Gary Barwin's Blog: serif of nottingblog, page 10

Being Irish: My including in the Irish Poetry Reading Archive as a Diaspora Poet.

I'm delighted to have eight poems included in the Irish Poetry Reading Archive hosted by the University College Dublin, included as an Irish diaspora poet. Above is the first poem, "Edwin," but the seven other poems are on the same channel. 

I’m Irish born — born in Belfast, Northern Ireland to immigrant parents (Ashkenazi Lithuanians by way of South Africa)—and my connection to Ireland and to what it means to have spent my formative childhood years in Ireland has always been a significant part of my identity as a person and, more indirectly as a writer. The complex negotiations of how identity functions in the modern world often includes a network of diasporas, national, ethnic, religious, and cultural components. For me, Ireland is an important part of this mix. The landscape, the narrative and poetic impulse, a particular relation to the language — these are elements that connect me to Ireland. But also, an understanding of modern Ireland, diverse, complex and comprising a web of relations to Ireland and to Irishness, which includes the further complexity of being born in Northern Ireland and its relation to nation, heritage, colonialism, cultural and religious struggles and identity.

Identity for me has been a recognition of “otherness” — in culture, language, history — while at the same time negotiating belonging and connection.

Additionally, because my grandparents moved from Lithuania to South Africa, and then my parents moved to Ireland, and then my parents and me and my siblings moved to Canada, thinking back about growing up in Ireland makes me aware of language, culture and identity as an agreement, as something constructed. Some part by history and place, some part by those living in that place and that history. It was evident that there were many ways of being, many ways of seeing one's self depending who and where one was. This is the experience of exile, of migration, of diaspora, of being a stranger in a strange land, or of recognizing how we construct "stranger" and how we construct the strangeness or normalacy of the land.

And so, because of this, I was very honoured to be part of the Irish Poetry Reading Archive as a recognition of my ongoing and abiding connection to Ireland and Irishness. I have never been recognized institutionally as part of the diaspora and I have had few opportunities to be included in Irish or Irish diaspora events or literary culture. It means a great deal to me and for my writing to have it appear and be collected in this significant archive. I am glad of the opportunity for my work to be able to be available to Irish and Irish diaspora readers and scholars as well as to have the archive become more well known to Canadian readers and scholars and to share my work as part of it. I’m also glad that this archive furthers the discussion of what Irish writing is and speaks to the more complex understanding of contemporary Irish identity. 

 

 

Charlie Brown���s Body

He shows up, years later with a rabbi beard. What���s broken, Charlie, can���t be fixed. If it feels like your head is an ellipsis does that mean something���s been forgotten or it���s waiting to be filled? Love, curiosity, grief. Old friends, the football, it���s hard to imagine real dirt on this ground. How simple is the neighbourhood of feeling until it���s your neighbourhood. A comet over the doghouse turns out to be a plane but from where we���re standing, it���s still burning.  Charlie, bald head, sullen sage, you say our lives are cartoons to be puzzled over again and again. What are we equal to and what do we translate? Like Schr��dinger���s Dog, the dog is always there but what about us? Sisyphus and Lucy kissing in a tree. The kite���s a twisted bird in the branches. Ancestors, Charlie. All these years. What���s the best thing about rhetorical questions? 

Charlie Brown’s Body

He shows up, years later with a rabbi beard. What’s broken, Charlie, can’t be fixed. If it feels like your head is an ellipsis does that mean something’s been forgotten or it’s waiting to be filled? Love, curiosity, grief. Old friends, the football, it’s hard to imagine real dirt on this ground. How simple is the neighbourhood of feeling until it’s your neighbourhood. A comet over the doghouse turns out to be a plane but from where we’re standing, it’s still burning.  Charlie, bald head, sullen sage, you say our lives are cartoons to be puzzled over again and again. What are we equal to and what do we translate? Like Schrödinger’s Dog, the dog is always there but what about us? Sisyphus and Lucy kissing in a tree. The kite’s a twisted bird in the branches. Ancestors, Charlie. All these years. What’s the best thing about rhetorical questions? 

with thirty protruding iron needles: a video

This video uses text extracted from William James' Varieties of Religious Experience, most of the phrases that begin with "with." I used a field recording of a Russian forest and then "extracted" piano, clarinet and flute parts from the record. Then I read the text along with the music. The video uses an MRI of a neck and head mixed with a walk-through of flowers from my garden taken this summer. I superimposed and animated the images.

