Chapbooks 1

Jim Larwill

Canadian Shield Chapbooks I.
Text Box: These six little booklets are virtual editions of the first chapbooks I published in 1996 under the Canadian Shield logo. Together here in Chapbook I this e-dition creates a collection of 38 early poems written 20 years ago. What to say about them? They are not the kind of poem I would write today. This is good and bad. I still very much like the form of these little booklets which over the years I playfully referred to as “crapbooks” because most poetry isn’t worth wiping your ass with, and at least with these poems, published on sheets the size of toilet paper, they could be used for that. I also like their hand held size and short length because most people read poetry in small doses and these tiny collections encourage the reader to experience the text as a whole in one complete porcelain sitting. Written at the birth of the internet their form may well be suited to the short attention span of the evolving reader and in presenting them here I have tried to create a simulacra of the originals. When I started to put these collections together I didn’t know anything about making a book of poems. Like a beginning poet who learns to compose in stages by learning to write a good line in the middle of a mishmash of words before really understanding stanzas and how to make a complete poem, I considered self-publishing my verse into booklets after I felt I had mastered writing poems that worked well on there own when I read them to audiences. Putting together these booklets taught me how to craft a book of poems. Each page a line. Each poem a stanza. Each booklet a complete poem. Even the two booklets which are a single long poem taught lessons in page breaks and layout and in making my own little booklets I was forced to think about the eye of the reader in the same way performing poems in front of audiences prodded me towards putting first and foremost the ear of those who I would ask to listen. Also the cover art I created with the simple Draw Perfect program of the time are the first examples of my beginning to explore the relationship between image and word. Looking at these little booklets again with the passage of time I am not nearly ashamed of them as I thought I might be when I turned to them again to publish them here. They are fun little “crap-books” and they have more going on in them then might first catch a reader’s eye. Metaphysical Donne is 6 simple sing song poems that can best be described as Metaphysical Doggerel. Some can be imagined in a Hallmark card. Puns and literary reference on the surface they rhyme and skip their happy way along; yet, this playful self-aware text is often winking at the reader while touching the side of its nose. Look at the cover. At first glance the image might be mistaken as an angel at prayer. Upon closer inspection one becomes aware it’s wings are in fact two ravens whispering into the ear of Odin. The sacred and profane. Sex and death. Time and space. Post-modern nursery rhymes. Simple is often the transcendent route to the sublime. Jim’s Poetry Emporium is still a favorite poem with audiences. While academic fashion may be anti-narrative, this dramatic monologue deftly creates an idyllic world that beckons the reader to enter the text of Romantic imagination only to have it shattered. Poetry is a world where anything can happen. It is “a time that never was, but is still today, part of all our memories.” It is a place where there are little poetry shops with poets sitting behind polished maple counters waiting to hear the silver bell rankle across the top of the opening door so they can jump up and greet the smiling faces of their regular customers. This poem entertains. Seduces. Confronts. Deconstructs the life of a poet. Rock Video Love contains poems I could not write today. As one ages one doesn’t have the same level of angst one once did. For example I doubt if today I would use the “C” word in a poem. Still it is important for a poet to over come self censorship and not to end up just being fragmented sounds in front of an audience looking for attention while expecting “the reader” to write the poem for you as you shine your precious academic brilliance upon those you expect to put more work in reading your poem than you did in writing it. I am a poet who every day still works with his hands. Voice comes from the pit of my lungs at the very center of my body. I once did smash stones with a sledge. Now I would find this act a sacrilege; still, some of these poems in their own way are prophetic. Today I do not pound stones as I look for their fault lines, I sit with them, waiting and listening, searching for the stories they wish to speak through me. Shamanic journey is an evolution of energy. From a sledge hammering against an audience to the eventual stillness of a fungus tongue, it slips into gaps, licks and searches ever deeper. Old Growth contains nature poems written in a style I call Jack-pine. They take their name from Milton Acorn’s Jack-pine sonnets, but they are not sonnets, they are concrete poems written in the shape of a tree. Lines are branches placed upon an invisible trunk balanced between positive and negative poles of left and right. The tree of the poem stands upon a horizon line at the bottom of the page representing land and water. Haiku these days tends to be the trendy poem used to capture moments in nature, and its tight little island form is well suited to Japan; however, I have always felt in form and content perhaps it is not the one best suited to the Canadian Landscape. At least my experiencing of “the land” is not a Haiku. Haiku is not the song my paddle sings. Eventually I would develop a Canadian Shield poem of 9 lines and three stanzas after noticing and riffing upon the similarity and stark differences between the Viking ljóðaháttur and Japaness haiku which are both 3 lines long but are mirror opposites in all other ways. These Jack-pine poems are a step towards the development of my eventual ljóðaháttur-haiku Canadian Shield style of nature poem and remain a fun little poem to write while on a canoe trip. My Moist Red Tongue contains the poem NeoFuturism which laments; “If only trees could understand man I could understand machine.” The first poem in the collection James William Mayakovsky is a post-modern rewrite of the famous “I wander lonely as a cloud,” poem by William Wordsworth mashing it with Mayakovesky’s “A Cloud in Trousers” dragging English Romanticism through Russian Futurism into the OmniGothic NeoFuturist age. The poems in this collection were written at the birth of the internet when post-modernism was still trendy. In contrast to post-modernism’s playful fragmentation of meaning the wingless fly in the poem Spider Web repeatedly declares “beware, beware, the web has meaning.” The preceding poem Materialization predicts the end of revolution and the rise of Global hive fundamentalism. Hymn of the Seven Stars taken with Tin-Man makes one think 911 wasn’t all that unpredictable. In the last poem the author takes his grandfather’s straight razor and shaves a video screen; “licking the blade, after every stroke, with my moist red tongue.” Tasting your own blood being the only way left to know you are still alive as you feel your face swallowed into the book of a profile and the material world dies around you. I Whisper Love is one of my first poems I would say was worthy of being called a poem. Ironically, given it is an obvious homage to I Shout Love by Milton Acorn, it is also an early poem where my own distinctive voice is arriving. People who hear me read often compare me to Allen Ginsberg; however, I have heard recordings of Ginsberg and what I hear coming from that voice is more of a whine than a howl. I suspect people hearing me think I sound like what Ginsberg should have been like. Indeed the poem Howl was not the howl of a wolf, but is the whimpering of a victim. Where the American Ginsberg was “cool” in tone Acorn the Canadian was “hot.” I Shout Love is a howling wolf and I Whisper Love is also not a whisper at its source. I wrote this poem at a time when declarative message based poetry was being silenced. I Whisper Love is the distant cry of a wolf carried on a northern wind calling out through time and space finding its way through the din of the urban landscape as its tickles the nestling feather of an ear. In a few years Slam would arrive and fashions would change.