Nancy Yakimoski (she/her) is an educator, visual artist, poet, and writer who lives, works, and creates on the traditional territories of the Lək̓ʷəŋən and WASÁNEĆ peoples (also known as Victoria, BC). She won The Malahat Review’s Words Thaw Prize for poetry (2017), was shortlisted for the Federation of BC Writer’s literary contest in the creative non-fiction category (2023) and was published in Arc Poetry Magazine (2024). She teaches art history, visual culture, and photography in the visual arts department at Camosun College.
“On May 26, 1979, one of the key figures in the New York School of poets, Kenneth Koch, delivered a lecture to students at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. My poem is a response to what he said before he began the lecture. Addressing the person operating the cassette tape recorder Koch asks, tongue-in-cheek, ‘Am I registering all right on the future? Nothing must be lost. I don’t know when anybody is going to make time to listen to all of us being recorded in the present; they’ll be wasting their lives catching up. My name is Kenneth Koch and I’m sorry I was late and I’m sorry we had to change rooms; it seemed very gloomy and dark and hot down there and scattered.’ Adopting Koch’s stream-of-consciousness writing style and his focus on everyday experiences, this poem is about multiple temporalities, close observation, and the ways that lived moments are preserved and perceived across time.”
What were they thinking
those New York School poets
who wrote about the everyday
the minutiae only lovers or mothers
would care about
named people they knew
wrote about one thing
followed by another thing
then another
conversational long
poems with short lines
that went on and on
lines that I would lineate differently
because it’s hard to keep attentive
when things go beyond
our conditioned expectations of time
you know, like popular songs on the radio
end after 3 minutes & 15 seconds and the
30-minute show on TV after 22 minutes and the
average movie in a theatre after 1 hour & 17 minutes
and a sonnet concludes after 14 lines
but these poets
have
all
the
time
in
the
world
and we go along with them
as they tell us
where they were going
what they saw
what they were thinking about
who they were with
just like last night
after dinner
when me and Rosemary
drove to the Swan Lake Nature Sanctuary
I didn’t want to go because I was tired
but she convinced me to walk around the lake
and if my dad were still alive
he would call it a slough
because that’s what farmers
call small bodies of fresh water
where you can see the other side
but city people call it a lake
and this lake has a Nature Sanctuary building
which closes at 4pm but that’s OK
because we have come to stroll
the trails and boardwalks
and it’s the perfect spring evening
as we walk on the floating boardwalk
that stretches across the lake
and when we look back to the shore
we spy the shape of a heron
standing on the edge of the water
in the tall green reeds
and Rosemary gets out her iPhone
sets the camera to 240 fps
for ultra-smooth slow-mo
to capture the beauty of flight
and we wait
it stands there motionless
so we stand there motionless
and wait for it to spear a fish
or maybe a frog Rosemary suggests
but I’m not sure if they eat frogs
and while we wait
we look into the water below us
and a Western Painted turtle
paddles its way to the surface
snaps at something foamy
then paddles its way back into the murk
and the bird still does nothing interesting
then a row of ducklings appear
with their mother
along the edge of the reeds
and then they slip out of sight
and still
the heron does nothing
people strolling on the floating boardwalk
stop to see what we are looking at
but the heron just stands there
not doing anything worthy of attention
so they move on
and now a barred owl
swoops from tree top to tree top
and when I look back at the heron
it still hasn’t moved
and the sun has changed
from bright to golden
and even though
we are in no hurry to get back
how long is long enough
I take a good look at the bird
it’s not very tall for a heron
it’s not very blue for a heron
it’s missing white breast feathers
it’s not a blue heron
it’s an American bittern
a type of heron rarely seen here
and now it cocks its head
and we wait for it to plunge its beak
into the water and nab a fish
but it jerks its neck up and forward
snatches a dragonfly from the air
and I look over at Rosemary
who has that photographer’s look of satisfaction
who has been recording the heron all this time
then suddenly the bird takes to flight
lands on the railing near us
we slowly walk closer
observe it from a different angle
before it flies away
and I am thinking
how long we waited
before seeing what we saw
as I sit on my couch
my morning coffee getting cold
in my favourite mug
the warm sunlight on my face
I’m thinking about this poem
and how I never write about me and Rosemary
but now I have
I’m thinking about the heron
that Rosemary documented using her iPhone
and how an hour of Koch’s New York voice
lives on a tape cassette
safely stored in a university archive
digitized, thankfully,
knowing the fragility
of magnetic tape
and how his first words
before his lecture
were a question
“am I registering all right on the future?”
to which I silently replied
yes and also yes
and to his other question
whether anyone
will make time to listen
to the past
again, yes
and his tongue-in-cheek concern
that listening to all that is recorded
will be a waste of our lives
because we will be catching up
no
no, Mr. Koch, there’s no need to
play catch up with time
time is a boardwalk
floating between two shores
if we closely observe what is before us
nothing will be lost
and even your double apology
for the reason you are late
though seeming to be nothing is, actually,
everything.
