Can't Stand Ya, Stanza

Poetry is everywhere (and everyone's a poet in training.)

Nov 08, 2021

Note: Don’t like reading? The Podcast audio is at the end of the story.🫡

All the world’s a poem.

The swell of a wave, serene with its power and aching its way shoreward. Grass rippling with the breath of a breeze, whispering its secret to an endless prairie. And you, there, squinting at the mesmerizing murmuration of starlings with their lazy sky dance and blind trust falls. Poetry is everywhere. It yearns for release.

All the world’s a poem.

Every mode, an ode.

The shimmering laughter from an unexpected joke erupting from a sealed-off seam in your lungs. Cat purrs on heart hearths and dog nuzzles to a dangling hand. There is the delicate roil of a winter stew bubbling on the stove and a soft sigh from another room. Summer thunder, a rumble in the tummy of our world. Hot bread cut with a crisp knife, or the crunch of a cold apple snatched from the fridge. The drip of warm rain from a broken gutter to a fern frond below. Far off, a guttural cry in the night, begging for elegy.

All the world’s a poem.

Every mode, an ode.

All upon it, a sonnet.

This is love. All is love. The vision of the time, the hope of the heart. The words that spring forth from the mouth of one declaring devotion, betrayal, uncertainty. To stand on a street corner with the compression of traffic booming. It sucks us to the pavement in its toil. The brush of a shoulder, the feel of your heart beating at your neck. Skin, hair, breath, gooseflesh. Your delicate wrist conducting its wave goodbye, orchestrating emotion and stirring the blood. Poetry is everywhere. A salve, a lifeboat, a port in a storm. Look up, about, and out—poetry is afoot.

“Poetry is bad standup.”

Jerry Seinfeld can’t stand ya stanza, apparently. I see the truth of this statement. Not of the statement itself—for his craft is to make people laugh1 and he’s just needling some fabric here—but remove the word ‘bad’ and the accidental exposure of his buried and unacknowledged poet shame is the real truth of it. He who wears the crown, yadda yadda. Poetry can be bad just as easily as standup can be unbearable. It can also be good and true and heckle-proof, just like standup. It’s all subjective.

Poems and jokes, they are one and the same—each flecked with the bones of structure to bind a body to. There but invisible, everything and nothing. The beats. The wordplay. The flow and the rhythm of it. Both poets and comedians set word tripwires and we happily stumble on through. We laugh, we get angry, we marvel at the magic trick of how they got under our skins. Sorry, Jerry. Hate to break it to you—you’re a poet. Enjoy your heavy head.

Poets are in pain. Poets are in love. Poets exist in hope and wilderness. No maps, no compass—just instinct. They feel too much and hold back too little. Pain in a teardrop, love in a syringe, laughter in a bucket. Poetry saves, amen! We consume their words like mood soups, dipping our spoons in, testing temperatures. The poems, the lyrics, the words. The sound of their philosophies hung out on lines that set hard and solid in the kilns of our brains. It’s too brilliant, too dumb, too silly.

Some of my favorite poets jumped off bridges, some succumbed to the slumber of the final self-inflicted sleep2, but in these acts, I do not see “job requirement.” You also don’t need to be a drunk to be Bukowski. Something to write with and somewhere to write it down—that’s all you need. Poets are not drama queens, for in these acts we see the sting of truth. Poets are just people, too. It’s not the salt shaker, it’s the salt. It’s not drama, it’s just life.

For that is poetry. Just life. Life expressed in bites and slurps and dribbles on our tablecloths. Poetry is everywhere. It is trapped in surly 15-years-olds3 who cautiously let it out, raw and unfiltered with no real purpose bar release. It fills notebooks and drawers and spills onto dark stages. The wells are deep and sometimes poisoned but the liquid of it is consumed and discarded or held in the secret undiscovered countries of our minds and recited in the darkness.

This is art for the soulful, the anxious, or courageous. For there is no money in poetry. No influencer coin to be had. Accessible, irrepressible, and honest. The most human of urges. You are told to resist it, but like a painful burp that threatens at the dinner table, I say better out than in.

Too much stock is put into the understanding of poetry. The analysis. As someone who did many semesters of picking apart ancient word slingers and modern free-verse flingers, I’ve observed that over-analysis can really suck the joy out of it. There’s an edge you should go to in the reading and no further, lest you fall into the pit of wankery.

Poetry is a consumable. It is expression shot from fingertips powered by the emotion of your life. It speaks to you or it doesn’t—it’s that easy. Where is poetry? It is everywhere. Patch my heart, soothe my soul, make my mind expand, contract, snap back, or throw me in the bin and make me forget, forever. Take me there, you wild and lost dreamers. I will go with you.

All the world’s a poem.

Every mode, an ode.

All upon it, a sonnet.

And on and on,

Anon4.

Yours in tiny thought,

Janeen

The ‘God sends his pale horsemen’ line is 👌🏻

A COUNTRY IS HOW MEN HUNT
by Billy-Ray Belcourt
What constitutes an NDN? A myth
doused in midnight? A soul
in the shape of a clenched fist?
Concerning the collapse of organized human life,
I demand my two cents be taken seriously:
God sends his pale horsemen westward every fucking day!
Canadian history — or, how to wage war
on an emotion. For a century,
no one spoke of the extinction of joy.
A village emptied of its children is a haunting.
Every natural phenomenon becomes an elegiac gesture.
Am I a war hero
if I succumb to Mother Nature’s fury
and not to my captor’s?
Poets pledge allegiance to a country I don’t believe in.
A country is how men hunt in the dark.
A man I love but don’t trust kisses me
the way a soldier might press his face into the soil of his old country.
I am a Museum of Modern Misery he storms through.
Which is to say the body signals a crisis of representation.
The body is an archive when it heralds an indictment.
My suffering will multiply.
So what if in the end my living amounts to an evidentiary act.
What I wanted was what I asked for.
I saw my kokum for the first time in weeks.
Miraculously, she is still alive.
All morning I picked bits and pieces of history from her hair.
Copyright © Billy-Ray Belcourt. Originally published in NDN COPING MECHANISMS: NOTES FROM THE FIELD (House of Anansi Press, 2019).

On rotation. Fontaines D.C. Another band I missed in 2019 I guess - it was Rough Trade’s album of the year, so not sure how I did, actually? Fixed that by ordering Dogrel and I dig it with all my heart shovels.