Featured Poet
Ariadne wrote: We are celebrating an exciting collaboration of poetry and song with Bernice Lever and Enrico Renz. They will be performing January 22nd at World Poetry Night Out at the New Westminster Public Library. For a good article on Bernice from The Vancouver Sun:
A poet, freelance editor and workshop leader, World Poetry Lifetime Achievment award Winner Bernice Lever, enjoys Bowen Island life. Her 10th poetry book is “Imagining Lives”, Black Moss Press, 2012. She edited WAVES magazine, 1972-1987.
Bernice’s travels let her to read poems on 5 continents. Her grammar & composition CD is “The Colour of Words” .
Active in many writing organizations, she is delighted to hear and help other writers. Bernice gets “high” on words. www.colourofwords
Dance on the Days
Dance on the days
when the fog smothers all
when the frost climbs the wall
when the sun blisters flay
when the moon stays away, you are not alone.
Dance on the days
when you hear His song,
the love of the Lord
holding you strong
in the crush of crazy times, you are not alone.
Dance on the days
when all your joints pain
when your head aches again
Poem and song link:
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Enrico Renz
Enrico Renz, Song writer and poet.
“I’ve just recently begun to perform my songs again after a twenty-five year hiatus. They’ve matured nicely. There are some new ones too. I like it when a song comes to me in such a way that I surprise myself. I see myself more as a song gardener than a song builder. The work lies in tending the song. It takes a lot of time and care and just being with the song to let it grow.
Playing chess and playing improvised music for contact dancers, are two other things I do passionately. Both these pastimes reflect on my approach to song writing.
Chess is all about creativity. To be successful, you have to imagine possibilities one step further than your opponent. But chess is also about precision. A single over-looked pawn can render the most elaborate strategies meaningless. Coordinating the rhyme, rhythm, sense and mood of a song so that not a note or syllable seems awkward, feels a lot like dreaming up and pulling off a spectacular checkmating sequence.
On the other hand, improvising with dancers is all about spontaneity. The music and the dance influence one another profoundly, but when the flow is perfect, there is no telling who is leading whom; the dance feels true. While my songwriting involves considerable crafting, I’m still reaching for that same flow and that same truth.”
Benevolence
Enrico Renz
March 10, 2012
the benevolent Universe theory came up again today
according to that faith
the worst horrors imaginable
are all part of the wonderfulness of the fabric
from some future perspective
all suffering will turn out to have been a gift
not knowing
not understanding
being kept in the dark
is all part of the deliciousness of this bitter cup
like the taste of olives
we’ll learn to love it
Mother Nature’s butterflies and flowers will seem all the brighter
for her gruesome teeth and claws
oh how we’ll laugh when
the scales fall off our eyes
and the atrocities we perpetrated on each other
reveal themselves
as kindnesses
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