Poetry Machine (with Nick Hamm)

 

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincemeat

 

food poem 10

What we discover on yonder side of lent is the love and life which fills us up instead of the food, sex, drugs etc that we had given up. Expecting one feast, we encounter another. When we do eat cookies and buttered rolls and drink Prosecco and take shots--when we do feast--it is merely a celebration of that love and life which is the true feast. Prosecco and the rest are good (so very good!) but we find they are not the point. All lent I've wanted to eat and eat and I have (largely without success) restrained myself but today, on easter morning, when the time of feasting has finally come, I suddenly don't want it as much, so full I am with the joy of life. Everything is in a new light. He is risen!

food poem 6

This is a part of my life where I use mostly Rubbermaid brand tupperware (the kind you get at Dollarama with red lids), but there was another where we had an IKEA set with green lids, which warped in the dishwasher and did not secure well. Though at that time I didn't often bring leftovers around, only I remember taking dry cereal and nuts to university in these. Still before that when I was a child we had a few small square containers with baby blue, rubberish lids. They were very scratched up and old-seeming, but durable, as things even ten years ago were more likely to be. In these containers would be small sandwiches made for me by my mother, or (I'm remembering now), one time a sandwich made by my father, which I considered an utter failure and somewhat bewildering, even offensive...I don't know if I ate it. It was weirdly wedge-shaped and on dark bread, as I remember it, with cheese and mayonnaise. I was entitled then.

Today in my red Rubbermaid container I ate two boiled potatoes and two boiled eggs for lunch. It was good and filling.  I'm living pretty frugally and I'll eat almost anything. I like to pick up the slack where my parents are over-indulged; I like to eat the unwanted food and the excess - but I know this is a play-act at poverty and that I still participate in the same wealth as my parents and that this is merely a new configuration of the old paternal relationship.

But, I mean, there's a lot here. A lot to be had. So even as I spend hardly any money and work hard to support myself, I guess I just don't want self-sufficiency. Even as I relentlessly pursue achievement in work and school and art, my life has organized itself around a pattern of least ambition. I'm huddling in the shadow of excess cast by my family and by the affluent nation I live in, getting by on what is left to those of us with enough time and attention to scrape it up, and, all the while, never moving or upsetting or accomplishing anything. 

It's not a bad place to be if you could live forever in it. But I'm reminded of my mortality by a hairline already receding. Often it feels like the dimensions of my life have reduced to what I am going to eat next. The only time I can overcome this constant anxious hunger is when I am really living: like deep in an important conversation, or in the few times recently I've felt in love. What I'm doing is not really living; what I call ambition could also be called a reason to live. We were talking last night about sin in the Platonic view which is moving away from God (and therefore goodness is moving towards God); what is it then to stand still?

Which is not to say that those peers of mine who are career-driven and GETTING THAT PAPER have a reason to live, either. And remember this:

With the few ingredients left in my fridge and pantry, a beautiful little meal has taken form. (Sometimes new and beautiful and good meals which I could not have planned or imagined take form of themselves through the effect of hunger, and lack, and love). Standing in front of the pantry window, my bowl on the dark-stained scratched smooth wood surface of the window sill, I'm looking out at the grey snow and the house across the lane. It's late afternoon and the light is already failing. I've spent all day at work, outside, exhausting myself taking Christmas light strings out of a tree with a long pole and listening to Tolstoy novellas and Joan Baez's early covers, in turns, and sometimes just traffic noise, and pausing occasionally to stand still with neutral expression to look out, while feeling myself breathing and the blood circulating in my body and my muscles taught. And thinking quietly. And pausing to write things down like this.

 

food poem 8 (May 17, 2024)

Montreal bagels toasted with Haskell berry jam. They are crunchy then chewy. The jam is bitter and bright and sweet and deep blue or purple. Actually something more complex and oxidizing than bitter, something oxidizing in the nose, while being blue or purple and bright and while being sweet. Not a good word for it I guess. And cold.

food poem 7 (May 14th, 2024)

I thought, biting into my roti pinched with vegetarian Indian fried grated carrot and cabbage maybe and other vegetables (it was spicy and amazing): this is among my best meals. We started with some soup made with a good mushroom stock and rye bread from Winnipeg. Dim lighting, we had just arrived to Zakir's cosy apartment in Ottawa. Zak cooks well, cares about food, makes good tasty Indian vegetarian food; eats small, thoughtful meals. One time he said: food is fuel, meaning that it's okay to eat non-tasty food, and also have some levity about it. But he eats better and more thoughtfully than anyone else.

