Beautiful, yet heavy

We live in a beautiful but terrifying world...dread is facing something squarely. I am drawn to poets who do this; they look at things and do not look away. -- Anne Simpson

I'm working on a paper for my Canadian Ekphrasis class right now. This is the class that has been keeping me going this semester. I am so deeply in love with it. For those of you who don't know, ekphrasis is poetry that is "poetry that speaks to or of an art object" (definition taken from Peter Barry's article "Contemporary Poetry and Ekphrasis"). Anne Simpson, one of the poets I'm working with, wrote a corona responding to seven works by Brueghel and a series of photographs of the Staten Island landfill where the debris from the World Trade Center after 9/11 was sorted. It's heavy stuff. Profoundly beautiful, yet terribly heavy. After a few hours I start to feel odd, like I've become weighted down by something, shackled by a grief and horror that is both my own and yet not mine at all.

Someone inside me will not get off his tricycle

Insomnia
Billy Collins

Even though the house is deeply silent
and the room, with no moon,
is perfectly dark,
even though the body is a sack of exhaustion
inert on the bed,

someone inside me will not
get off his tricycle,
will not stop tracing the same tight circle
on the same green threadbare carpet.

It makes no difference whether I lie staring at the ceiling
or pace the living-room floor,
he keeps on making his furious rounds,
little pedaler in his frenzy,
my own worst enemy, my oldest friend.

What is there to do but close my eyes
and watch him circling the night,
schoolboy in an ill-fitting jacket,
leaning forward, his cap on backwards,
wringing the handlebars,
maintaining a certain speed?

Does anything exist at this hour
in this nest of dark rooms
but the spectacle of him
and the hope that before dawn
I can lift out some curious detail
that will carry me off to sleep - 
the watch that encircles his pale wrist,
the expandable band,
the tiny hands that keep pointing this way and that.


The seemingly ever-increasing stress of moving means that I am getting ever-shrinking amounts of sleep. It's a really lovely example of an inverse relationship. Someone should make a math word problem out of it. Billy Collin's image is so delightfully odd and yet so apt. It is a perfect way to capture the insane spinning in circles that my brain does when it ought to be sleeping. Instead of sleeping though it thinks things like, "Call that guy about furniture delivery," and "You need to buy pillows, and sheets...and a mattress," and "How am I going to fit everything into my week?" And I eventually fall asleep thinking these things. I know I fall asleep because my alarm wakes me up, but it doesn't feel like I sleep. Instead it feels like one continuous thought, as if I could fall asleep in the middle of a mental sentence and wake up finishing it.

I think this picture is a kind of bridge between the poem and my mental state for me. Or, perhaps more accurately, it is a photographic representation of how my brain feels while the poem is a literary one and I feel as if the two are connected. These are the wheels of some farm equipment on display at Fort Edmonton. The brightly coloured nature reminded me of the slightly-juvinile characterization of insomnia's persona in Collins' poem. And the simple fact that they are a whole bunch of wheels connects pretty nicely with my always-on brain. Oh sleep, I miss you.

Simple Pleasures

I had a really good conversation with Bean tonight. I always love spending time with her. It's kind of cool actually because it is like we are leading parallel lives in a lot of ways so I feel like she understands everything that comes out of my mouth even if it doesn't make sense to other people. One of the things we talked about was the ability to find joy and inspiration in small things. I can honestly say that even though school is crazy busy right now and I should be freaking out with stress, things are actually good. It is largely because I've been finding lately that the smallest things can leave me feeling happy or inspired. Something someone says in a conversation, a sentence overheard in the hallway, a comment made in a class, a beautiful sky, Christmas lights...anything is fair game for leaving me with a smile and a sense of satisfaction and contentment that runs far deeper than I have experienced in a long time. One example of this is the fact that yesterday I bought myself holiday rice krispies. I have a lot of dietary restrictions so the cereal I tend to eat isn't all that exciting. But holiday rice krispies have coloured pieces in them! I am super excited about this. In fact, I was so excited when we were in the grocery store that I was explaining to my roomie who was with me why I was so pumped that I could by them and some random guy in the aisle started laughing at my enthusiasm. And I didn't eve care. Now every time I see the box sitting on top of the fridge or a pour a bowl of them they make me smile. I think the ability to find joy and wonder in the smallest things is something that people lose as they grow up. Kids find everything super amazing. Seriously, when you are 6 smelly markers are just about the greatest things on the planet. They are amazing. How do they make them smell like that? Plus they are just great markers. For some reason as we grow up this sense of wonder tends to dim a little bit. It's something that I don't want to lose though. Having gone through periods in my life where it took a lot to make me smile, let alone experience deep joy in just being alive, and now returning to this place I feel like the ability to let small things affect you in this way is a sign of good mental health. At least I know it is for me. So I am going to continue to smile every time I eat my coloured rice krispies.

The Sensation of Art

I spent today deeply immersed in creative activities. I loved every second of it. There is nothing more satisfying to me than being surrounded by art and completely surrendering myself to the experience. I went into the art supply store at the mall and while I was there treated myself to a pack of 50 oil pastels. I've been hankering after oil pastels for a while now so I decided to finally just break down and get some. As you probably have guessed, my prefered mediums for artistic expression are writing, music and photography, but I seriously love dabbling in other forms of art. I'm a particular fan of ink and pastels. I'm certainly not the most talented artist in these mediums, but that kind of isn't the point. It's more about the sensation of art. The feeling I get when I'm in the moment of creativity, the visual play of color and texture and line, the feel of holding a pen or a brush, the smell of the art supplies. There are so many elements. My new pastels smell like art to me. I think this is because smell is so strongly linked to memory and the smell of pastels brings me back to art class in junior high. Whatever the reason, I love how they smell and look and feel and I am so excited to break them in.

