sometimes I wonder (revisited)
Sometimes I wonderif she ever existed.
—found poem
Sometimes I wonder
if she ever existed.
Only a smile now
a gesture
copper hair flashing
she fades even in dreams
artist in the supermarket
She stands in the aisle like reverse Stendhal:frozen, her hand extended over the mound of apples.
Apples push into her like the fists of a lover
knocking at a locked door, urgent, juicy, plump.
It's always like this: fruit overwhelms, vegetables
scream longing; fresh trout imagines a sizzling grill,
beef lounges in a marinade, ready to sear.
She wants to paint, to cook, to knead warm
transit
Night. City street after rain.Early autumn leaves cling to the pavement
like wet hair on a waiting face.
Amber and blue incandescence
lies in pools for walking entrances,
performances and exits,
as the occasional soloist mimes
man walking alone on the street
concert
engine idle just beyond theancient boathouse
river calm and waiting silent
to the weed beds
and the spaces vast, beyond
ease the throttle slowly forward
hear the engine twist
inside the music
The part I sing in our quartethovers above or below the melody;
often it sounds like the French horn.
The Lead's note sounds familiar;
the Bass is the solid foundation;
the Tenor lilts above all, thrillingly;
my part, the Bari, fills it all in.
cocoon
Inside the silk threadsis what will come:
beautiful wings,
gleaming reds, yellows, blues,
curves and strength,
the freedom of flight
instead of plodding,
gnawing eating.
lotus eaters
This is the first in a series I started a while back. I should write a few more on this . . .everyone on the street was
somewhere else
listening to music
words from another time
another place
after
She used to purr when she leaped onto the bed;I prefer to think of her arrivals.
I could read her expressions through the fur:
glad to see me (and usually was):
relaxed eyelids, fur sleek off the face;
impatient with my stupidity:
Mauve and Gold
If a god were eating strawberriesWhen that sunset happened,
I know he'd stop in mid-bite
With red sweet juice dribbling
Down his chin onto his toga
And just stare and do a god-thing:
driving home
The sun set just before we turned west onto the roadthat curved into the pure black landscape silhouetted
against the absolutely clear tangerine and indigo sky.
As our headlights revealed and dismissed the familiar
meanderings of this riverside route and its clusters of cottages
On being mistaken for myself
Photos never lieexcept when they must,
with a minimum of mendacity,
tell welting whoppers
about how egregiously old
the old codger has become.
I have studied photos
taken years ago
that make me look
what was left
First they took away the all moneypoured it into the government trough
and they fed the war in Afganistan
but still that wasn't enough
so they crucified the artists
and they stood around and laughed
Review: A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare
A fresh view for these jaded eyes. Ten thousand performers auditioned for this production, and it shows.
I have taken hundreds of grade nine students through the text of this play, seen it several times myself, and taken my School of the Arts Drama class on tour with it; so when I saw NAC was bringing a production of this old chestnut to Ottawa, I was not enthusiastic. But early press notices suggested that this was something different, and it was.
This is a world touring production from India, with a cast that is all Indian or Sri Lankan. In spite of the fact that there is very little English in the performance (lines are spoken in Hindi, Tamil, Malyalam, Marathi, Bengali, Sanskrit, Sinhalese and English) the few English lines are just enough to keep the audience in the play. This is a phenomenon that is not too unlike viewing the play in Elizabethan English, which most audience members cannot understand anyway.
The performance features virtuoso performances by a standout cast which is required to be acrobatic, musical, terpsichoric, gymnastic, histrionic, melodramatic, comic—you name it; they can do it.
This was a lavish, fast-paced, ingenious production that I found delightful. It gave me a fresh and penetrating look into Shakespeare’s play. The doubling of the royal court of the land by the actors in the royal court of the fairies was a nice twist. All of the mistaken identities were there, the silly earthy love story between Bottom and the enchanted Titania, the fairy illusions, which made more sense delivered as exotic trapeze work. The performances were delivered with panache and beautifully choreographed invention. It was transporting.
I must comment on the visual aspects of this show:
The costumes are at least as elaborate as Elizabethan dress, but still modern. I cannot think of a way to make present day Northern costumes so wonderfully decorative and sensual. The costumes allowed the extreme movements demanded of the actors on climbable staging and trapeze and slung drapes, and were still fantastical and sensual.
The set is very practical, highly textured, versatile and expressive, without being artificial or drawing undue attention to itself. It could be palace and terrifying forest and romantic enchantment interchangeably. The drapery slings were perhaps the most engaging feature, allowing characters to hang upside down, sleep or make love suspended above ground, or hang above like fairies, observing or manipulating.
There were three musicians onstage, just outside of the action, adding percussive, stringed and wind instrumentation throughout the entire production, giving the action a cinematic flavour.
The acting was visceral, for example giving Oberon real power that in some productions has sometimes seemed elusively more a matter of tradition than inherent in the character. The declamation of lines in language that I certainly did not understand gave me permission to focus on the actors’ movements and declamation, as if I were watching dance or opera instead of interpreted words—very liberating, very sensual. More than that, the dynamics of movement in three (well, even four) dimensions was imaginative; this was almost more Cirque de Soleil than stage play.
This production was not just a splashy reinterpretation of Shakespeare; it was a realization of a very familiar work in a way that opened a new way of seeing it. Wonderful.
