Jane Eaton Hamilton
"I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions.” – Lillian Hellman
Tag: poetry
03/20/2017
Many Gendered Mothers: Ntozake Shange
I’m not sure Ntozake Shange would be thrilled at being my literary mentor, but nevetheless, she was my first and I honour her every writing day.
03/06/2017
So You Want To Write About Life
Gillian Jerome is a poet and essayist from Vancouver, British Columbia and a contributing editor at GEIST. Her work has appeared in GEIST, New Poetry, Colorado Review, Malahat Review, Canadian Literature and elsewhere.
Life Writing
March 25 @ 2:30 pm – 7:30 pm
“I write to define myself—an act of self creation—part of the process of becoming.”
–Susan Sontag
“This workshop is designed for people who aren’t professional writers, but who have something meaningful to say about their lives. We will learn how to discover our stories and to focus our material using techniques of creative nonfiction and Life Review, an educational process that enhances our understanding of ourselves and our lives through storytelling. By reading, writing and participating in interactive exercises, we will be guided toward finding new ways to write about our lives, for ourselves and/or for others.”
01/17/2017
27 Books Every Person In Any Country Should Read
…but especially if you’re attending one of the hundreds of Women’s Marches around the world this weekend. Or should I say especially if you’re not?
“These novels, essay collections, memoirs, histories, and more will help you understand why there is no feminism without intersectionality, why we should remember our history before we repeat it, and why Roe v. Wade is a lot more tenuous than you might think.” -Doree Shafrir
12/26/2016
The fleet-footed thing among us
fleetingness
happiness.
you cannot lock it out,
nor bar the door against it.
like the midnight cinnamon
and ginger wafts
from the kitchen
of the insomniac
finnish woman one floor
down, sleepless and dour,
prone to nocturnal baking,
it simply arrives,
happiness, that is,
through the vents,
the radiators,
the small cracks
in the parquet or plaster.
uninvited,
unannounced,
unreserved,
it goes from room to room,
examining your favourite things,
touching them, gently,
not saying why it’s come,
where it’s been,
who it’s seen.
genial, uncritical,
it overlooks the dust,
the lingering odours
of squander and rancour.
astonishing how much
space it claims, something
so small as this happiness,
so small and so demure.
it does not want you to fuss,
not even to fill the kettle
let alone put it on.
what would be the point?
it won’t be staying long enough,
not long enough for tea.
there’s somewhere else it’s going,
it has someone else to see.
goodbye, goodbye, till next time.
it’s come and gone before.
its bags are packed and ready.
they’re waiting by the door.
–Bill Richardson
10/28/2016
Best Canadian Poetry
This arrived today, editors Helen Humphreys, Molly Peacock and Anita Lahey, and I look forward to reading this year’s crop of “best” poems. I already know some of the poems in the anthology … Rachel Rose’s affecting “Good Measure,” Sally Ito’s soul-weathered “Idle” and Maureen Hynes’ “Wing On.” Lucky me, to get to explore further.
I can quite often roll my eyes when I read my own work (I mostly hate reading it because I would never stop editing and once you see where you can take a piece the piece as it stands seems murderously bad), but this poem I found quite funny. I love when humour manages to seep through the cracks of my work–which reflects my life, too, how laughter finds its way in, a magic dust sprinkled over the bad or humdrum. “Wish You Were Here” first appeared in CVII.
PS Someone asked and I found a link to a shorter version of the poem here on the blog:
10/20/2016
Poet Brigit Pegeen Kelly has died
Brigit Pegeen Kelly
I was sorry to hear that poet Brigit Pegeen Kelly has died. Her work will stay with me, and her poem “Song” will always shatter me.
09/27/2016
50 books by Canadian women of colour
What a celebration! The good folks at Room Magazine have put out a wonderful list of books for all tastes and styles. Much better fare than last night’s debate! Full of energy and humanity and hope. Full of talent and skill. Full of familiar names and books, and new-to-you names and books. Happy reading!
09/23/2016
Sharon Olds
Alexandra Schwartz, writing in the New Yorker, about Sharon Olds and her new book, “Odes.”
