Giving Thanks

Predicting My Death 3

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Predicting My Death before Yours

3

Know this: I have no regrets. Not in anything that touches you.
No regrets, that is, save for the thing I have done to hurt you.
Many things. Some underhand. Some unsuspecting. Some deliberate.
You know, after all these years, the way I am. Unthinking.

Selfish. Never unfeeling. Often unknowing. So many negatives.
Is it negative to embrace my death before it comes? I don’t
think so. Perhaps it’s the most positive thing I’ve ever done,
this coming to grips with the maggots that gnaw me away,

night and day, gnawing me away. They aren’t invisible. You see
them  sometimes yourself: in the bottle I drain to send me to sleep;
in my tone on the phone when I answer an unwelcome call; in kicks
delivered to sleeping dogs that I can never let lie. Why? I cannot

answer that question. It bounces like a pinball round my head:
why? why? why? But try as I may, there is never any answer.
Why am I made as I am? Why do things happen the way they do?
Why do you still love me, in spite of all my faults, my kinks?

There: I’m being negative again. Be positive: this is my last will
and testament. My love, I leave to you the pleasant memories.
Days in the sun in Spain; our daughter born healthy; grooming
the show dogs; digging the snow together. Our very presence here

in Canada is a sign of the highest bond that could ever unite
two people: leaving their homes, their families, their friends,
their birthplace, their nationality to set up a new home together,
crossing the sea to reach this new found land of ice and snow.

 

Predicting My Death 2

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Three Poems Predicting My Death before Yours

2

There never was anybody else but you. Too late now when
you’ve discovered this to tell you that there probably
never will be anyone else. Middle age: I look back on all
the things we’ve done together. Shall I count the ways?

No: I’ll make a list. So often we’ve sat together at the table
planning the next set of duties that will keep us occupied
by driving us apart. But of all the people in the world
you’re the only one who doesn’t need a list of what we’ve done

or haven’t done. Goodrich Castle, last year in England,
was your discovery. We went there together at your instigation.
A part of you that will always be me, that first discovery
of ruins, new to us, growing from red bed-rock. I thought I had

seen everything worth seeing till I looked on Goodrich,
explored its towers, its labyrinth of connecting rooms.
Civil War tore down the curtain walls, fired the stables,
driving the horses wild with fear. Sometimes, at night,

I can feel that fear pumping through my veins. Knowing
I will die before you, knowing I will leave you alone
to defend yourself between curtained walls, isolated,
besieged by the same memories that mill in my mind.

Predicting My Death 1

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Three Poems Predicting My Death before Yours

1

I cannot always talk to you. There are so many barriers.
The hoovering, the cleaning, cooking the daily meals.
When we go to bed, you are tired, I’ve had too much to drink.
We know our routine answers off by heart. There’s never any time

for each other. House work, gymnastics, paying the bills,
even housekeeping on the computer: they all take time.
Time, time: so little of it left. I can feel death’s seeds
rooting in heart and chest. Premonitions: so little time.

Comment:

Rummaging in the dusty memories that line my bookshelves, I rediscovered a sequence of love poems I wrote for Clare, 25 years ago, in 1991. This is the second in the sequence. A Golden Oldie, it grips today even more than it did back then. I am growing old. The insurance company’s statistics tell me that soon, all too soon, I will join those statistics and become another black number on a white page. According to those statistics, Clare will survive me, but we don’t know by how much.

How do we prepare ourselves for such things? Our society, a society that sees violent death every day on the road, on the street, on television, backs away from death. We don’t face it, not in the same way they do in Oaxaca, for example, where it is celebrated once a year on the Day of the Dead. Homes are lit up. The dead ones favorite food is prepared. Little altars are illuminated by candles. Photos appear. Do the dead return to their homes to join in the celebrations? Sometimes, I guess they do. Certainly the would be made welcome if they did.

Perhaps Francisco de Quevedo, the seventeenth-century Spanish poet who was the subject of my doctoral thesis, was right. “The day I was born, I took my first step on the road to death.” He writes too of “this death that I carry within me, that has walked beside me all my life.” “If death is a law, and not just a punishment,” he writes, “then we must accept it and obey its call.” I guess it’s easier, if you are a Stoic or a Neo-Stoic, to face up to such things.

