Elizabeth Bishop, “In the Village”

“We are in the ‘Maritimes,’ but all that means is that we live by the sea.” - Elizabeth Bishop, “In the Village”

BREAKING THINGS APART AND PUTTING THEM BACK TOGETHER

Ekphrastic Poetry

Benjamin Dawson

Bachelor of Arts (Honors, English), UNB, 2018

A Thesis Submitted in Patrial Fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of

Master of Arts

in the Graduate Academic Unit of English

Supervisor Triny Finlay, Masters (English and Creative Writing)

Examining Board Stephen Schryer, PhD (English) Matt Rogers, PhD (Education)

This thesis is accepted by the

Dean of Graduate Studies

THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW BRUNSWICK

April, 2020

ii ABSTRACT

Breaking Things Apart and Putting Them Back Together is an ekphrastic poetry collection composed of forty-nine poems, as well as a critical introduction. It deals with paintings from artists on the East Coast of Canada such as Mary Pratt, Harold Cromwell,

Maud Lewis, and Molly Lamb Bobak; these fours artists are discussed at length in the critical introduction that explores the creative and theoretical framework of ekphrasis. I reimagine ekphrasis as a collaborative art, through which I try to understand life on the

East Coast, finding within the range of artists I examined thematic and technical similarities, as well as a general folk sensibility; many artists illustrated landscapes suggesting a consistent creative connection with the land they lived on. While the images gesture outward to viewers, the poems I wrote about them are often introspective, dealing with issues of home, community, culture, and mental health.

iii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Special thanks to my supervisor Triny Finlay, who remained positive and supportive throughout this project even when I felt I wasn’t up to the task. Her feedback was fundamental to the body of the work, and I’m sure any praiseworthy aspect of this thesis credits her help. Special thanks to Stephen Schyrer, too, who was exceptionally helpful in refining my critical introduction, in addition to his consistent dependability and direction when I wasn’t sure how or what to write.

Special thanks to my parents, Andrew, Gail, and Ken, whose wholehearted support has kept me persistent in pursuing my education. I wouldn’t have been able to do this degree, or my prior, without the upbringing I got from them. My love and appreciation for them is boundless.

Special thanks to my friends – particularly those who helped me get through this degree. There are many of you; I owe you all gratitude and beer.

Special thanks to UNB, as an institution, which owes me a paycheck it refuses to give me for my final two weeks of work as a TA. I’ll never forget the last thing UNB did for me as a graduate student: screw up my rent.

iv TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract ...... ii Acknowledgements ...... iii Table of Contents ...... iv Critical Introduction ...... 1 Poems OCEAN ...... 18 TO GLASGOW ...... 19 OCEAN VIEW BALLAD ...... 20 LIGHTHOUSE PT. 1 ...... 21 LIGHTHOUSE PT. 2 ...... 22 LIGHTHOUSE PT. 3...... 23 EASTERN PASAGE ...... 24 HARBOUR ...... 25 PORT OF DEPARTURE...... 26 ANADROMOUS (UP COURSE) ...... 27 ALIZARIN CRIMSON ...... 28 SUMMER GOTHIC, WINTER EASEMENT ...... 29 WATER GOAT & KID ...... 30 ALL I EVER WANTED ...... 31 TOWARD A LARGER BODY ...... 32

FOLKish ...... 33

WORKING BERRIES ...... 34 COVE ...... 35 PASS BY ...... 36 BANG – A MESS ...... 37 ROUGH WEAVE ...... 38 IF THE WORLD IS A WOMAN, SHE DOESN’T HAVE TIME FOR YOU ...... 39 GIRL IN RED TURBAN ...... 40 FLOOD, WATERLOO ROO ...... 41 RE: SNOWFALL...... 42 AHEAD OF ME ...... 43 THE SCENIC ROUTE ...... 45 POST DEFLECTION ...... 46 MODERN ARCHITECTURE ...... 47 WHERE DO YOU FIND THE SPACE FOR SO MUCH DARKNESS? ...... 48 WINTER OMENS ...... 49

COLONIAL COAST ...... 50

NEW PRETENCE ISLAND ...... 51 MYRIAD ISLAND ...... 52 OUR CRAFTS OF DISTANCE ...... 53 OUR CRAFTS OF VIOLENCE ...... 54 LOGGING ON THE MIRAMICHI ...... 55 ACCRETION ...... 56

THE META ...... 57

BURNING THE RHODODENDRON ...... 58 BEYOND CITIES ...... 59 MAGNOLIA...... 60 BREAKING THINGS APART AND PUTTING THEM BACK TOGETHER ...... 61 SUPERSTORE ...... 62 GOING UNDER ...... 63 WHAT I SHOULD HAVE SAID WHEN YOU TEXTED ME ABOUT ANXIETY . . . . . 64 IS HEAVEN POST-TRAUMATIC? ...... 65 FANDANGO ...... 66 ALL DAYS ARE SHORT REGARDLESS OF HOW THEY FEEL ...... 67 64 POINTS ON THE ROAD BETWEEN MONTREAL TO HALIFAX ...... 68 ROTTEN ORANGES OF CANADIAN ART ...... 70

Works Cited and Consulted ...... 71

Curriculum Vitae 1

INTRODUCTION

John Barton writes in his poem “Forest, British Columbia” that there is “more than one way in/ into the forest.” The poem comes out of his collection West of

Darkness and was my first encounter with ekphrastic poetry. I printed off both the poem and Emily Carr’s painting Forest, British Columbia, then studied them side by side trying to see where Barton took motivation from the painting for his verse. He is initially visually descriptive: “for instance/ light carves/ through a dense shell of cedar crowns;” this description arises directly out of the centre of Carr’s painting, with the light in the forest standing distinctly apart from the darkness above it as it follows roughly along the top of the foliage. As the poem progresses, however, Barton shifts away from visual description: “… as I pass beneath/ any change in light/ delicious/ scent drawing me deeper.” Barton inserts himself into the painting by Emily Carr. This insertion is not merely theoretical; Barton overturns the primarily visual nature of the art and engages his other senses. He no longer only sees the forest; he feels it, smells it, and potentially even tastes it. The painting implies a depth that lurks behind the visual foreground, and

Barton, through ekphrastic poetry, deigns to further explore that depth. Ekphrasis, then, holds more potential than simply being a sort of descriptive verse. Ekphrastic poetry is evocative, sensory, and present; ekphrasis articulates the experience of the viewer responding to art.

My thesis was initially conceived of as an ekphrastic project about New

Brunswick art. I wanted to reimagine ekphrasis as a collaborative art while decentering the place of Western and Central Canada in the national conception of Canadian art by emphasizing the history and influence of Eastern Canada. Early on the project expanded 2 in scope to include any Atlantic Canadian art, finding within that range thematic and technical similarities. Aside from widening my scope, I adopted another change arising from my dissatisfaction with descriptive (or worse, prescriptive) verse that attempts to ascertain a painting’s meaning. In short, I grew tired of describing the art directly.

Instead, I wanted to turn the visual art around, to show a different face of the work, to pick something new out of it or to put something new into it through pairing the art with my own verse; I wanted a dialogue with the artist and their art. In doing this, I kept in mind Frank O’Hara’s essay, “Personism, a Manifesto,” which calls for poetry that

“address[es] itself to one person (other than the poet himself), thus evoking overtones of love without destroying love’s life-giving vulgarity, and sustaining the poet’s feelings toward the poem while preventing love from distracting him into feeling about the person.” I resolved to write to paintings and painters, and to adapt O’Hara, I wished to evoke the art I chose to engage with without dialectically dissecting it, thus preserving the endless “life-giving vulgarity” of art – that is to say, the way in which art (of any kind) says no more or less than what it portrays while also appearing limitless.

