VisuAlchemy—A RETROSPECTIVE OF JUDY WAPP'S AMAZING ART

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Artist, activist, radio personality and friend, Judy Wapp, who I've written about before (here, from 2013), has a show on at the Nelson Museum, Archives & Gallery. It's a retrospective of her art, with collage work that includes a number of pieces from private collections. 

The place was packed. I saw people I haven't seen in years, all of us there to celebrate Judy's wonderful art that is an in-depth examination of the effect media has on, well, everything. The evening began with a welcome to everyone by Arin Fay who curated the show.

Music was provided by my boy the minstrel, Jesse Lee.  

There was much excitement when the spirit of Elvis entered the room in the form of Judy's daughter, Bessie Wapp, who was larger than life—or at least, taller!

Like many of us, I've tried stilt-walking. When I was a kid my dad made me a set that got me maybe a foot off the ground and that was scary enough. Bessie is truly a master at it.

 

But it wasn't just her antics as she made her way around the room that was special; she did it while singing Love Me Tender to her mom, who had a bit of an Elvis connection back in the day but it's not my story to tell. It was a truly beautiful moment and you can see it here. 

Must have got something in my eye.

After that we got to go up to the gallery where Judy's art is on display until June 22. Here she is with one of the many professional photographers who were in attendance, Jeremy Addington. 

For some reason there were a lot of ties on display. Back in the last century if you were driving from Balfour up towards Kaslo you couldn't help but notice that all the hydro poles were wearing ties. Many an urban legend arose as to their provenance. Was it a grad prank? Aliens? Hmmmmm.

Ted couldn't remember how to tie one and I never learned so he wore his like this. Here is is with Heather Haake.

Heather, Jeremy, Judy, Ted and I got to know each other in Tom Wayman's creative writing class in 1991. When Ted and I got married, Judy created this for us. It's the first thing you see when you come into our new home in Nelson. 

Yes, after forty-nine years for Ted and nearly twenty-seven for me, we've left Ootischenia and are living in a lovely condo in Nelson. Moving is hell; I really don't recommend it even if I did lose twenty pounds in the process! We've been here just over a month and it feels like home already.

If you're in the area, check out Judy's show. Like her, it's simply wonderful. 

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A CAUTIOUS RETURN TO BLOGGING

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Hello there, blog readers. It's been a long time since I posted anything. Even though I've been close to home all this time, I've just not felt like it. Lots of changes have happened since last I wrote: Ted is dealing with dementia and various other issues that require attention. My tricky left ankle, that has bothered me for the past fifteen years or so, really went off last year. Thanks to osteoporosis I suffered a stress fracture to the bottom of my fibula and was in an air cast for four months. It's unreliable, as in I never know when it's going to act up and when it does it feels like someone stabbed it with a knife (or how I assume it might feel, never having been truly stabbed) so really long walks are out. No more Camino-like adventures for me, I guess, and that makes me sad.

I'm still working in the poetry mines. Thanks to Zoom, on Sunday afternoons I've been taking workshops with Paul E. Nelson and we're into year three now. October 6 to 8 the Cascadia Poetry Festival is happening in Seattle. I won't be able to go but thanks to having attended a couple of previous ones, I highly recommend it.

Last year I published three chapbooks for a couple of different groups of poets. 

I'm very pleased to have three poems in the current Event Magazine. Three! At least a couple of them originated as NaPoWriMo poems, and here we are again, it's April and I'm aiming to write a poem a day for the month. I'm not, as I did in previous years, going to post them here. Makes it awkward if I want to submit them anywhere, as lit mags prefer to be the first out of the gate to publish new work.

It's interesting; coming back and trying to write a blog post is proving to be quite challenging for me. Like I've misplaced my voice or something. Here, I'll leave you with a nice venison stew to warm you up til next time!

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AUGUST TO OCTOBER — POSTCARD POEMS 2021

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And it's done. Over for another year. This was year 15 for me, and it marks the first year all my cards are done by me on both sides! If I've said it once I've said it a hundred times; I'm no artist, but I'm truly amazed at how much fun it was to attempt to draw things with coloured markers. 

