Geomantic riposte: 'A Night for the Lady'
Originally from Winnipeg, Manitoba, Joanne Arnott defines herself as a Métis/mixed-blood writer and arts activist living in Salish territories, based on an island in the mouth of the Sto:lo River (Richmond, BC). A founding member of Aboriginal Writers Collective West Coast, Joanne has facilitated Unlearning Racism workshops for many years, and continues to apply peer counselling and storytelling strategies in her work in the literary arts. She has published seven books that are important contributions to the literary landscape, with her first poetry collection Wiles of Girlhood winning the Gerald Lampert award.
ABCBookworld had the following to say about A Night for the Lady, her latest poetry collection:
Once again focussed on the "brown feminine," A Night for the Lady is a rich tapestry of poems inspired by Joanne Arnott's personal relations with other writers and her wide-reaching influences from foreign literature. Both playful and mournful, Arnott celebrates the resiliency of the human spirit and her own hard-won dignity as a Métis mother.
At the First Nations University in Regina, Saskatchewan, at an event facilitated by poet and instructor Randy Lundy (a member of the Barren Lands (Cree) First Nation, in northwestern Manitoba), Arnott recently read to many attentive students from this collection, and I felt compelled to share part of my personal favourite, “the poet thugs of Saskatoon”, a bold comic exposition that transcends intertribal feints and really gets at the nib of what the life of a writer can be like when touring on the (short) circuit.
A Night for the Lady by Joanne Arnott (Ronsdale Press, 2013, Page 17)
every single person
at the table knows
it is time for him to go
before he does
he clings to a woman
who shirks him off
the poet thugs escort him
to the hotel doors
the feminist-lesbians call
leave it to the men
our men
will handle it
the Dene flies
into a taxi
a Cree poet
tugs on the locked door
a Cree professor
reflects on his youth
and the movie
300
we are not Cree
he cries aloud
we are Spartans
damnit
Geomantic Riposte: Prometheus
Beneath these fancy linens we all slash and dash and quake in this
'culture of silence' but that’s just the poets have you ever put
your life in another space case’s hands red-crossed a word out
or photoshopped a head onto another person’s dancing body only
to fix the body later when the poster somehow shrank around that
aforementioned head or ran weeping into the warehouse when
a blurb became a backrub and then what is that? then a swanky
conference on impoverishment with the cleaning staff in the back-
ground waiting to go home already but Courtney Bates-Hardy will
surely concur it’s more like Prometheus sometimes you gotta leap
out of that shower scene and torch that sucker who’s endangering
the entire crew but mostly because you’ve seen a faint glimmer of
that thing inside of him {not words} or sometimes you gotta use
that right to choose and self-terminate that non-kosher thing in-
side your own pretty innards because it will only take you with it