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.

Notes on Photography (unrevised) Three

William Notman studio, on Bleury in Montreal, 1875

13. After photography was invented, it was a fairly easy process to have one’s portrait taken. The recording of someone’s appearance--their portrait--was democratized so that even working class people could now afford a photograph of themselves. A camera could take a perfect likeness of a subject at very little expense. The change this effected in art is that the artist was no longer only an artisan or someone who was “objectively” reproducing a scene, or a person’s image; instead, the artist was now primarily expressing his own inner perception, his vision, of what he was painting. The invention of photography helped change the role of the artist.

14. Who is to say what art will last and what art will be forgotten by future generations. I had no idea that Andy Warhol and Salvador Dali—two artists whose work never much appealed to me—would be even more famous after their deaths than they were when alive. I remember Louis Dudek saying that only time determines what lasts and what is forgotten regarding the arts; years later, I read the same comment by T.S. Eliot.

15. I am an amateur in photography, I have no intention of trying to sell my photographs or even exhibit them beyond what is on this site. I don’t own a digital camera and my “darkroom” is the drugstore where my film is developed and printed. A few of my photographs have appeared on poetry book covers, but I have never made anything of this or even mentioned it to anyone until now.

16. My photographs are either documentation with respect to my work on family history or an expression of an emotional, psychological and spiritual state. My photographs are possibly an addendum to my work as a poet; being a poet has always been my self-definition.

17. My concern in art—what I am concerned with in my work as a poet and as someone who also takes photographs—is the soul and spirit, the inner being, and how this manifests in daily life. My vision in art is a development along a continuum from when I began to write to the present moment.

18. Three quotations:

Nature is a world of symbolism, a rich hieroglyphic book: everything visible conceals an invisible mystery, and the last mystery of all is God.
                                                                        —Christophe Ernst Luthardt

Rabbi Burnam was once walking outside the city with some of his disciples. He bent, picked up a speck of sand, looked at it, and put it back exactly where he had found it. “He who does not believe,” he said, “that God wants this bit of sand to be in this particular place, does not believe at all.”
                                                                        —Hasidic story

A good man finds every place he treads upon holy ground; to him the world is God’s temple; he is ready to say with Jacob, “How dreadful this place!” This is none other than the house of God, this is the gate of heaven.
                                                                        —John Smith

19. A public open-air exhibit of Notman's photographs taken in the 19th Century, which can be seen on McGill College Avenue between President Kennedy and Ste. Catherine Street, celebrates memory and Montreal's history as it is recorded in Notman's photographs. The importance of photography in Montreal is evident in Notman's work, whether in books that reproduce Notman's photographs, at the nearby McCord Museum where Notman's archives are housed, or in an exhibit of his photographs that is open to the public as is this exhibit. Notman is still the preeminent photographer of 19th century Montreal.

20. My cameras: A Kodak Brownie, used in the early 1960s, with which I took black and white photos (was it 127 film?); a Kodak Instamatic 100, 1963 to 1977, took mostly slides; a Nikkormat FT2, used from 1977 to the present, bought second hand from a neighbour, Lenny Ganz, now rarely used as too heavy to carry; various Olympuses from the mid-1990s to the present: a Stylus Epic (still used), a Stylus 80 (still used), another Stylus (given away), a Trip XB40 AF (free for opening a bank account and no longer used). For a while I used disposable Fuji cameras, bought at a pharmacy, that cost about $12.00 each and included processing. All of these cameras gave good service.

At Blue Bonnets Racetrack in Montreal