I hope, by this approach, to situate my work within what W.J.T. Mitchell describes as the ‘pictoral turn;’ Mitchell describes this turn as follows:

Whatever the pictoral turn is, then, it should be clear that it is not a return to naïve mimesis, copy or correspondence theories of representation, or a renewed metaphysics of pictoral ‘presence’: it is rather a postlinguistic, post semiotic rediscovery of the picture as a complex interplay between visuality, apparatus, institutions, discourse, bodies, and figurality. It is the realization that spectatorship (the look, the gaze, the glance, the practices of observation, surveillance, and visual pleasure) may be as deep a problem as various forms of reading (decipherment, decoding, interpretation, etc.) and that visual experience or ‘visual literary’ might not be fully explicable on the model of textuality. (Mitchell 16) 3

Images, like literature, are multitudinous by nature – they are no more or no less than exactly what they present while still being endlessly evocative. Modernity, and to a greater extent, postmodernity, is interested in the underlying world structure of art; this is to say that interest has grown in exploring the ideologies and discourses that inform both the creation of and understanding of art. We may no longer rely on signs and semiotics to speak images clearly to us. Strict codes of icons and signs, the science of semiotics as a whole, does not liberate the perceiver into meaning but rather continuously ropes us back into its reductive binds. This leads into W.J.T. Mitchell’s commitment to the ‘pictoral turn’ as a revised iconology. Mitchell takes issue with the notion that iconology promises us “a discursive science of images, a mastering of the icon by the logos” (Mitchell 24). The issue here, he argues, is that iconology all too rarely accounts for the effect of ideology; for example, a single apple will mean something quite different for Christians than for Taoists or Confucians. An ekphrastic poem that attempts to completely represent an image is a poem that closes off the potential of both the poem and the image to supersede expectations. Mitchell goes on, saying that “certain persistent images and likenesses insinuate themselves into that discourse [of iconology], leading it into totalizing ‘world-pictures’ and ‘world-views.’

The icon in iconology is like a repressed memory that keeps returning as an uncontrollable symptom” (Mitchell 24). Mitchell argues that iconology’s ideological privileging must be combatted if we are to understand the image’s capacity to examine, re-examine, and understand the world. Therefore, not only is it important to revive an iconology that critically encounters the discourse of ideology, but this iconology also must abandon the notion of a metalanguage or discourse that would “control the 4 understanding of pictures” in favor of a more appropriate method that might “explore the way that pictures attempt to represent themselves” (Mitchell 24). This iconology not only emphasizes the image rather than the ‘language’ supposedly underlying that image but decenters the human subject as the primary entity constituted by both language and image. While this revised iconology is the basis on which I encounter and examine images (paintings, photos, installations, etc.) in my ekphrastic poetry, I still personally evaluate images. The ekphrastic poetry I write, therefore, does not attempt to ‘stand in’ for the art from which it emerges; each poem arises from my dialogue with an image. I reject entirely the notion that I could ever properly represent the artist’s work in the modern day as W. H. Auden does so brilliantly with the “Musée de Beaux Arts” for

Pieter Brueghel’s The Fall of Icarus. I am interested in my role as a spectator and how people articulate viewership. Ekphrasis is just like writing a poem in response to a landscape or a bag of fish that I’ve encountered tangibly in the world. In this way, my poetry fits into a long tradition of nature writing. For example, Charlotte Smith’s

Romantic-era poem “Beachy Head” (1807) does not improve or totalize the real-world

Beachy Head. It simply represents the poet’s understanding of her relationship with her subject.

Emily Bilman writes of the “role of ekphrasis as the reflection of our changing social interactions” (2). This properly expresses my experience of writing ekphrastic poems; the poems I write relate the images I use not just to the modern day, but to my experience of it. Returning to O’Hara’s “Personism,” I imagine ekphrasis should be situated between the artist and the poet, as a poem talking to and with a piece of art. My ekphrastic work goes far beyond simply being “a plain declaration or interpretation of a 5 thing,” as the OED defines ekphrasis. Instead, I conceive of ekphrasis as the second line in an emerging dialogue. It expresses part of what art has always done in allowing people to reference, negotiate, and understand their world. Both the creation and understanding of art are intensely personal undertakings that still gesture toward a kind of universality.

As a poetry project about the East Coast, this collection highlights themes that occur throughout Atlantic Canadian painting. The paintings I discuss explore economic anxiety, ambiguity, endurance, and serenity. They also emphasize folk identity, demonstrated through landscape images of townships and scenes of the ocean with careening boats. What Erin Morton writes about folk art in Nova Scotia applies to many of the pieces considered for this thesis: “folk art became a source of optimism for Nova

Scotians in the sense that it provided them with a cultural object upon which they might affix their desire for an organized daily life despite the disorganized and despondent realities of late capitalism” (Morton 178). The art looked at for this thesis not only deals with the realities of late capitalism but the changing realities of modernity and postmodernity. At the basest level, all of these pieces articulate the experience of living on the East Coast, and encapsulate a wide swath of opinions, cultural touchstones, and thematic interests. Therefore, when the question “why the East Coast?” is posed to this project, the most basic answer is that this is where I grew up, and I want to understand it. If the ekphrastic goal of this thesis is to articulate the experience of viewing art, the personal goal of this work is to express the experience of living on (and in a sense, viewing) Canada’s East Coast. Atlantic Canada is bound together by Maritime culture: dreary, cold landscapes; economic anxiety (the Atlantic provinces have the lowest GDP 6 in Canada, with only the territories ranking below them); and a pride in the sense of home.

As for similarities in the poems, almost all of them feature the same form: lines left justified, line breaks consistently tending toward enjambment, and rhythm that follows the structure of breath. In many of the poems, especially those that address the ocean, the structure is wavelike. This pacing establishes a meditative quality that propels the reader from one line to the next. For example, in the poem “Ahead of Me,” after

Joseph Purcell’s Nova Scotia Winter, I write “we spend our winter infancy/ amazed at snow;” the line breaks allow sentences and complete thoughts to languidly flow along the poem’s structure, inviting in the line breaks a moment of trepidation and easeful suspense. I wanted these line breaks to reflect the experience of viewing art, where minute aspects of any given image offer a moment of respite to reflect on their function in the overall conception, before launching the viewer into correlated parts of the image that work together and continually reference back to each other.

One of the central artists to this project was Mary Pratt (1935-2018), a

Newfoundland-based artist whose art is concerned with daily life, the home, everyday objects, and most importantly light. Her nearsightedness clearly influenced her paintings, which are notable for their attentiveness and depth; she creates images which are small, alluring, and somewhat unsettling. John Demont, in a review titled “Making the Mundane Sublime,” writes of Mary Pratt’s “unaffected art” and how for Pratt

“reality is a very sensuous experience” (Demont 1995). Mary Pratt paints images of the objects that fascinate her throughout her day; her fascination with these objects reflects 7 the erotic charge she feels when light mingles with them to reveal themselves in a new way that rejuvenates and energizes them as objects and images.

