Moncton Finale

My Fulbright stay in Moncton has formally ended. And the Frye Festival was the perfect way to do it.

From Wednesday to Friday, I entered the anglophone highschools on the Moncton area and essentially read poems to teenagers. You would be surprised how much poetry still can affect people. The kids were engaged and shocked and were thoroughly moved, I think, which was energizing and validating and anything you need as a writer. I couldn't have asked for a better audience in many cases. Also, I received cool highschool schwag, such as a leather portfolio (from Moncton High), a cookbook (from Caledonia High), and a t-shirt and mug (from Harrison Trimble).

Wednesday night I saw the Zachary Richard concert, where I met the artist. We were just two Cajun anglophones talking to one another in French in Acadie.

Linda came Thursday night just in time for the last poem of my reading, "New Orleans [kudzu king]."

On Friday I conducted my first radio interview, with Radio Canada, and totally in French.

The final event of the Frye Festival (for me at least) was the Frye Jam on Saturday Night, which features readings by authors with musical accompaniment from the band, Les Païens. This was the highlight of the festival. I "performed" four poems quite theatrically while the band played amazing and genre bending music from and industrial rendition of "Offshore" to the Saint James Infirmary behind "New Orleans [final]." It was surprising how well I fell in to adapted the rhythm of my speech to the pulse and melody of the songs. For the first time in my life, I felt like a rock-star.

Incidentally, I feel like I want to cut an album of my poems now.

I didn't stay long after my performance because Linda and I had to drive to Rhode Island, which Linda bravely led--I was burned out after the week of visits and packings and endless endless goodbyes.

The New Art and a Barbaric Yawp for Teens (and Adults!)

I would say Spring is really here in Moncton, after being surprised that the thermometer in my car read 15 degrees C (about 62 F or so). Walking is easier and sweatier. People are milling about downtown as if for the first time in their lives. This is my first spring in a winter city.

I have a project for this week before the Northrop Frye Festival: figure out how to make poetry thrilling for high school students. You heard right--this coming Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, I will be giving lectures and workshops at Moncton's premier English high schools. I have anywhere between one and two and a half hours to stand before twenty to thirty 17 year olds and state my case. In the words of the early nineties: gag me with a spoon!

Seriously, this is a good opportunity to reach lots of people, continue (at least on a small scale) the influence of poetry, which as you know is waning about as fast as Louisiana's coastline. So this weekend I am rereading old favorites and my own catalog to find the most compelling poems for young adults (that won't get me thrown out of Atlantic Canada).

As I was talking to my friend Kimberly about this over lunch, she and I were discussing which poems teenagers would be interested in, to which I suggested, "Only ones with the word ipod in the title." She said, "Or cellphones." While this was all sort of a joke, there is an inherent truth to the changing of the guards in art--and not only in thematic.

Weirdly enough, some of the best art that I've seen recently have been advertisement campaigns (especially billboards in the Paris metro). Movies have certainly replaced live theatre (sorry). And even pop music, those bastards who stole not only the fields of music but also of poetry (kidding, I listen to pop music), is not so much on the decline so much as relegated to another consumable that people can use to "identify" themselves to others with similar "tastes."
I read an article recently on a student at Yale who's senior art thesis is video tapes of her inducing miscarriages, which she obtained through artificial insemination and then herbal arbotificants, and then smearing the blood from these episodes in vaseline coated plastic wrap. Needless to say, this is ghastly and shocking to most people (who are human), regardless of what side of the abortion debate they're on. But consider, in 1863 at the salon in Paris, Edouard Manet unveiled the Olympia, which scandalized art viewers and critics by showing for the first time an unadorned and average nude whore, staring directly at the observer. But now, what it takes to shock us needs no subtlety: we are the shock and awe culture, we've seen it before.

Recently I saw the acclaimed film No Country for Old Man, something that everyone considers hyper-violent and not in a Kill Bill/300 kind of way. But for me the most shocking thing was not the gore or the captive bolt pistol or even the ultra-menacing Javier Bardem as Anton Chigurh, it was how human I felt after I watched the film, how much I appreciated life, and how much I felt like we were all "in it together." Out of violence, there grew empathy.

And maybe this is the solution to both finding something to move children who live in seven minute periods between commercials and to the lack of soul in art today. Much writing, art, film, music, etc has nothing to do with a real connection with the Other, and its only communicative intent is to impress and sell. Great art now must shock you out of the consumerist loop, it must return you to a primal state wherein people are capable of caring for one another. And this extends well beyond the petty trappings of culture, demographic, writing movement, and any other dimension. This is why at least I do art. It is another ambition question, but one that holds an ultimatum: are you in with us humans or are you out?

Ambition value

Yesterday I went to a writers' meeting in Grand Barachois with Lee Thompson. There I met many people I had met already with the addition of the great Acadian artist and poet Roméo Savoie. We read our own work, etc. I read my poem titled "Ruin Value" which obviously touches on that same concept of architecture.