“In some six dozen poems, Olds sings in praise of things that are not often considered worthy of appreciation—tampons, stretch marks, fat, composting toilets, douche bags, menstrual blood—and reconsiders others that are.”
Sharon Olds Sings the Body Electric
09/11/2016
Milktini
Milktini
I) The Broom
is a pole with attached bristles
The broom can stand in a closet and be seen by no one
The broom comes alive only in hands:
a woman’s hands
ordinary, tremoring
sweeping mouse nests and spider webs across the kitchen tile
towards the living room carpet
under the underlay they lump like live things
The problem of cash
The problem of the vomiting child
The problem of varicose veins
The problem of the car’s bald tires
The problem of the husband’s fist
At the intersection of Drake and Thomas
a broom–turquoise, plastic, with short black bristles
has been struck, the pole twisted and warped,
the head de-throned
II) The Sponge
is not what the woman calls for when
her head splits, but it is all the boy thinks
to grab from the silver belly of the sink
and what he holds to her blood-clotted hair
It is the same sponge swiped the night before
across a clot of pork gravy
III) The Bucket
is worn by the boy when he wants to
shut out fighting
Is yellow. Has a
compartment to wring out the mop
When the boy wears the bucket he believes
he is invisible, an action hero
who can zip through the battlezone
as invisible as his mother
who is known to be clumsy
who calls in sick on average four days every month
IV) The Vacuum
was originally her mother’s vacuum
is so old it has a fabric electrical cord
a two-pronged plug
The bags fill up like paper pregnancies
to be discarded
She would like a wet-dry vac
The vacuum makes an unholy roar. Sounds like aircraft
V) The Mop
also combats dirt
the kind that adheres
the way a bruise adheres
When dinner is flung from the table
a broom will take care of the mess
(Caesar salad, green beans, rice, salmon)
but anything wet
blood in particular
leaves a sticky film
The mop is a fright wig
a Medussa head
VI) The Toilet Bowl Cleanser
Pine Sol. The boy adds it to water
where it turns to milk
While his mother serves ice cream
he passes it to his father
Milktini, Dad! Drink your milktini!
-Jane Eaton Hamilton, from LOVE WILL BURST INTO A THOUSAND SHAPES, 2014
08/09/2016
Woman With a Mango
Woman With A Mango (by Gauguin): Etta Cone
Gertrude you are a Gertrude are a Gertrude
no one in Baltimore is a Gertrude anymore
If you can’t say anything nice about anyone
come sit next to me
you said
and I did
under Mother and Child come sitting
in Baltimore in Paris in Baltimore
no one is a Gertrude is a Gertrude enough
There were the two of us, you said, we were not sisters
We were not large not then we were not rich
we were not so different one from the other one
an eye was an eye was an eye, gazing
A woman would smell
a woman would hold out her smell and smell and petals
would drop from Large Reclining Nude
white petals cool and fragrant and soft
and dropping and dropping and dropping down
Three Lives my fingers sore my wrists aching typing
Come sit next to me you said
and I did sit I did sit I sat and sat and after I sat I sat and sat
I typed until the “G” key stuck
Three lives, yours, Claribel’s, mine
I was sitting and sitting under
Woman With a Mango under Blue Nude
I was sitting with textiles draped over me
hoping their weight
but they are not you, because you have–
Alice? Alice? Alice?
Is an Alice?
Gertrude you undertake to overthrow my undertaking
You say my dessicated loneliness is
across the ocean in Baltimore and you pull Alice onto
your lap on the large brown broken armchair
where you sat with me
while Pablo’s portrait strains above
You sit, running Alice’s hair through your hands
her hair through your fingers
Your fingers in my hair unpinning tangling
your lips against my neck
There is no there there now
anymore
there is Henri there is Vincent there is Paul and Paul there is Gustave
my neck a neck is a neck with a rose
that died and petals like brown rain
I like what is, you said
I like what is mine I like it
*with reference to: Three Lives, Stanzas in Meditaion (VII), Sacred Emily, by Gertrude Stein
-from the book Love Will Burst into a Thousand Shapes by Jane Eaton Hamilton 2014
07/09/2016
Sharon Olds in Edinburgh
The exquisite poems of Sharon Olds. Her voice, always.