National Arts Centre English Theatre presents the Dash Arts Production of
Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream directed by Tim SuppleProduction
Set and Costume Design: Sumant Jayakrishnan
Music Director: Divissaro
Lighting Design: Zuleikha Chauhari
Assistant Directors/ Deputy Stage Managers: Quasar Thakore Padamsee, Mohit Takalkar
Choreography: D Padmakumar, M Palani
Company Manager: Shankar Arora
Stage Manager: Kavita Puri Arora
Lighting Supervisor: Doug Harry
Sound Supervisor: Rob Bass
Tour General Manager: John F. Fisher / CAPA
Production Manager: John McNamara
The Cast
Court of Athens
Philostrate, Theseus’ Master of Entertainment ….. Ajay Kumar
Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons ….. Archana Ramaswamy
Theseus, Duke of Athens ….. P R Jijoy
Egeus, advisor to Theseus ….. J Jayakumar
Hermia, Egeus’ Daughter, in love with Lysander ….. Vandita Vasa
Demetrius, Hermia’s Suitor ….. M. Palani
Lysander, in love with Hermia ….. Chandan Roy Sanyal
Helena, Hermia’s friend, in love with Demetrius ….. Kriti PantStreets of Athens
Peter Quince, a carpenter ….. Vivek Mishra
Nick Bottom, a weaver ….. Aporup Acharya
Francis Flute, a bellows-mender ….. Joyraj Bhattacharjee
Robin Starveling, a tailor ….. T Gopalakrishnan
Tom Snout, a tinker ….. Umesh Jagtap
Snug, a joiner ….. Jitu ShastriThe Forest
Puck, a spirit and servant to Oberon ….. Ajay Kumar
Spirits, servants to Titania:
Peaseblossom ….. Reshma Shetty
Cobweb ….. M Palani
Mustard Seed ….. Charan CS
Moth ….. Ram Pawar
Dragonfly ….. Tapan Das
Glow Worm ….. Dharmender Pawar
Oberon, King of the Fairies ….. P R Jijoy
Titania, Queen of the Fairies ….. Archana Ramaswamy
A boy, stolen from an Indian King ….. Lakhan PawarMusicians
Wind/Strings/Percussion ….. N Tiken Singh
Guitar/Stings/Percussion ….. Kaushik Dutta
Percussion/Wind ….. Gagan Singh BaisProduction viewed: November 8, 2008, 2 pm Running time about 2 hours, 45 minutes, including one intermission.
Financial markets
Some of us parked our cars
with headlights aimed at the foot of the
hill, giving us a bright target area
at the bottom.
We headed up the hill
dragging our wooden toboggans:
a variety of sizes,
my four seater, a couple of deuces,
Jeremy’s monster
that seated eight.
Above us the top, stars hung
like a massive opera chandelier.
The dark hill swooped down
like more night sky
to the glowing patch at the bottom.
Giggling riders sandwiched themselves onto
their wooden carpets
hugging the shoulders
or more intimately, chests
and thigh clenching the hips before them
a little wiggle, and the toboggans
began their contour-hugging glide
gathering speed over the
surprising night-black snow.
The early silent ribbon-ride
degenerated into
a screaming roller-coaster
as the moguls turned the toboggan
into a bottom-smacking
gnout that left tailbone
and teeth ready to confess
to any imaginable sin.
The return haul up into the darkness
was repeated by fewer toboggans
fewer riders until finally
the patch of light disappeared
and silence descended
the rutted snow
in peace.
A toboggan is a device made for sliding down a snowy slope. It consists of perhaps ten to twelve thin tongue-and-grooved slats of wood fastened together into a long platform that is cuved up and back at the front end. Sometimes these have a thin cushion for passengers. Tail-bone injuries are common, as are concussions which occur when the toboggan collides with a tree. Riders sit as they would on a floor, straddling easch others’ hips, and hugging the person ahead. It is a pretty intimate sensation, and very popular on outdoor winter dates, in a rough-and-tumble way.
glib
Tee shirt philosophy
bumper sticker wisdom
graffiti prayer
render surfaces
Im with stoopid
F yu kn reed this UR 2 clos
Bomb!ay
swe 
et
When is complex thought
invited to attend this world?
First Night
The bari’s laryngitis for his first time on the stage
built a backstage tension no lozenge could assuage.
The bass was getting nervous: he had a tricky part;
in “Sh Boom” he sings a counterpoint—the timing is an art.
The lead was clearly nervous: he projected pale faced calm;
he’d written jokes with the tenor, and hoped they wouldn’t bomb.
the tenor was realistic: he knew from his great experience
that smiles and energy overcome the audience’ hearience.
So what do you think then happened, with the nerves and the throat and the jokes?
They stood and sang and they minted gold with the song and the tag and the post.
The four parts of a barbershop quartet:
Tenor: the high part, usually sung in falsetto
Lead: the melody part
Bari: the baritone, the harmony part, ranging from above the lead to the bass range
Bass: the lowest part, the foundation for the quartet’s sound
Tag: the flourish of sustained chords at the end of most barbershop tunes (Barbershoppers often learn tags by themselves because they are so much fun to sing.)
Post: a long note, ususally sung by the lead or tenor, that resolves, gloriously, at the end of the tag.
poet warrior
Seems obscene, the thought of a poet fighting:
John McCrae, obscenely, in Flanders, writing
caught in ink obscenity's final purpose
writing in Flanders.
Moderns scoff at poets and when they do they
think of silly newspaper verse and drivel
flowing out of dreams with no mortal purpose
flowers and ashes
Contemplate the mobs on the sidewalks chanting:
hear their desperation growing in rhythm
Where's their power, but in the rhythm's music
poetry working
Think you not the poetry isn't with us:
In the cadenced steps and the soldiers marching
there's a focus driving the hard rebellion:
warrior poet
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