Glenn Kubish

Wordsworth, de Botton reminds us during this, the Christmas season of reading books and listening to music and remembering events, believed that spots of time spent in nature were, when recalled, correctives against the corrosive work done to human souls trapped in the enmity and envy that course through cities and industrial workplaces. This is from Book Twelfth, The Prelude: There are in our existence spots of time, That with distinct pre-eminence retain A renovating virtue, whence—depressed By false opinion and contentious thought. Or aught of heavier or more deadly weight, In trivial occupations, and the round Of ordinary intercourse—our minds Are nourished and invisibly repaired; A virtue, by which pleasure in enhanced, That penetrates, enables us to mount When high, more high, and lifts us up when fallen. The pic of Shelagh standing red-coated in the September snow at Pyramid Lake is a spot of time from 2017 for me. The video is poetry in slow motion: ...

Joe South said it pretty well then: Oh, the games people play now/Every night and every day now/Never meaning what they say now/Never saying what they mean. Eliot found words for the way words don't want to be found: Words strain/Crack and sometimes break, under the burden/Under the tension, slip, slide, perish/Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,/Will not stay still. I listened to South as a boy. My parents had cool LPs. I found Eliot as an undergrad. I love those lines from Burnt Norton. The poet uses perish and decay to talk about words! As if they were alive. And that word still that ends the line, what connection is there to the plea in Ash Wednesday to teach us to care and not to care/Teach us to sit still .?  (Perish. St. Francis Parish. Larry Parrish. Parrish played for the Expos before the parish had perished, and before the Expos had, too. Perish/Parish/Parrish the thought. Anyways.) I was considering these and other things yesterday a...

Edmonton Journal reporter Elise Stolte has asked her readers to share their favourite memories of the North Saskatchewan River. Or a favourite picture or hidden beach or a cool spot on the river that is so big and quiet we always miss it. My favourite memory of the North Saskatchewan River hasn't happened yet. I mean, I know what it would be, but it just hasn't occurred. Maybe it's not possible. Maybe it's not cold enough. But I do have a favourite photo, so far. Here it is: This is the view this morning from the 16th floor of ATB Place in downtown Edmonton where I work. It shows two rivers, two flows, one of traffic on 99th St., one of water. There are many days when the water is moving faster! I love the shot because it won't let me stand still. Am I in the present, the tense ruled by the automobile, or am I in the past, when the now-forgotten waterway was the channel of transportation and commerce? It's the water that brings a fragment of a pas...