On Eclecticism: The Joy of Being a Mess

"There are two kinds of music: good music, and the other kind. I play the good kind."

~Duke Ellington

I used to worry that I didn't have an identity. I was playing guitar in a rock band, playing bass in a blues band, writing as half of a folk duo, and then going home and churning out strange little string quartets and orchestral pieces on the computer. I was flitting about from style to style and sound to sound like a slightly detuned hummingbird. I was never sure who I was going to be when I picked up a guitar. And it worried me.

Because, you see, I could listen to any cut from any one of my guitar heroes and hear their personality shine through like a beacon. I could spot Bill Frisell a mile away. Jimmy Page is always and forever Jimmy Page. Frank Zappa?--no matter how far out weird he got, there was always that thread of continuity, what Zappa himself called the Project/Object, running through his music like an overloaded hydro wire that somehow connected Igor Stravinsky, doo-wop, funk, and the glory hole of your local truck stop bathroom stall in a way that sounded unmistakably Frank.

And then there was me, soaking up and imitating styles like an echolalic sponge, and never even having the good grace or self-discipline to get my imitations right. I was, I down-heartedly concluded, a duffer and a dabbler, a poseur and a fake. Not shredder enough to be a shredder, not bluesy enough t be a blues player; I was half-assed in every possible direction at once.

I tried to find a direction. Really, I did. I told myself I would only write pop songs. I told myself I was part of a piano-guitar-voice trio, until death do us part. I told myself I was working on an album of solo acoustic fingerstyle stuff that fans of Bruce Cockburn might like if they were willing to ignore the fact that Bruce was already so much better at that than I would ever be. But I couldn't stick with any of them.

And then I realized that all this compartmentalization was just me cutting off my nose without even the satisfaction of spiting my face. I wasn't trying to make a shitload of money. I didn't need a marketable image. And if I looked back at the heroes I referenced--Zappa, Frisell, Page, and Cockburn, not to mention Brian May, Jimi Hendrix, Jeff Beck, Ani DiFranco, Vernon Reid and Pete Townsend, among many others--none of them were compartmentalized, either. If you listen to their widely varied output, they don't seem to have a marketing strategy other than "do whatever the hell you like, as long as you do it well."

Neil Young was once sued by his OWN RECORD LABEL for making an album that didn't sound like Neil Young. Ween has basically been an entirely different band every time they've made a record, but they consistently crack me up and fill me with joy. Listen to Adrian Belew play for the Talking Heads, then listen to his solo albums and quick-cut to his hilarious Bob Dylan impersonation on Zappa's wonderful "Flakes"--the guy's all over the map, and I adore him for it.

And bands that find their sound, find their formula and grind out album after album of the same shit, year after year? Well, when something dies it soon enough begins to stink.

We all know AC/DC hasn't done anything worth listening to since Who Made Who, or maybe earlier. Bon Jovi, bless his slick black corporate soul, has made the same bloody album every year since Slippery When Wet, but people are so dumb or so stuck in their ways or so die-hard committed to their love of mediocrity that they continue to buy it. Fifty million Bon Jovi fans, I humbly suggest, can most certainly be wrong. Or at least be wasting their time.

Gradually it dawned on me that my only job as an artist was to sound like me. But still the doubts persisted: what does "me" sound like? Do I sound enough like me? What if "me" changes from day to day--is that bad? Weak? Demonstrative of a lack of conviction?

Basically, I was a neurotic twit. But I got better.

Projects came; projects fell away. Collaborators brought out different facets of my musical personality, helped me understand truths or partial truths about myself. I stopped trying to impress other people. And then, one magic day, I stopped trying to impress myself, too.

Now I just listen to the noises in my head, and try to duplicate them in the world. And if that means a slow Dixieland blues today and a jangly pop confection laced with jazzy #11 chords tomorrow, well, that's just fine. It's all me. Even if I'm trying to imitate Bruce Cockburn. Because, you see, here's the secret:

I never perfected that Bruce Cockburn imitation. 

