Father’s Day and Poetry

My children are now old enough to bake me my favourite double-chocolate muffins for breakfast and design and write me the most beautiful cards on Father’s Day. They also inspire some of my poetry. Here’s one I wrote a few years ago – although of course it feels like yesterday – about the incredible balancing act involved in being a poet as well as a father:

POEM FOR MY DAUGHTER

Daughter, you should know
writing poems over
the soundtrack of an Elmo video

takes a certain quiet kind of bravado:
the same focus and skill
required to be a father and a poet.

In the end, you've got to trust
the metaphors won't interfere
with Elmo's laughter.

Winner of the 2016 Poetry Vine Award for Canadian Jewish Literature.

“Enjoyable, readable, fresh.” – The Jury

In 1968 Isaac Bashevis Singer was asked by The Paris Review what he thought about the future of the novel. He was optimistic. But he did concede that poetry was in trouble. He actually went so far as to say that in the twentieth century poetry “became bad.” In his view poetry became bad because poets stopped caring whether their work was interesting or even possible to be understood.

Catullus’s Soldiers, my first collection of poems, was released by Cormorant Books in 2015. You’ll have to judge for yourself, but with the poems in the collection I’ve tried my best to be understood at least and, wherever possible, interesting…

Here’s the poem that inspired the collection’s title:

CATULLUS IN A MARTIAL MOMENT
  
 Caesar has his legions
 to move this way and that,
 to cross the Rubicon or not,
  
 to live and die at his imperious word.
 For this Caesar shall be remembered
 when he is gone.
  
 But my army is greater in number,
 and of infinite formation.
 I tell them when to come and when to go.
  
 They march to a cadence of my choosing,
 across the page like a wave of soldier ants
 and set up camp in the country of a foreign mind.
  
 When all of Caesar’s soldiers have fallen
 and lie mingled with the marble ruins of his desires,
 or are pensioned off to farms of forgetfulness,
  
 when his colonies have rebelled or been conquered
 by barbarians whose time has come
 and no more tribute is forthcoming,
  
 my soldiers will still be winning over
 a different people in a world
 I cannot even begin to imagine.

And here’s another one from the collection:

THE BUTTERFLY

 The swimmers laugh and splash each other
 in the clear shallows. Further out
 men fish. In the shipping channel a freighter
 slides by with surprising silence. The swimmers
 soon feel the ripples. On shore a Monarch
 butterfly lies flat on a stone. Its wings
 do not look broken. Its body is intact.
 It is still and looks asleep. I have never seen
 a Monarch butterfly so still. I have never
 really seen the patterns on its wings.
 When I touch a wing it barely flutters
 under my fingertips. The colours, gold,
 black, amber, become clearer to me
 as everything around it – swimmers,
 river, freighter, sky – keeps moving. It looks
 like an expensive hand-sewn silk scarf or tie,
 or the Indonesian shirt my late father
 bought once. Since it can no longer fly,
 it lies in the sun and waits.

Another of my poems, “The Threatened Swan”, named for the painting that inspired it, appears in The Ekphrastic Review, a journal devoted to poems about works of art. You can read it here.