food poem 9

First you learn about mustard because of hotdogs, later you learn about the mustard seed, because of the Bible. You will go on to learn more about mustard: mustard yellow, and cooking Indian food with a few mustard seeds thrown in with the onions and garlic and ginger and fennel. Dwight Schrute's "mustard shirt," &ct.

march 12 poem (food poem 5)

 

Pinchbeck Spalding

 

 

 

food poem 3

Sun pours into the microwave; my heart broken open,

These walls 

Transparent a delicious

Ratatouille for breakfast

food poem 1

Boiled carrots/ another day another dollar/ overcooked the potatoes and put too much mild aleppo pepper on em/ what can you do/ somehow I have two forks now/ I eat too much

Aren't they playing anything for someone lonesome tonight? 

Oh yes.  CBC Radio 2. 

 

 

Winter is hard for several reasons but one is that you can't pet the cat without her fur matting down and sending electric shocks something awful.

It sneaks up on you. Today, for example, it was bright and clear and crisp as anything and I thanked God to be alive and able-bodied as I raced my bike out the driveway and down Wellington. But tonight I am in the pit. You are in the pit so deep and fighting hard but then I guess you realize that you're here because it's February. And things won't get better til late March, probably, when Spring comes with a warm wind stirring up and you can smell things outside again other than just cold and frozen-nose. You can smell things again like mostly melting snow and road gravel, wind (this is biking at night with bright white street lamps, feeling my handlebars without mitts on for the first time in a while). 

 

Sam Ripat slicing up cheese so little

 One of the things I will think about and probably talk about on my death bed, when I have dementia, and remember nothing else, is Sam Ripat slicing up cheese with a Swiss-Army knife so fine, trying to make shredded cheese without a cheese grater, that one time, camping. I would have been 16. When that comes into my mind like it did just now--cutting up cheese finely for my pita lunch--it comes from a place beyond memory, not just something I remember but something I know.

What I remember about that camping trip, also, is a few things. I remember a plastic jug of white wine I would throw so high in the air at night we were dancing around and try to catch it. Mostly empty the contents getting all frothy from the motion. I remember some people trying weed for the first time from Sam Ripat's joint and we have a picture of that too, somewhere, on my colour film I think. There's also a picture from Ionas camera I took of myself with the flash on, shirtless, on the dock, being funny I guess, and I remember looking at it a few years ago and noticing that I didn't used to have chest achne which I thought I always had and still have now. Theres also pretty b&w photos I took of us walking around at evening time in high grass near the lake. But those must have been from the other year.

I remember trying to sleep with Anil on a inflatable double mattress, one of those huge thick ones not a camping one, in the centre of our big tent and it deflated. The next year we brought camping mattresses but I was meant to bring one for Sunny and I forgot and we got some pillows and stuff to sleep on at the MCC so Sunny could have my mattress. I remember one time, probably the first year, having some drawn out languid sexual thing with Anil one night and emerging from the tent to the circle of our friends embarrassed, I guess, but not enough to refrain from saying something about "sexy time" in apology, somehow to Lena, who was understanding, but that phrase has also stuck with me, though I hope to have forgotten it by the time I am on my deathbed.

 

on the dominion of man over nature and loving my cat

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. (Genesis 1:26)

 

    Recognizing the disgusting hubris of humanity in pillaging the globe—abusing and killing animals, levelling forests, polluting waterbodies—we conclude that this has been allowed by a misconception that humans have dominion over nature, when in reality we are part of nature: just animals, like horses or mice or birds, and not superior to them but maybe even inferior; for our stupidity and failure to live in harmony. People do a lot of meditation trying to unlearn our perceived separation from nature. 

    Nonetheless we are separated from nature--inexorably so--because we have the potential to love it. Nature cannot love us, but we can love nature. My cat cannot love me. This is a one-way street. God gave us dominion over the world not to abuse it but to love it. As if “dominion” meant you can do whatever you want, free of responsibility! Precisely the opposite: dominion entails responsibility, as the dominion of a father or mother over their child. 

    What else could God have said? There is no other way. There is only one thing to do with the world (love it) and everything else leads to destruction. It was precisely in giving us dominion over nature that God told us to love and protect it.

