Poems for Obama

[Eva van Loon]

Poems for Obama

Calling all Canadian poets!


CBC is putting together 49 songs for Obama, calling it Obama's Playlist. The Powell River Live Poets' Guild is doing the same, but with poetry! We need poems from all kinds of poets on what it means to be Canadian so we can compile 49 of them into a book and send them to the President-Elect as an inauguration gift.

You can nominate a poem by Leonard Cohen, another poet, or yourself. If the poem is your own, send us permission to publish it. If the poem is by another poet, please send contact information so that we can write for permission.

The book won't be finished in time for the 20th, but we've told the President-Elect what we're doing, and the book will get there soon afterwards. We need Canadian poems! Poems on Canada, Canadian identity -- what do you want to say to the 44th president?

Please send all poems to mettalaw [at] gmail [dot] com. Include whatever name you want to appear with your poem!

Please include words something like these for your own poems: "I declare that I am the author of the submitted poem(s) and I give the Powell River Live Poets' Guild permission to publish, without charge, my submitted poem(s) on the "Poems for Obama" blog and in the book of 49 Canadian poems for Obama, however titled, provided I am credited with authorship on the poem(s)."

When the poems are together and ready and the book is printed, we'll have it signed by as many included poets as possible and then send it to Obama.

So what do you say? Are you with us?

Kaimana Wolff/Eva van Loon, Director
Powell River Live Poets' Guild
Powell River, BC 604.483-4940

[imaginary friend]

I'm very happy to be Canadian, but I wonder why a book containing poems which all describe what it means to be Canadian, would make an appropriate gift for the inauguration of an American president?

[~greg]

I'm very happy to be Canadian, but I wonder why a book containing poems which all describe what it means to be Canadian, would make an appropriate gift for the inauguration of an American president?

One can see Canada from Alaska.
One can see Russian from Alaska.
Alaska is all there is between Canada and Russian.
And Alaska is in the United States.

So Canada should be grateful that Sarah Palin won't be president of the United States.

And you have to thank Obama for that.

[Eva van Loon]

There's one Canadian for every 10 Americans, and that's just one facet of the unbalanced portrait of our two countries. For decades there was a sense of pride associated with the phrase "longest undefended border in the world"--that's gone. For several decades, while I was growing up, there was a best-buddies climate hovering over the border--that's gone, too. Now we have the SPP and an agreement that our military forces will support each other in either country in whatever they are doing. We have surveillance cameras reaching 15 kilometers into Canadian territory, and a passport requirement which was laughable only ten years ago. We have a plan to make us virtually one with the US, including a joint currency called the Amero--does that sound like fun when financial pundits everywhere are predicting the total collapse of the American dollar? Have you seen what's happening to the northern Alberta ecosystems thanks to the thirst for oil, even platinum-priced, eco-disaster oil? Google some of these terms and see if the results don't send shivers down your spine! Do you want Canada to be nothing more than a subservient colony employed in a fire sale of natural resources? To a lot of Canadians,that's where events seem to be going--and they don't like it: witness the protests to the big Quebec SPP meeting in 2007 (where provincial police apparently went so far as to foment discord and violence disguised as protesters--this is Canada?).

That's not all. My family spent 1998-2006 in the US. While we were there, habeas corpus, posse comitatus, and a host of civil liberties went the way of the dodo bird. Fortunately, Canadian financial and legal structures are very different from those in the US, but that could change--and seems to be changing. In Canada people don't get thrown into jail without knowing what they are charged with and having some degree of natural justice--in the US, this can happen to anyone now, even kids. The US is one of the last countries that execute people for crimes committed during childhood. My own kid at 15 was arrested in pyjamas in the bedroom, without a warrant--for nothing! Government agencies monitor email, tap phones, and snoop into one's records at the bank, the public library, and host of other places. Does that sound like Canada to you?

Wake up! There are many fabulous people in the US, and many wonderful things about living there, but, being the kind of people who speak freely, our family was finally too scared to stay. Something sick is going on here! We want our good-neighbor policy back--and that means each neighbor recognises and respects the other as The Other!

Obama has the most awful job in the world ahead of him--nothing less than re-inventing America into a country the world can once again love. How much of that prodigious brain do you think he can dedicate to "learning" Canada while he's busy repairing the rents the Bush administration has torn in the fabric of America?

Canadians have more experience of America than Americans have of Canada. To judge by the tears of joy across Canada on November 4, many Canadians have faith in Obama's good judgment to turn the tide of fear, ill-will, and greed that lashes our borders, but he must have the facts before he can exercise that judgment. So I figure we should help him out by the shortest possible method--let him experience our arts, for by the arts is a people most truly known. Poetry, especially, standing as the gatekeeper between orality and literacy, has the power to transmit the experience of belonging to this land, of being Canadian, as perhaps no other art can do at such depth with such efficiency.

Pardon my rant, but it's been ten years in the making. Now is the season of hope, and this is a very happy project. The poems are rolling in, and they are wonderful! Please join in.

[Eva van Loon]

Amen to Obama's saving us from Palinocracy! Or is it Palinidiocy? We are all saved from waving semaphor flags across the Bering Strait and the North Pacific as an exercise in foreign policy!

Maybe we should pardon a Yukon moose and a Nunavut seal to re-declare our sovereignty?

[imaginary friend]

Eva,

There seems to be a mutual misunderstanding:

- I am an unabashed supporter of Barack Obama, on this Forum and at every other opportunity, and I look forward to a much better future with him as president.

