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Imprints on a Path: Selected & New Poems
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Wandering: The Collected Poems
The Imprints on a Path: Selected and New Poems contains poems that have been selected from many poems over decades that appeared in journals and anthologies but were not in any of my published collections, plus of course new poems from the last few years.
Wandering: The Collected Poems comes from my six published collections and contain performed spoken word poems and the poems written and performed at many retreats with Patrick Lane and a retreat with Lorna Crozier.
As a wanderer, one notices what one notices, perhaps, imprints on a path, signs, visitations, happenings, stories told, derivative stories that can be one line or many stanzas, each poem recording a moment that was remarkable. This is sediment that is accumulated over a lifetime.
“My writing comes from a process of accumulating this sediment. Experience, imagination, truth, and lies are laid down in layers and these layers are compressed by the weight of living. These are the strata that I mine to hone my craft.”
Since writing this comment, my poetry has drifted towards narrative, and I have become a witness and an observer of the present world and a chronicler of past stories. The journey, as a poet, is one of paying attention, being intensely alive, and looking at the world with “first time eyes” (Kerouac). One of my greatest mentors, Patrick Lane, says, “There is no failure, only an exploration of possibility.” With that in mind I am inspired every day to start anew. In these collections, a small part is assigned to my morning mediations which are an offshoot for American sentences.
The American Sentence was invented by Allen Ginsberg based on the traditional Japanese haiku of 17 syllables arranged rather than in three lines but as a sentence. I was introduced to this new form of poetry by Paul Nelson from Seattle who writes them every day. He has published a book titled American Sentences: One Sentence, Every Day, Fourteen Years.
With acknowledgement and gratitude to Paul, I dabbled from 2009 to 2016 in the process. I called my experiment, Morning Sentences that explored the form using 17 syllables and 12 syllables. After 2016, I focused more on writing novels, but still wrote morning sentences as visitations (sudden moments of inspiration) often about the nature I encountered as I wandered the landscape or looked from my window. In both collections you will find sentences arranged in 12 to 17 syllable form also with exceptions. The exceptions perhaps are a result of an untidy mind or one that had fallen in love with what at first it noticed and was happy with how the words fell out.
In the winter of 2007 Paul Nelson, a Seattle poet, introduced me to Allen Ginsberg’s American sentences. I immediately started to incorporate these short haiku-like meditative observations into daily practice. I started with Ginsberg’s seventeen syllable examples but progressed to creating my own twelve syllable meditations that further pared down the form.
Then around the same time Marjorie Green, and artist friend of my partner, Patricia Carroll, was cleaning out her library and presented me with One Hundred Poems from the Chinese by Kenneth Rexroth, where I met among others, Tu Fu. I embarked on reading various translations of the major Chinese poets, mainly of the Tang and Sung Dynasties. Since I had been interested in the Japanese haiku for many years, I also, that summer, investigated The Essential Haiku, Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issawritten by and with translations by Robert Hass.
In addition, I linked with Fiona Robyn on her internet site, a small stone. She describes a small stone this way. “A small stone is a short piece of writing that precisely captures a fully-engaged moment.”
Patrick Lane in his yearly retreats has encouraged poets to create shorter and shorter pieces, by reducing lines to their simplest forms through the paring down and the removal of adjectives and adverbs. He has helped me to practice entering the poem slowly, and to contemplate the world that is “near at hand.”
Lao Tsu wrote “A good traveler has no fixed plans.” Lao Tsu came to me in Oaxaca, Mexico in 1977 in the form of a tattered collection of his verse which I acquired from a travelling companion I knew for a brief period, in an exchange of paperbacks from our backpacks as we parted for other unknown destinations. That dog-eared collection still sits on my office shelf along with the writings of Allen Watts and Deng Ming-Dao. Seems synchronicity has been at work since both Tu Fu and Li Bai and for that matter also Paul Nelson and Allen Ginsberg who have been influenced by Lao Tzu.
In both collections you will find these short sentences, short verses of the moment, longer pieces that document events, and narrative that tell my life’s story.
Comments About the Collections in Wandering
from Readers and Reviewers
In the beginning, the products of creation are always flawed. The craft grows and develops over time. Many poems are mere experiments and often rubbish. Some are not chosen, yet many are selected as originals, while others are sometimes revised because they represent a moment, a vivid memory, or a marker event. I don’t apologize for these early poems as they represent an evolution. They create a poetic memoir, a self-reflection, and a maturation process spanning almost four decades.
