Retreat

I just got back from this Swiss-style chalet we rented for a week in the Laurentians. For us, this was as good as any writer's retreat... & a wonderful holiday, especially from our own clutter and distraction! No TV, no internet, no blogging, no telephone -- just a few books, our writing, a couple of visits from friends & a twice-daily swim in the lake to vary the pace.

For me, these few days were really productive -- revised about twenty poems and got a lot of work done on a new manuscript. Jocelyne finished the final chapters on her novel ms., although she still has a lot of drafting to do.

We brought a box of books, but I ended up reading (and re-reading) exclusively from one volume, an old textbook from University days: the Oxford Anthology of Romantic Poetry & Prose ... all of Wordsworth the book had to offer (including a generous selection from the Prelude & his Preface to the Lyrical Ballads), a number of poems by Coleridge & Blake, about a dozen poems -- all there was -- of John Clare, and, for satiric relief, most of the selection of Byron, including about 60 p. of Don Juan.

Part of this foray into the Romantics was instigated by the discussion of Don McKay's poetry & lecture below; part of it was that the context -- esp. for Wordsworth -- was just about perfect. Who feels like reading W's lengthy (at times, turgid) meditations on Nature in the city? Not me, at any rate. The only downside was that it was cloudy most of the time and rained almost every day, including several violent thunderstorms.

Sunrise on Lac Connelly

I happened to get up at about six last Thurs. morning, just before the sunrise, and caught this unusual glow in the sky. It looks like northern lights, but it did not shimmer or throb as northern lights are wont to do (not that I pretend to be an expert on northern lights, having only seen a few faint shimmers). I think it's the sun's rays filtering through some gauzy cloud or mist, although it's rather high in the sky for mist. "Red sky at morning, sailors take warning" -- & sure enough, there was a severe thunderstorm later that day. Maybe that's an explanation for any high-hanging mist. Click on these photos, and they'll fill your screen.
"The crack of dawn". That reddish glow, of course, had disappeared by this time. Below, another view, with the camera tipped vertically. This is of course is the kind of light favoured at the ends of sentimental movies, covers of Watchtower, and the like. Unfortunately, those tacky associations do take away from the sort of amazement I ought to feel.
Well, here he is: Mr. Sol himself. Not so unusual a photo, that's for sure. Of course, it's my camera lens that has broken the sun's rays into a ringed spectrum. But that glow in the sky I captured quite accurately up above. It's not due to any trickery on my part (I'm incapable of that) or the camera's -- although perhaps my only witness is the little guy below, who sat perched on this rock and seemed to watch this whole spectacle with me. (Unless, of course, he was dozing. Quite likely. Dzzzzzzz.)

Why at sunrise or sunset does the sky glow orange or red? If you need an explanation or refresher on that question, here's a good site.

P.S. That Emil Nolde painting I chose seems to have been prophetic.

A fantastic writing room

I return quite mellowed after about a week away. I have the good fortune of having a friend with a cottage near her summer home who rents it to friends at a very reasonable rate. It's on Lac Connelly, near St-Hippolyte, about an hour north of Montreal. My partner and I made it our writing/reading room for the week. Click on any of these photos, & they'll fill your screen. Views from the front room, which is surrounded by windows:

This tree has a special significance. I'll get back to it later. Below, yours truly at his Thinkpad (why didn't IBM come up with Imaginepad? Createpad?):


It was a productive week, free of distractions: I wrote four prose poems to pretty nigh completion plus three quite promising poem drafts and part of a song. My partner, meanwhile, wrote a draft of a short story.

Books & Stuff read: The Saranac Review #3 (the first review I've read from cover to cover -- it turns out I was not disappointed in what I was saying before, all the poems are good, as well as a number of the short stories) Theodore Roethke's The Waking and some of Words for the Wind out of his Collected (this was really suitable to this setting), some of Creeley's Selected, a pretty fair portion of Michèle Lalonde's Défense et illustration de la langue québécoise suivie de prose et poemes including her famous (and still apropos) protest poem, Speak White, plus Femelle Faucon by Quebec poet & friend Nancy R. Lange. I also listened to selections of William Blake, Byron, Shelley and Keats in the MP3 version of A Hundred Classic Poems. This of course punctuated by walks in the woods, and swimming & sunning (when weather permitted) by the lake.

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By the way, I just added a "Currently Reading" section to my sidebar -- some titles I'm reading right now.