This was excellent because Roméo was himself an architect before he became a famous Acadian figure. He said that Acadie created a ghetto for itself. That it will be a hundred years or so before the culture can move beyond the issue of the culture. He is the first Acadian to present this mindset to me, that culture is irrelevant, that the only thing that matters is life--not the homeland, not the language, not the cultural artifacts dressed out to confirm any lingering stereotypes from outsiders.

Meeting him and of course Herménégilde has been a breath of fresh air here. Because they understand more acutely the ambition of the artist. In the end, ambition is the real question. The ambition to communicate and reach the Other.

People don't write for themselves, solely. If anyone tells you this and then shows you his manuscript, he is looking for acceptance, one form of communication. He wants to show you this extension of himself, something he came up with. The qualifications of "personal" writing are a facade. Of course. But the point is that artists are trying to say something.

But this something is less important than you think. It is more in the manner, the style, and the technique of the communication. The concept is well less important than the execution. To quote J. Robert Lennon, "You can write anything you want, just don't write it shittily."

There was incidentally a bit of contention this week over a "movement" of new minimalist writers. I don't want to go too far into it, but most of the writing itself is unreadable and laughably self-conscious in an adolescent, look how cool I am kind of way. But the real problem with this writing was not topic (which though banal cannot be bad in and of itself) but with the lame prose and conceited, ironic tone.

In any case, I am 12 days until I leave Canada for good. In the meantime, I have to figure out what I am going to tell high school kids during my school visits for the Northrup Frye festival and pack and see what I want to see before I go. Linda will be here in 10 days for my readings and to help me pack.

Identity and Hockey

What does it mean to be an American? A Canadian? I just returned from an orientation in Ottawa, the capital of Canada. This, of course, was the main question. I am, afterall, on a "cultural exchange" in this fine country.

For starters, there are the stereotypes: Americans are straightforward, Canadians deferential. Americans start a speech with a story or joke, Canadians with an apology. Americans are fool-hardy and individualistic. Canadians are rational and cosmopolitan and consider community something important.

The stereotypes tell little more than what the country as a whole is perceived as, combined with its own self-perception. It doesn't, for instance, elucidate what one of either country does on long lonely evenings. It doesn't name passions and hopes. It doesn't delve into the sexual politics within relationships or otherwise. In essence, the stereotypes are sort of useless in determining identity.

As far as policy, the countries have defined themselves by their differing political acts. Yet not every American carries a gun and wants to impose her ideology upon all others. Not all Canadians are safely smoking hash with their same-sex partners.

I personally think hockey is a much more elegant and violent sport than American football. But I also believe that ambition is to be valued as a cardinal virtue. I've spent time with other Fulbrighters and with Killam fellows from both countries and can attest to the multiplicity of personalities. But maybe we are in a society we've created, the between-national scholar vagabonds, the thrivers of another's culture. We've come to this point because we have become obsessed with the other. Scientists, fashionistas, academes, actors, and poets. Some of us are more glamorous than others. But you wouldn't guess that the glamorous girl was from North of the border. That the Long Island boy was a shy Canada studies major. That the 40 year old American undergrad was the most cosmopolitan and subdued. That one law professor drew during lectures and another was an Irish aviation enthusiast. That the heroic professor who would spend his retirement philosophizing on organization and business was not only not American born, but British. That the francophone was a triple minor (none of them french) and was A+ at hockey. That the professor running the Fulbright show was a former hockey champ. That the American poet was the one who scored the winning shot.

This is all to say that I really feel bonded to the people I met this weekend (not just the ones alluded to), that we have at least some society among us. This brings me farther away from the question of what it means to be Canadian or American, but brings me closer to what it means to be a human. Which may be the point of cultural exchange afterall.

In other contemporary news, Brady has arrived.

The Journey Has Already Begun

In 1936, Albert Speer defined ruin value in architecture. This concept is that one should strive to make buildings that, if they were to collapse, would decay beautifully. Great stone structures, columns, anything carved deeply, etc. The Romans knew this but did not name it, like the Greeks before them.

In North America, our youth has stifled our ambition. We see history as ephemeral (as indeed it is). We are shortsighted. I am under the impression that Jean-Baptiste Colbert, finance minister to the sun king, planted the trees in field in front of Invalides in Paris so that in 200 years, the French would have a fine supply of lumber for their navy.

Cultures are by their very nature mutable. New situations arise which must be dealt with, for instance technology, modernism, consumerism. But what is culture anymore anyway? I am a Cajun, born in Southern Louisiana. But what does that even mean? I did not learn French, the language of the Cajuns, at home. In fact, I speak a Parisian French that I learned at the Sorbonne. What else is there? Food, music, good cheer, talking flat? Is that what makes a culture?

I am writing this as an introduction to what I am doing. I study culture, specifically Cajun culture and its mother Acadian culture and beyond that French culture, and these cultures in opposition to American, e.g. of the United States, culture. My precise job at the moment is to write poems under the auspices of a Fulbright grant while I live in Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada's premier bilingual city and epicenter of Acadian arts and culture. Maybe if I figure out what culture means, I will describe it here.