REJECTED BY NORTHUMBERLAND TODAY

Northumberland Today continues to be a dumpster for bloated mediocrity.

I was bored from Grahame Woods’ column, “Those were the days” (May 12) about his early macho motoring days which evolved into a lifetime of guzzling gas and contaminating my breathing space. There wasn’t the slightest remorse for his collaboration in the auto-culture that paved over paradise and put up parking lots, that supported suburbs that swallowed farmland, that financed Middle East dictatorships.

The column displayed continued pride in the I-was-cool-before-anyone-else syndrome. This dime-a-dozey tale is typically 20th century Americaca.

This is my far-more-cool-before-anyone-else tale.

I never possessed a car nor desired such. Back in the day in Cobourg, I watched puffed up cool dudes drive their egos back and forth between the then Dairy Queen at University/William, and the east collegiate, cruisin’ for babes.

So there I was, a young man from the lower working class, with a CCM no-speed bike. Babes? How could I impress babes? Poetry. Great gushing gobs of it.

“I want to translate pain into a prayer; if it is answered, the miracle will be your laughter.”

It brought Dr Alec Lucas, head of English Dept, McGill University, to Cobourg to discuss a book of my poetry. Then Louis Dudek, (one of the Montreal poets of the 60s that included Irving Layton, A.J.M. Smith, et al) jumped in to collaborate.

Dr Lucas wrote; “Gusto and intensity do not of course make art, but when they are combined, as in his poetry, with an unusual gift for creating images the results are striking. There is nothing here of a fear of words.”

Poetry was a babe magnet. It wasn’t the book; it was the lyrics and images that stroked their sensitivities.

“I use question marks as much as I can when I write of love because they are the shape of sleeping women who want to keep secrets.”

I didn’t need to display purchased items to turn heads. I had natural fair trade talent. I could take breath away without spewing carbon monoxide. My office and studio was inside my head. I was verbilicious.

“If a poet were the premier of something, what might that something be? Would it be a nation of obedient poetry lovers? Would the national militia consist of mighty tulips armed with colour and sunshine? Would the national anthem be a long joyful sigh after love? Would the Union of Pollen Producers go on strike demanding higher rates of sunlight and more elaborate fringe benefits such as lighter showers and heavier dew?”

A pretentious convertible as an ego extension wasn’t me. My stanzas went from zero to hero in nano-seconds. Jocks could flex their biceps. My stanza operating procedure was to flex my imagination and waste pulp frictioneers with 45 calibre metaphors and surface-to-sentence similes. Other guys pressed pedal to metal; I pressed pen to paper.

“Put your poem in its upright position. Close your eyes and imagine a nation made entirely of imagination. Units of verse of the unitverse, the poetariet of the Peoples Republic of Poetry, came charging at the drop of a poem, singing the Battle Hymn of the Poetic. En garde."

Pontiacs are mediocrity personified, but Poetry is Poetency! There ain`t a vehicle manufacturer that can beat that.

“She was the fire I always wanted to play with.”

Those were my days, and I still have them in rich abundance.