Witless Bay

(click thru to see large)

I photographed the sign because, since I wrote the name of this place in that poem, I acquired quite an affection it. In the distance (even between those two huge rocks), you can see the same iceberg pictured below. Love these rock formations... "entering" them with the imagination -- and the lens of my camera -- was like entering a miniature badlands. The second photo down is courtesy of Magie Dominic, by the way.

This signifies the end of this Newfoundland slideshow. My next post will be in a about a week's time. 'Bye for now!

Some more poets

Can we human beings legitimately call ourselves poets, or is "poet" a state or title we can only aspire to? I often feel this inner conflict when I find myself referring to myself as "poet". So, I'm sure, do many of these people -- although among them you'll find nominees and even winners of some major totems of distinction (otherwise known as awards, prizes, credits). But, on repeated reflection, I think these can be called poets, such as they are. Many of them have become quite lovely people, at least partly due to their practice -- however flawed, sporadic, or conversely, compulsive -- of this most demanding and difficult art.

On top: Sharon Singer and Susan McMaster
Middle: Marian Francis White, who organized this whole conference/fest (and deserves every credit for making it an excellent one), found herself without a seat on the bus she had reserved for us... so she had to "lap the miles" with several of us, inc. Allan Briesmaster; beside him is his wife, Holly.
Bottom: a whole busload of 'em, going to Marlene Create's in situ reading. Among these, at the back to the right, is Barbara Nickel, a poet I will definitely be reading more of in the coming months; and although he didn't get in this picture, Don McKay. I'd be hard pressed to name the others...except of course that guy on the right. (Who is he, again?)

Iceberg, Witless Bay

(Click through to see large)

Pictures I took as we approached and circumnavigated this medium-sized iceberg in Witless Bay -- mountain of ice, nevertheless, that towered over our boat. I've seen, though, much bigger on postcards. 9/10ths of bergs are, of course, under the surface; this was about as close as we could get, the radar told us, without risking a tear in the bottom of the boat. This berg is actually stuck, lodged to the bottom of the bay. And it will take a good while to melt; in late June, the water temperature was still only 4 degrees Celsius. (Needless to say, the breeze off the water was pretty chilly.) This year, close to a thousand bergs broke off of Greenland and floated down past Newfoundland, a record number due to global warming.

Witless Bay Ecological Reserve (Bird Islands)

Definitely, click thru to see large!

The Witless Bay Ecological Reserve is home for no less than 260,000 pairs of puffins, along with hundreds of thousands of other birds, including a cousin of the puffin, slenderer with a black beak; a certain species of seagull that only inhabits these islands, a number of eagle species, and tourists like me ;-) At top is one of the four islands that make up the Reserve; if you click on it, you can see the air above the island swarming with birds. (It is not Gull island, which we saw up close, but one of the others.) The steep, rugged cliffsides on these islands provide an infinitude of perches. Puffins (second picture down -- a stock shot) can't fly long distances -- the guide described them as having the aerodynamics of a potato with wings. They jump off the cliffs, and plummet as much as 70 meters deep, "fly" underwater and return with their beaks full of caplin, tiny sardine-like fish that still teem in these waters. Like penguins, puffins are monogamous for life. They burrow tunnels as long as three meters deep in the hillsides with their beaks, where they lay and protect the one egg they produce per season. Their beaks are bright and parrot-like only during the mating season. In winter, they molt the coloured covering, to regrow them the next summer. The high winds and waves of the North Atlantic make these islands uninhabitable in winter; a valley in the middle of Gull island (the brown V-shaped depression, 6th picture down) has been swept bare by waves that crash over the island, turning it at times effectively into two islands. The puffins, unlike the other birds, don't journey south in the winter; they fly and swim about a hundred kilometers out from their islands, and float about on the ocean. To appreciate these bird pictures, again, you really should click on them to see them large. The 5th picture down shows an observer's blind, used by the handful of naturalists that are the only humans allowed on these islands. Most of my puffin pictures, unfortunately, came out blurry, due to using the zoom on a so-so camera on a rocking boat; the best one I took is the third picture down. The puffins are relatively silent, but at times, the sounds of all the other birds can be almost deafening.

Heading out to Gull Island

(click through to see large)

On top, the boat I took out to Gull Island, the largest of four islands that make up Witless Bay Ecological Preserve, from nearby Bay Bulls. Further down, some of the rocky coastline, including a couple of pillars of rock that the waves long ago carved away from the shore... one of them itself is a nesting place for hundreds of birds. The waves also gouged huge caves in these coasts which, buried in shadow, did not clearly come out in any photos I took. In the bottom photo, we're rounding the point of Bull's Bay; in the distance, Gull Island, the largest puffin colony in North America. More to come...

For those of you who are new to this series, click on the label below, and you'll see it uninterrupted by other posts. Plenty of beautiful images...

