My tenth book (fifth of poetry), What It Means To Be Human, has come out recently. I post below some comments from other poets and reviewers:

Brian Henderson (See his great book, Nerve Language below – shortlisted for the GG)

I’m now thoroughly ensconced and really enjoying it, especially your language use. Lots of on your pulses collisions and power coming off the diction’s radiations. It’s an out of the corner of your eye writing with plenty of speed. Trying to crank up the word to be as fast as the skin (Massumi). P 72, p 84, yes. I think of it as Lorcaian, a kind of Duende art, filled with physicality, irrationality, intense awareness, & awareness of loss/time/death/otherness. Performing a kind of autopoiesis of language. I think in some way we’re driving thru a land of similar poetics, so I’m sending along a couple of things for your reading pleasure.

David Kosub – Speaking of Poetry Blog

David is not a poet, but is that rare sort of person that poetry needs: an interested observer who is willing to put the effort into a poetry blog and do regular reviews and articles for the love of poetry. Thank you, David.

Here are some words: “Like Tim Lilburn’s work, the metabolic rate of Reid’s poems is pitched very high, the effort to meld the poetry’s imagery and the narrative prodigious.” He did not buy the concept of poems/novel, however – the main technical thing the book takes aim at. But you can go and look, and you can find a half hour interview with Carmine Starnino, who comes across as a much better, bright, even modest guy than some of his written criticism would have you believe.

Alice Major – her The Office Tower Tales won the Lowther Award in 2009

Yes, we certainly share a liking for odd, technical kinds of language — nares and virga as well as gelignite. I love ‘virga’ and the idea behind it — rain that never reaches ground. You use that image very effectively. And there are many other striking images throughout — ‘black points of lash’ and the hole of wood under the dusty glass.

We tackle story in very different ways — I hope we get a moment during the League AGM to talk about that. Your fragmentary and provocative approach challenges the reader to make a coherent narrative, or else to let the shards lie unconnected. It brings up interesting ideas about wholeness.

Cynthia Kerkham-Woodman – Palimpsest Press will publish her, The Animal Lying Beside Me

… great title… intriguing, inspiring in its innovation… ‘the slow tongue of night in the tree tops giving way’…

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2008 – 2009 Books

What if red ran out – Katia Grubisic – Gooselane

Every poem in this book is superb. It is the work of a major Canadian poet at the peak of her powers. Reminiscent of Ted Hughes, but without his sense of declarative imperative, if that’s not double-speak, and of John Ashbury, but not too lush, too crammed with invention, not voltage that burns – at least not in a way that’s bad. And I had the sense, that I seldom have, that the book seemed the product of a male mind. Hmm, my failings, no doubt. Great authority, confidence, strong, undeniable narrative drive without being lyrical, occasional poems in the best sense of that expression. They take you easily where she wants you to go with her because she has that incandescent imagination that agrees with itself on where to go and without thinking about it, without it being an issue for the keen reader, you go there with her and discover along the way that you are glad you did. Poetry that is a communication, provided you want that out of your books, but not one that demands it either, muscular, a feral python. Only there is one little problem with all these attempts at words: this is Katia’s first book of poems and she is young. Makes one humble, jealous and thankful, too. Stop listening to my thoughts, you decide:

Oversight

Sharp and white, the moon notches the horizon,
funnels clouds into the early morning
Hoodlums pushing bicycles through alleyways, past gaping

casements. In the sticky heat, lovers conclude the night naked
and not touching. Fruit, rugs, all-nite coffee storefronts elapse. Perhaps
the day will illuminate new absurdities. The buses are full

of men, their apparatus and tired beards, their metal boxes
shiny between scuffed boots. Everyone gets off, everyone
else gets on. The vanished uncurl from rags and boxes, mute

in brooks of garbage juice. No longer full nor numb,
they throw off blankets on the marble ramparts of insurance
buildings, emerge surprised and maybe a little disappointed

to be not dead. The bus runs a red
and the moon slides down between the towers,
not really bothered, not bothering.

This is a book that will win awards, if anyone out there is awake. Dare I note the obvious unusualities: notches, gaping, not touching, new absurdities, apparatus, tired beards, vanished, and the best of all: brooks of garbage juice (let’s all steal that), ramparts, not dead, not bothering.

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2007 – 2008 Books

Note, I only review books I consider excellent, I don’t want to hurt any feelings out there by expressing misgivings, perhaps my own shortcomings, anyway, and my purpose here is to give the poet some confidence when working alone in the poet’s corner on that next book in times of indecision and questioning of one’s own abilities. A confidence thing.

Nerve Language – Brian Henderson, Pedlar Press.

Nerve Language is an example from a very current stream in Canadian poetry: a documentary about a real person in a real time, and a taking licence with the story, along with the strategy of making the notes at the end of the book vital poetry for understanding the rest. This book is about the life of Daniel Paul Schreber, judge in Leipzig in 1894, who went delusional, and came to believe it was his responsibility to save the world. This is a spectacularly jagged book in both images and structural motion, jumping from the nerve language world of Schreber who talked to god and to other spectators of the mental institute. He describes it, for example, as ‘slightly overshooting blood metallic tinsel oxide smell of success.’ This is highly-current, non-lyrical, oblong-rhythmic, consonant-clash, stuffing into one phrase, exact-description words that make the reader dig deep to make a commitment to decipher the text and not fall back on wanting accessible lyricism. Henderson delivers: the fragmentary, the difficult, the asymmetric. Excellent. Raging, as bill bissett would say. In addition, Henderson’s book’s over all structure is so neat and tight that it adds an opposite tension like a tourniquet on the reader’s brain so that the jagged and the bound in conjunction marks this book as better than the rest.

the rush to here – George Murray, Nightwood Editions

At once recognizable as a great book, the rush to here, effortlessly explores the sonnet in all of its permutations and is so neat in its execution, so Shakespearian in its lush authority that it sneaks up on a reader and takes him/her by the throat. There are quotable completely-full-of-themselves epigrams in each and every poem. From Silence is a Dead Language: What you’re looking for is ingenuity / enough to let ambition go: to find / yourself building the simple, the clever, / suddenly satisfied with what’s appearing // at the ends of your much-surprised hands. This is supple, sure, intelligent swelling of incandescence abundance. What impresses is the magic of great poetry captured in one of the western hemisphere’s millennia-long traditional forms, overleaping in one easy – for Murray – step one current retrograde neo-conservative stream in Canadian poetry that holds up structure as the only important consideration in poetry. The rush to here blows that movement completely apart even though it’s not intending to. This guy is so smart so sparklingly clear in his poetic invocations that every line rings as clear as a glass tinged by a fingernail. You want the music to continue and continue in its arpeggio octaves.

Muybridge’s Horse – Rob Winger, Nightwood Editions

I wanted, while I read another 60 books in this contest, for this oeuvre book to be my winner. This is the true story – if that is not an oxymoron – of Eadweard Muybridge, who proved with 50 precisely-timed still cameras, that when running, a horse’s four feet are off the ground during mid-stride; ground breaking work in 1878, that also led to moving pictures. In anyone else’s hands this story could be as humdrum as old yellow newsprint. But Winger starts with fire and just keeps on going. The first poem seeks to capture in words something in mid-motion. It is a very-current-poem-type that seeks to coalesce similar material rather than move in a trajectory from a to b. There is neither a nor b, only the quality of being between be and to be. For example: The time between target and gunshot…[in addition, by reversing the more usual order, the phrase actually implies motion as the sound rushes toward its object] a minute hand jumping to its next hour before the clock can chime… the darkness that happens before any object collides with your face… Thus the whole point of the book is made in the first poem, and in a way one that, in addition, confidently throws away on this page the usual way we write poems as a progression of thoughts as a connecting feature, setting down instead a list of syntactically and subjectly unconnected strings of words. And of course this is only the first poem. The rest is a documentary, novel, panorama of a life, twice as long as the usual book of poetry – every page good, even the ones that are essentially found lists of boxes of photograph titles worked up by an agile infusing intelligence.

This is a book that moves what poetry means along to the next link of the chain; it will last, in the same way that Ondaatje’s Collected Works of Billy the Kid has lasted as one of the best books of poetry of the last half century in this country and one that influenced a whole generation of young Canadian poets. Finally, it has to be said that Nightwood should be given an award for the best designed book of poetry of this decade. One small item: a horse at the bottom of many pages that if you run the pages through your hands like a deck of cards, it gallops.

Thin Moon Psalm – Sheri Benning, Brick Books

It has been said that all poets when they are young exhaust their coming to the world in the metaphors of actualization they contribute to the world of poetry. Once they run out of completely new, original phrases they move on to thematic concerns. If that is so, Sheri Benning is in the middle of her young poet’s life where every phrase is novel, every image startling and surprising in its un-before thought accuracy that older poets will recognize of themselves at an earlier age. Here’s an example: a flute can pull us from our prisons, / can piece together disarticulated days, // but these men strum furiously, their fingers inflamed wicks. / With vein-bulging intensity they shout their songs – // all of the cocked triggers of all the executions… And each of these is brought within the arc that art must conform to to satisfy the mind. These are not simply images that don’t connect with the story within which they fall and rise. On the contrary their shorthand code does connect. The poet moves light fingers between thoughts. Once they are lined up with one another you see the story within which the dissonant lines inevitably must belong. Benning has the puppeteer’s hand, the butcher’s meat cleaver and the beauty of a discarded algorithm. She sees with her phrase-making eye that the ordinary conventional words of our speaking are not great enough to convey the images that she sees. Like Tim Lilburn, she makes startling hyphenated new words of unexpected rhythms to convey what she sees. A gorgeous beauty of original, prairie landscape lyricism. The images spill forth in her need to write and move on because there is more, much more. Benning’s photograph at the end is as jarring and jangly, as her work. Read the book. Look at the picture.

Quick – Anne Simpson, McClelland and Stewart.

Once again this is a book that is sure of itself, a mature, nimble mind of a book that passes from one crystalline phrase to another. Each poem has zero extra material, no slither, as Pound used to say. The crispness is a sign of a decisive, confident mind, and the images it works with so compacted that one can go right on by and then have to come back and make the mind pay attention. The mind is rewarded in this book of poems about the body of a human and of nature. The confusion, the concussion of a near fatal car crash, to the bodily observations of a bee and a human woman. How easily rain forgets us as it softens, pulls back into cloud. How it forgets. A hundred scents ribbon my body this way and that. The bee, of course, is drawn to flowers by scent and Simpson’s lucent mind and touch make clear that the lovely confusions of scent are a problem for the bee. The woman observes it another way: Out of the nothing of daylight comes one watery shape, another. The architecture of what’s heard…. It’s as close as sky gets: fingertips trembling over our upturned faces. Decisive, exact, perfect.

Domain – Barbara Nickel, Anansi.

A highly-skilled, waited-for book from a poet who has already left her mark, in this, her second book of poems. A great series of exceptionally done glosas on Catherine the Great is part of the spine of the book, making the revelation, but only ultimately a detail:The girl pulls the blind and eyes the pills./They’re light as blossoms. Pale eyes.

