Showing posts with label Keith Garebian. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Keith Garebian. Show all posts

Tuesday, January 05, 2021

Reading in Toronto

Against Forgetting — Keith Garebian's collection of twenty-eight poems was recently published by Frontenac House Poetry. 


A reading is scheduled for Saturday, January 23, 2021, at 5:00 pm in Toronto which will include some poems and will be followed by a Q &A.

To join the reading, simply visit this link at 5 pm on Jan 23rd 2021:
https://meet.google.com/otd-zzgs-syd












Keith Garebian is the author of eight books of poetry and eighteen books of nonfiction, including the acclaimed biography William Hutt: Soldier Actor (Guernica Editions, 2017). Against Forgetting (Frontenac House Poetry, 2019) is his eighth poetry collection.

Monday, February 22, 2016

Keith Garebian: THE WALLS OF DIYARBEKIR

Old walls, volcanic rock.
A shape of containment, 
relics and small lives
cloistered in silence. 
Rock by black rock, they lived in this place
which closed them in. Old walls infested
with snakes, scorpions, and elegies
of spider webs.

Always hard 
not to have a safe place,
to feel cut off
because your spire, Sourp Giragos,
stands taller than a minaret. 

A foreign people, these ancestors
for one who is not hemiserim.1
But they have something to tell me
even when their stories are evasive
because they can’t name all
that was destroyed of their race.

Stonework of penetrable dreams
at any view.
Stone, metal, and spirit
locked in spirals
diminishing together.
On this side of silence
there are no smiles.

Yet we must dream above 
the fallen bell-tower,
the eight-sided clock
with bell cast in Istanbul.
Dream of poems in these walls
where one sad person talked to another,
songs surging out of souls
singing to the moon
after slow sunsets.


1 A person of this place


This poem was recently shortlisted for the GritLit Poetry Contest run by the Hamilton Arts Council in Canada. It will be included in Mr. Garebian's next poetry collection, currently entitled Armenian Elegies.

Tuesday, July 30, 2013

Armenian-Canadian poet Garebian wins William Saroyan Medal

The Armenian Poetry Project wishes to congratulate Keith Garebian who recently won the prestigious William Saroyan Medal, awarded by Armenia's Ministry of Diaspora, for contributing to the dissemination of Armenian culture in the Diaspora, prominent achievements in the sphere, and contributions to the relations within Diaspora Armenian communities.

Friday, April 20, 2012

Keith Garebian: THE MURDER OF HRANT DINK

It is a story, Hrant,
repeated for generations,
a long story that keeps
happening over and over,
growing in the telling until you reach
the edge of the world,
tracked down while the sun cries out
against you, and darkness swallows the day, 
and suddenly there’s silence, while you keep running
within yourself in the grim trespass of pain.

Your killers turn you into a sacrifice—
something special which becomes sacred,
incandescent against deniers
who devour their nation.

Your body in the street, after threats and trials 
cannot break you—
bleeds fear of what else might happen.
And the mourners cry out your name
with love and despair, having come
to see your body, 
the story itself and not simply its name—
and they call out your name over and over again,
wanting to identify with you:

They are all Hrant Dink.
I am, too.


This poem from the collection Children of Ararat appears in APP with kind permission of the author, Keith Garebian

Thursday, April 19, 2012

Keith Garebian: ADAM’S FINAL TRUTH

So rare was his warm touch on my head or skin
I cannot remember it, the waters of childhood
turning murky with faults, foam receding
from toes in sand as I watched him battle
the waves, a feeling of things shrinking
away from me underfoot. He was powerful
then, his muscled body glistening,
his legs contesting currents. I thought
for a while he was the strongest man
in the world, one who could tame the sea,
command the beach, own a kingdom.
He was a romance—his body
magnified, separating light
from darkness, forcing water
to swallow defeat.

Cancer shrank him in old age.
I was not with him when death came
in the municipal hospital, his lips
parched, the intravenous drip silent,
moonlight grim upon the window.
He died in his sleep, unable to reach
for water on the table, unable to gasp out
his plague of thirst. His mouth
a small black hole, caught
with grotesque suddenness
in the rigor mortis of unspoken
havoc. It locked open
in a silent, parched cry.

A strong man shrunk 
into the final truth of mortality.
How small his emaciated body seemed,
its bones and shrivelled skin
relics of an ultimate
abandonment.

But he has grown
in me as I stir memory’s water:
His story from another century
bearing me with it, washing away
darkness, despair, devastation,
yet leaving the face
of a dead man, diminished
in body, and a dry ground
for reconciliation—
his shadow in the grave,
and a pain greater
than pain, immeasurable
distance from here
to heaven, unforgivable.


This poem from the collection Children of Ararat appears in APP with kind permission of the author, Keith Garebian.

