Month: January 2019

Installment 40 travels further in time than any poem published here. David Cull presented “The Ride” to one of the “basement workshops” during the 1963 Vancouver Poetry Conference, organized chiefly by Warren Tallman and Robert Creeley. A trip worth taking slowly.  *** the ride To begin with; say you drive a motorcycle west, from Princeton or the summit just beyond that point, toward the city — now a hundred miles away. And say it is an afternoon; the sun cuts brightly through the trees, the shadows crisp although already late September; green, traced gold, the jackpines almost black against the rusty dirt. And Sunday; traffic bunching and congesting further in. The road down, say, from here (the summit) miles of curving mountain, down and swinging sideways as the Smilkameen winds through the thick green ridges to the head of water (Hope), the Fraser, and the broad, flat valley opens to the sea. I mean the mind’s eye holds; the sea, the river’s mouth, the city; forms and places both sides, thirty miles – have lived here long as you remember. Or, imagine it, the boundaries are given; goals, the slope, a slide that children play on for the pleasure of the loins. Or any method, way to get there; any way you can. As this is where I am, and you are; I propose to ride it. I propose...