One of the paintings this project works with is Mary Pratt’s Trout in a Ziplock

Bag. This is an image of exactly that, and it is particularly illustrative of her interests in the beauty and vulgarity of everyday objects. For this image, the sensuous experience is conveyed by the lighting and meticulous evocation of the fish’s texture. Because of

Pratt’s attentiveness to detail, viewers might perceive the coldness of the fresh trout and sense the slick it leaves as it slides along the bag. Her images only briefly and deceptively appear simplistic when in fact they are loaded with nuance; Tom Smart argues “that Pratt’s homely subject matter and naturalistic style” convey “metaphors of domestic and gender violence inherent in her early paintings of fish, fowl, and animal carcasses” (Demont 1995). However, these dark undercurrents do not exhaust her work, even apparently disturbing paintings such as her fish and animal carcasses. Cy-Thea

Sand, responding to an exhibition of Pratt’s work, writes that “authority and urgency reside in women’s relationships to things, and the fact that women share these things with others in private domestic spaces suggests Pratts deeply communal relationship to art. Its relational impulse has social meaning: domesticity is reimagined, revealed as an important source of human intimacy and cultural artifacts” (Sand 2003). Pratt’s relationship with domestic and everyday objects is one that not only suggests, but encourages, communal identification with those objects – particularly, in her case, for women. While illustrating very basic and unassuming items, Pratt does so with such care and reverence that that one is drawn into her art to experience its overtones of warmth, sensuality, and even eroticism. 8

It is out of this experience of Trout in a Ziplock Bag that I wrote “All I Ever

Wanted,” a poem that deals with intimacy in the home as revealed through objects and the sensual satisfaction they offer. The objects in this poem serve as “recompense/ for absence” between people who live together. The poem imagines this recompense as an implicit communication: “notice you again later in the plates,/ half read magazines, shoes at the door.” This communication is nonverbal; people who live together read each other’s movements through the traces they leave in the items of their home, which act like cultural artifacts: the poem describes this feeling “as if intimacy catches on where we miss/ each other,” blurring the binary of absence and presence. Light plays an important part in this poem too, as it does in Pratt’s artwork, drawing on the affinity of daylight when it illuminates important cultural objects that previously went unrevealed and unnoticed; the poem ends by lingering on these objects and the potential fulfillment they offer: “I find you in the light again/[…]/ the jar on the window sill,/ a fresh bag of raw fish,/ that elusive red onion.” These lines are an attempt to articulate the sensual and sometimes romantic fulfilment provided by everyday objects in the domestic sphere.

Insofar as domestic spaces are coded as feminine, and insofar as modern day thought recognizes that femininity is equally accessible to both women and men, Pratt’s feminist focus in her work creates solidarity between women while also inviting men to partake in the intimacy of the domestic sphere. Sand writes that “Pratt insists that women not only connect with everyday items but can rely on them for a sense of identification and purpose” (2003). Acknowledging the role of feminism in opening up previously gendered cultural sites, I’d like to insist on how the private space of the home increasingly opens up to men as the public world opens for women; men might 9

(rightfully) share an equal role in the household, and so everyday items provide for them too a sense of reliability, intimacy, identification, and purpose. At least, the home acts that way in my own life, and “All I Ever Wanted” was written in response to this sense paired with the elucidation of these themes in Pratt’s work.

This poem differs from another that responds to Pratt’s work, “To Glasgow,” based on Pratt’s painting with the same name. While “All I Ever Wanted” works within and attempts to update Pratt’s thematic interests, “To Glasgow” is interested in how the narrative discourse of identity is woven into and expressed by artistic forms. “To

Glasgow” was written with the intention of putting it first in the completed project; it encapsulates my experience of being away from home and family for this degree as a tumultuous experience that erodes the notion of a stable selfhood. Pratt’s painting, To

Glasgow, is remarkable for several reasons; it lacks the intense focality of Pratt’s still- lifes, instead taking a broad look at part of a ship caught in the turmoil of a raging ocean, with the intense waves casting water up on the deck. It has a grainy look to it, as though this chaotic scene has the gradient of an old camera. This gradient is consistent between the waves and the vessel, suggesting the lack of a boundary between the two. I see this work as biographical; Mary Pratt was a feminist painting about the home and its objects.

She was often neglected in favor of her artist husband Christopher, and was famously informed by her mentor at school that there could only be one artist in a marriage, and it wasn’t her. When she applied to the Glasgow School of Art, her husband was admitted while she was denied acceptance due to her pregnancy; she moved to Glasgow with her husband. In this image, To Glasgow, it’s possible to see Pratt confiding her sense of turmoil arising from uprooting her life, as though she were the boat in these waters. It’s 10 possible the water represents for her an unsettling world of men which sidelined and diffused women’s identity. Pratt must have felt positioned in relation to, identified for so long primarily as a daughter, wife, and mother. The painting illustrates this relational feeling, and represents an identity in crisis.

My poem similarly discusses feeling displaced due to the erosion of stable identity. The first lines evoke the desire to hold on to a sense of home: “can you smell the salt/ when you’re away?” The poem explores the unmoored experience of losing this stability; the speaker is “struck by brine/ on the furthest inland roads,” experiencing the coast as though they were still there, suggesting that sensory experience is fundamental to the conception of home. The short poem ends on an abstraction/ metaphor which encapsulates the feeling of displacement from home while still insisting on resilience:

“to Glasgow then, or any other coast –/ a boat that is barely keeping water out.” These final lines directly reference Pratt’s image, bringing this poem into dialogue with her themes. The image of the boat overtaken with water, paired with the notion of an individual feeling dissociated from their identity, becomes a symbol of endurance. This personal experience of Pratt’s To Glasgow gives me a place to creatively jump into the writing process as a reflection on identity and endurance in a period of crisis; I wrote about Pratt’s To Glasgow with the goal of finding a way of speaking that doesn’t attempt to represent the painting but is about articulating the experience of being a viewer. That resulted in a poem that, like many that follow in this collection, delved into my personal experience and dealt with issues of mental health.

Another artist explored in this project is Nova Scotia’s famous folk artist Maud

Lewis (1903-1970). Lewis, to a far greater extent than Mary Pratt, paints in a 11 deceptively simplistic mode. Many critics refer to her style as primitive, referencing her lack of formal training and her self-taught style. A commercial gallery owner, Bill

Ferguson, commented that she had “a primitive style [in which] there are no shadows”

(Morton 184). This comment resonates with the cultural elevation of Lewis as a folk artist of endless optimism: Erin Morton writes that

Lewis seemed to triumph over obstacles such as disability, gendered economic marginalization, and rurality through the joyous optimism of her small painted panel board landscapes, which inflected everyday scenes of Digby County life with bright colours painted without much treatment of perspective, scale, light, or tonalities. (Morton 176)

While she suggests that Lewis’s paintings are full of optimism, she also recognizes that this is part of a cultural narrative that was largely built up after Lewis’s passing. Morton clarifies that while Lewis’s folk art’s optimism derives from its depiction of “such rural labour activities of the past as farming, fishing, and logging,” the paintings became for

Nova Scotians and admirers all over Canada “a novel example of the resilience of traditional living undergoing modernization” (Morton 177). Resilience seems to be the appropriate word for Lewis, even more than optimism, as she faced economic hardship her whole life on top of her disability.

The paintings by Lewis looked at for this project were Lighthouse and Ferry at

Cape Forchu, Yarmouth County and Peggy’s Cove; when writing about these two pieces for this ekphrastic project, the two themes I kept in mind were those of optimism and resilience, though for Peggy’s Cove I also considered the exploitation of Lewis’s paintings while she was still living a life of poverty; her husband Everett handled all her finances and never gave her the proceeds from her work, going as far as forging her works and selling them for nearly ten years after her passing. I relate her experience of 12 poverty specifically to Peggy’s Cove as a cultural site in Nova Scotia that has been largely overcome by tourism, drawing similarities between Lewis’s economic exploitation as a folk artist and the village’s exploitation by the tourist industry. One of the direct comparisons I make is through the famous folk story of Peggy of the Cove, a woman who survived a shipwreck off the shore of Peggy’s Cove in the early 1800s and settled in the village after being rescued. The comparison hinges on the fact that both

Peggy and Maud Lewis lived in poverty but generated commercial wealth after their deaths, one through her story’s centrality to tourist narratives and the other through the value of her art; toward the middle of “Cove,” I suggest “a full life offers less/ than the story of it after.” This line speaks to the general lack of value we afford human beings

(particularly artists) until their deaths, questioning the priorities of capitalism concerning art. Earlier in the poem I write about the waves that overtake the ship in the folk story,

“leaving alone a little girl.” This solitary girl alludes to Maud Lewis; I use the ocean waves as a symbol for the negligence of an uncaring environment as I did in “To

Glasgow.” The poem ends with lines that bring together the real world with the conceit behind the poem:

What profits is hardly sustenance: people go to see the lighthouse and to stand far out on the rocks, pay dearly for Peggy’s Cove.

