fragments in search of a lecture: handout

The fear that a small wooden thread sticking out of the hem of my blanket may be hard, hard and sharp as a steel needle; the fear that this little button on my night-shirt may be bigger than my head and heavier; the fear that the breadcrumb which just dropped off my bed may turn into glass, and shatter where it hits the floor …

Rainer Marie Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

frg. 1: Fear
· Setting out

frg. 2: And then went down to the ship
· Ezra Pound. The Cantos. “I have tried to write Paradise …”

frg. 3: The Force Pump.
· I. A. Richards

frg. 4: The Window With Bars On It
· Childhood recollection
· Basement apartment, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

frg. 5: The Importance Of Learning How To Count
· One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. Whereas prose is spatial, poetry is temporal. Ten. What the hell does that mean?

alt. frg. 5: Genetics And The Poetic Imagination
· Homer
· James Joyce

frg . 6: Speech Therapy
· My father’s stutter, stutter

frg. 7: Grocery Store Dictionary
· The process whereby a household dictionary is ‘convened’

frg. 8: Prodigious
· “Large in quantity or size”

frg. 9: The Knife Sharpener
· It was good to have sharp knives once again

frg. 10: X-Men
· Comics
· Superheroes in a beatnik café

frg.11: Tempus Fugit
· In which the audience is asked to imagine something, for a second or two

frg. 12: The History Of Canadian Blues
· An interlude musicale
· Richard Newell aka King Biscuit Boy

frg. 13: My Brother’s Transistor Radio
· Bob Dylan
· "Like a Rolling Stone"

frg. 14: High School Librarian
· Mr. N. R[..] C[......]

frg. 15: Hand-Written And Framed On The Wall
· Leonard Cohen
· "Go by brooks, love … "

frg. 16: Chagall
· Lawrence Ferlinghetti
· "Don’t let that horse/eat that violin … "

frg. 17: My Criminal Past
· Whereat the stolen property is displayed as proof of abject state

frg. 18: Mermaids
· ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ by T.S. Eliot

frg. 19: Staring Out Windows
· University College reading lounge [University of Western Ontario]
· Winter is determined to be the better season

frg. 20: On Blind Poets
· John Milton, briefly

frg. 21: … That Lead To Other Thoughts That Lead To Their Unraveling …
· William Blake. "Tyger! Tyger! burning bright …"

frg. 22: How My Boots Got Dry
· W.B. Yeats
· ‘The Second Coming’

frg. 23: An Open Letter To The World
· My literary review. Mine, mine, mine!
· World Letter

frg. 24: My Flooded Basement
· My flooded basement

frg. 25: Not Enough ‘Poetry’ To Continue
· Wallace Stevens

frg. 26: What The Editor, Writer and ‘Infamous’ Workshop Leader G[........] L[...] Told Me
· In a letter
· G[........] to Jon
· Iowa
· Punishment

alt. frg.26 What Gertrude Stein Had To Say About Iowa
· You are brilliant and subtle if you come from Iowa and really strange and you live as you live and
you are always well taken care of if you come from Iowa

frg. 27: The Transcendent Desk of Saint Thomas Aquinas
· My desk and one other

frg. 28: R[.............] J[..............]
· Iowa City, IA
· Drinking from plastic cups
· Montpelier, VT
· Riding bicycle home, neatly drunk and fearless


FIN

Was this a lecture? Was it useful? Like a hammer is useful? Like dental floss? You tell me.
I didn’t see Neruda in Paris, in 1957.
In 1957 I would have been two years old.
Well, okay then.
I was here, and so were you.