CBC Question 5: On Winning

The Jim Interview

CBC: HOW ARE YOU GOING TO WIN THIS YEAR’S POETRY FACE OFF?

Jim hopes tonight “I” will not win. Jim hopes each poem tonight will speak to all of us, and for all of us, in small some way. Jim will win, if the “poem” from Ottawa goes on to be the poem which wins the National Poetry Face Off. Hopefully tonight we will choose the Ottawa poem all of Canada needs to hear. If Jim’s poem does go on to the finals, and there it does not win, Jim will feel as if he has failed his community a second time. There is no winning for a poet. There is only endless failure, or at worst the public humiliation of being interviewed by Allen Neal with some stupid plastic crown on your head.

(I have a poem I really want to perform to and for my local community. I feel lucky and privileged already; and furthermore, once the 4 minute CBC version is performed and recorded I can get back to rehearsing the 10 minute version and take it to Ottawa open-sets where the best live poetry in the country can be heard several times a week.)

On a technical note: Last time I think my poem was geared towards live performance; an avalanche of fragmented images, rapid reversals of tone, and polar shifts in emotions. It was not a “radio” poem that took into account – this medium’s voice is an intimate shadow. The contradiction of radio is that – its calling is a distant echo in an enclosed personal space. This year’s poem I hope is better suited to radio (and will still work for a live audience). It is simple. It is repetitive. It is direct. It is a song. It is a lonely human voice trying to touch a trapped human ear. It is an aging man’s lament for the lost stories of his grandmothers. It is a prayer for the logger’s rescuing peeve hook, as my cancerous mother one more time rides the raging spring waters on a sinking raft towards the tumbling falls. It is a hymn to the human. It is a sermon of nature railing against technological chains. It is a moment of silence as I ask this poem to perform me.