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Monthly Archives: January 2014

Self Portrait, 2013, after Frank Bidart

29 Wednesday Jan 2014

Posted by crowgirl11 in Literary & Art Theory, Photography, poetry

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aging, Canadian writers., catherine owen, frank bidart, lyric, nostalgia, poem, poetry, self portraits, sonnet

“sick of being decent, he craves another/crash. What reaches him except disaster?”

Self-Portrait, 1969

 Image

No longer young but incapable of looking old

The face sashays between a manic nubile pose

& morning’s shadows, subtle wrinkles

Striking at the edges of things, in certain lights,

Hard, yet the child still leans out the eyes’ raw

Sills, collects rusty flotsam, story tells,

Yearns for some rupture it can’t act out now,

A Jack Danielled animalism or even, the blind

Endorsement of muses, racing to them in Turkey

Or Deux Montagnes – what was that capacity

To feel little but the moment’s wild hurtling

Towards words? She cleans a lot now, wants her

Coffee rampant but days otherwise sedate, making is what burns

& the longing for what (somehow) remains.

Image

The Brooding Child: Two Found Photographs

22 Wednesday Jan 2014

Tags

black and white photos, children, girls, memories, nostalgia, old pictures, photographic theory, violin

The Brooding Child: Two Found Photographs

There is something rarely captured now in a child’s face, conditioned as they are to having their photo taken, to posing, to knowing they (or their caregivers) can instantly delete what doesn’t fit within their aesthetic. When these pictures were snapped, such was not the case.

I am sure my mother wanted me to smile but I didn’t. The first photo, at 3, with the violin, obviously a show-off moment, a dramatic punctum in time for which I have donned a little woolen dress, but I look down, dis-engaged, caught in my own context. The latter I have no idea of the occasion. I found it cut out like this. Perhaps it’s my 7th or 8th birthday. I liked checked shirts and hair clips and earrings but otherwise also relished androgyny. I look intense, guarded, again, swirling within my own mind.

Nothing much has changed in this way.

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Marrow Review of a CD: Crow Morphologies by Daniela Elza & Soressa Gardner

15 Wednesday Jan 2014

Posted by crowgirl11 in Uncategorized

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artistic collaborations., Crow Morphologies, crow poems, Daniela Elza, electronic music, Marrow Reviews, Soressa Gardner

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Sadly, there are few poetry recordings released in Canada, with or without musical accompaniment. One of the early tapes I heard was a  Galiano Island compilation called Rage for Order: Poems with Music (1989) in which Rene Mahlow and guests recited poems from Christopher Dewdney to Robert Bringhurst with other poems from American and International poets, accompanied by the guitarist Brad Prevedoros. A terrific initiative I listened to for many years. In the US and Britain, recording poets from TS Eliot to WH Auden and Dylan Thomas to Marianne Moore was more common but in Canada, apart from a few websites dedicated to preserving the voices of Canadian poets like Authors Aloud http://authorsaloud.com/poetry/owen.html, there is little out there recorded on CD or otherwise. In 2000, I collaborated with Vancouver musician Krisananda Mitchell to create our CD, CUSP, poems from my later book, Cusp/detritus (Anvil Press, 2006), featuring poems I recited to a range of his instrumentation on everything from an old bucket to a complex synthesizer. So I know a little about the tricky and delicious process of working with a musician to bring poetry to the ear in a unique and compelling way. The collaboration between poet Daniela Elza and musician Soressa Gardner on this CD is certainly that, and a tribute to the beauty to be found in two visions of aurality coalescing. 

What Shines: This six track CD, recorded in a home studio, and featuring poems from Elza’s book “milk tooth bane bone” (Leaf Press 2013) with Gardner’s synthesized magic, is sweetly clear and resonant. The journey begins moodily, with medieval resonance, Elza’s vocalization poised and water-drop luminous. Intense convergences build tenderly, beginning with Track 2: “The snowflake: a case study” (wonderful title!). Tracks 3 “at.tension” & 4 “pulling the morning out of the water” are the most powerful pieces, infused with Gardner’s exquisite singing, haunting the background of Elza’s corvid evocations, & striated with crow calls. “Where we are dark thought/perched in the tree of dreams” are lovely lines as are, in the last titular track, “the light in your eyes/ has taken years to reach me.” The video of Crow Morphologies, shot by Tara Flynn, that emerged from this initial collaboration, is also stirring: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnSCoa_HYh0. It’s wonderful when poets can stay poets while working with musicians and film makers and not feel they have to write pop songs or juggle jellybeans on fire to engage effectively with an audience.

What Stumbles: These days, confidence is so low relating to an audience for CDs that it is hard to muster up the confidence (or finances!) to pay attention to how the CD itself looks. Elza & Gardner thus just simply burned the CD, inked it with title/artist information and encased it in an origami-style wrapper. I can only imagine how gorgeous it could have been given funds and hope. The geek in me would like to have had the instruments and gear utilized listed on the back.However, the romantic in me preferred the tracks featuring more organic sounds and especially the human voice. Thus, I had the most resistance to Tracks 5 & 6 where electronic sounds prevailed, especially when Elza’s voice was robotically echoed, and particularly in the line “my experiment in freedom” which would have been far more potent with only the mellifluous twinnings of melody and recitation reverberating. The tonalities are so focused up to that point and the images remain so, that the insertion of a more electronic modus jars the listener. I am all for variety but this CD needed to honour its consistency right until the end. Otherwise, a most beautiful experiment I hope continues to flower. 

