Upcoming
Dog: Sonnets (with Joe Rosenblatt) -Completed
Fyre -Completed
A Collision of Seasons (Young Adult Novella) -Completed
Seeing Lessons -In Progress
Frenzy -In Progress
Misc: Lyrics -In Progress
Wake: A Novella -In Progress
Collections of Poems
Cusp/detritus -Anvil Press 2006
Shall: Ghazals -Wolsak and Wynn 2006
Caneide (30 Sonetti, with Joe Rosenblatt) -Schena Editore, Italy 2005
The Wrecks of Eden -Wolsak and Wynn 2001
Starvation Landscape -Chameleon Fire Editions 2001
Black Milk -Get to the Point Press 1999
Somatic: The Life and Work of Egon Schiele -Exile Editions 1998
Her -Wet Sickle Press 1995
And the Silence, Stones --Wet Sickle Press 1993
Anthologies
Joe Rosenblatt: Essays on his Works -Guernica Editions 2006
Companions and Horizons: An Anthology of SFU Poetry -Westcoast Line Books 2005
Poetry and Spiritual Practice -The St. Thomas Press 2001
Chasing Halley's Comet -Laughing Willow Books 1995
Wearing the Yellow Jacket -Wet Sickle Press 1994
CDs
Apocalypse EP -Godlesswrath Records 2006
Exeunt Armageddon -Godlesswrath Records 2005
Inhumanist EP -Godlesswrath Records 2003
Cusp -Krisananda Music 2001
All material copyright Catherine Owen 2003.
Webmaster: Chris Matzigkeit inhumanist@ziplip.com
Cusp/detritus: An Experiment in Alleyways
A glosa on four first lines by Siegfried Sassoon
Shall: Ghazals
12
Caneide
Besos
The Wrecks of Eden
The Dodo
Starvation Landscape
The Urban Angel
Black Milk
After the War
Somatic: The Life and Work of Egon Schiele
Seated Male Nude, 1910
Two ultrasounds
The Last Invitation
Joe Rosenblatt: Essays on his works
from Abject Oceans: The Piscatory Underground World
Companions and Horizons
Featuring four poems from The Wrecks of Eden:
Poetry and Spiritual Practice
Anatomy - for spring
Chasing Halley's Comet
Compulsions
Wearing the Yellow Jacket
Bjossa and the boy on the bright bicycle
Betrayals
Catherine Owen is a shapeshifter of words, a mystic always at the edge of a
precipice looking down into the absolute darkness. Owen is a poet with a decidedly
quirky Dark Side. This is pointedly clear as you immerse yourself in comprehending
Cusp/detritus, a confessional oeuvre par excellence, and a damned compelling one.
-Joe Rosenblatt
Winter light on green walls, greenish
Curtains. He had been pacing much
Of the night – the narrow yellow hall
Between end of the world & world’s end –
Nurses’ station in the middle like Lethe,
A white-pilled wash of nothingness.
Slumping near the window where many leaped
He drowsed and was aware of silence heaped.
No one awake, not Al, shoes hilled
Beneath the sheets, Cass quieter
Than morphine, Runt back in the padded
Room – white bulb, lack of shade –
Nose ring removed to prevent
The suicide of the dead.
He’d seen it all before; he wasn’t scared
He primmed his loose red mouth and leaned his head.
Stage Four by now, a short while
Til release; he’d sign the forms again, pick up
His gear: stereo & guitar, le Manifesto
Communiste, a welfare cheque – enough
For an NDG walkup, a 3 and a half where
He could work, undisturbed, on
His screenplay – “La Vie Continue” –
He seemed so certain all was going well.
The moment shook. A voice burst
From his head – the inheritance has not been
Left you, jerk, blood’s warranty’s expired.
So this was it then; this was it.
He had a letter to write, quick – gone to Lebanon,
Seeking death’s fix – but first the dried-out
Breakfast, a little milk, splash his face
He stood alone in some queer, sunless place
TOP
Owen offers a wonderfully evocative banquet for both sense
and sensibility in these compact poems. Enter and discover
a voice singing both high and low, the full gamut of love
to death.
-Doug Barbour
the drive
For painter Vladimir Mejer (d. July 12/00)
Where a man becomes a leaf upon the earth,
a parade passes. Undreamed of elsewhere,
this body language! A black child licking cinnamon.
An aged goddess braying Elvis. Your uncle jiving
to Brazilian samba on the coldest night
in July. What home have you bequeathed us?
Dark lilies in cement.
An eye’s long division outside pool halls.
This sweet madness shredding through holes until my
hands, my hands, my
hands. Who saw the painter leave?
He folded up his towns.
The sky cannot add the white now
to his gaze.
