Author: Ross Belot

Ross Belot is a poet, photographer, documentary film maker and opinion writer on climate change action policy. Sometimes he is in Hamilton Ontario

bolted landscape – Wordsworthianism Entropology & Third Landscape (Poem#7)

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Back in May 2016 a group of Saint Mary’s College of California MFA students were led by Brenda Hillman on a micro protest to go read poetry to the local oil refineries in the Bay Area, refineries that run some of the worst crude in the world (and surprise, it’s California heavy crude). I was there and I’m working on a documentary short that discusses Brenda’s thinking about micro protests as well as how I, as a person who worked in the industry, ended up at Saint Mary’s and at that protest and others with my fellow students. The longer piece is in process. This video of my poem is from that action as is Kelly Egan’s dance that opens and closes the video. 

 

In preparation for this action future mon amour Sara Burant and I, as the two key organizers, went on the weekend before to suss out potential places to do such a thing in Benicia and Martinez. One of the places we found was this space overlooking the Carquinez Strait where the I680’s two bridges cross between Martinez and Benecia.  To get to the space you drive on a road that pretty well runs through the Valero refinery.  I wrote a poem when I got back to where I was living in Lafayette and read it on the day of the protest at the site the poem describes. It was very fresh so perhaps a bit chancy to read.

 

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Video Gallery Half Way Lessons Learned

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I decided to take a two week hiatus on the Canada Council Digital Originals video production. I’ve produced one a week now for six weeks and it seemed like a good time to take a pause and re-energize creatively as well as look back at what I’ve learned from the project so far. Here are the top five lessons learned so far. 

 

#5 A week to produce a video is a good constraint

I’ve found that it is pretty intense doing a video a week. I’ve started on Saturday night and not finished until late Friday afternoon when all the steps are taken into account. I’ve had a lot of research to do, questions like: how to make a book levitate or can I find a good font and background for the aesthetics of the Cormorants Diving video. The amount of material on YouTube (often by youngsters) on how to do some of the effects I’ve ended up using is quite mind boggling. When I have an idea and need to research I end going to a rabbit hole and then there are the frustrations of learning these techniques using the software I’m using (Final Cut Pro X) and the the satisfaction of it working. Anyhow, the good thing about the constraint is that it forces me to focus, there’s a point where I have to get producing which means stopping the research and practicing and actually make something. The constraint does that, as well sometimes means I must make what I’m doing simpler from the concept I have started with which is almost always a good thing and one of the best lessons learned.  

 

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Lac-Mégantic – The Art of Revision (Poem #6)

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Picture taken from a Sûreté du Québec helicopter of Lac-Mégantic, the day of the derailment. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 1.0 Generic

My poem Lac-Mégantic is a good example of revision and also trying different angles at the same poetic impulse until you find the poem. I’ll take you through my Lac-Mégantic poem revision story. I went to the Community of Writers Workshop in California in the summer of 2015 where you write a new poem a day and read it the next morning to a dozen or so excellent poets and a faculty member.  In the workshop only what is working is discussed, the idea being you will try new things in your work, take real chances. 

I made three runs that week at the topic of the tragedy at Lac-Mégantic after doing a lot of online research of in-depth articles written about the place, the people and what happened. I had a high level of emotion as well because of my work at Imperial Oil. But I wasn’t sure how to approach it as a poem. I was very aware of the problems around writing about tragedy, topics of high emotion and big issues like our fossil fuel addiction and its impacts. 

The first poetic attempt being a kind of experimental form that I read to Brenda Hillman’s workshop. Brenda seemed appreciative but nobody else in that group seemed to really understand what I was doing. Also it turned out this horrific tragedy was not well known in the US so it failed to resonate without more explanation. A poetic failure.

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Cormorants Diving – Poetics of Scent (poem #5)

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Uji River Cormorant Fishing © Uji City Tourism Association Licensed under CC BY 4.0)

 

This poem comes from a discussion in a class I was in where we had read and then were discussing Robert Hass’ wonderful book “The Essential Haiku: Versions of Bashō, Buson, & Issa ” and we were talking about the poetics of Bashō, who Hass calls “one of the world’s greatest lyric poets”. One of the key concepts Bashō, who was a master poet and teacher in 17th century Japan, developed in his lifetime was the idea of the “poetics of scent”. 

 

Traditionally in the linked poems of the time the mode that was used for linking verses were either “lexical”, words with classical or cultural association, or “content”, where the linked verse expanded or extended the material of the previous verse explicitly. But Bashō proposed that instead the linkage should be less direct, the linkage should be more of overtone or aesthetic. He called this linking by “scent”.  

 

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12 Dancers on 12 Tables (poem #4)

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This week’s poem, 12 Dancers on 12 Tables,  is material collected from watching and listening to  an MFA in Dance group rehearsing out in the middle of the quad of Saint Mary’s College of California. The area was used by many students for eating and talking.  And in the middle of this normal every day occurrence, dancers unexpectedly got up on the large tables and performed in the middle of the rest of us.  A surreal experience where the observers were in the same space as the performers and yet also not formally an audience.  In addition as the performance developed there were crows, who were always about, that seemed to become part of the performance, at least for me. 

