Next to this bit in my book, AUG 1 is written in the right margin. I haven’t had much time for writing these past few months, and the entries in my notebook, which I date when I write them, are getting closer and closer together. I’ll jot down four or five lines if I get a chance break in a coffee shop, but I suspect that I won’t get a chance to finish Spring before the Christmas break.

From Spring:

The floor in the back room
Concealed a hidden staircase, and the gloom
Below outlined a sort of storage space.
We saw a lobster trap, a dusty case
Of dominoes, a toolbox, thick fish line
Wound tightly round cod jiggers, old red wine
(One bottle), several lengths of weathered rope,
And, by a lucky hand placement atop
A dusty ceiling beam, my brother found
A fifty-dollar bill. There, underground,
Herbert had squirreled away some savings: “For
A rainy day,” he chuckled. There were more,
No doubt — he even, beaming, suggested
That Matthew keep it. (Quiet words were said
Between Mother and Grandfather, and then
The bill was given back — but then again
Matthew would not have kept it anyway.)

It’s been a while! I’ve made some progress since my last post, but not a lot. I’m getting close to finishing up Spring, and I’m pretty excited about that. I’ve covered most of the major things I wanted to cover in Spring, but I still have about 180 lines left before I’m at my quota. Trying to come up with something else that fits into the chapter is slowing me a little, as is being in school again. Nonetheless, I have high hopes.

From Spring:

He taught us of poetic license; why
It’s alright to rhyme ‘why’ with ‘poetry’.
He showed us verse from William, from Frost,
From Wordsworth — and though much of it is lost,
I foggily remember Sandburg’s cat,
And Sam McGee, and Casey at the Bat.

I’m getting well into Spring now. I’ve covered a lot of the major points that I had intended to. Being this close to ‘finishing’ the first section is very exciting. For the past few days I’ve been working on writing about Pasadena Primary, the first school I ever attended (which has long since been torn down).

From Spring:

The Primary was built next to an old
Abandoned theatre which had been sold
And sat in disrepair. The grass had grown;
It crept onto the school grounds and was sown
With discarded film strips. I pocketed
A cartoon bunny and a sequence: red
Wine spilling from a glass onto the ground –
But I disliked the mess, and so I frowned
And reversed my eyes, whereupon the wine
Slipped back into its vessel, pre-decline.

I’m going to start posting less — or at least less lengthy — excerpts, I think. Spring is close to being done and when I have a completed version I’m happy with I might post it here or offer to send it to a few people for review. I’m still not sure if I want to post a quarter of my book online for public viewing, that sort of seems like bad practice.

I just returned home from a ten-day trip to visit my sister in Charlottetown, PEI. I had a great time, and even found some time to write a little. Being in the city for ten days, it was bound to make its way into my thoughts, so this came out on the plane as I flew home.

From Spring:

There are two
Places called Little Harbour. I have been
Only to one; the other I have seen
On highway signs. There is a Charlottetown
On my island and on another. Down
In Nova Scotia there’s a New Glasgow;
Prince Edward Island has one too. I know
These are coincidences, but — oh, and
In Pennsylvania there’s a Newfoundland.
Some trick of time or tongue has caused a great
Deal of place names, it seems, to duplicate.
And thus, up on a plane, a man admits
He’s from a small town somewhere, and that it’s
Strange — though his seatmate says she’s from there too,
They’ve never met, and as we tend to do,
Both forget the exchange.

Just a thing I made. It needs some work, but I could definitely extend this scene.

From Spring:

A lemniscate of light shaped by a cloud
Slides down my window, slips, and cuts the shroud
Cast by my closet doorframe. In the day,
Behind the closed door, while I am away,
Shadow and light take part in mock war-games.
Dark ramparts rise up, formed by windowpanes
And stacks of books. Warm sunbeams pierce the glass
And gather on the floor, where they harass
The shifting walls and towers. Battles churn,
Are won, and lost, and then, when I return,
One side has made an accidental kill:
A melted crayon on my windowsill.