These lines point toward the economic exploitation inherent in these stories as well as the precarity of Maud Lewis’s life, both represented by the threat of the rough waves crashing against the cove rocks. This threat highlights the resilience behind the

‘optimism’ of her art. 13

For one of the other pieces by Maud Lewis, Lighthouse and Ferry at Cape

Forchu, Yarmouth County, I write about the experience of her art without specifically bringing Lewis’s biography. The image is true to her style in its use of colour and simplistic form. The lighthouse itself is very plain but for this reason stands apart from the rest of the image like an immutable monument – this effect is amplified because the solitary lighthouse stretches across the background of land, sea, and sky. In “Lighthouse

II,” I write about the optimism and resilience apparent in her paintings. Considering Erin

Morton’s work on Lewis’s importance as a folk artist who supplies Nova Scotians with optimism in a late capitalist world, I write about the image of the lighthouse as a source of optimism and guidance: “you were the one who said/ things will be alright.” This poem also expresses hopeful melancholy motivated by the experience of Lewis’s art, saying, “I know you lie, but I trust you,” thereby putting some of my own cynicism in contact with the purported optimism of Maud Lewis. While in this poem I still write of the ocean as a symbol of the dangers of the external world, I also write of fog as a symbol of the uncertainty that comes from navigating late capitalist societies, especially in an economically disadvantaged province: addressing Lewis’s optimism, the poem states that “you shine through this unbearable fog.” Fog is referenced elsewhere in the project too as a source of confusion and misdirection; specifically, in the poem “New

Pretence Island,” where it represents the obfuscation of Canada’s history as a settler- colonial nation. This use of simple symbolism comes from my engagement with modern ekphrastic theory; while similar messages can be conveyed by more complex metaphors and symbols, I wanted this work to trust the ways in which images speak for themselves.

Therefore, my ekphrastic work uses symbols from the collective imagination of 14

Canada’s East Coast; I write in “Lighthouse II,” “like the boat depends on this oceanside obelisk;/ it’s one of those things that’s a given.” I am, in this poem, attempting to tap into the optimism of Maud Lewis’s work while also respecting, and engaging with, the world as it appears to me.

Another artist that this collection encounters is Harold Cromwell, a Black Nova

Scotian born to a poor working family near Weymouth, in Digby County. His work is done with pencil and ink, and most of his illustrations are about life in Weymouth and

Weymouth Falls. David Woods, an associate curator of Black Nova Scotian Art at the

Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, suggests that he was relatively unknown in the Nova Scotia art scene, but he “would have been a Canadian folk art icon had the public seen the scope of his work” (1976). This project deals with two illustrations of his, called Green

Cove Smelt Fishing up the Weymouth River and Blueberry Pickers Back in 1930. Both images are black and white, depicting rural labour activities. They are also both very detailed, with careful attention given to the shading, to the extent that they might be mistaken for old grainy photographs. The poem that responds to Blueberry Pickers is titled “Working Berries.” This poem was difficult to write, as I was unsure of how to respect without appropriating the experience of the marginalized Black Nova Scotian community. I found it easier to insert myself into images when I could relate the artist’s experience to my own life, and this was something I felt much more trepidation doing for artists from marginalized communities. However, I still went forward with my effort since I believe that a project that attempts to articulate the experience of the East Coast must include communities that are foundational to the region, even if they are sidelines in official histories of it. I tried to accommodate my life experience to the art, writing of 15 my own experience working blueberry fields as a kid. The poem evokes the culture of berry picking; I reflect on the cyclical nature of berry picking each season, continually reiterating the line “grow to hate them,” which touches on the repetition and resentment of intense labour. I also evoke the pain of this labour:

Working berries, a taste of a breaking back. Bent over blue bushes, firm up the rake. Grow to hate them.

These lines convey the sense of hard work captured by Cromwell’s illustration. This poem, as well as the poem “Anadromous” (which responds to Green Cove Smelt

Fishing), were some of the most difficult pieces I wrote. I found it easier to insert myself into images when I could relate the experience to my own life, and this was something I felt much more trepidation doing for artists from marginalized communities. However, I still went forward with this work despite a lack of confidence in the process; it is important in a work that attempts to articulate the experience of the East Coast to include communities that are foundational to the conception of the East Coast, even if I am not privy to their particular experience.

Another artist worth discussing here is Molly Lamb Bobak (1920-2014),

Canada’s first female war artist. I focused on paintings from the second phase of her career after the end of World War II when she painted open area crowd scenes. I wrote on two of these paintings: Untitled (Street Scene in Fredericton, NB) and Fredericton

Exhibition. Both of these paintings are distinctive for the sense of immersion in the crowd and movement they convey. Sara Angel writes in her introduction to Michelle

Gewurtz’s Molly Lamb Bobak: Life and Work that in Lamb Bobak’s “paintings of large 16 engaged groups, Lamb Bobak positioned the viewers as part of the assembled crowd by using a ground-level perspective and conveying a sense of vitality and movement” (10).

In my poems responding to these paintings, “Pass By” and “BANG! A Mess,” I try to preserve that sense of movement through quick shifts in attention. For example, in

“BANG! A Mess,” responding to Fredericton Exhibition, I write about a disagreement between two men which holds the poem’s attention briefly before a fight breaks out and the focus shifts. Later in the poem, the speaker recalls the men: “I’ve lost sight of the two men,/ forget them in the crowd/ when the receiver blurts out.” These lines encapsulate the feeling of being immersed in the crowd, which appears to be shifting and moving in Fredericton Exhibition. The quick movement of attention in the poem, too, reflects a formal feature of Lamb Bobak’s painting; Gewurtz writes of Lamb

Bobak’s modern life and crowd scenes that they are “a careful balance of form, colour, and space, creating a clear, rationalized vision of moving scenes that are intentionally devoid of narrative” (96). This lack of narrative reflects the complexity of modern life in the East Coast of Canada. While Maud Lewis’s bright, simple, and optimistic paintings resonated with the population due to what Morton calls their desire “for an organized daily life despite the disorganized and despondent realities of late capitalism” (178),

Lamb Bobak’s paintings confront those disorganized realities. The exhibition is the perfect scene for these ideas, as carnivals commonly represent ambiguity, absurdity, and often chaos. I also write of the nausea of carnival rides, linking it to the social anxiety of being in a large crowd of strangers in motion. The way the lines break in this poem reflect the motion of Fredericton Exhibition, exhibiting a breathlessness as the reader is swept from one line to another. 17

This ekphrastic project engages with East Coast paintings as the basis for understanding life on Canada’s East Coast. Most of the artists I write about share a folkish sensibility. Even when that sensibility is absent, they share thematic concerns, coming back again and again to the ocean, rural labour, and economic anxiety. Many of the artists also illustrated landscapes, suggesting above all else a connection with the land they lived on. While the images gesture outward to viewers, the poems I wrote about them often look inward to my own life. I explored my feelings of attachment to the land, and I articulated the psychological dislocations induced by living in this part of the world. One goal of the project was to articulate the experience of living on Canada’s

East Coast through explorations of Atlantic Canadian art. If this collection doesn’t completely encapsulate that experience, it illustrates some of the fundamental aspects of

Maritime life. In so doing, it fulfills my other goal of approaching ekphrasis as a collaborative mode of writing poetry. My poems respond to artists from all over the East

Coast. These artists provoked me to take creative paths I otherwise wouldn’t have undertaken, and they enhanced my work by locating it within a robust culture of East

Coast painting.

