Thursday, May 15, 2008
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
Thursday, May 1, 2008
The Vehicule Poets
The Vehicule Poets, Montreal, Maker Press, 1979. Front cover, top: Ken Norris, Tom Konyves, Stephen Morrissey; back cover, bottom: Endre Farkas, Claudia Lapp, Artie Gold, John McAuley. Group photo taken at Vehicule Art Gallery by Chris Knudsen.
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Notes on Photography (unrevised) One
2. I began to see my photographs as another aspect of my creativity and not just snapping away at pictures for no reason. I realized that the photographs I took are an act of creativity in addition to the poems I was writing. Some of the photographs manifested the same psychic content of my poems.
3. Today, I sometimes want people in my photographs. People in a photograph can sometimes heighten the intensity of the image. I am also interested in the irony one can observe in life, of the humour that exists in what might seem to lack humour.
4. I never thought of my photographs as “snapshots” although perhaps that is what they are. These snapshots were always an expression of my inner being, unless it was a photograph of friends or relatives. Then it was archival work, documentation, family history or some event in which people congregated. But always the finiteness of time, of life, has been somewhere in my consciousness, even when I was a child, and it is present in some way in many of my photographs. Since I have researched my family’s history for many years, I have taken many archival photographs, or photographs for documentation and research purposes, of graves, churches, old buildings, and other places of interest. This is a large part of my body of photographic work.
5. When I worked in the Science and Engineering Library in the Hall Building of Sir George Williams University in the early 1970s, I would look through books of photographs that were part of their collection. That’s where I saw a photograph of Dostoyevsky’s desk, which I mentioned in a poem in my first book, The Trees of Unknowing (Montreal, Vehicule Press, 1978). Later, over several years, I took photographs of my own desk. Then it occurred to me that these photographs of clutter were also a way to divine the psyche and life of the person whose desk was being photographed. It was a kind of photograph of the person, it was a way of seeing their psyche and ego in the clutter of the desk. I have always loved looking through books of photographs, whether it is famous artists like Diane Arbus or Anselm Adams, old photographs of cities and people by now anonymous photographers, or contemporary photographs by as yet unrecognized artists.
6. A subject of some of my photographs are archetypal images, something that was pointed out to me by CZ. I believe there is an order to the universe that can be observed in mythology and archetypes. Life is not a series of random meaningless events; life is full of meaning, with an order to the universe. My photographs of archetypal images, as we tried to do with the Aquarian Symbols (Vancouver & Montreal, Coracle Press, 2000), are meant to open a portal into the depths of consciousness.
7. I’ve always owned a camera. Since I was ten, eleven, or twelve years of age I’ve taken photographs; it was never considered "unusual," it was never a decision, if I was interested in taking photographs then I was given the means to take photographs. Photography has been a source of happiness for me. I have enjoyed living a fairly solitary life, and photography has been an important part of what I do, in addition to writing, in order to fulfill the meaning of my existence. Photography is a way, like poetry, that I can be creative, but I can also express my concerns about life. If there is an art form other than poetry that I feel is a true expression of my inner being, an expression of the divine presence in life, of the epiphanous moment that captures an existential reality, the transience of the human condition, it is photography.
Friday, April 25, 2008
St. Hubert Street
The sidewalks on the several blocks of St. Hubert Street are covered, making it an attractive shopping district. This is the street in Montreal where brides' and bridesmaids' gowns, and just about everything else that is needed for a wedding, can be found in the dozens of stores lining both sides of this street. St. Hubert Street is a Temple to the Wedding, a street dedicated to the Feminine, to union, new beginnings, an affirmation of life, sexuality, and joie de vivre.
Stairs, St. Patrick's, St. Joseph's
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
James Wilson Morrice
James Wilson Morrice was born at Montreal on August 10, 1865; he died in Tunis, Tunisia on January 23, 1924. Morrice was one of the first Canadian modernist painters and achieved acceptance in Europe before being acclaimed in Canada. Regarding Morrice's work, George Woodcock writes, "They are among the first truly great Canadian paintings."
Thursday, April 17, 2008
Our Last Day at 4350 Montclair Avenue, March 23, 2007, 5 p.m.
I returned to the empty house at 5 p.m. and took some of these photographs. I had been there earlier in the day when the movers arrived. The photographs of the house, furnished, were taken the previous Christmas, 2006. The group photo, from left to right, is my mother, myself, and my sister-in-law Kathy. This was our family home from spring 1962 to March 23, 2007.
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
At Edmonton City Hall
The Hermes Building
A crowd of people passes the Hermes Building on Peel Street in downtown Montreal.
