My new book Pole Shift has been released!

Pole Shift & Other Poems explores our upside-down world

A draft of the book cover that’s very close to the final version.

INTRODUCTION: Friends, my new book, Pole Shift & Other Poems has just arrived from publisher Ekstasis Editions of Victoria, BC. (Click the link to go to the order page.) Due to multiple converging factors, I haven’t had time to organize much in the way of readings and launch events yet, but am working on it. These factors, as readers of my Substack will know, include the month-long running crisis of the Slocan Valley wildfires that pretty much consumed my every waking hour and all my energy to report on. In addition, there were several delays in the production process for the book, so it was impossible to schedule events. But I’m very proud of this book, if you’ll pardon me for saying so. You can read a few poems from the title sequence here.

Every book could be said to be the culmination of a lifetime’s worth of training and experience, and this book is even more so. I’ve been writing and publishing poetry since high school, though I only took it up seriously in the mid- to late-80s when I began publishing in literary journals and doing reading tours with other poets.

Being an outsider to the academic establishment not affiliated with any university or college creative writing faculty, it was a hard slog to finally get a complete collection of poems published. I have of course published in many other literary journals in Canada, the US and UK, including several anthologies. I’m grateful to Ernest Hekkanen, editor of the late New Orphic Review for believing in my work and publishing it in his journal as well as publishing my first three collections, The Charlatans of Paradise (2005), Star Seeds (2009), and The Price of Transcendence (2015). Some of these books went into two (small) editions—in Canada a book of poetry is doing well if it sells 100–1,000 copies, unless you’re Leonard Cohen, of course. It’s something of a dying art in our failing culture, yet poets continue writing and publishing by the thousands.

I’m copying here for my readers the Introduction to Pole Shift & Other Poems, to whet your appetite and explain the theme that prompted me to write the new poems. Poetry remains our most concentrated form of language and it contains a spiritual depth charge not usually found in prose. For me it’s also about providing a poetic record of the age, in the hopes that, even if our current culture is too dumbed-down to appreciate it, future readers seeking insight into our times will have a ready resource. History gives us the facts of the times. Poetry gives us the spirit, the soul.

Your support of my work is greatly appreciated!

Pole Shift Introduction

1. Shifting Ground

We live in a time when the very ground beneath our feet—literally and metaphorically—is shifting. Some of the sociological changes are organic, the result of expanding human awareness. Others are imposed on us by predatory elites using their unprecedented wealth to advance their power agendas on a global scale. Post-pandemic, we seem to have entered a period best described by Redacted News journalist Clayton Morris as “insane clown world,” as everything that moored us to stability and sanity in the postwar era comes unstuck.

That got me thinking: Besides the usual social, political and economic factors that are historically responsible for such late-empire collapses, could there be more subtle, geophysical forces at work upon the human psyche? Since the pandemic and the micro-divisions cultivated by our social engineers, society is more divided than possibly any time in history. Could magnetic pole shifts have a subtle effect on us, causing errant behaviour?

Living in the post-glacial period for the past 20,000 years or so, we’ve been given a false sense of security about climate, and “climate change” is treated as if it were a new phenomenon almost entirely caused by human activities. The fact is, the Earth is a dynamic, not a static entity. Ice ages, volcanic eruptions, droughts and floods have continually altered the face of the planet. Its stability is only a relative one on the vast scale of geological history spanning millions of years. The past two years have seen unusually busy activity in volcanic forces, including an undersea eruption in the South Pacific in January 2022 that “sent a tsunami racing around the world and set off a sonic boom that circled the globe twice.” [i]

Added to that has been a period of equally unusual, sometimes downright weird, cosmological events such as the high-energy Amaterasu Particle ray that struck the Earth’s atmosphere in 2023, “apparently traveling from the direction of the Perseus constellation in the Northern Hemisphere.” [ii] Scientists are puzzled as to why it should originate from this region of space. We’ve also entered a peak in the solar flare cycle, with one flare in December 2023 resulting in “one of the largest solar radio events ever recorded.” [iii] Then there was the massive black abyss or “coronal hole” that opened on the face of the sun, also in December, “spewing powerful streams of unusually fast radiation, known as solar wind, right at Earth,” according to Space.com. [iv] We should be grateful to our amazing Earth, whose protective atmosphere safely absorbs and disperses such potentially deadly cosmic rays.

