It was good to see Saskatchewan-born writer Fred Wah being appointed as the new parliamentary poet laureate. Wah is the fifth poet to hold that office. The first was George Bowering, whose roots, like Wah’s, are in the tradition of the American Black Mountain poets. Wah, former president of the Writers Union of Canada, won the Governor General’s Award in 1986 and teaches at the Banff Centre for the Arts. Senate Speaker Noel Kinsella in making the announcement said, “As a distinguished poet, editor, and teacher Fred Wah is known across Canada for his interest in a range of subjects. Mr. Wah brings forth a collaborative approach and unique perspective to his work inspiring younger poets, students and others both nationally and internationally with his reflections on Canadian culture.”

Commons Speaker Andrew Scheer described Wah’s writing as being grounded in the country’s political and social landscapes. Wah said his work as a parliamentary poet laureate will involve an engagement of poetry as it “represents our homes and migrations, our questions of history and identity.”

I shot this photograph of the poet at the Pause Cafe in Windsor Ontario when Fred Wah was here to talk about his writing.

Check out the Globe and Mail article: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/ottawa-notebook/multicultural-obsession-drives-new-parliamentary-poet-laureate/article2278971/?utm_medium=Feeds%3A%20RSS%2FAtom&utm_source=Politics&utm_content=2278971

I just returned from seeing the movie My Week With Marilyn, a film set in the summer of 1956 in England when an aspiring filmmaker Colin Clark worked on the set of The Prince and the Showgirl, a film that brought the famous Sir Laurence Olivier together with Marilyn Monroe. Such a lovely film, and I had forgotten all about the interview I had done with Arthur Miller in 1987 when he was promoting his memoir Timebends. I interviewed him in Toronto, and was told not to mention Marilyn’s name in the interview. Of course, I couldn’t see how he could avoid talking about her, and he did speak about his relationship, and his marriage to Marilyn. You could tell that while he had been tortured by her, he had a great love for this woman. He respected her. And defended her. At one point, he said she may never have read any more than a handful of books in her lifetime, but she had this uncanny ability to size up a book in just a couple of pages, and could tell you how it was going to end, how it was going to spin out to its conclusion. She also distrusted anything fictional, preferring only the truth. Miller once told her she was the “saddest girl” he had ever met. At first, Marilyn was hurt by this remark, but suddenly realized it was loaded with tenderness and affection. She responded by saying no one had ever said that about her. She told Miller that she believed men only ever wanted “happy girls.” That wasn’t her. She was real.

One night, Marilyn told Miller a story that silenced him in the most tender way. The story emerged when Miller and Marilyn were casually standing together looking out over the city of New York, and apropos of nothing, she started speaking about her elderly Aunt Ana, a Christian Scientist who had been her guardian. She told Miller about how one day, her aunt suddenly took ill and died. Marilyn was in terrible shock over her aunt’s death. So much so that the next night, Marilyn made her way upstairs to her aunt’s bedroom, and climbed into her bed, and slept there. The next day, she went to the cemetery, and when she spotted some men digging Aunt Ana’s grave, and saw ladder running into it, she asked the gravediggers if she could climb down. They graciously moved aside, and Marilyn slowly made her way down to the bottom, and stretched out on the loamy earth and gazed up at the sky, with the men standing at the rim of the gravesite. She could see them leaning on their shovels and smoking, and she lay there a few moments, and felt the cold against her back. It was when the men started joking that she roused herself, and got up and climbed back out of the hole. That story has stayed with me. It was a young Marilyn, not yet the actress, not yet the sex symbol. Just a young girl saddened by her aunt’s death.

Arthur Miller wrote: “To have survived, she would have had to be either more cynical or even further from reality than she was. Instead, she was a poet on a street corner trying to recite to a crowd pulling at her clothes.”

