Saturday Poetry with Ben Ladouceur
Today for Saturday Poetry we have Ben Ladouceur on "Vulgaris," which originally appeared in his latest collection, Mad Long Emotion. This is a lovely, if bittersweet, reminder that spring is here, even if we can't enjoy this one like we have in the past.
How wrong does this poem feel today? I don't foresee any long and leisurely bike rides in the months to come, and since I can't see any lilac trees from my front or back windows, their week of blooms will come and go unnoticed. The birds I hear most often are my daily dose of imitation seagulls from my digital alarm clock. (The settings are beach, forest, gong, bells, and radio. Before all this, I went with radio; now it's beach.) Despite how things might feel, it is early spring. So here's a poem that commemorates that. Stay safe, wash hands, shop local, all best, xoxo.
Ben Ladouceur is the author of nine chapbooks, including bpNichol Award nominee Lime Kiln Quay Road (above/ground press), and the collection Otter (Coach House Books), which was named a best book of 2015 by the National Post, nominated for a Lambda Literary Award, and awarded the Gerald Lampert Memorial Prize for best poetry debut in Canada. He has published poems in Poetry, The Awl, and The Best of the Best Canadian Poetry, and short fiction in Maisonneuve, The Malahat Review, and Prairie Fire, among other publications. He was prose editor for Arc Poetry Magazine from 2015 to 2018, and he received the Writers’ Trust of Canada Dayne Ogilvie Prize for Emerging LGBTQ Writers in 2018. He lives in Ottawa.