Most of the cards were written at my desk. I love this desk. It used to belong to my grandmother and then my aunt. Now I get to sit at it and write things. 

As far as the poems go, every year I try to work towards some kind of constraint. This year's fest was in honour of Michael McClure and Diane di Prima, two poets who died in the past year. Diane actually participated in the August Postcard Fest in the first or second year and I was lucky enough to get one from her. It reads:

Just Like the Rules Said

some of them respond

to a card, or picture

some of them

are a vision in my head

some walk into or out of

the fog

or someone's dream

To be perfectly honest, when I first received that card I thought the poem was kind of a toss-off. But that was before I'd thrown myself fully into the game, the game being to write the damned poem directly on the card; don't overthink it; don't write a bunch of drafts on paper and copy what you think is the best one. Nope. The idea is to take your pen, apply it to the card, and let the words fall where they may. Took me a long time to get even slightly comfortable doing that, but now I find it incredibly freeing. 

This year I decided to honour Diane's Revolutionary Letters. I read them, made a list of all her first lines and then, without rereading the poem, I arbitrarily chose one and included it in the poem I wrote to each of the poets in my group. Most of the time I started with the line, just as she did. For example, Diane's Revolutionary Letter # 1begins with the line 

I have just realized that the stakes are myself

and I continued

I have just realized that the stakes are myself

however I decide to drive them.

Smoke hangs heavy among

the unburnt trees that tremble

in their nervousness

knowing they could be next.

We are all sentient beings.

We bring what we have 

to this party called life

to this game where the stakes

grow higher every day.

I throw mine in with the rest.

Sometimes Diane's line wound up in the body of my poem, like this one that begins her Revolutionary Letter #34

hey man, let's make a revolution, let's give

and my poem turned into this:

Being a teenage in the sixties

was both confusing—

all that fifties' modelling—

and exhilarating—

look Ma, I'm on the pill!

Instead of making accidental babies

it was

hey man, let's make a revolution, let's give

peace a goddamn chance!

I did this with twenty-nine of the thirty-one cards; missed the first two as I hadn't yet decided on the constraint. It was an interesting way to honour a poet whose memoir I took out of the library twice and brought it back late both times. She was, shall we say, a kindred spirit.

Last year, and starting again today as it happens, I took a number of Zoom courses/workshops/discussion groups about poetry and the next batch of poems I wrote went out October 1st to some of the people I met in those groups. So far this year I've written forty-five cards. This last bunch that just went out follows no constraint or theme whatsoever, but the poems were all written directly onto the cards.

And here are all the cards I received this year. It was a lovely haul with some great poems and lots of wonderful, original artwork. A huge thank you goes out to everyone involved! It was kind of a tough summer. First there was the heat dome and we got temperatures in the mid-forties Celsius (113F) and then there were forest fires all over the province so the air was awful. Covid numbers really blew up around here (southeast BC) and it finally got into my mom's care home so we couldn't visit her for six weeks. Hard to explain to someone who's 101 and can't remember things like she used to. 

Get the damned vaccine, people! It won't hurt you for more than a second or two and it might save somebody you love.

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IT'S POSTCARD POEM TIME AGAIN! COME PLAY!

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I have a stack of postcards that have been following me around for several weeks now. Since May, actually, when I agreed (with myself) to draw something on blank cards. Oxygen Art Centre in Nelson was doing a prompt a day event called "Big Draw" so I sort of followed that.

I am no artist. I remember Mr. Brown's Art Class in Junior High, how I'd watch enviously as one or other of my classmates would produce something gorgeous. A tree that looked like a tree. A mountain scene. A familiar street with houses that looked right (I must have been daydreaming when he discussed perspective.) Something abstract with fabulous colours. Watercolours that didn't run into each other. 

Writing classes, however, were different. Oh, they weren't just writing classes. "Compostion" was lumped in with English classes which were divided, in the earlier grades at least, into English Grammar and English Literature. I enjoyed both, particularly when we got to "write" something and even more particularly when we were studying poetry. In Grade 12 I actually had my father for English 91, as it was called then. It was the only A I got that year. (He made a point of assigning all the marking in that class to another teacher so he couldn't be accused of bias.)

