Patrick Friesen
Biography
Patrick Friesen, born in Manitoba, now lives in Victoria, BC. He has taught at various colleges and universities, has worked as a radio and film writer/director/producer for Manitoba Education, worked in a factory and as a cabby. Friesen has collaborated with pianist Marilyn Lerner and dancer/choreographer Margie Gillis. Among the films he has worked on are documentaries on Esther Warkov, Don Proch and Patrick Lane.
Friesen has published more than a dozen books of poetry, a book of essays, stage and radio plays, three CDs of text and music, and has co-translated five books of Danish poetry with Per Brask. One of these translations, Frayed Opus For Strings & Wind Instruments by Ulrikka Gernes, was short-listed for the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2016. His play, a short history of crazy bone, won the Winnipeg Theatre Award for Outstanding New Work in 2018.
With Niko Friesen he co-created Buson’s Bell, a spoken word/music CD. One of the tracks, Emissary, was produced as a video by Ryan Flowers. Outlasting the Weather: Selected & New Poems, 1994-2020 was published by Anvil Press in 2020.
Poetics Statement
“I have no formal poetics. I have spoken about poetics, written about it, and I have contradicted myself. What seems clear one day is not on another. Then, something that was unclear, or even invisible, suddenly emerges. My capacity to organize all this into some kind of coherent poetics is practically nil, and it would not be of benefit to anyone, especially myself.
I write poems, but I don’t know if I’m a poet, or whether what I write is poetry. Who defines it? What does it mean? It’s all been said and done.
I’m interested in the immediacy of poems, something approaching improvisation, and yet shaped. I’m interested in the sound of poems, the interplay of words and voice. Giving the poem its due as a way to connect. For me poetry is a way of thinking, a way of being. What I am and know, remembering.”
Sample of Poet's Work
signature
the movement of his hand across paper was not an embellishment
but the rehearsal of his name
what he wanted to shape was a motion something of the spirit
that gave decency its depth
a man practices his signature filling scrap paper with his name
over and over again
a man enters his signature he repeats the rhythm of his hand
and the sounding of his name
his name written all over the sheet torn from a scribbler like the
devotions of a pilgrim
what a man has outside of love is the work he has woven to his
name the honour of his hand
he sat there at the kitchen table with the wealth of his name
and the certainty of his god
a man belongs on earth with his children a man works his way
through his name
monkey hands
a distant grumble of thunder, the kind that
arrives slowly, and the child slipping out of
the bedroom window, a boy in peril, standing
inert in the ozone smell of the approaching storm
a boy holding the fear of beasts, of owls and
demons, his eyes never having been lost in
such darkness before, trying to be still, deepening
his breath
a far-off flash inside a cloud, boiling in the night
sky for a moment, seraphic, the boy hearing
his blood, like thunder from another time
he raises his hands to his face, they’re monkey
hands, he can see that, him knowing suddenly
the darkness inside, what he is, the earth of
himself, his skin a thin border
and he’s boy and chimp, he’s an unborn thing
always being born, and there’s a noise in the
hedge, something alive, the boy grabbing a
low branch and climbing a tree, hugging the
trunk high up, that home where there are no
stories to make him human.
pterodactyl
pterodactyl glides across the water with leathery wings,
long legs lowering as it nears the shore, and I’m waking,
confused, coming awake, to being human, the species,
how does it work, this sapiens, this brain? these hands,
trembling slightly with age, the body, what is meant by
this blessed body? confused by the species, where are
the border lines? between salmon and sapiens, hawk and
human, the heron standing still in the shallows, priested,
yes, then snakey as it uncoils, then stalking on stick legs
into prehistory, looking for momentary flashes of light
just beneath the surface, stabbing swiftly into the shimmer
of a fish, a brief life, and it begins to come back to me,
the necessary earth, it comes back, my tongue-tied
non-existence, the heron rising, legs dangling for a moment,
a gaunt ghost of extinction, a million years of it, and me,
word-spawned bait.