- I am thrilled to be a Canadian, and to live a country that leads (to borrow Bill Clinton's words) '...not by the example of power, but by the power of example.'

- I'm all for sending an inauguration gift to Barack Obama from Canadians, and a book of Canadian poetry is a great choice of gift.

- But I misunderstood the intent behind the poetry theme of 'What it means to be Canadian'. I wondered why we would presume that Barack would want to be given insight into the Canadian psyche, as a gift in celebration of his US inauguration. I really did need to 'Wake up!' Thanks for enlightening me that the intent behind the gift was to assert Canada's autonomy, let him know from the outset that we're nobody's baby, and deter any ideas he might have of annexing Canada. Yikes! It's even more inappropriate than I first thought!

[Eva van Loon]

This is not a political exercise.

My political views have nothing to do with this project.

The project sprang out of these principles: the arts promote understanding; to know all is to understand all and to understand all is to forgive all; earth as a living system would be healthier if human beings understood one another well; poetry is more fruitful than politics.

If you see no need to promote understanding between Canada and the US, you're probably not alone.

I'm a member of the other club, having lived in the US too long to presume on its friendship, or on the past.

We differ. How Canadian!

Let's write.

[Eva van Loon]

Dear Poets,

The blog is up, the poems are rolling in from the famous, infamous, and emerging poets of this land, and we're on the way to collecting 49 quintessentially Canadian poems to the 44th president of the US!

Mr. Obama will receive a taste of the collection on Inauguration Day, but, since it will take him a while to recuperate from attending ten inaugural balls anyway, collection will continue to the end of January.

With a person running the US who is open to the influence of the arts as perhaps no previous president has been, we poets have an unprecedented opportunity to increase Obama's appreciation of who his neighbors are.

Don't feel you must write a fresh poem. Please study your poem collection with an eye to what your lines say about being Canadian or in Canada. We're not looking for political acumen, opinion, or commentary on US/Canada relations. Your poems needn't say anything about the US or Canada at all on their face. We just want poems that express...well, call it Canucktitude for now.

Take this one as an example--not a political word in it; yet it speaks volumes about the immigrant experience in Canada half a century ago. (I can do this because it's mine--don't worry: your entries will not be posted.)

Easter, Sylvan Lake, 1956



Half the century ago
I found the Easter Bunny
dead about three days
his stench didn't stop my little hand
from stroking his velvet ears
from noticing the hole in his heart
where my father had pierced him

Now I wonder
how it felt
between those darkened fingers
the silken ears still warm
as he flung the little life into the bush

if he felt better
maybe stronger
about the stubborn sleeper in the tent,
the one who lay and moaned
for silk and velvet dreams
left rotting on a European shore


Can Powell River Live Poets' Guild produce this book? With your participation, Yes, we can!

[imaginary friend]

Hi Eva,

'Easter, Sylvan Lake 1956' is a very fine poem...and yes, the sensibility is distinctly Canadian.

Thank you for posting it.

[Eva van Loon]

Thank you very much.

For fun, and just to prove that Obama has a poetic sensibility in him (although legal and political training may have killed quite a lot of it--this poems are a good quarter-century old or more) here are the three poems American student journalists have unearthed, written by Obama during high school and college.

POP
Sitting in his seat, a seat broad and broken
In, sprinkled with ashes,
Pop switches channels, takes another
Shot of Seagrams, neat, and asks
What to do with me, a green young man
Who fails to consider the
Flim and flam of the world, since
Things have been easy for me;
I stare hard at his face, a stare
That deflects off his brow;
I'm sure he's unaware of his
Dark, watery eyes, that
Glance in different directions,
And his slow, unwelcome twitches,
Fail to pass.
I listen, nod,
Listen, open, till I cling to his pale,
Beige T-shirt, yelling,
Yelling in his ears, that hang
With heavy lobes, but he's still telling
His joke, so I ask why
He's so unhappy, to which he replies...
But I don't care anymore, cause
He took too damn long, and from
Under my seat, I pull out the
Mirror I've been saving; I'm laughing,
Laughing loud, the blood rushing from his face
To mine, as he grows small,
A spot in my brain, something
That may be squeezed out, like a
Watermelon seed between
Two fingers.
Pop takes another shot, neat,
Points out the same amber
Stain on his shorts that I've got on mine, and
Makes me smell his smell, coming
From me; he switches channels, recites an old poem
He wrote before his mother died,
Stands, shouts, and asks
For a hug, as I shink,* my
Arms barely reaching around
His thick, oily neck, and his broad back; 'cause
I see my face, framed within
Pop's black-framed glasses
And know he's laughing too.




UNDERGROUND
Under water grottos, caverns
Filled with apes
That eat figs.
Stepping on the figs
That the apes
Eat, they crunch.
The apes howl, bare
Their fangs, dance,
Tumble in the
Rushing water,
Musty, wet pelts
Glistening in the blue.




* "Shink" may be a typo, but the poem is reproduced as published.


Poem Obama wrote in High School

OLD MAN

I saw an old forgotten man
On an old, forgotten road
staggering and numb
pulls out forgotten dignity from under his flaking coat,
And walks a straight line along the crooked world.

It seems that empathy was a quality Obama possessed from an early age.

The project now has contributions from, inter alia, two laureates and a wide spectrum of westerners--how about come wisdom from the east of the country? Check the blog for my email. We'll collect for at least another ten days. Thank you!

Eva van Loon/Kaimana Wolff
Powell River LIve Poets' Guild