Monday, March 20, 2017

[how do you do your research?] unknowing.

I first accept that what I know — what I think I know, is likely wrong
I think I know that I know nothing at all
I like to think I know how to love/care/respect everyone as I try to learn
what there is to know —
but then I know that I cannot possibly know how to love/care/respect
                                 
                                 not right now
                                 not knowing how
                                                                               to love/care/respect my self

I must unknow to know.
and so I listen, I read, and I spiral into more
unknowing
questions build
but they are in the forms of punctuation only
BIG BOLDFACED curves hovering over
endless, expansive, overbearing black holes of
unknowing
deep breaths as my heart beats through my chest
and slows — how can I possibly know?
does my unknowing show?
can you please help me unknow?

Thursday, January 5, 2017

The Community Garden Conspiracy - Les Danyluk

The Community Garden Conspiracy.
Inspired partially by the presentation by Dylan and Amanda and the reading of Anne Boyer


After many many months of investigation and continuous under ground reporting, we have finally been able to shed some light on the Community Garden Conspiracy story.  Our investigative team has uncovered the true and sinister nature of what these so called community Gardens really are. The shocking news is that they are not “gardens “ at all but in reality, they are really in fact residential plant prisons.

While monitoring the construction of a number of these new modern design community gardens, we could not help but notice that in almost every case, always the first step in establishing a community garden space is to erect a giant perimeter security fence around the proposed space.  A cage in fact.


This serves a two-fold purpose, the first purpose of course is to keep the offending plants in, and now come on now we are not fools. Do you honestly think that we would go through all this trouble to build a facility such as this and then just let the plants get away? You have to give us a bit more credit than that, come on we are not as smart as we look you know.  And secondly the purpose of the perimeter fence is meant of course to protect the garden from the outside community itself. There will be no stopping to smell the flowers by the community at this facility, or at least not while I am on duty.


The next phase in construction of these facilities is to erect a number of separate rectangular structures that will be filled in with dirt. These are not garden beds why they are cellblocks, forms of solitary confinement and means of segregation. These are essential for the garden administrators to prevent and control cross-pollination and contamination between the different factions housed together within these garden walls.  


This helps to prevent gang violence and recruitment; it impedes the spread of hate literature and limits the sharing of information with regard to escape attempts, planned up risings and radical political protests.  The administration being so fearful of this occurring that they won’t even let the peas and carrots grow up next each other, like they had always done before.


Rumours abound that these imprisoned plants that are held in these unregulated and un monitored facilities are being subjected to genetic alteration, injected with chemicals, covered with animal feces and god knows what other inhumane tortures and conditions.


Why what other types of nefarious plots and plans do they have in store for your community garden? Colourless carrots, pod-less peas square lettuce or seedless sunflowers. (hey have any of you tried the new pit-less plums, Oh! My God they are horrible just pitiful ) So please don’t let the plaintive cries of the captive corn fall upon deaf ears maybe you too can live in a world where we are all free to roam just like out fruit compatriot the constant traveler the coconut.


One of the reasons I have taken this satirical view of the community gardens and the concept of caged food, as it is kind of a coping and defence mechanism. As the more I consider the term “community” the more confused bewildered and perplexed by the term I become. As it becomes more and more evident to me, that the term community is being perverted to now mean more than ever. To be a privatizing of the general public, that communities have become exclusionary rather than inclusive, a way to separate advance or promote a smaller private enclave of certain peoples separate from the general populous.  


For myself it is hard not to notice that in the area in which I reside, it is yes in fact a community but the only thing that seems to be common or unifying in this particular area. Is the ever so obvious observation of the ever popular and commonly occurring cage. I walk the streets and avenues of my community and am amazed by the fact that nearly every single yard, every residence, every vacant lot and every community garden except for one notable exception (the living bridge) is fenced. Some of these yards and lots are even fenced front and back and in some instances even the waste bins are caged. Of course this makes perfect sense considering the fact that we caged people who eat caged food with caged mouths would of course create caged refuse.


So instead of living in a more affluent secure “gated community” the only conclusion that I can come up with after living in my neighbourhood for six years now, is that I reside in a community of cages and community gardens do not grow communities they only sprout more cages.

Thursday, December 22, 2016


Somatic Exercise: Put on a shirt with a tag backwards and inside out, so the tag is under your chin. Then put on a pair of pans with a tag inside out and backwards, with the back pockets on your thighs. Run around the block like this and try to read the words on either one of the tags. When you finish the run, write down the words you remember vertically down the page (if you’ve remember most, you can choose a few). Then, write an acrostic about the experience using these letters.