05/27/2016
“Adrienne Rich’s Poetic Transformations” by Claudia Rankine
Adrienne Rich remains one of my favourite writer and a touchstone to me as a lesbian poet in the 1980s and beyond. Here is the astute Claudia Rankine in The New Yorker talking about her legacy. I, with my partners, dreamed of accessing this common language. That it remained a dream was as much our personal failures as the then pressures of patriarchy and homophobia.
“Lying is done with words, and also with silence.”
― Adrienne Rich
“Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you; it means learning to respect and use your own brains and instincts; hence, grappling with hard work.”
― Adrienne Rich
“No one has imagined us. We want to live like trees,
sycamores blazing through the sulfuric air,
dappled with scars, still exuberantly budding,
our animal passion rooted in the city.”
― Adrienne Rich, The Dream of a Common Language
Today a backhoe divulged out of a crumbling flank of earth
one bottle amber perfect a hundred-year-old
cure for fever or melancholy a tonic
for living on this earth in the winters of this climate.
Today I was reading about Marie Curie:
she must have known she suffered from radiation sickness
her body bombarded for years by the element
she had purified
It seems she denied to the end
the source of the cataracts on her eyes
the cracked and suppurating skin of her finger-ends
till she could no longer hold a test-tube or a pencil
She died a famous woman denying
her wounds
denying
her wounds came from the same source as her power. ”
― Adrienne Rich, The Dream of a Common Language
“That’s why I want to speak to you now.
To say: no person, trying to take responsibility for her or his identity, should have to be so alone. There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep, and still be counted as warriors. (I make up this strange, angry packet for you, threaded with love.)
I think you thought there was no such place for you, and perhaps there was none then, and perhaps there is none now; but we will have to make it, we who want an end to suffering, who want to change the laws of history, if we are not to give ourselves away.”
― Adrienne Rich, Sources
“That’s why I want to speak to you now.
To say: no person, trying to take responsibility for her or his identity, should have to be so alone. There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep, and still be counted as warriors. (I make up this strange, angry packet for you, threaded with love.)
I think you thought there was no such place for you, and perhaps there was none then, and perhaps there is none now; but we will have to make it, we who want an end to suffering, who want to change the laws of history, if we are not to give ourselves away.”
― Adrienne Rich, Sources
“My heart is moved by all I cannot save:
so much has been destroyed
I have to cast my lot with those
who age after age, perversely,
with no extraordinary power,
reconstitute the world.”
― Adrienne Rich
05/25/2016
Best Canadian Poetry
Best Canadian Poetry, 2016
Great news! Just received word today that I’ll have a poem in the 2016 volume of Best Canadian Poetry! The poem is “Wish You Were Here” first published in CVII. The editor for this year is Helen Humphreys, and the series editors are Molly Peacock and Anita Lahey. Thanks, Helen, Molly and Anita.
05/06/2016
Publication Day!
Always an exciting day for a writer–publication day when we first see our new book! WEEKEND is out! I’m so happy to be launching at Historic Joy Kogawa House, where I’ll be writer-in-residence, on June 6. My special guest is author Anne Fleming and, yes, their new poetry book POEMW and their banjo, which I hear will be plunking out some campfire songs. Sharpen your marshmallow sticks, kids. Price of admission is a ghost story. Here’s hoping somebody will tell one about the ghosts of frogs we pithed in high school!
04/28/2016
Best One-Sentence Advice You’ve Ever Gotten on Writing?
Over at Lit Reactor, Christopher Schultz has compiled some great one-liners of advice from well-known authors in this article here.
03/17/2016
On Writing Across the Curriculum
magnolia: Jane Eaton Hamilton, unknown year
Instead of asking me to repeat myself, why don’t you challenge yourself to expand? I am not ever going to make myself smaller, my talents fewer, my range tiny, in order to garner your praise.
