DAVID W. McFADDEN—HERE'S TO YOUR BEING HERE AND HERE'S TO YOUR GOING

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Here's a David McFadden book spine poem. He’s had a form of Alzheimer's for a few years and now he's in palliative care.

Kootenay friends may remember him from his time teaching at DTUC in Nelson back in the early 80s. Why Are You So Sad?, published by Insomniac Press, was nominated for the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2008. It didn't win, but at the reading that preceded the award ceremony he read Secrets of the Universe which is a completely Nelson poem in so many ways—Ward and Baker streets get a mention, so does Hipperson Hardware, and then there's the encounter he describes. Have a listen and you'll see what I mean!

He didn't win the Griffin that year, but five years later he did, for What's the Score?, published by Mansfield Press. A mutual friend says his daughter Jenny would like it if we’d read one or two of his poems today. It’s hard to read just one once you start, but when I opened Why Are You So Sad? and landed on this one, it was just too perfect not to share.


Love’s Golden Splendor

A woman is reading a book called Love’s Golden Splendor
on the bus heading down to the Pape station
And I look out the window and see a young man
pushing an old lady in a wheelchair, quickly,
for it is about to start raining.
Later, on the subway, there’s another woman
reading Love’s Golden Splendor, and a young
African woman, fashionably dressed, sits by herself
unself-consciously singing Billie Holiday songs.

My verses are subtle yet unschooled, amateur but never
didactic. The twentieth century means nothing to me.
This could be ninth-century China for all I care.
Everything is myth. I've wound up all my affairs
and am about to put all my possessions in a boat
and push it out in the bay and sink it. We have never
taken a step out of eternity. I think it's time
for you to come with me. Let's just go
and let's not know or even care where we're going.



 Here's to your being here, Dave. Here's to your going.

David McFadden, October 11, 1940–June 6, 2018

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MID-MONTH POSTCARD POEM UPDATE

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Just past the ides of August and the cards are starting to trickle in. Six incoming to date—the other two in the photo are from my friend Judy who has taken to sending postcard poems year round to a select group of lucky recipients. 

I've received poems about monkeys, magpies, and muses, and cards that have explored themes like barking dogs, the vagaries of getting up in the morning, and one with a poem about windmills and redwoods that begins with a delightful epigraph by David Cronenberg that reads: "I don't have a moral plan. I'm a Canadian." 

I love and appreciate them all.

I continue to write one or two every day or so and have sent off 18 so far, all to people on my share of the list, although not necessarily in order. 

For this year's constraint I'm prefacing my own poem with a line or two from ones written by the seven finalists for the 2013 Griffin Poetry Prize. In some obscure way the lines relate to either the image on the card or the poem I end up writing. (Sometimes the relationship is so obscure even I can't figure out what it is!) I'm doing this in order to become more familiar with the poets in the anthology, only one of whose work I had had any contact with.  (David W. McFadden, this year's Canadian winner). 

Ghassan Zaqtan was the international winner. He's the Palestinian poet who was first denied a visa to get into Canada for the award ceremony because "the reason for the visit is unconvincing". There was also some concern about his financial status. Well, duh, he's a poet. You visa-granting bureaucrats expect him to have a fat bank account? Anyway, happily for all concerned (except, possibly, the runners-up) he won the $65,000CAD prize. As it happens, I really like his poems.

My friend with the chapbook inquiry reports that she's making progress. Glad to be of help! 

And so glad you're reading my blog. Thanks to those who've been leaving comments, too. Keeps me doing it. And keep sending those cards, okay?

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ACTUALLY, AFTER READING THESE POEMS I'M NOT SAD AT ALL

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Why Are You So Sad?

            David W. McFadden

The introduction to this 2007 Insomniac Press collection of David W. McFadden’s selected poems (as chosen, or sometimes fought over by editor Stuart Ross and the author) offers this insight into McFadden’s work. “There are few Canadian poets who offer as much pure pleasure as Dave. In fact, he forbids analysis of his poems.”

It’s been another long day of this, that and the other thing and I don’t much feel like analyzing anything, but I was reading some of the poems in the book and that’s exactly what they do: offer pure pleasure. The one that got to me today is Poem for Jennifer to Read Many Years From Now. He wrote it in 1969 when his daughter was a wee thing, and it’s funny and poignant and slightly horrifying and whimsical all wrapped up into one glorious piece.

This being a fairly big book of poems, I tend to crack it open willy-nilly and read at random, which in this case is pretty much how the poems got laid out anyway; McFadden fed the titles into his computer and had it generate a random order for them—and I just realized I wrote that the poems got laid. Good for them!

In 1940 he writes:

            Poetry thrives when language is allowed to flow

            naturally like a river, brook or creek

            and in order to initiate and maintain that flow

            the poet must stand aside, keep himself

            completely out of it, and once that flow begins

            should it wish to carry him or her with it

            he or she should not resist. In order

            to write poetry one must keep himself out of it

            but once the poetry begins it soon becomes apparent

            it has a mind of its own and if it wants

  to exploit intimate aspects of the poet’s life

  to resist it would be to destroy it.

Words to live by. Talk about a manifesto for poetry!

There’s a Facebook page called Lost Kootenays devoted to pictures of yore taken in the Koots. Someone added one of the Shamrock Grill in Nelson, from which arose a long thread of nostalgic comments. So you can imagine my delight when I came across Margaret Hollingsworth’s Typewriter that begins:

            I was eating scrambled eggs in the Shamrock Restaurant

            and the eggs tasted like Chinese food

            so I said to the waitress I’m a person

            who likes Chinese food but doesn’t like

            my eggs in the morning to taste like chicken fried rice

            and she laughed and said it must have been

            the green onions and suggested the next time

            I come into the Shamrock for breakfast

            I specify that I want Canadian green onions

            with my scrambled eggs or I’ll get Chinese again

            and I said there won’t be another time,

            this is it, I’m a widely respected blah blah and blah

and on he goes, and yes, he gets to the typewriter.

McFadden spent three years teaching at David Thompson University Centre in Nelson at the end of the seventies. I grew up in Nelson, couldn’t wait to leave of course, so I missed all that. But I got to meet him in 2011 when I was in Toronto and he was at a book launch I attended.

At the November 2011 Mansfield Press Fall Launch, Lillian Necakov signs a book for David McFadden 

David W. McFadden is a finalist for the 2013 Griffin Award for Poetry for What’s the Score?, a Stuart Ross book from Mansfield Press. I think it would be just lovely if he won.

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