So all those mistakes I make? They're uniquely mine, and I love them fiercely. All that wandering doesn't mean I'm lost--I'm just enjoying the ride. The mess that I am defines me, and I wouldn't trade it for any polished imitation--not of any other musician, and not even of myself--now that I've figured that out.

why who how where when what

Like most teachers, I was at work yesterday setting up for the start of another year. In the photocopy room I found myself discussing courses with a colleague. She asked me about my 3U English class this semester: was I starting with the novel, the short story unit, the obligatory Shakespeare?

I gave her the straightest and simplest answer I could (straight and simple answers are decidedly not the spécialité de la maison: Shakespeare, probably, I guess. I dunno. Truth is, I hadn't really thought much about it.

She looked around nervously, waiting for the lightning bolt. I hadn't thought about it? But the semester starts in three days! Why the hell haven't I thought about it?

Because I'm thinking about other, more important things.

Because WHAT I'm teaching on a day to day basis is the least interesting and least important aspect of my job.

Because the real sequence of questions for any serious teacher goes like this:

WHY do you teach?

WHO do you teach?

HOW do you teach?

WHERE and WHEN do you teach?

And only then, at the very end, 

WHAT do you teach?

What matters most is the intention--the WHY. A good teacher must be aware of their motivation, their goals, their inspirations, their aspirations. A good teacher must understand themselves and their relationship to their profession and their students if they are to be effective. Kids can smell insincerity. Adults going through the motions at the front of the room teach kids nothing except to go through the motions themselves. Adults who love what they do, love learning, love sharing--they teach children to love learning too.

Next on the list is WHO. Contrary to what the stylish nonsense of standardized testing would have you believe, there are no standardized children. They each come to school with a different set of motivations, goals, triggers, passions, expertises, and challenges. In effect, they each come with their own WHY. A good teacher needs to learn WHO is in the class in order to teach each student the way they most want to be taught--as much as is reasonably possible within the increasingly narrow confines of budget, time, and sanity.

Which brings us to HOW. You know what you're doing in the room. You know who else is in the room with you. How are you going to get through to them? There are no "guaranteed success" teaching tips or tricks. There is no one textbook, or activity, or strategy, that works for every kid, every time. So the good teacher, once aware of WHO is in their care and WHY that child wants to learn (or not learn!), has to grapple on a daily basis with HOW to bring a diverse group of children each to a place of receptivity. This, really, is the majority of the job for most front-line teachers on a day-to-day basis: how to make the subject matter at hand sensible and appealing to the children in our care. This is the art that elevates the craft.

WHERE and WHEN are really just a subset of HOW. Children cannot learn effectively in hostile or uncomfortable environments. Part of the job of a teacher--and here we must also include the surrounding host of administrators, architects, cafeteria staff, government funding models, community support groups, soup kitchens, urban planners, furniture manufacturers, and child and family welfare agencies, among others--is to create an environment where children feel safe, comfortable, and engaged. Every day teachers struggle to help students who have not slept properly, not eaten, never been read to at home, are worried about money or their personal safety or that of their family members, worried about whether the heat will still be on when they get home from school, worried about whose couch they'll crash on tonight. Schools run breakfast clubs, walk in closets, drug addiction counselling programs, and a host of other programs designed to make the WHERE and the WHEN of learning possible and palatable. 

The last question, the WHAT question, certainly bears consideration in the grand scheme of education. WHAT equals CONTENT, after all--could there be anything more important than that? Sure, there are vital philosophical and sociological issues at stake in curriculum development: what we choose to teach, and what (more importantly) we neglect to teach are societally formative decisions. If our schools do not produce the next generation of physicists, cabinet makers, accountants or soccer coaches, who will do these jobs? Should our schools teach healthy active living at the expense of literacy? Advanced mathematics at the expense of poetry appreciation, ethics, or small engine repair? If we ignore Black History Month or celebrate Diwali in our classrooms, have we made the world a better or worse place? What if there are no woman novelists on the reading list? At first sniff, the WHAT question appears to be the most important one.

However, those decisions are largely out of the hands of front-line teachers; the big framework type decisions are entrusted (rightly or wrongly) to policy mandarins at Queen's Park several telegraph relays removed from the classroom. Most teachers have little part in curriculum design, even though many would have excellent insights. Most curriculum designers have no part in day-to-day classroom education, even though many would probably find it enlightening. As a consequence, the general outline of WHAT I teach is prepackaged and piped to me in a PDF file: the learning outcomes for my courses are not up for discussion.

