May 1, 2007
Kathy:
I was wondering if we could have an e-mail conversation
about the Reunion project... perhaps use a correspondence
format instead of the suggested supplementary essays? Let
me know what you think.
Elizabeth
_______________________________
May 17, 2007
Elizabeth:
A conversational reply format is a wonderful idea, and
wholly appropriate given the way that the poems came about.
I’ll start…
A couple of things stick in my mind about the process
of writing the Reunion catalogue. The first concerns the
way collaboration was integral to the production of the
poems.
On one hand I found it very stimulating and rewarding
—I wrote a poem, lived with it and revised it for a few
days, then sent it to you, whom I have not yet met in the
real world. Despite that, you were the perfect audience;
it was gratifying to get such patient and careful readings
quickly. (A writer can wait months for feedback on a poem.)
On the other hand, the collaboration added a layer of
structure that I hadn’t expected; I had your vision to
accommodate as well as my own creative drive. The poems
needed to respect your personal world, about which I knew
nothing when I initially visited the gallery.
You and I each supplied one of the needles upon which
the Reunion poems were knit.
Kathy
_______________________________
May 17, 2007
Hello Kathy,
My response to your poems is complicated... I am simultaneously
inside and outside them. Reading them before they were
published, and knowing that how I responded would affect
your writing process was daunting. I wanted to let you
know what I considered “inaccurate” from my perspective,
but I was anxious not to interfere with what you understood
and believed as a viewer.
Although I’ve had numerous other people write about my
work, your project became a parallel creative process,
rather than one that simply responded to my work. Maybe
parallel isn’t the right word, since this implies something
that happened simultaneously. I suppose this is what’s
unusual about our collaboration, the fact that your part
followed mine. Collaborations usually take place in the
same time and place. Ours didn’t.
I also think that your poems (your ideas) have their own
relationship to the drawings that is not dependent on me.
You didn’t have to come through my ideas to get to yours.
Does this make sense to you?
Elizabeth
_______________________________
May 20, 2007
Elizabeth:
The Reunion Poems are ecphrastic—art inspired by other
art. But they differ from most ecphrastic work, because
the Reunion Poems are more than just an onlooker’s response—
they were also influenced by our correspondence. Just as
I am aware that our e-mails are intended not just for each
other; there’s an audience listening over our shoulders.
I too was daunted by the duality of the process by which
the poems were produced. Who knew, back in 1956 when Roland
Barthes declared that the author’s intention is immaterial,
and that the response to the text alone is all that matters
he was actually simplifying the critical process?!
By responding first to the exhibit and then to your responses
to my responses, we ended up with poems with layers of
interpretative possibility. To me, those layers directly
parallel the experience of looking at the exhibit, and
thinking about the infinite possibilities in the face pictured
there.
No wonder we were daunted!
Kathy
_______________________________
June 1, 2007
Kathy:
Lately I’ve found myself, once more, surrendering to the
persistence of grief. My eldest brother died at the beginning
of December. I was glad to have spent time with him just
before he died, and his passing was what has been called
“a good death.”
BUT. Although I was able to take time over the Christmas
holidays to focus on my grieving, come January I was back
in the surge of my busy life (as a teacher, as a mother...)
After my classes ended in April I thought I’d be able
to get back to work in my studio, BUT. I came down with
a flu that just wouldn’t quit. As I recovered, I was faced
once more with the weight of my grief for my brother as
well as all the other losses of my life. As you may know
each new loss connects you to all the other losses, previously
experienced, in a more palpable way.
Grief is now a condition that is part of who and what
I am... like high blood pressure or diabetes. Grieving
is part of living, the two can’t be separated.
So as I read through your poems and meditate on our collaboration
my thoughts and feelings turn to my brother’s death (who
looked a lot like my mother... in fact as he lay dying
I kept seeing my mother’s face in his). After my mother’s
death my siblings and I became orphans... and because of
this we lost the furthest reach of ourselves.
Our parents allow us access to the past (our own and theirs)
that we lose at their deaths. So my brother also served
this role for me (among others). He was one of the few
people in my life who remembered me as a baby, who knew
the names of all the pets we ever had and remembered the
words to the songs my father used to sing when we drove
to New Brunswick every summer of our childhood.
