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Poetry Reviews by Kirk Ramdath: of ash of brick of water

Poetry Reviews by Kirk Ramdath

of ash of brick of water by Kirk Miles

Published in 2010 by Bhouse (Calgary). ISBN 978-0-9810499-6-0

Kirk Miles has a painter’s gift for imagery in of ash of brick of water, his collection of poems by Calgary publisher Bhouse. With his poet’s brush he evokes a vivid four-dimensional image of a life as an artist striving to do his thing in Calgary, Alberta. Though surprisingly there are no odes to his native city, he captures the quintessential Calgary-ness of having an intense personal relationship with the places one must traverse when the need comes to escape – Banff, the Rocky Mountains, and the prairie. His affinity for the landscape is most evident when he dives into a sea of wheat and replaces blank prairie-like page with description of durum that waves like “a mustang dipping its mane”. It seems a classic image, and the text does cast a spell of timelessness, charting a family history through almost 100 years, starting with his grandfather who organized minstrel shows in Canada in the 1920s, right up to the modern era with the last section titled, “iDeath”. There is concern for death as much as there is for life – he is a father who has to come to terms both with the death of his own father as well as the birth of his daughter – the circle of life and responsibility. Life goes on, and so must the show. To support his poetry career Kirk Miles also performs extensively as Hamlet the Clown. His songs of clown joy and songs of clown hell are an entertaining and insightful look into the life of a performer, but it is also clear that he never stops being a poet. This is a keen insight, because it also means that he quite likely also never stops being a clown. It is interesting to consider the tricks that Hamlet the Clown might be using to influence the reader with these poems, but as the text says several times, he’s “just selling entertainment.” These poems are the purest form.

Love in a Handful of Dust

Is it just me or have the last five months flown by at breakneck speed?

After years of personal anticipation and hard work, my first book, Love in a Handful of Dust, was published by Frontenac House on March 29, 2011 at a full to the brim Auburn Saloon.  The launch party was an extravaganza that launched my book as well as Yes., Narcissus Unfolding, and Forgetting the Holocaust and the 2011 Calgary Spoken Word Festival.

I was on cloud nine as can be expected and it was shortly after that I received word that I received a Canada Council grant to work on a new project.  This was a welcome development since the end of a project that had been my sole focus for several years left me with some very sudden gaps in my life into which all of the oxygen seemed to disappear.

I wouldn’t be a poet if it wasn’t the most challenging thing I have ever done.

The new project filled the gaps but has presented its own challenges. The project involves looking at my experiences growing up in Trinidad and Calgary and to draw connections between those experiences to reveal something deeper that connects the colonial histories and shared language of two very different places.

Spending time in Trinidad was an often heartbreaking experience wherein I learned the lesson of not being able to go back home.  Home doesn’t exist as it did when you last saw it 20 years ago; the only thing to be found there is family and delicious food and shattered idealism. Nonetheless I wrote some essential poetry while I was there and also discovered Derek Walcott.

Writing about Canada presented a different challenge, only because I was suddenly tasked with the challenge of representing Canada. It was easy enough to start along the same old paths and then I realized that I cannot simply restate cliches. But removing the cliches, what does it mean to be Canadian? Aha!! That’s a million dollar question, maybe.

2011

2011 is here at last.  What an age! Surely we will see some wondrous things this year.  In September 2011, Apple will release the iCube!  After that nothing will be the same.

On a more personal level, I move forward with my arms open to embrace the new decade.  My book will be published in March and as it moves closer and closer to existing, more and more I look forward to the shape my writing will take as a new project replaces the old.

2010 was a year full of challenges and amazing good times. In 2011 anything can happen!  Until September, when the iCube is launched and aliens make first contact.

Save the date people!

On Writing Fiction

I don’t know what it is about writing fiction that is so terrifying.

When I was younger I always thought of myself as a fiction writer.  Most of my creative writing was fiction.  Most of it would have been considered ‘speculative fiction’ – what that actually means I’m not sure.  I wrote science fictiony and fantastic stories about, say dolls that convinced people to commit murder, or vampires that fell in love… with a tragic end.  This was many years ago, before the current vampire craze.  My vampires didn’t twinkle!

