Milton Acorn Is Full of Poetry

 I've been reading Olivia Chow's amazing 2014 autobiography My Journey. So I woke up dreaming of my years in Toronto, and Milton Acorn. A review of Olivia's book will follow when I've finished reading it, but in the meantime, here's an old poem of mine about Milton.

 

Milton Acorn is Full of Poetry

even tho
you repeat yourself
thinking even your mumbles
are more important than
the truths of beginning poets

and even tho you've never even
acknowledged that I write poetry
you old fart

I am still a student of
THE MILTON ACORN SCHOOL OF POETRY
even if you are too
goddamned proud to open it

So the only way I could join
was to declare it
OFFICIALLY OPEN
in this poem
So here it is, Uncle Miltie

And even tho I've said
a nasty thing or two
in this dedication
More Poems for People is still
the only book I read often enough
to hide my money in

from my book Foot Through the Ceiling
1986, Aya Press
it won the inaugural Milton Acorn People's Poetry Award in 1987

note 1: Milton did eventually recognize that I had some talent as a poet

note 2: The story of finding hidden money in More Poems for People is true. I can't remember which birthday, prob. circa the late 1980s, but I shook out a twenty dollar bill and went to Greenwood Racetrack.  

winter escape to Barbados

 

Farley Hill, Barbados

 

We climb past Bajan Sunday drivers
picnicking among the flower garden
ruins of a slave plantation.
Pine trees skirt the brow of Farley Hill
their needles reminiscent of a colder land
a colder people.
Below us the earth drops
                        and then gently rolls to the sea.


The homesick plantation owners chose well.
It does look like Scotland.
Focus on the sea
ignore the rippling motions
which only wind through sugar cane makes.
Transport from this beautiful island
of sugar and bleeding flowers
to the primmer beauty of a Scottish highland
where virginal heather only hints at blooming.


There is a force too strong here to ignore.
If you looked to the sea to hide your thoughts
slave owner
you would slowly have been swallowed  . . .
Those endless swells have traveled
six thousand unbroken miles from Africa.
They have not seen land until they reached your shores
slave owner
and their force was not broken on your beaches
but only coming home.


Chris Faiers

 

 

This is a reposting from 2011, the first year of my blog. Dr. John recently sent me a link to an article on retiring to Belize, which got me remembering my personal escape fantasy, the gorgeous Caribbean island of Barbados.

 

I visited the island of Barbados from Boxing Day 1979 to New Year's Day 1980, staying in a hostel for island travelers. I was treated like a long lost family member by the incredibly friendly Bajans. All the workers in the National Life Insurance Company kitchen, where I worked as head chef, were from "the islands", and their stories of island life encouraged me to visit.

Barbados, my sister/fellow workers and the beautiful Bajans inspired me to write a sequence. Three of these poems were published in a special lyric issue of Grain magazine in August of 1982,  guest edited by Paul Bidwell. I received the then princely sum of $25 per poem, but more importantly, I finally felt confirmed as a legitimate Canadian poet.

In 1983 Wayne Ray, publisher of HMS Press, produced my chapbook Island Women. This sequence was also included in my 1986 collection, Foot Through the Ceiling, published by Aya (now Mercury Press - thanks, Bev and Don Daurio). I received the inaugural Milton Acorn People's Poet Award for this collection in 1987.

Having a blog gives me the opportunity to reflect over my life as a poet, and to post online those poems which have stood the test of time. My current publisher, Tai Grove of HMS Press, has encouraged me to begin sifting and sorting poems for an eventual selected works. I'm sure Farley Hill, Barbados will be included.

I Went to the Communist Party: Chris Faiers (poem)

 

I Went to the Communist Party


I went to the Communist Party
but no one was dancing or drinking beer
I went to the Communist Party
but no one was laughing or listening

I tried to join the Communist Party
but a shorthair in a suit turned me away
because I was a hippie draft dodger
so I cut my hair
and they let me join
but now no one trusted me
because I was too normal

I went to the Communist Party for help
when I was organizing a union at work
but the Party wasn't interested in small numbers
of kitchen slaves in a nonvital industry

I went to the Communist Party
because I believe in Canadian independence
but they told me American imperialism
isn't in this year

I went to the Communist Party
and they printed my poems
but when I wouldn't move to a small town to organize
they stopped publishing me

I went to the Communist Party
and they kicked me in the head
I went to the Communist Party
and they kicked me in the head harder
I went to the Communist Party
and they really knocked the shit out of me
even my pup has more sense
than to go to the Communist Party

Chris Faiers



published in my 1978 chapbook Dominion Day in Jail, Unfinished Monument Press, Toronto
also in Foot Through the Ceiling, 1986, Aya/Mercury Press, Toronto (this book received the
inaugural Milton Acorn People's Poetry Medal in 1987)

I was listening to a CBC Radio program about francophone music last night, and the host, Jim Corcoran, raved about a folksinger whose song, Banned from the Christian Coffeeshop, reminded me an awful lot of this old poem of mine. The folkie's song was about being thrown out of The Christian Coffeeshop - same structure and rhythm, same theme, same humour, different times. Damn, wish I'd learned to play guitar & sing!