Hurrah! My poetry granting season has opened with a "yes"!
Every year the Ontario Arts Council runs a grant competition called The Writers' Reserve. It's an interesting program: the OAC gathers a number volunteer publishing houses, literary magazines and the like. They allocate to each house a certain pot of money to give away, and writers approach each house directly. The house doesn't publish the work, or make other commitments to the writer -- they just nod in the direction of the kind of work they like. So the OAC is supplying the money the houses are doing the work, just for the joy of being able to say yes to the stuff they love. The result is a great array of small grants, supporting a hugely diverse body of work. I'm such a fan of this program.
Like many pretty-much-mainstream poets, I approach a variety of houses through the Writers' Reserve. Last year it was ten, and I got two recommendations. This year it was 13. The first one just came back: and it was a yes. Thanks for the nod, ARC magazine.
So, what am I writing? Well, according to the project description, I'm writing this: "Too Strong to Stop, Too Sweet to Lose" is a long poem in small parts. The poem is about 30 pieces now: I hope one day it might be 50 or 80, which could make it chapbook or book length.
Each piece of "Too Strong" has a title that asks big question, such as "What can save us?" The body of each piece answers the question - though obviously the answers are oblique and partial. Some of the answers take the form of aphorisms, parables, or lists, for instance.
I once called this long poem "Systems of Knowledge," before I decided that made it sound as if it might contain words like "didactic" or "mimetic," the thought of which makes my teeth ache. The poem is, nevertheless, concerned with the ways in which we put knowledge together into systems: concerned with religion, with superstition, with science. There is quite a bit of science hiding in these little lines: the recent discovery that the color of dinosaur feathers can be deduced by electron microscopy is there, for instance. There is superstition, too: casting runes and counting crows and stirring soup with knives.
The quotation from Willa Cather that contains the title asks: "what is any art but a mold to imprison for a moment the shining elusive element which is life itself- life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose." One could replace the word "art" with "magic," or with "science." What is any great work of humankind but just such a mold?
In what it says "Too Strong Strong to Stop, Too Sweet to Lose" comments on what is knowable - but ultimately the poem is about what it doesn't say, what cannot be known. To wit: What we do with this life that we cannot hold onto, and cannot bear to let go?
"Too Strong" is sometimes known (on Twitter and elsewhere) as Big Weird Poem. Here's a sample:
What do we hold to?
This sweet world -- how we love it.
As an old horse loves the harness,
loves the stall.
The drenching smell of leather.
The work and rest.
The sweat and hay.
Dust-slanted, cricket-singing, the barn.
Even when it's burning.