Ocean

To Glasgow To Glasgow, Mary Pratt

Can you smell salt when you’re away? I do, and am so often struck by brine on the furthest inland roads; hear the sea like a conch shell clasped my ear. Nothing else might move me like rancorous waves – nothing build me so far on the up and up, crest and break. There is a sense in my bones; bluenose: oceanic body. To Glasgow, then, or any other coast – a boat that is barely keeping water out.

Ocean View Ballad McLeod’s Beach NB 1, Caren-Marie Michel

I’ve sat long by the ocean And never needed more. Yeah, I’ve spoken of the devil And he’s never been to my door.

I used to be a type of gambler, Risk my life among the waves, Drop coins into the water, And let them mark my grave.

My heart is worn and weary, Each breath I take a labour. I’ve earned this by the fires I light And my cruelties to my neighbour.

This soil gives no comfort – My mind disdains the land. I’m a kinder, better person When I set off from the sand.

I won’t live my life lightly But to keep my heart at ease I’ll sit long by the ocean And enjoy this frigid breeze

And when the devil does come knocking, He won’t find me at home. He’ll trace my steps to the water’s edge, Worn and washed in foam.

Lighthouse I Lighthouse, Chantal Khoury

I've been looking for shore; somewhere dark and warm that would take me in, claim me. I've been growing tired of the haze, perpetual fog, thinking maybe it's about time I finally give a damn. Sailing since I was little, I coasted, never docked, found port, or stepped onto the harbour.

It's easy on the boat, carried by the water. If you don't care where you are going, float on. Few concerns but capsizing, sometimes I lean out and look down.

I imagine the bottom, daydream of depth, hope there's more beyond our surfaces. I'm trying to prove by catch and release; I'm making plans to cultivate a garden. Dimly aware of light, I'm moving toward the shore; I'm done with death and depth. I leave them like I once did solid ground and hope I keep my legs.

Lighthouse II Lighthouse and Ferry at Cape Forchu, Yarmouth County, Maud Lewis

I know you lie, but I trust you like the boat depends on this oceanside obelisk; it’s one of those things that’s a given. You keep me honest, on course. You’ve seen me break apart on the rocks, fall into the ocean, wash up battered on shore as driftwood, a ruined ship. You were the one who said things will be alright and even if that wasn’t true I went about the world like it was. I’m apt to believe you against the world. You shine through this unbearable fog. I see you in the rock face smiling. I hate this poem. I hate writing poetry. But I’m fond of you, my lighthouse. I’ll keep writing for you. I’ll describe you as the light you are. You endure beyond monument. You direct me without effort, rebuff me in my errant routes without a word; just a slow turn toward me, I see you as light shining in my eye. I’ll never break apart on the rocks again, never wash up battered on shore to take up fistfuls of sand.

Lighthouse III (Another Day Following Directions) To The Lighthouse, Laurie Dolhan

Point of guidance, direct me. I'm lost, just dimly aware of other avenues. Hang out a little longer at the lighthouse. Point of departure, departing.

Little schooner passing big vessels. So close to grasping the impact of those nearby, those arbiters of direction shining light on ways of easy passage for each return, for accountability making ends meet. Vassal, look for a barge directing the beloved home, oh swooner, return to me! Staying here looking out over the coast was a scenic misdirection.

Turns out love is the Trans-Canada getting further away from you; you're really East of it all now. Love isn't coming back, either.

Eastern Passage The Schooner Bluenose at Sea, Dusan Kadlec

You claimed it would be their birthright; a ridgeline along the coast, property that met the water. You talked about the sailboat with which you'd catch the ocean air, the way to rig the mast, switch with the swinging boom, cut the sail and roll the boat for fun – your eyes clear, mirrors for the ocean’s surface.

You're much quieter when you talk these days, less sure of yourself on land. When you do talk it’s always about leaving. Your knowledge of knots and all that other nautical nonsense now a hangman's noose; I see this when you set loose the sail, when the wind blows back your hair; I see this in the way you declare out loud your readiness to join the water, the steadiness of waves.

Harbour Idylls, Sarah Jones

Underneath masts like steeples read reverence on the water; canonize the names of ships. Write silhouettes against sea as miracles, outward ripples as prayer, always and ever reaching outward like a sailor leaving home knowing – with luck – they’ll return one day. Feverish longing unrequited, disgusted of want: there’s a system in place that permits us not to think of these things, that respects what’s distasteful to our ears and minds. Or, to the double nature of worldlings, that we’re locked out of the totalizing worldview of ocean gods. Halifax’s harbour, industrial sewer, was always dear to me. The garbage resting at the bottom, the sludge and slime, that guilt of my own consumption.

Port of Departure Port City, Jonathan Johnson

In the port we docked all of our pleasures, left our feet behind dangling in the water. We watched tall ships take leave, the setting sun another sign of our loved ones leaving us. The caramel sky a slight comfort for the forlorn. We accept some goodbyes as final, the wet salt of our eyes a rude reminder of what remains lost and what laid claim.

Anadromous (Up Course) Green Smelt Fishing up the Weymouth River, Harold Cromwell

Migration from the ocean to the mouth of Weymouth, smelt start spawning. Anadromous – up course, a life lived largely at sea starts fresh downriver. The smelt won’t all make the way, they’re food for many fish: lake trout, stripped bass, and salmon – similarities are forsaken by hunger. The loss is another’s gain. Long pole hand-held dip nets hardly save them. Clean them of their heads and entrails – what we recognize in our own. Cook with bones, fins, and scales; the digestible signs of Spring. Osmeridae, change is coming, like it or not, change is here. Run up black and white waters, home is hard to find, harder to keep, but we do what we can. Buckets in shallow streams swing along and pull up, sometimes, quite full.

Alizarin Crimson Silver Fish on Crimson Foil, Mary Pratt

This blood fills all our foils, animates the weakest of our characters. Show me blood where it breaks fault lines – don’t show it in the food. Wash your hands, blood all over them. Faulting again, blood in bleed out, sear the wound, stem this boastful crimson branching. So blue blooded it seems like security; a concerto of cadmium bars keeping it all in check.

Summer Gothic, Winter Easement Four White Boats: Canadian Gothic, Christopher Pratt

A mind imagining waves. Caught where ocean holds sway with land, admitting concessions and rolling them back. Coastal worlds wearing with tide. Summer policy gives way to winter easement, hoarfrost bearding boats. Let there be a firmament, God said, in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. Fishers wander out on the ice in the evening, draw open depths, throw lines and work on patience. Reel out slimy desperation, slam for soft red rime. Glazed eyes and gutted body, aware, knowing agony in any death away from home. Bodies over waves. Turmoil barricaded by ice, barely. Then melt. Fishers return to their vessels, lower them into water and break ice.

Water Goat & Kid Gary Stairs Fly-Fishing, Bruno Bobak

My grandfather said it was patience that baited the fish and brought them on my line. The last time I saw him, we went fishing out behind the old house and when I didn’t catch anything he reminded me I was rushing, that if I didn’t take my time in life it would pass me by and so would the fish in the stream. He said fishing is something you do with people you care about – it’s between people and on some of my best trips I caught nothing. I didn’t get it; after a few catches that came along we went home. I watched TV by the armchair as he fed the birds. I don’t remember what was on. Often when I fish today I go it alone, I take my time. I’ve come around and little care what I catch – we’re offered so few chances to feel situated, calm, for thoughts to catch the line. I reel in and release back to the water. It’s unfair that the young lack the language for love, that people leave us before we find our own. I would have said fishing is something I did with you and no one else. Looking through the window as he fills feeders, the warmth of the armchair, taking his time.