The work on every day reality , its history, its absentness, its ultimate structure of a life, takes domesticity to a new and clearer place. So many times when poets start out they disappear for a decade in a time when children come to them. Some of them never make it back out, to being a poet. Barbara Nickel has done both and the trip through her and our Domains is a better place for her having born witness to what we see and most of us forget, or worse, think nothing more of ‘the what is happening’, what John Lennon said is ‘what is happening when you are busy making other plans’. I’m glad for us poets that she found her way back out of what happens. We are richer for it. Read: The Storage Room, and you will get what she found, not unapart from the what that has happened to her. The simple, the foreboding, the wrapping in the warm fresh scent of cedar: In the dark I’m all alone and safe, down here/in cedar closet smell and furnace purr, and the mirror’s returning images of different emotions, times and people.

No, read first the lead poems to each section. Each does a nifty trick of tying its last line to the beginning line of the next section’s lead poem. So it is a kind of history of what we live in our own lives – they become the real spine, and a frame for the book in its many parts as though the rings of the years of a tree. The things we do not understand, the mother we remember and then re-remember the years that we are growing. And the Domain is contained, and yet keeps on flowing, memory and witness the subject of our briefness in this world, the intentionality of memory, the artistic whole that gives structure to the dome that we would like our lives to be. Yes.

My mother agrees with the dead – Susan Stenson, Wolsak and Wynn

This is the best fully-accessible book of poetry I have ever read. Not one word too many, not one word too few. A fully realized meditation on real death. The best feature is how Stenson captures in few words her mother’s character, a woman who was a mother in the 1950s and ’60s’, in small town Saskatchewan. Spare and laconic, without sentimentalism. After getting the cancer message, the two confer, write lists, and go through them together, without flinching, well, the mother at least: Book the hall. Buy the coffin/… Fix the zipper on the silk blouse. As though her mother needs to die as she lived, as though there are rules for living, her nose all the way to the paper as she writes, and slowly perfects each letter as though a teacher were watching over her shoulder and there is a need to do it right; this sense pervades the book dense with character, personal idiosyncracies and in its accumulation it is a death that each of us has seen with a person close enough to us that we are forced to pay attention, prepare for the loss.

The Shovel – Colin Browne, Talonbooks

This book should be required reading for every would-be poet. That is because it covers so much ground, so many styles, and is just so endlessly brainy and erudite that before they are allowed to paint with words, all poets should see the entire canvas and tradition within which they will work. After all, anyone who wants to be leading edge, or experimental, cannot do so without knowing what the edge is, and where it is, despite what the poet might think.

All our wonder unavenged – Don Domanski, Brick Books – I have an extra copy that will go to the first person who sends me an email at: dcreid@islandnet.com

This book of poetry is sure, quiet, endlessly inventive in images and thoughts that flow from one phrase to the next in an apparent effortlessness that is, as Dickinson said it: the gift of screws. Hard, hard work by a mature poet who has come to a flowering point in his art. Nature poetry in the best sense of the words. This book deserved the GG.

write and rewrite then shut off the light   roll the great stone
back into place   all flat land after that   all the way to sleep

All poets can appreciate the ease of this writing, that moves gently but with assurance from one small, or large subject to another, as though they and all the other words have to be there, and you go, yes, this is so. We are glad to be reminded what we have taken for granted in the endlessly renewing world. And the simple lyricism that is what so much of Canadian poetry is, is not done so well as here in Domanski’s eighth book of poems. There is much to be learned by many poets in this writing.

A Few Words Will Do – Lionel Kearns, Talonbooks

This book, a selected works, has flow and a mercurial mind of endless felicities. Lovely.

Other notable books from 2007

Fluttertongue 4 – adagio for the pressured surround – Steven Ross Smith, NeWest Press

Like Colin Brown’s book, Steven Ross Smith’s book needs to be read by poets, so they can see one of the dimensions of Canadian poetry. From the bp nichol, Fred Wah sound poetry angle, Fluttertongue 4 is not an easy book. It requires a person to read until they are in synch with the style and then keep going. Throw out conventional structure – no little narrative stories here. This is a book-length poem that intends in its brought together fragments to be a different kind of telling. You have to bring your mind down to the microsopic to take in the perceptions as they come to you, as though you are turning in a circle, eyes coming to light here and then there. There is connecting movement, but it is told through the individual line or two fragment, and comes back to Smith’s wife, his father, his son, a trip to coastal Canada and the repetition of each gives the book passage from beginning to end. sun a low blaze, molten through trees. // i have read a few thousand words since rising, to free them. // was it wind calling? tires on gravelled road? the pressure? These are three back to back stanzas so this has that precision of small, but each is a leaping on or to other and this characterizes the whole book. This is a method for writing poetry that the poet should pick up and understand that it is legitimate, and try to write this way because in doing so is to take a great leap in what you can do. Smith’s book is a style, fleetingly enjambed-takes on what he poet sees, thinks and experiences. Doing things that are hard make a poet better. Even knowing that this kind of poetry exists gives the poet the context within which she or he writes. Do remember that the fragmentary need not be organized for there to be poetry, and even though this is subversive of the artifice of poetry.

Aesthetics Lesson - Christopher Doda, Mansfield Press

This book has a great series of glosas. For the as yet uninformed, the poet takes four lines from a poem, usually one that the poet admires greatly, and posits them above the poem about to be written. The glosa is a four stanza poem with ten lines per stanza. The first line from the quote is the tenth line of the first stanza and so on. There is also a rhyme scheme, if memory serves me correctly, the second line and fourth line together, and then the fifth, ninth and tenth together.

The glosa is an early Renaissance form, developed by the Spanish court poets. P.K. Page brought the form to the attention of current Canadian poets in 1994, in her now seminal, Hologram, from Brick Books and since then the poets of this country have turned out exceptional glosas. There is something about this form, as there is about the sestina, that brings out the absolute best that a poet can do – I think it is the using of the four lines from one’s idols that does it -and Christopher Doda’s glosas are… my search for superlatives comes up short.

And, Doda has added another twist that makes the poems even more difficult. He has written not one, but eight glosas, all are related. In addition to this difficulty, he has, starting with a favourite quote from John Donne, made each successive poem start with the last four lines of the previous glosa as its quote to be worked upon in the glosa form. This means that the fourth line from the Donne quote is the last line in all eight glosas. Added to this symmetry the eighth glosa in Doda’s series ends with the four lines that are the Donne quote that is posited on the first page. Doda’s bookis a good place to start when you are thinking of writing this form.

Found - Souvankham Thammavongsa – Pedlar Press

If you like books that marry content and design well, one real gem, that should take the silver medal for design in 2007 has to be Found. The cover lets you know what the design is all about: space and a few words, so that you focus entirely upon them. The front cover has one silver line on a navy blue background. This book is from her father’s scrapbook – and some of her own words, later – written in 1978 while her parents were living in a Laotian refugee camp. This is a book about understatement.

Souvankham’s father was not literate and his scrapbook could not be called a diary in the usual sense of the word. But Pedlar Press has done a fabulously understated design so assymetric, Asian, so simple that it makes you feel humble in its unadorned, bleak, thin, grey gruel of humanity stunted words of a man who had no words but was compelled to write down the little that he thought. And the photo of Souvankham at the end looks down and away, so that it would be hard to recognize her from the photo. Perhaps it is small because of her father; I don’t know. A few pages before the end, the single downstroke of the cover is understood to mean that on that day, or week or month, he stroke it off and there was nothing to be said. And it was also his record of captivity – when you look at a calendar of each day stroked out, it is a captivity, a striking off of what has been of little value, but is gone.

Read his daughter’s acknowledgements at the back of the book. They will tug at you if you are human, and that will make you want for there to be a place for bare pain reduced to sadness to be kept safe from all the damage of the world. There are many names in this list, and so you will know, that many people feel this way, too. This book is the memory of what is spare. The book will not take long to be read, but it will rest a long time in you once it has been read. This is a good thing. Thank you, Souvankham.

more to keep us warm – Jacob scheier – ECW

One my my chores last year as VP of the League of Canadian Poets, was to be chair of the membership committee. That meant reading about 60 books a year, along with submissions of poems for associate membership. more to keep us warm by jacob scheier was the best book I read. His style is straight ahead speaking of the story he is telling, not lyrical, mysterious or floating, not deliberately elegaic, but telling you what he is thinking: We decorate the past with gin martinis/that night, now, heavy as an olive pit/sinking in your coffee. In this there is the the surpise of the end of the first line and the end of the second. There is much in this poetry that is like this, many surprises which is the mark of an active mind of its own novel perspective on the world.

Most Canadian poets will know that Jacob’s mother was Libby Scheier, a feminist, academic poet who was felled before her time by cancer. And there are those poems in this book that deal with that time for him, and the distance that he has with his father. But they are clear, intelligent, idiosyncratic, in a good way, and moving where his agile mind will take him. There is cleverness, too, with a human side so that it is appealing. And anger: Fuck, I’m not comtemporary enough for publication. I’m too/narrative, too personal. Or, I should just tell CanLit to “go/fuck yourself with your regional aesthetics” But that’s not/subversive enough on a syntactic level. and so on, a short part of a long prosy poem about the state of, apres Howl, poetry. There is angst. Confessionalism that is not embarrassing. Honesty. There is much to be said about honesty, for it is its own crucible and there is much difficulty in bringing that forward for all to see, and a first book that is of uniformly high quality from beginning to end. And it has been short-listed for the 2008 GG, a great accomplishment for a debut book. And funny, too. November 18 brought in the news that Jacob’s book has won the GG for 2008.

And briefly, others that want to be read and should be, too:

The Bindery – Shane Rhodes, Newest Press,
The Bone Broker – Lillian Necakov, Mansfield Press
return to open water – Harold Rhenisch, Ronsdale
The Crooked Good - Louise Bernice Halfe, the best aboriginal book of many a year, and among the best in Canada from 2007
Torch River – Elizabeth PHilips, Brick Books, has the best section on childbirth I have ever read.
The Incorrection – George McWhirter, Oolichan, a book of many different interests, styles by one of the best-loved, by his students, academics in Canada
The Exile’s Papers – Wayne Clifford, Porcupine’s Press, you want sonnets done as easily as breathing, you got ‘em.
this is erth these ar peopul – bill bissett, Talonbooks, another idosyncratic book from Dr. Bill who singlehandedly invented performance poetry way back when
rivers… and other blackness… between us – d’bi’young.anitafrika, Women’s Press, urban, woman of colour, a book that really rocks. Again another stream in Canadian poetry. She’s going to be great.
Notes for a Rescue Narrative – J. Mark Smith, Oolichan
forage – Rita Wong, Nightwood, the first third of this book is highly inventive, using hand writing written around the poems and internet information beside it, poems of environmental outrage, that again, on their own form another stream in Canadian poetry. Read this, again, for what it can teach you about new dimensions in poetry. Wong’s book won the Dorothy Livesay award for the best book of poetry in BC, 2008
Red Bird – Ian Roy, Buschek Books
Father Tongue – Danielle Lagah, Oolichan (many good boods from Oolichan in 2007)

Made Beautiful by Use – Sean Horlor, Signature Editions, a great first book
LIfting the Stone – Susan McCaslin, Seraphim Editions, my choice for the best Christian book of the year
Human Resources – Rachel Zolf, Coach House Press a kinky, computer word generator book, and took the Trillium if I remember correctly

This post is for cool things not yet written.