This disconnect does not make classroom teachers powerless; it certainly does not absolve us from thinking about WHAT. Nowhere in the English 3U document does it say we have to teach Shakespeare, or even read a novel. So when I do either of those things with my class, I should have good reasons besides "that's what my English teacher made me do in Grade 11, a millenium ago." Funny thing is, though, the rationale for choosing a text, an activity, an assignment, never comes from the WHAT. It comes from the WHY, the WHO, the HOW and WHERE of education.

finally (you dreamers)

fly me to a place
far beyond the moon
where i can look back at the earth
and watch it turn

all the oceans blue
and all the deserts brown
and all the billion souls
but me and you

half the world in darkness
half the world asleep
the thin line of the sunrise
racing west across the deep
waters of night

finally you dreamers
dream yourselves to life

limn the streets with gold
turn your half-blind eyes
the brown and blue and billions
towards the east
and open wide.

finally you dreamers
dream yourselves to life.

coast

there are only two stories: the rise
              and the fall.
there is no legend of the
coast along in the middle of life
       doing just fine
              just fine today thanks
for asking.

that man on the beach
call him me--does it matter who?
must look away instead
for the vector of his life
towards the multiplying versions
              of his many births
        his many deaths
his squalid unbecoming becomings
and his dessicated
inexorable
becoming unbecoming.

Exam Haiku

 Teacher knocks. Flurry

of mutely shouting hands rise

like startled pheasants.

“You have one hour

remaining. Tell me everything

you know about X.”

Nerves twitch electric.

Fifteen more minutes to sit.

Words are exhausted.

Someone always coughs.

My pen is always dying.

Negativity.

Tendons start cramping

Pinched scrawl limps across the page,

crow with shattered feet.

I just stopped to think.

Birds sang on white window ledge.

Where did the time go?

three bed poems, feb 2013

Every semester I make 3 cut-up poems alongside the students in my EWC class. It's a nice way to put a finger on the pulse of my subconscious. We deliberately let go of the idea of grammar, the idea of making sense, the idea of "proper." We follow our instincts, succumb to the sounds of words, the rightness of clusters of images. We let go of the outcomes and accept what we are given.

This time, we wrote about beds--our earliest memory, our current bed, our dream bed. Then we chopped up our writing and made poems with pre-selected titles. Here are my three poems for the semester:



#1: breathing out

        submerged and falling not a
motion sink soft into the watercolor
        through the waving growing seaweed
                down through layers of deepening night

the unspoken truth
        slowly to coral the upper air like clouds
hooked c of the arms of the world
        waning and filling the day so i can feel
                at home.



#2: like moonlight

desert moon rush across the black
waking up cold and twisted
        at hip and ankle

predatory cat in my memory
remembered fear: warm and earthlike
smelling of unexpected nouns
which surrendered the fight

tiny room beneath silent unseen fans
windows like moonlight
sleep is gone and so we
        and so
                and so
                        towards the landing



#3: seeing you around

you take the warmth. it all runs
        to morning and
the secret verbs are soft and solid
curved summer across our winter dreams
portholes in the sunset are
                lost mariners

dreams are treasures
bound down with gravity and
sinking soft

although i was never there
and love has a memory
of ourselves from the side
i wonder what else we believed
so many years fooling everyone
        guess i still do

                i hope you do too

Barbarians (πᾶς μὴ Ἕλλην βάρβαρος)

everybody's talking about

the war that no-one's talking about:

sizing up sides

stitching flags on the insides

of hollow eyelids

branding the kids with irons.

everybody knows

it's everybody else's house 

that's on fire.

everybody's banging on

the drum that no-one's beating:

sounding alarms

moving back to farms

of their ancestors or

trading cash for a subdermal chip.

everybody knows 

that hip 

is the new death of hip.

everybody's hearing horses

at the gates of gilded cities

just off the edge

of the white map of sleep.

we each decide

if we walk or we ride

if we're out or inside

that circle of light.

everybody knows

the barbarians 

are always right.

goodbye, and all that...

