Vigilance and poetry

2018-02-28T02:29:53Z

Tomorrow I'm going in to the office to plan and then in the afternoon to attend the Vigil for Indigenous Justice.

I'd like to say something angry and perfect about the recent verdicts, their injustice -- but -- as sovay puts it -- Tiny Wittgenstein keeps stepping on my tongue.

This hypervigilance does me and anyone no favours. And yet it also has a real purpose.

At first I wanted to say (somewhere, to someone): Canada, you break my heart. Or, to friends in other places, who might not really know, who might think this is a pretty good place, policed by cute guys in red serge tunics with pet deaf wolves: this country will break your heart.

Last night I was writing about this problem of language to A., with whom I am collaborating on that poetry exchange project, only it hasn't yet gone anywhere -- for we are thinking about language, and I am thinking about language and murder.

I'd sent A. some poems to respond to, and he hadn't responded, and I felt, as you do, "Ah, I sent the wrong poems, I ruined it."

So I was writing exhorting him to forget any constraint that wasn't also generative, to collaborate with me, but not to complete anything -- just to set the poetic process in motion, to give it some room to prowl.

I gave as an example, grasping at straws, Kathy Fish's poem (story? meditation?), "Collective Nouns for Humans in the Wild", which is about collective nouns and also about the gun violence crisis in the US.

That brought up a line I've thought but never found a place for

This is the place where the crows murder.
or
The crows are murdering in the park.

Thinking about murder as a verb meaning gather, convene, instead of / in addition to kill.

And then somehow that got around to responding to the Colten Boushie and Tina Fontaine verdicts

murders

Some link of presence, place, language, and murder--

And let's be clear, nobody needs two white guys holding forth on that. I can't see A. and I writing a poem responding to the verdicts, but the processes of poetry kept moving in me anyway.

( They did not make a good poem, but I watched them work, and I reported on them to A. )

And poetry keeps going on trying to solve an insoluble puzzle, unknot an un-unknottable knot.

Something about the process comforts me, even though I would not trust myself to speak the poem itself, to finish it, to bring it to a conclusion -- only to watch the process at work.

So that's more or less what I said to A. (with fewer capital letters, because I was feeling earnest and urgent).

So that's
whatever that is.

{rf}

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radiant fracture

Vigilance and poetry