It results because I am sometimes ahead of my computer division and I need an extra place to put stuff while the many thousands of them race to catch up. Okay, so there are not thousands of people in my IT division. Here is something better: a creativity exercise that will improve your poetry.

Creativity Exercise

You can help your brain to be more creative. You can do this by simple willing it to be more creative. By will is meant a positive favouring of thoughts of creativity. It does not mean free will and it does not mean will power. How this actually works is fascinating.

What happens when willing yourself to be more creative is the production of new brain cells. In songbirds, for instance, it has been found (1) that in the brain’s song centre there are 1% new cells every day and this is necessary for the bird to sing its complicated songs. And this means that in a little more than three months the entire brain centre is absolutely new.

Primates have been shown to grow new cells continually (2), too, and this includes humans. Both stress and a dull or constraining living environment reduce the production of new brain cells and you should intentionally change such situations in your life. On the other hand, stress is good for focusing the brain on what is happening to you, right now, the incandescence of an image, even though it is bad for memory and bad for creativity. So, you need both.

Here is a simple technique for getting your brain to produce new brain cells. Try to focus your thoughts on the left side of the brain by putting your fingers on your left temple and feel your will asking the speech production and language recognition centres (Broca and Wernicke’s areas) to become better. In addition, for poets, put your right hand’s fingers and thumb on your right temple and ask your brain to give you a highly creative period. The purpose is to open the gate of the right hand brain, much like a dam, to let it flood over both hemispheres and have a spontaneous out-flowing of poetry. Finally, put your first finger of the hand you are most dextrous with on the bone just above your right eyebrow, which is the centre of consciousness and where the concept of I resides. Once again ask your brain to be more creative and feel the power of your intention flowing down your finger into the brain. This does two things: it primes the conscious right prefrontal cortex where conscious creativity comes from; it also let’s the most creative thoughts come out of your brain because poetry, like music jamming and jazz (3), comes from making words that most closely arise from the I centre of your brain.

For both prose and poetry, put your first fingers on either side of your head just behind your ears. Try to aim a positive beam of will from each of your fingers so that its greatest power is inside the middle of your head. This is where the hippocampus is and this area of subconscious brain is where learning and, more importantly, memory are dealt with to the greatest degree. Prose writers in particular need huge memories whereas poets need to combine different areas of remembered thought. The drug fluoxetine, more commonly known as Prozac and Sarafem, are two such drugs that increase production of new brain cells.

1. Nottebohm
2. Gould
3. Charles Limb

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Take Pills, Get Smart

Many scientists (Gage, Gould, Duman, etc.) have made discoveries that suggest that antidepressant drugs have the most important long term effect of stimulating new brain cell growth, particularly in the hippocampus – the memory centre. And drugs are now being developed specifically for this purpose. This presents the very real probability of most people taking such drugs because who wouldn’t want to be happier (new brain cells make us happy!), more intelligent, have better memories and so on. This is a real life soma for Pfizer. But it also contains the scary notion that the Brave New World is upon us, for we can take pills to change our brains, even when the person does not have a pathological condition – they just want to be better and can be so. Scary. It means changing what we are as humans.

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I have just received Rocksalt which is an anthology of British Columbia poets – Mother Tongue Publishing. There are 108 poets and their poems and their poetics in this book. As the first such book in over 30 years, it is an important one. It will become even more important over time, as it will snapshot a year and hold it in amber. In addition, each writer has written a poetics which is very valuable because it lets other poets know what moves other poets.

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Random Poetry Esthetics

Line Breaks

I was looking to illuminate myself on Carmine Starnino’s New Canon, so that I could acquaint myself with its reasons for feeling that Canada could use a bit of new formalism – writing poems in forms like sonnets, sestinas, etc. I stumbled onto a review by _________ who criticized the movement and the book for a number of things. One of which was a poem by Diane Brebner written not long before she died.

And ______ said that the big wrong things with the poem were its line breaks and its cliches in the place of original images. He did a long critique and I got the feeling that while the expressions were everyday language, there was not much wrong with them, and that more importantly he had missed the important thing which was that Diane was dying of cancer. I found myself writhing in my seat, not just because I had met her just before her finding that out, but because she was writing in the face of imminent death and knew she was going to die in a matter of months. And that made me pay a lot of attention to what she was saying and be a lot more compassionate about common locutions. After all, rancour and criticism mean nothing once your meat putrefies.

And the fellow went through another critique of explaining why her line breaks were all wrong. And that got me thinking: are there such unshakable laws of line changes? Is there a book of rules the poetry police puts out? And I realized that, no, there were no such rules. Creative writing departments all over the country do teach people about line breaks, and there are texts that will go through alternate methods of lineating the same piece. And, though I have taken creative writing at a number of universities, and done decades of workshop stuff, it is some time ago, and one grows for the rest of one’s life past putting down the books. If one didn’t, it would be time to quit writing.

And when I broke from my past, I wanted to write in lines that had no end. As we put poems in books that are seldom past six inches wide – bookstores don’t like to stock them in their shelves – that arbitrary frame limits where lines can go. I wanted to write a number of thoughts and then I would make each thought, each line a stanza, and perhaps as much as three feet wide. What ever was required, one could do it. Just a different visual look, and one that went with saying a completed thought, and then saying the next and so on. That being my aim, it made the page in a book be seen as simply arbitrary and thus the line endings in this method would be arbitrary too, because, in the real poem every single line was accommodated sideways. This means that rules in an arbitrary setting are arbitrary, not within the particular setting, those were esthetic considerations, but arbitrary, limited.

At this point, I had left the world of line breaks I had learned, and no doubt, the young fellow so critical of CS would throw out my work, now – and no doubt, CS would, too. But would he, or they, throw it out ten years down the road? I’m not so convinced. He was pretty bright and the issue is how willing the artist is to break with tradition and stamp it his or her own way. All truths are provisional, and what seems sure after the teaching, unravels over time. But many different considerations go into the types of line changes that one is taught. Usually, lines end on big words, nouns, and begin on small words, prepositions, articles and so on. our English language has its own rhythm and flow – use Latin words in poetry and they jar, though that is not a reason not to use a different language, just make them comfortable with one another or emphasize the jostle. The rules also set natural phrasings apart, they can set up one meaning and then because the line gives way to the next, another and then a mixed meaning occurs and so on. And of course in strictly metred line, the metre itself determines line endings.

I decided that I wanted the big words on the left and the small on the right. I decided that I wanted to end a line on an offbeat, and make a single line be staggered down as it continues on. I also left off the ending words of lines, something that works particularly well with the last line of a poem. I added a first parenthesis in the middle of a line and never ended it (not a new technique as Atwood did it in the ’60s). I wanted a visual structure to a poem that made line endings simply to do with how a poem looks on a page, even if it has no other meaning.I will often take a poem and rearrange it several times until the visual structure works to my eye, a consideration that, again, is an intention outside what would be accepted as conventional line endings.

And I often end lines in prepositions, such as ‘of’. A conventional mind, using the common rules, would toss the poem out for making this mistake. But, and this is the point, if the poem and poet doesn’t intend to use a convention, then the reader, and one hopes for an illuminated reader, must take it on its own grounds.  It doesn’t make much sense to say something is bad if it is not intending to do what you think is good. On the other hand, it’s a good idea to adopt a certain line ending structure for, at least, one section of a book, or a whole book, so that it isn’t confusing because you change your own methods in every poem.

Here’s another thought. When I do readings, I change the meaning of poems by emphasizing different things every reading, changing the emotion in my voice, changing speed, grouping and other verbal differentiating things. This means that the line changes on the page may never coincide with the meaning in a performance, so, being to rigid in one’s rules, in this case, line endings, reduces the possibilities of your poetry which is about as many meanings around a particular, strong meaning as you can handle.

New Formalism – The New Canon (2005) -The Poetry Nazi:  No Soup For You!

Summary

The New Canon is an anthology of younger Canadian poets who write poetry in traditional Western forms, for example, the sonnet. Carmine Starnino is the editor and has championed the use of form. His essay in the book, in a nutshell, makes the argument that: the only good poetry is formal poetry and a Canadian poet has to write in these forms or his or her poetry is bad, because Starnino says this is so. Other forms of Canadian poetry are crummy mainstream image-based, little narratives with little, sound, poetry skills, avant gardisms that move into private indecipherable jokes, or degenerate forms of post modernism.

I think that there are some basic problems with this argument:

I will make some short preliminary comments and then some longer ones:

1. The argument says that Canadian poets need to write in forms. This leaves out poets from all the other countries in their countries and when they come to this one, and even Canadians who move elsewhere.

2. Poetry must be in forms. The problem with this is that it means English/European forms – perhaps a dozen. This neglects that there are more than 1000 different formal poetry ‘templates’ from around the world. See Robin Skelton’s, The Shape of Our Singing, or the Princeton Dictionary of Poetry Forms (not sure of the title).

3. Non-form poetry is bad because Starnino says so. This is the Poetry Nazi response. The problem is that poets refuse doing anything that they are told to. They just won’t do it. And they don’t have to. No one can tell you what to do.

4. The mainstream is crummy imagistic narratives. I agree that the mainstream has its faults, but that doesn’t mean you have to write in forms. (And, virtually all of the poems in The New Canon are strongly narrative driven, just like the Canadian mainstream).

5. You must use sound poetry skills. The problem with this one is that its definition is that sound skills are what you use to write form poetry. It’s circular, and, sound poetry skills depend on the stream of poetry, not on forms.

6. Avant garde poetry becomes indecipherable jokes. While some ‘experimental’ poetry does become ‘insidey’, much does not. The stream will not collapse.

7. Degenerative post-modern poetry typifies the rest. No, there are many streams of Canadian poetry, not simply post-modern. It is also the case that we live in an attention deficit, segue world, of the cell phone and blackberry, where all of human thought can be accessed instantly on the web. Much poetry reflects this.

Now I’ll make some more general comments.

1. The Streams in Canadian Poetry – see below (the next item) for a brief discussion of examples

2. The categorical nature of the argument is disappointing. I have no problem with someone saying: I like formal poetry and here are the reasons why. But moving on another step and saying that all other kinds of poetry are bad is not true. If this step had been left out, I would have felt more comfortable with accepting the argument.

What is below is just a first draft. Please excuse the tone. I will amend that later.

Here are some random thoughts, as I read through:

1. While the essay points out that there have been many anthologies over the years, it disregards them and draws a distinction with only one of them, Dennis Lee’s version from the ’80s. I have a dozen Canadian poetry anthologies on my shelf – several put out since The New Canon, and including Kate Braid and Sandy Shreve’s: In Fine Form, an anthology of formal poetry also published in 2005 – and it’s not fair in one’s argument to not take them into account. If one disallows 90 % of the poetry anthologies out there, as relevant to the argument, it allows for a drubbing of the Lee book and saying that one has shown the flaws of all anthologies. There is no truth in this form of argument. And, one doesn’t have to argue something away, just to posit one’s own thoughts. They can coexist.