Wednesday, December 21, 2016

conrad's somatic exercise #4

Take a red magic marker and draw a 9 on your naked chest. Draw the 9 from the bottom up. Start the tip of its tail at your naval and sweep UP to have the round circle of its head in the middle of your breasts. Put on a shirt that conceals the 9 from other eyes. Go out to the corner and quickly choose a direction. At the next corner choose another direction. Don't think about where you are going, instead spend the time between corners looking carefully at the world. Finally come to a complete stop at the 9th corner. Look across the street and focus on four different objects. Draw a line to connect them, looking carefully at what's inside this square you've just made. What's outside it? What's half-in? Imagine you string lights to make the square. Imagine its contents at night, dimly lit. Imagine this square a year from now. Ten years from now. Now go somewhere quickly and write, run, run to a place where you can write. Suddenly the city, your city, is a place where places to write come to mind, you must always know those places at all times. 

Come for the flavour, stay for the pills
Get your fill
Fill up and ride
Sidle up and make a choice
Talk about something wild
Felt some cold on my blue legs
Can't imagine never seeing it again
It'll all outlive me
Keeping me alive, a sustenance, a market
Of pleasure and pain and necessity
Needs me less than I need it
Next time I come back for you
I'll get another sandwich and watch another merry band
Enjoy whatever it is they do these days
Not the same days, but all days all the same
Happy thoughts, chin up,
Slog your way back through your personal fog
And rely on it, it'll be here the tomorrow after you

Karen's Somatic Exercise

Somatic Exercise:

Imagine yourself into the bottom of a ten foot pit. No light, no sound, nothing-- just you and a clean dark pit. It's your pit. It's all for you. Lay down (literally or not, whichever-- if possible, go somewhere you might identify as your ten foot pit) and imagine its full experience-- how does it smell, what does it feel like, are you warm or cold, do you feel safe or afraid down here? Now you're going to write your way out of the pit. Write the things you need to to get out of this place, or to write yourself anywhere else. Write the things you love about your pit and the things you hate about it. Write about your footholds, about the rope connecting you from that bottom to those who love you and want you back. Write about what it's like coming back out. Is it easier to stay down there, in the end, or not? Who knows? Are you ok?

Thanks, everyone, for the semester. Hope you're all well :)

Somatic Exercise

Somatic Exercise (Conrad)
2.) In your home alone. Take a bucket or basin of room-temperature water to your front door and strip naked. Put a piece of paper or thin notepad under the bucket and lay a pen nearby. Stand in the water. Get used to being naked while standing in water at the front door. Look through the peephole. Look for a long time at the world out there. Then look above you, and at the door, the walls, and make note of something you hadn't seen before -- maybe a cobweb or crack in the paint. Every once in a while stretch your arms over your head stretch as high as you can stretch stretch stretch then relax in your bucket. If someone knocks or rings the bell it's your good fortune! Look at them through the peep hole while saying nothing. Maybe have a friend come over at a certain time to knock and say, "Are you naked in your bucket of water?" Don't answer, you're a poet, this isn't time for idle chit chat, besides that you can warn them ahead of time that you won't be answering them. Stretch, and be quiet. Step out of the bucket and sit your poet ass on the floor, get the paper from under the bucket and whistle short, loud bursts of whistle four times. Then write. When you feel the need for more whistles, pause, whistle, then write some more.

"The Result"

What a waste of water
Was there ever such a waster of water
Will the water waster waste her
Water once more? Or
Mni?
When she wants it turns the tap
And looks at
The roof ceiling hook—LOOK!
The ceiling hook  she couldn’t hang herself from but
A plant could hang there. A plant that needs water.

And there are three windows where the water evaporates thanks
To the sun.
And the ceiling hook hangs nothing, and hangs there kinetically full of potential.
And the boyfriend walks in on this poet ass, bare-assed and laughs and laughs
And the poet ass jiggles as the poet laughs.

Let them think it’s crazy. Stretch out in your bucket and let yourself say fuck it.


My Somatic Exercise

Go into your bathroom and clean your tub for this one first. Now.

Go to your kitchen and fill your biggest cup, glass, or mug with water. Bring that drinking implement to your bath tub and pour it into the bathtub making sure that the stopper will stop that precious water from going down the drain. In whatever you happen to be wearing at the time, get in the tub. Lie down and try to relax in the small amount of water around you. Let it soak into your clothes if you’re wearing clothes. Try to wash your hair. Imagine how you would live your life differently if that amount of water in the tub is the amount of water you were allotted daily for a month. Write a the first half of a poem about what you would do during that month, and the second half of the poem about what you would do the first day of the next month (with access to as much water as you have access to presently).