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The Boreal Poetry Garden,
Portugal Cove, Newfoundland 2005– (ongoing)
medium: site-specific poems hand-written on card and
installed temporarily for photographing; photographs printed with
Ultrachrome inks on Epson lustre paper.
dimensions: each 30 inches high x 20 inches wide (76 x 51
cm).
The Boreal Poetry Garden is also presented as
live-art events with walks and on-site readings, including longer poems.
Beauty
is nothing but the beginning of a terror we are just able to endure.
Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies, the First Elegy
For Rilke, beauty was the beginning
of a terror; for me, it is a loss—beauty is just the beginning of a
loss that I know is inevitable and that I can hardly bear.
The Boreal
Poetry Garden commemorates certain fleeting moments of my
interaction with the land where I live. The brief texts reflect some of
the site’s particular geophysical and climatic characteristics, its
plant life, wildlife and social history, and my experiences here. For
me, the location of the words in the specific spot to which they refer
is fundamental to the radiating energy of their meaning and, of course,
their beauty. The place I inhabit is both wondrous and constantly
changing, which, I know, entails loss. My cosmology, I suspect, is
basically elegiac.
Visibility,
Meaning and Language
It seems to me that the meaning
of a place cannot be photographed. One of the crucial questions behind
my work is: can there be meaning without language? It’s strange for a
photographer, perhaps, but I am more and more taken by what I cannot
see, by what is not visible—the flexible, elusive, and ever-changing
layers of meaning in places. For example, there is an overgrown meadow
in front of my house. Fishing families from the cove, a couple of miles
away—where the houses stand close to each other on a rocky hillside
over the salt water—grew potatoes in this old meadow at one time. And
the main path through the woods behind my house was formed by people
walking back and forth to the stream, carrying water to the vegetable
gardens. I learned the meaning of this sublime path and meadow, their
history as part of a labour-intensive subsistence, through language.
Detals of Geography and Local
Culture
One of the inspirations for the
poetry garden is the rich Newfoundland vernacular. Its words reflect a
very concrete correlation between this language and this landscape.
Here are some of my favourite idioms that connect with this locale:
bawn: a
meadow or grassy land near a house or settlement
blasty boughs: spruce or fir branches,
dead and dry but with the needles still adhering, used as kindling
brishney: a small bundle of dry sticks or
boughs gathered for fuel
crunnicks: old twisted dead trees, with
bark all gone, weathered and turned white; dry crooked sticks of such
trees
droke: a valley with steep sides, wooded
and with a stream
dwy: a short snow flurry
faffering: of the wind, blowing with cold,
chilly gusts
glitter storm: coating of ice on trees by
freezing rain
goowiddy: sheep laurel; shrubby vegetation
of a barren-like site
hoppy wood: firewood which burns noisily,
emitting sparks
ice-candle: icicle
lolly: soft ice forming in water; loose
ice or snow floating in water
mawzy: of weather, damp, warm, foggy,
muggy, a little rain maybe
pinch: a short, steep, difficult part of a
hill; high point of the path
rattling brook: a stream marked by rapids
or a waterfall
rub: a barely discernible passage through
dense woods not used long or often enough to be a path
sish over: of the surface of a body of
water, to form a thin layer of ice
snapperin’ bough: a dead conifer branch
which has turned red
sprinkles: needles of spruce or fir
starrigan: an old gnarled, twisted
evergreen tree
tolt: a hilly promontory
tuckamore: a small stunted evergreen tree
yaffle: an armful
Sites of
Conjunction and Experience
Within the 5 acres of my
property there is a multitude of microhabitats: dark spruce and fir
woods; an arid, windblown tolt with goowiddy and tuckamore; a rattling
brook called the Blast Hole Pond River, which flows through a steep
droke; an old bawn overgrown with wildflowers; and moss-covered
volcanic rock up to 1,000 million years old. Each has a very different
dynamic, resulting in different details of observation and experience.
These experiences are grounded and marked by a specific location, as
all experiences may be.
Marlene Creates, 2005
Two live-art films on this work are
available.
A publication on this work is available:
The Boreal Poetry Garden
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