up my idiosyncrasies – a bio
by richibi
___________
for a bio with which I’ve been asked
to provide an online poetry magazine
I’ve been encouraged to apply to, I’m
submitting the following text
I thought you might enjoy it
Richard
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my name is Richard Bisson, from
which you’ll intuit my French
Canadian background, though I
write mostly in English, with no
trouble however in French, my
mother tongue is le français
I am thus imbued, undoubtedly,
with that sensibility, my peers
most of all Marcel Proust, whom
I imbibed for 33 years, in French,
page by page, reading each out
loud as though it were my own, I
cannot but be replicating now his
rhythms, his aesthetic, his view
of the world
it didn’t take me as long to read
Homer, in the thunderous Robert
Fitzgerald translation, – a mighty
roar resounding still from the
ninth century before the Christian
Era – from him I learned to speak
from the heart, it’s not one’s style
one has to master, but one’s
humanity
Robert Browning gave me the
dramatic monologue as a poetic
device, a gift he’d received from
Shakespeare himself, of course,
the unbridled freedom of his own
literary imagination
Carl Sandburg‘s “Chicago“ taught
me to talk about every wo/man,
about things even my own folks
were doing
Collapsed“ showed me that even
apparently inconsequential acts
can be poetry, poetry in the
apparently humdrum
Mary Oliver is a strong present
influence
the cadence is entirely Beethoven,
with some help, I must admit, from
the atonalists, Schoenberg, Berg,
lines
I call what I do prosetry, a word so
new my computer won’t even let
me write it, I’m a prosetrist, this
word either
I want to link everyday experience
with poetry, make poetry in the eye
of the beholder, where truth and
beauty lie
if people can see what I see, they
can see that way themselves, it’s
something one learns, and it’s all
in the way one entrenches words
and ideas
I eliminated the word “if” from my
vocabulary once, for being then
too speculative, it changed my life,
I’ve replaced it since with the word
“miracle”, that has also changed
my life
I am 67 years old
I live in Vancouver, Canada
I consider myself to be, at this
point in my life, bibliosexual, I
sleep with my books, and we’re
all still getting along just fine
may you be so blessed
Richard
psst: also Anaïs Nin, for the
intimacy of her diaries
o, and Woody Allen, for
giving up before his
nihilism and just
laughing
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