This month’s Versed in Florida is with poet Kelly Canaday of Naples. She’s a student at Florida Gulf Coast University where she’s majoring in English and minoring in Creative Writing. She’s also co-president of FGCU’s Creative Writing Club. In today’s selection, Canaday draws from the works and style of writers including John Updike, Piers Anthony and Jim Morrison to explore post-modernist themes on the way our minds work and how we perceive reality and meaning. We began our discussion exploring a bit about the writing process itself and how the audience comes into play in the mind of the writer when first putting pen to paper.
Earth Portrait/Ruined Choirs
The space my mind occupies: a house
with a pale pink rug and soft heat.
There’s an itch in it,
a water moccasin,
an oil painting,
computers that have the hierarchy of angels,
and a globe on a string in a dark room.
Let them see fences drawn tightly
Let them walk through sprinklers that start to
smell like crab rangoon,
Let them see sockeye salmon dyed pink while
workers hum show tunes,
Let them condemn the wretchedness of bumper stickers
and habit,
of Hyde and Papoola,
and the slow blinking cat
Neurons die by the time I order my soup
And yet I take my coin from the vase
and dip them in clay, waiting.
As sweet powder-fresh smoke
in a ransacked village rises,
we all make crude remarks about
the living days, and everything in between.
We want to fall, to join the nuns
of the playground,
the men by the bus stop howling,
the armed guards and secretaries
of the planet, to feel amused once more.
Death is darkness with a made up name,
It’s a classroom where we steal each other’s memories,
we are all in a hall
with letters on our doors,
like singers at the end of a show
where visits are possible,
but it doesn’t occur to us
through the brick
and our gumball machines,
our desperate posters,
like a cheap college town.
Our shows don’t make sense, but our letters would
if we cared enough to write them
while people put roses across
a fresh perfumed grave.