TOP
This poetical collection is Cerberus-like, three-headed. In the
course of its compilation it has accquired another head: that of
the poet and heavy-metal musician, Catherine Owen, who contributed
to the third section [while]... the second is a cross-breed... the
first eight lines of each sonnet belong to Rosenblatt, the other
six to Owen. Or the converse occurs. [These poems] co-exist in
perfect symbiosis... lavishly imaginative.
-Ada Donati
"If this be my twelfth labour..." and here
Heracles, in light's last pang paused,
for the dog in his mind furled black lips
back over racks of thrice-bared teeth, a hundred eyes
spawning from six, staring him thin as a sizzle
of rain on the noon-high plaza. Kafka's
machine inscribed the sins of language: flesh
amending its transgressions - "Turn over
Doppelganger, you're not done yet!" Who
loves a Cerberus indeed, bar to the underworld
when all one wants is sleep? Heracles
severed the heads but a shadow always returns
on its platter, shining behind walls hewn with exile's
utterings, to snarl, "Kiss me you sword-drawn fool!"
TOP
"The Wrecks of Eden re-animates, superbly, the corpses of the fauna so blithely tortured,
slaughtered, wasted, by our civilization's pursuit of ecocide. Catherine Owen's macabre
menagerie testifies to our gross inhumanity to nature. A superbly clear-eyed poet, an
anti-Romantic Audubon, her precise elegies enter the heart like scalpels."
-George Elliot Clarke
"These are poems of deep and original accomplishment. From the elegiac opening section,
The Lost, in which extinct species of plants, birds and animals are detailed and mourned,
to the masterful sequence of praise which concludes the book, Catherine Owen proves
herself to be observant and attentive to the music of the world. I haven't read poems
this generous in a long time."
-Theresa Kishkan
Extinct on Reunion Isl., 1790.
unassuming things that hold a silent station in this world
-William Wordsworth
If there is a dubious glamour
to being extinct, then surely the Dodo
is the Mae West of the lost.
In youth, it was the only creature I knew
that was no longer alive, except
in images, as almost a poster beast
for the vanished, with its thick, curved
beak, waterfall of tail feathers and stubby,
inert wings. Or inside the language, in expressions
such as don't be such a dodo, or dull as a dodo:
unflattering epithets spawned by inept
observations; sailors intent on meat who mocked
the peace-keeping birds squatting passively
before their guns, as their hounds decimated
the oval silence of eggs. It deserved to be exterminated,
they later said, just sitting there like that,
doing nothing. As reminiscence of this flightless dove,
I prefer Sir Thomas Herbert's words, who
described the eyes of the last-seen Dodo as
like to diamonds, round and rowling
TOP
"Your uniting of pastoral longing with the metal of machine culture is often disturbing...
disquieting, as I am sure you intend. The ten acre plot you write of is now the world..."
-Robin Matthews
"These poems were written between 1995 and 1997 - years in which I, & many others, fought
to
preserve a local ten acre forest in Burnaby known as 'Trillium Trails Nature Reserve'.
They are angry elegies against an economy in which the production of video games is
valued above clean air & water, wildlife & a sense of place through which the spirit can
seek silence & strength."
-Catherine Owen
He is not the cherub of gift wrap,
heaven's letter-carrier, a benign apparition.
In today's city, the angel slaves for corporations,
a security guard whose flaming sword bars
entrance into unprotected edens.
As we first bit the earth, passed its taste
to our children, a nakedness was assumed-
we were cast into suburban zones of knowledge.
Warned away from lichen, deer, wisdom
by pepper spray-this eden (he tells us) is only
the dream of a developer. Reneged
on our innocence-no turning back-
a hot light shines, gum cracks insolent,
on our slow, partitioned loss.
TOP
"A beautifully designed, hand painted chapbook which contains a series of dramatic, well
executed poems by Catherine Owen all centering around fertility, fecundity, lactation and other
horrors of the body. Titles like The Afterbirth, The Two Abortionists and Puberty set the tone
for
what is rather a harrowing collection.
These poems are like being smothered in someone's
cleavage. They convey a sense of
suffocation, a physical feeling of isolation and discomfort
oddly incongruous with our
idea of pregnancy and childbirth."
-Broken Pencil
"A courageous book about abortion arranged in such a way that the reader is drawn
compellingly
into the experience with compassion and empathy. Catherine Owen's poetry is illumined by
grace, mystery and startling imagery which never falls flat.
Every line and image is heightened
by skilled craft and reverenced words.
Here is a major voice in the making."
