A Valentine's Week Reading
Each holiday is apt to spread out like water or ice over a flat calendar’s square and become a season unto itself, yes? Witness the Boxing Week Sales, Black Friday month, and the Christmas quarter.
For new years our charity shop cleared out Christmas and put out the heart-themed items. (Then March is St. Paddy’s. April is Easter and gardening themed. May is Mother’s Day. June is Father’s Day. Then Canada Day. Two months off then onto Thanksgiving. I digress.)
Now we are nearly there. Heart’s Day. Another 8 days. And because crowds, the bookings for the 14th, probably start on the 9th so 3 days. And because it’s the month of red, chocolate, and love, my Valentine’s reading is on the 15th. There’s a spillover of St. Valentine’s to the 17th in a Hummingbird chocolate tasting which I probably won’t go to.
But love. And Poetry. Set aside poetry. What is love? A relationship? A sensation? An immersion? Is it a choice or is it a thousand habits of behaviour? A lens or framework to interpret the world? A word imposed categorically around things, not inherently a thing itself? An excuse for chocolate? All those questions could stand for poetry as easily.
Love is what nourishes self and others. What feeds love and connection has been my increasing preoccupation for the last few years. What you attend to is, likelier than not, liable to grow. My last 2 chapbooks published were love poems. Maybe I’ll pull out an earlier one too.
And because it’s a romantic love for this holiday, let me squeeze in here a Good Omens Valentine’s Day fan fic recommendation: Operation Nightingale.
What isn’t central is sometimes a salient point anyway. Does it matter the outcome or the means? The content or context? Listen loosely so that I might speak loosely hovering in your peripheral vision.
In times of distance, social and otherwise, connections are a kind of beauty that feeds health. Choosing curiosity and trust are gifts we can give at no cost except to the ego which may want to be autonomous know-it-all, in a protected fiefdom of self. But so much richness can happen by meeting our past with grace and our multi-directional future options with a sort of faith based in our own capacity to love and adapt and lead with, you guessed it, love.
But my point, and I am getting to it, ambling towards the lede in the brambles…although you did see the whole, er, title thing, so too late for spoiler alert eh?
In case you missed it, the "poetea/poésie series: evenings of sharing poetry" of La Pêche has been on hiatus since last summer. It is back, and at a new venue. I'm the feature reader there in just over a week. Been a minute since I’ve done one of those. I’m reading of about 20 minutes of love poems. (Chapbooks for sale, naturally.) What? When? Where?
Thursday, February 15th, 7pm @ Wakefield library, 38 ch de la Vallée-de-Wakefield, Wakefield, Québec J0X 3G0
Host Gillie Griffin is joined by a new co-host, Julie Le Gal.
This month is on the theme of love...bring a favourite poem (or two) on the theme to share. You are also welcome to share a poem you have written that fits with the theme. In person only, not live-streamed. The venue is accessible to people with reduced mobility. Masks optional.
There's a regularly monthly spot to watch for. Hopefully it will become a thing. Save the dates for the next sessions: March 21st, April 18, May 16, and June 20.