All I Ever Wanted Trout in a Ziplock Bag, Mary Pratt

With the cloistered promise of a red onion I peel apart to admit that I missed you, and missed this, our daily recompense for absence layering home: you silently walking past, our hands opposite poles on the same planet, magnetism all that briefly brings us together. Notice you again later in the plates, half-read magazines, shoes at the door. Contact in making the bed, hurried notes on the fridge, leftovers we never eat. As if intimacy catches on where we miss each other. I remember long loneliness, all the mess that’s solely mine, when I naively made a world where people are not drawn together in the daylight, and the night is empty, catching nothing. Alone now, I find you in the light again looking like all I ever wanted; the jar on the windowsill, a fresh bag of raw fish, that elusive red onion.

Toward a Larger Body Sans titre, Noémie DesRoches

We do not forget the ocean -- we just wonder about access. Mortality a tough bind, we are vicarious and vivacious. We'd like a long life. We'd like to drink your saltwater without death and release your tide from the grip of the moon, to give reign to our stranger impulses. But you keep us grounded in what's real, what commits us to the land we stand on.

One body could never be enough. We'd like billions. Stability, finally, a fabrication that we've grown tired of. We'd like our damp feet to feel the same current and then contrast; we want to find the cold and warm, consolidate: bring together bodies of water.

We want a sign that people watch the same waves; that the impulses of your body submerge all to bring us back together again.

FOLKish

Working Berries Blueberry Pickers Back in 1930, Harold Cromwell

Grow to hate them, working berries, a taste of a breaking back. Bent over blue bushes, firm up the rake. Grow to hate them. Get the kids involved, good money for the young. Can’t pay the way for those who find themselves depended on, uniquely needed – grow to hate them, those blue ones who don’t do anything for themselves, sneaking and snacking some out the bins. Ground water swell, promote any growth – these things I saw. Working berries, return again tomorrow and the next year, grow to hate them.

Cove Peggy’s Cove, Maud Lewis

These days the quaint cove village is talked of as a tourist trap. People go to see the lighthouse. They look out to the waves which washed the whole ship under and away leaving alone a little girl and they wonder and then they go to see the lighthouse; boldly stand out on the beaten rocks and watch the waves roll over, threaten them too. They pay for this. A full life offers less than the story of it after. People go to see the lighthouse, the rocks. Proverbially, you reap what you sow and you cannot eat your money. What profits is hardly sustenance: people go to see the lighthouse and to stand far out on the rocks, pay dearly for Peggy’s Cove.

Pass By Untitled (Street Scene in Fredericton, NB), Molly Lamb Bobak

Blurred: energy from the crowd. Anxiety: not knowing anyone. Unpause: see people walk away, motors humming cars out of frame. What more is there to say? That I’ve seen that sky? That I’ve walked that street, fallen down and slammed against it? How to break into the mundane and see the value in our trite sentimentalities, as if repetition might once be praised, then again, while small moments are never squandered. Drop change into a cup. Could I ever spill out into plenty? I’ll build a home here for me and mine and I’ll claim all of you.

BANG – A Mess Fredericton Exhibition, Molly Lamb Bobak

Cacophony in the fairgrounds. Obviously. Discord between two men; they’re out of love and the carnie wants to give it to them, shouts highfalutin promises: everyone is a winner but you can win big. Someone calls him an exhibitionist but that’s lost when a fight breaks out; the bodybuilder shoved the man making balloon animals and now that guy is blowing it all out of proportion. People watch in gradient sidelines, cheer on as if this were part of the show and as if all this is as ordinary as the Ferris wheel winding around. The zipper winds up and throws us up and down, weak stomachs throw up and feel down. There are so many bodies in flux and thrust and I feel sick. I’ve lost sight of the two men, forget them in the crowd when the receiver blurts out a voice from far away: we’re back in business again; please stay on the line, your call’s important to us.

Rough Weave Home, Ann Manuel

Stitch these sticks together like the settling of a stag’s horn as the boughs bow down low. Cascading tones in brambles create the cadence of a jagged safety. Sourcing home from similar surfaces. Slumbering in work; lumber toward what’s known. I don’t always slip into what’s good for me; dream less than sleep. Hopeful branching out may make me bold, might manifest this pile of twigs and allow some degree of comfort. Life emerges where we make more than what we have – where we bond through the outward show of brokenness. Rough cut living – to be too neat seems needy, needless. Cut myself on what’s close to me; a maelstrom in my home as a settled sort of mess. Spot my obfuscated edges, the places where I disappear into what I put around me.

If the World is a Woman, She Doesn’t Have Time for You Untitled (Hope Jarvis and Chestnut Canoe), Lucy Jarvis and good for her. you didn't look after her favourite plants; you let the ivies run rampant. she left the dogs with you and you treated them badly, left them out in winter. you took more and offered less. spring couldn’t come fast enough. if hope is a cigarette the closest puff you'll get is second hand. in a chestnut canoe she rests easy and leaves you.

Girl in Red Turban Girl in Red Turban, Mary Pratt

You take off your face, slow turn to smile. I wonder why you won’t permit yourself to look tired more often. You scowl. I try to save face, explain myself; you look satisfied when the day is done. You say: I’ve been told to bear my burdens. Women should never be tired, angry, or turned on. You tell me: tired of you, angry at us. And turned on? You laugh. Energy flushes back in blush. You throw your towel at me, say the day’s been long. You’re tired of me, but you’re trying. I rinse it out, fold it together, leave some things for later.

Flood, Waterloo Row Flood, Waterloo Row, Bruno Bobak

Everyone here acts like they've never seen water. As if when something shows itself where it has never been before it becomes another thing entirely. The streets rarely reveal their depth people are surprised to find that trees can stretch proudly downward, that water on the ground expands the sky.

A drowned city: our mild Venice. No one builds a gargoyle on any buttress. Tenants move what they can out of basements, work against water damage. A mother wonders, worries where her daughter is -- that same girl who wades down Waterloo, covering as much ground as a young girl or river must feel they ought to.

42 re: Snowfall Shovelling Out, Maureen Vezina

You shovel snow; it keeps coming. Scrape and grate, the force of ice against your gut. Thrust and toss away, move on.

You shovel snow, guard against the cold; shovel snow, shovel And displace. Disparate snowflakes reimagine themselves into mountains.

Shovel snow. I’d like to pass here later; you clear wide. All proof of work casually heaped aside. Toss and it melts as you cast it over.

Still you shovel and before rest night grows long again, and snow falls like a swift sleep. Again you rise, you shovel snow.

Ahead of Me Nova Scotia Winter, Joseph Purcell

Wandering the depths of our dale we leave deep prints in snow that trace us to the Salmon River and fade away onto the ice as faint foot-shaped breaks in rime. Small traces of us melt, leave little ephemera beyond cluttered corners in the mind. Seldom in the view of home, we spend our winter infancy amazed at snow – what we build, what tracks we leave, what places reinvent themselves for the season. Home remained the same – consistency in the fraught and fallible. Warm. It was nice to step into the cold, inconsequential worlds that melt, freeze over, fall apart. We always wandered together but one day we split, and it wasn’t wrong – you’re supposed to make your own tracks – I couldn’t always lead the way. You were drawn to the backroads, stranger routes. One day we were ruined, and I was fine.