-LPG
from a quote by Anne Truitt, American painter
And when we sorted matters out after the war - the toys
piled in bags, carpets cleaned of every speck of Playdoh
and Spam, books ranged neatly on shelves, other more delicate
separations begun (child from a woman and woman from...
we were older, the years since we had first
roomed together, at fifteen, recovering from birth,
abandonment by boyfriends having flown past, or not
flown but been dragged through the detritus of children,
our absorption in their well-being. After the wants of them
had settled down to echoes once a week on the phone, we
found our time our own, yes, but not what it had been at ten
or fourteen, before we took men inside us, bellies swelling
with their definitions. We had become too serious, seniors
at thirty-five, too old to play the games of childhood, long
jaded by the mating game, longing for what memory
told us was perfect: untouched skin, a school dance, adolescent
dreams-the distant, sugar-coated past. (In the bath,
our hieroglyphed bodies wouldn't lie for us). We told
each other how glad we were to have a quiet house, only
ourselves to amuse after work, no squabbles with the kids.
In the space before sleep, something else insisted-something
made redundant by haste, betrayed somehow, quivered,
and secretly damaged our wombs shrank
to the size of fists.
TOP
Egon Schiele was born near Vienna in 1890. His father's insanity and subsequent death from
syphilis when Egon was fourteen initiated his artistic preoccupation with the human body as a
manifestation of mental and spiritual torment. He died at the age of twenty-eight. Catherine
Owen, haunted by his works, now brings them into focus for the reader in these sensitive
poems. A remarkable blending of art and life, words and images.
"Catherine Owen's dirty poems about artist Egon Schiele, Somatic (Exile Editions, 1998)
is prized for its I Can Make Anything Seem Perverted quality. Owen's obsessively bawdy
reading of Schiele's paintings - "the infant eats through her hymen," she writes of Young
Mother - show us that Rorschachs aren't just for crazy people anymore."
-Lynn Crosbie
"While Somatic in some ways fails to match the mastery of its subject, it does flash lucid
surprises of language and image that provide illuminating perspectives for the art aficionado,
and that demonstrate the seriousness and promise of Owen's talent."
-Jennifer Duncan
knees are the gargoyles of his body,
carved from an edifice of bone
they glare down at the landscape:
calves and feet form.
thighs spring like sinew bridges,
intersecting roads, muscled hillocks,
all connecting to the pubis:
one-industry town.
the stomach is always snow covered;
one child, navel-size, prepares to slide
down the well-worn path which divides
east and west of this steepest climb.
hips jut like plateaus,
catch-alls for what may fall
down the runnel of the body
and settle.
ribs are farmlands
where martyrs plant,
rows of rock and skin, seeded
by lungs.
nipples are secret landmarks
where settlers drink, draw round
red pleasures on the table tops
at sundown.
his sex lurks, soft outcast, in this city of bone.
TOP
The probe skates the unwanted rise of my
womb. What is unseen is not said.
The technician is brisk, making curt lines of
gel on my skin, pressing for measurements
or brighter visions. I do not feel life in me,
what is moving, beating, is only the darkest
grain, a still life of marks and shade.
*
The student is eager with monitors.
His mind swoops like the probe over my
bloated surface. He speaks of a beauty
I have never seen, an underwater of tropical
parts; follicles are "lovely," muscles
"divine," ovaries and womb as intricate as
a coral reef. What is beneath is known with
new dimensions, a certain light,
clarity of the inside.
TOP
i am the wine
you have tasted
i am the sponge
on the hyssop stick
you sucked
then denied
are you afraid
of my sweetness?
come,
my body is yours
it is the only
last supper
you desire
TOP
Edited by Linda Rogers
Features essays by:
Barry Callaghan, Italo Evangelisti, Ada Donati, Susan Musgrave, Allan Safarik,
Catherine Owen, and others.
"Catherine Owen's satire of a Joe reading imaginatively
caricatures his intense sensibilities."
-Linda Rogers
of Joe Rosenblatt
*
Through the aquarium's porthole, the poet is seen parking his
bathysphere, leashing it to the thermometer beside the copulating
shades of eels. KNOCK, KNOCK - he clears his throat with the
force of an underwater earthquake, grayed locks streaming like
shoals. Great M? Mr Shark burbles inquiry. Tis I, the poet's eyes
announce with aqueous intention, falling intensely upon the scene
within where piranhas knock back pints and the Divine Dogfish, Ms K,
reigns in all her inedible glory behind the makeshift bar
in one corner of her East Van abode...
TOP
Edited by Stephen Collis
Featuring poetry by SFU alumni,
George Bowering, Kate Braid, Wayde Compton, Brian Fawcett, Daphne Marlatt, Roy Miki
Lisa Robertson, Betsy Warland and Rita Wong.
