tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30182380768585564592024-03-20T00:32:48.539-07:00Jay Ruzesky - Writing NotesJay Ruzesky - Writerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04098750284045352513noreply@blogger.comBlogger66125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3018238076858556459.post-61548565452956241412021-11-13T15:40:00.000-08:002021-11-13T15:40:17.600-08:00<p><span style="font-size: large;"> <span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Peek-a-boo: An Interview with Phyllis Webb. </span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"> Originally published in </span><span style="font-family: Palatino; text-indent: 49.2px;"> </span><i style="font-family: Palatino; text-indent: 49.2px;">Where the Words Come From</i><span style="font-family: Palatino; text-indent: 49.2px;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Palatino; font-size: large; text-indent: 49.2px;">(Nightwood Editions, 2002).</span></p><div><span style="font-family: Palatino; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 49.2px;"><br /></span></div>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">by Jay Ruzesky</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>PW:</b> I don’t want to say anything. I have no message for the world!<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>JR:</b> I loved your essay on “Poetry and Psychobiography” [<i>Nothing But Brush Strokes</i> 87]. The idea of it fascinates me. You talk about the invasion of Anne Sexton’s privacy in biographical approaches to her work and yet the only way you can do that is by providing some of the details of her life--brief sketches I admit--but details that are what that voyeuristic way of looking at a life involves. Was that a difficult piece to write? </p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>PW:</b> Yes it was. I’ve spent many hours with psychiatrists in my life. I remember hearing something on the radio about disclosure and I almost passed out. It’s that sense of the loss of control over your private space and your private mind that upset me about the Anne Sexton incident when the psychiatrist released the tapes. It seems amazing to me that a doctor would do that, and it’s all very fascinating and we’re all interested. It’s that ambivalence of being either the subject or the object. This causes me a lot of confusion. I recently turned down an invitation to a conference at which they’ll be discussing some of my work and I realize that is the problem again. Will I be a subject or an object? That dichotomy is existentially very frightening. </p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>JR:</b> Can you explain what you mean by that dichotomy? Why is it frightening?</p>
<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>PW:</b> It’s a woman’s problem of being an object - a sex object and that frightening loss of personhood. </p>
<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 36px;">Being the thing discussed... the person and the work get confused–the impression that “my work is me”. If my work is being discussed perhaps I feel that I am being objectified and analyzed and dissected. I don’t want to be identified or confused with the work and I don’t want to be there while I’m being discussed. The body of work is not me. There is a kind of sexual anxiety there of being on display. </p>
<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 36px;">I’m such a private person and I’ve gone to extremes to remain private, apart from my public performances.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>JR:</b> Which isn’t necessarily you.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>PW:</b> No, that’s the mask. I’m curious about the subject of that essay which is psychobiography and the use of titillating private life details and the whole mystery of why that is almost more interesting to people than the work.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>JR:</b> Do you have a sense of why?</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5enUEjv38Y3yz6PSjp2C3UG6vq6mjx3HBzhgTsOo77jKnqiUMYJuIWW_IieSR6JpTM4oa9q2hVP6Z9UG3CDcyPFaTDWCfirTzezQNHwj3tjBA_ELSOamyIvoocVsB69i-WYz8Dk6I81q7/s2048/IMG_3612.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="2048" height="689" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5enUEjv38Y3yz6PSjp2C3UG6vq6mjx3HBzhgTsOo77jKnqiUMYJuIWW_IieSR6JpTM4oa9q2hVP6Z9UG3CDcyPFaTDWCfirTzezQNHwj3tjBA_ELSOamyIvoocVsB69i-WYz8Dk6I81q7/w689-h689/IMG_3612.JPG" width="689" /></a></div><p></p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>PW:</b> I offer a theory in the essay which is that it’s a return to the source of creativity, of biological creation, of how we are made. It goes back to who screwed whom. It’s the secret of life that we’re all consumed with finding out about.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>JR:</b> Biography informs literature. Most people are interested in biography after they do some reading. You read about a writer because you know something about their work and that information informs your past and future reading of that work.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>PW:</b> In a way it probably shouldn’t. It’s unfortunate that we have lives. The work doesn’t need that dimension. <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>JR:</b> There is the idea of the purity of the poem; it ought to be able to speak for itself and often does. And yet we’re interested in biography. Sylvia Plath is a good example. Many of her poems are marvelous and I read them before I knew much of anything about her, but I think “Lady Lazarus” is somehow more potent when you know something about her life. Maybe it’s a sense of the poem seeming more authentic. Is that what draws us to biography? The desire for authenticity?