studio - behind the scenes

slow art

….really slow! Two years ago I finished my altered-book-poem-setting on the Montreal Massacre after working on it off an on for eight months (almost a baby!) Two years ago was the 75th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and I started sketching ideas for an assemblage-poem-setting about Peace. Two years! It just seemed so much easier to drag out “off and on” during the pandemic. Time became ropey, like toffee, or sludge. But now, I am taking advantage of writer’s block by making a serious start to this project, hoping the physical piece and the accompanying poem with inform and inspire each other. I am going to reread some Theatre of the Absurd as research (what could be more absurd than war and peace and war and peace and…) If anyone has a dusty volume of Beckett, Ionesco or Genet I’d be happy of the loan.

the cause and effect of writer’s block

these white butterflies
how to write about them
without killing them

A study in white-for Hiroshima.

Twenty years worth of journals are a double-edged razorblade. Looking back, some cut, some shine. Ten years ago I wrote, “Here is a blank page, waiting for whatever I turn it into. This would be a good way to expunge the “me” from my writing, as Anne Carson said on Writers and Co. She was studying John Cage and attention to one thing…the colour of blue of the lines on this page? November grey blue. Slate. Sharp as the sound of true chalk on true slate. The colour of blue on lined paper varies, but not the maraschino cherry red margin line. What if I write only in the margin? Marginalia on a blank page”

And “All that comes up (visually) is the empty-mind-room of yesterday morning’s not-dreaming-sleep. There was something indescribably attractive about that waking dream state’s familiar emptiness. It was grey-blue-green. That’s all. Maybe it was more a feeling than an image. Maybe it was something between the two.”

Ten years later I am again working with white, with absence, this time fabric, prototyping a setting for a poem (yet to be written) with fabric instead of paper. It’s been two years I’ve been off and on this piece about the hibakusha, the “explosion-affected people” of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and their dead compatriots, reduced to white outlines on the ground.

but is it art?

I went to The Workroom in Toronto, looking for something else, of course, and spied a Merchant & Mills pattern (from Britain) for a woman’s boilermaker suit. I had 6 yards of fabric that I had retrieved from my late aunt’s place, that she had bought at, yes, Simpson’s….

…buttons from an old trenchcoat, linings from an old shirt…

…all I was missing was a boiler to make. However, I do have 2 acres, busy with biting insects, that are in constantly call out for sculpting and shaping. So my new suit, materials $0, labour $2,000+, serves the art and beauty of my garden palette.

Blind hope, illustrated

My dear cat caught a bird the other day, leaving a feather and bloodstain on the patio. The next morning I noticed the feather sticking out of an ant hill. This is where the ability to carry X times your own weight fails. What optimism, though! I will take it as a lesson, one I also wrote about in a poem recently submitted to a literary journal – “believe with your heart in all that you do for your living and dead, though you doubt its utility, are sure of its ultimate futility” (Now is a Good Time to Write About Roses). Whether or not submitting poems to literary journals is the ultimate futility, I believe with my heart in the act of writing and creating.

a bouquet of ideas

Now is the time to write about roses. My friend, Kim, painted this scene, and she cherishes it’s dramatic colour. It immediately brought to mind the short story by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, called The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World. Between the image, the story, thoughts on consecration, and news from Europe of desecration, I struggle with turning a bouquet of sentences and phrases into a linear poem. Am I simply unable to get my thoughts in order, or have I chosen the wrong medium? Will this work’s style be impressionistic, or should it have an end-point, even a pointed end-point? The answer, sez Bob, is blowin’ in the wind.