Al Rempel
Biography
Al Rempel’s books of poetry are Undiscovered Country, This Isn't the Apocalypse We Hoped For, Understories, and four chapbooks: Behind the Bladed Green, Deerness, Four Neat Holesand The Picket Fence Diaries. His poems have also appeared in various journals and anthologies, some of which have been translated and published in Italian. His videopoem collaborations have been screened internationally. For more information, please visit https://alrempel.com/
Poetics Statement
“I imagine my poetics is a box of curiosities: an unusual rock, a railway spike, a cat’s eye given by an older sibling, some old coins, one stamped with my birthyear. Objects I dig out every now and then, reorder, shuffle around. Here’s a few items currently in the mix. Attentiveness. By this I mean: not only paying close attention to the world but also to the poem. Listening to where it wants to go, what it wants to be. Sitting with an image long enough that it can breathe the best part of itself into a line or two. Surrender. Though the word is too charged for what I mean. More at letting go, letting the poem work itself out, find its own way in the world. The freedom to let a word’s sound bounce around between lines and to suggest other words, maybe start a cascade that spills down the page. The freedom to crack open a line in the middle and let the innards of its syntax glisten. Immediacy. What am I seeing right now, as I’m writing. The shock of a colour or smell from my childhood that sneaks up on me. The five birch trees growing up from a common root that says “hand” so loud I feel it in my wrist-bones. There’s a special object I hope to never lose that I call my BS meter. I keep the batteries good and charged on this one and pay close attention whenever it goes off. Torque. Although my ideas about torque have evolved and expanded, I still think finding the twist in a line as the key that separates a great poem from a good poem, or from “prose that just happens to be chopped up into lines”. I keep looking for the pivot, the hinge in a line that can unfold multiple meanings or send a poem bolting off in a new direction. Where the turn itself, the unwritten, the unspoken, can suddenly flash, momentarily stopping the reader in their tracks, or perhaps register as a small catch in their throat. ”
Sample of Poet's Work
Occasional Poem for a Birthday
it’s on days like this, the plain
waking up days, the just get it done
or don’t bother days, with pollen in the air,
and cottonwood seed in a sideways drift,
and soccer fields full of yellow shirts,
and kids calculating their fourth favourite colour
in back seats of cars, that I realize
another year has come and gone,
seamlessly as some student, some god,
idly spins a globe in an empty classroom;
if I wanted to do the math, I could:
how many heartbeats have kept me going,
how many times have I wiped the sleep
from the corners of my morning, made coffee,
looked out at the day, my day,
if I made it so
in the coffee shop, the man sitting next to me
has one artificial arm, and two women on the other side
are whispering about cancer, about cutting her hair
now, for a wig, for later —
I’m not eavesdropping; I’m trying to write a poem,
but everything sneaks in: Leonard Cohen from above
singing about angels and redemption, the river
I cross each day, so obvious a metaphor
it slips under me
what I think is this: we can’t hold
all our love inside our hearts, some of it
always spills over
we could wish for a longer summer, for less to do,
for days braided with sunlight and tadpoles on the lake,
for half-submerged logs covered in moss and ferns,
for that spasmodic moment when the canoe
finds its own belly in the water
and we push off
We Have Become Children
when fireweed spikes
the summer sun
hanging still in the sky
and we clean forget
the deep dark
winter held tight —
how we clung to it
how we cradled it
as if it were a flame
how darkness we dare
is as much part of us
as light —
in buttercups & goldenrod
yellow at our knees
and in the gusts
bending trees to shape
bowing like Buddhist monks
to blessing
I see you river
in the distant gleam
moving stone over stone
I see you mountains
how you prop up the sky
with cold white spires
thank you
so we too open our lips
to mouth our prayers
like water over stones
On the Hart Highway
willows still green, green-yellow, the rest
have dropped all their leaves, given in,
a ragged wind, frost once or twice,
the neighbours have rolled up their garden hose
and you should too, keep forgetting, sniff
what’s to come in the air and yeah
here it is again
further down, the fireweed gone to seed,
walking cadavers, you think, a phrase
that caught your eye in a book
you didn’t finish, their tops so ghostly gray,
highlights a pulsating redness in the undergrowth,
the osier dogwood veined, stubs
the way crows float on a upslope wind
on this side, industrial sprawl of shops, fenced yards
with barbed-wire angled out, mobile homes, a motel of cabins
strung out together, abandoned burger bar, hand-drawn signs,
piles of scrap metal, idling logging trucks,
and just visible over the ridge, the wreckage
of a new subdivision, underlined by a band of birch
against the staggering conifers