La belle dame sans merci

La belle dame sans merci

John Keats

O what can ail thee knight at arms,

  Alone and palely loitering?

The sedge has withered from the lake

  And no birds sing!

O what can ail thee knight at arms,

  So haggard and so woe begone?

The squirrel's granary is full

  And the harvest's done.

I see a lilly on thy brow

  With anguish moist and fever dew,

And on they cheeks a fading rose

  Fast Withereth too -

I met a Lady in the Meads

  Full beautiful, a faery's child;

Her hair was long, her foot was light

  And her eyes were wild -

I made a Garland for her head,

  And bracelets too, and fragrant Zone

She look'd at me as she did love

  And made sweat moan -

I set her on my pacing steed

  And nothing else saw all day long,

For sidelong would she bend, and sing

  A faery's song -

She found me roots of relish sweet

  And honey wild and manna dew,

And sure in language strange she said

  I love thee true -

She took me to her elfin grot

  And there she wept and sigh'd full sore,

And there I shut her wild wild eyes

  With kisses four.

And there she lulled me asleep

  And there I dream'd - Ah! Woe betide!

The latest dream I ever dreamt

  On the cold hill side.

I saw pale kings and Princes too,

  Pale warriors, death pale were they all;

They cried 'La bell dame sans merci

  Thee hath in thrall.'

I saw their starv'd lips in the gloam

  With horrid warning gaped wide,

And I awoke and found me here

  On the cold hill's side.

And this is why I sojourn here

  Alone and palely loitering;

Though the sedge is wither'd from the Lake

  And no birds sing.

Has anyone else seen the movie Bright Star? I absolutely adore it, and have probably mentioned it on here before. The film tells the story of John Keats and Fanny Brawne and is a poignant and beautiful love story. After I first watched it I decided that I could happily fall in love with a poet. Now, I love poetry. There is something wonderful about luxuriating in a wonderful poem. You have to read poetry slowly, at least I find that the poetry I enjoy the most has to be read slowly. You have to drink it in in sips, not gulps. I haven't always loved poetry though. In fact, I almost used transfer credits to allow me to skip out on the second half of intro English (which, at King's, focuses on poetry and drama). However, I decided that I might as well take it just in case I decided to choose English as my major. That class was absolutely wonderful, and it made me truly fall in love with poetry. I wrote my first paper that semester on Walt Whitman's "To a Locomotive in Winter" and Emily Dickinson's "I like to see it lap the miles" and suddenly discovered how much I loved delving into a poem, looking at the words and turns of phrase and poetic devices. I know that not everyone shares this opinion; in fact, most of the people I know are of the "poetry is a waste of time" school of thought. However, thanks to a wonderful professor, who, incidentally, also is the person who convinced me to go into English studies, I have a profound enjoyment of poetry. Despite this love of poetry, I have never really been able to appreciate the Romantics. I don't know what it is. Perhaps it is simply because I have read the same poems over and over and over again and since I didn't love them in the first place they have come to leave a bitter taste in my mouth. So I was quite suprised when I finished watching Bright Star and emerged with a deep desire to read John Keats. Having the incomparable voice of Ben Whishaw reading the poems in the film (since he plays Keats) probably had something to do with it, but it is more than that. I bought the Complete Poems of John Keats and dearly love them. They are fantastical and dream-like, beautiful, thoughtful...in short, they are exactly the kind of poetry that one must drink in ever so slowly. And for that, they are wonderful.

One of the reasons I turn to poetry is to recharge my artistic batteries. Whenever I am feeling a bit uninspired or like I might want to take an office job after my undergrad rather than pursuing my masters I automatically turn to music and literature. I soak myself in art, particularly words. Poetry reminds me why I love words so much. This artistic "bath" is always enough for me to kick-start my own creativity. It makes me want to write, or photograph, or draw, or sing, or play piano, anything creative will do. That's one of the reasons I turned to a poem for today's post. Although, I had a lovely weekend filled with birthday celebrations for a dear friend, a lazy, rainy Sunday reading Mansfield Park and The Sound and the Fury while drinking tea, and an evening with my best friend who I haven't seen in ages, the idea of blogging and being creative was almost overwhelming. So, today I resolved to post something. And not just something mediocre, but something that I could feel truly satisfied with. Thus, I turned to poetry and music to inspire me...and voila! a beautiful (if I do say so myself) blog post.

In order to make up for my absence the past few days, I bring you a lovely, long post today. These pictures seem to capture the fantastical, dream-like quality of the poem I've paired them with. First up we have an image from Jasper, the day that my roommates and I drove out there for a picnic (I've posted images from that trip here and here). I did absolutely nothing to this picture editing-wise, that is just how the light was in that little nook of the trail. Absolute perfection. Next is an image from several years ago on a youth retreat at Camp Nakamun. It was early October so the trees were bare and there was just a grey quality to everything. I (obviously) made the image black and white and then I gave it a bit of a "glow" to give it the dream-like quality called for in this set of images. The third image is once again from our Jasper trip. The original image is in color and the blue sky is really intense, but because it was so shady in the forest the trees are all dark and shadowy. I felt like making it black and white gave it an almost eerie quality that was suited to the fantastical nature of this poem. Pretty much the same story goes for the next image as well. Finally, we have an image from a walk I took with a couple friends through the Edmonton River Valley in the fall of 2007. It was a really gorgeous day. This shadowy bit of a creek (no that is not the North Saskatchewan River) seemed perfect for this post. I upped the color saturation a bit just to intensify the dreaminess of it that much more. There you have it, a bona fide photography blog post!