PHEW! MY FIRST "LONGER THAN 10 MINUTES" READING

Here I am, reading some of my 3:15 Experiment poems. I ended up grouping them very roughly so I read some "getting started" ones, followed by some "people poems" and then some "process (as in about the) poems". Threw in a couple of short, snappy ones for good measure. Read a Christmas poem and a piece of short fiction called "A Black Eye, A Swollen Lip and a Peanut Butter Sandwich", which was published in Horsefly last year (or maybe it was the year before).





Last night I was reading to a small but enthusiastic audience at the Kootenay Gallery, in the small room. Such great acoustics in that building. April, seen here, with the lovely smile, spearheaded the return of Spoken Word, and was in fine form.



I also read a poem for my mom, who was there. I think—no, I know—she enjoyed it, although maybe not as much as the pecan square, recipe from the Whitewater (ski hill) cook book. I swore I was never going to buy another cook book, but this one proved irresistible. I've only owned it a week, and already a couple of the pages are sticking together! But I digress...

After it was over a woman I don't know came up and said nice things about my reading and mentioned she remembered hearing me at one of the readings at Common Grounds last year.

How come compliments mean so much more when they come from complete strangers?

Over and out for tonight.

JOURNEY TO THE FLOOD

Okay, here we go. Yesterday Ted and I drove to Nelson, where "we" kept an eye on Kyran while his mom was working and the trio his dad belongs to (Thistledowne) was singing in the rain. That's Cottonwood Falls exploding in the background. I love watching people notice Thistledowne when they get to singing; even in the pouring rain folk were stopping in their tracks to listen. That's Jesse on the left, Aspen in the middle, and Jessa on the right. Talented bunch! After we got the kids safely delivered home, we headed up the Valley, which, around here, means the Slocan Valley, where the rivers and creeks are full to bursting thanks to the extremely hot weather we've been having; 30 and up Centigrade, which translates to really fukkin' hot. Snowpacks are melting furiously. Here are a few pictures of the Slocan River, parts of which are so close to flooding that people have been evacuated from their homes. We had dinner at the Mexican restaurant in Rosebery. Fabulous food, as always, and the margaritas weren't too bad either. Back in Silverton, there was an opening for a juried art show Ted put a piece in, and when the dust settled (not that there was a lot of dust given the amount of aforementioned RAIN), his gorgeous curly maple platter and dish/stand got the best established artist award. A hundred bucks and a certificate. And I was the one who first suggested he try to figure out how to stand the platter up so you could really see it!

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3:15 EXPERIMENT ANTHOLOGY "BETWEEN SLEEPS" ARRIVED TODAY

(If you click on the subject line you'll get to where there's a picture of the cover)

Woo hoo! It's exciting to get a shiny new book that has one of your poems in it. I'm so impressed at how quickly this project got together. I submitted my work when I was in Sechelt, I believe it was. Or maybe it was Ucluelet. Beginning of March or so, anyway. And here it is, May 8, and it's in my hands.

I'm really very happy with some of the poems I got out of the 3:15 Experiment. Here's what's happened to some of them, so far:

4 will appear in the Fall 2006 New Orphic Review
1 got an honourable mention in a Canadian Poetry Association contest
1 wound up in a chapbook called "Love the Main Course" published by Beret Days Press for The Ontario Poetry Society
1 is in the "Between Sleeps" anthology
1 was short-listed in the United By the River writing contest organized by the Columbia River Writers
2 are in the new Workworks magazine, as part of an article I wrote about the experiment.

http://bcwriters.com/wordworks/2006/spring/Wordworks_Spring2006_web.pdf


All from poems written in the middle of the night, in varying degrees of consciousness.

Go figure!

LIKE THE GIRL SAID, NO WHINING (Poem: INSTEAD)

So isn't it great? She's set up a blog, supposedly for poetry, and then she posts nothing. Nada. Zip. Fuck all. She is in AWE of all those bloggers out there.

She nearly typo'd "bloogers" just now. There's an image. There's the T-shirt. But she digresses, as she often does.

"When I have fears that I may cease to be"... but that's not really the danger any more, is it? That's bloody unlikely, in fact, given the myriad ways one can leave bits of themselves online: hint of an address here; a photo there; quotations from conversations long forgotten—little marks on the trail, mostly meaningless on their own, but with the means to lead a seeker back to the source.

What if she gave a blog and nobody came?

Anyway, back to her infatuation with blogs. However do people manage to keep them up? She can't imagine having the time. Making the time. She's too busy. She's too tired.

She's so full of shit.

What it takes, she realizes, is a commitment to take the time. Which she just took, as it happens.

So here:


INSTEAD

She likes to watch,
Shrouded in mystery.

She likes to dance,
Inhabit the music.

She likes to sing,
Voice rusty with time.

She likes to sob,
Clear the way to silence.

She likes to pray,
To gods you've never heard of.

She likes to tap,
On toe-shoes made of gold.

She likes to melt,
Alchemy-girl, fading to white.