Folks, there’s a new reading every Wednesday for the next month posted at Event Magazine for your listening enjoyment. Join John Elizabeth Stintz, Rose Cullis, Tawahum Rice and me! Honoured to have been chosen and to be in such great company.
Folks, I’m reading in Peterborough at The Garnet tonight Jul 3 and in Ottawa at Venus Envy Jul 4. Check my events page for time and details.
photo: Jane Eaton Hamilton, Musée de L’Orangerie, Paris 2014
Another poem from “Love Will Burst into a Thousand Shapes.”
The Drowning
In the month before they find your son’s body
downstream, you wake imagining
his fist clutching the spent elastic
of his pyjama bottoms, the pair with sailboats riding them
He’s swimming past your room towards milk and Cheerios
his cowlick alive on his small head, swimming
towards cartoons and baseballs, towards his skateboard
paddling his feet like flippers. You’re surprised
by how light he is, how his lips shimmer like water
how his eyes glow green as algae
He amazes you again and again, how he breathes
through water. Every morning you almost drown
fighting the undertow, the wild summer runoff
coughing into air exhausted, but your son is happy
He’s learning the language of gills and fins
Of minnows and fry. That’s what he says
when you try to pull him to safety; he says he’s a stuntman
riding the waterfall down its awful lengths
to the log jam at the bottom pool
He’s cool to the touch; his beauty has you by the throat
He’s translucent, you can see his heart under
his young boy’s ribs, beating
as it once beat under the stretched skin of your belly
blue as airlessness, primed for the vertical dive
One of my favourite Welty stories. You can’t watch this one with its You Tube florid green screen, but you can listen to the master’s delicious voice:
Eudora Welty reads Why I live at the P.O.
Eudora Welty reads A Worn Path
Here she is talking to Gore Vidal:
Eudora Welty interviewed by Gore Vidal
Here is information about her photography career:
I am awarding myself the Bravest Writer in the World Award, and my audiences the last week the Bravest Audiences in the World Award, after what has been a highly difficult two weeks for me medically, resulting in a dodgy quality of readings.
I limped through my readings for Douglas College’s LitFest and Swoon, neither of which I could, in the end, prep for: just showing up and reading took all my juice. I am usually impecable with timing with readings, but at Douglas I went over, and apologize to the audience, my hosts and co-reader. On Wed night, at Fanny Bay, I needed to sit while reading and read far too long. On Thursday, reading on Hornby, I was full on sick.
“If I’d had more time, it would have been shorter.” –Winston Churchill
Even though quite unwell, I was delighted to read four places last week: Douglas College’s LitFest, Swoon, Fat Oyster Reading Series in Fanny Bay and on Hornby Island. Thank you to my generous hosts and my accomplished co-readers. And of course to the audiences–we couldn’t do it without you. Lovely to see a turn-out of 60 plus listeners at Fanny Bay!
Here is the Fanny Bay Flyer with generous reviews of my work:
Come out and hear us read if you’re near Fanny Bay, tomorrow April 29! So excited to be reading with the excellent and raging Maleea Acker, Patricia Smekal and David Fraser. And the next evening on Hornby Island!
Sex and swoon. How could an evening be better? Come join us, y’all.
Come help me launch “Lost Boi” by Sassafrass Lowry with Leah Horlick, author of “For Your Own Good” and Amber Dawn!
Come here me read poetry at Cottage Bistro, Vancouver, March 5, 8-10 pm. I am the featured reader, up last. If lots of peeps from the community come, I promise I will read sexy bits.
Saskatoon reading! I hope you’ll tell your queer friends and come on out.
Hamilton Krause NO 28 2014 MRB Saskatoon.pdf
Hey, y’all. Come on out for Poetic Justice this coming Sunday at the Heritage Grill in New West from 3-5 pm. An afternoon of poetic delights.
Eaton Hamilton 