Other People's Lives: The History of a London Lot

By Chris Hutchinson

Exciting music, delicious ironies, radiant self-awareness.

With imagination, wit and scrupulous candour, Chris Hutchinson’s poems negotiate and renegotiate the shifting no-man’s-land between self and others, introspection and public life. Here are poems carrying unflinching perceptions on their own innovative, edgy music, refusing inflations of rhetoric and complacent notions of the inner life, bringing skeptical intelligence and radical imagination-those supposedly incompatible room-mates-into electrical connection. The result is a poetry of daring honesty, close observation, and humanity, executed with exhilarating verve and humour.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brick Books
• Release date: Sep 15, 2009
• ISBN: 9781926829333

Chris Hutchinson

Christopher Hutchinson, a young artist and Connecticut native, ran for Congress as a socialist in 2010.

Book preview

OTHER PEOPLE'S LIVES

OTHER PEOPLE'S LIVES

CHRIS HUTCHINSON

Brick Books

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Hutchinson, Chris, 1972-

      Other people’s lives / Chris Hutchinson.

Poems.

ISBN 978-1-894078-75-7

      I. Title.

PS8615.U823O84 2009               C811’.6              C2009-902302-4

Copyright © Chris Hutchinson, 2009

We acknowledge the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP), and the Ontario Arts Council for their support of our publishing program.

The cover image is Night City #4 by Joseph Siddiqi.

The author photograph was taken by Meghan Martin.

The book is set in Sabon and Bliss.

Design and layout by Alan Siu.

Printed and bound by Sunville Printco Inc.

Brick Books

431 Boler Road, Box 20081

London, Ontario N6K 4G6

www.brickbooks.ca

For Anne Grant

Contents

Prologue and Directions

1

English Bay (Vancouver)

Other People’s Lives

The Man Who Lives in the Gazebo

Homeless

Café Poem

A Room without a Door

I Keep a Name

Vocation

Entertaining

Nostalgia

Fin de Siècle

Metamorphosis

A Name

Nineteenth-Century Loner

The Summer Place

2

Game

Continual

As It Was

Mining Sapphire

No City for Young Victims

American Still Life

Small Town: Menagerie

Riddled

Talking

Cross-Eyed

Crosswinds

Crossover I

Crossover II

Crossover III

Someone Else

Suburban Interior Magic

Passing Through

The Way the Day Devolves without You

One Love

Academe (and Emily Dickinson)

Monkey-Man

3

Tautologies of Becoming

Notes from the Top of the World

No Such Address I

Up Above

Veronica Lake: Purgatory

What We Think She Sees

Art

Cockroach

Dear Sidewalk

The Invention of the Aeolian Harp

Whatever It Was

Just Awake

Elevation

In Passing

The Musicologist

No Such Address II

Me

4

Cross-Sections

Especially the Hand or Fingers

Prologue and Directions

To coax me out

from winter, praise

the newborn fingers

of magnolia uncurling

from their husks.

Why resist

the weightless

pleasure, promises

unanchored

as gymnastics

on the moon?

Mark each passing

scent, mildewed and sweet

belonging to the bluish

moisture of your breath.

Never mind the fuse

that lit and sped

your journey,

the rills of traffic

echoing and flanked

by the isolate

vacant tracts.

Note the distant

peaks of rooftops

gathering in the elvish

shapes of fog—

Now moving alone

inside the radiant

prison of my body,

squeeze your eyes

almost shut.

1

English Bay (Vancouver)

An ingenious wind combs the ocean’s surface back

and forth, folds it to black-and-white

piano keys.

The mountains on this coast are not Glenn Gould’s

hunched shoulders—though let’s say the city hums

in homage to his ghost.

Inside a late March sun, gulls flicker and flash—synapses

of a gifted mind? I wish I were a lone disciple,

or at least an audience of one.

But perched everywhere, the anonymous busts of others

like me: shivering romantics, far from genius,

staring out to sea.

Other People’s Lives

              Day appears through

a sieve of dust, through a maelstrom

of institutional schemes and designs,

as other people’s lives kaleidoscope,

a whirlwind of butterflies, photogenic

as a nation-state, perpetually

childlike—

              Night appears through

tear-translucent glass,