 

The material of the poem includes description of the scene, found dialogue, observations about the crows. But the mixture of material is attempting to provide the reader with the experience of being in that place and watching that wild mixture of something unusual happening in a usual place.

 

On the page the form of the poem mirrors this disorientation.  It has unusual line breaks, dropped lines and some material is grouped into stanzas while others into single lines.  Also the dialogue is not indicated except for “here” “we” “go”, which means it is up to the reader on whether terms like “really beautiful” is from the dance choreographer or from the speaker of the poem.  This mirrors the experience, who is just an observer and who is a participant.  Like as if you were at a table with one of the 12 Dancers on 12 Tables. 

 

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Marriage – Magical Realism (Video #3)

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This week’s video and poem go all in on magical realism. I found what I think is a good definition of magical realism in a blog post by the author Neil Gaman:

 

“Within a work of magical realism, the world is still grounded in the real world, but fantastical elements are considered normal in this world.”

 

The narrator in the poem takes as normal that furniture moves and arranges itself and has some kind of motivation for doing so.  So a typical Sunday afternoon early in a  marriage is shaded by these fantastic happenings.  If the poem had just said the “we” in the poem moved the furniture around on Sundays it loses something compared to the furniture moving itself.  The magical realism in this poem functions as representing an external force that is frustrated around Sunday afternoons, that time of the week the busyness of life disappears, and the couple are just observers rather than active with respect to this force. 

 

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Black and White Image…. – Ekphrastic Poem

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Beach Ice BW

 

This blog post will talk about two aspects of this poem both of which relate to choices made in the making of the video as well.  

 

The first is this is an ekphrastic poem. Ekphrasis, Poetry Foundation tells us, is: 

 

“Description” in Greek. An ekphrastic poem is a vivid description of a scene or, more commonly, a work of art. Through the imaginative act of narrating and reflecting on the “action” of a painting or sculpture, the poet may amplify and expand its meaning.

 

This poem is a response to a photograph I took of a winter scene in Port Dover Ontario. Often in ekphrasis we are responding to someone else’s art. It actually can be any art form involved in either the subject or the art chosen to do the response. But there is a long history of ekphrastic poetry, perhaps because poetry is often digging for what’s underneath the words, and images are so inherent to the art form of poetry that it’s a natural medium for this type of response to other’s work.  

 

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On Leaving – 1st Video Gallery Poem

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This is the first video I’ve made for the Canada Council’s Digitals Originals program. My plan is to release about a dozen of these over the next three months.  The goal is to provide an experience of my new collection, Moving to Climate Change Hours published by Wolsak and Wynn, through a video gallery of selected poems. As well I will provide a blog post discussing each poem, its poetics and something around my thinking in the making of the video for the video gallery. 

 

The poem On Leaving was written after hearing a discussion on the use of steep enjambment in poetry. Poetry Foundation gives us this definition of enjambment: “The running-over of a sentence or phrase from one poetic line to the next, without terminal punctuation”. Or another way to think of it is the line ends in the middle of a phrase with the continuation being enjambment on to the next line. 

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I Got Picked (please excuse the visual pun)

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berries

Canada Council for the Arts

I heard yesterday about my grant application for Canada Council for the Arts’ Digital Originals program.  I applied for this a while ago, the program is “to help artists, groups and arts organizations pivot their work for online audiences during the COVID-19“. It’s $5000, what they a call a micro innovation grant and they are giving out something like 200 of them, so a million dollars over all. 

I saw a Facebook post a few months ago by another poet talking about missing a Canada Council grant deadline for something else.  And I thought, “hey, I should think about that”.  So I looked up what you have to do, the first step is being approved to be able to apply in terms of published work etc.  You submit the required material and then wait.  I was approved for literary writing so then started looking and saw that at the moment the only thing I could apply for was the Digital Originals program. 

 

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Touring The Twentieth Century With Campbell McGrath

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This is a book review written a few years ago.  I was lucky enough to see Campbell read from this book at Moe’s in Berkeley. Only a handful of people were there for the reading, it was before the book was a finalist for the Pulitzer but still that’s the Bay Area, so many great poets coming through all the time means there are opportunities to see great poets in intimate settings.

  

Campbell McGrath has produced an ambitious project with his book XX: Poems For The Twentieth Century, a book that provides a literary experience well worth the effort of reading its full 222 pages.  McGrath’s collection is a sequence of poems for every year from 1900 to 2000 plus a epilogue for 2016, 102 poems in all. The poems themselves delve into the artistic, literary, musical, philosophical and technological aspects of the century. This is a book where we are asked to perceive the twentieth century as a river that McGrath has taken a dipper of material out for each year.  There is a chance feel to the flow of the historical subjects he is choosing, yet the overall experience is one of control and care. 

 

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