Poem called 'Lament For A Lady'

         Despite my belief that most people don't make too much money writing poetry, I've started writing poems now. I realize that in poems you can say and feel things that you can't do - or I can't do- painting pictures.  So here's my first poem in a long time called 'Lament For A Lady'.


     Men didn't invent love or lust
     it was there
     before two legged beasts stretched themselves upright
     long ago
     and walked slowly onwards
     in the African dust.

     god didn't invent you
     you were born
     months after your father
     and mother held each other
     embraced each other
     and made love together
    forever in my mind

      i didn't search for you
      you came singing unannounced
       long ago
       a part of a choir
       chanting hymns in the choir's second row
       in a church
       i no longer go to.

       i no longer seek you
       in eager scurrying crowds
       downtown or uptown or in the burbs
       but i dream of you
       not at night time    but in the day's first stirrings
       when the sun's white rays peep above the green horizon
       and then
       i miss you
       and will miss you
       probably forever
     
      
    
    

My Life In Two or Three Short Chapters - Chapter Three

               Deliverance Two - How My Life Finally Improved


            When I was 32 another tragedy hit me. I became handicapped. My knees swelled from chondromalacia or patella femoral syndrome. I now needed crutches to walk and whenever I walked my knees ached.
     I was by now a fully grown man, and a short, stocky, bad person.
     I abused men and especially women. I couldn't control the anger that coursed through me and I was overwhelmed by grief and sadness. People saw me as a person to stay away from. "Oh help me, here comes Dave Jaffe!" one man exclaimed when he met me in someone's back yard. Another man who worked with me as I drifted from one job to another, told me years later," When I worked with you I thought you were crazy and completely paranoid."
      Yet then there came a saviour, right when my life had fallen to its lowest level. Edward, as I'll call this man, was a tall nerdy individual who did three things for me. First off, he introduced me to primal therapy. Then he taught me how to write news stories and longer feature stories. He was teaching me the outlines of journalism. Last he showed me how to access welfare for my savings were quickly sinking to zero.
      Bingo. Ten years after my father found a new life as a salesman, I found a way to survive. My problems were solved. Now in 1976, the second half of my life began. I lived on welfare - at least for a while. I wrote news stories for small papers - sometimes under other names.  In many of these stories I attacked the power holders of B.C. and Canada. "That man's still fighting with his father," one woman I knew said of me. "Only this time he's doing it in print." She was right.
     I continued doing primal therapy and then rational emotive therapy. My anger subsided some and my sadness started to fade. Finally I was grieving the hurts and pains in my life. And for the most part I stopped abusing people, especially women. After learning to write news stories, I took up drawing and then painting. At last I was learning some skills.
      I should point out that I'm also a fetishist who gets turned on by certain parts of women's clothing. I ended up going to prostitutes to relieve my tensions. These visits cost me a lot of money but I had to make them. In my 60's I stopped visiting these women.
       I had a political side too. But in my mid-50's I left political parties and the anti-poverty movements I'd been part of.
      A woman I knew loathed Edward who at one time had helped me so much. "He stole thousands of dollars from me. That man is a fraud." she said. "Fair enough," I replied ."But this man saved my life. If he hadn't come along when he did, I'd be dead by now."
     I am grateful to my friends who put up with me and my tantrums and far out interests. I am also eternally grateful to Canadian taxpayers whose taxes fund social programs that I have lived off. For these programs have kept me alive. Without them too, I'd be long dead.
      This is my life in short and simple words.
      