A lot of the inspiration for me in writing this very long poem comes from reading the works that inspired it — Pale Fire and the poems of R.A. Parsons — but also having encountered, as an English Literature student, a number of very lengthy epic poems: works like Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Faerie Queene, Paradise Lost, and In Memoriam (a personal favourite). I don’t mean to compare my own writing to these works but simply to highlight that they are monumental undertakings. I think the idea of taking on a huge poetic project is exciting, and I don’t know how often it happens in the present day.

My poem rhymes, and though it seems to be the case that rhyme is much less common in poetry than it used to be, I don’t think I would be able to write it without rhyming. If I were to sit down and try to write the events of my book in a novel form, I don’t think it would work. I imagine I would find the process rather boring. Writing out a list of events is easy enough, and with enough attention to detail one can turn a list of events into an autobiography or a historical record. I don’t want to do that.

My poem, certainly, is autobiographical, but not in the typical sense. I can’t remember every last detail. Some of it will be fictionalized. Some things I plan to write about didn’t actually happen. Some happened long after I was a child, or while I was well into high school. While most of the content will be based on real events, some parts will be filled in with embellishments. This is because I’m not trying to write an autobiography. I’m trying to write a blatantly romanticized version of a fairly typical childhood.

Writing in rhyming verse, I think, will help me steer the work away from strictly factual autobiography. The sort of rhythmic, archaic rhyme scheme hints that the poem is not supposed to be modern, or realistic, or factual. It’s also a challenge that I’m presenting myself with. Writing out the events of my life would be fairly easy, but writing them out in heroic couplets is much trickier. I’m trying to ask myself: Can that be done? (Of course it can, but it will take some persistence.)

The idea of constrained writing interests me. In 1939, Ernest Vincent Wright published the novel Gadsby, which in its over 50,000 words does not ever use the letter E. Mike Keith wrote the Cadaeic Cadenza, a 4,000-word short story in which each word contains a number of letters equal to the digit of pi that corresponds to that word (word 1 has 3 letters, word 2 has 1, word 3 has 4, etc). My constraint is heroic couplets. It is definitely not as strict a constraint as some others, but it is enough to give me a challenge, and makes writing this poem all the more enjoyable.

In fact, the rhymes will often help me figure out how to go about expressing a certain thought. I usually write whatever comes to mind and try to continue with that one thought, rhyming when necessary at the end of lines. If a sentence I write proves too difficult to rhyme, I change the wording, or the thought entirely, until I end up with something I am satisfied with. Often thinking about possible rhymes completes my thought for me, as helpful words will jump to the front of my brain to partner with what I have already written.

(Sometimes the rhythm forces me to use atypical wordings; note below how I had to write letter subsequent instead of subsequent letter to fit the iambic rhythm.)

From Spring:

A man, Brossard, from Montreal, composed
An eight-page letter to my Dad. Enclosed,
Some specimens for your collection, and
Another question — had you ever planned
To open a museum of your own?
And that was that. Brossard, a francophone
Possessed a certain certainty; he had
A way of setting fires in my Dad.
With every letter subsequent, the goal
Came ever nearer. Though it took a toll
On him from time to time (to say the least),
Father’s determination was a beast
That did not die. The temple (as they called
It in their letters) opened in the fall
Of ninety-eight. The thing had taken ten
Years of my father’s life. Now and again
I think about Brossard’s triumphant speech
The day they cut the ribbon.

If I reach
Straight up in our front yard, I can just touch
The lowest branch of birch. It wasn’t much:
A bungalow, first white-and-black, then -green,
Perched flatly on an avenue between
Pine hills behind, the rest of town out front.
When exiting the house, one would confront
A small decision: to turn right or left?
Both ways led to the same road, so, bereft,
Of any consequence, the choice became
Unconscious. I can, to this day, name
Most of our neighbours: Tiller, Rideout, Smith,
Richards, and Publicover, the house with
The two dalmatians (that name slips my mind),
McNeil, Wilcott, and Perry.

This is the extent of what I wrote today. Please note that anything I post here is a very early draft and will probably change. I won’t often post excerpts this long either, but I like the way this section turned out.

