Reading: April 5

 

 

 

Songs for Learnin': a fundraiser for scholarship

This year, until August, proceeds from downloads of my music will go to The Read More Books Scholarship at Sault College in Sault Ste Marie. The scholarship is designed to assist a student (perhaps students, if this goes well) who has a passion for reading and the arts. To qualify, students need only write a simple letter expressing their involvement in art and their love of books. Details, for any students wishing to apply next year, can be found through Financial Aid offices at the college.

    There are two ways to download: CD Baby and iTunes. CD Baby retains only 9% of the download fee while iTunes retains about 40%, so I suggest CD Baby if you’d like to participate. The download links are at the bottom of the SHOP page on my website. Here is the link: http://www.mddunn.com/#!shop/vstc9=music. A CD Baby page is available here: http://www.mddunn.com/#!cd-baby-market-page.

     In addition, $2 from every book sold through my website will go to Canopy, a Canadian organization that works to reforest sensitive regions. If you have questions or concerns, please contact me.

      A new CD is coming, I promise.

 

The CD Baby market page from my website: http://www.mddunn.com/#!cd-baby-market-page

The general shop page with iTune links at the bottom: http://www.mddunn.com/#!shop/vstc9=music

 

 

Always Unexpected

I'll just say it was a bad week, and share this draft of a poem:

Always Unexpected

This morning I wrote “too soon, too soon, too soon”
across the top of a grainy sheet of paper
and tried to remember her face, the student
who left us after planning for next September.
There are so many, year after year. 
You love them, many of them. 
Some, you’d like to forget. Some
you forget without trying. In all, you see
the babies they were, the motherly love
that brought them through their first prone days,
the struggles and entitlements that brought them to you.

Wishing for time. Wishing for time.

 

 

 

Happy New Year and a Review

Happy New Year!

 

If I were to make a New Year’s resolution, it would be to blog regularly.

Unfortunately, that is as far as it’s going, because I don’t make NY resolutions.

    Here is a review by poet Jim Zukowski of _Fancy Clapping_. Thanks, Rumpus. Thanks, Jim.

http://therumpus.net/2013/01/fancy-clapping-by-mark-d-dunn/

 

 

 

Poem found in the margins of a secondhand book

Poem found in the margins of a secondhand book

          (_Everything Arrives at the Light_)

 

“delightful”

sound & light

sound is full of hearing

because the throats are warm

 

-idea of sound and light

-something about something that people

arrive at

 

-drunk

 and

 unpleasant

 

Imagery

 

-more philisophical

- about deficiency of language

 

“soul of one newly dead”

-relation between life and death

-souls continuing to exist

 

-earthy religion

is bourgeois Christianity

 

-language sing of alienation

 

-allusion to Virginia Woolf

 

-time

-recapturing time

 

-animals spend time occupying W,

then move on to animals again

 

 

Eating Crow

I like crows. Almost every morning several crows call impatiently for the grub we’ve been feeding them since last winter.

They circle above the patio. They perch on the telephone pole, watching, waiting for us to go back indoors. I like crows, but I don’t like eating crow.

However, I am glad to “eat crow” on this day.

    Several posts back, I lamented that the two Coles bookstores in Sault Ste Marie weren’t carrying my books. I believe I expanded the complaint to say that the stores had no poetry section and carried little in the way of poetry. Well, things have changed. Both stores now have clearly marked shelves of poetry with some good stuff on them, new and old. And, yes, they’ve got Fancy Clapping (http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/Fancy-Clapping-Mark-D-Dunn/9781896350486-item.html?ikwid=fancy+clapping&ikwsec=Home), several copies in fact. So, I take it back, whatever it was I said. They’re even carrying a new book by Gary Geddes that I might well spring for.  

     So, cheers to you Coles Books in Sault Ste Marie for opening the door to poetry. Thank you.  

     Now we’ve got to make it worth the effort and buy those books.

 

Why bother, you ask?

In response to a posting I made about the marginalization of poetry, and the compounded marginalization of “regional” poets, John Gagnon, an activist, agitator, and all-around instigator, asked:  “… one simple question? Why did you want to publish? Fame, fortune, riches, notoriety, to just tell a story in print and let time do its work by allowing the future to recognize your genius?” Ignoring the low-hanging fruit of notions of “genius” – as I say, John is a trickster – it got me to thinking about my motivations. Why bother publishing? The writing is the important part.

Putting aside the larger questions of publication (that is, “to make public”) for now, I’ll say that for me it began as a desire to connect with a larger community. Long before the internet brought everyone’s living room to the public forum, we had newspapers, magazines, and books as the major conduits for thought. There were not many books in my childhood home. We had Dr Seuss and a few other titles, that was about it. I was a comic book kid, and read these voraciously. One day, my grandmother brought home a 1963 hard cover edition of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer / The Adventures of Huckleberry  Finn that she’d found at a yard sale. It was one of those flip books, with Sawyer on one side and Huck on the other. I still have it.

For whatever reason, I wrote stories and poems and songs. My first attempt at a novel was a space opera inspired by and loosely based on Star Wars. The notebook that held it is long gone but I remember the anguish I experienced over having to kill off one of the main characters. Even at nine years old, I knew that a person couldn’t get sat on by a dragon from Jupiter and survive. To make it more difficult, I’d modeled the character on my next door neighbour, my only friend at the time.

A few years later, I began to mail my stories into magazines. Again, I don’t know why. I wanted to see my stories in print, yes. I wanted to get paid, yes. Mostly, I was probably just a lonely kid looking for community. I sent stories to Asimov’s Science Fiction, Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine, Amazing Stories, even the Canadian literary journal Quarry. The editors must have known they had a child’s work in their hands. The rejections were courteous, kind, and helpful. An editor from Asimov’s told me to keep writing and send more stories. The editor from Amazing Stories advised me to not send in original copies. This was good advice, but it meant that I’d have to type out two good copies of each story on the little blue Brother. The editor at Quarry, a man named Bob Hilderley, quickly became my hero upon sending back a page of notes and suggestions for a terrible story about an abused horse. Mr Hilderley’s most memorable advice, “Try not to use too much description. Let your readers fill in the details.”

I kept sending away stories and poems for years, from the age of about 14 to 19. Then I took a ten-year break from the publishing racket. The only suggestion I make to people who want to send work to publishers is to be ready for rejection. Young people should feel absolutely ready, as early rejection could shut one down for good. Early rejection didn’t discourage me. It made me realize that I needed time to become a better writer.

Books were, and remain, the instigators. In tenth grade I found a copy of ­The Stone Bird by Al Purdy. This collection recounted some of Purdy’s adventures in the far north. Now, Purdy is often thought of as a brawler, a braggart, a drinker, an all-around difficult guy. But The Stone Bird opened the possibilities of poetry. I had no idea that poems could do what they did in that book: namely, tells stories through imagery and emotion.

So, Purdy and Poe, Dickinson and Twain, Vonnegut and Brautigan, Bradbury, Atwood, Bester, and a beautiful little anthology called The Voice That is Great Within Us, edited by Haydn Carruth, got me on the publishing kick. I wanted to contribute something to that magical pool where I’d found companionship. It’s never about fame. And, apart from the journalistic pieces I did over the years, it’s never been about money, either. Perhaps it was about recognition, acceptance. I’d have to spend some time on the couch to get too far into that vault.