So, back to postcards. It's almost time for August Postcard Poeming again! I've been doing this every summer since 2007. And this year, for the first time ever, I'm sending all orginals, as in both sides by me!

I still don't "get" perspective and I'm not sure Mr. Brown would approve of this hodgepodge of stuff, but by golly I had fun! And that's the main thing the Postcard Poem Fest is about; getting your inner-editor off your back and going for it.

The idea is to dash off a poem directly onto the card. It took me several years of the fest before I was actually able to do this so if you have to write out a first draft on a notepad who am I to tell you not to? You write a poem a day during the month of August—once you've got your list of 32 names including your own, feel free to start. Some days, to be honest, I don't get to it. Other days I might write two or three.

This year's fest is dedicated to the memories of Beat poets Michael McClure and Diane di Prima, both of whom died in 2020. In one of the first years di Prima participated in the postcard fest. Here's the card I got from her. See how she summarizes what the fest is about in just a few lines.

just like the RULES SAID

some of them respond

to a card, or picture

some of them

are a vision in my head

some walk into or out of 

the fog

or someone's dream

                                                                            Diane di Prima

If you want to play along, here are a few relevant links:

The blog for the fest is here: https://popo.cards 

Sign up via Submittable here. The $15 entry fee goes to support Seattle Poetry Lab and all it does for poetry. DEADLINE: JULY 18th, 2021

A workshop handout for the poetry postcard writing exercise by Paul Nelson who started this whole adventure is here: 

And finally, pay attention to postal rates. In Canada it costs 

$1.07 cents to mail a card within Canada (.92 if you buy in bulk) 

$1.30 to send one to the States 

$2.71 International destinations 

Not an inexpensive exercise, but I think of it as a nice dinner out.

If you're not in Canada (and most postcarders are not), PLEASE check with your own post office for your out-of-country rates. 

Here, mostly for my own records, are some of the posts I've made where I talked about postcard poems:

2021  2019 2019 again  2017  2017 again  2016  2014  2007  2007 again

Sisu just came in, saw the cards on the floor, and decided to make a statement. I think he's saying, "Not this again!" 

'Fraid so!

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A MEANDER DOWN THE COLUMBIA WITH FRED WAH AND RITA WONG

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This morning I found myself returning to a poem to do with the Columbia River I started writing a while back. It's form, if it has a form, is kind of a departure for me. It starts out like a "regular poem" and then morphs into a series of words beginning with the letter n in an attempt to suggest the inexorable flow of the river as it makes its way to the Pacific. Yesterday on a Zoom call I read it to a small group of fellow writers and one of them had a great suggestion, namely to return to the beginning of the poem after I go through all the n stuff. 

After fiddling with it for some time this morning, doing a little fact-checking online and so forth, I wanted to see a picture of the whole river so I got out my copy of Rita Wong's and Fred Wah's 2018 book, beholden: a poem as long as the river. And I did something I'm always telling other poets they should do; I read it aloud. To myself. First Fred's poem, then Rita's. 

One of its authors, Fred Wah, talked about it at a symposium about upstream benefits in 2017 and I mentioned this book here a couple of years ago. I referred to it as "gorgeous", and it is, a visual tour-de-force from Talonbooks in Vancouver. I remember seeing it displayed in its 1x114-foot-long glory at Touchstones Gallery in Nelson—a stunning piece of work by artist Nick Conbere where the entirety of the two poems is displayed in such a way that you can imagine yourself walking along the river itself.

Recently I've been part of a small group of us who are reading Nathaniel Mackey's Double Trio aloud, each of us taking turns, and that has reminded me how much more powerful poetry IS when heard as opposed to simply read. (In the case of Mackey, I can't say I understand it all but the sound, people, the sound!) I have looked at beholden many times since I got it, read parts of it (as I tend to do with most poetry books, to be honest), but today I read it, out loud, start to finish, and it was such a different experience I want everybody to do it! 

