Today, the light

Today, the light smoulders across the sky, leaving clothes saturated in an incandescent soot and the skin's scent encrusted in a saline crust.

Galanis-Calderaro: Collaboration

Our collaboration began in Puerto Rico in July 2013
when we met at the Walking Seminar. Two days into it —— out of a 3-week long walk in the island —— we decided to write a series of haikus together yet alone, as individual, then combined, responses to the landscapes we were walking in. We gave each other the task of writing either the first and third lines, or the second line, in sets of twelve, without sharing the results with each other; then reversed the distribution of task, up to 72 sets total. The last day in San Juan we sat down and finally shared the lines worked in this sort of blindness, combining them into final haikus. 

Part I is a selection of those first haikus created while walking in synchronicity.
 
Part II is a selection of haikus utilizing the same process once we were separate in different places after the Puerto Rican seminar. It is a remote collaboration that reflects the distance and the time lapses experienced a few months into separate realities. 

PART II

XIII
some nights, i recall
leaves will keep their energy
death - we were once friends

XXIII
taken from behind
a foreign tongue tastes like sex
capital, debt, law

II
We swam, we swam - then
aviones en el cielo
the phone stopped ringing

V
And then came the drought
walk slowly yet go, endless
the Jews of Madrid

XVI
careful, it might die
generosidad verde
books are funerals

XX
give me more music
his orgasm was her Why
for my bones to hear

PART I

IX
brain body skin flow

a dog curled up on the road 
mareao adrift floats


XVI
amor residual

fish explode like shooting stars 
amor sin red, sin 


VII path with no return 
water - all my relations 
sadness of the word


XIV
sleep naked, my love

at the airport, remove shoes 

no need for trophies 


XXVII 
thunder - lights go out 
exuberar~resistir 
fuck hernan cortes


XXXIV
evidence the odd

us, at night, swimming, laughing 
post humanizar 

Bibi Calderaro
Christos Galanis

Today, the light

Today, the light bleaches edges causing outlines to bleed, and what is considered 'inside' to inverse.

Today, the light

Today, the light is a shadow puppet show behind a veil of silk.

Today, the light

Today, the light is the foliage on make-believe trees.

David Arnold: Two Poems

1.  

walk swiftly through these
                                        woods
outsourcing calories
    is ecstasy through slow burn

may slip on tree root --
take out a whole chunk
& come to in blissful
accommodation with the world



2.

        This mind
in tilt
            flings out
    a foot            beneath
a knee

Self promenades - in groups -
    its other selves to see -

walks out,    bereft
            or blithe

Describe a path
from 'Fisherman's Wharf' to 'Orford Quay'

Can limbs combine with history

Today, the light

Today, the light makes us see red.

Today, the light

Today, the light is a mimic.

Today, the light

Today, the light is a cluster of moments incomprehensibly far away.

Today, the light

Today, the light is a straight line.

Marlene Creates (excerpt)

Marlene Creates is an environmental artist and poet who lives and works in Portugal Cove, Newfoundland, Canada. This conversation took place via e-mail, May 2014. The complete conversation can be found at Atlas Place.


Bach: With your in situ poetry walks in The Boreal Poetry Garden, how do you choose your collaborators? What connections are there between this performative work and other more active participatory works in your oeuvre (The Distance Between Two Points is Measured in Memories)? Or works by other artists that may have inspired these cross-disciplinary collaborations?

Creates: I choose my collaborators from either knowing them personally, knowing their expertise (or both), or thinking of something that I myself would like to hear or see happen in The Boreal Poetry Garden or learn about its ecosystem. Then I look for someone who can fulfill that wish. My collaborators have ranged from experts in the sciences (boreal ecology, local geology and wildlife) to other art forms (literature, music, dance).

I'd like to mention that starting the in situ poetry walks was a practical solution to a simple problem, and they have become a major artistic, collaborative, environmental, and social endeavour. This is how it happened: I had been composing short, haiku-like poems, handwriting them on small cards, installing them in the spot that the words refer to, and then photographing them.  But a problem arose when some of my poems became too lengthy to write on small cards. So it occurred to me that the solution was to read the poems out loud to people in situ. In 2005 I started inviting people to the site to go on a poetry walk, and I've held several of these events every summer since.  I believe there's an aesthetic dimension to simple, practical solutions, and over the years I've found this to be very helpful, more economical and, increasingly, ecological.

I've never really thought about any connection between the current collaborators in The Boreal Poetry Garden and the people who drew the memory maps for me in the late 1980s. Thank you for asking about that, because it gives me the chance to see how both undertakings embrace and delight in what other people know, say, and do. In all cases, the collaborations are based on the fact that I don't work from my imagination. That's because what other people contribute is better than anything I could make up. The branch of philosophy with which I identify is Phenomenology, and I try to operate within that mode when approaching both the external world and other people.