The river always struck me with its persistence, frozen over but still running the currents below. We go two miles down, two miles back, go on and off, back to track in our hollow footfalls, our feet following where they were before. Following our steps like recounting trauma, the reasons we never talk. Later, recount snow, spending time together, the unflinching solidarity of children. Hardly ever off-course, we follow again like the faithful. Our pilgrimage 44 near the end only after the sun drops, finding importance in the illumination of snow. Ignoring the dim lights from windows acting like lanterns set by strangers; we retrace our steps in snow, lit by the moon’s slight warmth. You’re always ahead of me.

The Scenic Route Cheticamp, Cape Breton, Joseph Purcell

Bring along what belongs to you. There’s a disconnect between what we want and where we’re going. There’s anger in the uncertainty of the long drive, distrust about arrival. We lay on our horns and our “get out of my way.” Get going. Keep inventory of abject objects that remain dear and retain compassion. In cold Nova Scotia I drag myself, leave watercolour words for things I still care about: my ticket to fly, pictures of my sibling’s kids, items my exes never asked for, postcard poems from wandering lovers. Of what represents itself, I keep my truck full.

Post Deflection Guardrail, Ned Pratt

We grow up around guardrails, vagrant benches for the young who smoke out behind the dump and get ourselves high on the rooftops. Post up, laugh and jeer at passing cars flying by for no reason – it goes beyond criticism. We were Simon Cowell on the rail, railing against the Martins and the Harpers of our youth as they passed us. Blood on the backseat, keep your windows up – we’re throwing fish. Any opening an opportunity, delineating our boundaries. Just kids angry at the fucking man, what were we to do when fishing grew boring but revise our plans? We raised ourselves on abusing cars. Share the pack. Park nearby to a deflated tire. Proper guidance, truly, hard to come by.

Modern Architecture Modern Architecture, Fogo, Ned Pratt

What about weightlessness, the feeling of resting on solid ground? How do you feel about extending yourself, yourself an extension? The foundation is deep, expansive. Brick by brick and stone by ruddy stone, remember when you felt firm. You rest on this ground holding every generation, every genus, and still a gap for you, to hold everything and all that you are and you do. There is so much depth, cavernous, ocean, this self-evident and resounding rock.

Where Do You Find The Space For So Much Darkness? Black Shed, Port-au-Port, Ned Pratt

I keep it rear-facing. I don’t look back. I admit it marginally. Just move on. It’s centered in all I do. Miss it for complicity. You’ve housed here before, churned deep within these walls. You too remark on the radiance of light against the water; you too plant compliments in my garden.

Winter Omens Last Snow of Winter, David Milne

August was warm, the winter long and full of snow. Hundreds of sparrows flock the yard, feverishly flit between branches. Early arrival. The last storm nearly over. They say in August if you see a flock of birds without end winter will be hard; an abundance of acorns signals a harsher season. Black caterpillars, the pomp of a squirrel's tail, the thick skins of onions. Count seeds in a persimmon, dried fruit of a serpent. Couched in our comfortable rituals, I still look for a mackerel sky, think of fishing with my grandfather in spring.

COLONIAL COAST

New Pretence Island A Misty Afternoon, St. John’s, Newfoundland, Maurice Cullen

Gulf Stream moderates the bleak. Low mist that keeps us from knowing all there is. Mitigates horror. Remember: mist and fog are not the same, argue for different dispersions. The buildings, old colonial works, couched – we’re already losing where we are, what we just came from. Fog is denser, lasts longer, leaves us in the lurch. Pretend there is nothing old under the sun, perform your life as the only world that is and ever will be. When the mist lifts, when the fog rolls out, act like what you see is new, and good. All actions of the mind are easy; hateful of fruitless passions, catch us fishing between the crags at the edge of the world where all drops off.

Myriad Island MIRIAD Island, Philippa Jones

Look for the horror, the way the island cuts in crags myriad images in inky blood. Bury the old tools of creation with bare hands. Left to rot with driftwood, protest association. Following the suggestions of shape reimagine an old island as geomatic, crafted with harsh polygons preloaded to render with no texture. Introduce anger. Take something full and empty it. Internecine warfare in the woods, cleave and rip up the pine, an amputation of trunks. Leave stumps to remind other trees. Saying it isn’t safe for you here in the washes. Villainous, this enormity of false magic. Settler, you arrive like Prospero.

Our Crafts of Distance Figures on a Red Plain, Miller Brittain

Allegorical pastel sun burning. Vast plains reaching off. Obscure the thought that this may go on forever. Bodies cease against a muted green sky. This woman stops all motion as she finds another reclining on the sole rock in the scene – dependant on things that ground us, we’ll stop moving forward when we find part of what we’re looking for; nearby a rugged stump preaches about the trunk so roughly removed. From her to him, it could be the distance from sun to sky, close enough to call it.

Our Crafts of Violence Figures on a Plain with a Blue Sun, Miller Brittain

Witness the intensity of that which appears close; how underneath these trees the foliage becomes the sky and the blue veneer of the burning sun barely breaks through. Two distortions enraptured by each other. After the fall, outside the garden. Land burning under mass suffering – The foolish fever dream of empty space. This falls apart where we insist it is all craft, when we push and ask about what falls outside the frame. Reproduce the forms handed down to us. A woman fully exposed, the closure of the man’s back.

Logging on the Miramichi River, Blackville, NB, 1915 Photo by Wm. Notman & Son

In the most natural of situations we might remove water to wood with a presumption of growth. Unnatural then, most days on the Miramichi River, whenever the wooden poles are not for traversing tributaries or fishing out salmon and the broken limbs of New Brunswick's better nature float downstream, water-logged bones for building. One note, two-toned, we've always done this. Trees thirst for water and we oblige them at the cost of roots, of any real ground to stand on.

Accretion Between Ecology and the Object, Emilie Grace Lavoie

A process of layers: look to gradual accumulation and gratuitous growth. A forceful bringing together, we form larger bodies. We’re opportunistic invaders colonizing pre-existing wounds in excess. Lichen: not what we thought. Accretion creating value in organic bursts. Acquisition of all assets, a zero-sum game remains catastrophic. Possible synergy between us still a point of severance.

THE META

Burning the Rhododendron Burning the Rhododendron, Mary Pratt

Awkward encounter in fire again, anxiety about a burning body. Can this withering, smoldering flesh leave behind ashes that tell a story of fullness and plenty, an overflow of self? Can one sing a sweet soprano with the throat choked up by dust, debris, and smoke?

Beyond Cities Solstice Drive to St. Anthony, Christopher Pratt

A series of endless roads looping back around to me. Find me passed out in the ditch, my uncanny valley of coffee cups, cigarette butts, and roadkill, happy among all those things that we’re comfortable leaving behind. I’m talking about trash, like me – that which can’t or won’t drive. Mark my anger in this blank slate gaze, my legislative purview skipping fields and cities, only reading roads. Rely upon me to count all you’ve left undone while wondering where in the hell I enact my limits. Find me waking up and making the long trek, hedging foolish bets on fast cars, astrological readings, tarot cards, and grains of tea – roads which you’ve long dismissed. Cities moonlight as wastelands, alert me that I’ve let these things fall by the wayside too, that I was stupid in my youth and nothing really changes. Every year I hoped for more endings, prayed they would stop a road before it went nowhere.

Magnolia First Flowers, Sarah Maloney as home décor online market floralsvasestextiles jewellery & bakery as drama magnolia as a flexible and powerful CMS as off-white extended play magnoliaslipping out of Southern mouths & rising Magnolia Iowa Indiana & Illinois & more Magnolia a ‘new world’ warbler branching out disambiguation cast in bronze first flowers

Breaking Things Apart and Putting Them Back Together Once for Drying Fish, Karen Stentaford

Angry again. Sawblade chewing against the grain, that ruddy work. Steel meets wood for a bloodletting. Winter turns and leaves shoot; the tide rolls out and I remain on shore, sap seeping through my palm.

