Fieldnotes, frags

“Alexander Byvshev, a Russian Poet who criticized his country’s invasion of Ukraine
in a four-line poem has been sentenced to seven years jail.” NDTV WORLD, 22 Mar., 2024

1)

I grew up in the presbytery of St. Andrews, in a little purple bungalow off Highway 9. A fifty-minute bus ride on the now extinct Beaver Bus Line, to the now extinct Greyhound downtown depot, constituted my first solo forays into the country’s cultural capital. Venturing into that nineties kinetic prairie city energy - most times for the entire day and not returning northward until the midnight run – freed me from the then-sleepy wheat and potato fields of the southern Interlake. Whether in lock-jaw winter cold or in fire-crackling summer heat, debussing downtown meant deliverance from my otherwise rural and partly suburban existence. I read a lot of Hardy Boys.

But I embraced the abracadabraic-portals of The Pyramid Café and Pyramid Records; Highbrow Books (at the end of a Lethean ally of intersection wind) Red River Books (ever legendary); Mary Scorer Books (now the boarded-up Soup Pierre) Club 200; Ms. Purdy’s; Di Machine; the Fyxx in the Exchange. These, plus many other now vanished landmarks of the city’s core helped for me to conceive of myself as more than a pimply Wayne Gretzky, or decent scrapper for my weight class who wanted a job at the steel mill.

On those lonely bus rides, I may’ve sought some understanding of my genetic origin, or some respite from my otherwise plain and loving childhood, but I never could have imagined how books would turn me into the criminal who sits before you today.

2)

At the Holy Ghost Fraternal Society on Main, old men argue. “Is Gretzky Belarusian, or Ukrainian? I want to know.” You hear an old neighbor yelling from the shuffleboard table. “Forget about Gretzky, read Mayakovski! They still don’t know if it was KGB.” You know exactly what your old neighbor means. The avant-garde, always under attack from authoritarian states. Someone yells from the embankment of slot machines. “Can they not be happier? Have more fun? Over there?” The old bartender yells at everyone. “Stick to poetry! Who knows what Sputniks circle us overhead.”

3)

Instead of a Preface

In the terrible years of the Yezhov terror, I lived

seventeen months in the prison lines of Leningrad.

Once, someone “recognized” me. Then a woman,

with blue lips standing behind me, who, of course,

never heard me called by name before, woke up from

the stupor to which everyone had succumbed

and whispered in my ear (everyone spoke in whispers there):

Can you describe this?”And I answered: “Yes, I can.”

Then something that looked like a smile passed

over what had once been her face.

April 1, 1957

Anna Akhmatova, “Requiem”

4)

Twenty or more years later, I admit I foresaw little of my eventual fate. It starts in an era prior to cellular telephones, back in grade ten, and extends into even today, as I pray by God’s good grace I walk free from this place.

We formed first as The Recycling Club, with Tina, Elvis and I meeting at noon over our baloney sandwiches, sometimes venturing around the school grounds to collect and crush soda pop cans. But when it became apparent that our recycling was going nowhere, would only pile up in festering green bags outside the gymnasium, we started walking to Elvis’s for lunch.

To explain the basement rec-room adorned as a mecca to Elvis Presley (the bedspread over the chesterfield was a shag portrait of the King in Jailhouse Rock) Elvis said that his mom had been a fan since her youth, in Manilla. Elvis’s dad, although always absent overseas, intrigued us the most in that gloomy split level: the dad was plainly idolized by Elvis, who from early age took on his father’s esprit for anarchy, Swiss Dada, performance art. Before eventually shaving his head, Elvis stood out to me as a lanky young man quaffing a Ducktail – espousing Riel’s vision of Red River Metis living simple, nomadic lives across a wide homeland. And Elvis fist-fighting anyone.

I was drawn to him. I’d already been drinking Growers for two years and was into heavy rock; and when Elvis suggested that we form The Friends and the Enemies of Automatic Drawing, I volunteered as the Treasurer.

We used his father’s Iron Hand letterpress to distribute pamphlets, ranging wildly in theme and content, mostly bathos and satire: Rediscovering the Rotarians; Letter to a Young Rapper (loosely based on Rilke); Vasyl Kurylenko for Premier; How to get High from Banana Peels; Acmeism for Beginners: each carefully rolled off the press in black lithograph, never more than fifty numbered copies. The last I saw Elvis he was wearing an Antonin Artaud t-shirt, heading down south on Greyhound.

I still have some of our pamphlets in boxes in my parents’ garage.

In 2017 my parents received a collect call from North Dakota State Penitentiary from Elvis asking for my number. Though they gave it to him, he never called, and all my efforts to locate him in the prison system were stonewalled. Tina married the heir to an overseas mattress manufacturer, and about three years ago I heard they were living in a new development, south of Winnipeg. We three have had no connection for ages now.

I’m not even sure if I can read a statement before sentencing. I honestly don’t believe that throwing one Molotov cocktail at the Royal Bank of Canada, completely after-hours, should equate to anything more than house arrest.

5)

KGB REPORT

Akhmatova has acquaintances but few friends. She is good-natured and does not hesitate to spend her money if she has it. But at heart she is cold and arrogant with a childish demeanour. She is helpless when it comes to practical tasks of an everyday nature. Mending a stocking poses an insolvable problem for her. Boiling potatoes is her greatest achievement.

6)

“Missiles are being fired at Ukraine,

the Kremlin has spurned conscience and morality.

Officer’s honour, where are you...”

Byvshev

7)

How long are these nights of misery

to which we never asked admittance?

Moments without advance, centuries dusted

behind with zilch plurality of peace.

We only cross a certain plane until pulses

turn hierarchical. Killers: is it the moon who

billows our souls uncannily, forking our

tongues, deadening our gazes? Who falls prey

to hawkers, prey to jump-scares, prey

to the emergent presence of quarrels?

Those controlled by computers or controlling

computers, please remember joys. Feel the logic

of love that may soften the ire from our hardened

countenances. Recall those golden-helmed rims

of sunrises cresting everything in shine

across the embryo which is our world. Tender

the rebuilds, jubilation dreams when we can

serve no bondsmen, no enslavers, no bias

to accept munitions into our arms, brothers.

Take into your whispers these poems for you

to hold. Take fondest memories, brightest spores,

when you held kind hands amid childhood friends.

Take in the horizon, those nights you reposed

among the heavens with your scapula resting on

the peaceful world. Know you are loved and can

love, fierce and radical, and make everyone one

friend with whom you can walk alongside. There,

there, sad one, at the possible close of miserable

centuries without plurality of peace, moments advance.

8)

The lights go down at the Holy Ghost. You’re off to Boogies with Walter Benjamin. The Northend, you think, begins to feel like Cold War Prague. For sure tonight you’ll play Are You Lonesome Tonight – something, later, by Robbie Robertson. You’ll order a veggie nachos and watch screens of UFC. Tonight, you’ll treat yourself to a pack of Canadian Classics. Tomorrow, you may find yourself wandering around arguing with Robert Kroetch.