Among these forces of change is Earth’s geomagnetic pole, which is shifting. This is not conspiracy theory or New Age theosophy, but science. Although details conflict and scientists can’t be certain of the impacts it may have, extreme weather events, disruption to GPS and global communications systems, and impacts on migrating animals and birds are all plausible possibilities. There have been several pole reversals throughout Earth’s history, with the last partial pole shift happening about 40,000 years ago, when “for a temporary period, magnetic north was south and magnetic south was north.” [v] That event may have contributed to megafauna extinctions due to climate disruptions. [vi] Scientists now think the simultaneous appearance of cave paintings at sites such as Lascaux from this period may indicate that early humans were driven into caves for shelter from the temporarily thinning atmosphere caused by the geomagnetic pole shift. The red ochre used in the paintings may also have been used by humans as a sunscreen. [vii]

These polarity reversals have occurred up to 100 times in the past 20 million years, with the last complete reversal occurring between 772,000–774,000 years ago. Thus, according to scientists, we’re long overdue for another one. [viii] Long-term records kept since 1580 show that “the north magnetic pole moves erratically around the rotational north pole over periods of a few hundred years or longer,” and that this process sped up during the 1990s, when its shift toward Siberia kicked into high gear, from about nine miles per year to more than 34 miles annually. [ix] It’s as if the rapid-fire social, political and economic changes we’ve seen during just the past handful of years is mirrored not just on Earth but in the cosmos itself. Or is it the other way round—that these terrestrial and cosmological forces are having an impact upon us?

2. A Poetry of Relevance

What does any of this have to do with poetry? It has long been my view that poetry of relevance must be sensitively attuned to the events of its day. The late San Francisco poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, politically engaged in his writing to the end of his century-long life, believed it was an imperative for the poet to “transcribe the consciousness of the race.” [x] I’ve always been a proponent for political satire in writing, with the utopian and dystopian classics high on my list of must-reads. From the 1516 novel that coined the genre, Thomas More’s Utopia, through Orwell, Huxley and the realm of science fiction novels and films, writers have sought to satirize the excesses of their societies. The artist’s outsider status in society affords them a unique vantage point, a clarity those at its centre lack.

The postwar aesthetic of postmodernism sought to de-politicize art. As is now well known, postmodernism was weaponized by the CIA as part of its arsenal of Cold War strategies. The goal was to counter the Soviet Union’s socialist realism with a more abstract aesthetic that just coincidentally happened to be stripped of any political content. It was art reduced to pure object, yet another easily controlled and exploited consumer item the West could market globally. The paradox was that this de-politicized art was indeed exploited for political purposes. “Like the New Critics’ ahistorical approach to a text, the paint splashes of Jackson Pollock did not lend themselves to a Marxist or anti-imperialist narrative the way Diego Rivera’s sweeping murals did,” writes Joel Whitney. “A use for culture had finally been found: it was a weapon… Its mission was to nudge the intelligentsia of Western Europe away from its lingering Marxism and Communism towards a view more accommodating of ‘the American way’…” [xi]  

Gary Geddes has said of some of my poems that they employ the voice of “an Old Testament prophet,” sputtering in righteous rage. Fair enough. I’ve written many poems that unapologetically use this voice—what used to be called a Jeremiad, after the prophet Jeremiah. Geddes is the master of subtle yet biting political satire, as in his classic poem “Sandra Lee Sheuer,” about the 1970 Kent State student shootings. He tried repeatedly to write about that tragedy and had scrapped everything but the resulting poem. His reliance on the specific details of one student’s life zooms the focus in from the anonymity of a news report, with its faceless victims, to make one individual’s death painfully real. It’s the principle of “one person’s death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.” [xii] Humans can more easily grasp a tragedy that is up close and personal than one distant in time or place. Geddes succeeds again with this aesthetic strategy in a recent poem on the catastrophic destruction of Gaza.