I once asked my grandfather, a man who survived the trenches of the First World War, if he was worried about dying. He looked at me in silence for a long time. I was very young and we were sitting in the sunshine on the bench by the old Swansea Hospital where he went daily to gossip with his friends. “Roger,” he said. “We are all going to die. We will die if we worry about it. We will die if we don’t. So why worry?”

I certainly don’t want to go. I didn’t want to go twenty-five years ago and I really don’t want to go right now. I have decided to take my grandfather’s advice. I’m not going to worry and I am going to continue to enjoy myself for as long as possible because: “For there are many fine things to be heard and good things to be seen / before we go to Paradise, by way of Kensal Green.”

 

 

Secret Garden

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Secret Garden 1

Being the secret love poems
I write to Clare at midnight
while she is upstairs, asleep.
They make up for the things
I can no longer say because
I am uptight, or under pressure,
or working too hard. Or maybe
because we are quarreling over
something stupid. So these are
some of the seeds I wanted to plant
but never did because I was busy.
They are also the things
that I would like Clare and Becky
to remember me by if I should
suddenly pass away without being
able to say good-bye. My parents
left me nothing but bitterness.
I want my wife and child to have
a garden they can wander through
without my being there, knowing
I have cultivated these thoughts,
at night, sleepless, without them.

Your Voice

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Your Voice
Love poem

Still in the still of the rain
I sense you near.

The room is full
of the scent of emptiness
yet even the silence
turns my head.

The walls expand
to enclose the world.

With gaudy flags
on a colored map
I mark your progress
through my memory,
upwards and inwards
your progress to my heart.

A moth glistens in the circle
cast by my reading light.

Your stealthy footsteps
sound in the corridor.

A voice, your voice,
drifts through the night

Structure in the Short Story

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Structure in the Short Story
Wednesday Workshop
30 November 2016
Posted: 4 December 2016.

I just attended, with one of my writers’ groups, a writing workshop offered by a guest speaker. Our speaker threw out some interesting ideas on structure in general and structure in the short story in particular. The first comment he made was “Are you sure that your novel is not a short story and vice versa?” He then suggested that often beginning writers run out of steam because their novels are not really novels but are short stories that need cutting, rather than expanding.

He followed this up by suggesting, and I made no notes so I write from a memory that fails me more often than it used to, that a short story should have a structure that runs something like this:

stasis > key occurrence > end of old world (stasis broken) > beginning of new reality (the world upside down) > quest (the search for  new balance) > climax (when all the events of the crisis come together) >  the moment of truth (when the central character is faced by a decision) > the choice (the protagonist chooses) > pay-off for protagonist (order is restored and the protagonist is changed or confirmed by his choice) > pay-off for readers (who see that change and are themselves changed by looking at the same old world through different sight and a new knowledge or insight gained).

 One of the group members circulated his notes from the workshop and summarized the idea rather more succinctly:

The first thing I remember … in any story, the main character has to be changed at the end from what s/he was in the beginning.

The other item was the list of elements in a story: Stasis, Trigger, Quest, Surprise, Critical Choice, Climax and Resolution.

            Clearly this is a theoretical structure, but many short stories follow it or versions of it. Through this structure, our speaker suggested, there often runs a leitmotiv and this can provide a thematic unity that also holds the story together. Returning to this thematic unity and writing selectively from within it, can often produce the desired change in reader and protagonist. Equally clearly, there is no length to this structure and the resulting story may be very brief or suitably enlarged.

According to our speaker, the character of the protagonist is very important and the key aspects of the protagonist’s character must be clearly drawn, right from the start. The protagonist must also go through some sort of change as the story and the protagonist’s character both develop. Place is also important and the protagonist should be linked into a place and preferably a time. The protagonist in the short story is, after all, in a dialogue with his time and his place (his chronotopos, as Bakhtin would phrase it).

This is certainly a prescription for short story writing, one of many prescriptions, I might add. A quick search turns up another definition, this time of a five-point narrative arc offered by Mark Flanagan:

“Sometime[s] simply called “arc” or “story arc,” narrative arc refers to the chronological construction of plot in a novel or story. Typically, a narrative arc looks something like a pyramid, made up of the following components: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution.”