"David Fraser's Going to the Well is a remarkable journey filled with a zest for all that life offers. His poems surprise, delight, and enrich the reader. They truly deepen our understanding of the human condition...all in all, this collection represents a most impressive debut." - Vernon Waring
"I found in Mr. Fraser's work not only elegiac words about human beings self-disposed from their natural endowment, but also words of hope and optimism arising from reverence for things that charm and challenge us with the riddle as well as the promise of their existence. Indeed, Heidegger's comments came to mind. The philosopher, in this context, holds poets in high esteem and comments in his Introduction to Metaphysics that " Poetry, like the thinking of the philosopher, has always so much world space to spare that in it each thing - a tree, a mountain, a house, the cry of a bird - loses all indifference and commonplaceness.
Al Staffetti
"It was a pleasure reading Going to The Well. It is probably one of the best I've read so far. Your skillful means of penetrating into the heart of darkness is profound and full of insights, that leaves one questioning themselves, about one's own struggle, failure, guilt, and ills, as well as nature's struggle with society.
Overall, it attempts to extract truth from all directions and inspires a broad level of perception, exposing a deeper sense of existence too. By far, the book completes a personal experience and an image of humanity's dark and lighter side of the self."
Albert Lawrence
No Way Easy is a raw and candid responsive reflection on the universal journey toward awareness. It begins with observations from a state of shock produced by the entrance into the unconscious world. From there it moves through the trauma of growing up by delving into memory and epiphany in a life of ordinary circumstance. This is a journey all of us must take, surviving the shock of childhood and adolescence and becoming our own unique selves, free of the pain and suffering of the past.
The poems and commentary in this section of Wandering Collected Poems are taken from only David P. Fraser’s contributions to the creative work, On Poetry: ISBN 978-09736568-3 by Naomi Beth Wakan and David P. Fraser.
The sheer volume of contradiction, whimsy, apprehension, pithiness, and diversity contained in this wonderful collection of words about poetry, by poets, proves, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that those of us who call ourselves poets frequently have no idea what we’re doing, or why we do it. All we know is that it must be done. Perhaps Carl Sandburg said it best: “I've written some poetry I don't understand myself.”
David Bateman
This little book, On Poetry is a kaleidoscope of ways of seeing, being, reflecting, deflecting, confessing, professing, processing, revealing the mystery at the heart of things. Open anywhere to lift the spirits.
Patricia Ludwick, writer, editor, and addicted reader
These poems from Maybe We Should Dance swell with life. Through ordinary events and details David Fraser and Pat Smakel give us wisdom, love, and humour and whether it’s with a heart-shaped stone, a granddaughter, the full fandango, or tango, they transform reality. This is a book that is attuned to the ancient tradition of friendship, a book that invites the reader into a circle dance of creativity! Leanne McIntosh, Dark Matter, Leaf Press
An intuitive soft-shoe duet of poems (Maybe We Could Dance) tapped from both the reminiscences and perceptions of a fast friendship¾the collaborative rhythms shifting from playful to poignant, sharp staccatos to gentler slides. Clip along. Lace up your shoes. Do the dance!
Kim Clark, Dis ease and De sire, the M anu S cript, Lipstick Press and Sit You Waiting, Caitlin Press
“Let us read and let us dance—two amusements that will never do any harm to the world.”
Running Down the Wind reflects on life from personal events, metaphorical interpretations of the landscape and of the social and political directions of a voracious world. I’ve tried to engender raw emotion, express love, and loss, delve into my psyche, and display the anguish and joy that characterises life as I see it.
“This poetry invites us into an intimate dance with Nature and makes us question our ‘spaces more mechanically laid out.’ Sitting around a campfire in Nootka Sound the poet sees the sun ‘spilling blue fragments upon the night’; hiking the Wild Pacific Trail he observes the ‘rainforest/snuggling up beside the foaming sea.’ He bemoans his ‘fading words laid down/that never reach a perfect state’ and yet he can capture in a single image what many of us fail to notice in a lifetime.”
Cindy Shantz
David P. Fraser’s poetry imbues vivid imagery and great depth of feeling. He can draw on the inside experience to touch the very essence of life itself. The vocabulary is evocative for me as a painter and at the same time allows me to use my own imagination at will.
Philippa Haidu
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Imprints on a Path: Selected & New Poems
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Wandering: The Collected Poems
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