</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>PW:</b> You mean that this is the true story?</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>JR:</b> It’s not so much a factual truth. Readers want to know that they’re being told something real. </p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>PW:</b> We don’t want to be conned. But the work of the imagination can float free of that biographical data. It never really floats free of the self. I’m curious about that hunger for “this is based on a true story” as they say on television. It’s supposed to make writing more real but if it’s fiction or fantasy it’s not real. A made thing is not real life. Poems are creations. I don’t know what would be the true story except maybe a police report.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>JR:</b> Like reality TV. That must be what’s so compelling about it. Real drunks being arrested by real cops. Somehow that’s fascinating in a way that it wouldn’t be if I made it up.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>PW:</b> Do you think that’s because our experience is not satisfying for ourselves? That we have to have someone else’s experience because there’s a lack of depth in our experience? To fill “lives of quiet desperation.” People are living quiet lives of emptiness and this provides a thrill.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>JR:</b> Real TV would do that but I don’t know if that makes the world more thrilling. </p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>PW:</b> You can also watch them bungie jumping or being towed by a boat or other activities that adventure stories once fulfilled, and detective fiction would have also filled that need.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>JR:</b> My theory is connected with those lives of quiet desperation. Maybe many people don’t feel their lives are very real. I read a book a few years ago called <i>Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder</i> [by Lawrence Weschler] which was about strange things in the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles. Some of the exhibits are true and some are not and what that does is it inspires a kind of wonder. There are things... ants with huge horns, that seem like they shouldn’t be true but they are, and other things that are believable but aren’t true and I think that we have a kind of engagement with the world that is like that. It’s about wanting to be impressed by the world. We want to be open to being in awe of the things that are around us. </p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>PW:</b> Ants with huge horns sound marvellous and suggest to me that we’re in the realm of magic realism. The magic and the real playing tag, a very serious game. Awe and wonder bring us close to the mystical, the hope of climbing out of the boxes we live in from day to day. </p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>JR:</b> I’m very interested in what happens when the magic and the real come together. </p>
<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 36px;">There’s a beautiful line somewhere between truth and lies that writers play with all the time. When I’m teaching I often talk about the idea of the well-made mask. Fiction (whether it’s poetry or prose) reflects some of the features of the real face beneath the mask and the mask reflects the face but it’s also shaped and crafted to take on a kind of expression of its own. The reason it has an effect though is that there’s an essence of the face that comes through. Normally you would see the eyes for example.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>PW:</b> True, even if it’s a wolf mask.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>JR:</b> Because perhaps there’s an essence of the wolf in the face beneath. The mask draws us in but it’s what’s behind the mask that has the impact. The authentic stuff coming through.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>PW:</b> So are we trying to tear the mask off? Perhaps. In which case there is not enough appreciation for the mask maker and maybe for the beauty or the ugliness of the mask.</p>
<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 36px;">On a confessional note, I do find it hard to read novels by friends. I know something about their lives and there is a terrible temptation all the time I’m reading to say,`Is this true?’ I feel it’s a sickness almost and I wonder why I am doing this. Is this an aspect of fiction that it sends off a message to say, come on and read me? Figure me out if you can?<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>JR:</b> In another essay in <i>Nothing But Brush Strokes</i> [“The Muse Figure” 3] you say that “we do not have muses”. Can you explain? Is the naked truth something that anyone can strive for in the age of information?</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>PW:</b> I guess I said we, but <i>I</i> don’t. It’s a matter of personality now. It was formerly a tradition, a kind of manner of behaving as a poet. It’s also a way of projecting another part of the self so that it’s over your shoulder or advising or communing with you. It’s more a male construct because usually the muse was female so I always felt I had to have a male muse if I had a muse. A lot of my mentors have been men but I wouldn’t have called them muses and I wouldn’t think of the beautiful male being a muse in the way that the female has been for male writers and artists. </p>
