Tightly an easel

...will grip the support - be it canvas, paper, panel - as the brush strokes and slaps and strikes its surface. As the easel holds on, the artist tries in many ways to let go.

It's late. The easel and I had a long day, but not nearly as long as the days of others. Tonight I think of Goya, his life and his work. Take this painting for example. Is it the result of holding on or letting go or does it come from a timeless state somewhere between grip and release?

How weak the wall must have looked while it held it.

Nevermore

...says the raven over and over in Edgar Allan Poe's famous poem. This comes to mind as the sun falls and the ravens begin to fly over town as they do every day at this time, heading to a roost less than a mile northeast of here. The cat and I watch the sky thicken. Nevermore nevermore nevermore...hundreds of them. The bills all aim at the same point. It's as if a wheel is suspended above us and we're beneath the rim watching the tire break up, the rubber bits flying up the spokes to rejoin on the hub. In the morning we'll see the reverse. Evermore evermore evermore...

For some reason

...I couldn't get The Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dalí off my mind today.

To pull

...paintings, photographs, sound, a kinetic assemblage and a video installation together so they work as a whole is a tremendous challenge, yet we forge ahead. We have less than three months to finish preparing the show, a two-day show that will be part of my book launch.

The sound and video components are the product of a collaboration. I put forth my vision and my partner then translated it into the media. Sorting through the weird shifting images in my head and articulating a sense of the finished product is much easier said than done, but after several long discussions I managed to convey my ideas. Though both the sound and the video still require editing, he certainly caught the spirit of my vision.

Today we hung half the paintings to see how they work together. As we sat and discussed the work, the cat strutted about, flicking her tail, a tail that's slowly coming back to life.

Yesterday I learned

...two paintings from Alex Colville: Return, an exhibition of Colville's recent and earlier works, were vandalized. While vandalism happens all the time, and art vandals are not unheard of, it's particularly troubling to think that someone would enter a gallery and attack the art it houses.

Years ago a small painting of mine, along with a number of works by other artists, was stolen from a small commercial gallery. Though I was compensated for the piece and I got lots of mileage out of lame jokes about how my work, too, was worthy of thieves, to this day I wonder what came of that painting. Is it hidden away or was it merely tossed in a nearby lake, my hours of work now the platform for a sucker or some other bottom dweller?

Quickly now

...what do iron and grass have in common?
This. I must see this gust. I must.

For anyone who, like me, has felt and fallen in love with an anvil's smooth face, this.

A giant came to mind

...this morning as I was reading about someone's super-sized baby. Suddenly, the museum I'd visited years ago in Willow Bunch, Saskatchewan became vivid again, and I could see my pale self standing at the foot of Edouard Beaupré's bed, the monstrous bed of a giant. Overwhelmed by heat, the lack of food, and this man's sad story, I, generally invincible and not at all prone to such things, grabbed onto the nearest solid object, worried I'd faint and fearing I'd never shake the landing.

There is no vet

...in this town, but one drives up here every Wednesday. We had planned to take our poor limp-tailed cat - a cat who, by the way, *usually enjoys listening to poems - down to the vet on Monday, but a long road trip during a heavy snowfall and through freezing rain isn't all that wise. Same story Tuesday. So this afternoon she, as usual, battled the pet carrier all the way to the temporary vet clinic in the church and she battled it again on the way home, charging the gate, her nose the battering ram. Anyhow, after 0.5 ml of Dexamethasone, my cat's tail resembles this one. That's an improvement.

*The exception being a speedy reading of E. E. Cummings' "anyone lived in a pretty how town", to which she flattens her ears in disdain.

Some copper spilled

...onto the canvas yesterday and hardened. I'll always know what I was reading before that painting came to be. Many of my paintings will forever bear the weight of whatever was on my mind when the paint was still wet. The canvas tends to darken as I watch my thoughts drying.

This morning I listened to John MacKenzie read two Milton Acorn poems. I read about the scrolls of Herculaneum on Hassenpfeffer. How this will affect the composition, the color and the way I handle the paint, I've yet to see.

Again the Kingdom of Edom

...makes the news. Though archaeological matters always grab my attention, new findings on metal factories and copper production are especially intriguing. Certainly this interest largely comes from living in a mining town where copper and zinc are extracted; however, the idea that people in Edom were pouring metal into molds at around the 11th century BC leaves me looking sidelong at our own chisels and axes.

I balanced all, brought all to mind

...says Yeats in "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death". I think about this as the snow falls, as the cat drags her useless tail around the house, searching for balance, becoming the im-, that dreaded prefix, as she jumps and fails to land as she'd intended.

So goes the day. Outside the snow is still falling. Inside the cat struggles with dis- to attain and maintain equilibrium. She weighs all things, seeks balance with an im- just off-stage, in the shadows, prompting.

Surely the moment before the cat jumps, that pause, is the very same moment Vermeer captured in Woman Holding a Balance. Now I can imagine what happened once the woman put the balance down.

Yesterday, by chance, the voice

...of a poet whose work I am close to reached my ear. Immediately that voice became part of the poems I've read over and over. For that I am grateful.

Sadly, I will never hear the voice of Richard Outram in the same way. For more on Outram's passing go to Bookninja.

Today the paint applied itself

...to fresh canvas as it tends to when my thoughts head elsewhere.

This odd day began with research on cats with broken tails. Poor thing.

