A Fountain at the Jardin Botanique, Montreal

The Window at Natalie's Hat Shop on Decarie Boulevard, Montreal

The importance of this photo isn't evident in the photograph itself. Here it is: after my father died my mother purchased a new hat for the funeral at Natalie's Hat Shop facing Decarie Boulevard. The viewer couldn't have known this, which is, after all important to the reason why this photograph is included here. There is more to the story, including poems I wrote about the hat and what became of the hat. Also, that Natalie, the hat shop's owner, later lived at one of Hoolahan's flats on Oxford Avenue; in fact, she lived in the flat next to where we had formerly lived... so there is quite a bit of synchronisty to this.

The Vehicule Poets in 2002

Artie Gold (SM in background).

Endre Farkas.

Tom and Marlene Konyves.

From left: CZ, Stephen Morrissey, Artie Gold, Endre Farkas, Tom Konyves.

Photographs taken at a Chinese restaurant on the corner of St. Denis and Sherbrooke Street West in Montreal.

Cendrars cut-up, original text

Fence in Tree...

Notes on Photography (unrevised) Four

Alexis Nihon Plaza, solarium, 2013

21. The Observing Eye: What photographs reveal is what the eye (the consciousness of the photographer) finds of interest, observes, and pays attention to. This is the observed world of the photographer, it shows a consistent and cohesive vision of the world. It is the documentation of the observing eye.

22. Krishnamurti writes, “The content of consciousness is consciousness.” What is recorded in the photographs is the consciousness of the photographer. 

23. A photograph records how a specific time and place is seen by the observing eye, photographs are the record of what is observed. In my photographs, I am aiming for an elegant austerity. 

24. Krishnamurti writes, “The observer is the observed.” What you think you are observing turns out to be… yourself.

25. Whatever I photograph has a deeper, personal meaning for me; some of the most obscure photographs refer to an image or a line or phrase from one of my poems. So, “Between Chaston and Green” refers to where my father is buried; “Natalie’s hat shop on Decarie Boulevard” refers to where my mother purchased a hat to wear to my father’s funeral; and so on.

26. Artists have access to what the public knows little about but feels is important, has value, and wants: it is access to the unconscious mind. 

27. Today, many people want to be artists. They want to publish their poems, they want to exhibit their drawings and photographs, they want to be creative. They want to fill the emptiness within themselves with their artistic expression, with their poems, their music, their photographs.

28. There is more to being an artist than creativity and talent, there is hard work, being alone, and an obsessive personality.

29. Why would anyone be as obsessed about death as I have been? or as consumed with the ancestors? or have taken so many photographs in cemeteries and churches? or have written obsessively about the same subjects, book after book, diary after diary, decade after decade?

30. It is necessary to speak one’s truth. I can say this with conviction, as someone who has always taught others not to censor their words, their vision. And yet, I have censored myself, I have held back what I wanted to say, I have doubted myself, been silenced by others, not wanted to offend or cause arguments, been too concerned that others not think badly of me and so remained silent. And yet, I have been happiest when I have spoken my truth; when I have not spoken my truth it has gotten me nowhere.

31. (from) Letters of Arthur Rimbaud: May 15, 1871: 

… The first study for a man who wants to be a poet is the knowledge of himself, entire. He searches his soul, he inspects it, he tests it, he learns it. As soon as he knows it, he cultivates it: it seems simple: in very brain a natural development is accomplished; so many egoists proclaim themselves authors; others attribute their intellectual progress to themselves! But the soul has to be made monstrous, that’s the point:… Imagine a man planting and cultivating warts on his face… One must, I say, be a visionary, make oneself a visionary.

Trees and Roots

Fountain at St. Joseph's Oratory, Montreal

Blaise Cendrars Cut Up (two)

An old monk was

Novgorod.

And I, the bad poet who Still, I was a very bad poe

everywhere I couldn’t go to the end.

And also merchants still I was hungry

To go make their fortune And all the days and all

And all the shopwindows glasses

And all the houses and all I should have liked

And all the wheels of cabs and all the streets

pavements those lives

I should have liked to plus turning like whirlwinds over broken

nge them into a furnace of swords

the square

And my hands took fligh The great almonds of the

wings And the honeyed gold of

And those were the last An old monk was reading

Of the very last voyage I was thirsty

And of the sea. And I was deciphering

When, all at once, the pig

I was in Moscow, where too,

with the rustling of albatross flames

And I was not satisfied of the last day

that my eyes turned

Their train left every many dead out there

It was rumored there we rates

One took along a hundred accounts I the bank.

clocks from Blac Malmö filled with tin cans and cans

Another, hatboxes,

Revolution… omen

And the sun was a fierce hire which could also be useful

That burned like live

It was in the time of my And I should have liked

I was scarcely sixteen And tear out all the

And dissolve all those

garments that enrage

I could sense the coming

______________________________
Cut up of “Prose of the Transsiberian and of Little Jeanne of France”, by Blaise Cendrar

2226 Girouard Avenue, Montreal

SM and his grandmother, Edith Sweeney Morrissey, back porch at 2226 Girouard, around 1953.

SM in front of 2226 Girouard Avenue, around 1998.

SM at St. Patrick's Cathedral in NYC

Blaise Cendrars Cut Up (one)

o grind up all the bones cathedrals all in white

the bells

all bodies, naked and strange under me the legend of Nizhni Novgorod

me…

of the great red Christ of the Russian letters

eons of the Holy Ghost flew up from

wound adolescence

I had already forgotten my birth

it was war

Love carted away millions of corpses

the last trains leaving

because they weren’t selling any ging to me the legend of Nizhni

going away would have liked to

didn’t want to go anywhere, could go

had enough money

corkscrews

Still another, coffins from I was trying to nourish myself with

of sardines in oil

Then there were many with the bell towers and the stations

Women with crotches for stars

Coffins

They were all patented day morning.

It was rumored there were many dead.

They traveled at reduced boxes of alarm clocks and cuckoo

And they had savings Forest

and an assortment of Sheffield

the women in the cafes and all In Siberia cannon

Hunger cold plague

them and break them And the muddy waters

In all the stations I saw

Nobody could

more tickets

And the soldiers who

stay. . .

______________________________

Cut up of “Prose of the Transsiberian and of Little Jeanne of France”, by Blaise Cendrar

At the Montreal Botanical Gardens

At the Getty Museum, 1997

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