            Flanagan continues with a definition of each moment in the story. Exposition reveals the characters and the setting. Rising action is a complication that hinders the protagonist. Climax is the point of highest stress or tension. Falling action is a releasing of the pressure and the resolution ties up all the loose ends. (Taken from this site)

http://contemporarylit.about.com/od/literaryterms/g/Narrative-Arc-What-Is-Narrative-Arc-In-Literature.htm

Lope de Vega, the Seventeenth-century Spanish playwright, suggested a simplified three-part structure: situation > complication > unfolding / dénouement. Of course, the complications may be multiple, resulting in an action that runs situation > complication > further complications > complicating the complications > even more complications > even more complicated complications > and then the final unraveling of the ‘by now very twisted’ plot. An even simpler two-part definition, also from Spain’s Seventeenth-century, offers us the dual structure of a ‘world in disorder’ > ‘a world in order’ — how the characters progress from disorder to order is up to you as a writer.

Of course, the author may decide NOT to tie up all the loose ends and re-order the world to perfection. When this happens, we may have a dystopia: the disaster continues; or we may have an open ending that prompts the reader to wonder what might happen or what might have happened. As for ‘beginning at the beginning,’ there are also stories that begin in the middle (in media res) and then go backwards in time before going forwards again. This raises the awkward question: how short is a short story? I won’t attempt to answer that one here.

Whether you describe or prescribe, there are many possibilities in the world of short story telling and it is always the story that counts. If it is good, then perceived structural flaws that go against these prescriptive methods may well become a prescriptive structure for another future writer. Interior monologue and dream, for example, linked thematically but not necessarily linked in time and space, may well distort or destroy yet another structural format, that of the three classic unities of time, place, and action. these, incidentally, are expanded into four by the great Spanish playwrights (among others, I am sure) who add unity of theme to the other three.

Robin Grindstaff, in an online article entitled “Narrative Arc: what the heck is it?”, available at

http://robbgrindstaff.com/2012/03/narrative-arc-what-the-heck-is-it/

suggests yet another simplification and reshaping, of the narrative arc idea.

“Think of narrative arc as a bell curve. It starts at a point on the lower left hand side of a graph, rises in a curve to a peak, and then drops back down again. The standard narrative arc is often referred to in terms of the three-act play: a beginning, a middle, and an end.”

            This is not unlike the structure outlined by Lope de Vega, except for the fact that ‘middle’ is a rather inadequate term for the multiple complications outlined in the Lope de Vega model. This statement may be a little unfair as Robin Grindstaff goes on to outline the complications that may occur in the second act in the following fashion:

“In act two, the main character must try to overcome the conflict presented by the inciting event. The character wants something, has a goal in mind. The conflict and tension of the story rise, and obstacles are thrown in the path of the character to prevent her from achieving her goal. The character faces these obstacles on her way to overcoming the conflict. The obstacles get bigger, more difficult, and the character may be on the verge of defeat or surrender. At this point, the character must make a critical decision or a moral choice that changes the direction of the story.”

            Clearly the ‘obstacles that are thrown’ compare favorably with Lope’s consistent throwing of obstacles and ‘middle’ therefore becomes a euphemism for ‘complications.’ Act three allows for the climax and resolution of the story and this includes character change or ‘death in defeat’ and tragedy. I recommend this article very strongly, as it goes way beyond the outline I have offered thus far and clarifies many features of the narrative arc.

In fact, Grindstaff then references Nigel Watts, Write a Novel and Get It Published, and outlines an eight-point narrative arc that runs

stasis > trigger > quest > surprise > critical choice > climax > reversal > resolution.

 This runs a close parallel to the circulated list (quoted earlier) of seven elements:

 Stasis > Trigger > Quest > Surprise > Critical Choice > Climax > Resolution.

 The main difference being the insertion of a reversal between the climax and the resolution.

