Jim Larwill YouTube - Click banner above for YouTube Channel link - Sample videos below
Jim Larwill is a wrinkled old man with a long white beard wandering the Gatineau hills north of Ottawa, Canada. Six months of the year he heats his cabin with twigs from the woods, drawing inspiration and water from his frozen lake. When beavers are not dropping trees on his home he tries to write poetry.
Raven is his muse.
Wolf is his totem.
Thank-you for visiting my website. This is a new incarnation of its title page. It seems I am still learning how this new-fangled inter-web thingy works.
Once all the world was a stage where we were all players and actors, but today the world is an open-mic where everyone has become a wanta-be of some kind. I feel lucky that as global access became a-point-and-a-click away I am reaching the end of my writing life. It has spared the world 40 years of crap and now hopefully I will be able to share the best of that miss-spent life with all who wish to read it.
To start with I now have eight on-line publications.
“Gypsy Girl”
"In Wake of Tekahionwake: Fire-Flowers and the Imperialist Frame”
“Spring Meditations”
“Chapbooks I”
"Chapbooks II”
“Chapbooks III”
“The Discovery of the Franklin Expedition is the Sabotage of Canadian Literature”
I am now also very happy to include my literary theory of human cultural origin called the Carnivoresque in online book form.
“i Wolf” link to Carnivoresque home page.
"i Wolf" link to Carnivoresque menu below.
Please see additional links below where you will also find links to my YouTube channel and videos.
"Jim Larwill - Omni-Gothic Neo-Futurist Poet" on You Tube.
Jim Larwill YouTube - Click banner above for YouTube Channel link - Sample videos below
Raven Song
Bones are our stories of the past. The Traditional Bone Picker prepares these bones so they can continue to be honored. This tribal shaman has finger nails of great length and these pincers are used to prepare and preserve the bones of the dead for the living to remember. The Bone Picker cleans dead flesh from bones. This tribal shaman is both feared and revered. Their fingers are sacred and shall not be used by themselves to eat. They never touch their own month and as such they must be hand fed by other members of the tribe.
The Bone Picker sings in this world and dances in the next. I was brought up with stories of the Bone Picker. As a little girl in isolated rural Quebec my grandfather in the 1930’s took my mother to “the dances” that took place in a big tent by fire light. It is only recently that I have realized these dances due to the Indian Act would have been illegal at that time. At one of these dances there was what my mother described as the Last Traditional Bone Picker. This individual was incredibly old and my mother being indoctrinated by Catholic nuns and priests was absolutely terrified by the visage of a wizened demon from an other spirit world and distant time. The Last Traditional Bone Picker demanded to dance with my little girl mother. Taking her hands with his beak-like fingers he pulled her up to dance with him in firelight with hands that cleaned bones of the dead. They danced. My mother danced with the Last Traditional Bone Picker.
Through my mother I have been touched by hands of the Last Traditional Bone Picker. It has been said this is a land of hidden stone giants. Has Raven trapped the Bone Picker in rock? Will the Bone Picker return and Dance again?
Snow Leopard
The Snow Leopard was originally inspired by a dating site profile picture of a woman in a leopard dress. While this playful poem may appear simple on the surface it delves into much deeper themes and takes on The Tiger by William Blake. The beauty of being a poet is your work competes with every poet who has ever lived. The goal is never to write a poem as good as a William Blake, the goal is to writing one that is better. Within my poem the imperial Christian themes of Blake are morphed into more of a Maoist and Buddhist view where emerald British fear is replaced by Canadian winter wonder. Aspects of feline, feminine and divine intertwine to liberate the soul in sweet surrender towards social transformation.
Stone Aviropophagy
I a child was told a story of two ancestors. An Australian sailor who married a Polynesian woman and long ago settled in Montreal. If nothing else I seem to have a very cross cultural background. After multiple generations in Canada something everyone has. Why would an ancestor sail from Australia to Quebec over a hundred years ago? Patriots of the 1837 revolution were sent by the British to the penal colony of Australia. Was this so-called Australian ancestor one of those prisoners? Un Canadien Errant? One who eventually became a sailor and in his travels married a Polynesian woman finally making it back to Quebec? Did his wife come from Easter Island? This poem is not about that. While this poem came as a meditative vision it is not so much a vision of where I have come from, but more of an apocalyptic reflection of where we may all be going. Do we all now live on an Easter Island? A culture and society that builds huge monuments to permanence that soon turns the island it stands upon into a trap. Earthly material permanence soon replaced with hopeless idealistic dreams of flying up into the heavens.