"The poets showcased in this anthology offer stunning evidence
of a particularly unique community of writers, editors,
publishers and teachers who continue to have impact on our
imaginations and whose poetry has been crucial in mapping
some of our most valuable cultural traffic."
-Fred Wah
Antenatal
The Christening
A Little too Abstract
Easter Island
TOP
Edited by Susan McCaslin
Features poems and essays by:
Hannah Main-van der Kamp, Alice Major, Lee Johnson, Sister Eileen Curteis, John Terstra,
Susan McCaslin, Joy Kogawa, David Walter-Toews, Margo Swiss, Richard Greene,
Marianne Bluger, George Whipple, Catherine Owen, John Livingstone Clark and Beryl Baigent.
"Catherine Owen's relinquished Catholicism permeates her work in her recurrence to biblical
themes such as the loss of Eden, reinterpreted in ecological terms. Her most recent book of
lyrics, The Wrecks of Eden, is a poignant lamentation for the destruction of the natural world
that supports us. In the vein of her predecessor Robinson Jeffers, her work compels us to
touch
the earth as a manifestation of the divine."
-Susan McCaslin
the bee clambers
inside the swollen, sloped petals of the unplanted holly-
hock
- a second obscured
but for the way the flower pulses finely
beneath its skin
the throb of pollen
loosening
- a heart inside a lung
*
watch how the bee bores into the node
of the flower and the flower withdraws a little
to receive it and only as much movement
as a breeze occurs as pollen bursts softly
from the wound
*
spawn of sunlight,
bees toss among phlox & laburnum, legs
furzed with pollen like the raised
eyes of braille
- yet unreadable - like their dances
which still annotate the blueprints for their distant
inhuman hives
Also read: Everday Epiphanies: Nature Awareness as Spiritual Practice
TOP
Featuring poetry and prose by the winners of the
Federation of BC Writers' Festival Competition 1995, including:
Gillian McNamara-Savage, Donna Kane, Roseanne Harvey, Valerie Andrews, Marion Jensen,
C.E. Gatchalian, Denny Bohn, Maria Richards, Susan Young, Jack Wang, Vern Switzer,
Les deFosses, Brad Glenn, Billeh Nickerson, Trevor Chaney, Joni Miller, Catherine MacNeil,
T.A. Craig Jones, C.B. Kleiman, Catherine Owen, Mavis Jones, Diane E. Salmon, Bob Spall,
Shannon Stewart, Kathie Austin, Cait Coogan, Terrill Bodner, Shannon Cooley, Heather Conn,
Jon Laursen and Shirley Musekamp.
"The poems from both Catherine MacNeil - It's my Tongue, Mother - and Catherine Owen -
Preparing me for the width he desired - are passionate and well wrought... Chasing Halley's
Comet is definitely worth reading. It'll be a great way to support some very exciting emerging
writers and also a member of that endangered species, the small Canadian publisher."
-Rene Rodin
You who as a child felt the balance of sidewalks,
how in multiples of four your feet should touch
equally until comfort, a weight of reason was reached.
You who set fires in the backyard behind your father's
studio, who lit eight small fires on the dried marsh
grass, all the same size,
until an equality of heat was reached. You
who spoke of this day as a cure, how when the eight
formed one, you knew the sudden destruction
a construct can take. You are not freed from
compulsion, your words continue inside me, their sound
a child's need, carefully placed.
TOP
by: The Stray Dog Poetry Project, featuring:
Myron Neville, Catherine Owen and Chad Norman.
"Strong content, electric images, from 3 clear and confident voices."
-Sue Nevill
"A compilation from a Lower Mainland traveling reading group, inspired by the poetry
and lives of Russian poets such as Akmatova and Mandelstam."
-Catherine Owen
the boy
on the yellow bicycle
rides round & round
with mad eyes
in the heat
of a Sumatran day.
All that weekend
he has been held captive
having sex
with 3 German tourists,
received candy,
money for his mother
and this bright thing on wheels
which soon makes him dizzy,
forgetful
in the dust
and the heat
of the day after all those days,
so much like a whale
trapped in an aquarium far away
swimming round & round
wild-eyed
in something so entirely
man-made.
TOP
if I inscribe your initials
on the smooth, denuded trunk of this tree
and it dies of its defencelessness
then are my love's bright lines
worth anything
against my willingness to kill?
*
if raven's cry at dusk
should collide with the shadow of machines
laying dark over its wild nest
then does it matter
how your eyes
still turn me ash?
*
if the sunflower we grew is false
and a bee mistakes
the dry corona for a pollen cache
then does our realness
amount to much
compared to the countless
lovely traps we fix?
Listen to Dialogue for one voice.mp3