Wild Poetry
When Armand Ruffo, Guest Editor of Arc Poetry Magazine #84, asked me to submit to this special issue I wrote the poem “Afloat.” I’m honoured that my writing is included in #84 along with Louise B. Halfe (Sky Dancer), Gwen Benaway, Jane Munro and Katheryn Wabegijig, among others
Today’s Book of Poetry has reviewed Dust Blown Side of the Journey: “Schönmaier is a perfect mix of Nelson Ball’s wonder and brevity along with the breadth and wisdom, experience and vision of a Lorna Crozier or a Sharon Olds. That is some fine company and Schönmaier is right at home…monstrously good…Reading Dust Blown Side of the Journey is like that first long cool and quenching gulp of fresh spring water after a long hike.”
“If prose is a house, poetry is a man on fire running quite fast through it.” —Anne Carson
Yesterday evening by total chance Bobby Mitchell and I, each of us in different countries, were at the same time working on the New European Ensemble program for Dust Blown Side of the Journey. The planned Den Haag and Amsterdam evenings will include the “Magic Circle of Infinity” by George Crumb and the poem When the crumbs fall (among others).
I’m working and writing on the edge of the forest. A bluejay keeps me company.
While hiking along Atlantic coastal trails, I’m memorising poems which I’ll recite at the launches for Dust Blown Side of the Journey this week. Also on these walks images for new poems enter my mind. I usually write poems in my head before they find their way to page or screen.
…hoping sleep will
reach him like a gift
dropped through
the mail slot
like a feather
fallen from a
blue wing…
excerpt from “Nocturnes” from Dust Blown Side of the Journey
into my cage, I taste
Lorca on my lips. why
had I forgotten
the stars? during
all those summers
the water stroked
my skin as I swam
in the night’s mirror
note after note
the stars inked
on the score
sheets of the sky
and when I play
their songs
owls
call me from
the dark opposite
shore
From Dust Blown Side of the Journey (McGill-Queen’s University Press)
Dust Blown Side of the Journey events are being planned for the Netherlands in September.
Beachcombing
the net you cast
is never a trap:
it is the hammock
where I rest my
thoughts: the welkin
and the forest-wild
that you weave
together for me:
your blue-
green threads:
the trim
on the shore
that I strive
toward
from Wavelengths of Your Song (McGill-Queen’s University Press)