Regarding work by other artists, until recently I've felt quite on my own. But thanks to the very digital communication systems that have made our experiences of the world so mediated, there are several online networks that I participate in, such as the Walking Artists Network, the Women Environmental Artists Directory (WEAD), the Ecoart Network, the Performance and Ecology listserv, the Place Location Context and Environment (PLaCE) Research Centre, and the Association for Literature, Environment, and Culture in Canada (ALECC) that are a source of inspiration, critical exchange, and confirmation, as well as hope. I'm starting to feel that there is a very active critical mass of people out there with whom I am in accord, and that certainly includes you, Glenn Bach.

Bach: Describe your collaboration with Elizabeth Zetlin and Jedediah Baker on A Virtual Walk of the Boreal Poetry Garden. The site is technically sophisticated, and a video-poem like River of Rain is substantially more nuanced with its layers of texts, images, and sounds than any separate treatment could have been. I imagine that this outcome was shaped by the specific perspectives that your collaborators brought to the project.

Creates: Elizabeth Zetlin (Ontario) is the artist and poet who introduced me to video-poetry; Jedediah Baker (St. John's) had done a locative internet project linking short videos of personal stories –– his own, as well as other people's –– about New York City to a Google map. (I wanted to use an aerial photograph, not a map, and I was able to get a very high resolution one from the provincial Department of Environment & Conservation.) I conceived of the virtual walk from what I had learned from both of them, and then they helped me achieve it.

River of Rain is the most complex video-poem I've done and I'm pleased you noticed it. By using a combination of images, my voice, and text, I tried to convey the ability of human consciousness to be in two places at once: both perceiving the exterior world that's right in front of us and generating a medley of interior thoughts (which are represented by text over stills, and include my memories of things other people had said). The concluding montage gestures towards the relationship between language and landscape. The human voice –– starting with meaning and ending with murmur –– replaces the sound of the river.

Bach: Earlier you state that one of the reasons for honing in on a slow engagement with one particular place is because of the preponderance of technology as mediator, yet A Virtual Walk of The Boreal Poetry Garden is one such interface. Could you talk about the contrast between the immediate, haptic, and intimately personal experience of walking the boreal forest and the virtual interface of its documentation? Perhaps this is an issue with the work of all land artists: what is the work, the original experience or the presentation of it (Richard Long's walk scores, or Andy Goldsworthy's, and your own, photographs of transitory interventions in the landscape)?

Creates: The proliferation of digital geographical technologies –– including Google Earth, tracking devices, and satellite navigation systems (such as GPS) –– have revolutionised our geo-spatial positioning in both our everyday places and remote spaces. Several years ago I even considered creating GPS-triggered smartphone recordings of my site-specific poems. I also toyed with the idea of installing weatherproof solar-powered audio players in the forest that would play recordings of my poems for visitors. As my goals have become clearer, these ideas now seem very counter-productive. But at the time I felt it was the kind of whizbang thing that could help me receive the support of an arts grant. I still think it would be a lot easier to spark interest for a grant by proposing a project using new technology than saying that what I'm going to do is simply stand at certain spots in the forest and read my poems out loud to people. It's hard to get across the multi-sensorial dimensions of these poetry walks, and the ripple effects from the social interactions that occur.

It turns out that people love going on a walk through the forest and having someone read poems to them. The events in The Boreal Poetry Garden are completely booked up every summer, and some people come back year after year.

You've put your finger on the paradox of A Virtual Walk of The Boreal Poetry Garden. I made it because the number of people who can actually come to the site in Newfoundland is fairly limited. Also because I love video-poetry (it's a perfect genre for someone like me –– a visual artist who loves language). Unfortunately, the Virtual Walk does lack the kinaesthetic, sensorial aspects of a real walk, as well as the power of people being together. And, by the way, I did receive a grant to produce it.

+++++

Full conversation can be found at Atlas Place.

Today, the light

Today, the light highlighted dust cascades in bright shafts across the perturbed air. This microspeckle choreography twinkled as tiny glowworms glinting on a fairy queen's crown.

Today, the light

Today, the light is a fragmented journey cloaked in technicolour.

Today, the light

Today, the light is a subcutaneous air pocket, dislodged and gyrating through murky liquid to an oil-slicked surface.

Today, the light

Today, the light knows exactly whence it comes from, and whither it is going.

Today, the light

Today, the light passes through; tiny pin pricks of connection.