2. And then Lee’s book is done away with. It is suggested that Lee’s anthology is ‘too-accommodating’ in spirit. What has happened here is that after eliminating the many threads and streams in Canadian poetry, as not needing to be considered, the argument goes on to say that a good feature is actually a bad one. And then moves on to drawing a distinction between the New Canon and the Lee book as all that matters in the argument, for all of Canadian poetry. I don’t think so.

3. There is also this curious sense that one gets that the argument being developed has a decidedly eastern flavour. By eastern is meant Ontario and Quebec. That tends to eliminate a whole lot of other poetry as well, and sound foreign in the same country in which the rest of us live.

4. Then the suggestion is made that to move forward, that when we write: ‘What conventions will we agree to respect and what will we allow ourselves to wincingly push past.’ The point is that the original expression has nothing to do with cats. It is: herding poets. And it doesn’t matter how clever your argument is, poets just don’t listen and go on moving as forward as their skills and point of view allow them. They write and after wards the description of what they do is figured out by other writers and academics.

There is only agreement in conventions by a group of poets who have similar leanings. Most poets will argue endlessly about those conventions. That is how art moves forward, in the sense that, over time, the art changes.

And, of course, there is the other comment: ask ten poets their definition of poetry and you will get several dozen different versions of the answer. So, someone whose interest is, say, creating a mental effect in the mind of the reader, may have more interest in looking inside their own head and the work of others for clues as to where to go in words to achieve what they do. And someone, who considers a page in a book as an arbitrary edifact, then wants to write a poem that may be only one line going off into side ways space and never end. They may write in traditional forms, but probably not. Trying to be the poetry police, and saying only one approach is valid, is not only wrong, but won’t be listened to by those who have other aims.

5. The reference to Stephen Heighton’s Quarry assessment that the nation has drifted toward poetry slovenliness (as in not in traditional forms) suggests that in six years several styles came and went. If this had said it took 20 years, I might be more inclined to believe it. But, does it seems likely that a style rose for a year, then died for a year, and did this three times in six years. I think not. I would have been more interested in hearing – and still am -words on the view that academia has strongly affected the poetry of this nation by pretty much teaching the writing of narrative, lyrical poetry that tells little stories that move from a to b. I’d say that 75% of what is found in Canadian journals is summed up by the preceding sentence.

6. “If Canadian poetry has been largely a list of prohibitions…”. This is an interesting thought that is not developed. I would like to hear more because I didn’t know there was a list of prohibitions.

7. “These poets are contributing to something bigger than themselves, an event that transcends the limits  and operational bias of this anthology to represent a larger creative blossoming… what we are seeing is a new Canadianism.” It seems to me there is a problem here, and that is that Canadian poetry has many streams – as above – and the recent formalist stream is one of them. It is not better or worse, it is just a stream, like the others. If the argument presented had not taken the extra step of saying the rest is bad, I would have no complaint. It’s fine to note an angle. It’s wrong to add that only it has merit.

7. In choosing poems: “I was after big rhetoric, eccentric detail, arresting phrases. I wanted actively jarring, mood puncturing poems, poems of aesthetic betrayal. Indeed, more than minting every phrase afresh, I wanted poems that egged themselves on, saying: “If it aint broke, break it.”" I am absolutely and completely with Starnino on this front, and would say the same words myself in looking for those that do the spindle cell dopamine cascade thing and just keep on coming like a cross between a horror show and heroin. I do, however, see such poetry in all traditions, not simply those who hearken back to forms from our western, largely European, tradition. But I am getting nagging with such criticism.

8. … and, after all these reservations, why is it I feel a sestina coming on?

9. And why do I know Carmine could argue black into white even though I don’t believe it? He has a great command of the English language and it is fireworks to watch the words in motion.

And The Poets in The New Canon

Oh, and, of course, there is the book of poems. How could I come so far with not even mentioning it? There is much to say. But, coming as I do to the poems, and seeing in them what I would call the fine flesh of a European philosophical argument, not of this centry, or even the last, no, perhaps even before, not as consciously as I would have thought of the forms that Starnino had led one to believe, but for the first 250 pages I am reading, a completely sound choosing of good, narrative poetry with a formal flair, only one or two with the sing songy effect of an aa, bb rhyme scheme and a few, relentlessly metrical feet, virtually all with a sure hand, and some of the more interesting remembrances of words, not before but of the accumulated language of the continent to our right (check out Anne Simpson’s, Seven Paintings of Breughel, for instance, for well-wrought, formal, verse, that has as a common feature with the other flesh, that sentences and the slowing punctuation marks of semicolons and periods, that makes for a non-lyrical progression that gives much of this book its similarity. Sentences that start one place and go to another, and for her that self fulfilling and satisfying sense of not so much the rhythm, but of the internal felicities of rhyme and half rhyme among the lines that cast your mind back to find where this has been set up. Well done. ; or Elise Partridge’s, Book of Steve, or Mark Abley’s, A Wooden Alphabet; the high class, ridiculously low humour of Noah Leznoff; the weirdly photographic, strobic, Sleep Walking, of Susan Gillis, periods ending each of 14 lines, not necessarily sentences;  the pure simplicity of seamless metaphor and double entendre of Jeffery Donaldson’s small Spending Part of the Winter; Bruce Taylor’s agile, quick wit and unerring sense of qualification, poetry lending itself to an entertaining reading; David Manicom’s sure hand and flowing text;  Steven Heighton’s gripping, sickening thing that is warfare, trenchwarfare with others who might be brothers before, but not after, The Machine Gunner; Gil Adamson’s dark and darker, almost unexplained, perhaps connected, similarly war inflicted poem wounds, Black Wing, for example; Eric Miller’s paean to the starling; Patrick Warner’s, any parent’s worst fear, The Bacon Company of Ireland, any human’s inability to watch a death, but not to then eat it; Tim Bowling’s tubercular west coast heron existing from before history was invented to after-man;  Andrew Stenmetz’, Late, an English comedy of manners, just a few days late, and the self-congratulatory, less than delusional, chit-chat that entails before taking the subject for real – in another poem; Michael Crummey’s middle autumn move out into the universe after building the Observatory on Mount Pleasant (1890), an everyday divine thing for someone not so;  Karen Solie’s, Sturgeon, and teenage brutality to an old old mind’s inability to understand and accept it; John MacKenzie’s run on hugely filled world in one small place, Riding The Route For Nature And Health, ’sledgehammers/slamming fractals’ on a bicycle ride to melting facial flesh; the aftermath of breakdown, where one once was young now viewed from the other side of age and mind of Todd Swift’s, Evening On Putney Avenue, and the women he tangentially loves there;  David O’Meara’s, mind of a child, The War Against Television, we were and are concerning our eventual demise, and not really ever getting anywhere in our one finite chance at existence;  the lovely word flow, riff and rhythm of poems you can’t resist wanting every variation even before comprehension of Tonja Gunvaldsen Klaassen’s, August sequence that someone had the perspicaciousness to choose for the CBC Literary Award;  the best meditation I have read on west-coast aboriginal past and present begun with another kind of tree and ending, The Vine Maple, from Christopher Patton; Stephanie Bolster’s small painting of the blending a family makes and doesn’t make, her storm front in a glass coffee cup, in, Chemistry; Life, McKenzie and reasons not to do away with yourself after getting sacked. Suck it up and get ready for more of Adam Sol; Ken Babstock’s Palindromic nice touch with half and near rhyme more satisfyingly, to me, on the off beat, going nowhere somewhere near Christmas past and… ; George Murray’s sure touch with the flow of narrative and incandescent imagination in, among the others, The Last Sinner Waits On A Rock For Noah, sound stuff; Suzanne Buffam’s fine sense of how to end on an unexpected, yet prepared for ending, Sweet Basil, for example, discussing the aging of herbs and ending with the growing of girls; the seizure world of Shane Nelson, Bedside Delerium: Family Visit, and a construction accident that takes him and father back to the first crush): finial, jackdaw, permian, stilly, elides, plash, plicking, angelica, valerian, trefoil, colophons, sconce, vouchsafe, sedge, inglenook, adamantine, termagants, flummery, scend, spavined, scrattle, scarps, florentine, bracts, gibbets, cadge, bosky, muzzy, elan, smutchy, fid, … unusual words, a small thing perhaps, but a good thing. And perhaps my unfairness is to have thought that formal poetry would be constrained by a dozen forms, when they are simply starting points for much of this work, though formal it is also.

You must buy this book. And dip into it. Like water, your entry will be everywhere and nowhere. Ignore the essay and you will be fine. Right as rain.

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The Streams in Canadian Poetry

As mentioned, and you can go to reviews under home (above left), in reading over 100 books of poetry to jury last year’s CAA contest, I was struck by how good our poetry is and how many poets write in completely different ways, comprising different streams, that don’t compartmentalize as neatly as Starnino suggests they do. They all deserve to be siphoned up into the mind so that the next time the poet writes, their bigger mind helps them write better poems.

The obvious contrary ’stream’ is that virtually the entire literary tradition of this country is not written poetry at all (written poetry is largely about the past 200 years in Ontario and Quebec, a small portion of the country, and time) but is a verbal language tradition, as in First Nations for the past 10,000 years.

The hard part, I found, after realizing that there was this and many other streams in our poetry, was how to compare the relative goodness of books from different traditions. For example, how do you compare, a verbal performance of aboriginal legend (or a woman of colour’s Caribbean verbal poetry with its beat and dance flow, and etc.) with say, any written poem. That is very hard: is it great poetry of a type and is it so good that it is better than something of a different type, as in: is this particular apple a better fruit than this particular orange, and then, is it better, say, than this pork pie, or this cognac? I found this a real struggle not to disregard books because I was coming to their kind of poetry, for perhaps, the first time. In the end, I found myself disregarding the streams, and my crunched down top ten represented half a dozen different streams that did not relate to one another. I used taste, or as I put it, the juice: what the poetry did to my head.

Here’s another interesting point: the other judge’s – we had no contact, did not even know one another’s names – first short list (we were to arrive at a top ten, and then the lists were compared) had six of the same books in it as my short list of ten.  In other words, the ‘goodness’ of a book is obvious to the reader – even those of different sensibilities (I tend to the associative and fragmentary. The other judge, once I found out the name, is from the narrative lyrical stream that is this country’s dominant stream).

Starnino will be happy to know that both lists were half formalist work. In other words it didn’t make any difference, neither away from the stream or to it, what stream the work was. And our short list of five – combined same choices (the sixth had to be turfed for a technical reason) – was 60% formalist. And our ultimate choice was Asa Boxer’s, The Mechanical Bird, a formalist book. In other words, stream doesn’t matter at all. The poet senses great work.

Very briefly, below, some of the streams, I encountered – and some books crossed boundaries – and one could argue that something, like, say, gay writing isn’t a category at all as any of the poems could be written in different ways. My suggestion is to just pick up the poems novel aspect and put it in your mind. Don’t disregard it. You will be a better poet, and that is what it is all about.

