Author Notes: Aaron Tucker
Aaron Tucker just learned how to tie this thing.Recent contributor Aaron Tucker discusses his poetry in Issue XXI: Spring 2013 of The Puritan.For a person who can’t swim, I love the ocean. My mom grew up in Ocean Falls and would get us to the coast every chance she got. Our family would get right up on the beach, chase shells and seaweed, leave with the returning tide. I went to school in Victoria if only to get that much closer. Tofino. Port Renfrew. The opening pages of Moby Dick: there is a wave or whale bigger than us. And here’s a weirdo story about its home.Hate pools, love the ocean. The poem I began punchlines (above/ground 2013) with was a sad sort of letter to a trip down the West Coast to San Francisco. There is a lot of Highway 1 that drags along the water, populated by towns built just above the high water marks, landmarked by clam fishers and the best chowders I’ve ever had. The poems after that first one, the ones in Issue XXI: Spring 2013 of The Puritan, came with the same sense of looping rhythm, the same sort of absurdity and humour borne of a long horizon of water.And from the ocean came fish with legs until they weren’t fish anymore until they weren’t monkeys anymore until they weren’t human anymore. I can imagine a Commodore 64crawling out of the deep on unsteady, unevolved legs only, until it wasn’t a Commodore anymore until it wasn’t a laptop anymore until it wasn’t an iPhone anymore. I’m thinking of these poems as a communal beach someplace, far from the primordial muck, where humans and iPhones can tan together, a great view of the ocean, giant and quiet and still and too much surface.Aaron Tucker’s poetic works and reviews have been published across Canada. His chapbook, apartments, was shortlisted for the 2010 bpNichol Chapbook Award. His current project, titled punchlines, is now available in chapbook form from above/ground press. More of his work can be found at aarontucker.ca. In addition, he is a professor in the English department at Ryerson University where he is currently teaching essay writing and digital literacy to first year students. He is working on learning chess in between watching his beloved Raptors lose games.