Today, the light

Today, the light is a continuation of the earth and the sky; an amorphous felt blanketing the nothing of a middle ground. An horizon extended vertically.

Today, the light

Today, the light hides behind a veil of nostalgia.

Darren Carlaw: Blinking Eye: A Photographer's Story

Blinking Eye: A Photographer’s Story By Darren Carlaw

My sight is failing. Some would say my eyes are on the blink. Blinking eyes. I thought the doctor at the R.V.I. was having a laugh. 

“What job do you do, Tom?” he asked in that snooty ding dong tone you get down London. 

I sat picking at the stitching of the surgery chair.

“Photographer,” I said. “Isn’t that just my luck?”

An uncomfortable pause. He didn’t look like a lad who liked a joke. 

“How long before I’m blind then, doctor?” 

He pulled that doctor’s face that says the news isn’t good. Gave me some spiel about optic neuropathy. Optic what? 

“Soon then?” I cut him short.

He nodded.

And that was it. I was out on the street. Catching the bus back to Gateshead. 

Gateshead. Not the most beautiful woman you’ve ever known. More like your Aunty Gladys. A bit spikey if you cross her. But she’ll always pour you a cup of tea and make you feel at home. Like it or lump it, Gateshead’s my town. And just like Aunty Gladys, she’ll treat you canny if you know the right way round her. And I’ve gotta admit, I love the old lass. 

That’s why I’m here now. Out on the street recording this. Getting laughed at like a right silly bugger. 

I want to remember her. Right?

I want to remember Gateshead before she slips from view. Before I cannit see her.

So me mate had this idea. And gave us a portable tape recorder. 

“Portable?” I says.

It’s like a bloody brief case. And here’s me humpin’ it around the streets. 

 It’s 1966 man. You think they’d a come up with something a bit smaller. 

Anyhow. Enough about that.

I don’t just take photographs at weddings and that. I always like to be out and about. Pokin’ me camera lens in shopkeeper’s windows. Takin’ snaps of people at work: The lads heading down to the railway yards. The lasses coming out of Shepherd’s department store with their makeup done. Aye. The buzz of the street, that’s my thing. 

When I’m blind, all those photos I took will be just cold paper in darkness.

But if I walk with this recorder and talk about what I see, well...

When I listen back to them tapes, I’ll be my own lamplighter, I’ll light up that dark world. 

Walkin’ memories, sonna. Walkin’ memories. That’s what I’m up to at the minute. 

* 

Is it on? Aye. There’s the red light. This tape’s getting me goat like.I’d take a camera shutter release over a record button any day of the week. But beggars can’t be choosers, can they? 

Right. October 12th 1966. It’s a Wednesday. And this is Gateshead. This is how I see Gateshead. 

It’s Autumn and the last orange leaves are still clinging to the branches. One frees itself and comes circling down and gets trapped in the scrub. 

Up above six crisscrossy telephone wires string between the buildings and cut up the grey sky. 

North east weather, eh? Baltic as always. 

I’m outside the Essoldo cinema. 

When I first started taking’ pictures, I brought my camera here to the corner of the High Street and Sunderland Road. 

Something about this picture house always reminded us of New York. Maybe a photo I’d seen of the Flatiron Building or something. The old place was built in a fan shape and it had glitz. 

Aye, it’s flagged for demolition now. It’ll be gone next year. The council are putting the flyover in right through here. 

An’ the’ call that progress? 

Across the road, Geo. Wilkes’s furniture shop. A squat buildin’ with its half wheel motif above the top floor windows. A remember me mam buying a three piece there and thinking she was dead posh. 

Right, let’s get started – we’ll cut up the back lane of the High Street. 

‘Round the back of the pork butcher’s, I spy a well built lad liftin’ half a pig carcass from a two-tone Ford Thames van. Its cold skin presses into his shoulder: white porcelain ribs separated by fleshy membrane, and a limp, dangling trotter waving goodbye. 

He brushes straight past an old fella with a pepper coloured beard who is sweeping out the doorway. The fella’s tired broom darting between the delivery lad’s feet. 

Dietz the German butcher had hell on during the war. Always did a canny sandwich though. 

In the quiet back lane I like to look at the workings of the High Street. It gets you out the crowd. Old fruit and flower boxes from all over the shop stacked high against the walls. 

I took a great photo of Carol here standin’ by that red brick wall. We were walkin’ back from the Scala Picture House and a had me camera with us. She was wearin’ a black fitted mini dress and this tooled metal belt with turquoise stones. I remember she rolled her sleeves up to the elbow and gave me this defiant pose. Hands on hips. Aye, Carol...quite a stunner. 