So, we have now established an narrative arc, or a pyramid, with 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 or 8 steps included within it. This is all very prescriptive: do it and you will succeed. My greatest fear then becomes the gate-keepers, those anonymous figures who sit on shadowy selection committees, place ticks in appropriate boxes, and judge the quality of writing by consensus in committee. I can hear them now: “#7 is missing. There’s no reversal. Reject!” “I don’t like #5. The choice isn’t critical enough. Reject!”

As writers, we must remember that all these arcs and numbers are just theories. The most important thing is the command ‘Take up thy pen and write’! All the theory in the world does not produce a good short story or a good novel. In fact, the opposite may be true: too many rules may stifle our narratives at birth or choke them to death My advice: know your theories, then smash them into little pieces and create the new structures, the new formats, the next new great piece of writing that will lead you, as a writer, to boldly go where no writer has gone before.

 Blessings, happy writing, and follow your creative instincts.

Catching Crickets

 

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Catching crickets, caging them, and making them sing

We track them through their courting ceremonies
hunt them down by the noise they make
clutch them tight between anxious fingers

We weave glass jails
sentence them one by one to green imprisonment

At day’s end we ferry them to city apartments
incarcerate them like canaries in their cages
and wait for them to sing

At first they are silent in this strange environment
we feed them with bread dipped in brandy and wine
and sooner or later they sing in their captivity

Now they will not eat
they await the liquor that burns them
into fiery tongues of song

 Our midnights are haunted by their spirituals

Commentary: This is a “Golden Oldie”going back to when we were living in Santander, Spain. When we visited the beach at Noja, we would lunch with our Spanish family and all their children on the grassy headland overlooking the sea. After lunch, the children would hunt for crickets. When they caught one, they would weave a grass jail from blades of grass and place the crickets in there, one by one. Then, when they went home, they would bring the crickets with them and cage them. The crickets usually ‘sang’, but if they didn’t then alcohol was used as a bribe and a persuasion. I told this story in class one day and one of my students, Sheree Fitch, herself an excellent poet and story teller said: “It’s a poem: quick, write it down.” And I did. And here it is. With many thanks to Sheree Fitch.

NB Our cricket, the one they caught for us, wouldn’t sing. Clare and I took it down to the local gardens and released it when nobody was looking.

Balancing the Books

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Balancing the Books

I knew that I did not have the strength and stamina to make a living as a writer. I knew too that I could not put my beloved and my family through the strain of maybe, or maybe not, making it as a creative writer. And I wanted to be an artistic writer, a poet above all, not just a commercial writer, writing adverts for a living, or pandering to the lusts of a baying multitude.

So: the most difficult thing for me would be look after my family and balance the books. Rather than writing full time, I chose a career in academia. My career as an academic led to 90 research articles in my various fields, 70 book reviews, the publication, in book form, of part of my doctoral thesis, and an online bibliography, now turned into a searchable data base. Add in unpaid, voluntary overload teaching to maintain a small program in a small university, overseas travel programs for students, a relatively successful coaching career at club, provincial, regional, and national levels, and a commitment to various editorial positions, in 14 local, regional, national and international journals, and my creative writing career has understandably suffered. In spite of that, I published 10 poetry books, 11 poetry chapbooks, 12 short stories and 130 plus poems in 20 Canadian (and other) journals, and won several writing awards. Indeed, to have been a full time creative writer and to have maintained a house and a family and a second career would, in my opinion, have been impossible.

Now that I have retired from university teaching, I can finally write full time. In my part-time creative writing career, maintained while I worked in academia, I kept a journal and made sure I spent at least one hour a day writing creatively, even if I had to get up early to do so. This resulted in a couple of poetry books with small presses and later a series of self-published poetry books that doubled with various festivals and other writing sequences. My poetry books did not sell well, and there is very little money in poetry anyway, so I started to give the books away to friends and well-wishers who were interested in what I was writing.

In retirement, I discovered CreateSpace and I now have eight books up on Amazon and Kindle. I am working on my ninth. What do I love best about Canadian Culture and Creativity? That it allows a person like myself, born in Wales, and speaking English, French and Spanish, to live and write in Canada about Wales, England, France, Mexico, Spain, and my adopted homeland. However, the literary and cultural industry boasts of our international character while totally ignoring me and writers like me. We ignore the self-published (calling them adherents to the vanity press) and we put down those who have not progressed in the ways that the literary societies accept.

