Another Auction Treasure!

Who'll give me five for his bunch of kids' lp's?

I put up my hand. 

Sold! 

O, the treasure. A great pile of lp's--unscratched.    

So we got out the old turntable.

We've been spinning ever since.

 

Pageturners, A Red Headed Freckled Girl, Northrop Frye, and more...

So yes, I'm obsessed with books and Project Bookmark Canada projectbookmarkcanada.ca as anyone who is my facebook friend might know by now. I will keep posting until month's end. But my obsession will not stop there. 

There's a reason. There's a history. 

Here I am in Moncton, New Brunswick, (once home of literary critic Northrop Frye) , at the beginning my of my magnificent obsession. 

 

 Here is Northrop Frye. 

oops. I sometimes mix them up. No, no--- here is the picture of the statue of Northrup Frye that the Northrop Frye Festival has erected in Moncton. Check them out too.  http://www.frye.ca/index.php/en/toutes-les-nouvelles/50-launch-of-our-2012-2013-season

It's beautiful. You can sit down by him and rub noses--- shoulders I mean. When I do, finally, I will be reciting Blake softly in his ear.  Might look something like this 

But that's me with me another man. Sir John A. MacDonald in Charlottetown. Bear with me a moment, I've had a long week of words --this is all connected.  

When I around seven, one of my teachers noticed I was a hypersensitive child writing poetry and snorting books like other kids snorted lik-m-aid  ( for you who do not know of what I speak think sucking powdered sugared Koolaid ) 

 She suggested my parents take me to PEI to -- where else --- to the only monument we really had that celebrated a writer from our region.  

 Her house! Anne's house. Exciting.

 And then  :  

 Lucy Maud Montgomery, the writer, was dead. Very dead. Hence the line you hear so many writers of a certain generation say quite honestly : "we grew up thinking writers were all dead people." OR lived in United States where a distant second cousin of my father's wrote for Reader's Digest. Or maybe, Ontario where I had rich cousins. Somehow I'd equated writers with being rich. (:   

It's my turn today to be a "pageturner" for Project Bookmark Canada.

What no one so far has said (I think) is that writers don't have to be dead  (or rich) to get a bookmark now! Wow. 

"Look Mama, they're alive! They live and move and breathe amongst us!" 

If you go to : 

projectbookmarkcanada.ca  you can see a wonky video "we" made:  my husband, and a gathering of writers, librarians and booklovers here at our house last Friday night. We were getting ready for a writing conference for teens on the north shore of Nova Scotia-- called Writing on Fire which is part of a Read by the Sea Festival initiative. If you do not know about Read by the Sea-- you need to go here. http://www.readbythesea.ca/

River John is little village with a a great literary festival every summer. So here are some of the suspects you will see in the video waiting for the conference to begin---- right about this time last Saturday: 

They look Verrry different in the video! The teens were amazing in the workshops, so happy to connect with living breathing writers.  

While you're at the bookmark website, projectbookmarkcanada.ca I hope you click and donate.  Find out how to get involved. Maybe champion the books from your region you'd like to see have a bookmark. One day the literary landscape of Canada will also be a literary mapscape where we can go to the place, read the words from a bookmark by an author (dead or alive) who wrote of that place. We can leap into a world of their making. Then what happens? Well, I believe we consider that place and who we are in some new way. It is map making. It is mythmaking. For me, forever, literature keeps asking us ( not telling us ) what it means to be human. Even books about Dragons.  

I have a favourite personal metaphor:  My life is a dot to dot puzzle and I still don't know what picture I'm making. 

Once we have bookmarks all across Canada, it will be kind of like a dot to dot puzzle --but the picture we make? A nation of readers who care about literature and place. And a living breathing ever evolving literary culture. And who knows ---it might mean one young writer will grow up to make worlds out of words . 

Poetry Month -Why Poems SAVE Me.

 
    

"Nearly every day, poetry saves me, " writes Kim Rosen in the prologue to her generous book Saved by a Poem. When I read those lines I nodded--they ring true for me. She goes on to say "some favourite line or surprising image will rescue my vagrant attention from the careening bandwagon of my thoughts and redirect it to the path of my soul. My mind quiets, my breath deepens and I remember what matters most to me." Yes, reading poetry does that for me.  It all started with my father saying  O wild west wind thou breath of autumn's being and my mother singing mares eat oat and does eat oats and then there was the day Carl Sandburg made fog move on little cat feet and I fell into the page under the page and knew I would never be the same again. And I fall to my knees, saved, in the reading of this : 