Today was really my first official “public” appearance as Poet Laureate. I went to Catholic Central and spoke to a couple of classes, mostly history classes. This was organized by Ellie Csepregi, an amazing English teacher, but also a gifted poet and tremendous supporter of the arts in Windsor. Chad Barrette and Taunia Piknjac Phillips, two history teachers from the school, were also there. Both Chad and Ellie were dressed in costumes reflective of the time. A gangster and flapper. Ellie also brought one of her classes to this event where I showed a Keynote presentation on The Rumrunners, my most popular book. The photos in this presentation are from the Roaring Twenties, the period of Prohibition in Canada and the U.S. There are photos of old jalopies laden with whiskey and being driven across the ice to Detroit. There are pictures of women stuffing bottles of booze in their garters, of men in blind pigs and speakeasies, of authorities rolling barrels of alcohol into the streets and dumping them into sewers, of gangsters, of torpedoes filled with booze and being shot to secret terminals on the Michigan side … These are all in my book, and they are part of a presentation that I have been doing for a number of years. I spoke to the students about that little piece of history and how it impacts our part of Canada. Someone asked me how long it took to write. I explained that I first wrote a play about that period, and then went on to write The Rumrunners. It took me about a year. I revised it all a few years ago for Biblioasis. The book hit the market again in 2009 and was an instant bestseller all over again. When it was first released in 1980, it sold more than 25,000 copies.

The classes that turned up in the auditorium at Catholic Central were amazing with their questions. They wanted to know about the torpedoes. They wanted to know about Al Capone and The Purple Gang. They wanted me to tell them how I went about writing the book. This last one is an interesting question because I never considered myself an historian, though I loved history when I was studying it in high school, and later at university. My greatest love is poetry, but in the narrative form.  I am drawn to history at its best when the storytelling is so compelling. I luxuriate in tales of ordinary people, as well as those accounts of the famous in ordinary, everyday situations. I am fascinated by the sense of “place” and its importance to the decisions and behaviour of people. And when all of this comes together, that’s when the writing gets done.

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I have been working with a crop of new students at the University of Windsor in the English Department’s unique editing program where we edit manuscripts to be published by Black Moss Press. The program is really an internship with the press. This year, we have been working with two titles: one by Mary Ann Mulhern, the other by Terry Ann Carter. The first is called Brides in Black and focuses upon the stories of women who have remained in the convent, or left the monastic life. Their stories emerged from interviews that Mary Ann had done. She, herself, was a nun with the Sisters of St. Joseph. She was also a teacher. The other book, Day Moon Rising, is about Cambodia, and Terry Ann’s experiences of working in that country where she joined a humanitarian crew building homes. Her work  reflects both the beauty and the horror of the country.

At Elias Deli, my favourite morning haunt, our class met for breakfast, and we read some of the poems in these two books, and celebrated the moment of our completion of the editing. Mary Ann joined us for breakfast and read from the manuscript. Three students — Jessica Knapp, Victoria Faraci and Emily Abbott — also read selections. What a great way to begin a rainy Monday morning in Windsor. Breakfast was fabulous. This place has been host to other poetry readings and to celebrities world wide.

A word to the editors in my class: “Master editors are artists themselves. They need to be…” From Noah Lukeman.

Sam Abell, an Ohio-born photographer who worked for National Geographic, speaks about photography flowing from values, but also says values flow from childhood. He also suggests style flows from childhood, too, and somehow pervades everything we do, or how we look at the world. For that matter, it also affects how we speak to the world. How we reflect that to the world.

Another thing that Abell mentions is that he never finds it difficult making photographs. His biggest challenge is “that time between photographs.” Abell says it is difficult “not knowing when or how another image would reveal itself.” The same applies to poetry, or writing. Hemingway feared the same thing when it came to writing fiction. He always left a little in the tank when he quit for the day, so that he could go back the next morning and continue from where he left off.

Here is one for  Windsor. You step outside in the dark of the morning, and you know they are out there ….

Squatters

I roll out of bed

to see them cavorting

on my front lawn

at not quite 5 a.m.

a mother skunk

and four furry tailed

little ones

frolicking in moonlight

I regard them

the way some might judge

squatters, or worse,

carjackers

I fear them

I can’t say anything

I feel trapped

in my own house

not wanting to risk

making my early morning

run to Tim Hortons

yet I wish to warn these creatures

what might befall them

if they dare burrow

under my pool

Last summer

their hillbilly cousins

moved in

I hired a wildlife service

to trap them humanely

then fed a hose

down their tunnels

blocking up escape routes

with cement blocks

hoping to roust them

from their home

but they never got the point —

they defied my every move

till I stuffed

their underground grid

with chlorine-loaded pool pucks

and sealed up the exits

So now I want to tell

these happy little creatures

mind your own business

leave me alone

let me go to my car…

pretty please