Friday, April 16, 2010

Keith Garebian: DIKRANAGERD

When he talked of Dikranagerd
my father’s eyes vanished
into a town sometimes Turkish,
sometimes Russian,
history as swift as a flood,
roots swept away
with crops and trees, fields
dissolving, everything muddied.
The only permanence—Ararat,
In white caps neither growing
nor breaking, awaiting
some angel to deliver
the landscape:
the stone-faced churches,
rocky fields,
oxen pressed each to each for heat
like dark ophans in pictures.
Perhaps I would have died with history,
grandparents and aunts, a whole tribe
uprooted from metallic ground,
hard as the heels of assassins,
or the bones left by ravenous dogs
too weak to chew them.
My father always sipped his tea noisily,
teeth braced the way he flinched
from memories, no sugar cube
to sweeten his loss,
slowly re-tasting his life
In slurps, a far-away look in his eyes
once gold in Dikranagerd
* Dikranagerd won first prize in a Canadian competition

Wednesday, April 07, 2010

Keith Garebian's new book is now available

Keith Garebian is a widely published, award-winning freelance literary and theatre critic, biographer, and poet. Among his many awards are the Canadian Authors Association (Niagara Branch) Poetry Award (2009), the Mississauga Arts Award (2000 and 2008), a Dan Sullivan Memorial Poetry Award (2006), and the Lakeshore Arts & Scarborough Arts Council Award for Poetry (2003). This is his fourth book of poetry.


ISBN: 978-1-897181-32-4






If we put our ears to the ground, we will hear “death by wholesale subtraction,” we will hear the story of shoes lost and the sounds of shoes boiling. We will hear the powerful passionate voice of Keith Garebian who will not be silenced and whose tongue “licks the caves where the dead lie in hibernation.”
—Joy Kogawa
In Children of Ararat, Keith Garebian, relentlessly and with an optic heart, pursues the suffering of the victims, exposes historical hypocrisies, and pleads with the world to acknowledge the truth about that dark chapter in the lives of his people. The Armenian genocide has certainly stung Garebian into poetry. These poems are a splendid memorial which will continue to haunt the reader long after he has put them aside.
—Henry Beissel
Rage, for it to work on the page, requires a control so stern it seems like ease of phrase; historical pain made personal cannot be made convincing without such control and craft as is found in these poems by Keith Garebian.
—Barry Callaghan
If you want to feel how deeply a genocidal history can impact the imagination, read these brave, passionate, relentless and incandescent poems by Keith Garebian.
—Peter Balakian
Children of Ararat addresses the legacy of the Armenian genocide. A son shaped by his father’s experience serves as witness to the aftershocks of brutality. This poet is unafraid to face the horror that is too often the result of politics and too much the truth of history.
—Jury, Dektet 2010


Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Tuesday, September 09, 2008

Keith Garebian: FIBONACCI VARIATIONS




1. ETHNIC CLEANSING 2. ARMENIAN SOUP

He Grass
calls weeds
the genocide buds, leaves
and his jihad make a soup
an ethnic cleansing, and so in a battered copper pot
becomes father to a race of Al Zarqawis. that they drink and vomit,the
starving Armenians.

3. STRONG MEDICINE 4. TURKISH QUESTIONS

A Where
love is
for facts Christ now?
and unvarnished truth: Where is Jesus?
proves too strong a dose the Turks mock, leading a
for the Turk who coughs up daily falsehoods. donkey with a mangy dog
on its back.


5. ARMENIAN QUESTION 6. DEPARTURE AND ARRIVAL

Who’d They
choose leave
this history a place
we have lived of sudden knives
for centuries in ruined Eden slicing into young and old
enduring holocausts by murderers and arrive where death burns
who never abide truth? through any skin

Monday, September 08, 2008

Keith Garebian: FIBONACCI POEMS



1. MAT 2. DHIMMI

To I’ll
be tell
a hai you why
is to be some dhimmi
a mat for the Turk speak only Turkish
on which to wipe his dirty feet they risk having their tongues cut out

3. SULTAN 4. RITUAL

A Let
man us
who sits torture
on his throne rape and kill
drinking, eating, and then pray to Allah
murdering with bejeweled hands the All-merciful for reward

5. BOY COLLECTION 6. HAMID’S DINNER

Did Was
they his
desire squash stuffed
boys for work with fresh
or sexual pleasure— young Armenian flesh
Hamid’s Ottoman officers? served on a warm silver platter?


7. CIVILIZATION 8. TURKISH NERO

Is The
it mad
Europe Sultan
cleaning knives makes music
with elegant cloth while Armenians burn
for the mad Sultan and his killers? in a wholesale ethnic cleansing

Wednesday, September 03, 2008

Keith Garebian: BEHEADING

Dressed in fezzes and uniforms,
moustaches thicker than their lips,
sinewy arms crossed in proud distinction,
they sit like pashas at a table,
staring straight at the lens,
while two male heads lie on platters,
spattered with blood. The camera
doesn’t lie, its details
to be passed on to centuries,
living proof that gets in the way
of cold denials. A moment
defining what they did in their spare time,
before dreaming up reasons to round off
genocide to zero.

Keith Garebian

Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Keith Garebian: EATING SHOES

(Rev.)

They ate mouldy shoes boiled for three days.
Hands which had grown vegetables, surrounded
by cows and dogs, lifted limp laces
like pasta. Sick men with wolf faces,
hoarse voices, and grotesque lips.

