Poetry in Motion: Frequent, small loads of laundry
A sassy, smart debut collection from Rhonda Ganz, Frequent, small loads of laundry (Mother Tongue Publishing) is all about the ways in which we behave in moments of intimacy and domesticity. Ganz strings together the ordinary with the absurd and hangs up to dry snapshots of flawed love. As Lorna Crozier puts it: “If this is what laundry looks like, the wind couldn’t be happier and I want some on my line.”
By:
ALU Editor
Share It:
My friend Mike tells me my poems offer the reader a way out. If someone wants to read for entertainment, there is a surface level of engagement offered as a likeable diversion, which might be all a reader wants. If they’re in the mood for deeper scrutiny though, I nudge them towards a more serious reflection about the issues or emotions the poem, in its short narrative, either alludes to or is flat out in your face about. I’m absolutely going to pretend I came up with this description on my own.I make things up. Love making things up. Poetry is the perfect genre for me because each poem is its own plot and only has to be cohesive within its few lines or stanzas. I can have a dog in poems, or a girlfriend, or be abducted by aliens or marry an Englishman. Then I’m over it and move on to inhabit another made up scenario.My poems take a detour. If I can lead the reader to a place they didn’t expect the poem to go, then I’ve done my job. I’m interested in people, not places, and rarely write about nature.I often think of the last line of a poem first. By the time the rest is written, the last line might have become completely irrelevant and must be changed, but working backwards works for me.On a flight home in the early 2000s, I heard Wendy Morton read her poem “Clare’s Heart” over the intercom (she was WestJet’s Poet of the Skies). I was surprised at how moved I was. Hearing her made me want to write poems too, so I took a course at the Victoria School of Writing. That first year I finished one poem.Now I’ve got a book. In Frequent, small loads of laundry I mix darks with lights and peg out the quirky and bizarre, both real and imagined, with all seams showing. From spontaneous combustion to suicide, from psychopaths to pterodactyls, I am obsessed with the way people behave in moments of intimacy and domesticity. I pair the banal with the absurd to expose the flaws of love—the frayed edges of belief and despair.My poems are informed by crime fiction, reality tv and bad dreams, and have appeared in Rattle, The Malahat Review, Room, on city buses and in the anthologies Rocksalt: An Anthology of Contemporary BC Poetry, Poems from Planet Earth, Poet to Poet and Force Field: 77 Women Poets of British Columbia and Harvard Design Magazine’s December 2016 issue “Shelf Life.” I have been a featured reader at Planet Earth Poetry (Victoria), WordStorm (Nanaimo), Word on the Street (Vancouver) and at Galiano Literary Festival.
LOVE SENTENCE
It starts with the bread, the way he dips his fork into the bag, takes first
one piece to the plate, then a second, only the tines of the fork touching
the bread, then his spoon delving into the bowl of nuts, no chance
of salt on fingertips, the precision with which he pours a single vitamin
into the lid of the bottle, tosses the pill from lid to throat, again
not touching, the fork and the spoon and the lid the only conduit
from surface to mouth, his fingers reserved for the alignment of
magnets, the smoothing of metal, the braiding of filament, the ridge
of the woman’s clavicle, buttons on a denim shirt, the cream before
the razor, belly of the cat—his fingers have their paths, their expeditions,
and these are finite, and he chooses, and if it is to be the cheek of the
Rhonda Ganz reads “Frequent, small loads of laundry” from her collection.* * *Born in Kenya, Rhonda ended up in Victoria, BC, where she works as a graphic designer and editor. She shares a home with one human and varying numbers of cats. She has been known to write poems on the spot for people in hotel lobbies, parks, and cemeteries.* * *Thanks to Rhonda Ganz for sharing her work with us, and to Mona Fertig at Mother Tongue Publishing for connecting us. For more poetry videos and excerpts, click here.
