robert kroetsch: selections from the hornbooks of rita k

[hornbook #1]

Often in the afternoon he cries for awhile. He wants a poem that will be as accommodating as a peanut shell. Sometimes he sits at his desk while he cries. Sometimes he goes outside and pretends he is weeding his rock garden. He wants a poem that will make him understand why men plant land mines.

Sometimes he laughs in the middle of his crying. He wants his fingers to recover their lost intelligence. He wants his mouth to speak. He stares out through the windows at the place where the sky should be. He wants a brick to crash through one of the windows, A brick thrown by a poem.


[hornbook #27]

The crescendo of our loneliness fills library basements. Books transform into dust, dust into landfills, landfills into gas. There is always hope.

The brittleness of our desire forces us to climb stairs on our hands and knees. We groan. We imagine we are praying. There is always hope.

He is always standing in the snow, watching for the sun.


[hornbook #28] 

     A poem is an empty house.

[Stranger, you must enter, then knock.]

In a poem, everything (including the hollow door, the reddening sky) is at risk. A risking business:

     
     once again the old thump

     onto belly or the rump.

[hornbook #[]] 

One of the considerable and neglected art forms is the stack of papers.

This can be at once a literary form and a version of performance art. In my own case, it takes he form, most often, of a stack of letters which I feel I should or must answer quite soon. But not immediately. The stack then occasions in me a complex mixture of delay, anticipation, dread, shame, guilt and self-condemnation. I am vaguely aware of the individual sheets of paper and texts in the stack, but the hole [sic] is much greater than sum of the parts. The mere and sustained appearance of the stack, unfortunately, announces a kind of completion. It is a completion which is flexible in that it can be added to but not subtracted from. The stack, like a poem, begins, if nothing else, to describe intention.

Kroetsch, Robert. The Hornbooks of Rita K. Edmonton: The University of Alberta Press, 2001.

the spirit is too blunt an instrument - anne stevenson

The spirit is too blunt an instrument
to have made this baby.
Nothing so unskilful as human passions
could have managed the intricate
exacting particulars: the tiny
blind bones with their manipulating tendons,
the knee and the knucklebones, the resilient
fine meshings of ganglia and vertebrae,
the chain of the difficult spine.

Observe the distinct eyelashes and sharp crescent
fingernails, the shell-like complexity
of the ear, with its firm involutions
concentric in miniature to minute
ossicles. Imagine the
infinitesimal capillaries, the flawless connections
of the lungs, the invisible neural filaments
through which the completed body
already answers to the brain.

Then name any passion or sentiment
possessed of the simplest accuracy.
No, no desire or affection could have done
with practice what habit
has done perfectly, indifferently,
through the body's ignorant precision.
It is left to the vagaries of the mind to invent
love and despair and anxiety
and their pain.

Stevenson, Anne. "The Spirit is too Blunt an Instrument" Scanning the Century: The Penguin Book of the Twentieth Century in Poetry. Peter Forbes, Ed. London: Penguin Books, 1999. 316-7.

men and women have meaning only as man and woman - joan murray

Men and women have meaning only as man and woman.
The moon is itself and it is lost among stars.
The days are individual, and in the passage
The nights are each sleep, but the dreams vary.
A repeated action is upon its own feet.
We who have spoken there speak here.
A world turns and walks away.
The timing of independent objects
Permits them to live and move and admit their space
And entity and various attitudes of life.
All things are cool in themselves and complete.

Murray, Joan. "Men and Women Have Meaning Only as Man and Woman" Modern Canadian Poets. Jones, Evan and Todd Swift, eds. Manchester: Carcanet Press Limited, 2010. 79.

prayer - carol anne duffy

Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer
utters itself. So, a woman will lift
her head from the sieve of her hands and stare
at the minims sung by a tree, a sudden gift.

Some nights, although we are faithless, the truth
enters our hearts, that small familiar pain;
then a man will stand stock-still, hearing his youth
in the distant Latin chanting of a train.

Pray for us now. Grade I piano scales
console the lodger looking out across
a Midlands town. Then dusk, and someone calls
a child's name as though they named their loss.

Darkness outside. Inside, the radio's prayer --
Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.

Duffy, Carol Anne. "Prayer" Scanning the Century: The Penguin Book of the Twentieth Century in Poetry. Peter Forbes, Ed. London: --Penguin Books, 1999. 494.

this given day - george elliott clarke

Morning yawns, the sun stretches, and the train
Pitches the air with smoke, paws the iron earth,
Tracks its big city game along the coast,
Narrows the span between our birth and death.
From dreams, we, depayses, fall to coffee,
Orange Free State oranges, new news, fresher dreams,
Prophesying what tomes were now must read,
What names we will need, what gods we will prize.
   All we can prove is the sun and the bay
And the baying hunter that is the train,
All joined in a beautiful loneliness --
Separated from our pure world of wounds,
Our globe of love (sharp nails hammered through palms),
Happening alone, as if it matters.

Clarke, George Elliott. "This Given Day" Modern Canadian Poets. Jones, Evan and Todd Swift, eds. Manchester: Carcanet Press Limited, 2010. 216.