Did you know there was an Olympics going on right now? A winter Olympics? We know, we were surprised too! Where was the warning? Why did no one tell us?
Anyhootles, for Poetry Friday, we thought we'd get somewhat in the spirit of the snowy sporting events going on right now in South Korea with an on-topic poem. However, the closest we could come was "not very close."
That said, please enjoy Charmaine Cadeau's haunting "Winter" from her 2004 collection What You Used to Wear.
This was the week of Valentine's Day, 2018. Poetry Friday obviously missed the date, but that doesn't mean Poetry Friday can't think about relationships anymore. In fact, that's all Poetry Friday ever thinks about.
Accordingly, here is Alyda Faber's "Speed Dating", from her 2016 collection Dust or Fire.
For no discernible reason, this week's Poetry Friday concerns cephalopods and cooking.
Just the mood we're in this week.
Without further ado, from the collection True Concessions — winner of the 2010 Archibald Lampman Award for Poetry — here is Craig Poile's weirdly wonderful poem, "How to Trim Squid."
We love to travel, but sometimes we can't get away as far as we like. So, for today's Poetry Friday, we'll take a quick haiku-heavy jaunt via Brian Bartlett to "West End, Halifax" (from his collection The Watchmaker's Table).
Reached via social media, Brian had this to say about the work behind his poem:
This haiku montage is one of three in The Watchmaker's Table. Stitching haiku together to create long poems (which I've compared to collages or mosaics) became so much a part of my writing a dozen or so years ago that I went on to publish a whole book of seven more montages, Potato Blossom Road (Ekstasis Editions, 2013). That book also includes an essay, "Haikuing," which details my reflections on this popular but often misunderstood, misrepresented mode of writing—which I've also experienced as a way of thinking, seeing and hearing.
In this moist corner
of a used-book store
a lone mushroom sprouts
Two giant zucchini
by a grinning girl’s ears –
green parenthesis
He holds high his rolled-up
Yoga mat, fending off
a crow diving close
The blackout lasts
one second – the neighbourhood
blinks – glimpse of Zilch
Where Dublin St. meets
London St., a soaked atlas
falls apart in grass
Behemoth tree-trimmer spits
limbs into its gut –
noisiest eater around
Garbage night, one hopeful
sound in the dark –
bottle-scavengers’ bag clink
From under ice
in a mid-winter thaw
a worm crawls, earth’s colour
A sort of grace –
a falling icicle strikes
his foot, not his eye
Blizzard-buried,
a locked bicycle’s shrunken
to its red reflector
A maple wingseed
stays stuck to a skate blade
crisscrossing a rink
Two bootprints frozen
in sidewalk ice, one pointing
down the street, one up
Through twelve months
a scarecrow on a porch gives
each season the same scowl
Oh for X-rays to show
all the trees roots holding
these streets together
Last week, we Poetry Friday'd ourselves into the Internet proper with a poem tangentially involving cats. We thought that this Friday we'd stick with the animal theme (again, at least tangentially) and look to a horse poem to read and discuss.
Specifically, a dead horse poem.
