Dault, Gary Michael

Canada, (contemporary)

[untitled]

  1. I am here because life
  2. has withheld any gated solution
  3.  
  4. Meticulous to the point of clairvoyance
  5. I neglect (I feel it in the snows of my breath)
  6. what alchemists called lubedo1
  7. the redness of days
  8.  
  9. Time piles up at my feet
  10. like tongues of flame
  11. under a pig’s carcass
  12.  

© Gary Michael Dault. The Milk of Birds. Toronto: Mansfield Press (2006).

About the Poet:

Gary Michael Dault (contemporary), is a Canadian poet, writer, visual artist and critic based in Toronto. Dault written for many newspapers and magazines including the Toronto Star, and Canadian Art magazineand has contributed regularly to numerous radio and TV programs, most frequently to TVO’s Studio 2 and The Agenda.

Dault teaches Modernisms: Twentieth Century Culture and Criticism as Adjunct Associate Professor at the at Waterloo University School of Architecture, and is a part-time lecturer in the Image Arts Department of Ryerson University.

A prolific writer of poetry, with three books published, as well as magazine articles, catalogues for museums and art galleries, Dault also has contributed a weekly art review column, Gallery Going, to The Globe & Mail. [DES-06/14]

Additional information:

  • Gary Michael Dault at http://www.garymichaeldault.com/
  • Nothing Much – And lubedo is too, that stage in the alchemical transformation, white to red to white again, where desire manifests and the human soul bonds with the world soul.
  • The Amazon.com notes: The 100 poems making up The Milk of Birds (the title comes from a chocolate candy the author’s partner loved when she was a girl in Poland) began as a deliberate homage to Kenneth Rexroth’s 100 Poems from the Chinese (1971).
  1. “In alchemy, the transference of white (albedo) to red (lubedo) and back again signals the manifestation of desire and the subsequent engagemant of the passions that then leads to the admixture and thus the ‘integration of the human soul’ with the world.”
    Kurt Schwitters, in Elizabeth Burns Gamard, Merzbau: The Cathedral of Erotic Misery (2000).[↑]

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