Do I care? Of course I care. That is why I am writing this and why I will continue to write. Will anyone read this and take any notice? I doubt it. Will anyone take any action as a result of this tiny pebble cast into a Great Canadian Lake? I really, really doubt it. I can see the shoulder shrugging now as the eye-brows raise themselves slightly and the reject pile beckons. Will literary Canada keep staring at its own belly button and congratulating itself on its wonderful cultural opportunities for self-expression in writing? I guess it will. Will things change for artists on the periphery, for struggling artists, for artists like myself who with great difficulty have fought throughout their lives to balance the books? I doubt it very, very much indeed.

But I am here, as others are here. We have a voice. A very powerful voice. A voice that has been side-lined by the establishment and the institutions. But we are many. Very many. And one day, we will be heard.

A brief commentary:

The Writers’ Union of Canada (TWUC) invited its members to contribute a piece on their Canadian Writing Experience to Canadian Heritage, a group interested in gathering comments by Canadian Writers about their experiences. I thought about it for a while, penned this piece, and submitted it for their consideration. I was very pleased to have it accepted and it has attracted some attention.

 

Power Out-[R]-age

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Power Out-[R]-age

A tree fell across the wires.
Our power went ‘poof’!
No lights. No water. No heat.
We lit a log fire and strove to keep
sub-zero temperatures at bay.

It was as if God had stepped
away from the high altar
and gone out for a coffee
at the local Tim Horton’s
leaving a deserted church
to the mercy of the elements.

Guttering candles surrender
their skimpy lives but scarcely
warm us as more snow falls.

Shadow demons creep in
with the gathering night.
Shivering beneath piled blankets,
we cling together and hope
to keep out the growing cold.

 Warning: Raw Poem

Another raw poem. We lost power at 8:30 am on Wednesday, 30 November and it returned on Friday, 2 December at 2:00 am. 42 hours without power and the temperatures not rising above +2C and dropping to -3 / -5C. No light. No heat. No water. No phone. No internet. I thought of the victorious general who announced to the tune of the bombs bursting behind him on our tv screen that “We bombed them back to the Stone Age.”

Well, here we were sitting in our own miniature stone age and mentally unprepared for the shock of what it all means. What a struggle: to light the fire, to keep it alight (day and night), to keep warm, to prepare hot food over a log fire in an insert fireplace (and us so lucky to have one; some of our neighbors didn’t), and we won’t talk about going to the bathroom! At least, I now what it means to lose power at the start of winter. However, I really don’t understand what it means not only to lose power, but to know that an enemy deliberately and callously stripped that power away.

I tried to put those thoughts into the first version of the poem, but then I took them out as I didn’t want to politicize what is right now a nature poem, pure and simple. The out-[R]-age is there, with or without those other memories and that out-[R]-age comes partly from the knowledge that our civilization, if indeed we can truly claim to be civilized, is indeed skating on very thin ice.

First Snow

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First Snow

Lying in bed
on a snowy morning
with the first flakes
fast falling,
can you follow
the rag-tag-and-bobtail
drift of snow thoughts?

Filled with sparrow, siskin,
chickadee and finch,
the now leafless tree
stands outlined in the yard:
black skeleton,
white wind-drift.

A scarecrow
with many arms,
it braces against
these feathered weights
that settle
like colored snow.

Warning: raw poem.

I rarely let any of my writing out while it is still raw. These words will undoubtedly change, the snow will settle, the birds will fly away, a crow and a blue jay will startle the smaller species, the sun may come out, the wind may get up, and so may I. In addition, the poem, like the birds in the tree may or may not survive. The tree itself chose to surrender to a family of yellow-bellied sap-suckers and they changed into a chess board of small square holes that leaked the tree’s life blood throughout the summer. Perhaps the tree won’t survive. Well, I know it won’t survive for ever, but perhaps its life will be even shorter, curtailed by those ravenous little beaks.

Whatever: I have taken a risk by sharing early, and we will see how you, my readers and fellow bloggers, rise to the bait. Perhaps you will encourage me to place more early verse online. Perhaps not. Hopefully, you’ll click and make some comments: we’ll soon see.