Is diatribe effective in poetry? Probably not, but then it’s not meant as a rhetorical tool to convince people of anything. It’s a cry from the gut of wild animal rage at atrocity. Our Anglo tendency to mute that agony of rage in favour of the understated does us no favours in this instance. Ferlinghetti says something very similar in Poetry as Insurgent Art: “If you would be a poet, create works capable of answering the challenge of apocalyptic times, even it this means sounding apocalyptic.” [xiii] He did just that when he wrote “Assassination Raga” in visceral response to JFK’s assassination, “a raga in rage / at all that black death…” [xiv]

I’ve always said that if you’re going to take your readers into the Valley of the Shadow of Death, you ought to lead them back into the light again. The Old Testament prophets didn’t just stand on the sidelines and scream criticisms. Their Jeremiads were always a means of urging the unfaithful back toward a healthy relationship with God, a return to spiritual balance.

3. Giving the Soul a Home

I prefaced Pole Shift with this wonderful quote from Rainer Maria Rilke’s perennial classic, The Book of Hours: Love Poems to God:

As it happens, the wall between us

is very thin. Why couldn’t a cry

from one of us

break it down? It would crumble

easily.

It would barely make a sound.

—Rainer Maria Rilke, Book of Hours:

Love Poems to God, 1.6, translated

by Anita Barrows & Joanna Macy [xv]

Rilke was a century ahead of his time in writing poems that were deeply infused with non-sectarian spirituality. Still, his spiritual intuition knew better than to take the atheist path of his compatriots in a century disillusioned by the slaughter of two world wars. Rilke’s path was not atheistic materialism, which sadly most of Western society adopted, but a powerful urge to direct the soul to a higher plane, just as millennia of priests, poets and prophets had done before him.

Rilke was not unconscious of the schisms in society produced by the sectarian clash of religions. He wished to rescue our ancient urge toward God, minus our tendency to create the ideology and dogma that inevitably divide people from one another. In Words from the Dead I wrote that it’s not the content of faith that matters, but the act of faith. [xvi] Ideology divides, whereas faith unites humans in the common urge toward the sacred—that which is higher than our own will. Rilke sought to free us from the constraints of ideology “that prevent us from reaching the invisible soul, this dancer among the stars…” [xvii]  

It’s my sincere hope that humanity is at the bottom of its descent into darkness where the rebound into the light begins. The Tarot card for the Wheel of Fortune depicts a person strapped to each side of the wheel, one with his head up, the other down. When we hit the muck, there’s only one way to go—up. And then, once we’ve reached the apex of the wheel, we’re on our way down again. It’s a process of perpetual motion, as Sallie Nichols writes in Jung and the Tarot:

Life presents itself here as a process—as a system of constant transformation equally involving integration and disintegration, generation and degeneration.… As the Wheel’s turning reveals, nothing exists per se: everything is becoming and everything is dying—not sequentially in time, but all at once. Even as we read these words, some of our body cells are dying and new ones are being born. [xviii]

The cycles of history repeat again and again, ad infinitum. As Will and Ariel Durant observed in The Lessons of History: “…known history shows little alteration in the conduct of mankind.” [xix] Is this a recipe for despair? Not necessarily. Knowing our place in the cycle of history is empowerment, just as it is to know our individual strengths and limitations. Social evolution, at least at global scale, may have proven to be a progressive mirage. Yet individually the potential for spiritual growth remains boundless. Paradox is after all a defining principle in this reality. Such growth is dependent upon our willingness to transcend fear, to never stop learning. It remains true even in our dystopian 21^st century that “knowledge is power,” even if it demands more close attention than ever to separate the false from the true. Closely allied is wisdom, which can be defined as applied knowledge and experience. King Solomon wrote in the Book of Proverbs: “If the wise man listens, he will increase his learning … for wisdom will sink into your mind, and knowledge will be your heart’s delight. Prudence will keep watch over you, understanding will guard you, it will save you from evil ways…” [xx]

Thus, like the man strapped to the Wheel of Fortune, spiritual wisdom and flexibility is key not just to survival but to our capacity to thrive when a world is turned upside down, when the poles begin to shift. Take courage—the cosmos is sending us new light every day.

