{"id":10992,"date":"2022-05-11T15:33:24","date_gmt":"2022-05-11T10:33:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/mc-warrior-disappearing-minglewood-blues\/"},"modified":"2023-02-14T01:32:13","modified_gmt":"2023-02-13T20:32:13","slug":"kim-trainor-on-disappearing-minglewood-blues-by-mc-warrior","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/editorials\/kim-trainor-on-disappearing-minglewood-blues-by-mc-warrior\/","title":{"rendered":"Field Notes: M.C. Warrior’s Disappearing Minglewood Blues<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

M. C. Warrior\u2019s Disappearing Minglewood Blues<\/em> documents his life working on the BC coast, as a logger, a fisherman (herring gillnet and salmon seine), and as a union activist. The poems are organized thematically and by work history; section titles signal each theme, such as \u201cBushed,\u201d \u201cAt Sea,\u201d and a section with union poems entitled \u201cRevolutions are Festivals of the Repressed.\u201d As a whole, this collection gives you the sense of a man with a notebook and a pencil in his pocket, recording field notes over the course of a working life, scribbling down impressions after a long day\u2019s work, or during a break or shut down. He captures beautifully the rhythm and seasons of a working man, as well as the dark watchful atmosphere of the coastal rainforest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"\/<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In \u201cquitting time\u201d we learn of the daily round, the constant waiting: \u201cas i climb over the cold-deck pile i think \/ how after lunch i\u2019ll be waiting \/ out the four hours \/ till quitting time, \/ at quitting time waiting for sunday, \/ on sunday, for fire season or a strike, \/ after fire season, for the winter layoff.\u201d The repetition of the phrasing is simple but effective, and introduces the particularities of seasonal logging work, with its fire seasons and winter layoffs. Yet this monotony can also be punctuated by sheer terror. In \u201cseven long\u201d Warrior recalls a near-miss by a siwash (an obstacle that can create a dangerous rebound by a wire) that gives him a flashback to a less fortunate logger in his past: \u201cheap of yellow raingear \/ splayed against torn earth \/ and rotting snow, lying \/ beside his tailhold where the siwash \/ had sliced through blood-red alders \/ and jumped a creek  \/ to catch him.\u201d The near-fatal accident is neatly echoed in the siwash slicing through \u201cblood-red alders,\u201d which stand in for the flesh of the man; logging gear is personified, dangerous\u2014jumping a creek \u201cto catch him.\u201d The title refers to the alarm of seven long whistles meant to alert the crew that someone has been seriously injured or killed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the pleasures of this book comes in encountering the technical vocabulary of Warrior\u2019s work as logger and fisherman\u2014siwash, hooktender, grapple<\/em>\u2014terms which are glossed as needed, but are woven naturally into each poem: \u201call night I break up jackpots and manoeuvre \/ in caulk boots along 6\u2033 steel I-beams \/ in order to buck logs trapped in the side-lift\u201d (\u201cthese double shifts\u201d). The other pleasure comes from reading a poetic diary of the BC past, from the perspective of a worker. Warrior\u2019s precise, spare lines offer evocative snapshots of the 70s and 80s, and of the coast\u2019s dark, slumbering power, contrasted with the thin veneer of western industrial civilization. This contrast is captured succinctly in \u201cnorthumberland channel: 04:30 hrs, December 14,\u201d where we are offered a single image: amidst the smell of \u201cdiesel tinged with brine\u201d a tugboat is observed out in the channel, \u201clike a horizontal christmas tree \/ -green and red and ice white\u2019 \/\/ gliding deliberately across the frigid black water.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

Bios<\/h2>\n\n\n
\r\n
\r\n \"kim\r\n <\/figure>\r\n
\r\n

Kim Trainor<\/a><\/h3>\r\n

Kim Trainor<\/strong> is the granddaughter of an Irish banjo player and a Polish faller who worked in logging camps around Port Alberni in the 1930s. A thin fire runs through me<\/em> appeared with icehouse poetry in 2023. Her poems have appeared in Anthropocenes (AHIP), Ecocene, ISLE, Ecozon@, Dark Mountain<\/em> (UK) and Fire Season I <\/em>and II<\/em> (Vancouver). Her poetry films have screened in Berlin, Athens, and Seattle. Her current project is \u201cwalk quietly \/ ts\u2019ekw\u2019unshun kws qututhun,\u201d a guided walk at Hwlhits\u2019um (Canoe Pass) in Delta, BC, featuring contributions from artists, scientists, and Hwlitsum and Cowichan knowledge holders. [updated in 2023]<\/p>\r\n <\/div>\r\n <\/div>\r\n <\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

M. C. Warrior\u2019s Disappearing Minglewood Blues documents his life working on the BC coast, as a logger, a fisherman (herring gillnet and salmon seine), and as a union activist. The poems are organized thematically and by work history; section titles signal each theme, such as \u201cBushed,\u201d \u201cAt Sea,\u201d and a section with union poems entitled […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"1703","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_relevanssi_hide_post":"","_relevanssi_hide_content":"","_relevanssi_pin_for_all":"","_relevanssi_pin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_unpin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_include_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_exclude_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_no_append":"","_relevanssi_related_not_related":"","_relevanssi_related_posts":"15943,10427,10455,10759","_relevanssi_noindex_reason":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1703,1749],"tags":[],"genre":[21],"publisher":[200],"issue":[],"poet-in-residence":[],"series":[3132],"topic":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10992"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10992"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10992\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10992"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10992"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10992"},{"taxonomy":"genre","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/genre?post=10992"},{"taxonomy":"publisher","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/publisher?post=10992"},{"taxonomy":"issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/issue?post=10992"},{"taxonomy":"poet-in-residence","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/poet-in-residence?post=10992"},{"taxonomy":"series","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/series?post=10992"},{"taxonomy":"topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/topic?post=10992"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}