Cowboys know that April is Poetry Month

April is Poetry Month, a sure indication that poetry is in serious need of life support.  Whenever an entire month is devoted to something, one can safely assume it is not a mainstream idea, subject, issue, or movement.  For example, poetry shares April with Irritable Bowel Syndrome Month and National Oral Health Month.

Aficionados of poetry are desperate to create a love of poetry in the multitudes. Unfortunately, the poetry that they love does not appeal to the vast majority of North Americans: it doesn’t rhyme and has no regular rhythm.  North Americans like a beat and at least an occasional rhyme, a tendency perhaps inherited from the Anglo-Saxons a thousand or more years ago who wrote their epics with a heavy beat and lots of alliteration. 

For the last hundred years, poets in North America have drifted away from rhyme and a regular rhythm, relying for impact on other, less discernible poetic devices, the ones that your English teachers in high school tried to get you to memorize (simile, caesura, onomatopoeia, etc.), all of which you quickly forgot.  The last great poet who used regular rhythm (meter) and rhyme was Robert Frost; he was also the last great poet who was admired by the average North American.  Frost famously said that writing free verse, poetry without rhyme or meter, was like playing tennis without a net.

The irony is that the poetry that today’s poets have derided, or at best acknowledged without enthusism, have prospered: rap and cowboy poetry.  While most contemporary poets struggle to find an audience, rap and hip hop artists fill stadiums and cowboy poets perform before enthusiastic audiences at events throughout the West.  The two genres could hardly be farther apart in most ways: rap, along with its variants, is urban, raw, profane and often violent or sexual in content; cowboy poetry is rural, bucolic, nostalgic and a celebration of human virtues.  What they have in common is that both have a very regular beat and rely on rhyme for emphasis, cowboy poetry in particular usually  rhymes at the end of each or every second line.  This is a notable feat since it is difficult to find words that rhyme with “horse.”

No matter what your taste in poetry, however, and no matter whether you prefer, Keats, Frost, Buckshot Dot or LL Cool J, find a little time to dig out a book or CD and read or sing along in celebration of Poetry Month.  Better yet, write your own.  Your old English teachers would be proud.

Falling through the crevasses in Vancouver

The issues surrounding the death of three men in an illegal rooming house in Vancouver in 2010 were all put to rest this week when Vancouver’s City Prosecutor dropped all charges against property owner Choi Leong.  The three men, Stephen Yellowquill,  Dwayne Rasmussen  and Garland McKay died when, according to fire inspectors, a faulty string of Christmas tree lights set the ramshackle house they rented on

Pandora Street

ablaze.  I took an interest in the case when it came to light in 2010 because Garland McKay was once a student of mine. I liked Garland when I taught him in Grades Nine and Ten.   He was quiet and didn’t care much for homework, but he had a sense of humour, and he was clever.  He could draw well too.  Though I liked him, I have to admit that he was responsible for one of the three occasions when I lost my temper at school.  I caught him playing Tarzan on the stage curtains in the gym just before a drama production I was directing.  I blew up, called him an idiot. I saw him in the hall after the production was over, apologized and extended my hand.  He took it and smiled a little. I think that was the last time I spoke to him.

The coroner said Garland and the others had six to eight times the legal limit of alcohol in their bodies when they died.  I don’t know what kind of a person Garland was in the end.  The newspaper stories never commented on that.  Like so many people living in squalor in Vancouver and every other large city, Garland became anonymous, just another cipher, statistic, digit.  The woman who owned the house that he rented didn’t really care what he was like either, as long as he paid the rent.  According to an article by Michael Mui in Canoe.ca, landlord Choi Leong said she collected $1400 to $1600 a month from the five men who lived in the illegal rooming house.  She admitted at the inquest that was held that she had been instructed to make many repairs to the old, decrepit house in order to make it safe and habitable, but she had ignored them. 

The city didn’t seem to really care much about McKay or the others either.  The laws, by-laws, rules, policies and procedures that are supposed to prevent landlords like Leong from taking advantage of indigent tenants are rarely enforced.  Conflicting jurisdictions, levels of authority, agencies and bureaucrats cite all kinds of transgressions and infractions, but men and women like Garland are never really served.  The expression is that they “fall through the cracks” which implies that only a very few, particularly thin individuals apparently end up being taken advantage of.   In truth, the cracks are crevasses and as usual those with lots of money and power, and no conscience or character, find the weak and vulnerable easy and profitable targets.  For the last couple of years, whenever I have heard politicians talk about how much better life would be if only government at all levels would just “get out of the way” so that free enterprise could make the nation prosper, I have thought of Garland and people like Choi Leong.

Garland and his friends no doubt had their reasons for drinking themselves into oblivion one last time, but no matter how dark and troubling those reasons may have been, the darkness wasn’t total: they had hung a string of Christmas lights.  The irony that those faint lights caused their deaths is perhaps the saddest part of the story.

I wonder if Ms. Leong had any Christmas lights hanging in her house.