Insects really aren’t all that scary. A lot of people are afraid of them but the vast majority of insects are harmless, both to humans and to other animals. It’s more often the case that an insect ought to be afraid of a person, as we’re prone to squishing them.

For every insect that has a stinger or mandibles for biting, there’s another insect whose main method of staying alive is to stay out of sight, or to pretend to be something it isn’t. There are more low-profile insects than there are dangerous insects. I briefly mentioned, in my post about the stag beetle, how self-defense requires a great deal of energy and effort on the part of an insect. To that effect, it is much easier for an insect to simply go unnoticed than to go out of its way to antagonize something.

Today at work I tried to collect some photos of insects that have interesting ways of staying out of trouble.

This sulphur butterfly looks almost exactly like a leaf.

During a butterfly’s pupa stage, it remains stationary for weeks or even months, and is thus very vulnerable to predation. Birds, which frequently feed on butterflies and moths, will also happily eat butterfly chrysalides. To combat this, many pupa resemble other things.

These owl butterfly chrysalides look like brown, dried leaves.

Other butterflies take a different approach — these chrysalides resemble bird droppings, which a bird will most definitely not try to eat.

Macleay’s spectre is a type of stick insect that pretends to be a twig or dried leaf. They enhance their camouflage by swaying back and forth as they walk or when disturbed. This simulates a breeze or the movement of a leaf in the wind.

Other insects take a different approach, preferring instead to use trickery or misdirection to confuse predators.

This emerald swallowtail butterfly has little ‘tails’ at the bottoms of its wings; these are meant to look like caterpillars. If a bird attacks, there’s a chance it will go for the false caterpillar instead, and the butterfly will just lose part of a wing instead of being eaten.

This is the largest species of moth found on the planet, Attacus atlas. It has no means of self-defense…

…but its wingtips feature false ‘snake heads’ that sometimes confuse or scare off predators.

Perhaps the most convincing of all is the owl butterfly (Caligo memnon). The bottom of an owl butterfly’s wings resembles an owl’s face.

So the next time you recoil in fear at the sight of a moth or a beetle, just remember that it’s probably just as afraid of you, and would much rather be left alone to its business than be stepped on.

Lethocerus americanus, or the giant American water bug, is one of the largest insects found in Newfoundland and Labrador. They are an aquatic species, spending nearly all of their lives in and around the water. Because of this, they are fairly uncommon in urban areas. Sometimes when they wander into towns or cities, people see them and understandably become alarmed at their size.

Now would be a good time to note the distinction between the words bug and insect. People, myself included, have a tendency to use the word ‘bug’ to describe any small critter or arthropod (insects, spiders, scorpions, centipedes), but in its strictest sense bug refers to the order Hemiptera, which is a subcategory of insects made up of those with piercing or sucking mouth-parts (as opposed to biting or pinching). Hemiptera are sometimes referred to as ‘true bugs’ to get around this ambiguity.

The giant American water bug is, as its name implies, a bug. These bugs use their back legs to swim, and their strong front legs to grab and manipulate food and prey. Their larger front legs are often mistaken as pincers due to their size.

In the photo, you can see small claws at the end of each leg. These are simply used for movement and grip, and are not weapons. Most insects have some sort of claw on their feet (though they are usually very small, and don’t quote me on that). The bug’s mouth is underneath its head and not visible in the photo above, but it can help to visualize it as a sort of curved ‘beak’ that is used to pierce into prey and inject digestive agents. With that said, these bugs are capable of delivering a harsh bite, and should not be bothered in the wild. Like most insects, they would sooner avoid a confrontation than defend themselves, but giant water bugs are not very mobile on land and will likely be more prone to hostility, as they cannot easily escape.

On June 4th, I spoke to Anthony Germain of the St. John’s CBC Morning Show over the phone about a few sightings of this bug in St. John’s. You can hear the full interview here.

Coincidentally enough, Lethocerus americanus also makes an appearance in Giant World.

From Spring:

From the TV my eyes were pulled away
By a strange noise. Against the morning’s glare,
Framed in the window, something struggled there:
A small brown shape, it droned and buzzed and beat
Itself against the glass. I gulped, felt heat
Stir in my chest, and was afraid to look
More closely.