 

What it Echoes: Ryan Livingstone’s encaustic crows, Bjork’s Pagan Poetry, Gifts of the Crow by John Marzluff and Tony Angell, Hildegard von Bingen’s plainchant music, Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963) 🙂

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ditch, poetry that matters [an online Canadian poetry journal]

15 Wednesday Jan 2014

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Canadian poetry, catherine owen, ditch, experimental poetry, John Goodman., poetry, river poems

New poems from Riven.

A sequence called The Museum of Ruins.

This is Gallery A.

Artifactual words parsed for sounds that utter & interrogate & surge with “river.”

Best read aloud.

Imagehttp://www.ditchpoetry.com/catherineowen.htm

Marrow Review: Ground Rules: the best of the second decade of above/ground press 2003-2013 (Chaudiere Books)

08 Wednesday Jan 2014

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above/ground press, anthology reviews., Ground Rules, poetry anthologies, rob mclennan, small presses in Canada

Reviewing any anthology is a tricky proposition, stuffed as they are with such rangings of work, or in this case, “poetries,” often selected on the basis of thematics or geographies by editors already aware that many final choices as to inclusion or exile are political and/or personal. And that, like translating in a sense, compiling anthologies are impossible acts, better than not attempting to do so but always likely to be found lacking in one vital way or another, according to their particular reader. So with this proviso in mind, herein my perspective on this Ottawa anthology edited by the capital city’s (and perhaps Canada’s) numero uno creator & disseminator of words. 

What Shines: rob mclennan has been running above/ground press for 20 years. This in itself is a phenomenal feat. Living with the man, Warren Dean Fulton, who has run the smaller but still essential Pooka Press, also for nearly two decades, and having run my own tinier presses, Wet Sickle and Above & Beyond, for briefer amounts of time, I am well aware of the challenges, economically, time-wise, artistically and psychologically, it being often a depressing aim to create the handmade or short-run or underground in this star-based consumerist society. So kudos.

In the introduction by Gil McElroy, he uses the metaphor of the early computer game of Pong to zag back and forth between mclennan’s preoccupations with language-based verse, experimental texts and fragmentary lyric, along with his concerns to present the writings of both local Ottawa poets and national as well as US poets, established and new. As US poet, Marthe Reed notes: “Of particular value is the work he does through above/ground of facilitating connections across the border, putting Canadian and U.S. poets face-to-face, as it were,” while Cameron Anstee points out his “willingness to publish new writers alongside writers who have been active for decades.” 

While this 230 page anthology with its starkly-interpretable cover Image

may seem unnecessarily hefty, it represents only a small portion of the texts mclennan has midwiferied into the world over the past ten years. For instance, when he was poet laureate at U of A in 2007, he produced a special series of chapbooks by authors who were residing in Edmonton, myself among them, none of which he chose to excerpt or reproduce in their entirety here. 

The best of collected in this volume thus represents a winnowing of texts that most crisply represent mclennan’s personal aesthetics, among them his compatriots Monty Reid, derek beaulieu, Stephen Brockwell and Robert Kroetsch. The selection from the sadly deceased Kroetsch, “Further to my Conversation” was certainly one of the strongest sections in the collection, along with the one poem from Stephanie Bolster, Lisa Samuels’ intricate “The Museum of Perception” chapbook, “My City is Ancient and Famous (Sprawl)” an urban-eco sequence by Julia Williams, and Helen Hajnoczky’s quirkily narrative, “A History of Button Collecting.” The poem I relished most in the text was Stephen Brockwell’s “from Pindaric Odes to the Objects of Science, by Wilhelm Scheif” with its memorable opening line “Best of all things has always been you, water,” the paean concluding with a stark image collusion: “May that one lodge in a dormant neuron/of an untapped cortex of my brain,/singing of glaciers.” 

What Stumbles: O the usual feeling of omissions. Where was Phil Hall for instance? And William Hawkins was pretty bad. There are also two typos I marked on pages 149 and 194. But these are just peccadillos. While occasionally I sunk into that dreary swoon epitomized by Anstee’s Lear-like lines: “words & words & parts of words/& parts of others’ words,” mostly I relished the variety, and the sheer effort, such magnitude being gathered into another kind of resolution here in this anthology, and a relentless opening. 

Link

Pandemonium: A Collaboration in Poetry, Video & Photography

04 Saturday Jan 2014

Posted by crowgirl11 in Grief Notes, Literary & Art Theory, Music, Photography, poetry, The Environment, Uncategorized

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apocalypse, beauty, catherine owen, chaos, collaboration, film, nature, Pandemonium, paul saturley, photography, poetry, website

Pandemonium: A Collaboration in Poetry, Video & Photography

T614738_10151672681491965_809606567_ohe culmination of a two year vision created by Catherine Owen & Paul Saturley.

Images, words, & sounds evoking the chaos of nature, imminent apocalypses & trembling transcendencies.

http://www.catherineowen.org

http://www.inkriver.com

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