R. Kolewe
Biography
R. Kolewe was born in Montreal. Educated in physics and engineering at the University of Toronto, he pursued a career in the software industry for many years. He now lives in Toronto and writes full time. His work has appeared in various online and print magazines, and he has published four collections of poetry, A Net of Momentary Sapphire (Talonbooks, 2023), The Absence of Zero (Book*hug, 2021), Inspecting Nostalgia (Talonbooks, 2017), and Afterletters (Book*hug, 2014) as well as several chapbooks.
More can be found at https://kolewe.net
Poetics Statement
What am I trying to do in my poetry? As far as I’m concerned, a poem isn’t a narrative, or an argument, not that narrative or documentary or essay poems aren’t poetry, but they’re not the kind of poetry I want to write. Maybe that means I’m a lyric poet. I’m not quite sure. “Emotion recollected in tranquility” doesn’t exactly resonate for me.
Somewhere or other John Ashbery said that his poems weren’t about an experience, rather they were about the experience of the experience[^1]. I’d take that further and say the poem itself becomes the experience. Ideally that’s at least part of what I’m trying to do in my work. Of course I don’t do it nearly as well as Ashbery did.
One of the things I’m interested in is the way the particular experience of memory is constructed. That’s led me to long-form poems, composed using formal and chance procedures, repetition and error. Both The Absence of Zero and A Net of Momentary Sapphire are built that way.
Citation is part of it too. Every poem lives in a net of interdependent texts and I think it’s interesting to acknowledge and make use of that. So there’s a lot of plunder in my poems.
Another aspect is performance, the sound and rhythm of the poem. For me this means punctuation and line breaks are particularly important. I want poetry to be something other than prose broken up into lines! I think of poems written that way as having “rhetorical line breaks,” and while that can sometimes be effective it’s not what I want to write. (A side effect of all this is that I’m a bit baffled by prose poems, which probably means I should pay more attention to them.)
For the long-form poems the performance of duration is significant as well. Reading one 16-line fragment is very different from reading 256 of them. Something very interesting happens when all those words pile up on each other over a few hours.
[^1]: A. Poulin Jr. “The Experience of Experience: A Conversation with John Ashbery.” Michigan Quarterly Review, vol. 20, no. 3, 1981, pp. 242-255. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/mqrarchive/act2080.0020.003/92:21
Ralph Kolewe is looking into the camera before a darkened backdrop. He is wearing a navy denim button-up shirt and black and white-frame glasses.
Sample of Poet's Work
Beginning Again & Again Is a Natural Thing Even When There Is a Series
12.
Light fading
& rain again, light
rain asking if I
will fade into weather
well we all will.
Is that what this is
when you can say the light
has faded completely
rain continues.
24.
The neighbour’s mailbox across the road
old postman’s shuffle as he
makes his way up the street
in the early afternoon rain.
Any season clearly seen
& no message in the seeing
no messengers
the empty details at arm’s length
entropy when this book is full.
33.
If I wake before dawn (& old, I often do)
& there are a few stars bright
over the lovely lit towers, monuments
that will come down
in the weather that men
& women & all of us have made
I can only remark the quiet
scattered light. This is not a silent time.
Morning is emptiness. You know the rest.
37.
The petals of this week’s tulips
scattered on the table & the floor –
sunshine on the stones outside, cause
& effect of shadow. No end
to remembering difference & sameness.
No end to asking
for a simple explanation, the desire
for a simple straight line
from the beginning to the end remains.
(from A Net of Momentary Sapphire)
https://kolewe.net/a-momentary-net-of-sapphire
3.3.1.0
More difficult than coming through nothing
exists without you.
At a certain point in time the cost of memory
not the same as coming to the end of it under Orion
the smell of death unforgettable revolting sweetness
whether the singularity will be in our past or in the future of our past.
Aphorism & scale independent error silences differ
the noise of accidents
deliberating & there is no refusal. Time & weather
dispossessed, abstract & unbodied the way mathematics is.
Devote yourself to calculation, enumeration,
a book beginning this & ending time, or burnt & one.
Frequencies of froth & foam the result of runoff from farm fields
children playing in the street this afternoon
eating an apple now
sharp edges, diffuse shadows, breathing.
(from The Absence of Zero)
https://kolewe.net/the-absence-of-zero
Triangle
1.
Making something beautiful isn't always.
The cage is locked. The key
isn't knowing. I don't know what the key is.
2.
There are three sides to every history I've found
myself looking back at points A and B
seeing and wondering and desire.
3.
I hold an empty glass dream.
We take our obsessions Bacon said and we pour them in.
We don't choose them but want them know I do.
4.
Let me bring you sweet drizzled with indigo
bruised or robes or innocent with honey
twilight growth in the shadow of my hands.
(from Inspecting Nostalgia)
https://kolewe.net/inspecting-nostalgia
