Birth of Uncool

By Madeline Walker

You are at your most uncool now age spotted, raggedy, not giving a shit, saucy, insouciant, real, crackly and juicy at once. —from “Crackly and juicy” Birth of the Cool, a compilation album by jazz great Miles Davis, was released in 1957, the year before I was born. That album defined “cool jazz”: elegant, distant, hip, and stylish. Davis and his eight comusicians made it all look so easy. From the time I was very young, I was trying to be as cool as Davis’s jazz: aloof, intellectual, desired, mysterious, alluring, and perfect. Only in my fifties did I understand that I had to relinquish this striving and rebirth the uncool parts of me—those bits that are sentimental, awkward, and vulnerable. This book is an eclectic and uncoolly accessible collection of musings on motherhood, childhood, recovery, faith, and love.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Demeter Press
• Release date: Apr 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781927335703

Book preview

uncool

birth of the uncool

POEMS BY

Madeline Walker

DEMETER PRESS, BRADFORD, ONTARIO

Copyright © 2014 Demeter Press

Individual copyright to their work is retained by the authors. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for its publishing program.

Demeter Press

c/o Motherhood Initiative for Research and

Community Involvement (MIRCI)

140 Holland St. West, P.O. 13022

Bradford, ON, L3Z 2Y5

Telephone: [phone]

Email: [e-mail]

Website: www.demeterpress.org

Demeter Press logo based on the sculpture, Demeter by

Maria-Luise Bodirsky <www.keramik-atelier.bodirsky.de>

Front cover artwork: Michael Carpenter

eBook development: WildElement.ca

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Walker, Madeline

birth of the uncoool : poems by Madeline Walker

ISBN 978-1-927335-37-6

Cataloguing data available from Library and Archives Canada.

Printed and Bound in Canada

This book is dedicated to my parents,

Ken and Virginia, for making life

and to Michael, for making life wonderful.

Contents

I. Recovery

My Ariadne

Storm

Local sources

Recovery means

Feed your demon

The Dr. Seuss Challenge

Bleak trail

Keep

Leaf people

Out of caves into the light

Epistemology check

Third step, a villanelle

II. Youth

The Stag

Schoolgirl

Looking a gift horse in the mouth

Daisy

Coming of age in Toronto

Bell bottom blues

Broad back of life

Paradise lost

Motherlode

III. Motherhood

As was your plan

MOTHER to mother

Cupcake

Big rock candy mountain

Genealogy

Vacation on the farm

Light the way

Youngest learns to ride a bike

Young noble

Eldest son

IV. Coming Home

Around the house: A week of domestic sedokas

Marriages past and present

Rhubarb harvest

A house is a home

A honeymoon tale

NYC Quartet

Death of the planet

Paper sheets

The sex life of a middle-aged woman

V. Birth of the Uncool

Aubade to the body

Elegy

Last cry

Hope shimmers

Fist

Leo

Apocrypha

Ego

Winston’s dream

Poetree

Crackly and juicy

birth of the uncool

Works Cited

Acknowledgements

I. Recovery

If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is thank you, that will be enough.

—Meister Eckhart

My Ariadne

Part I

-1-

I sleep on the ponderous foot of Ariadne,

my world.

I doze in her long stride, she decides

how to walk the labyrinth today.

The Minotaur is a metaphor.

Sub-clinical anxiety and ever-present dread are

the human condition.

My Ariadne punts out dread each morning

with a double kick: gratitude and meditation.

She never noticed Theseus—

Some guy in her peripheral vision.

But that’s ridiculous! It’s not the same myth, then!

She told me she is here to lead me

through this life.

Thank you,

thank you, my Ariadne.

- 2 -

Yes, my Ariadne is married to

Dionysius.

It’s not that he took pity