Thanks to my friend Brian Creswick (whose website will be up this week), I’ve discovered the hilarious and surreal poetry and song of Ivor Cutler: Fame first came in the late Fifties. He was lying on his bed with a primitive tape recorder for company and, as he puts it, a story came out of his brain. Surprised at the ease at which he could bypass his intellect he tried again, and a second story emerged and was also recorded. Then a third. Writing poetry then began to manifest itself. “My way of writing poetry was to go to a …
The entire cosmos copulation. And each thing is word, word of love. Only love reveals but it veils what it reveals, alone it reveals, alone lover and beloved in the illuminated solitude, the nights of the lovers, word that never passes while the water flows beneath the bridge and the slow moon above the houses passes. — Ernesto Cardenal Cosmic Canticle, Cantiga 2: “The Word” “What’s you understanding, general, of that first force?” The journalist Belausteguigoitia asked. Sandino replied: “As a conscious force. Initially it was love. That love creates, evolves. But everything is eternal. And we are moving towards …
The Ecotone wiki, a collaborative project by bloggers who write about place, gets it’s official launch this week with a collection of essays about how we all came to write about place. My contribution, from my Bowen Island Journal, is about how I began to see the world through the eyes of an exile while I was living in England as a kid. Others at the Ecotone wiki seem to also be drawing on both their childhood experiences and experiences of moving, and being dislocated as some point in their lives. I think it is this dislocation that gives us …