The Coffee Guest
Bonnie Nish interviews Marc Cremore
When Marc
Creamore's first wife left him he began a spiral road downhill, drinking too
much, trying to cope with raising a two year old alone, all of which resulted in
writing self-pitying and self-defensive poetry. When he met his second wife
Donna he realized he couldn't
keep going in this direction and so cleaned up his act, stopped drinking
and once again found a focus being able to see a future for himself. Not having
done anything with his writing for a long time, he finally showed it to Donna
who encouraged him to keep going and do something with it. What this resulted in
was the creation of their own publishing house Frog Hollow Books and Marc's
first collection of poetry 'Tea Leaves and Denim' which would be followed by
three other volumes of poetry.
Creamore
who as a child suffered from rheumatic fever escaped from his childhood
illnesses into books. By the time he was 13 he himself began playing with words.
In grade 11 he befriended Trevor Hughes who was a huge influence in his life and
they for the next five years became inseparable Trevor turned him onto Ginsberg
and Kerouac and Japanese and Chinese Poetry.
"At this
point in my life I became very diligent with words. There was a very Asian
influence. I loved Ginsberg but found the writing too restrictive." Creamore
recalls,. "I wrote the first half of 'Tea Leaves and Denim' before my
downward-slide and the second half after I got together with Donna."
From here
came 'Bleaker Street And Other Observations' where Marc feels he really started
to develop elongated lines and become political. Great lines such as, " Bleaker
Street, Ginsberg's children wander aimless/ on broken sidewalks, numb-eyed,
seeking/ substance in supermarket aisles stocked with/ fleeting hope and
advertisement." litter the book.
His next
book 'Corridors' (which is also available on CD) was written during another
specific time period in his life. Marc who had been going to a reading series at
the Old Times Cafe met such local talents as Steve Duncan, Diane Laloge and CR
Avery. He also met a man who would profoundly influence his life- David
Campbell.
" This guy
gets up with a guitar and starts singing about a hero. I kept going down to see
him. He was there every couple of weeks . He hit something vital in me. His work
opened me up so much."
The two men
clicked and became good friends. For two years he and Donna were involved in a
project with David called Creative Voices out of the Britannia Community Centre.
Regularly 15-20 people would show up to read poetry, sing and play music. And
with all of this creative influence happening around him Marc's book became a
deeper exploration of self with a focal point on morality.
Marc
reflects, " My last book ' The Wrong Side Of The Curtain' is a continuation of
that plus the state of the planet. With the the two towers you have to wonder
why we are still in a bloody cave, beating each other with clubs. We've evolved.
psychological evolution, evolution of the planet and of man. There are
technologies and devises to enable us to live better lives. But we left
something so important behind. We've gone backwards. The basic premise of all of
my books is that we are capable of so much more."
Creamore
who believes that once you tap into your source of creativity you gain a certain
amount of clarity has done that over and over again through out the years. His
deep thoughtful edge has continued to develop and he will no doubt continue to
help us question ourselves in profound ways.
THE WRONG
SIDE OF THE CURTAIN
We’re
standing like forlorn ghosts,
watching a
dead parade pass by with it’s legacy
of dark
secrets,
While one
million harmonicas wail on the wrong side
of the
curtain.
Oh the
wrong side of the curtain,
the veil of
truth inverted, turned inside out,
Where
druids chant beside the burning ash can
of an
international ghetto
Where we
dress our eyes in a fable of brutality
Where the
genetic mystery keeps slamming the door shut
because
it’s imprint was corrupted from
the very
beginning of time
Where
industrial clowns cavort with siliconed sirens,
Make
derelict love in the basements of the towers
on Wall
Street
While a few
blocks away an Afro-American saint puts
his mouth
to a tenor saxophone
and weeps.
Oh the
wrong side of the curtain
where a
deranged monk stands in an empty courtyard
And
embraces texts of separation with his bleeding
hands
Where a
poet whispers from a flaming pyre of bones
Where an
old man sits on a forgotten ledge
and
contemplates an ancient prophecy gone bad
Where a
singular eye gazes down to penetrate
the inner
heart of humanity,
And finds
it vacant, even after all these years,
all these
simple clues,
All these
aches and trembling reverberations
that have
made little or no difference
Because
difference is frowned upon by the diviners
of economic
thrust.
Oh the
wrong side of the curtain
where we
become the creases in the rotting garment
of a dead
mystic
Where we
fall down in the crow black night
and try to
cleanse ourselves with a bar of soap
in a muddy
river
Where we
pray in pews like broken clarinets
Where
locusts keep hungrily dancing across
the
prairies,
Even though
the band laid down it’s instruments
a couple of
Centuries ago
When Europe
disabled the buffalo and the dove
flapped her
white wings and flew to a cave
of silence
That was
once the echo chamber of the initial utterance
from the
mouth of Creation.