Of course, it doesn't hurt that both poets are masterful with words. Listen to Fred Wah here: 

...the River's voice is the sound our body makes when we're sleepwalking through the abyss of our own presence in the world... (p.80–81)

or Rita Wong, when she says:

...Imperial delirium silences salmon abundance   chokes Kettle Falls' joyful convergence that cannot be forgotten, cannot be unseen, unheard, unspoken since recreation that wrecks creation leans to dazed stupor that isn't fun for anyone... (p. 57–59)

They go on like this throughout, starting where the Columbia begins as a tiny spring coming out of the ground at Columbia Lake up near Invermere in British Columbia (here's a 2 ½ minute video that gives you an idea what it looks like there) until the River arrives at the Pacific Ocean, when, to quote Rita Wong again, it ...takes over the page as the ocean accepts the river.

It's easy enough to follow who is writing which poem because Wah's is typeset while Wong's is in her own handwriting. They weave in and out of each other, crossing over bridges to get to the other side for awhile, then crossing back. If you look carefully at the way I've situated the next two pictures you will see two such crossings, first over the Robson bridge where I go when I want to walk the Waldie Island Trail and then over the Kinnaird bridge which is the one I cross from Ootischenia, where I live, to get to Castlegar. In the middle of the circle of words is the confluence of the Kootenay and Columbia Rivers, and Zuckerberg Island. As you continue south on the Columbia you pass Genelle on your way toward the border, that serious-looking line that bisects the bottom page at ...remember the Smoke Eaters whistled offside for years of pollution flowing south across the border as tainted as at the signature of Treaty  /  and all the forked tongues whispering Doctrine of Discovery... (Wah) and a riff on global warning—...the incomprehensible speed & scale of logging, unforestry, turning pines into poles and matchsticks, burning us up faster than the  /  glaciers could cool us down. (Wong)

So yes. Get this book. Read it aloud, to yourself, to anyone who'll listen. You'll be glad you did. And you'll have to excuse me now. I'm going for a walk. As it's late in the day, I'll head for Waldie Island to catch the last of the sun—it got up to 30C/86F today, the hottest so far this year. I'll be walking on the north side, see if I can catch some more of my own poem, the Columbia having been sneaking into my work on and off for a very long time. This year will be year 15 for the annual August postcard poem fest. The first card I wrote, back in 2007, began with the words Let it begin with a river... 

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One Thing

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NaPoWriMo 2021 Day 29:

Ah! The penultimate prompt for this year's NaPo "is called “in the window.” Imagine a window looking into a place or onto a particular scene. It could be your childhood neighbor’s workshop, or a window looking into an alien spaceship. Maybe a window looking into a witch’s gingerbread cottage, or Lord Nelson’s cabin aboard the H.M.S. Victory. What do you see? What’s going on?"

Yeah well, this prompt ain't speaking to me either. I see nothing.

Instead, let us have a small poem to do with this picture, one I took in the mangrove in La Manzanilla a couple of years ago.

one thing

only one thing is true

sometimes you're the bird

and sometimes you're the fish

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WhoWhatWhenWhereWhyWhereWhenWhatWho

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NaPoWriMo 2021 Day 28:

"Our prompt today (optional, as always), is to write a poem that poses a series of questions. The questions could be a mix of the serious (“What is the meaning of life?”) and humorous (“What’s the deal with cats knocking things off tables?”), the interruptive (“Could you repeat that?”) and the conversational (“Are those peanuts? Can I have some?”). You can choose to answer them – or just let the questions keep building up, creating a poem that asks the reader to come up with their own answer(s)."

WhoWhatWhenWhereWhyWhereWhenWhatWho

Who was I in a past life and if there is a past life is there a future life?

What does it matter?

When will my mother die and when she does will she really be dead to me?

Where are the answers to my life's big questions? 

Why do I keep picking at them as if at a scab that as a consequence will never heal?

Why is it so difficult to write of this?

Where will I find the truth to the story of my father had two wives?

When did I realize it is possible to have three fathers?

What is the point of even asking about life's big questions?

Who are all these people and why do they keep invading my poems?

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