Steven Ross Smith – flutter tongue 4 – sound poetry, no narrative, no form but what the occasional phrase about father, or son suggests organization

Sylvia Legris – Nerve Squall – hyper squeezed, two-word lyricism, Latinate, scientific, word riff, choppy rhythm, must slow mind down and then text jumps out at you.

Anne Simpson – Quick – very good design that fits her high intellect

Brian Henderson – Nerve Language – about the life of a tortured human being – fabulous work, but difficult, fragmentary, oblong rhythms, footnotes

Rob Winger – Muybridge’s Horse – about the life of a particular human being, inventive poem structure, best book design in the decade, like Collected Works of Billy the Kid, see the first poem for the technique of organizing: being between two states, a list of such things

Colin Brown – The Shovel – huge intellect, writing in virtually all the forms out there, fragmentary

Susan Stenson – My mother agrees with the dead – best completely accessible, narrative, lyrical book I have ever read, no extra, not one word too few

Barbara Nickel – Domain – One of our best young women writers – glosa section – the formalist stream

George Murray – the rush to here – all sonnets, marriage of neo-conservative form poetry with spectacular poems

Asa Boxer – The Mechanical Bird – all sonnets, form poetry stream

Chritopher Doda – Aesthetics Lesson – spectacular glosa section based on John Donne

Bill bissett – ths is erth these are peopul – the guy who started performance poetry and writing phonetically, gay writing

Wayne Clifford – The Exile’s Papers – all sonnets written in 19^th century diction

Arlene Pare – Paper Trail – a book about her white collar job – half poetry/half prose, a between streams form.

Louise Bernice Halfe – The Crooked Good – female aboriginal writer and great.

Agnes Walsh – Going Around with Bachelors – accessible, performance poetry and a cd at the end, NL writing

Larry Small – Around the Red Land – NL writing about NL accessible, narrative, lyrical, about the sea

Rachel Zolf – Human Resources – sentence generator poems using internet sites for poems, again office work

Dennis Lee – yesno – tight, stripped, ee cummings, word play, epigrammatic, associations of one word and then move with it

Kathleen McCracken – Mooncalves – poetry and images inspired by one another

D’bi.young.anitafrika – rivers… and other blackness… between us – women of colour and with the influence of Caribbean rhythms and music

David Bateman – Impersonating Flowers – gay writing, not at all in the closet

Susan McCaslin – Lifting the Stone – poems about Christian religion

ThammaVongsa – Found – found ‘poetry’, a diary, and the neatest execution of design used to make the all the poems stand out and be moving in a small format.

There is also poetry that has no language at all in it – unlanguaged poetry – but I did not ‘read’ such a ‘book’. Dub, slam,…

Oh, and, see Carolyn Force’s The Blue Hour, for its 40 page abecedarian poem that has as its only organizing principle that lines are listed alphabetically, it’s all over the map, but the mind puts structure into it to make it comprehensible. You don’t need form to see form.

… music, mathematics and poetry seem to be more closely allied than any of them are to ordinary conversational speech, to prose fiction, or to prose in general. Poetry involves pattern recognition – and so do those other forms of word assembly – but the nature of the patterns appears to be different – closer to those of music and math.

Comment: Check out Charles Limb’s MRI work in the bibliography on this site on the nature of where jazz comes from in a musician – from the I centre. I have asked him whether he will will be doing the same MRI work on poets and he said yes, but in a few years. (I will keep an eye on his research to update you, the reader). In other words, poetry comes from the I centre, and, I think that is why poets, artists identify so much with their art that they refuse to give it up in a world that wants them to get a job and raise a family.

Further, from Atwood:

[Our past] oral cultures swam in a sea of language – rich, aromatic, multiplicitous, exfoliating language. We on the other hand – as a culture at large – live on a comparatively dry shore. This is possibly why poets often feel – to themselves – obsolete, archaic, somehow not modern. They’re told that what they do is a remnant of something human beings no longer need – that we live by technologies and numbers now, and that these technologies and numbers represent the real world, as opposed to the dream world that poets live in, along with lunatics and lovers – of imagination all compact, each one of them – the implication being that the creatures of the imagination are not real.

Comment: The religious cult of science in its current paradigmatic form.

More Atwood:

“The arts”… are the heart of the matter, because they are about our hearts, and our technological inventiveness is generated by our emotions, not by our minds… it’s… the human imagination, in all its diversity, that directs what we do with our tools. Poetry is an uttering, or outering, of the human imagination. It lets the shadowy forms of thought and feeling out into the light, where we can take a good look at them and perhaps come to a better understanding of who we are and what we want, and what the limits to those wants may be. Understanding the imagination is not a pastime or even a duty, but a necessity; because increasingly, if we can imagine it, we’ll be able to do it.

Comment: Pay attention to the art and pay attention to the science.

Quote of the Month – July, 2008

Introduction to the Boreal Poetry Garden - Marlene Creates, Newfoundland, Canada – 2008; See: marlenecreates.ca

I want to take you on a walk through the woods to the spots where the poems belong. They’re site-specific poems and, as a rule, I only read them in the particular spot where they arose – I won’t read them in a show-white gallery of a lecture hall. Only here. I hope the spoken words you will hear will enhance your experience and perception of this natural environment.

To some extent, I’m trying to work outside the institutions of the art world. I’m trying to integrate my life and my artwork in these 6 acres of boreal forest, which has resulted in the slightness of my artistic gesture. In responding to the landscape that surrounds me, my work is becoming more and more dematerialized.

All that is needed for the work I’m going to present is our perceiving, sensing bodies and the immediate experiential surroundings – the textures, colours, shadows, shapes and sound of this landscape. Mostly, my body has a silent engagement with these things. But more and more I have come to realize that I do not experience this place without local names sounding in my head. The expressive gesture of speech has texture and rhythm like the material landscape, and is often informed by and tuned to the sounds of the terrain and the beings in it. I find that many Newfoundland vernacular words fulfill a beautiful sonic relationship with this landscape.

Often words are the only means to convey things that my camera cannot capture, like sounds and other fleeting phenomena. My responses to these moments are quite various so I need to warn you that some of the poems are longer but some of them – those which are kind of like haiku – may be over before yo ustart to listen. I’ll tell you when it’s a short one and I’ll leave a space before I read it and a space after it’s over.

The present moment is often thought of as a tiny point between the enormous past and future. I’d like you to gaze around and try to bring all the present into your awareness – so that the present moment swells into a vast expanse while the past and future shrink down. Let the present balloon into something very large that takes in all of us and the circumstances of this place at this time. Take in the material landscape that surrounds us, including the sky above, and try to take it in through all your senses. Let the past and the future dissolve so only the immense present remains. Try to take it in through all your senses. Let the past and the future dissolve so only the immense present remains. See:www.marlenecreates.ca.

Comment: Two things: first, this kind of exploration has nothing to do with the scientific reductionists eight universal laws of art and beauty as suggested by Ramachandran. Marlene’s work may have beauty in it, but she is not searching for that – and it is an intense search, not to mention that as the forest is always changing, so the poems always change, something not addressed in the current scientific view of art: that art, this art, changes every day and over time, infinitely, and, is also cyclical.

As we were walking through the forest, listening to Marlene, Canadian poet, Don McKay and I were musing on the laws, I saying that the R-view says artists use his laws to make their art to make people like it and buy it, and saying that not only is this not in a gallery, that you have to come here, to NF, Canada, and to the land and also to have Marlene read you the poems, to get the art presented to you. And, as we walked on through the forest, Don pointed out, among many other things, that a frame for a painting in a gallery is simply an artifact of necessity because it’s only useful in a gallery. Of course this is true, but the reductionists don’t notice because their understanding of the nature of art is I am sorry to say, without depth. Why is it that intelligent people who grow deeply into their own specialty, think they know deeply another area that they have spent zero time trying to understand?

Second, note Marlene’s deep search into the nature of time and the suggestion that the past and the future need to be shrunk and then the present swells ‘into a vast expanse’. Not so strangely, I am reminded of Einstein, the Doppler effect, and that active perception deposits consciousness, seemingly as a continuous stream, rather than the other way around.

Chronic Fatigue Syndrome – How to Get Help

I have had chronic fatigue syndrome for more than 15 years, and have had all the symptoms that one can have. Here is my list of things to do if you have it. Please keep the faith that one day you will be well.

Please look at item 11 for research studies that you may want to enter into.

1. Finding a Doctor

Fifteen years after getting CFS I can tell you that doctors are still as clueless about the disease as they were in 1995. When I first started asking my GP about my symptoms, he sent me to three specialists. All of them sent a note back saying to send me to a psychiatrist. In other words, these four doctors knew nothing about CFS, only that I was a head case and needed talk therapy and anti-depressants. And this took more than a year of my life, in which time I was so sick I could be in bed for a week at a time. That’s seven days so sick all you can do is get up to use the bathroom.

I am sad to say that all these years later, when I run into someone who has chronic fatigue or is floundering around trying to get a handle on how bad they feel, doctors still, at the end of the first decade of the third millennium have no more knowledge than when I was at my worst. Hence you have to go out and find the right person yourself. I am not a person who believes in non-traditional medicine – the explanations, is what I mean. I believe in cures that actually work – but I can tell you that a naturopath or homeopath type ‘doctor’ often can do you some good with natural remedies.

Here’s why: I finally found a doctor who specialized in chronic fatigue. You have no idea the relief you will feel when you find someone who actually believes you have a disease. This is very important, because the medical profession, as mentioned, is pretty useless, even a psychiatrist who will try to talk you down – though his antidepressants might well be a very good idea.

Doctor Hoffer I found by chance in Victoria where I live. His thing, as he was a friend of Linus Pauling, was vitamins – but his believing in me gave me something to hold on to in an awful time. His belief in vitamins is something he shares with naturopaths and herbalists and so on, hence, why they may do you some good. My sister who also has CFS and been sicker than I, found a naturopath in 2009 at a Vancouver clinic: Dr. Agape National Health Centre. Her condition has improved dramatically, particularly her physical abilities, such as climbing stairs.

His regimen included many things, every day, and more than $100 per month: Vitamin C; Oil of Evening Primrose, Vitamin D, Vitamin B12, Niacin (vitamin B5?), vitamin A, a B compound Pill, folic acid, calcium and magnesium. I had to take protein supplements, too, because of my allergies to meat. In my opinion, after taking all of these, and more, for five years that the most important ones that stood out for me were Niacin and B12. That does not mean the others are not important, they are, Vitamin C being an obvious one. Linus Pauling would have gotten the Nobel Prize for the third time if he had not been considered nutty in the ’70s – its antioxidant properties.

But the two stood out for me. Niacin gives you the wildest rush for the first fifteen minutes. If you didn’t know that it did that, you would go to emergency, it is that much of a flush and creeping of insects down your neck, arms and chest. But the purpose of the niacin is that it prepares you to deal with all the allergies that you have.

Vitamin B12 I had to take by injection every three days which is pretty icky, but that’s what I had to do. I had stopped eating red meat (beef, pork, lamb) and one runs out of B 12 from these sources in 3 to 5 years (you vegetarians need B 12, too). The purpose of B12 is to reduce mental confusion and inability to think. This was vital to me because the simplest decision becomes impossible to make, let alone trying to earn a living.

