photo credit: Jennifer Still

On February 11, 2013, a group of Winnipeg poets met at The University of Manitoba School of Art Gallery for a workshop hosted by The Centre for Creative Writing and Oral Culture, Ekphrastic Encounters, the second in a series that explores poetic engagement with a visual work of art. In ekphrasis the poet’s job is not simply to ornament or replicate the existing art with description, but rather to refract it, speak out from within it in an attempt to bring forth something new.

Bonnie Marin’s What are you scared of? (curated by Mary Reid) is prolific. There are 41 collage assemblages in this show, each screaming with narrative and commentary from the nexus of fear. The titles of her pieces “What are you scared of?”, “How long will you walk your kids to school?”, “What was I thinking?” and “There’s something I have to tell you”, are probing in nature, inquisitive, and mysteriously suggestive. By nature, Marin’s work quite explicitly implicates the viewer: answers to its questions are demanded, uncomfortable laughter is evoked and nervy reconstructions of common, recognizable objects (ie: dollhouses, checkerboards, fishing tackle and bullet shells) unsettle the notion of play and innocence. All perfectly disorienting conditions for writing! Yes, our own fears are triggered, but too our own impulses to avoid what we might not want to engage in.

Our goal was to attempt in our poems, on some level, to answer Marin’s question What are you scared of?. We gathered our “material” –the language, words, stories, and fragments—as Marin had done for her collages, and then reframed them into new contexts and understandings.

There’s a rich amount of subterrain in Marin’s work. The art is built on objects, images and materials that suggest subfloors, caves, the cavernous reaches met by meat thermometers and fishing tackle—attempts to measure the unmeasurable depths of subconscious fear. We wanted to sneak up on that subterrain in our own poems. Trick ourselves into a place that might be too uncomfortable to approach head-on. We cut, folded, in some cases even shredded, our words, drew them out of a hat, aleotoric-style, devising convincing constructions of chance. It was fascinating to see what coherence prevailed in the leveling of our lines, what meaning emerged out of our fragments and what fragments we made out of meaning. The poems included here peer into those crawlspaces of language.

With many thanks to Bonnie Marin, for her fantastical artwork, the brave poets who wandered with pen and paper within them, and University of Manitoba School of Art Gallery Director and Curator, Mary Reid, for hosting us and posting this sample of our work.

March 2013,  Jennifer Still
The Centre for Creative Writing and Oral Culture


photo credit: Jennifer Still