Oh the
wrong side of the curtain
where we
resurrect a manifesto of inconceivable
graffiti
Where we
witness naked fear and become rag dolls
in the rain
Where a
hobo weeps without a boxcar
Where the
Madonna tucks her white unkissed breast
into a
rough hewn garment,
Feels her
face wrinkle and crack beneath the paint
of a
surreal canvas
And goes
stumbling down through the annuls of time
in search
of an immaculate stable.
Oh the
wrong side of the curtain
where the
engine travels on a crooked track
Where we
finally arrive at the station and discover
that the
train left 10 minutes ago
Where
Edison’s ghost laughs all the way
to
Hollywood
Where the
dead man climbs out of his catacomb,
dusts the
cobwebs from his eyes,
Puts on his
historically moth eaten robe
and
reenters the coliseum
Which is
still a nightmare of hopeless aggression
even after
a couple of millenniums of sleep.
Oh the
wrong side of the curtain
where the
forest is seduced by the sickness
of a
chemical firefly
Where we
all bear the same maggot infested burden
Where the
angels left without telling us why
Where the
old jeweler closes his blinds,
turns off
the light
And
staggers home to his wife and children who play
video games
Until it’s
time to collapse into a bed devoid of dreams
or
possibilities of imagination.
Oh the
wrong side of the curtain
where the
literary waterfall of Japan evaporates
beneath a
polluted moon
Where the
beer soaked bar stool of separation is never
empty
Where the
void contains one billion spirits
who stagger
across the ever moving sand
Where
Robert Johnson trades his guitar for a shovel,
sits down
at the crossroads of Main
and
Armageddon
And
discusses the burial grounds still to come
with St.
John of the Cross.
Oh the
wrong side of the curtain
where the
ashes and stench of spiritual decay blacken the nostrils
of beauty
Where even
holy ground can sometimes blister the feet
Where our
bones yellow beneath the moist Earth
and its’
centipedes and blossoms
Where Walt
Whitman gazes across the fields
of what
used to be America,
Shakes a
defiant fist and realizing that
the
leviathan that crawls before him is numb
to his once
listened to words,
Drifts back
to the poets’ round table and sips
from a
mystical grail with William Blake.
Oh the
wrong side of the curtain
where
across the street the last folk singer
hangs
himself with a guitar string
Where a New
Age philosopher picks up the remains
of a
distant prayer and casts it aside like an empty
cigarette
case
Where the
laughter of a cicada is captured in
the 3rd
movement of a dead symphony
Where the
implementation of the plans for the next
millennium
is laid out upon a desk
Where the
reality of starvation and poverty is ignored
and the
Third World is a gnat that creates
an itch
somewhere in the wrinkled brow
of the
United Nations
Even though
the Third World has spoken forcefully
in an
explosion of absolute fury and desperation,
Towers
collapsing like dominoes upon the carpet
of
democracy.
Oh the
wrong side of the curtain
where
sparrows pray that the sun won’t fall
from the
sky
Where
bardic fathers moan on the banks of swollen
rivers
Where we
are sodomized by a shadowy hallucination
of
relentless lust
Where a
sunflower wilts outside a rusting iron gate,
collects
the dust and deathly matter of diesel fueled
machinery
And tries
to reflect an image of abundance,
all the
while coughing and sputtering like
a displaced
salmon.
Oh the
wrong side of the curtain
where
skyscrapers stand like sentinels
And watch
over cities that only perpetuate a continuum
of death,
death, death
Where tired
raindrops pound upon broken window panes
and
snowflakes are scarred by battery acid
Where the
hunchback strains every muscle
in an
attempt to keep the planet’s orbit on course
Where we
enter the ballroom wearing boots
of
debauchery
Where we
tear at a parasite that will never leave
the flesh
Where havoc
is created beneath a tree of candles
Where white
crosses weather like rotten teeth
in the
mouth of humanity
Where the
generals are busy conspiring a new nightmare
Where the
song being heard on the airwaves
is the age
old apocalyptic blues
Where we
can no longer walk out into the light
of
breathing ivy
Where green
expanses fail to overgrow archaic
battlefields
Where the
laurels of the past are nothing but
a lonely
tomb
And where I
sit here in some dark compartment
of my mind
Scribbling
a black litany out into the Universe
in the
hopes that some alien scientist,
some until
now unseen messiah
or some
radiant cosmic child
Will reach
beyond this unacceptable malaise
and with a
translucent hand
RIP THIS
ILLUSIONARY
CURTAIN
ASUNDER.
Marc
Creamore