The last stories I wrote were actually for my creative writing class at the University of Calgary.  That was a great course.  I learned how to edit myself, an invaluable skill for  a writer.  Then the class finished and I somehow fell into writing poetry almost exclusively.  That was in 2004.  Yikes.  How time flies.  I have tried a couple of times to re-enter the realm of fiction writing, but I haven’t tried seriously, and as I sit here thinking of writing fiction, it seems almost terrifying.

I think it has partially to do with me being quite uncertain of what the appropriate style of writing is.  The first story I wrote for that University level creative writing class was the wildest concoction I have ever come up with, full of sexy robots, artificial intelligence, sex, drugs, hallucinogenic trips, Alan Turing, and more sex.

I was so proud of it. Then I got the lowest mark I ever got for an assignment in an English course in the entirety of my academic career, a C+.  I was aghast.  So I reformed my writing style for the later assignments, producing more realistic stories that recieve better grades.  But at the end, perhaps I had shifted my fiction writing away from the place it actually comes naturally from?

Who knows.  All I know is that the first Passion Pitch Fiction Open Mic happens this Saturday, November 13, 7 pm at the Auburn Saloon in Calgary. (passionpitch.wordpress.com) And I vow here in writing that I will have new fiction to read by then.

Yikes.

On Calgary

 

Seagull eating fish on Long Beach, Vancouver Island

 

It wasn’t too long ago that I experienced a sense of dread at the thought of staying in Calgary another month, another week, another DAY.  I was ready to pack up and leave and keeping my eye open for possible escape routes.  Then dramatic events unfolded and I quit my job and other dramatic events unfolded and I was free of my lease and suddenly I was free of all ties that required me to remain in this geometric location.  It had been six months since the last poetry event I organized, and Calgary was feeling dead to me.

I got in my car and drove to the place that I have been compelled to go every year since my first trip there in summer 2008 — Vancouver Island. Specifically, the North West coast where Long Beach resides between Ucluelet and Tofino.

I got in my car on Thursday morning and was in Vancouver Thursday night, thankful to my friends Robert and Jiao for letting me crash at their place, as well as for reminding me gently that not everyone’s lives are as spontaneous as mine.  I caught the ferry the next morning and was on Long Beach by Friday afternoon.

I was free.

This was the third summer in a row that I was on this beach, and the first that I was truly free.  Oh still plagued by lingering clutches of debt, but money was never important to me.  I was free of so many of the burdens that I had brought with me to this beach the previous two years; mainly the plague of a persistent broken heart.  Oh woe is me, etc, well I’m a poet for a reason, so there.

Needless to say, after spending the rest of the day on the beach writing, at my campsite cooking, then at night by myself with a fire, moonlight, stars so bright, the motions of the ocean, and a Maudite, I had absolutely convinced myself to move to Vancouver.  On Monday.

My plan was: when I left the island on Monday morning, I would go find an apartment in Vancouver, thrown down a damage deposit, drive back to Calgary and get some stuff, and then drive back and become a Vancouverite.

I spent the next three nights in a kind of bliss I had yet to experience in my 31 years.  I camped on the beach by myself.  I acquainted myself with the seabirds and discovered that my camera takes high quality photos at 40X digital zoom.  I wrote during the day, and in particular I wrote a quite remarkable poem while I was at Florencia Bay.  The poem was the second supernatural, almost mystical, dare I say — divine — gift that I have received from that specific place.  Both the poem and the other thing, well, they are stories in themself.

I went through the gamut of emotions over those three days.  By the third evening, I felt that, as good as this experience was, I didn’t want to be alone anymore.  What’s the point of all this beauty if there’s no one to share it with?  Seagulls are the most indifferent of friends.  The moon was full in the sky that night and I stayed a bit later than previous nights tending the fire I had to myself on the beach.  When I walked back to camp, it was very dark, and all the warnings about the dangers of bear attacks seemed suddenly very real.  I tell you, every shadow made me jump and by the end I was almost running back to my campsite so that the bears (cougars, and wolves) wouldn’t get their paws on me.

I woke up the next morning feeling refreshed, somehow accomplished, and eager to go home.  I guess I didn’t really want to move away from Calgary after all; I just needed to get the hell out of Dodge for a weekend to stare at that big beautiful ocean from that big beautiful beach.

Now I’m back in Calgary and every day it seems more and more like home.  After a seven month hiatus, I feel re-energized and have started organizing poetry events again.  And other ideas are brewing that will take their own shape and form soon. Stay tuned.

Also check out the Passion Pitch site: passionpitch.wordpress.com.