Soft Self-Portrait with Fried Bacon (detail), Salvador Dali
Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision. ~Salvador Dali, Declaration, 1929
I’ve missed Poetry Month by a few weeks, but the following poem is among the first pieces of writing I succeeded in getting published. It appeared in the obscure literary magazine Mainline, published by Eugene McNamara out of some shadowy cloister at the University of Windsor.
It began, the editor conceded, as “the Zap Comix of the little poetry mags.” Nonetheless, the journal published some great work by Earle Birney, Joyce Carol Oates, Michael Ondaatje, Alden Knowlen, George Bowering, et al.
It was pretty heady stuff for a 20 year-old ― to have one’s poems appear (in No.13) among verses by such CanLit luminaries as Len Gasparini and C.H. Gervais.
I’d just returned from my first bicycle traverse of British Columbia (there ends the cycling connection) and was sharing a tiny, damp cottage with the friend who had accompanied me on that trip. He worked night shift at a lumber mill; I worked days at a doorknob factory (I kid you not), so we didn’t trip over eachother.
Weekends were dedicated to serious nightclub debauchery ― where I often played blues harp ― but the drudgery of running a production line left my mind free to ponder such weighty topics as the nature of consciousness.
Second #2
You dream of razor blades
marching across the delicate flesh
of your trembling vision
marching over the very delicate flesh
of the moment
marching where it is twilight
and you cannot always stay
where you dream a concrete solution
for a question you never meant to formulate
Your eyes turn about in their sockets
Still nothing is certain.
Then something dark and massive
collapses onto shining steel
Bios: Eugene McNamara | C.H. Gervais
The League of Canadian Poets | The Academy of American Poets
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