My Life In Two Or Three Parts- PartThree

                Deliverance


     It must have been March 1965.
     I had graduated from McGill University the year before with a useless degree in English Literature. My parents were shoehorned into a tiny apartment in Montreal's north end. I was jobless, and hopping from one friend's place to another, a man on the move just following in my parent's foot steps and mimicking their endless moving.
      As the snow melted in the streets of Montreal, my father ran into a man he knew.. "Monty," he said," you can get a job selling cablevision to homeowners and apartment dwellers."   My father went around to the address he was given and was instantly hired.
     Then he went out and started selling cablevision.. In the first week he made more than he'd made in the previous six months.
      Bingo he was no longer poor.
      We moved again downtown into a small apartment and I tagged along with my parents. In the next year I dropped out of teacher's college for a second time and then hitchhiked and bused out to Vancouver. I loved this city on the Georgia Straight with its neasrby mountains and mild weather.
    As soon as I came back I told my dad, "we should all move out west to the Pacific. It's great out there." My dad told me that he'd already told his company that he wanted to move to Vancouver and that's where and my mother were planning to go to.  In late 1966 my family pulled up roots again and took another journey. I followed my parents out west  and left Montreal with my sister Valerie in the middle of a December snow storm.
     When we arrived in Vancouver in the middle of night it was raining. "This is the fortieth day in a row that it's raining out here," the cab driver who picked us up told me. "God bless the rain," I used to say years later.It sure beats the snow." But I didn't say something like that in the first years that I lived in Vancouver.
    A few months later in the spring of 1967 I was feeling good. I was preparing to try for the thired time to be a teacher. Yet then tragedy struck
       In late April Valerie the sister I was closest to, died of a cerebral hemorrhage. In September my mother Lillian Jaffe passed away from cancer. In December one of my cousins died in a hospital in London England. I was devastated.
     In the history books, the summer of 1967 is called 'The Summer of Love'. That year as U.S. armed forces fought killed and died in Vietnam, the Beatles's 'Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band' played in millions of North American homes. Thousands of young people left their parents's place for a while to live in places like Kitsilano in Vancouver, Toronto's Yorkville and above all The Haight Ashberry district in San Francisco.
    The young people called themselve'hippies'. They grew their hair long, dressed in casual clothing, smoked marijuana and made love sometimes in old houses. "I'm for love and peace," they said. I could not join this great outpouring of energy. In my history book the summer of 1967 I called "the Summer of death'.
     
         
     

My Life In Two or Three Short Chapters. Part Two

          Part One of My Life.


      In  a few years I'll be gone. Dead. Kaput. Finito.   My body will be cremated and my ashes - I hope- will be scattered along the shores of Spanish Banks.
      Of course, I won't be here to see this. Every year 50 million people die and so for once I'll be part of the vast majority, the 27 billion people who once lived but 20 billion of whom are now gone.
    "Are you married?" people often ask me, a 73 year-old bald old man. "Do you have any children?'.
     I reply in the negative to both questions. Then I'm often asked what did I do in my life. "I'm an ageing impoverished artist," I reply. I painted pictures I say that only half a dozen people ever saw and before wrote news stories that only a few hundred people ever read.
     My life splits into three or four distinct parts. The first part begins when I first came into this world in May, 1942. I was born in England as German bombers scoured large parts of Britain bombing and killing. At first I was lucky. My family wasn't poor and my father owned two businesses.
    Yet then disaster struck. When I was eight or so, my father lost both businesses, and spent money he didn't have. Plunged into disgrace, me, my two sisters and my mum and dad left for Canada to seek a better world.
     At first it was not to be. From about 1953 or 1954 my family fell into poverty. My father an intense working class Londoner, Montague or Monty Jaffe, was a fanatical Orthodox Jew though he never wore the long sideburns or black suits of the really devout Jews. My mother, Lillian Bolloten Jaffe was a declassed formerly upper middle class woman who ended up working in poorly paid claerical jobs in Montreal offices.
    My father started endless businesses in Montreal that just like the ones he'd founded in Britain, all went bankrupt. "Your father wasn't a business man," a man who knew my father well said. "He just didn't have street smarts or know how to save money."
    In Montreal my family moved from one ill-furnished apartment to another, barely ahead of yapping bailiffs and landlords. My dad ended up selling aluminum sidings to poor French Canadians. At this stage of our life say about 1960, we were losers pure and simple.
     Yet slowly life improved. My elder sister Sylvia was the first to escape. She moved to California in 1960, got married, divorced and then married again. To-day she's a wealthy woman who lived in suburban Chicago and is a strong Republican.
     My younger sister Valerie and I stayed behind. Along with our parents we first went nowhere, sweltering in Montreal's broiling humid summers and freezing through its endless winters. But then came deliverance.
          (Continued in next part)
   
    

