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On the advice of a friend, I got a subscription to James Hawes' Turret House Press, a Montreal-based small press. I like to subscribe to small presses where I can, especially Canadian. I usually have a bunch of lit mag subscriptions, and then a few small press subscriptions, getting everything they publish in a year. It's a lot, and it's sometimes hard to keep up, but it's amazing to try to navigate the currents of a small amount of everything being published. Some of it's amazing. Some of it's not to my taste, and all of it's worthwhile.
So I got my first Turret House package the other day, and one of the items is "Mortal Taste", a selection of poems by the late Artie Gold (from a manuscript thought lost, but recently found in the McGill University archives), and poetic responses by George Bowering.
Here's my favourite from the collection, a response from Bowering (all his poems start "GB", all of Gold's "AG").
This will be it,
a floor plan of my life
seen in my purchases.
You could say I was just looking,
strolling the empty aisles of life's supermarket,
hungry,
broke. Well, with no authentic money.
See, my life is not a place. No,
it's an underground shaft somebody
sunk through the property of this century.
Away from all my purchases
I would die, totally becalmed,
pockets empty.
You think you can
take away a child's matches
and live a long life at home?
It is funny how a coin,
one coin in your hand
connects you to your desires
even if you don't right now
know what they are.
I'm thinking of some person
reading this, whatever it is, thinking,
whenever this is, how say, how clumsy
her life has been,
wishing she could spin back the years,
rolls and rolls of regret.
Not me. I just wish
I had taken a lot more photographs.
I couldn't tell you why, but there's one thing
I'm sure about:
and that is that I'm not at all positive
about my uncertainty. When looking to the future,
why did I make a path but not a plan?
I just kept my imperfect eyes open,
mistakenly believing the eyes knew
what was what, what a dollar was worth.
The future I thought I was looking at
never became the present. I wasn't shopping.
I was just looking, thank you.