The other poems I wrote for the Gala

This week, I am posting some of the other poems I wrote in preparation for my reading at the Mayor's Celebration of the Performing Arts at Aultsville theatre on March 28, 2009.

I scheduled "Circling the Moon", the Gala poem, to post during the Gala, after I performed it. I brought out my recorder with me, placed it on the podium, and recorded the reading, which I posted that night, with the poem.

Yesterday, I posted "Incident in a framing store", along with a podcast of my reading of it. The incident actually happened a few years ago while I was in a framing store admiring a painting by Brenda Beaudette, who has a wonderful ability to see what is around her with her own unique vision. In this case, it was a wonderfully simple painting of a holstein cow. While I was standing there, a young woman came in breathless to buy one of those signed-by-the-artist, so-called "prints" that is actually a commercial mass produced magazine-style fabrication which the artist has glanced at for a few seconds while scribbling his or her signature on the lower corner. Certainly, the artist has produced the original, which is worth something; but I protest strongly that a factory produced replica of a photograph of it is not worth very much, if anything except as an autograph. I can feel my blood pressure rising as I write this; I'd better get off my soap box.

Today, I put together a revised draft and podcast of "Dreaming with fishes", which will appear tomorrow at 8:30 am EDST. Tamia Doll died of cancer a few years ago. I discovered her in the early nineties when I was Chair of the now-defunct Seaway Arts Council. I was fairly heavily involved in the local art gallery at the time, and discovered that there was an artist who actually painted the river. It was one of my peeves, and still is that we live beside the St. Lawrence River, one of the mightiest water systems in the world and ignore it. Especially that our artists ignore it. My theory is that it is too huge a subject; writing about it or composing or painting about it is like writing about sunsets or God: it's too much and in our minds too obvious, too much a life cliche.

Tamia was one of very few artists to paint the river. She loved fishing, and eventually bought a house right down on the river. I saw some of her paintings at the local gallery, but they were all sold. So I went to visit her. She was painting when I got there. She had a painting that I bought; it now hangs in our living room. I never tire of looking at it (see below). It is a simple view of part of a fishing boat with another in the distance. Tamia died of lung cancer a few years later. I eventually asked teh Gallery director if she had any of Tamia's paintings, and she told me the story of the flooded basement. I remember a few of the paintings I saw at Tamia's house that day, and wonder if any of them made their way into the world.