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Feb. 9, 2006
Oct. 11, 2005
The Colours of
Fall are colours taken from actual photographs; the colours of the
"drops" in Tree Drops are designer colours for Fall 2005.
March 26, 2002
Here's another poem which seems age
appropriate and visual.
While Cathy and I were in Myrtle Beach
over the new year, we went to a small estate which had a lovely
garden and a few animals. They were keeping grey foxes in with the
red and the red foxes which do not climb trees by nature, had
learned to do so from the grey and were sitting high in the branches
there pretending not to watch us watch them and of course watching
our every move.
March 25, 2002
I have used a photo
of children running in capes in the school ground of the high school
that I attended-- Mt. Baker Secondary High School in Cranbrook, B.C.
as a basis for this graphic. Children had gathered for summer
festivities. It was obviously very enjoyable for them and I
could imagine many of them in their minds believing that they would
take off and fly at any moment as they donned a colourful cape.
All they needed was the magic of their imagination. Thoughts of
love and connection to earth change to the soar of the imagination
particularly when dressed in the appropriate garb.
March 22, 2002
Two of my photo
images came to my mind after much reflection of this poem. At
first, I felt stuck but when I remembered the photo that I took of
John B. Lee when I first met him during his visit to Lethbridge.
I had talked him into a photo shoot. He was looking through the
south window on the 8th floor of the University of Lethbridge at the
wired buffalo (an art piece I obviously am fond of). The second
is one of the first snow falls of 2001. It is not uncommon for
Lethbridge residents to see snow upon flower blooms. I layered
these images and the image of an insect photo that I had taken and
enlarged for this collage upon a pattern from a photo that I had
thought of using for the "tree section". I'm particularly
pleased that the poet image appropriately reflects John.
With ten poems in the Nova Scotia section, the websection is removed
from the website.
March 19,
2002
Here's another poem I thought might be
nice for the age group and the Yea Spot.
February 20,
2002
Here's a simple little poem I wrote this
morning...I think it simple enough and visual enough that it might
provide you with some inspiration for our web site.
December 10,
2001
Your photograph of clay trees inspired
the poem, "Worry Dreams." I'd like to see the poem stand in the absence
of its impulse, and so I'll let it speak for itself.
December 9,
2001
Two of my photo
images came to my mind when reading your poem. The first is a
photo that I took at Police Lake this fall. The image of the
autumn colours of the trees which lined the lake reflected on the
water making it a good backdrop for the image and for your poem.
I overlaid a winter photo (left) that I took two years ago of the
coulees (our Alberta ocean) looking southwest from the park beside the
cemetery -- gives a wave effect sans water. Youth with helios
arrive from the upper right -- images of youngsters in sunflower
blossoms and outfits, to lose their colour, glow and detail as they
emerge to the bottom left, no blossoms and not all images make it
through the center sunflower and globe shaped window frame. Water
droplets further push the images away from detailed viewing.
Over twenty layers of images are blended into one. The red rose
was added, ready to be withdrawn by the stem. Its edges and
leaves are softened so that outer detail is not sharp with the heart
which exists in shape only.
December 8,
2001
I was reading some of the theology of
the middle ages one of which involved the belief during the middle
ages that there would come 'the little season' at the turn of the
millenium, during which man would live in the final event of the
existence of man on the earth and the
arrival of the second coming of Christ. Basically the apocalypse.
The phrase intrigued me and I thought of our brief life upon the
earth as being rounded by a sleep, and indeed it being a 'little
season' between birth and death. We were talking at hockey in the
dressing room about how twenty years pass in a blink. Eventually we
all come to the realization of how brief a time we have upon the
earth. I don't despair, but rather glory in the possibility of
joy. I have been thinking theologically all my life. I wonder if I
wasn't born an 'old soul.' My aunt Ruth told me she found me a
strange little boy. One summer day when I was around 8 or 9 and
staying with my aunt and uncle and cousins for a couple of weeks
with my sister as well while my parents were off to the Canadian
west with their friends, I had been out working in the hay with
Uncle Russ and cousin Stuart. Apparently when I came in that
evening to supper, I said to aunt Ruth, "well, we'll never have that
day again." She found it odd in a boy so young.
I was raised an Anglican. I was
confirmed young with a crop of fellow Anglican children brought to
catechism as a group. Quickly thereafter I was pressed into service
as a 'server,' what they call altar boys in the Catholic faith.
