Don't
Stop Clapping Till I'm Famous . . .
It was the
greatest poetry reading Canada ever heard
AJM Smith was there with his polaroid land camera
Earle Birney stood by the door flipping his lucky
both-sides-beaver
nickel
The Governor-General smiled like a Parisian-born trick
you could hear everywhere hoofbeats of moose & windblown
birch boughs
Everyone was related to everybody else.
Across the audience smiles broke like quebec bridges
I kept thinking the face on the very next guy to read was
the
splitting image of an autumn-blown maple leaf atop Mount
Royal
we threw the critics out early in the show
they asked the poets the wrong kind of questions and we just
knew
they'd leave early and cause trouble for us
at
the banks)
famous people read aloud and no smart-asses coughed at
crucial points
the concluding speech told you what the next fifty years of
canadian
poetry would be like, whereupon
All stood
And the flag
was raised & lowered by the unseen hands
of Robert Service's ghost who'd been with us since
intermission.
I was proud
alka-seltzer-proud ...
a patriot was
stationed at each exit and it was the patriot's duty
to after each poet had read / fling open the door to the
subzero howling
winds which beat at all our faces and cold that turned the
sweat on our
cheeks to icicles / while a sign was held up above the
stage's dais which
read:
DON'T
STOP CLAPPING FOR A MINUTE FOLKS
OR
YOU'LL NEVER HOLD ANOTHER PENCIL BETWEEN
YOUR FROSTBITTEN
FINGERS
--thank
you,
--merci.
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