Moment
For Louis Dudek
Walking out of the library with
Beckett’s Not I under arm,
I thought that rock was much like a cat,
or something like that, sitting there, or
maybe just a hat someone dropped,
it could be that, where it sat,
it looks just like that, from the corner of the eye
when looking askance, a chance glimpse,
as the eye glides over, before
thought seizes the moment to deceive,
but it’s something else,
before you notice,
just past your shoulder.
A rock, or small boulder?
rounded and curved,
resting, well-grounded,
I thought it a cat,
or something like that,
in that split-second,
before mind seized eye.
But, just a rock sitting
at the sidewalk’s side,
its gray fur glistening in the rain
Waving to
Phil Hall
for Erín
Moure
His thoughts engage, essay-poetics
and linguistic illuminations.
We shared the stage at Chapter Two in Windsor,
then chatted, about his times at Sage Hill,
Berton House, and Queen’s U.
Phil plays banjo, lives near Perth, paints with
the alphabet.
His writing reminds me of Federman’s
"Surfiction"
Sometimes we “wave” at each other
through email exchanges,
I sent a message about the Hopi sense of time,
and mentioned that Hopi prefer
verbs over nouns, "waving" over
"wave".
To the best of his understanding, Phil said, Hopi
see
continuances where others see the minute hand, or
a clock ticking.
He figured their sense of time is more like water
pouring, and
he said, he prefers being underway, or among,
instead of alone, or “ticking” boxes.
His Essay
on Legend, depicts Al Purdy,
and the second annual Purdy picnic at Al’s
A-Frame at
Roblin Lake near Ameliasburgh.
Al invited me, but I couldn’t make it.
While there Phil talked about Zukovsky’s “A.”
He said, Al wrote inside an A near a town
starting with A.
And Phil wondered if Al ever read Z’s A?
I thought of objectivism, self-reflexivity,
narrative disjunction,
sounds, syntax,
lexical fragmentation,
repetition.
I thought of ruptured
lines pouring
outside of convention
& speech patterns.
I thought of Phil’s (s)light-of-hand,
how one assembles sur-poetic, or sur-rural
juxtapositional strategies that realign, maybe
malign lingo.
Phil mentioned McNamara and
how M never said,
“Kid, go back to
Bobcaygeon & work in the bank,
these poems you've written are painfully awful.”
He said M taught him how a word can be used as a
stone
in a stone wall, and also as a grace note.
We talked over beer after reading, at Chapter Two.
He sent me his Notes from Gethsemane.
That night I thought of Ron Silliman, George
Oppen,
& Robert Kroetsch’s effing the ineffable,
I thought of
the treachery of narrative, and Brossard’s
intense syntax,
&
Erín Moure’s radiant transformations.
Karl Jirgens, former English Dept. Head and Chair of the Creative Writing Program (U Windsor), authored six books (Coach House, Mercury, ECW). His The Razor's Edge won two awards (Porcupine’s Quill). He edited two books (on Jack Bush, and Christopher Dewdney), plus, an issue of Open Letter with Beatriz Hausner. His scholarly/creative texts are published globally (recently in Japan). His poetry was selected for Best Poetry of Canada, 2023. His next book (poetry) is due 2025 (Travesties, Exile Editions). Jirgens founded/edited/published Rampike magazine featuring stellar international art, writing, and theory (1979-2016) archived at U Windsor’s Leddy Library and the Thomas Fisher Rare Books Library. https://scholar.uwindsor.ca/rampike/about.html.
[photo credit: Collette Broeders]