“Now every mortal has pain
and sweat is constant,
but if there is anything dearer than being alive,
it's dark to me.
We humans seem disastrously in love with this thing
(whatever it is) that glitters on the earth--
we call it life. We know no other.
The underworld's a blank
and all the rest just fantasy.” 
― Anne Carson, Grief Lessons: Four Plays

April may be the cruuuuuellest month according to Chaucer but my month began with a package arriving in the mail. A book of poems and a novel---gifts from writer Bruce Hunter. http://www.brucehunter.ca/ 

We've met face to face but rekindled a connection on facebook --and when I opened the awarding winning book Two O'clock Creek my eyes fell on the poem entitled "What My Students Teach Me."  Piercing, painful, beautiful, Hunter shows how poetry can be a container for pain and horror. The poem reminded me what poet and mentor of many, freind Sue Goyette told me just last week when I confessed  why I'd lost my heart for writing poems. She wrote: "Poetry could carry this. Poetry does what it does, it origamis the pain and gives back bird or flower. Use it. Use its light."  Sue's latest book Ocean published by the gorgeous makers of books Gaspereau Press will be launched this April 13th. I am away sadly. Anyone who can, go! Sue is one of the finest Canadian writers writing today. Even her posts in our Writer's Fed weekly updates could be in a book called, well, I dunno, Friday Poems? Sue tells the truth and tells it slant! There's not a cliche anywhere in her DNA.  It'll be a grand book and grand poetrybash. Details here:   http://www.gaspereau.com/bookInfo.php?AID=0&AISBN=9781554471225

    Sue and Bruce and Allan Cooper who also gifted me with books of poetry this winter have made me think of writing poems again. So has editing an anthology of Atlantic poetry for children from Sir Chares GD until now with Anne Hunt.  And so has Jane Yolen. http://janeyolen.com/ . Jane Yolen's poem a day emails  have been the VERY best way to start my day, gotten me through a long winter. I am amazed, simply amazed at the poetry and the output and she makes me see how lazy I've gotten. Discipline, intention--- is a good thing!    

 I'm ending with one of my favourite poems by my first poetry mentor Fred Cogswell. He saved me. Yeah, he did.  I miss him.  

Eve Ensler says in the forward to Saved by a Poem---  "This book is a call for attention-to detail, to nuance, to each other. It teaches us that by bringing poetry deeply into our lives, our hearts, and our bodies we strengthen the muscle for care, our capacity for intricate metaphoric thinking, our appreciation for ambiquity. This book encourages our longing not for answers but for ever expanding questions."  Well, Poetry does that. Fred's work does that for me. He was a traditionalist. I learned a lot from him.    

In the poem that follows Cogswell articulated a magic I always felt but could never find words for. I guess it's about kindreds. About recognition of an "other" that you know you know even as you meet them for the first time.  I always thought that was some little weird thing in me - but when I read the poem --I was maybe 19-- ah! I knew I was not alone. Maybe not soooo weird? Now I wonder aren't we all Star People? This is how we touch each other---or at least yearn to -- with words, or sometimes just a knowing.  Some day, I hope to write a poem as good as this. Or one of Bruce Hunter's. Or Sue Goyette's. Or... well the list is long of poets I turn to.  

In the meantime, Happy POETRY Month.

Read a poem a day. Save yourself....  or at least keeps some bugaboos away.

Next week I'll be writing about Project Bookmark Canada where the words of Canadian poets and writers will come off the pages and onto the landscape. 

But for now --- here's Fred Cogswell. And here's to miracles. I call them poems. And yes, they save me.   

Star-People

In all shapes and sizes do they walk the Earth
As men and women wherever men and women are;
How can we know them? How can we tell
Beneath what skin unfolds the petals of a star?

They eat and drink and love and hate like men.
Like men they’re prone to colds and shirk their tasks.
So well they ape the human-robots in their moves
That they at times forget they’re wearing masks.

But when they meet another of their kind,
Underneath the current of their usual words
There chimes, inaudible to human ears,
Bell-music like the cries of mating birds.

And when they touch the other’s hands or eyes
Such joys along their nerve-ways race
They scarce can bear to smile and make small-talk
As though no miracle were taking place.

@fred cogswell 

Singily Skipping Along -Sneak Peek.

Deanne Fitzpatrcik http://www.hookingrugs.com/ is the amazing artist and friend who hooked my next children's book. I, too am a happy hooker.. We are very excited to put the work of women's hands and hearts in a book which will be in the hands of children.  Fall 2013. Thank you Nimbus Publishers for being open to a hooked book! Now, by hook or buy book !   (: