His power comes from images always drawn from everyday Island life. Milton James Rhode Acorn was a Canadian poet. He was born in Charlottetown (Prince Edward Island) and was a World War II veteran. http://meetingbenches.com/2017/04/stunning-canadian-landscapes-quebec-region/ In Montreal he published his early poems in an political magazine. With a radical personality and strong working-class sentiments, he translated these elements into his poem writing. His first collection of poems was called “In Love and Anger”. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvvo7YMEYHw In 1975 his collection of poems “The Island Means Minago” won the Governor General’s Award. Before his death in 1986, he lived in Vancouver, Toronto and Prince Edward Island. There is selection of two beautiful poems to read: The natural history of elephants, I shout love, I’ve tasted my blood.
THE NATURAL HISTORY OF ELEPHANTS – In the elephant’s five-pound brain. The whole world’s both table and shithouse. Where he wanders seeking viandes, exchanging great farts for compliments. The rumble of his belly is like the contortions of a crumpling planetary system. Long has he roved, his tongue longing to press the juices from the ultimate berry, large as but tenderer and sweeter than a watermelon; and he leaves such signs in his wake that pygmies have fallen and drowned in his great fragrant marshes of turds. In the elephant’s five-pound brain the wind is diverted by the draughts of his breath,rivers are sweet gulps, and the ocean after a certain distance is too deep for wading.The earth is trivial, it has the shakes and must be severely tested, else it’ll crumble into unsteppable clumps and scatter off leaving the great beast bellowing among the stars. In the elephant’s five-pound brain dwarves have an incredible vicious sincerity, a persistent will to undo things. The beast cannot grasp the convolutions of destructqon, always his mind turns to other things – the vastness of green and of frangibility of forest. If only once he could descend to trivialities he’d sweep the whole earth clean of his tormentors in one sneeze so mighty as to be observed from Mars…
I SHOUT LOVE – I shout love in a blizzard’s scarf of curling cold, for my heart’s a furred sharp-toothed thing that rushes out whimpering, when pain cries the sign writ on it. I shout love into your pain, when skies crack and fall like slivers of mirrors, and rounded fingers, blued as a great rake, pluck the balled yarn of your brain. I shout love at petals peeled open by stern nurse fusion-bomb sun, terribly like an adhesive bandage, for love and pain, love and pain are companions in this age.
To pursue this issue, you can digit: https://www.amazon.com/More-Poems-People-Milton-Acorn/dp/0919600107
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