Poets & Travel

So what have I been doing with my time?  I hardly go out.  I haven't been streaming that much on-line content (many theatre channels I have basically dropped after the early days).  I have been watching a bit more TV and movies on the weekend, though not binge-watching by any means.  I haven't even been writing that much -- largely because SFYS has gone dormant over the past few months, and apparently I need some external deadlines...

One thing that I have been doing is sorting through a lot of files that I digitized over the past few months (while I could still go into the office).  Some things are quite fascinating (to me anyway), and I'll try to post a few things from time to time.  I have a small stack of acceptances from small poetry journals and a slightly larger rejection pile.  It looks like I had a poem accepted conditionally, but I simply cannot recall if I wrote back and agreed to the edits and had the piece published or not.  I wonder if this happened as I was preparing to head off to Toronto for grad school or something else came up.  Strange.  Not that a handful more published poems would have really changed my trajectory and kept me in the literary world.  

What might have changed things (possibly) is if my proposed poetry anthology had been published.  At that time it was very tightly focused on subway poems (mostly about the New York or London underground) with a handful of poems about elevated rail lines (again mostly New York and Chicago).  I found a publisher who was interested in the project but couldn't swing the royalties, and I basically let it drop and moved on with my life.  But things change.  I probably am in a position now to partially cover the royalties myself, but the nature of the project has shifted with time.  

Roughly 10 years ago I broadened the scope to include all forms of transportation and made the focus less New York-centric.  I'm now in the mood to re-evaluate and do another very broad sweep of poetry but with a bit of a slant towards lesser-known poets and Canadian poets.  I think it might take a couple of months to go through my old files and all the poetry books I've collected in the meantime (especially from Brick Books), and then I'll put an actual manuscript together and shop it around a bit more seriously this time.

Sometimes I find there are poets I would like to include, but probably won't work out for one reason or another.

As an example, I just finished reading through Robert Hayden's Collected Poems.

He has one long poem about travel by boat, "Middle Passage," but in addition to being a bit long for an anthology is a bit too heavy.  That doesn't mean I would automatically rule out a poem on the Middle Passage, but it can't overwhelm the rest of the poems in the collection.

The same heaviness applies to travel by foot in his poem about Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad -- "Runagate Runagate."

There is a short discussion of walking to campus in "A Plague of Starlings" but it is a bit too tangential in a poem that is on the long side, so I don't think that quite fits either.

The two that are the most likely candidates are both auto-oriented.  "Tour 5" has aspects of Driving While Black, though Hayden never portrays himself as being personally threatened.  "Traveling Through Fog" is more of an impressionist piece, linking the distorted view to the shadows in Plato's allegory of the cave in The Republic.  I like both.  In some ways "Tour 5" is the more obvious choice, and it is more clearly tied to auto travel.  Either might potentially make their way into the putative table of contents before this is all said and done.

Anyway, this project will likely keep me occupied and out of trouble for the next few months, when presumably I'll be able to do a bit more travelling of my own.

The Hammer Falls (Again)

I am so depressed by these emergency orders, which have just been extended through Feb. 9.  In some ways, I'm annoyed that there are so many loopholes that you end up feeling like a sap if you follow them to the letter.  We can only leave our houses for exercise and essential services, but then plenty of businesses can still be open for curbside pickup?  Really?  And to make matters worse, because the Province won't just come out and close down most of these businesses, they can't really decide whether to keep going or not, making it harder for their employees to apply for federal or the (very slim) Provincial safety net programs.

No one really knows if the high school students will get back to in-person instruction around Feb. 10 (or even the 3rd Quadmester!) and whether this will erode the minor progress we've seen to date.  I am glad that the cases are finally coming down (probably now that all the "essential" travelling to see relatives over the holidays has worked its way through the system), but I still wonder if the cost ultimately will be too high in terms of mental health, obesity in children as well as adults, bankruptcies and general fraying of the social fabric.

My mental state is not great these days, and I find I simply cannot be bothered to write much of anything.  I very much liked going in to the office, where I was basically completely alone in my side of the floor.  I find that I really need the separation from home, as well as the exercise to and from work, and the sooner I can return to that, the better.  I very grudgingly cancelled some holds at the library, but since the library is still offering curbside pickup, I put the holds back on and at least will have a purpose on some of my bike and walk trips, rather than aimlessly wandering.   

The realization that the promised vaccines are not coming at the promised rates and that most Canadians will not be vaccinated until September (so another summer with all core activities scrapped) is just too much to bear.  I do think 2021 is when a lot of small companies/restaurants/galleries/theatres decide it is time to pack it in.