The title is another phrase from the James, though one I didn't use. 

I read a list of nouns for Alvin Lucier: a video

This video evolved from a slow process, surprisingly like a collaboration, except in this case, with myself.  I made a recording a solo soprano saxophone track which I then made into a canon. Then later, I read a word list of nouns which I found on my computer. I made this thinking about the news that Alvin Lucier had died. Then my friend Arnold McBay posted a video with audio from the group we plan in together (TZT). It was an MRI of a brain and head. I took that video and blended it with a track I'd made of a walk through some woods where there were lots of wildflowers (that, itself blended with processed "blobby" multicolour video I'd made with the help of MAX/MSP. I mixed the whole shebang together and this video was the result. I deliberately keep the dog barking (thanks, Happy) in the audio of my voice, thinking about Lucier and how his recordings often reflect the actual acoustic space of the recording. I wasn't recording in an abstract place, but in my home at a specific moment. 

I was thinking about a recent conversaion with Elee Kraljii Gardiner where we spoke about how collaboration takes us out of our implicit assumptions in making work and adds levels, nuance and complexity. This was a case where it happened to me with my own work. Usually I only notice this when I'm working with collaborators, such as Elee. (We're in the middle of a fascinating really productive writing project together where I'm learning much from the process as well as having fun.) 

Let's say we want to be true

 

I read a list of nouns for Alvin Lucier [in memoriam]

 

I read a list of nouns for Alvin Lucier [in memoriam]

(version with dogs)

The great artist of what is the potential of the world for sound, Alvin Lucier died today. I made this poet/sound piece to remember him.

ABRAHAM JUDA "SHORT FINGER" FUKS

 A friend of mine discovered through an online DNA search that she had an ancestor with this name. She shared it with me -- this was something she knew that would entertain and engage me. I couldn't resist and so wrote this short piece about her forebear. Here's to you, Abe, and your short finger. Unless it was really long. 

No one warned you what your body would be like coming home.

 

On appropriation, acknowledgement, tribute, dialogue: an apology

Where does inspiration end and appropriation begin? How explicit does one need to be in acknowledgement? I’m thinking of this because Amanda Earl has called attention to some of my recent photo works which are in conversation with the work of Dona Mayoora and Kate Siklosi. For example, I made an image of a hand with a small twig on it. Amanda rightly points out that Dona has a series of images featuring images of her hand. (Indeed, Dona and I have a chapbook forthcoming where we incorporate these images into new images.) And Kate has been making exquisite images with leaves and other natural objects. Amanda notes that I did not acknowledge their influence in this work and that too often men appropriate work or approaches of women and women of colour. I absolutely take her point and—which is why I’m writing this in the middle of the night—would be horrified to participate in such an appropriation. That certainly wasn’t my intention but Amanda is right that I should have been much more careful in being aware of the process and acknowledging my debt, that ensuring they were acknowledged and that these works are implicitly or explicitly in conversation with Dona’s and Kate’s work which I know and love. 

I do make many works in response to many people’s work and in fact, collaborate directly with many writers and artists. However, I think Amanda is right in that in some part of my conversation with their work (this time, not a collaboration or direct response) I might have obscured or neglected to note their influence. I apologize for that. I value the syncretic and the dialogic, the conversational and sharing and intertwining of interests and concerns but I would never want to obscure, overlook or appropriate someone else’s work, especially those who that has historically happened to (e.g. women and POC) and certainly not Kate and Dona’s, who I both value and respect greatly. 

I guess i thought I was obviously in conversation with them and was clearly both influenced by them and paying homage, but clearly upon reflection (thanks, Amanda) that it doesn't read that way, that it obscures a large history of appropriaion (particuarly by men with regards women and POC and more) and that I was not careful about it. I will endeavour to be so in the future. 

I should note that these recent works of mine are also in dialogue with work by Geof Huth (his various object poem assemblages) and Eric Schmaltz (he did some beautiful leafy work a while back.) 

Thanks, Amanda, for calling all of this to my attention—and for doing this with grace and sensitivity. And if anyone wants a great resource to appropriate from wildly, um, I mean, to have one’s mind blown and see the great riches of recent visual poetry by women, I would suggest checking out Amanda’s fantastic recent anthology Judith (Timglaset Press). Also, Dona's work is here and Kate's is here.