The lane comes out here on Chandless Street. My great granddad used to live down there. It used to be a long row of terraces before they knocked it down in the late fifties. Replaced it with them tower block flats, the Chandless Estate. Bloody eyesore if I say so meself. 

Me an me old man used to drink in The Olde Fleece right here on the corner. A pint of double diamond. Bella the barmaid always had it ready on the bar as you walked in. 

I remember one night my old man had crossed words with a top class local boxing champion. ‘Course he didn’t know that at the time. They decided to settle it outside. Queensbury rules and all. Me dad soon saw the error of his ways. Always a bit gobby he was. 

Right. Out onto the High Street. 

Two leggy lasses waft by in a cloud of perfume and hairspray. They’re eyed up by a lad in a ‘Surf City’ t- shirt and ice blue denim who’s hanging around outside the chippy. The one with runny eye liner shoots him a hacky look. 

In the flats above the shops there’s a sash window open. Someone’s listening to the Stones at full belt. Can’t get no satisfaction? Aye, tell us about it, son. 

Along the road there’s Law’s Herbal Supplies. Have a look through the window. It’s still got the same marble bar I used to sit at as a kid. Me and Terry would always come here after we’d been train spotting and get a big browny-red glass of sarsaparilla. By the looks of things the bairns still do the same thing. Happy days, eh?

The Phoenix is right next door. A bloke with red bristling sideburns and a white shirt lurches out the bar and leans against the wall. He stares down at his worn brown brogues and spits out a chesty smoker’s cough. With a shake of the head, he gets a packet of tabs out his pocket. A cellophane wrapper curls to the gutter. “Aye” he says wearily under his breath. “Aye, Aye”. 

I always liked taking snaps of these fellas when they weren’t looking. Mind you, if they caught you you’d better scarper quick or else. You’ve got to watch yourself in this game. 

Turning left at the Met, I walk along Jackson Street. 

There’s a couple of Mods admiring an aqua blue Vespa propped on its stand. One’s wearing a spear pointed button down collared shirt and a grey four button tonic suit and thinks he looks the business. A granny in a headscarf with a bag full of shopping looks at them suspiciously. 

If you want to avoid bumping into someone you know, avoid the Co-op. It’s full of busybodies. Just the other day Mrs. Tweddle said to me mam: “Tell your Tom to get a haircut.” Turns out she’d seen us on the High Street and thought I looked a right state. 

The Co-op’s a cracking looking building though. What’s it say up there? 1881? Look at them sandstone columns. On a sunny day the old masonry gives out a proper warmth. 

I could look up at this place for hours and still find something new. 

I mean, look at that, the Co-op coat of arms in a circle right at the very top. Some fella with a hammer and chisel sat and worked on that for weeks. But does anyone look up and notice? Do they wattle. 

Right. Let’s push on. 

As I turn right onto West Street, there’s St. Joseph’s where I was christened. I never stopped crying me mam said. I never did like water. 

Saying that, I’ve always liked the church’s slick black welsh slate roof when it rains. 

And I remember how the wild roses twisted around the black wrought iron railings of the presbytery. And how the housekeeper’s cat would slip between the overgrown planters every time I peered through the gate as a young ‘un. 

Up West Street, I head towards Shepherd’s. Past the schoolgirls feeding the pigeons and brickies with concrete dusted overalls. 

Lot of building work going on here at the minute. They’re busy putting up some sort of car park and shopping centre. It’s massive. Ugly anarl. 

Here’s Shepherds on the corner of Ellison Street. I remember in 1946 when this place burned down. Took them about three years to build a new one. The swankiest shop in town. They even have their own money.

Look in the shop window. Someone’s filled the whole display with white sand. At the back a hand painted scene of palm trees and seascape. A couple of inflatable beach balls. Mannequins in bikinis all sporting bobs. And a sign that reads: “From here to there, it’s faster by air: Fly BOAC”. I bet the travel agent is making a killing. 

And then there’s my reflection in the glass. The kink of a broken nose. The smudge of a mole. The diagonal of a chipped front tooth. There’ll be a time when I won’t see this face aging. When the skin will be no more a changing texture under my fingertips. It’s blurring. The image. It’s blurring even now. 

Blinkin’ eyes. Right Tom pull yourself together, lad. 

Ok. Note to self and anyone else who cares to listen: Out of sight, out of mind is an old lie. Never think otherwise. Never forget the town in front of you. Remember these images. Even in darkness. Hold on to them. The town is here for you. Part of your Gateshead is here. Right here on this tape. 

Today, the light

Today, the light is of no importance (unless it's the radiance within the heart we speak of).