Stuck, for now. Construct a feeble monument under the impetus of impotence. Watch the water wash it over, away. Often, I have felt rancor sincere as the waves, soliciting both crash and calm, coming back around to where I’ve been before. Throw fish back into the roaring ocean, hope they settle deep. Can I leave my work better than this mess?

Settled, deeply. Sometimes I sleep and dream; sometimes I simply sleep. Nothing done or undone in that snap from wake to drowsy wake. Once more for dying fish, returned to a roaring ocean break. The tide turns back and nothing else.

Superstore The Great Beyond, Jack Bishop

The sun never sets on Superstore, pharmacy and all. The sun hangs there above it – and in the expansive pavement field fresh cars play rough house, run you down with illusory urgency. Unaware of how much time is left, of how seconds saved never add up and neither do the pennies. Count your luck, call it pocket change.

Going Under Cherish Your Freedom, Monika Wright

Start by second guessing yourself. You say it's like sitting down in the shower, as if you're in the rain scene. You just confessed and you're soaked. You say actually it's more like pinning poems up on the walls and tearing them down in anger, resigning all joys to monochrome again.

It's not reaching family. It's missing calls, sitting on texts, slipping loved ones back into your pocket. Guess again. Say too much.

Crack your screen and use it as a mirror. Crack the camera lens too, take pictures of familiar smiles. Categorize: categorically sympathetic makes you feel simple, pathetic. Spend all days inside. Kill yourself in the comfort of sleep. Guess again – you don’t sleep. You stay in bed awake and want more.

Pin a new poem to the wall. It's clunky the whole way except the ending, which is perfect, so it stays up. After a few days you feel better.

What I Should Have Said When You Texted Me About Anxiety Earmarked, John Greer

If full recovery is too much to ask, we’d like to just feel better. We treat ourselves badly. You, couched in bad faith like a thin sheet, sacrifice yourself to the cold. Know this: you’ve been a hermitage too long housing a stranger, refusing to love them. Tomorrow you will treat yourself kindly. You look to the ocean every day. Tomorrow you will wade in, go deeper.

Is Heaven Post-Traumatic? A Slip of the Tongue Blown Out of All Proportion, John Greer

The word is inconsequential when nothing matters, but for the living a lack of consequence signals denial or delay. My mother, learning I believed in death and decay, assured me that it didn’t matter. I was a baptismal child, she said, and I laughed, let her know I’d remain the dismal child I always was, ungrateful in the face of love and God. What I didn’t say is: your idea of God must be some kinda junkie who just fucking loves life, and death to them is like our fish going down the drain and it’s not that we never loved them either even as they swirled away, evaded us. A friend once said that if we hit upon an afterlife it can’t be better than this which is a kinder thought than this is all we have. Another friend, full of care, had this for me: it doesn’t matter who’s wrong or right, it’s who finds comfort.

Fandango Face, Philip Iverson

Our weakening bodies complicate the idea of possible wellness. In an internecine world our fractures are bridged and never brought together. I want to be more like water and land, sun and sky. I want to be brought together. I am driftwood put in place. I am all-chromatic, an aberration against those I’d be close with. I keep putting myself back. Sometimes replaceable, I look strange to people who don’t see fissures and walk bridges without realizing there is any movement or difference in where they are and where they came from, that someone made these paths. This world stratifies me from them, who find meaning in any of this.

All Days are Short Regardless of How They Feel Rootlets, Chantal Khoury

Today has been long, so I’m taking the world up on its easy routes. Tomorrow I’m ordering in, undressing early, sending all my sparrows home.

Today has been long, so I’m trying to find the good in it, the respite of drinking water, of stepping outside and taking my time to smoke before returning to the mire, dire and dread, my deadened joy a prediction of overcast weather hanging over the places I dead-end myself.

Tomorrow I’m following my predilections, my tendencies to ignore the pressing in favour of those easy routes; driving far away and going slowly, getting myself where I need to be with no particular rush, no urgency.

64 Points on the Road Between Montreal and Halifax 64 Points on the Railway Between Halifax and Montreal, Eric Walker

1 autoroute 30 saving time 2 global positioning turn through the water to Montreal 3 stare at distant high-rises disappearing rear-view 4 think about cheaper beer hidden in the trunk 5 stop for gas and stay awhile – grow sick and tired 6 knock-off Originals smoking out the window every five 7 pull over and piss away from the road between car doors 8 bust the right speaker with the beat 9 remain sick of maps 10 think of sleeping in the parking lot 11 step out into the water and soak the seats 12 remember reclined restlessness in Thunder Bay – drive on 13 fight with the co-pilot over trust and left turns 14 know that one song and sing it 15 ramp over train rails – land poorly 16 bust the left speaker with the base 17 feel claustrophobic – open windows 18 pull over to roll a joint or two 19 escape! from Quebec City 20 rear speaker drawl suggesting turn it up or slow down 21 blow the tire – fix it slow 22 curse the costs 23 explicitly ignore time & push on past nightfall 24 red hot chili peppers again – drive in silence 25 what’s one or two coffees 26 stop for a bathroom – it works out anyway 27 fast food for the fast lane 28 fill up the tank sniff a litre or two of gas 29 tag along with the shuck of the engine not for long 30 signposts blur and blur someone blurb them 31 unarticulated roads go where exactly 32 treetops treetops treetops clearing 33 wonder where space keeps coming from 34 drive for hours and hours and go nowhere 35 visit a friend in Fredericton who isn’t home 36 listen to a book retaining nothing 37 take scenic river routes right 38 curse the left lane lover 39 dozing through to rumble strips 40 drift lines wake up calls and growlers 41 pull over smoke a joint or two 42 hear that song again sing it 43 slow down for the scab 69

44 rattle the car breaking down it must be 45 think nearly there to feel better 46 never again abstract distance 47 the dog is so well behaved don’t think about it 48 some six thousand miles get mad about it 49 talk to gas station attendants – they’re good today 50 curse driving 51 roadwork ahead is about time 52 six flags sign nothing at the border 53 wind turbines standing still 54 swing by the old home drive slowly by 55 resent tolls take the long route through the mountain 56 curse 57 one pack two pack three pack four 58 five smokes ten smokes twenty more 59 some sixty cartons smoking back 60 Halifax that great harbour the home of homes 61 park the car the fumes and exhaust 62 around roundabouts sing nurseries round ‘n round 63 walk along the dock enjoy the buskers 64 place is meaningless but I like it here

Rotten Oranges of Canadian Art Oranges of Canadian Art (for Dennis Reid), John Greer

Three rotten oranges: I'm reminded of all the things I hate. All hate, Canada and the arts. Why do we let what is fresh go to waste? Why are we so concerned with preserving form?

I wanted to eat an orange. I was told about style, about content, so much rot. I was told to feel dispassionately.

You always were an overeater, unsatisfied.

You always wanted more. Played pretend about good and bad, about taste, the trappings; but you were just hungry.

When does this get redundant? I once knew an anecdote who took years and years to realize it was a silly story, variety of comfort and devastation. I guess they were a sort of anec- doche, some syntactic hokey-pokey.

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Curriculum Vitae

Benjamin Dawson

Bachelor of Arts, Honours in English, University of New Brunswick. Graduated May 2018. - Awarded UNBF Student Union Bursary

Master of Arts, Creative Writing English, University of New Brunswick. Graduated May 2020.

No publications. No conferences.