Romance poetry is an old tradition. This Gypsy Girl collection contains love poems to the profiles of woman I will never meet. Where once men took pictures of women objectifying them into standard formats for the benefit of other men to look at, women today are taking their own pictures and many are re-appropriating this discourse as they playfully deconstruct the male gaze.
How could I not fall in love with them?
How could I not write a few poems?
This collection of poems is written in a Canadian form I have developed by combining Norse ljóðaháttr Hávamál sayings with the haiku format of Japan. They are terse opposites. Didactic verses esoteric. Alliteration in one. Rhyme in the other. Both are poetic forms suited to their time and culture. Canada is a land in between the two. I like the short triadic form, only Canada is a much bigger place so what works better for me is three lines of three stanzas; sky, alive, and land.
Spring poems of nine lines woven together with alteration.
In Wake of Tekahionwake: Fire-Flowers and the Imperialist Fame; was first delivered at the 2014 Purdyfest Symposium on Pauline Johnson. It contrasts the political esthetics of a poet from the margins Pauline Johnson; and a poet from the center Rudyard Kipling.
Too often over time writers from the center continue to be renovated as their influence spreads, while in contrast those from the margins are deleted. Pauline Johnson is an example of a writer who should be known and studied world wide.
This is an essay arguing for an Undergraduate Degree in Canadian Literature. Cultural colonies do not have undergraduate degrees in their own literature which will promote their cultural products at home and abroad. I have not known whether to base this piece of writing on: Stephen Leacock’s sketch “The Sinking of the Mariposa Bell,” or Lu Hsun’s essay “On Not Beating Dogs in the Water,” or Archibald Lampman’s poem “The City at the End of Things,” or even Milton Acorn’s essay “On Not Being Banned by the Nazis.” Lobby MPs for a Canadian Literature Undergraduate Degree.
The Carnivoresque - Our ape/wolf culture of origin.
Our first totemic metaphor "i wolf" was the spark that ignited true language.
When an ape saw itself as a wolf it became human.
Much later when a wolf identified as human it became dog.
Jim Larwill is a wrinkled old man with a long white beard wandering the Gatineau hills north of Ottawa, Canada. Six months of the year he heats his cabin with twigs from the woods, drawing inspiration and water from his frozen lake. When beavers are not dropping trees on his home he tries to write poetry.
In his youth he was a political radical and union organizer in the electronics industry. His first artistic endeavours were as a playwright and he was on the board of management of Great Canadian Theatre Company and Steel Rail Publishing. With his eye on the future and wanting to have a real impact upon the unfolding of history he left this direction behind and then for a decade stayed at home as the primary caregiver of his three sons.
In 2002 his Master’s Thesis in Literary Theory (completed at Carleton University where he received a Senate Medal for Academic Excellence) postulates the first human thought was “i Wolf” and that in the process of pre-human ape scavengers creating a co-operative cross-species pack with more advanced carnivore wolf hunters, this pre-human tool-maker moved beyond direct metonym to an ability for metaphor with the adoption of totemic behaviour. Symbolic thought began with the invention of the first metaphor “i Wolf” which then sparked the ability for language to fully develope. In addition, as this ape learned to assist wolves in hunting it rejected ape troop social structure in favour of pair-bonded pack society. Basically in this hybrid wolf/ape pack the apes eventually became modern humans and the wolves became dogs. Modern humans then changed the story of how the original connection came about. This theory referred to as The Carnivoresque is the story-of-origin cultural equivalent to Evolution. In a hand written note Dr. David Suzuki has told Mr. Larwill “You may be a Darwin…” Only Jim Larwill is many things and in some circles he is referred to as “The Raven King.”
This Poet Philosopher of the Canadian Shield on stage has a voice that - cackles with thunder, caresses with gentle ripples, feathers across open water like a dark shadow on the wind.
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