How bad do you get? If you suffer CFS you will know, but here is an example from my life: when I tried to get writing contracts, I would have to go to an interview. I found the stress of having to deal with this situation was so bad, that if it was on Thursday afternoon, say, I was wiped out and in bed from Monday all the way through to Thursday at noon when I had to drag myself from bed. Then after the half hour, I had to spend the next four days in bed. That’s how bad.

At my worst, I remember driving five minutes to the marina where I had a boat. I got on the boat, smelled the gasoline and had to leave. I spent the rest of the week sick in bed with my allergy to gasoline. Absolutely, completely wiped out. I didn’t think that I could drive home. When the light changed from red to green, I didn’t know what that meant. That’s how bad you can be. That’s why finding a doctor is the first step. But if you can’t find a doctor, the list below will help you deal with the disease.

2. Sleep

Sleeping is next to impossible when you have chronic fatigue syndrome. That is why it is called chronic ‘fatigue’. And you must get this one under control or you may get so bad you die. A human being cannot be awake for 13 days without dying. This disease can last two decades. You must deal with the issue of being able to sleep.

Here’s what you do: you must provide yourself a full night of rest. Many sufferers try to ‘nap’ in the day. I put the word nap in soft quotes because I have never, in more than 15 years of having CFS been able to sleep when I lay down in the day. I did and do lie there vibrating. I would never get to sleep. The only good the ‘nap’ does is to use less energy than required if sitting in a chair.

And there is a negative outcome to napping in the day: you cannot sleep at night. But I can tell you that the most important thing you can possibly do for yourself, though you must do many other things, too, is to provide that sleep. If you have to take pills, take them. Do not rest in the day if you cannot sleep at night. I take Zopiclone and its derivatives. I have also been prescribed Novo-temazepam, but found that it left me woozy for half of the next day. There are a long list of ‘pam’ drugs, for example, lorazepam, and the related, Alprazolam, commonly known as Atavan, for anxiety which you will have big time if you are trying to earn your living while having CFS.

Now, all drugs have their side effects. I take Zopiclone, and have done so for 15 years. It is a progressive hypnotic, meaning that it is addictive and that it is technically not a sleeping pill. I dealt with the addictive part by not allowing myself to take more than 1.5 of the 7.5 blue pills.

I take one whole Zopiclone at bedtime, leaving a half of one to take in the middle of the night. I also take probably the oldest antidepressant, Amitriptyline. It has two effects for me: it is a sedative (from the era of valium), so it puts me to sleep; and, it is an antidepressant in amounts from 75- to 250-mg. I take three 25 mg yellow tabs along with the zopiclone before bed and take one 25 mg pill with the other half of zopiclone in the middle of the night. This arrangement allows me to sleep about 9 hours. Please note that the effect of taking the pills in the middle of the night might just be psychological, but who cares. It is the issue of being stressed out just considering that you may not be able to sleep that wipes you out. Do what it takes to take this problem off your mind.

You need to figure out a routine of pills to achieve a full night of sleep. Do not turn down antidepressants, but tell the doctor you want one that will help put you to sleep. Not sleeping is, among other things, depressing.

I only vary my pills in the event that I have to be up early and therefore simply must get to sleep at a specified time. I add a half to one zopliclone, but I only do in for one night – remember its addictive properties. And when the depressive thoughts flood my mind, I add a fifth, and some times, sixth amitriptyline. Do note that I add the extra antidepressants for as many nights as it takes to feel better.  Some antidepressants, for example, paxyl, take as much as a month to start working. So taking one one night and not the next will not solve being depressed. I keep taking the extra until my mood has risen and stabilized. I have to add that I have been assessing my mood for a long time and am much more healthy than I was. When you are really sick with CFS, you may be unable to assess your mood.

You simply must get your sleep pattern under control or all the rest of what you should do will not help you.

3. Allergies

The most important issue to get under control, and as important as getting sleep, is the allergies, intolerances and sensitivities that you will have to everything around you.

I had had mild hives and itchiness  with ice cream and strawberries for a few years before I found that I was sick. In that same time, my marriage was falling apart, and the stress from that was so high it was two years until after my divorce that I realized how sick I was.

My first killer of an allergy was to roast beef. I was going to the rights of passage place for Canadian writers: The Banff Centre, and had a huge fill of beef before leaving. When I arrived in Banff I was so sick, I had to stay in bed for a week, instead of work and etc. I could not eat the food there and was taking three extra-strength Tylenol every three hours with little relief from migraines. I had foolishly, prior to this, slowly worked up to taking a dozen extra strength Tylenol everyday for ten years – something that 20 years later, has given me liver and kidney problems, but at the time, it was before all the contraindications we get today.

When I got home, I went to an allergy doctor which was a waste of time because they do that prick thing for 100 things to which you are not allergic to. For example, pine turps and so on. The only things that were positive were dust mites, dust and cat dander. But I was allergic to the entire world and you will be too. All the tens of thousands of chemicals that have been invented in the 20th century are in our environment making us sick. (The most significant to the human race is: bis-phenol A. It is from the type 7 recyclable plastic and mimics estrogen, making males into non-, hermaphro- female, and non-reproductive males, calling into question the survival of entire species. Frogs first, humans next. And you thought Global Warming was bad).

The hard part was figuring out what made me sick. The problem is this: how do you figure out each particular allergy when you are allergic to more than 90% of the foods out there. It took me more than two years of trial and error. And many of the items I would not have expected. One of the hard ones was carrots. How could one be sick of a basic vegetable? That is how hard it is, even if the food is clean. By this I mean sulphite and nitrites and nitrates. The former is put on lettuce and etc. the latter in every smoked meat, like hot dogs, and barbecue sauce, even soy burgers.

Here’s a short list of the foods I could not eat: tomatoes, nuts (and that included even touching a nut, any kind, from peanuts to cashews, and any product that had a nut oil in it), milk, eggs, white rice for Pete’s sake, all dairy products including yogurt, cream, ice-cream, butter, all cheeses, and my favourite: pizza, because of the cheese (and lactose intolerance and irritable bowel syndrome), salmon and every other kind of fish, lobster, crab, shrimp and every other crustacean, pork, beef, lamb and every other red meat (for example, elk, deer, ostrich, etc.), all oils whether made from palm kernels, canola, soy or anything else, mayonaise, all preservatives, like the kind they put in every canned and bottled product including all cereals, chocolate (can life be so unkind), Coca Cola, my favourite sin, and every other cola soda pop, root beer and all other soda pops featuring anything other than carbonated water, Hawkin’s Cheezies (could hardly go on without these) and every other kind of chip whether ripple chips or tostidoes, pita bread, pastries, date and nut loaf, banana bread, bread, no gluten problem for me though, but every kind of baked bready food, avocados, garlic, white onions and every other kind of onion, ketchup, relish, mustard, horseradish sauce and every other kind of condiment in a container because of the ingredients and preservatives, soy milk, soy this, soy that, everything soy, every thing that came from a bottle, or a can, or plastic container, bananas took me five years to figure out and then every other kind of fruit (save apples) including pineapple, lemons, limes, oranges, pomegranites, beans, rasishes, peas, chick peas and all other vegetables other than raw corn, all kinds of dried fruits, particularly those that come from places like Chile where they still use DDT, and places like Turkey where they use sulphur or sulphites on things like apricots, raisins because they have wax to make them shiny and so little sulphur you can hardly smell, but I can tell you that your sense of smell goes way up. I can smell sulphur on vegetables just going into the vegetable part of the store. If I make a mistake, by the time I smell it on my fingers, I am already dead.

But this is a short list. There are hundreds of other foods that had to be cut out. And this is the big problem that you face, with no doctor to help you, unless you find a copacetic naturopath/homeopath and many years of being sick to figure out what you leave out. But slowly after many years you will start getting to the point where you are not wiped out by foods, because you have very little choice left. And the niacin will help in this regard.

What is left to eat? Virtually nothing.  It will take you years to figure out your problems. I existed for ten years on: one specific kind of raisin scones, apples (skin off because of the carnuba wax they put on them to make them shiny), boneless skinless chicken breast with no sauces or flavourings whatsoever, apple juice, only tea until noon, potatoes in the skin, and raw corn. A whole decade.

And that is only the beginning. I am allergic to virtually every kind of chemical in our environment. You will be, too, and you need to figure them out. Once you do, you will look at your household cleaner cupboard as simply full of poison. I threw all of it out, and cleaned things, when I was able to, with hot water on rags. That’s it. Vacuuming made me so sick, because it lifted the dust into the air, I had to put up without vacuuming for many many years. My house was killing me. But I had no alternative to living with a slow case of sickness because cleaning made me so so sick. Try to eliminate carpets and underlay. Get down to wood or linoleum and have someone else clean it, if you can  find anyone. You will not on your own be able to afford a domestic goddess.

The chemicals in your cleaning cupboard include pinesol, toilet cleaners like Vim, those blue duck things, Drano, most particularly air fresheners like Febreeze – you will come to think of these things as poison directly from an oil well that you spray into your only air to make you so sick you can’t get out of bed for days. This includes all paints, whether latex or oil based, and does not matter whether it is acryamide, enamel or whatever.

As for the chemicals in the environment, meaning the ones you know you come in contact with – you can’t take action against chemicals that you can’t smell, like PCBs or Bisphenol A and so on. But in the aerosol department, gasoline is a killer for me, get a few drops on my hand when filling the car and I am sick in bed in less than an hour. Even the smell of gas, any kind of grease or oil-based product that is in the air. Every time I fix something like my car, or boat, lawnmower, and the exhaust from all of these, once I get grease on my hands I am wiped out for the rest of the day. Wear disposable gloves. If you are allergic to latex, or to baby powder, try the blue nitrile ones. When I paint, I use an industrial gas mask with the replaceable chemical filtres so that no scent comes my way. And, even then, if I get paint on my my hands or clothes, then I get sick, too. This includes paint thinner, any chemical like dormant oil spray for plants, citronella for insects, smell of propane, glues, Goop, diesel, WD-40, Loctite, all dry-cleaning products including, Scotch Guard, per-cloroethane, Brillo Pads. More than 75,000 chemicals have been developed in the past 50 years, and only now are we staring to realize that they are killing us. Asthma being a leading generalized disease group results largely from chemicals we breathe, particularly living close to a major road syste.

And the long long list of personal products that people use. Shampoo, conditioner, those absolute killers, static cling sheets for the dryer, even the ones the neighbours use because their vents come into the air you breathe outside, deodorant, skin creme, hand cream, dermatologic products, perfume, cologne, candles, candles wax, bees wax, the scents from candles, burning candles, women’s makeup, particularly the base or foundation put on the skin before putting on makeup – a real killer for me. I have to walk away from such smells within the first few lungfuls of them or I can be wiped out for several days. Lipstick, mascara, the clothes people use to clean their glasses, anti-fungal creams or aerosols, soap, dishwashing soap, clothes washing soap, walking in the soap and chemical aisles of food stores. Simply the smell can leave you in bed sick as a dog. House mold and mildew, static air from not exchanging air in the winter, not changing furnace filtres often enough, needing HEPA filtres. The first one I bought actually made me sick because the charcoal in it, in early use was putting the smell of charcoal in the air. Everything in the air can make you sick. Alcohol, yeast, beer (a true tragedy!), buildings with mold in them, like archives and museums. It’s a mine field out there for allergy sufferers. So no going out to restaurants, bars, nightclubs, churches, recreation centres, city halls, shopping malls, stores, any building where people gather will be filled with dozens of chemicals that will make you sick.

