Sealed Doors, Mount Royal

At the Museum of Anthropolgy in Vancouver (two)

At the Museum of Anthropology, Vancouver (one)

A Day in Ottawa

The Shaman’s Way

Years ago—in the early 1970s—my brother gave me a large woodcut entitled “A shaman on the back of a grizzly.” I had this on my bedroom wall, in different bedrooms, for many years. Looking back now, I see how important shamanism has been to my creative, spiritual, and personal life. In fact, it was staring down at me all those years ago. Shamanism is mankind’s oldest form of spirituality. It is the spirituality of our most distant ancestors. The shamanic journey—the shamanic way—gives cohesion and meaning to pivotal experiences in my life. I do not renounce my western traditions or my life in the 21st Century, but I can better understand my own existence, my concerns in poetry, because of shamanism. Shamanism does not displace the contemporary, it deepens and widens and co-exists with our understanding of the contemporary. As well, shamanism has helped me to understand experiences I have had; it has helped me to better understand my own life, spirituality, and what I had intuited from an early age regarding my concerns as a poet. Let’s just say, shamanism was always in my unconsciousness, waiting to surface, like ancestral memories. The image of the shaman on the back of a grizzly—the image on the woodcut—entered my psyche and, looking back, became a part of my inner being. It made a deep enough impression on me at the time that, in 1972 or 1973—probably not long after I was given the woodcut—I wrote a poem, “a shaman on the back of a grizzly,” using the woodcut as a narrative for the poem. The shaman sitting on the back of a grizzly bear, incongruously almost as big as the grizzly; always riding “bear back”; always staring directly at the viewer; always the expression of surprise and worry on the shaman’s face; the shaman and the bear always appearing from some unknown and unknowable psychic place and always departing to some other place that is unknown and unknowable, and always in the continuum of existence. “a shaman on the back of a grizzly” a shaman on the back of a grizzly the black fur a black streak moving between the trees then across an open grassy field a shaman eyes blackened hair hanging limply down over ears & arms holding to handfuls of bearskin he leans slightly forward knees pressing to flanks the grizzly face down & mouth open a bewildered look on his face we see the white of his teeth we see the shaman mouth open we see him see us we see them disappear back into the forest they see us disappear back into the forest we see them disappear back into the forest we see him see us (1972-1973)

The Empire State Building

At The New York Public Library

Fairy Land, Montreal

Located on the west side of St. Francis Xavier, on the same block as the Centaur Theatre, between Notre Dame and St. Paul, this store sells or rents costumes. I am not too sure what the original name, "Fairy Land", refers to.

A Day at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

At the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

Hindu and Buddhist icons at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, Ontario.

The Old Port, Montreal

Playing Polo in South Western Quebec

Santa Monica, California in January 1997

A Statement: All Art is Vision

After seeing Huichol yarn paintings in Galeria Uno in Puerto Vallarta: The art of the Huichol shaman is created only when in a peyote trance vision. All art, then, is vision. This is different from the way most art is created by Western artists who are in the grip of the “art production assembly line."

For many years I searched for this clue to my own approach and understanding of art. It is what I intuited in late 1960s when I began experimenting in my writing, when I attempted to write outside of the narrow linear and rational mind, when I was absorbed in experiments attempting to short circuit the rational mind. Now a shamanic approach has been articulated to me, an approach that I can identify with.

I place my heart in the visionary’s approach. My identification of myself as a poet has always been outside of the mainstream of the poetry community. I was never very much a part of any poetry community as they rarely expressed my concerns in poetry.

Written on 19 November 1984, Puerto Vallarta, Jalisco, Mexico; Huntingdon, 1991; Montreal, 2008.

Fountain at the Getty Museum

The Mystic Beast

At the Museum of Anthropology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia. I liked this statue so much I used  drawing of it, by Ed Varney, on the cover of my book, The Mystic Beast.