Starving Artists- Continued

         The Self-Destructive Artist 200 years ago and after



    The myth of the self-destructive artist and poet came out of late 18th century Britain. "Heard melodies are sweet/ But those unheard are sweeter' wrote one early Romantic poet. Yet whatever poets heard or didn't hear back then, some of them died quite young.
     John Keats, a famous English poet wrote some great poems but died of tubercolosis at he age of 25. Keats was born in 1795. He didn't live to see much of the 19th century.
     Lord Byron a bisexual poet from the British aristocracy did get out of England but he didn't live too long either. Byron, says of one  person of him, "was one of the greatest English poets." He made love to dozens of women ansd men and was a cash addict who wasted oodles of money.
     In the 1820's,George Gordon Brown went off to Greece to help the Greeks in their war of independence against their Turkish rulers. The Greeks won the war but Byron didn't live to see it. He died from a fever in Greece at the age of 36.
      Then before Byron and Keats there was Thomas Chatterton the 18th century English poet. He killed himself at the age of 28 in 1770.
     Yet writing poetry didn't always  lead to poets killing themselves or living in poverty.
     "You have lived your elaborate lie'" wrote the young Leonard Cohen. "So let us compare mythologies." Cohen like many talented poets avoided addictions, alcoholism and suicide. So did most other poets. Irving Layton who like Cohen also lived in Montreal, was a flamboyant figure who grew up really poor. Yet he ended up as a tenured professor teaching at the University of Toronto.
    Nor were these two poets exceptions. In post World war Two North America, many creative writers found jobs teaching at colleges and universities. Others took up careers in other fields and still found time to write poetry, and novels, or teach in the visual arts.. So writing poetry isn't always a dangerous task. Only one thing stands out about poetry is that like many other arts it doesn't make you much money, by itself.

Starving Artists- Continuation of previous story on poetry. Part Nine Continued

    Writing Poetry Can Endanger Your Health and Your Life


   Being a poet isn't sometimes just  a road to poverty. It can also lead to an early death. Gwendolyn MacEwen grew up in Toronto. She was three years younger than Margaret Atwood. MacEwen was a good poet too. In the 1950's and 1960's she and Margaret Atwood were great friends.
    Yet MacEwen's literary career just didn't take off like Atwood's. She was an alcoholic and died in 1987.
    Sylvia Plath became a poster child of the doomed feminist woman poet. Plath was a Boston-born prodigy who wrote poetry, short stories and novels. Her semi-autobiographical novel 'The Bell Jar' came out in the early 1960's. A short time later this gifted woman killed herself in London, England.
    Plath belongs to the haunted generation who came of age in the 1930's and after. One of her contemporaries, Anne Sexton was another gifted poet who committed suicide. She died in the 1970's.
     Male poets of this era didn't all get off easily either. John Berryman was another great American poet. "He was one of the founders of the confessional school of poetry," said one critic about Berryman. Berryman had his problems. His demons stopped haunting him in 1974 when he killed himself.
     Randall Jarrell another fine poet of mid-20th century America did himself in in 1966.
     Some U.S. male poets survived but just barely. Theodore Roethke drank lots of alcohol and had bouts of mental illness.He died at the age of 55. "The greenhouse," wrote Roethke , "is my symbol for the whole of life, a womb, a heaven-on-earth." Maybe Roethke never found that greenhouse on this earth.
     Robert Lowell trod down the same path as Roethke though he lived longer. Lowell was an upper class Boston Brahmin who had many bouts of mental illness. He spent some time in mental hospitals. He died in 1977 at the age of 70. Helen Vendler, a critic called Lowell's 1960 book 'Life Studies', "Lowell's most original book." It was acclaimed by many as a poetic masterpiece.
    For some poets in 20th century North America, life was a tough road to go down. Yet this wasn't  the first time that poets had faced mental and physical problems.
      

Starving Artists - Part Nine

       Writing Poetry Doesn't Mean You Earn Much Money


    They are both famous Canadians and not only famous. Until recently, they were both rich. Now only one is. Yet at one time they both wrote poetry. But they rarely write it any longer. For poets like many other creative artists don't make much money from churning out poems.
    Margaret Atwood is a writer, novelist, poet and librettist and is one of Canada's most famous writers. "Margaret Atwood is an icon in Toronto," one of that city's residents says."it takes guts to criticize her back there."
     Montreal-born Leonard Cohen has written songs that are played all over the world. His song 'Hallelujah' has been covered by dozens of artists. k.d. lang sang it at the opening of the 2010 Vancouver Olympics.
   Until recently, when Cohen's financial advisor was revealed as a croo, Cohen's assets supposedlytotalled in the millions of dollars. Yet even to-day Cohen's not a poor man. Now both of these artists started out writing poetry. To-day they may still write the occasional poem but they don't make their living writing poetry. Not too many poets do.
     "Poetry," writes John Berger, "addresses the heart, the wound, the dead. Everything which has its being within the realm of our intersubjectivities." These are perceptive words about poetry. Still, those who write poetry have to eat and  writing poetry these days just doesn't  pay the bills.
     Margaret Atwood started writing poetry in the late 1950's. She wrote some fine poems but this didn't bring in much cash. In 1969 she published her first popular novel called 'The Edible Woman'. She then followed it up with another novel called 'Surfacing." Atwood was now on her way to fame and fortune.
     "Every book that Atwood turns out is usually a best seller," one Vancouver book store worker said back in the 1990's. If she had stuck to writing poetry, Atwood by now would have rated an honourable mention in a Canadian anthology of poetry. Yet she didn't. Fortunately for Canada she turned to writing novels She did well and so did most Canadians.
    Then there was Leonard Cohen. "I'm going to be big," Cohen told his friend Ron Halas in the mid-1960's. "I'll be bigger than everybody including Bob Dylan." Cohen never achieved the kind of fame he predicted basically because his music never became very popular in the United States.  Still, his song writing and performing music gave him money and fame. His poetry like 'Let Us Compare Mythologies' and his novels 'The Favourite Game' and 'Beautiful Losers' were quite good. Cohen I think was a better poet than a novelist. Still, none of his prose works brought in much money. Song writing did.
     What happened to Atwood and Cohen as poets was just typical.  Thomas Stearns Eliot moved around London in the 1920's and after as head of a publishing company. The St. Louis-bornT.S. Eliot just about invented modern English language poetry with his long poem 'The Waste Land'. Poetry opened the doors for Eliot to enter British society. Yet it was his job as a the head of a publishing company that paid the bills, and not his poetry.
      Wallace Stevens wrote some great poetry in the U.S. in the first half of the 20th century. But once again poetry couldn't keep him alive. In the daytime Stevens worked as an executive in an insurance company.