The only thing good about all this is that your nasal abilities will increase to an astronomic level. I can smell scented products in the air from 30 feet away. I can to into a room of several hundred people and walk right up to the one person with perfume on and point them out – this is assuming no other personal product or its residue on clothes, has been worn by any of the hundreds of other people in the room. At my worst, I had to hold my breath and dash out into the air so that I wouldn’t get as sick, but, even one lungful of a scented product put me in bed for days. Develop your nose. It will save you many times. You will come to realize that we are saturated in chemicals that are killing us, only the effects in others is not as strong – yet.

You will get to the point where your would like to explain how sick you get by putting your hand on the head of someone with a scented product on who just doesn’t get the point and saying: “I take from you your health, and give to you my sickness.”

4. Floundering

You may feel very badly about yourself because you just can’t seem able to get it together to get it together. Don’t feel bad about not achieving things, even though this world is about achieving things, if you are an adult. CFS wipes out your ability to do anything. Try not to beat yourself up about your inability to keep to even the most rudimentary plan.

I floundered for more than 10 years with my family and others telling me constantly what to do, and how could I live if I didn’t have a job, and why couldn’t I eat white rice or whatever, which is simply negative stuff aimed your way. You will not be able to do anything about it. You will simply flounder without hope year on year and life will seem to grow away from you, even though you are so sick you just cannot do things: keep a job, take kids to lessons, plan meal schedules, do washing.

I have been improving slowly, but now have realized I will have chronic fatigue for he rest of my life. I have to tell myself constantly that I cannot achieve things because I am sick. It is something that I struggle with even now, when I have been telling myself for the better part of two decades not to feel bad about not achieving anything, that I am sick. You just have to keep at it.

It’s true, too, that even now, I could not go to a regular job, which I have not done for more than 22 years. The stress of not being able to control my situation would leave me totally wiped out by coffee break at 10 in the morning. Keep telling yourself you are okay when the negative thoughts enter your head. Most of the time you will be too sick to even have negative thoughts.

Not long ago, I was asked to talk with someone else who had CFS and was much earlier in her sickness than I. When I asked her how she was feeling, she was unable to tell me. She was so incapacitated with feeling small that she could not put into words how she felt. So I started telling her about me, for example, what I had had to do about sleeping. Only then did she tell me that she napped in the afternoon but couldn’t sleep all night long. I told her what I said above.

I should add that she was unable to do her job, but had a husband who was working. Needless to say, her sickness was affecting her releationship. But she didn’t have the confidence to tell me this. I had to lead the conversation saying that I could not have someone in the same room as me if I was ever to go to sleep. And that prompted her to say that she a some problem.

The conversation ground on for three hours, her unable to even talk about having CFS, and I trying to lead her by telling her my story. She couldn’t even have a conversation. That’s how bad she was.  I had to tell her parents when they said they were at wits end, about how they had to intervene with doctors for her, harp on her to do certain basic things, to follow through on seeking a herbal this or a vitamin that. She just couldn’t do anything. She was floundering and had floundered for almost a decade and still couldn’t even verbalize her problem.

Her parents said what if I’m in my sixties still doing things for my child. Will she never grow up? Who will do things for her after I am gone? And so on. I said that your child is floundering, she isn’t doing it on purpose and you have to continue to support her for as long as it takes and just accept that. She will come out of floundering when she is able to do so. There is no time limit, no score card.

One of the small things that can help, with the depression that occurs with sickness is a seasonal affective disorder lamp, as in, a SAD lamp. These put out high luminosity of light – not full spectrum – and sitting with the light on your face for half an hour a day, makes a person feel better. Try it out. I now leave mine on all day while I work at my computer in the winter – Canada seems all winter sometimes – from late September into late May. Get out in the sun and take Vitamin D.

Just accept that you are floundering, it’s okay to be sick, even though you may be so sick you cannot even comprehend what I am writing here. And for relatives, you must commit to staying the course, and find non-pressuring ways to help your sick relative. Remember that if you do it with any kind of negative tone, that the person will just pick this up and slide away from you, back into sickness.

5. Eating Regimen

With all the allergies and sensitivities that you have, you will have a very restricted list of foods and drinks that you can eat. Going out to a restaurant will be a major challenge, if you even attempt it. The problem is that those without allergies don’t think about the little things, like toast that is put on a grilling surface rather than being put in a toaster. They do not get that the residue of cooked meat, for example, can make you sick. Fortunately these days, there has been a big improvement in the public’s and restaurant understanding that some people do suffer allergies and will leave off things that you ask them to.

First, make a list of those things you can eat, and eat enough of them to give you enough protein, calories, vitamins and minerals. Do note that you need to be specific in what you cannot eat, for example, I could not tolerate apple skins, but could eat skinless apples all day long. Be specific. Go to a dietitian with your list of foods. I found, for instance, that I was eating about a quarter of the protein I needed in my diet. So, I added a protein supplement. These are very expensive and it seems hard to justify their purchase when you are ill and in financial stress. But do what you need to do to get a proper diet – or you will not ever get well. I found that I could tolerate whey protein – though I am lactose intolerant and get irritable bowel syndrome from milk products. You may need gluten free/soy free foods/proteins.

And follow your eating plan. I am now hypoglycemic, something I did not have prior to CFS (meaning I had to first find out that I was hypoglycemic, something that took several years to figure out). I went through peaks and crashes all day long. Finally I realized that I had to eat about every twenty minutes to maintain my sugar level. That means constantly eating something. You may well have to do this too, or have some other regimen type requirement. Make sure you find out as if you don’t eat properly, it will make you far sicker than you already are. And do note that protein in your diet helps to maintain the sugar level in your blood for as much as three hours. Eat it and you have one way of counteracting the peaks and crashes. You will need to carry food and drink with you at all times because if you crash, you will be wiped out for a whole day. So you need to catch the crash at the first symptom, often, a reduced level of thinking and decision making. I never go anywhere without water and without some types of candies high in sugar. Werther’s Original candies have saved my bacon hundreds of times, as do Tic Tacs. One Tic Tak gives me about 30 minutes of leeway. But if you are out without something, get to a store and buy something quick.

If you travel, say by plane, take enough food for several days. If you tell the people at airport carry-on security you are diabetic – much easier to explain than hypoglycemia -  they will understand and let you take on what can otherwise seem like an excessive amount of food items. You can get stuck just about anywhere and you do not want your thinking abilities compromised in a foreign country, particularly one where you may have difficulty finding the quality foods you must have to stay healthy.

My experience is that ringing in the ears – an experience that is so killing I cannot even describe it – is made far worse by lack of food, lack of rest and too much stress, among other things. I have asked other CFS sufferers and many of them say the same thing. Don’t let anyone tell you that tinnitus (the technical name for ringing in the ears) is not serious. It is the worst symptom of CFS. It takes you right off your feet for weeks at a time, and you need to eat properly so that it contributes to reducing the ringing.

6. Getting Control of Your Schedule

When you have CFS you lose the ability to work because it wipes you out. For those of you who still retain some of this ability, I am happy for you. In any case, getting control of your schedule will help you be less stressed and less wiped out. If you have control of what will happen in your day and life, you don’t have to worry about what will happen because you will already know. This seems self evident, but let me give you an example: for years, and I didn’t know this was happening, I was completely wiped out in the evening, any time after about 4 in the afternoon.

After years of this languishing so stressed that all my muscles contracted for hours at a time, it finally came into my conscious thought that one of the big worries of mine was that I never knew when the telephone would ring. As I had no ability to stand the stress of this possibility I was wiped out by the possibility, even though it seldom happened that the phone would actually ring. I decided not to take telephone calls after 6 pm, to turn the ringer off and machine noise off and leave the phone base in a different room from where I was. This small change in taking control of my schedule took a great deal of stress off me, so that evening was not a time of silent, lonely dread.

Over the years, I moved the close off time to 5 and then 4 pm. Some time later I decided never to take a call when it came in. My family and others, work things, for instance, were not very happy, but I told them it was my health and schedule that was important. I now seldom phone anyone back in less than two days. People who know me send me emails, as I have less stress with those and they are a kind of cool thing afterall. So take control of your schedule.

If you are putting exercise in your day, and you should, as below, try and put it in at a specific time and make a rigid unbending rule about everyone and thing in your life. The purpose again is to reduce your stress, and with CFS the possibility of stress is almost as important to eliminate as it is to ensure you sleep properly. I do it first thing in the morning, have a shower and clean up so the day does not begin with the detritus of yesterday hanging all over you and your night clothes. It is very easy to slip into complete slothfulness as it is too hard to climb out of it. And nights become days and days become night and the inside of your head drifts down and away.

Part of getting control of your schedule is finding a way, if you can, to fit some income working time into your life. I will deal with the income part next, but here, the point is to figure out what you can do. For me it was to become a freelancer of non-fiction. As a literary writer, non-fiction comes as easily as breathing to me. For you, your strength might be gardening – so put a flower stand in front of your house, and make money that way, or eggs (many cities allow people to keep chickens), or stuffing envelopes, or knitting for charity, or developing a product of some kind and starting a blog to sell it. I know someone who was able to begin drawing (but not use paint because of allergies). She was able to over time develop into making drawings from photographs of babies, houses or whatever else she could do. And then, if you do so, sell it at market rates. Your confidence will be low and you will never price what you do at its correct value. But I say: if the market price is, say, $50 per hour, then use that as your price. Where you make allowances is not with your confidence up front, but later, after the doing, for example, if an accomplished artist would do the drawing in 10 hours, you charge $500. It doesn’t matter that it will take you, let’s say, 25 hours. First you price yourself in the market, and slowly, over time, your speed will increase.

By having control over your ‘work’ schedule that eliminates stress and gets somethings done. For me, at my worst, I might have gotten 15 minutes a day before I was wiped out. I made myself accept that inability and told myself it didn’t make me a bad person. For about five years I was only able to work one hour a day. So I sat at my computer and wrote as fast as I possibly could for my hour, and then went back to bed for the next 23 hours. Awful, but it was a plan, and slowly I worked toward being able to pay some of my bills. Don’t beat yourself up for your inabilities, just work with what you can do. Keep the faith that one day you will do better.

7. Making an income

Making an income while you have chronic fatigue is an oxymoron.You just can’t do it. The problem with this is that we all have to pay our bills and that is a huge problem. Chronic fatigue is so hard on a person that losing your job means you have to have some other support or you will slowly become so financially low that you become homeless. Then you will die because it is not possible to have chronic fatigue while you live on the street and sleep on cardboard. That is simply the truth. A sad one, but the truth. A truth for a person without any other support, as in some family who will help you out.

