studio - behind the scenes
A Flash Poem
I pray my hands together pointing up into the godless silence like an arrow the arrow I just yanked from my own ribs I'm not impenetrable
This poem arose from a poetry workshop. The exercise involved a mind map, and, well, arrows! February is the longest shortest month of the year and I seem to do a lot of staring. So, it’s good to remember that a poem can come together in a flash, fast. The workshop was part of the 2022 biennial Northumberland Festival of the Arts, and 2024 is another Festival Year!
How to avoid those rejection letters….
…why, don’t submit your manuscript, of course! Divert yourself, as I am, by working on prototype illustrations. This one will be a cattle drive, rendered in found fabrics and bought beads. My memoir about my father and his ranch is essentially complete and will be sent out into the world this month. While I wordlessly wait for replies, there are three wordless creations on the drawing board.
Things get messy
Stories about my father and his ranch, which I started a year ago, have been scribbled down, typed up, workshopped, ordered, illustrated and made whole. Now my beta readers weigh in with their suggestions, knocking me off my high horse and back to earth. The last time I was knocked off a high horse was in fact on the ranch fifty years ago or so. The feeling is the same. The need to get back in the saddle is the same.
Pretty unreal
Yesterday’s pink dawn was absorbed by the peachy trees and then pink and peach were both subsumed by my fibbing phone camera and its robotic desire to please by saturating colour and smoothing out the smallest imperfections. Capturing what you perceive is easier with a digital camera, and easier still with a film camera (but oh, the wait to see the results!) Capturing not the thing but the effect it produces demands different media altogether – paint – collage – music – one scintillating word set in a reflective verse.
Revisiting the recent past…
… is in part the inability to let things be. It was time to make this piece from 2020, called Stanchion, “exhibitable”. My bricolage settings for poems tend to defy convention and complicate my intention to submit pieces to juried art shows, which can have particular rules. And now I have a poetry reading coming up September 21, the first since my chapbook launch in 2021, and am searching my recent works for poems to include, tweaking and ordering them so that they are thematically cohesive. Perhaps it is not surprising that one of the emerging themes in my recent work is war and peace, war amongst ourselves, war with the other than human world, the kind of fed-up-ness that attends the times we live in, but also the peace to be found in the contemplation of nature.
silence and circularity
This is what remains of Sgang Gwaay, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Gwaii Haanas National Park, Haida Gwaii. (In 2010 the Haida Nation “respectfully repatriated” the name “Queen Charlotte Islands” back to the Crown.) Trying to write there, I found myself silenced by the power of the constantly moving water and the still shoulders of the steep islands we sailed along, the deep strength of the silver poles and the swirling echoes of Haida stories. Villages were lived in and left. People names, place names, ancestor names changed. Relationships, like the islands, were circular. We were confounded by our inability to impose our linear paradigms, our roads and lot lines, patrilineage and patronage. We struck out, in every sense. The Haida prevailed. There’s more to say about circles and lines, if I can only get out of this well of silence. But should I?