Jim Erkiletian: for love of america PEACE canada

Can we send you a CD of songpoems of peace?
Suitable for air play, but hard to get on radio because...

Peace doesn't sell cars, or cops or
cosmetics or even hockey or
football regardless the
winners maybe started on the
fields of competitive play
as did the loosers
on both sides...
And the dead don't ask
embareassing questions...

[editor's note: spelling is deliberate]


for a copy of the CD, erkil@telus.net
This poem has appeared in the website Poets Against War a French-English bilingual website. Jim Erkilezian's poetry has appeared in Crossing Lines: Poets Who Came to Canada in the Vietnam War Era, Edited by Allan Briesmaster and Steven Michael Berzensky and published by Seraphim Editions.

Poètes contre la guerre (Canada) cherche à engager poètes et lecteur(e)s de toute sorte, à bâtir une voix unie contre la guerre, la tyrannie et l'oppression.

Jim Erkiletian: Between what is

It is not you and is not me
that tells us what will be
that gives us reason to go on
against the swollen river's strong
unhappy pressure bearing down
to death beneath the sea.
You're over there, I'm over here
across a gulf of circumstance
the twisted dance invites us here
but not to touch or see or hear
beyond the circumscribed unchance.
But if you get my meaning clear
it's not what happens there or here
that gives our tortured lonely lives
the meaning that like razor knives
allows a sense to sense its way
to something more that kills the fear.
You are you and I am me
of that there is no doubt or loss
but what scene's seen of bright chaos
and meaning's mean meanderings
is not what's there or here
but what's there in between.

Jim Erkiletian

Jim Erkiletian is a logger-environmentalist who has played banjo from the stages of the Yukon to the streets of Vancouver. Rug rats know him as Juggling Jim McBanjo. He holds university degrees in Economics, English, Education and Anthropology, writes and directs videos and stage plays, bikes, canoes, and builds dugout guitars. He is banjoist for the bluegrass-reggae fusion group, SOULSTICE, and the writer-director of the bluegrass opry, The Ballad of Darlin¹ Corey, and originator of the Nanaimo Fringe Festival¹s Rainbow Review. He's worked at both labour and management levels in transportation, sales, construction, research and education.

He is responsible for three books of poems, Slapjots, (ISB# 1-895848-04-0) Metaphorplay (1-895848-02-4) and How You Can Profit From the Coming Ecological Collapse, (1-895848-14-8), and an instruction manual for building and playing a variety of stringed instruments, Dugout Guitars (1-895848-08-1). He recorded a CD in 1995 with SOULSTICE : Gettin¹ Down, and a tape of sixteen original and semi-original songs, Heart & Hands in 1996. With Canadian Metis singer Janette Briere he's recorded three CDs, Wilderness for Evermore (2001), Westcoast Magic (2002), and For Love of America PEACE Canada (2003).

He's compleated on novel, Windigr (2000), a western, of sorts. All CDs and books are available from him, or from Nanaimo Publishing Cooperative, 368 Haliburton Street, Nanaimo BC Canada V9R 4W2.