I have made some suggestions above for when you are well enough to do something. Unfortunately, there are many years before that time will arrive and you will flounder looking pretty useless to anyone outside of yourself. As mentioned, don’t think badly about yourself. You are sick and that’s that. The most important thing to have in order to pay bills is family, particularly a spouse or parents where you can live while going through the worst of the disease. This means that if you can help maintain it, the most important thing you can do is try to maintain a good relationship with your partner or family during the trying years. A partner may want to move on and leave you because they didn’t sign up for supporting someone for a period of time that seems endless. And you may lose that partner, another strong pain to bear. The bright side of this is that you will be so sick that you cannot feel much about losing the relationship.

I lost my marriage (thankfully in my case), my health (previously something I thought in inexhaustible supply), had no money, had no job, couldn’t work and lost my children – the worst thing that could ever happen to anyone, and it goes on at 15 years for me (no contact at birthdays, no contact at Christmas, etc. – this is just life). Very painful. Perhaps it will change.

Regardless, you will have to pay your bills. The best thing for you to do is: do something that you are good at. This is usually your favourite hobby, and so it is something that is nourishing and positive for you to do in your diminished capacity. It’s positive, even if you don’t earn much. Then you find someway to make $$ out of it. Remember the person who loved watching soap operas. She parlayed that interest – didn’t have CFS – into Soap Opera Digest a multi million dollar outcome. You will not be able to handle the stress of such an outcome, but it is unlikely that you will ever get to such a stage.

The reason for doing something you are good at is that you don’t have to any studying, or course work or anything else. You are already starting as something of an expert. Don’t ever start out to do anything where you have to do anything other than what you know – research never pays off, except when it contributes to a longterm goal. It takes too much time. Then find a way of expressing what you already know in a way that brings you money. I have made many examples above in item 6. Your hobby may be: horses, drinking wine, collecting stamps, collecting Star Trek memorabilia (Elvis?), playing bridge, singing in a choir…

My hobby was fishing. I didn’t think I knew that much and there were plenty of people out there who I thought knew way more than I did. But you don’t have to be an expert when you start out, just have something to say. You will become an expert over time. It just slowly snowballs. I made my first trip to BCs Queen Charlotte Islands to fish Langara – paid by the resort on the understanding that I would do an article – when I was very sick. This was when they didn’t have any sympathy for those with allergies. It was tough (and the guy who went with me almost ended my budding career on my first trip, the turkey). I just took pills and got through it. I knew that when I got home, I could go back to the one hour a day writing and spin the one story into a dozen in the next few years.

After 15 years of being sick, I have developed so that writing about fishing is an important contributor to my overall income. I have written more than 1500 articles in that time. I have been a weekly columnist at the local newspaper, the Times Colonist, for more than 7 years. My fourth book on fly fishing came out in 2008. I have one more written and making the rounds and in the process of selling another about fishing the remote coast of British Columbia – I have traveled the entire coast asked by remote resorts to come in. I have become something of an expert – to some more and to some less – fly fishermen can be picky – just because I have made my hobby work for me in my down time. I slowly learned a whole lot over the years. And my next book that I am shopping around is about how to bring salmon runs back. It is intended to be one of my major books in my career, so a very serious pursuit for me. Fortunately for me, my first degree is in biochemistry, so I can understand scientific research. And so it goes.

Develop your own interest/hobby into earning money. It will take a long time, but you do have time. And, once again, try to maintain your personal relationship with family and partner as you will need their help to get you through. Tell them you are sick and need help. It’s a tough sell but it is what you need to do. I hope that they will be able to see that you are not just unable to get it together to get it together.

8. Exercise

Probably the most underrated but highly important thing that you can do for yourself when sick or not sick is: exercise. When you have CFS you are at your most unwilling to add exercise to your life because you are chronically without energy. But, take it from me, it is as important as getting your allergies under control.

Exercise that has a cardio component, meaning it gets your lungs going and your heart beating, such as bicycle riding, running and swimming is good for anyone because it makes you happy, is good for your body and can be a solid social activity when you are least able or inclined to be social. I am a runner and do so, for the past 15 years, at a gym. It takes your mind off how badly you feel, and it keeps you in the company of other people who are not sick so that it gives you perspective from the very depressing life that you lead.

The most important point, beyond what I have said, is stretching your body out. Both yoga and tai chi are useful, low energy requiring alternatives if you would prefer those. The reason that stretching, and I mean your arms, shoulders, trunk, stomach, bum, quads, glutes, hamstrings, knees, calves, ankles and toes, is so important, is because in chronic fatigue your muscles tend to tighten up into spasm, and regular stretching will keep them from putting you in great pain. This is also important because many, including me, get fibromyalgia in the upper body and shoulders. Stretching out your muscles reduces this pain. I stretch twice a day, first thing in the morning, before exercise, and last thing before bed while lying brain dead in front of the TV. Before I started stretching, I could feel my body tighten up all day, and slowly all my muscles would be contracting so that my body slowly went into a fetal position. Very painful.

Exercise gives you a break from how awful you feel. It gets your mind off it, and you can use it for having a goal in a time when you cannot achieve much else. As mentioned, as adults, we live a life where we are expected to achieve things, and feel poorly when not. If you are trying to get to 25 lengths in a swimming pool, or to run a 10 km run in the spring, there are goals along the way to getting to where you want to get to. This part of your life can help you, then, with other aspects of your life, and the endorphins of it all are good for you. The spindle cells that comprise your dopamine circuits for immediate satisfaction are also turned on by exercise. This is a good thing as this system is the one that underlies our experientially derived sense of satisfaction.

Exercise will also help you with how cold you feel with CFS. Feeling cold is very debilitating. This results because blood vessels get constricted, because you are using less energy from lying still, and thus your body’s temperature is lower. No doubt your metaboloic rate is lower in CFS because folic acid, which helps with thermoregulation, is one of the supplements that you take with this disease. I can tell you that I spent years on the couch frozen, in a down sleeping bag, having to go to bed fully clothed. A very depressing way to live. Exercise which involves breaking sugar down to move muscles, gives off heat because muscles breaking sugar into two carbon fragments cannot harness all the energy released during the process. This energy is given off as heat and it warms you up.

9. Fibromyalgia

Fibromyalgia is characterized as pain in the upper chest and arms. It can be very debilitating in itself, as pain wears you down completely over time. Seeing a doctor can produce a ho-hum response because such pain has been conjoined in the literature with most of the symptoms of CFS, for example, anxiety, inability to sleep, mental disturbances, mental incapacitation and so on. This makes it a syndrome, not a disease, and one that overlaps so much with CFS that some don’t take it seriously – not to mention that they don’t take CFS seriously.

But you must do something about the pain. The problem is that every common pain medicine causes its own problems in the body over time; Tylenol is not good for your liver; ibuprofen is not good for your kidneys, and so on. My pain got worse as the day went on, and it was conjoined with being exceptionally cold, as mentioned above. Search the web for all such things. I wouldn’t take Codeine on a long-term basis as it is a narcotic, and there is the constipation thing. Inderol is also a beta-blocker, but is what I took for two months to wean me off acetaminophen (Tylenol); it reached the point that the 12 extra strength acetaminophen pills I took everyday, simply resulted in rebound headaches, and when I had to hit higher amounts, it finally had no effect at all.

So talk with your sympathetic doctor, after you have done your web search – a recurring theme, here. And make a point of turning up your heat in the evening. Pick up a space heater for the room where you lie in state having to watch tv for the time before you take sleeping and anti-depressant pills to put you to sleep. Leave that high intensity SAD light on all day long and sit in the room with it. I have to hit 75 before my cooled body starts to warm up.

10. Be Around Well People

I have been so sick that for more than 15 years, it has been impossible for me to stand to be in the company of other human beings. I was so sick that just the stress of thinking about being with someone, even a week away, would reduce me to a wreck. This is inability to take stress. It also made me impossible to be normal around others, and so many many of my relationships, friendships, ‘work related’ acquaintances, significant others failed or never got off the ground. I mentioned to someone not long ago, who I had not seen for about 15 years, that I had CFS. She was visibly shaken because she and a whole lot of other people thought I was constantly over the edge and pretty well impossible to deal with because my mood swung so badly. At the time, I was unaware of the problem. Only now as I slowly improve, though I will never get well, am I able to think about such a subject; it was beyond me for a long long time.

My best advice to try and keep yourself a little bit level is to be around people, easy, normal people. Odd advice perhaps given my inability to do this when I was sick. But people need people. We are social animals. We die without such contact. And CFS kills such contact. Try and be around easy people, ones who do not make you anxious, nervous or whatever. Don’t put yourself in difficult personal situations. Even it this is as simple as watching people walk by on the street, or in a recreation centre, church or whatever. People do not understand long term sickness, how bad you feel and how weird you may act. And you can’t blame them for that. But find some people to talk to about everyday things, even if it is the weather, or saying ‘Have a good day.’ to someone. I finally, after 50 years of my life, understood that such a saying was not superficial. I mean it when I say it. And accept such a saying as a kindness to you, too. Be compassionate with yourself. Allow others, who may be able to hold you, do that. Speak and listen.

When my divorce ended, it took two years for me to realize how sick I had been in the marriage. The marriage was so turbulent, I had no idea how I felt. Grieve for what you lose. Watch a show like Intervention if it makes you weep. You need to pass through the illness, pass out the pain and emotion and reintegrate with life in due course. I lost my children. And it took me 15 years to come to terms with that. We all need the simple conversation that is people going about their lives. Please talk to them. Please try.

11. Take Action – Be in Research

If you can tolerate such a thing as being in a research study, below are some current ones. I read through the abstracts for most of these and found that most of them would not include me as a relevant subject. This sounds to me like more of the same old same old: well-meaning researchers not quite getting the point of the disease. For most of these studies I am too old – over 45 – and don’t have the specific things they are looking for. But, do a search at some of the websites, and you may find a subject in which you fit. It is a positive thing to do, and helps others. And these research studies are mostly done in connection with universities. But, do satisfy yourself they are right for you.

Here they are – there are many more than these:

Studies currently recruiting patients with CFS or related conditions

• Center for Hypotension (added 1/26/2010)
• Weill Medical College of Cornell University (added 12/10/09)
• Whittemore Peterson Institute (added 12/10/09)
• Huntsman Cancer Institute (updated 8/09)
• Center for Pediatric Hypotension (updated 8/09)
• Hunter-Hopkins Center (added 9/26/07)
• The Center of Community Research at DePaul University (added 11/09/06)
• New York Medical College Seeks Adolescents with CFS (updated 8/09)

The CFIDS Association of America regularly issues funding announcements as part of its research grants program. Its most recent Request for Applications was issued on March 3, 2008. For more information about this funding opportunity, please visit http://www.cfids.org/profresources/grant-policies.asp.

Please note that cfids is worth looking at as it is a website that has as its mission: working to make CFS widely understood, diagnosable, curable and preventable. I looked at their list of symptoms and while they are short compared with what I have had, they do have most of the most important symptoms.