Some time afterward, I took
My waking father by the hand and brought
Him to see what I’d found. Strangely, I thought
Nothing of how the creature had come to
Be in our house.

In years later, I knew
It had belonged to Father, and had been
Lethocerus americanus. In
A calm voice, “Giant water bug,” he spoke,
As if to reassure me.

Enjambment is a word used in poetry to describe breaking a phrase or sentence or thought into multiple lines. Compare this set of lines, from Romeo and Juliet:

A glooming peace this morning with it brings.
The sun for sorrow will not show his head.
Go hence, to have more talk of these sad things.
Some shall be pardon’d, and some punished.

To this set, from Pale Fire:

And finally there was the sleepless night
When I decided to explore and fight
The foul, the inadmissible abyss,
Devoting all my twisted life to this
One task. Today I’m sixty-one. Waxwings
Are berry-picking. A cicada sings.

Notice how the lines from Romeo and Juliet all end in periods. Each line is a complete, succinct thought. Compare this to the second set, wherein the phrases continue beyond one line and terminate in the middle of the next, or the next. The fifth line itself contains two periods.

I love the effect that enjambment creates. It encourages a poem to be read not as a strict, metered, rhythmic thing, but as normal sentences. If one was to read the second set of lines with a pause at the end of each, it would sound stuttered and odd. Instead, they should be read as the punctuation dictates. This creates a much easier flow.

You could take this to an extreme and write the lines out without line breaks, to help in reading them:

And finally there was the sleepless night when I decided to explore and fight the foul, the inadmissible abyss, devoting all my twisted life to this one task. Today I’m sixty-one. Waxwings are berry-picking. A cicada sings.

This results in a sort of unnatural-sounding sentence (fight the foul, the inadmissible abyss) but helps in establishing the idea that an enjambed poem can be seen as just a piece of prose that happens to have rhyme and rhythm if you put line breaks in the right places. I find that idea fascinating, and I’m trying to capture it as much as I can in my own lines. I think poetry can be a little inaccessible sometimes, or feel out-of-reach, but it really isn’t.

From Spring:

My mind can conjure, sometimes, if I try,
A painted-white wood crib in which I lie
Within our living room. The old brick wall
Aside the staircase. Somewhere down the hall
My mother moves from room to room. I hear
Her soft footfalls upon the carpet.

I thought I’d start doing little profiles on some of the insects I’ll be working with this summer.

I wanted to focus on perhaps a couple per week, whenever I got a chance to take some photos of them. It made sense to start with something pretty basic, so I picked a beetle. Beetles are a good representative of insects in general because they are the most successful and numerous group of animals on the planet.

When I went to interview our stag beetle (Dorcus curvidens), he was all cozy in a nook of this piece of wood.

When I put my hand and camera into the tank, he moved a little and finally came out. He’s not the friendliest beetle, so he displayed his mandibles for me to let me know he meant business. As I tried to get more shots of him, he kept turning to face the camera.

Male stag beetles have these huge jaws, and it’s where they get their common name, as their head ornaments are a little bit like antlers. Males use the big jaws for intimidation and to grapple and fight with other males over food or mating sites. Females have much tinier jaws, and look like ordinary beetles.

The presence of physical differences between males and females of the same species is known as sexual dimorphism and is very common in insects. It will almost definitely be mentioned again on this blog if I take a look at other species. Sometimes it’s just a matter of, for example, male and female butterflies having different colourings, but other times it can be very important to know about when dealing with the insects, as one sex might have the ability to bite, pinch, or sting, and the other might not.

Stag beetles like this one can deliver a pretty serious pinch, and while I’d never consider something like this a ‘dangerous’ insect, getting your finger caught between those mandibles wouldn’t be fun. It’s not generally something one has to worry about. Most insects that are capable of defending themselves have distinct threat postures, like this beetle does. An insect or a spider will go to great lengths not to have to defend itself, because doing so takes a great deal of energy and can be risky. Dorcus curvidens adopts the pose you see in the second photo above — facing the threat, jaws clearly open and on display — but even when threatened will not generally lunge at you or try to attack you himself.