Ours was a low Anglican church, and I was the first server for that
church in decades. I read the Bible daily and thought I was
destined for the vocation of a priest. I remember even as a little
boy kneeling as hard as I could so that I might inflict pain on
myself and through that suffering come closer to God.
One of my poems, "When Shaving Seems
Like Suicide" deals with my early memories of church. I have very
fond recollections of church going, but I decided the life of a
minister was not for me because in my little mind, the trappings of
falling in love with the show were too seductive.
It just so happens that this past year I
have been collaborating on an anthology of poems and prose pieces
called, Smaller Than God: words of spiritual longing. My co-editor,
Brother Paul Quenon is a Trappist monk from Gethsemani, Kentucky.
The fruits of our labour has been published by Black Moss Press.
The book contains a previously unpublished poem by Thomas Merton.
It also includes new works by Margaret Avison and James Reaney. It
also includes a new translation of one of the psalms and a new
translation of a poem by the great Spanish poet, Unamuno.
This morning just prior to writing this
poem, I was reading several authors from the middle ages including
Thomas Aquinas and Danté. The phrase,
"the little season" inspired me to go to my desk and wrestle with
the little season which wraps itself around the four seasons and
wedges itself within the large season of before and after...the
pre-creation darkness of being unborn and the post corporeal
darkness of after-death what some call the afterlife. I have been
forced by recent wrestling with a book called, The Universal
Baseball Association, J. Henry Waugh, Prop. by Robert Coover, to
wrestle with a lot of high-minded ideas. Only when I sat down at my
desk with your photograph winking at me did I realize how absolutely
appropriate my musings were and how your photograph of the church in
decay with its trinity of windows, its fading paint, its
architectural mortality were....
Oh, wow -- what a different response and reaction
than my own!.
I saw a light and a goodness remaining amid a ruin;
I saw art maintained in decay; I saw evidence that my soul could live
beyond its body; I felt angels protecting and reminding; I knew beauty
in a desert lying in wait for special visitors—I felt I was one of
them.
December 7,
2001
here is the poem I wrote on the day I
heard the news of George's untimely passing.
Paul McCartney has said how proud he
is of the legacy of 'love' which was the Beatle message. He spent
only one night of his thirty years of married life without Linda,
and that on the occasion of her being in the hospital.
John Lennon risked his
reputation as an artist in order to spread the word of world peace.
In the end he was martyred for his fame
.And George Harrison's final message
to the world was "search for God and love one another."
Of course Ringo is loved by all. He
seems the truest friend of the four and in some ways, although he is
the most ordinary, he seems also the best of a very good bunch. I
bet he'd be the one who would be the most fun to have as a brother.
So, although I'm sad, I'm also proud
that I was there when they were there to move me, to wake me up in
the world, to make me listen with both my ears. I'll always be
grateful for the music. I credit them with everything, since I
started writing poetry almost immediately after that fateful day,
February 9, 1964 when my Uncle told me to come down stairs and watch
Ed Sullivan.
I stood on the steps of the Dakota.
I attended the vigil in Strawberry Fields. Strangely, I was moved
more in prospect than in the real. There
were thousands milling around, singing, lighting candles, weeping,
laying flowers and so on. I just wanted to get away from the crowd.
December 5,
2001
- John sends
Sweet Sleep with this explanation:
here's a poem inspired by the mural...it
seems such lovely work, it contains all which is best about being
alive and doing good work in the world. It reminds me in some ways
of the lovely fatigue at the end of a day of labour when we know the
work we've done is heavy hay...good work, the important weariness of
helpful labour.
- John sends
The Ghost of His Bones Still Falling with this explanation:
I was looking up falconry on the web in
order to give my poem on your falcon some language to link by. I
know that the falcon is making a comeback, as is the eagle, from
near extinction as a result of DDT and other egg-thinning
chemicals. I also can see that this falcon is free, not a hunting
bird. However, I looked up falconry nonetheless and what amused and
amazed me was that my quest led almost instantly to a web site
called, "Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump" web
site. I found it fascinating and indeed poetic that I should come
almost instantly full circle from falcon through falconry to buffalo
jump archeology... It gives one pause. yes, indeed, everything is
everything.
