As cultures broad see capitals deemed
Horse snort less stable than once it seemed
Formed there is new wiggle in rooms
Scribes awl pin light through prescription doom
In blankets gold will weight there be?
To sway frayed throats of Necessity
Hooved aeration to fescue razed
Ignored voices on borrowed lands graze
Wailing, cajoling, and though vapours still
Condense to drips, repeat, pray fill
As cultures broad see capitals deemed
Horse snort less stable than once it seemed
Formed there is new wiggle in rooms
Scribes awl pin light through prescription doom
In blankets gold will weight there be?
To sway frayed throats of Necessity
Hooved aeration to fescue razed
Ignored voices on borrowed lands graze
Wailing, cajoling, and though vapours still
Condense to drips, repeat, pray fill
Okay, here is basically how it works. This article is a “journey” piece (the artistic adventures of Kris Demeanor / Alberta’s quest for meaning), so I mimic a few lines of Chaucer’sCanterbury Tales. Each line serves the tonic—my role in Calgary at a time of cultural growth and national notice contributing (hopefully) to the enriched health of our collective souls and intellects, against the odds. Prairie imagery. Avoid obvious word pairings, change “poke” to “awl,” “taunting” to “prescription,” “floods” to “drips,” “unheard voices” to “ignored voices,” have fun with Late Medieval phrasing, count the syllables and speak it aloud a few times to assess flow.
I think I like it. I can’t actually tell if it’s any good. There’s care and thought in the verse, but I don’t know if it will connect with the general public or pass muster with career poets. Unstudied in poetry, I practise a diffusion-based, intuitive, self-conscious kind of improvisation. Since March 2012 I’ve felt like someone with a Grade 9 education and a penchant for insult and bar stools, proclaimed King through force of personality. Like someone who’s handy but unlicensed, and, in a boom, puts a decal on the truck reading “I Am a Legitimate Construction Company,” learning on the job while cashing in on the frenzy.
I’m a songwriter. I need an audience. So I became Calgary’s first poet laureate. If that sounds glib and falsely modest, I certainly don’t suggest the selection process was arbitrary or that my writer friends who were also considered weren’t being recognized for their gifts. It was just a “Calgary” choice, an endorsement of that over-referenced “can-do” spirit. Calgary and I, like a sitcom with a heart, were going to learn about poetry… together.
To contextualize the journey, a quick word on the “What is Poetry?” debate. It’s a non-starter. At the 2013 Edmonton Poetry Festival, where 16 poets laureate gathered, all we acknowledged was how literary genres evolve, cross over and learn from each other, and that ghettoization is not only pointless but an inaccurate reading of history. Summed up by Scottish poet laureate Liz Lochhead: “When I see poetry, I hear it, I hear it spoken and I see it performed. Is it poetry, spoken word, song, theatre—who fucking cares? Just make it good.” There.
So, great, it’s all poetry, but I already know I can energize an audience through the lyrics of my songs, my theatrical presentation of rhythmic spoken-word pieces. This is not easy to do. Connecting with people while keeping content standards high requires craft. I tap in to the psychology of the suburbs, the struggles of immigration, and woefully forgotten realities of First Nations history, illuminating something about Calgary, all to a metronomic foot stomp.
But back to the sitcom—while Calgarians understand music as a delivery system for creative language, when it comes to spoken poetry, reaction often ranges from indifference to aversion. I believe the jury—a six-person panel selected by Calgary Arts Development and consisting of, among others, a poet, a U of C professor, an arts writer and an arts administrator—named me the first poet laureate in hopes I would have the performance chops to help penetrate the masses’ preconceptions about poetry, and enough sophistication to hearten the intellectuals. To this end, I resolved to lean less on the guitar, focus on ink and page, plumb Calgary’s appetite for poetry and stimulate it, and honour a title that rightly acknowledges poetry as the best way of documenting a society and expressing its collective passion—with sublimity and elegance, in ways that beg patience, reflection, interpretation, imagination.
The traditional mandate of the poet laureate (England’s many centuries of laureates include Spenser, Wordsworth, Tennyson; the US has had a series of them going back to the 1930s, though they were called “Consultants in Poetry” until the 1980s) is to promote the reading and writing of poetry to the populace, and though there are usually no specific duties attached to the honour, there’s an expectation that new work will be written for important occasions (“Ode on Stephen’s New Christmas Sweater,” “Elegy for a Reclaimed Tailings Pond”). An honorarium comes with the role, which in Calgary is generously provided by private-sector endorsement of the program because there’s-no-goddamn-way-my-taxpayer-dollars-are-going-toward-something-as-wholly-unnecessary-as-poetry. Historically, payment consisted of 105 imperial gallons of sherry. I wish.
At the gathering of poets laureate in Edmonton, the limits of official duty were discussed: Are there things we do refuse or should refuse to write about? Should we be subversive? If so, how do we challenge the status quo while celebrating and honouring our communities? How does one fulfill the role not only of conduit between the general public and the literary arts but of “official poet” to a city, the good-natured jester who gives the occasional goose of scary clarity? These questions aren’t theoretical—they’re tested. Both our parliamentary and Scottish laureates were asked to, in their official roles, create and deliver poems marking the Queen’s Diamond jubilee. Each had issues with monarchy. They did their jobs with reluctance. The laureate of Victoria was asked to do a poem for city council for Canada Day, and celebrated Dominion by reminding city council about whose traditional land they were on and how long it had actually been inhabited before they came along. A couple of the small-town Ontario laureates are careful not to rattle the sensibilities of their local councils and citizens, and thus they avoid controversial topics to ensure they don’t screw things up for other artists who require grants in a conservative community.
I had a lot of practice finding the palatability/revolutionary balance growing up. My art-teacher dad wouldn’t let my sister or me give people store-bought cards; they had to be handmade. I became adept at chronicling landmark family occasions through verse and song and putting them in the cards, based on fragments of personal memory, historical fact and input from relatives. It became the thing I did. It was always of utmost importance to get laughs, which I did through the technique of the soft roast, detailing events in the person’s life that are embarrassing but never outright humiliating. I take the same approach writing poems for Calgary. One of the first things I was told by the City’s poet-laureate liaison was—and this was truly appreciated—“We’re expecting you to speak your mind and stir things up once in a while.” Alas, I regret not causing more trouble than I have to this point. I’ve witnessed that, even among the artistically conservative, or those who may be unconvinced the city needs a poet laureate at all, there is an acceptance, even an expectation, of boldness of opinion bordering on outright provocation from our artists. Perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising—essentially what holds me back from turning my observations into rants is that, as far as fostering thought and discussion, the time-release capsule is more effective than the hammer. Allegory and metaphor are still the legs of critique, and South Park-esque satire can allow great latitude for commentary while keeping the crowd laughing; but highlighting bald reality in exposing a truth is often the greatest way to reach an audience. People want to say “That’s me!” or “Thank god that’s not me!”