FOOTNOTES:

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[i] “Tonga Eruption Blasted Unprecedented Amount of Water Into Stratosphere,” NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, August 2, 2022: https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/goddard/tonga-eruption-blasted-unprecedented-amount-of-water-into-stratosphere/

[ii] Jennifer Ouellette, “Meet “Amaterasu”: Astronomers detect highest energy cosmic ray since 1991,” Ars Technica, November 23, 2023: https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/11/meet-amaterasu-astronomers-detect-highest-energy-cosmic-ray-since-1991/

[iii] “Biggest solar flare in years temporarily disrupts some radio communications on Earth, US authorities say,” Australian Broadcast Network (ABC), December 15, 2023: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-12-16/biggest-solar-flare-years-disrupts-radio-signals-on-earth/103237724

[iv] Harry Baker, “Gigantic ‘hole’ in the sun wider than 60 Earths is spewing superfast solar wind right at us,” Space.com, December 5, 2023: https://www.space.com/sun-coronal-hole-earth-auroras-dec-2023

[v] Agathe Lise-Pronovost, “We found the first Australian evidence of a major shift in Earth’s magnetic poles. It may help us predict the next,” The Conversation, February 14, 2021: https://theconversation.com/we-found-the-firstaustralian-evidence-of-a-major-shift-in-earths-magnetic-poles-it-may-help-us-predict-the-next-155040

[vi] Carolyn Gramling, “A magnetic field reversal 42,000 years ago may have contributed to mass extinctions,” Science News, February 18, 2021: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/earth-magnetic-field-reversal-mass-extinctionsenvironment-crisis

[vii] Carolyn Gramling, “A magnetic field reversal 42,000 years ago may have contributed to mass extinctions,” Science News, ibid.

[viii] Jonathan O’Callaghan, “Earth’s magnetic poles could start to flip. What happens then?” HORIZON: The EU Research & Innovation Magazine, December 7, 2018: https://phys.org/news/2018-12-earth-magnetic-poles-flip.html

[ix] Elizabeth Howell, “Is Earth’s Magnetic Field Flipping Soon?” Space.com, last updated July 6, 2022: https://www.space.com/43173-earth-magnetic-field-flips-when.html

[x] Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Poetry as Insurgent Art (New Directions, New York, 1975; 2007 ed.), p. 7.

[xi] Joel Whitney, Finks: How the CIA Tricked the World’s Best Writers (New York: OR Books, 2016), pp. 22, 23.

[xii] Popularly attributed to Josef Stalin, but its provenance is uncertain. “A Single Death is a Tragedy; A Million Deaths is a Statistic,” Quote Investigator: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/21/death-statistic/

[xiii] Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Poetry as Insurgent Art, ibid., pp. 3, 4.

[xiv] Lawrence Ferlinghetti, “Assassination Raga,” The Secret Meaning of Things (New York: New Directions, 1966, sixth printing), p. 4.

[xv] Rainer Maria Rilke, Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, 1.6, trans. Anita Barrows & Joanna Macy, 100^th anniversary edition (New York: Riverside Books, 1996; 2005 ed.), p. 53.

[xvi] Sean Arthur Joyce, “Apocalypso,” Words from the Dead: Relevant Readings in the Covid Age (Victoria BC, Ekstasis Editions, 2022), p. 219.

[xvii] Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Life: New Prose Translations, trans. Ulrich Baer, (New York: The Modern Library Classics, 2005; 2006 ed.), p. 68.

[xviii] Sallie Nichols, Jung and the Tarot: An Archetypal Journey (York Beach, Maine: Samuel Weiser Inc., 1980; 1990 ed.), p. 186.

[xix] Will and Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1968; 1996 reprint), p. 34.

[xx] Proverbs 1:5, 2:10–12, New English Bible with the Apocrypha, Oxford Study Edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976).