    
   

Starving Artists - Part Eight: The Life of One Film Director.

         Starving Artists - Part Eight


   You often meet very interesting people at a Starbucks restaurant.
     In the summer of 2015 I started to chat with Ross Munro, a 52 year-old teacher at a west side Vancouver high school. He was having his morning coffee at a Starbucks restaurant before going off to work.
     Munro not only helps young people learn to cope with everyday challenges, he's also directed and scripted two feature films and two documentaries. "my first feature film cost me about $50,000 in 2000," this energetic native of Winnipeg says. "My second film will cost me about $75,000."
    I saw Munro's first film called 'Brewster McGee' on my DVD machine.. It's shot in black and white and takes place in a parked car and a nearby fast food restaurant. I liked parts of it but it seemed to me to be incomplete. When I gently suggested to Munro  that the film needed maybe more background or introductory material, Munro smiled.
     "I could have done a lot more," he said if I'd had even more money."
     In this story on underpaid if not starving artists, I've left out film directors and specifically Canadian film directors. This short piece is an attempt to fill that gap. "The film is the art " or most important art, "of the first half of the twentieth century," wrote John Berger way back in 1964. Even to-day with the rise of the Internet, a movie or at least a well-made one is still the most important work of art to-day in 2015.
     Films are incredibly expensive to make and take a long time to complete. I can paint a small watercolour picture in less than three hours. my painting materials cost me less than twenty dollars. I may never sell my work but I always get a great kick from doing a watercolour.
    Contrast this with a director like Munro. Munro writes a movie script in maybe two or three months. He directs the film too. Yet before the film gets shot, he has to find backers to finance his film. He has to line up actors and seek loacations where he's going to shoot his film. Then he and his wife, Maria who is his producer and comes from Venezuala, have to attend to a myriad of other details.
     Once the film is complete where will it play? Only the big and well-publicized American films usually get shown at your local cineplex or mega- theatres .As one Canadian film director once said in effect, "I'll believe that I've made it as a director when a film of mine plays in Penticton, B.C. and all across Canada in towns like Penticton." Only a handful of Canadian directors have reached this stage of their careers.
     Only once has Munro been able to get one of his films shown at the Vancouver Film Festival. His movies so far as I know, have never played for any length of time in a movie house or a cineplex. And the   total amount of money he ever got back was a measly eight American dollars.
     "I got that from one movie house in Seattle that showed ones of my films," Munro says.
    Yet this middle-aged man keeps on pursuing his dream. He's already planning two more feature films, one about a novelist the other about a visual artist. Both will be taking place in the period from the 1930's to the 1950's.
     Like me Munro is an insatiable reader who's always finding new novels to devour. He can discuss in detail many of the novels he's read, including many from Latin America. Of course he's got a family connection here since his wife is Venezulan-born.
     I'm hoping one day that a Ross Munro film will break into the big time. Until then, I must remember the Canadian film directors who struggle on to get their films shown to a wide audience. "Socially," writes John Berger, "the film depends on large urban audiences."
   Ross Munro hasn't found those audiences yet. I hope he will one day. And I wish the same for many other underfinanced and underpaid Canadian directors.