National Poetry Month : Liz Howard,

 

 

In the beginning, sometimes I left messages in the street.

Can I have a word?
Can I get it in
Edgewise?
Are you going to let me
Finish? 

I am issuing from the problem
of time. A problem for which
there is no solution. Being
composed of itself there is
no outside of it—for my
purposes. It is merely to be
worked through. Does it follow
that work is a matter of will?
The world is independent
of my will, Wittgenstein wrote,
and Ravel composed a Piano Concerto
for the Left Hand for Wittgenstein’s
brother, Paul. The Blue Clerk is the custodian
of the poet’s left-hand pages. And who
Is seated at the left hand of the Father?
Is it Ravel or Wittgenstein?
Is it “I”?

 

 

 

 

Liz Howard’s debut collection Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent won the 2016 Griffin Poetry Prize and was shortlisted for the 2015 Governor General’s Award for Poetry. Her second collection, Letters in a Bruised Cosmos, was published by McClelland and Stewart in June 2021. Howard received an Honours Bachelor of Science with High Distinction from the University of Toronto, and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. She is of mixed settler and Anishinaabe heritage. Born and raised on Treaty 9 territory in northern Ontario, she currently lives in Toronto.