there's nothing special about this
last cup of tea. i mean, yes, you
boiled the water, but that's

no reason to get worked up:
just a couple cents' worth
of electricity, some tap water

(practically free) and a few
dried leaves from somewhere
you'll probably never go.

me neither. yet there it sits
steeping on my desk, staining itself
antique green, pirate map brown

and cooling slowly. soon it will be
room temperature. tepid. undrinkable.
but that's entropy for you:

of all the laws of the universe, it's the one
most likely to ruin a perfectly good
cup of tea. i could drink it quick

but it wouldn't matter. either way
you will be gone, and i will have to
make the next cup all on my own.

it's no big deal. really. i
can make a cup of tea
without anybody's help.

it's just that i have grown
fond of having you around.
it's just that some friendships--like tea--

grow stronger, deeper, the longer
you let them sit. it's just that i might
miss you a little when the kettle starts to boil.

but i'll be okay. and so will you.
it's just a little water, just a little heat,
just the comfort of ritual and good company.

no big deal. so. goodbye and all that.
if you need the kettle, it's here.
i'll keep it warm.

Unloved Children

There are no bad babies.

Some arrive unexpectedly.
Some are inconvenient.

Some overfill an already crowded room.
But that is no fault of the child.

Some are not loved:
Because their parents are not loving,

Or not in a position to love,
Or were hoping to love some other child instead.

Every note you play is a child:
Produce them deliberately.

Love them fiercely.
There are no wrong notes.

Only notes you didn't want,
Notes you failed to celebrate

Once you gave them life.

poet man (ii: a ball of clay)

how nice not to have to live
surrounded by everything we have broken:

our failures

our embarrassments

the curio shelf i made in grade 10 shop class
in spite of having no curios
no plans to acquire
no patience for right angles.

the ashtray i made fathers day 1977
when smoking was in and podge was in
and i was old enough to know
the smile on dad's never-smoked-a-day-in-my-life face
was also broken a round bowl a lump of grey
a small 7 thumb-print for a cigarette to rest
along the edge. useless. ugly.

if dad had turned it over he would have seen
poet man as child had taken the compass
from a protractor set (buffalo instruments
blue plastic case with also
30/60 and 45 angles plus ruler inscribed
in both metric and imperial: the two official languages
of how-far-the-moon-from-here?)

and carved a heart.

the international symbol for
i-don't-know-how-to-say.

a rough but dutiful thank-you was fashioned from a tongue of clay.
poet man as child waited for elves to haul it away.

add it to the list of times an apology was owed to someone.

but who? and why? the problem has never been
how to speak, only what to say.

the problem has never been
how-do-i-feel-about-what-just-happened
but did-it-happen-that-way-at-all?

let's be honest here:

all i am sure of in that story
is a red picnic table under a tall hickory tree.

that, and maybe the protractor set.

the word "podge" has the ring of truth
and so it stays.

the past is clay we mold and shape
to make our ugly useless gifts
and every broken thing we give away
is redeemed only by the heart we scratch beneath.

whoever the hell you are
reading these wasted broken words right now,
forget everything else i have written.
turn this poem over:

see? i love you, too.

poet man (i: a ball of string)

he is his cat.

he has this ball of string he bats about
worry is the word i'm looking for
i should go back and change line 2 but
part of me insists that every mistake
is a pure form of utterance
and every revision a lie
calculated to hide the honest ugly
of my mind. so as i was saying

he worries

this ball of string this scrap of cloth
this little nothing fished from under the sofa
where only tiny claws could reach
where no-one ever vacuums.
he has it. he worries it.
he worries he might actually be

normal.

that all this restless energy
this industrious assiduous creativity is just
an act he puts on
like a towel a scrap tied around his throat
to make a hero cape. poet man!
but all the world knows. and is laughing at
the underpants on the outside.

he worries--like i said--that he might just be
normal.

do normal people worry this? that they are
what they are? the fact that he worries
this ball of thread itself suggests that

normal

is not whatever he is
which leads to the counter-concern
that he is weird.
that all this sea of sounds is just
the thump of a poorly tuned engine
the whining friction of a fan belt turned too tight.

how comforting to live in a binary world
where everything not in is out
and everything not right is just
a short trip away from the curb
where garbage elves will whisk it away
to faerie land.