The roots of their hunger remembered
kitchens and tonirs baking lavash,
green vine leaves climbing webbings,
assiduous aunts boiling near ovens,
fierce chain-smoking uncles, tussling children,
pimply adolescents among fat flowers,
glitter of finned fish,
spicy oils and raw meats slashed
for grilling. In the orchards,
black grapes dark with dreams
and pomegranates with ruby fire.
Under the cool shadow of Ararat,
appetites flourished in town-squares and fields,
throats throbbing with promise of plenty.
Miles away, the sea yawned,
sated with shimmering food.

They were marching somewhere
in the desert’s furnace, seeking caves
where they could scoop out refuge
before blood became a processional
underground. A lucky few
found corpses with shoes,
knelt in the black furrows of death,
and plucked up paltry leather
to make meals from plunder.

Insanely single-minded about hunger,
dull jawed, they ate hide
as if it were prime beef,
forced it down their raw throats,
mouths creating juice, minds
pushing back death with bony fingers.
Boiled shoes would give them life
so their naked feet might move
through calendars of bayonets,
burning wind ringing in ears,
eyes cooked by a saturnine sun.
Shoes had passed from feet to feet,
age to age, rubbed and scuffed by stones,
joints glued like perfect sockets,
relics of animals on dry steppes.
Heels broke apart like bones,
tongues of hide tore in flaps.
When they were full,
small nails were left for ravenous dogs.

Leather fed bad dreams, delirium,
ghosts. Centuries of Turkish heels
on necks the colour of sand.
Time stumbled over shoes,
fell through their holes
into the seams of rocks
where names disappeared
in the dank smell of clay
as scimitars sliced the horizon.


Keith Garebian
Dec. 24/07

Wednesday, August 20, 2008

Keith Garebian: GHAZALS IN HOMAGE

1
The clouds are electric around Ararat.
Some of the dead burn fissures in the sky.

When I look at Masis, I see Noah’s ark
empty and forlorn, broken by the flood.

The ark could not help the unicorn
which fled and drowned in the flood.

Was God envious of my father’s people?
He forced them to die together.

The stars of the universe aren’t all diamonds.
Some burn us as they fall.

2
Sun and moon have their way with them,
companions in Turkish crime.

The caravan of urchins staggers through sand,
dust and stones photographing the faces.

For me, the past plays over and over.
Dust collects in dunes, and scars are plagues.

Do you think I am talking only of his life?
It is I who am now at an abyss.

I tell you the plain truth about them
so their eternity may touch my lips.

3
The Armenian ploughed fields and fertilized the mind
while the Turk sharpened his dagger and wound his bow.

The orphaned children are alive with instinct.
They play in bewildered shadows.

At night they remember their mothers’ gentle breath.
This is when love cries out with special yearning.

In Istanbul, a stock of bronze Ataturks.
A plethora of petrifying memorabilia.

What spirit is found in these places of slaughter?
A new Adam learning to begin again.

Is re-creating a nightmare imagination’s blasphemy?
The brutality of facts cannot go into darkness silently.

4
When winter winds roared like Stentor, peasants burrowed underground.
The difficult country brought them closer to hell.

Such cold makes for great legends.
A cat froze in the act of running.

We can all be part of someone else’s story.
Armenians were forced to do so, deprived of meaning.

The hours fell like dead flies.
The shuddering sky unnerved them.

In the solitude of sleep, horrors multiply.
With torn and swelling feet, they remember everything.

5
These words are a supplement to what my father remembers.
These words are a supplement to myself.

Dreams are a strange language created on Ararat,
far above the poppies, then blown into sleep.

Violence of sore feet and dry throats keeps happening over and over,
so is the repentance for minor sins that brought on the violence.

Scavenger dogs sink sharp teeth into the dying,
their impartiality the mania of sadistic killers.

Sometimes we feel guilty for deserting our hate,
so should we leave the dead and care for the living?

6
“What is the fault of children?” a grandmother asks,
her lament resounding from Harput to Syria.

An iron fist, a rapacious dagger, and a bullet respond.
Her voice vanishes like thin mist.

They are forced into widening circles on naked feet,
the hot sand pretending they are close to home.

Thin hands holding tickets in a boxcar for a return journey
never made. Human wreckage on wheels.

Commissars of falsehood! Your denials are desperate.
We shall complete our stories and our mourning.

7
Are you free, then, Talaat, free of everything
but your cruelty and Armenian ghosts?

And you, Enver, child-killer, scum hero,
are you buried with a harem of virgins?

Jemal completes the murderous trinity.
What new atrocity are you planning from Hell?

Peasants, bureaucrats, and ministers, shrinking from truth,
explain the unforgivable to bribed sympathizers.

Your protests against Armenian tears
mock your pretensions of humanity.


Keith Garebian

Keith Garebian

Keith Garebian is an award-winning author of 16 books, three of which are collections of his poetry. He lives in Ontario and is completing his fourth book of poetry, tentatively entitled 'Children of Ararat.'


Photo by David Young



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