I’m especially struck by the beginning of your last poem
“The Absence of Absence.” I wonder if you are familiar
with this quote from Simone Weil: “To lose someone: We
suffer because the departed, the absent, has become something
imaginary and unreal. But our desire for him is not imaginary.
We have to go down into ourselves to the abode of the desire
which is not imaginary. The presence of the dead person
is imaginary, but his absence is very real; henceforward
it is his way of appearing.”
My brother’s absence appears wherever I look. I’m (still)
learning to surrender to what you called the “perfect attention”
of grieving.
Elizabeth
_______________________________
July 4, 2007
Elizabeth:
You make me see.
Right now, you make me see that I’m avoiding pain by trying
to turn this essay a simple dialogue about process. And
you aren’t having it, quite rightly.
When you say “Grief is now a condition that is part of
who and what I am...” you articulate something for yourself,
and for me, and for most of our generation; the prospect
of loss has moved from an abstract to a palpable, daily
state.
As a teacher and a former poetry editor, I’ve seen more
than my share of poems about the death of a close family
member. In all of them, the writer struggles with the problem
of making art about something both wrenching and quotidian,
a rupture you and I both grapple with daily—not just emotion,
but its expression, and not just for ourselves, but for
the people who choose to enter a gallery, open a book,
surf a website.
A few years before I wrote the Reunion poems, my first
book came out, anchored by a long poem about my mother
and her death. The two decades it took to write that poem
weren’t years of contemplation followed by an enlightened
epiphany. No—it was twenty years of writing and rewriting,
and giving up and starting over elsewhere, and picking
and exploring metaphors then discarding them, and on, and
on. Until I finally got it right.
The Reunion drawings are another way of getting it right.
Your experience, your self, your mother's self —all incised
in each soft line of your drawings—made me thrum like the
set of untouched strings beneath the top, strummed set
on a sitar, calling from my experience, my self, my losses,
the poems in the chapbook.
So, from my perspective, you are absolutely correct in
calling the poems a collaboration, even though they came
subsequent to the drawings.
Kathy
_______________________________
July 9, 2007
Kathy:
Perhaps our losses make it possible for us to understand
other people’s losses, and other people’s losses return
us to our own.
Throughout the Reunion project I considered ways to integrate
language, as I had in previous projects. I know that language
can overwhelm images, so, in the end, decided to let the
drawings speak for themselves.
Earlier in our correspondence I said that I found
myself simultaneously inside and outside your poems. Your
poems represent a perspective that is both inside and outside
my story. This refracted view enables what you called
“the infinite possibilities” of meanings to emerge. Meanings that
aren’t dependent on either of our stories.
Elizabeth
_______________________________
July18, 2007
Elizabeth:
What inspires the urge to create? Two things:
Loss: the need to Make is a profound response to an unmaking
in the world; we rail against the dark by creating light
to fill whatever little corner we can.
And others’ creativity, which requires joyous recognition,
even in the midst of loss—“yes, I understand; here’s where
we feel the same. And here’s where our experiences diverge….”
Together, these elements produced the compelling impetus
for the Reunion poems.
Kathy
_______________________________
About the Artist
Elizabeth MacKenzie has lived and worked in a number
of Canadian cities including Toronto, Saskatoon, Edmonton,
and currently, Vancouver. She studied at the Ontario College
of Art and Design in Toronto and received her MFA from
the University of Saskatchewan (Saskatoon). Her work in
drawing, installation, and video has been represented in
numerous exhibitions and festivals across Canada, United
States, and Europe. Her work has been characterized by
an interest in representations of maternal ambivalence,
notions of the parasite, interrogations of portraiture
and the representation of ambiguous identities. A commitment
to collaboration sustains her as she juggles the demands
of a life shared with two active daughters, a traveling
partner and a sporadic teaching practice.
About the Poet
Kathy Mac’s book Nail Builders
Plan for Strength and Growth (Roseway
2002) was shortlisted for a Governor General’s Award, and
won the Gerald Lampert Award for the best first book of
poems published in Canada that year. To support her poetry
habit, Mac teaches in the English and Women Studies/Gender
Studies departments at Saint Thomas University in Fredericton.
Her next book, The Hundefraulein Papers, will be published
in March 2009. |
