Category Archives: Poetry

Chain ditty

Posted on January 8, 2008 by Francois Lachance

Frank Zappa “Packard Goose” has a segment sung by the character, Mary from the bus. Information is not knowledge. Knowledge is not wisdom. Wisdom is not truth. Truth is not beauty. Beauty is not love. Love is not music. Music … Continue reading →

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Tergiversation

Posted on December 28, 2007 by Francois Lachance

John Ashbery in “The Bungalows” in The Double Dream of Spring announces We shall very soon have the pleasure of recording A period of unanimous tergiversation in this respect And it so happens he ends the poem thus For standing … Continue reading →

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Trigger Words

Posted on December 23, 2007 by Francois Lachance

Seamus Heaney devotes one of his Oxford lectures (The Redress of Poetry) to Oscar Wilde’s The Ballad of Reading Gaol. It is an honest assessment of the poem’s aesthetic merits and faults. However one sentence glistens for me. Wilde’s own … Continue reading →

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Honouring

Posted on December 20, 2007 by Francois Lachance

Mona Oikawa writes towards the end of “My life is not imagined: Notes on writing as a Sansei lesbian feminist” about her father’s experience of loss and how it informs her practice. I remember a story told to me by … Continue reading →

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Flight Arrested and Prolonged

Posted on December 19, 2007 by Francois Lachance

It is a splendidly gorgeous title. Tell Me Again How the White Heron Rises and Flies Across the Nacreous River at Twilight Toward the Distant Islands — a collection of poems by Hayden Carruth in which there appears this ending … Continue reading →

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Cross-Referencing the Competition

Posted on December 17, 2007 by Francois Lachance

David Trinidad has a section near the end of “Essay with Moveable Parts” (collected in Plasticville) which converts the author into a doll which in a piece devoted to commenting on collections of Barbies and Troll Dolls is not surprising … Continue reading →

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Reading the Index Finding Treasure

Posted on December 16, 2007 by Francois Lachance

In these days of full text searching, the reading of indices is no longer an habitual activity. It is not however difficult to appreciate the indices prepared with the care and preserved in tomes such as The Book of Knowldge: … Continue reading →

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Imagining Endings with Wriggling

Posted on December 13, 2007 by Francois Lachance

“At Thomas Merton’s Grave” by Spencer Reece in The Road to Emmaus begins…. We can never be with loss too long. And now an ending… It is disagreeable, to tend your garden, on your knees, With the sensation of tending … Continue reading →

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urban cubes

Posted on December 10, 2007 by Francois Lachance

Approaching Montreal from the Maritimes, the speaker of “from the ocean, inland” in Matt Robinson’s A Ruckus of Awkward Stacking reminds me of Frye encountering the contours of Quebec City. on approach montreal is a spilt pallet of cardboard boxes, … Continue reading →

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Apostate Beetles

Posted on December 9, 2007 by Francois Lachance

There are two poems some pages apart but both touching upon the theme of consuming or eating in Mary Di Michele’s first book of poetry Tree of August. The first poem describes the labours and predation of the buffalo beetle … Continue reading →

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