Marlene Creates: in situ

(click thru to see large)

On Sunday evening, at the end of the LCP Conference/Fest, those of us who didn't have to immediately fly home took a bus out to Marlene Creates' property near Portugal Cove for an in situ poetry reading. Says the program:

The Boreal Poetry Garden is a project by Newfoundland artist Marlene Creates that uses words in situ. The texts commemorate certain fleeting moments in her interaction with the 6 acres of of boreal forest where she lives in "relational aesthetic" to the land. On Sunday, June 22, 2008 at 7 p.m., Marlene Creates will lead a walk along paths she has been making in the forest and pause at certain points to read site-specific poems.

One of the inspirations for the project is the rich Newfoundland vernacular. Its words reflect a very concrete correlatoin between this language and this landscape. Within these 6 acres there is a multitude of microhabitats: dark spruce and fir thickets; a steep wooded droke; a windblown tolt with goowiddy and tuckamore; a rattling brook called the Blast Hole Pond River; an overgrown bawn; and moss-covered volcanic rock up to 1,000 million years old. Each has a different dynamic, resulting in different details of observation and experience. Marlene Creates says, "I have become more and more aware that my experience of the landscape includes language. I cannot walk this terrain without the local names for landforms and vegetation sounding in my head."

Many of the poems were very haiku-like, and some I quite liked. I was reminded of certain Zen poets who rather than publish poems in a more permanent form, would simply tie their poems to a tree. (What a marvelous meditation that is on the ephemeralness of art and life!) Marlene said that for more than thirty years she had worked as a professional visual artist, much of that time spent marketing, packing and putting her art up for exhibitions. Although still quite active in the visual art world, she has grown quite skeptical of the marketing conventions around art; poetry publishing -- at least professional poetry publishing -- runs of course along similar lines. These particular pieces, she vowed, would never leave the property. Indeed, for her it would seem like sullying them to do so. For people to experience them, they would have to come out and hear them where they had been written. So far, dozens have -- ensuring a larger audience for these poems than a good many literary magazines would have provided! And in a partial reversal of her anti-marketing stance, a video called The Boreal Poetry Garden, featuring excerpts of her in situ reading, was aired on Bravo! TV last April. Nevertheless, the Poetry Garden Walk and Reading was an impressive experience of poetry for the inherent experience of the art itself -- a spiritual dimension we literary ladder-climbers can easily lose sight of. (As a joke I asked her if her forest accepts multiple submissions.)

PS. JULY 16: I just received this e-mail from Marlene about this post. It seems that I got some details wrong about her raison d'être for doing these poems in situ. Pay particular attention the third and fourth paragraphs of her letter. Did I mention that I listened to her talk on these walks and her video on about three hours sleep? Of course not. Anyway, I stand corrected, and appreciate the further insight she has provided into her creative process.

Hi Brian,

Thanks for letting me know about your blog, and thanks for your enthusiasm. The pictures look nice too.

In your commentary I think you understood quite well my approach. I especially like the comparison you made to the poets who attached their poems to trees. (And you probably didn't even know that I've been hand writing some of the short poems on card stock, installing them temporarily in the spot that the words refer to, and photographing them.)

There are a couple of things in your commentary, though, that aren't quite what I meant in my introduction to the walking reading. The word "marketing", for example, was not in my introduction at all. I did say I had been framing, crating and shipping my artwork to the outside world for 30 years, and that now I'm trying to work outside the institutions of the art world to some extent by inviting people to experience my work in situ. The institutions I was referring to, broadly speaking, would be public galleries and museums, which are the main kinds of places I have shown my work. I think I've always been somewhat "skeptical of the marketing conventions around art" (as in the commercial side of it), so that's not something new.

I haven't vowed that the poems "would never leave the property," though I plan not to read them out loud anywhere else. Not because it would "sully them" but because I feel the specific material details of this locale -- its tangible textures, its ambient sounds, its visible colours and shapes -- are important parts of experiencing the poems. As Liz Zetlin pointed out to me, there are things I haven't written that are part of the poems.

In fact, some of the poems do leave the property in other forms: as visual art, for example. These are photo-landworks, the ones where I've written poems on little cards and photographed them in the pertinent spots. (Since starting the photo-landworks of the poems, I've found out about Han Shan, the Taoist poet, who attached his poems to trees.) Some of the photo-landworks have been published, and some have been in exhibitions. You can see images of some of them on my website:
http://www.marlenecreates.ca/works/2005boreal.html

And there's another reason for the in situ experience. For many years, much of my work has been an exploration of the different layers of history and changing meanings in specific places. So when I stand in a certain spot and read a poem out loud, the words refer to an ephemeral event that happened right there. And the audience itself becomes another layer in the history of what occurred in that spot.

The film on Bravo! TV was a documentary that included me reading some of the poems in situ. The title of the film is "The Tolt, the Droke, and the Blast Hole Pond River with Marlene Creates." It's part of the series "Landscape as Muse" by 291 Film Company.

