On tour -- Afterthought 1 -- Pirate story -- Athought 2 -- Comic book -- Ancestors 1 : om standing upright -- A plain lie 1 -- A plain lie 2 -- Emily Carr as totem -- Keyed in -- Fable -- Ancestors 2 : hoofing it -- Classical mythology -- Rendezous -- Wild turkeys -- Game theory -- Taste -- Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina -- Mirror -- For Kristian, for assurances -- Muse report -- Trade off -- Sage Hill writers at St. Micheal's Retreat, Saskatchewan -- Sharing a pizza -- Cheticamp, Cape Breton Island -- Guesswork -- Just be yourself 1 -- Just be yourself 2 -- Touch -- Winter parka -- Appalachian back roads -- Hot fudge sundae -- Making faces -- Driving to the airport at five am -- Just for once -- Please post -- Arctic miracle -- Night vision -- To Eli Mandel -- CJCA, Alberta, 1935 -- Horse's petunia -- Pembina Highway, Winnepeg -- Dear Mark Twain -- Flooding the rink -- If I were you -- NATION IN PERIL -- Freedom of choice : pie shop -- Anne of Green Gables, found poem -- Wind chill factor -- About the author -- Goose air base, USAF -- I swear I didn't do it -- Bad timing -- Country boy -- Walking backwards in a blizzard -- I saw it with my own eyes -- The word sprang to my lips -- Visit to Japan -- Cottage season -- "no ideas but in things" -- Seduction attempt 1 -- Seduction attempt 2 -- Applause -- Pessoa and his heteronyms -- Cars whizzing by -- Henri Rousseau, "The sleeping gypsy" -- Terracotta Army -- Laundering the poem -- Dear lovelorn -- Horoscope -- Cafe au lait and croissants in Strasbourg -- Daedalus -- The feet of the lone traveller -- Living life as a poet -- Don't blame us -- Victorian Lit, University of Alberta, 1946 -- I try to steal my identity -- Playing card with my sisters -- Nature buff -- My windshield scraper -- Locating story -- Late breaking news -- Making am impression -- Cockadoodledoo -- Watching for signs -- About poetic despair -- About poetic hope -- Grade ten typing lesson : how now brown cow -- The sky is falling -- Everything considered -- Time to spare -- The unnameable -- Motion sickness -- Noosa heads, Queensland -- Risking it.
Summary:
"It was part of our education, learning to lean on the wind, trusting the wind, learning to be the hypotenuse." "Trigonometry, our teacher explained, is the study of angles. Late for school is a failure to Connect two points with a straight line." "The blizzard sealed our eyes, we said. We had to walk backwards in order to see---our tracks in the snow, the shape of the wind." "The past, we argued, must be a curved line. Walking backwards in the driven snow, we had arrived, by our calculations, early to class." "With a prodigious body of innovative writing behind him, Robert Kroetsch turns to a Starker lyrical mode in Too Bad: Sketches Toward a Self-Portrait, Oscillating between the many moods of a human heart that has lived through so much---from whimsy and scorn through desire, longing, lust, love, and serenity---these sketches mark a candid walk through the tortuous corridors of the poet's remembering, and exemplify the memorable dictum of an old teacher. "Every enduring poem was written today."" ""This book is not an autobiography, It is a gesture toward a self-portrait, which I take to be quite a different kettle of fish."---Robert Kroetsch"--BOOK JACKET.
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