher at the school for twenty years. While it was tempting to offer his poem Vancouver Lights, I had to go with a personal favourite, "From the Hazel Bough". Although it's one of his most anthologized pieces, I think it really endures....

From the Hazel Bough

I met a lady
    on a lazy street
hazel eyes
    and little plush feet

her legs swam by
    like lovely trout
eyes were trees
    where boys leant out

hands in the dark and
    a river side
round breasts rising
    with the finger's tide

she was plump as a finch
    and live as a salmon
gay as silk and
    proud as a Brahmin

we winked when we met
    and laughed when we parted
never took time
    to be brokenhearted

but no man sees
    where the trout lie now
or what leans out
    from the hazel bough

Military Hospital, Toronto 1945/Vancouver 1947
-Earl Birney

The second piece comes from Vancouver's very own Poet Laureate George McWhirter. The Belfast-born writer has called Vancouver home since 1968 and was head of UBC's Creative Writing department from 1983-93. Last year he became the first author to be named Poet Laureate to Vancouver. The following poem is actually a translation done by McWhirter, of a poem by Mexican writer Homero Aridjis. Many argue the act of translation can be as fine an art as composition itself, and I found this piece to be particularly effective.

Goethe Said that Architecture

Goethe said architecture
is frozen music,
but I believe it to be petrified music
and cities, symphonies built out of time
concerts of visible forgetting.

Of sounds and silences wrought
into iron, wood and air, he said nothing,
perhaps he spoke about the places of verb
where we live, and that way alluded
to us language factories.

Musical streets didn't concern him either,
although man slips via these walkable rivers
into old age, love, the night,
up to the table, into bed,
like a sonata of flesh and bone.

--Homero Aridjis, tr. George McWhirter

What kind of music do the streets, slum and skyscrapers of Vancouver evoke for you? Bitter responses are welcome.

If you're diggin' the poesy, stay tuned to Beyond Robson and I'll do my best to hit you with a few more posts before the month is up. In the meantime theres a great list of resources over at the League of Canadian Poets that should keep you busy for awhile, as well as full details about National Poetry Month.

Do your best to make April a month for reading, and writing;
with --
or without,
punctuation.

-great header photo by jj look of the BR flickr pool-