Thanks for the attention you paid to my project, and good luck with all of yours,
Marlene
www.marlenecreates.ca

NB, Dennis Reid has put Marlene's introduction to the Boreal Poetry Garden on his website as his "Quote of the Month". Float your curser over his "Home" link; it's there on the drop-down menu. Dennis' website has lots of interesting stuff, by the way; worth exploring.

St. John's -- wild nights

George Street -- the street of outdoor cafes and live music bars in St. John's -- is really hopping on Saturday nights, especially in the summer. At Trapper John's, one of the more prominent pubs, they serve Newfoundland Screech -- a strong Jamaican rum -- but to have it you have to go through their traditional "Screeching In". Here's the ritual: the bartender (seen above) puts the shots on the bar, which she orders the participants not to touch, at the pain of a wooden sword with which she'll mockingly strike any hand that ventures near a glass, until the screeching in has begun. Then everybody has to bellow these incomprehensible lines:

Indeed I is the old cock,
And long may your big jib draw!

When she's satisfied everyone has shouted these lines as loud and lustfully as they can, she rings a bell for a few seconds, during which you're to drink the shot "down the hatch". If you've stayed straight -- standing, that is -- you're supposed to kiss a wooden carving of a Puffin, the provincial bird, in the behind -- then she knights you with the sword and gives you a certificate pronouncing you "Honourary (sic) Member of Trapper John's and Newfoundland & Labrador." All rather silly and fun. And if this little rite, adapted primarily for tourists, did indeed evolve -- or devolve -- from some tradition, it may have been drinking bouts where the winner was the only one left standing.

The dancing, by the way, was as wild as I've ever seen. Several girls were celebrating a stagette -- one of them was getting married -- and they dragged men in (me included) to the dance floor to dance with them. They also had this inflatable doll with a huge erection which they were throwing around and with which they were doing all kinds of -- let's put it politely -- suggestive moves. All this to music provided by one lone singer-guitarist with a voice like a serrated knife and very strong strum -- he played a mix of traditional Newfoundland songs, Dave Matthews, Rolling Stones, etc.

The approximate meaning of the "Screeching In" slogan above, I'm told is,

Indeed I am a good guy
And clear sailing to you!

which strikes me still as rather a non sequitur. Of course this translation is bowdlerized of all kinds of phallic connotation. The big jib is the triangular foresail, the one that projects out front. Nellie Stowbridge, author of The Newfoundland Tongue, told me that her grandfather used to greet his old buddies with, "How're you doin', y' old cock?" Reminds me of "salty dog" in old blues songs. Anyway, I'm sure you can get the drift. The use of "I is" is a testament to Newfoundland vernacular, and now remains pretty much a vestige from the past. It also survives in the famous song that goes, "I's the b'ye that builds the boat, and I's the b'ye that sails her".

Kitchen Party/Ron Hynes

On Saturday evening of the 21st, after a day of meetings, Don McKay's lecture, Gala awards dinner and then even square dancing which some us us tried a hand (hand to hand?) at, all of us were invited to kitchen party at the home of the owners of The Pepper Mill, one of the better restaurants in town.* "Local musicians" provided entertainment -- actually the man to the left playing the accordion is (correct me if I'm wrong) Clyde Rose, founder of Breakwater Books, and the other man may be associated with them too. That was fun, but after a couple of hours there I went on the town to check out St. John's fabled folk music scene.

It wasn't hard to find -- a few blocks down at The Rose & Thistle, as luck would have it, I stumbled on a performance of Ron Hynes, one of Newfoundland's most significant singer-songwriters. What a treat! I didn't really know the man, but immediately recognized the quality through the window, and gladly forked over the $10 cover to take in the last set. He has quite a following on the Rock, apparently -- practically everybody there knows him. It was a fine show -- he mixed fingerstyle, solid rock rhythms, one piece a capella ("We're Dirt Poor!") that everyone sang along with: plenty of passion, humour, introspection. I took pictures of the crowd partly because the scene gave me such a gas. Here you can see all ages -- 18-80 -- crowded into this bar, hanging on every word that a 60ish-year-old man is singing.

How unlike Montreal, where everything's trendy, where the live music scene so often seems the exclusive preserve of teenieboppers & 20-somethings!

Here, to a much larger extent, the culture enjoys music and music-making for itself, rather than as part of some massive promotional record-selling hype.

I know what I'm saying reeks of simplification -- but regardless, this was water to a parched throat for me.

Stopping in at a couple of Irish bars with live music -- people of all ages dancing in the wee hours -- confirmed the impression.

Mind you, Montreal has a couple of good Irish bars too, down on Bishop's & Crescent St. I haven't set foot in them for years. Frankly, ye olde Irish music doesn't interest me that much: it's lively and fun, but highly generic.

P.S. Of the Ron Hynes sound samples on this site, the ones I like best are "My Name is Nobody" (the most touching song I've heard in a long time) and his classic, "Sonny's Dream".

*actually, I'm mistaken -- that was on the Friday the 20th, after a day of meetings & seminars.