I've lived with my best friend for a cumulative five years. We've had homes blocks from both oceans that touch Canada's toes, but spent the majority of our cohabitation in one kind old house in Toronto's annex. We aren't big partiers, but have been known to throw hullabaloos here that make everyone laugh sideways. One February when we were undergrads we had a Valentines celebration. We had prepared a piñata but couldn't figure out how to hang it up. A small team of guests drunkenly bashed it open on the floor atop a spilling pile of hermaphroditic porno magazines that someone had brought to craft magnets out of. This was the crowning ceremony for the main event - a poetry reading where we recited our worst love poems. Encouraged were those written in high school or earlier. The idea was to take something that wasn't “good” and appreciate it for how raw and emotionally elicit it was. My favourite piece was a narrative rhyme-scheme written by the fifteen year-old version of a flower of a friend about the experience of giving her first blow job.
I've read lot's of “bad” poems that I've admired. I've also read many poems that have disappointed me - in that they relied too much on prettiness, or used language so well to say something that didn't feel particularly new. Of course everyone has their own preferences, but there are many “fine” poems that I find haughty or gushy and really turn me off. I guess that's why I write poetry, because I see more than your insecure, brainiac older brother in it. It's got wide shoulders, and pink lips. I don't want it to have a lame-o reputation.
To me poems are the delivery of special moments. They are the bird's eye view of a great story, or the magnification of an integral flash in one. They are songs without melodies. I like when they prickle like record static over and over in my head. I like to watch the words up close, look at their curves, see where they shake or stay still.
I spent much of this year living in St. John's, Newfoundland, a place of fairies, and forest ponds, and kind eyes. I had fallen in love with the city when I moved there on a whim the summer before, and had returned to it with a hasty lack of self-control. As much as I wanted to be there I was finding it a struggle to be actively “different” everyday. I didn't talk like a Newfoundlander, think like a Newfoundlander, joke like a Newfoundlander, or drink like a Newfoundlander. The culture there has defined itself through hundreds of years of invasions, isolation, and heartiness. I often felt like a lone mainlander living in a foreign country that was considered part of my own in name only. All winter I came home from my day job and sat in my living room in the dark, craving stories from my home, written by poets who had developed similar ticks and cultural reflexes to my own, as a result of exposure to concrete, admirably hard-working Toronto. When I visited my family in December I grabbed books to bring back to the rock, titles by Stuart Ross, Zoe Whittal, Tara Michelle Ziniuk, Elyse Friedman and Pasha Malla - contemporary Toronto writers, who are funny, and frank and weird. Such books weren't stocked in the Memorial University Library where I scouted out reading material in St. John's.
After that trip I decided to move back to T.O. I felt like I needed to find a sturdy place in my mind so I could reflect. I missed the comfort of being somewhere where everyone belongs because no one seems to more than anyone else. I came to Diaspora Dialogues to explore this feeling, and am working on poems that shriek and giggle about the wide-world of Toronto. Though I'm sure I will continue to move around this country and live beyond it too, I'm glad for this time to write about home from home.
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