November 23 list

1.  So many years spent on the edge of giving up

2.  Pastels again out the window. 

     A web of branches, angled winter sunlight, stripped paint, getting dark now.

     Our world is dying and it is incredibly beautiful.

     Our only responsibility is to care for and attend to and love it, and to love each other

3. 

4.   Youth is a precipice because you really don’t know, as a 16 year old, if you’re going to survive this life. And everything you do and experience is evidence for and to the contrary of this supposition; small things take on great weight. So the metaphor of a bird leaving the nest really makes sense: you are 18 and are on your decent downward towards the ground, having just jumped out the the nest, and you need to figure out how to fly before you hit the ground and die. Into your 20s, you start to feel yourself flying and gliding along. But the stakes are real high at first, when you’re young and on a precipice. 

 

5.  This black bread they have in Estonia. 

 

 

 

 

Eating an orange for breakfast is always romantic. I had a toasted bun with honey on one side and jam on the other, and coffee, and then my oatmeal. I took my time and looked at the bare, clean apartment and the dull morning-light on the walls. I listened to Up in Wolves; I had  awoke with it in my head, clear and musical (that lyric guitar melody).

I made it to class on time, despite my leisurely morning.

Youth is a glaze of beauty and romance. Aging brings you in contact with reality, unglazed. This is good because reality is truthful and the beginning of love and the fear of God, but tragic because you feel disqualified from romance and beauty. Your experience of beauty & romance is partly extrinsic. I experience my sublime breakfast through an imagined spectator. If I am not beautiful, that spectator turns away, and I’m left with the bare facts of my existence: the actual foods I’m eating, what I am planning on doing today, what I am worth.

Winter in Winnipeg

 

Winter in Winnipeg

Walter J. Philips 

 

clear air autumn walk

hit in the face by a leaf 

dichotomy poem

 

September 2 Poem

I want another cookie 

I am reminding myself that there'll be a new heaven and a new earth where everything is reconciled

No more longing

$4.95 Starbucks cookie

 

Was pretty good though

Minor taste of preservative

Also ate a tuna sandwich and a Fresco slice and other things

today (turkey club sandwich, )

 

Staring Contest

 

July 3 Poem

 

 

 

Kissing sits heavy in my mouth
Here alone in my room

My insides all still
Sitting here bent over

Light leaving the pale blue dusk
It is darkening, making grey

And pocked with dark leaves

Out the window

Ghosts

I processed some ancient film that I found at a flea market, but to no avail. Some interesting textures, mostly blank, no images. This film was probably from the 1960s, and it was sold to me all rolled up, exposed but never processed.

 

Looking at these scans, years later, I saw two ghosts emerge from the chemical marks and scratches in this frame:

 

 

 

Enlarged slightly...a woman and man stand side by side in the centre of the frame.

 

Tina Modotti on the Riverbank

Found somone's dissertation on Tina Modotti frozen into the mud on the riverbank, open to this page.

A photograph: printed, forgotten, discovered, printed again and studied, forgotten again, multiplied across pages and digital images, and a book is printed and forgotten and loses its original purpose.

 

At moments of danger, Benjamin argues, earlier generations alert us to the mistake that we are on the verge of making through an image that bursts out of the continuum of time and travels toward us. 

Kaja Silverman, The Miracle of Analogy, page 12.

A picture flying through time and through different contexts, but never losing its essential being, greets me, startlingly, as I bike through a big ice puddle near the river bank.

 

Where the painting remained in the possession of a particular family, now and then someone would ask about the person portrayed. But after two or three generations this interest fades; the pictures, if they last, do so only as testimony to the art of the painter. With photography, however, we encounter something new and strange [...] something that cannot be silenced, that fills you with an unruly desire to know what her name was, the woman who was alive there, who even now is still real and will never consent to be wholly absorbed in " art. "

Walter Benjamin, A Little History of Photography, page 510.

They do so because we are in a position to "change the character" of their "day." If we recognize the present in this image from the past, and also understand that it is "intended" for us, we will redeem both the past and the present. At the moment in which this redemption occurs, which Benjamin calls "Jetztzeit" or "now-time," "what is" because co-present with "what was."

Silverman, continued from quote above.

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bottlecap.berlin

 

From Warshauer Strasse to Alexanderplatz.