Thursday, April 3, 2008
Vehicule Press Publications 1978-79
Publications
1978 –79
Vehicule Press
1978 –79
Vehicule Press
New Titles
Violent Duality: A Study of Margaret Atwood
By Sherrill Grace
Before Romantic Words
By Artie Gold
What Henry Hudson Found & Other Poems
By John McAuley
Baby Grand
By Guy Birchard
The Trees of Unknowing
By Stephen Morrissey
Inter Sleep: The Box in Which He Keeps His Voice
By Opal L. Nations
The Perfect Accident
By Ken Norris
No Parking
By Tom Konyves
I Don’t Know
By David McFadden
Our 1978 Bestseller:
Montreal: English Poetry of the Seventies
Edited by Andre Farkas and Ken Norris
Selected Backlist:
The Concrete Island: Montreal Poems 1967 –71
By George Bowering
Vegetables (2nd edition)
By Ken Norris
Nothing Ever Happens in Pointe Claire
By John McAuley
Honey
By Claudia Lapp
Murders in the Welcome Café
By Andre Farkas
The Strange Case of Inspector Loophole
By Opal L. Nations
Violent Duality: A Study of Margaret Atwood
By Sherrill Grace
Before Romantic Words
By Artie Gold
What Henry Hudson Found & Other Poems
By John McAuley
Baby Grand
By Guy Birchard
The Trees of Unknowing
By Stephen Morrissey
Inter Sleep: The Box in Which He Keeps His Voice
By Opal L. Nations
The Perfect Accident
By Ken Norris
No Parking
By Tom Konyves
I Don’t Know
By David McFadden
Our 1978 Bestseller:
Montreal: English Poetry of the Seventies
Edited by Andre Farkas and Ken Norris
Selected Backlist:
The Concrete Island: Montreal Poems 1967 –71
By George Bowering
Vegetables (2nd edition)
By Ken Norris
Nothing Ever Happens in Pointe Claire
By John McAuley
Honey
By Claudia Lapp
Murders in the Welcome Café
By Andre Farkas
The Strange Case of Inspector Loophole
By Opal L. Nations
Thursday, March 27, 2008
The Vehicule Poets at Place des Arts
Tom Konyves, Endre Farkas, and Claudia Lapp, Montreal, April 2004
In April, 2004, the Vehicule poets celebrated their twenty-fifth anniversary. It was a quarter century since the days when Ken Norris, Artie Gold, Claudia Lapp, John McAuley, Tom Konyves, Endre Farkas, and I met every Sunday afternoon at 2 p.m. for readings at Vehicule Art Gallery on Ste. Catherine Street West. Since then we’ve all gone our separate way: Ken to Maine, Tom to British Columbia, Claudia is in Oregon, Artie died in February 2007, and John McAuley, Endre Farkas and I are still here in Montreal. But we still have the occasional reunion or a project we work on together. The last reunion was a gala reading on April 8, 2004, "Cabaret Vehicule," at Le Septieme Salle de Place des Arts, with an overflow audience of 300 people. That evening, a dance troupe performed a selection of our poems and then there was a short reading by each of us, with Ruth Taylor reading for Artie who was not well enough to attend. As well, an anthology, The Vehicule Poets_Now, edited by Tom Konyves and I, was launched. Now, video excerpts of the readings are available online at the Vehicule Poets website.
Monday, March 24, 2008
Our Endless Winter, 2008
Our endless winter -- 2008 -- here in Montreal. This is from the last snow fall, 30 - 35 cm. in early March. Here I am, leaving our home by the side door.
Our front lawn and "tempo", or temporary garage, installed every fall to early spring in which people who don't have garages park their cars.
More shoveling, and then the city snow plough drives by and you're snowed in once again.
Impassable sidewalks, no parking, endless shovelling, endless winter...
Our front lawn and "tempo", or temporary garage, installed every fall to early spring in which people who don't have garages park their cars.
More shoveling, and then the city snow plough drives by and you're snowed in once again.
Impassable sidewalks, no parking, endless shovelling, endless winter...
This was the kind of winter we used to have years ago, an old-fashioned winter, Glad they're not too common anymore...
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
Welcome
About ten years ago, Lasha Seniuk, an astrologer in Vancouver, told me that in a few years I would be very involved with the Internet. I know it’s difficult to conceive of a time without the Internet, but I can remember receiving my first Email, and then the gradual, almost complete, ending of personal snail mail until the point where receiving a letter via Canada Post is a quaint reminder of a by-gone age. So, it isn’t too far fetched to say that "being involved with the Internet" seemed a fairly unlikely prospect at that time. It seemed unlikely at the time even though my son and his friends all seemed to exchange email among themselves, and later had their own websites, wrote computer programmes, and some now work in IT.
I now have several websites and writing this blog seems the next step into virtual reality. I am hoping that working on the blog will be a place to discuss what I love, poetry and poetics, taking photographs, and what my old friend RR Skinner called “things appertaining”, by which he was referring to psychology and spirituality. Other interests that I hope to discuss on this blog are Jungian psychology, dreams, shamanism, spiritualism, the ancestors, family history, politics, history, and so on. That’s a lot! Let’s see how it goes.
Addendum: It's ten years later, 23 May 2018, and how my life has changed. I'm old, fat, white hair, and feeling tired all the time. But I'm still interested in and writing on "Jungian psychology, dreams, shamanism, spiritualism, the ancestors, family history, politics, history, and so on." I guess I omitted poetry because I thought it was a given. It's been an interesting ten years, not the easiest ten years, but at least it's been interesting...
SM
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