Note: reminder: this project started off
with a buffalo theme which was taken off of the website when that
section was completed.
- John sends Four
Rust-blue Milk Cans Abandoned Beside a Boulder in the Sun with this explanation:
I was reading Tacitus and came
across his phrase when he was attempting to capture the notion of Pax
Romana...he said of the Roman Empire and its expansion into barbarian
territory where it established order and good government, and indeed a
thousand years of peace, "they make a wilderness, and call it peace."
I was thinking of America as well, which I think without irony might
be referred to as the new Rome, and its struggle with Islamic
fanaticism...and terrorists, who like the barbarians, the goths, the
visigoths, the vandals and indeed the Christians who brought down Rome
from within by being indifferent to the secular city of Rome with all
of its trappings of wealth and luxury, and Augustinian notions of the
City of God within, which gave rise to mendicant behaviour similar to
that of Osama bin Laden who lives in a cave
and rejects the west...makes me go, hmmmm? In any event, all of this
was going through my mind as I sat down to write this poem. Most of
what I've just revealed did not make it into the poem, at least not on
the surface, and there is little if anything in the poem to hint at
any of the aforementioned. However, the muses which suggests the word
music, and amusement, and all the "M" ing in the poem seems
appropriate to the larger concerns hinted at by the ferruginous
abandonment of the milk cans which have been painted blue while the
rock seems guano splashed...and the grass untended...and so on. Human
presence, the midden, the archeology of the modern, the notions of the
Grecian urn, and what remains when the
weather of the world has claimed it all back. But on the surface, the
poem marries the milk cans to themselves and is accessible
in ways that yesterday's poem is not.
December 4,
2001
- John sends
Meditation 17 with this explanation:
I sat down and wrote a poem in response
to your photograph, "Tree island."
It's a tad meditative and requires more
of the reader than most, but then I'm in a meditative mood I
suppose. Unlike the other poems, this one includes a brief
afterward which might be necessary as an accompanying explication of
what was on my mind when I wrote the poem.
Your photograph made me think of John
Donne's famous sermon, "Meditation XVII" which includes both the
famous phrase, "No man is an island unto himself" and "ask not for
whom the bell tolls it tolls for thee".
I was also grieving George Harrison's
untimely death and only recently returned from Manhatten (also an
island) where a vigil was held in Strawberry Fields Central park to
honour his passing. Thousands of fellow Beatle fans gathered and
sang and lit candles in his honour. Cathy and I were in New York
when this was happening and as a Beatle fanatic, I walked through
central park and visited the Lennon memorial in Strawberry Fields
coincidentally while they were gathered in mourning to honour
Harrison's life.
I learned that the reason Manhatten sky
scrapers exist is a response to the fact that Manhatten is mostly
granite and exists as a result of the ice age when the weight of
fifty miles of ice compressed the island into rock. When the ice
retreated, Manhatten Island was left behind and of necessity, sky
scrapers became the architecture of choice in response to the
problems of subterranean building. The twin towers were the
ultimate example of architectural technology in response to urban
crowding.
I wasn't thinking about the Twin towers
when I wrote this poem. But I was thinking of all the other things.
September 20, 2001
September 19, 2001
May 27, 2001
Mar. 26, 2001
Mar. 25, 2001
With ten poems in the Buffalo section, the websection is removed from
the website. Hardcopy and E-pub book entitled The Yea Spot:
Buffalo, are now works-in-progress by Blue Grama
Publications.
Mar. 19, 2001
Mar. 12, 2001
Mar. 11, 2001
Mar. 8, 2001
Feb. 25/26, 2001
Jan. 30, 2001
Jan. 29, 2001
Jan. 11, 2001
Dec. 21, 2000
Nov. 21, 2000
- John and Marlene discuss the continuation of the website given
that there is virtually no teacher/student interaction. They
decide to continue. Marlene sends the first of the Window
series photos: Historical Space
Nov. 20, 2000
Nov. 16, 2000
Nov. 15, 2000
Oct. 20, 2000
Oct. 15, 2000
Oct. 12, 2000
Oct. 5, 2000
Oct. 4, 2000
Oct. 3, 2000
Oct. 2, 2000
Sept. 28, 2000
- Project begins. Linda Nolin signs on as an interactive teacher.
- Marlene sends photo for The Invisible Buffalo.
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