The world about us

"The world about us would be desolate except for the world within us" says Wallace Stevens in "The Relations Between Poetry and Painting". I reread this today, thinking of it after reading a post by John MacKenzie, then I headed back down to the studio to face the paint laden canvas.

The painting I found surprised me. Beyond the rough terrain and unpredictable weather typical of an unfinished painting was something I didn't recognize. As I spent the day painting, forgetting to eat, missing the snow, the plows, the salt trucks, I wondered if I'd stumbled upon a new world yesterday - or worlds, worlds the sun holds just a bit closer or maybe a bit further away - or was the painting, smeared with post-Stevens ebullience, merely glowing in my mind? From where I stood and from where I now stand it's hard to tell.

The sky is sitting on the town

...this morning, pushing the wood smoke back down the chimneys. Earlier the sky, clad in worn grey flannel, brushed my peripheral vision as I biked and soon I began to see two ghosts - one poking me straight in the eye, the other bouncing off the left lense of my glasses.

Perhaps I wouldn't have noticed them if I hadn't been reading the first installment of the 2004 Caroline Heath Memorial Lecture, "Anne Szumigalski and Eli Mandel: Two Visions of Blake" by George Elliott Clarke, which appears in the January/February 2005 issue of Freelance. After I heard Clarke deliver the lecture back in October, I looked forward to reading it, wanting to linger on whatever it was that moved me as I listened to him speak about these two great Saskatchewan poets. Sure enough, as I read it I felt again that strange stirring, a stirring I cannot describe much less explain. The sky, still in its old pajamas, seems to be waiting for me to figure it out.

I'll begin the day by pointing

...to John MacKenzie's post on John Thompson and Stilt Jack, Thompson's book of ghazals, a book that I have not yet read even though it has been on my reading list for quite some time.

Though I've only read bits and pieces of Thompson's work, I'm certainly taken by its power. The excerpts from his ghazals that appear in Lorna Crozier's afterword to Bones in Their Wings, her book of ghazals, are enthralling.

It's when poets I admire speak of poets they admire that I get the clearest sense that poetry itself is one great living, lung-powered thing. I can almost see each poet being inhaled, then exhaled. In through the nose, out through the mouth. We are breaths, coming and going.

That dank blank-canvas dawn

...from "The Conundrum of the Workshops" by Rudyard Kipling struck me this morning as I stared at the still blank canvas. I've always wondered if this staring is part of the art and if some day it will be the art itself. A foolish notion perhaps, but lately it seems this period of blankness has been gaining a lot of weight. I'm convinced it somehow corresponds with Alice Notley's caves in Disobedience. Perhaps Notley's "walls of blank rock behind panes of glass" are the very same walls that have always stood between me and the canvas. Perhaps one day the walls will come to light.

The Nude Descending a Staircase

...came to mind as I went downstairs to turn the heat up in the studio this morning. The Nude Descending a Staircase, Marcel Duchamp's controversial painting from 1912, is what I saw as I put a blank canvas on the easel. Then I thought of the final line of X.J. Kennedy's poem about this painting. Descending a staircase - that's how it feels to look at a canvas's unmarked surface. It's that eerie moment when I begin to see the restless shapes yet to be painted. This is always followed by the disconcerting ability to see through them. Yet, I continue to descend.

The Sunlight on the Garden

Sometimes a poem will catch the rough edge of a reader's heart and tear into its rawness, yet these are the very words the reader will return to again and again until they pulse naturally through the body. One poem that has become my blood and the blood of many is " The Sunlight on the Garden" by Louis MacNeice.

Much has been said about this poem's brilliant rhythm, the rhymes, the purity of its music, its near perfect pitch, but none of what I've read comes close to touching the poem's brilliance. Much has been said about the poem's history, about the poet's circumstances at the time of its writing, but, again, this kind of exploration does nothing to explain why it has touched so many so deeply.

Sometimes a poem will simply flow away from such study and carry its keeper - that is what I've become - onward to new vessels. After hearing John MacKenzie read on CBC last year and hearing him read a poem by Seamus Heaney (the audio is on Salt and Ice, John's blog), I began to hear, or almost hear (or whatever it is the mind does to make this happen) my beloved "The Sunlight on the Garden" in John's voice. I suppose this is how great poems live on.

Listen to John MacKenzie read "The Sunlight on the Garden".

The other day Swamp Angel appeared

...in The Orange Toad, a lovely coffee house/used bookstore that I visit weekly. It's said to be Ethel Wilson's finest novel. I've always wanted to read it.

I also bought The Journals of Susanna Moodie by Margaret Atwood. I left The Orange Toad wondering who in the neck of these woods is filling its full literary section, hoping that I'd run into a who on the way out. No such luck.

Sure it's Boat Pose

...but, when your hands tire from holding Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, it's also a built-in book holder.

Windchill warning continued

It's been too cold for too long. The chickadees have been frosted up for days. Bits of poems - sometimes a line, sometimes a few words with blurs on either side - come to mind only to freeze, crack and shatter within moments. I spent the morning hunting for The Orchards of Syon, hoping to thaw whatever it is inside that froze overnight (yes, indeed, I believe something did freeze) but the book will not show itself. So I am here, looking.

Tonight I will finish Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. I think I'm in love with Childermass...

The title of this blog

...is the title of a poem in More Than Three Feet of Ice. Though not a winter poem, it's quite fitting for today. Anyhow, welcome.