<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 36px;">The white goddess was represented, according to Robert Graves, as a naked woman. I don’t think she’s always naked. I have trouble with the whole thing. Do you have a muse? </p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>JR:</b> No, I don’t think so, but I like the idea as a representation of the naked truth. Back to authenticity again. </p>
<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 36px;">In your poem “Two Pears: A Still Life” [<i>The Sea Is Also a Garden </i>8], in the last line pears become “secret, original, a dream of candor.” It’s the word “candor” I react to. It’s an act of faith and trust to tell the truth and to expose yourself even through the mask of poetry; to express something that is deeply one’s own.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>PW:</b> Sir. Philip Sidney said “look in thy heart, and write” and that has a kind of directness without too much embellishment and it seems to me a way of evading a lot of what I do which is to be intellectual and witty. I’m not sure how often I look in my heart and write. I did occasionally. I don’t think that’s the place to write from all the time and I don’t know that the naked truth is what it’s about all the time either. </p>
<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 36px;">I don’t think I have a heart any more so maybe that’s why I’ve stopped writing; it wore out.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>JR:</b> Do you mean that? </p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>PW:</b> I don’t know. I’m sort of heartless I think.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>JR:</b> Some of your poems that strike me most are your love poems. “Propositions” [<i>The Sea Is Also a Garden</i>” 2] is a beautiful poem.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>PW:</b> I must agree. That’s one of the miracles that happened. It was written very quickly in Paris. It’s mathematically balanced. Someone worked it out mathematically. </p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>JR:</b> I don’t know that I felt drawn to add things up.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>PW:</b> It’s very one, two, one, two.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>JR:</b> And very moving about what love is and wholeness. The last line about the half-moon.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>PW:</b> I still think of that when I look out the window and see the half moon. I think of my own line.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>JR:</b> “a half-moon, its hidden wholeness there.” </p>
<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 36px;"><i>Naked Poems</i> as well are wonderful love poems.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>PW:</b> Not all of them are love poems. The “Suite of Lies” is not love poems.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>JR:</b> There are several layers there. It’s also about the love of language.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>PW:</b> It’s about poetry too. Yes.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>JR:</b> Those poems have had a big influence on other writers. </p>
<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 36px;">Do you think romantic love will always be a driving force in literature? Is it an endless subject or are all poems love poems of a kind?</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>PW:</b> The kind of love poems that are written now are not like the old lyrics. The way people write about love now seems to be much more bristly. It’s honest. It’s more about the difficulties of relationships than about falling in love. The romantic love poem tends toward the lyrical.</p>
<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 36px;">If you think of Anne Carson, for instance, always writing about love; but how acidic she is and how funny. This is a complicated approach to love. I think there’s no such thing as a straightforward simple.... I’m thinking about Leonard Cohen’s early poem about Annie but he’s a singer; he’s still in the lyric, the singing lyric.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>JR:</b> It’s probably harder to write that kind of love poem. </p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>PW:</b> I keep getting images of thorns and scratches. Maybe it all changed with Margaret Atwood’s <i>Power Politics</i>--“you fit into me / like a hook into an eye”. In Canadian literature that was probably the turning point in the love poem with the entry of this female voice: the sharpness, the vitriolic tone. There’s a real intelligence at work which cuts into the lyric outburst. <i>Power Politics</i> was a landmark in Canadian literature in the sixties. </p>
<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 36px;">There’s more about married love now, it seems to me. If you think of Sharon Olds; there’s more daddy love too. The poet is more willing to grapple with actual relationship and is less outside admiring the object. It’s much more relational and that’s why it’s more complicated and bitter and edgy.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>JR:</b> It’s a sign of the culture where relationships have changed so much in the last century. There’s a lot of questioning of societally conditioned love.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>PW:</b> But the basic formula hasn’t changed despite all the questioning for centuries. We’re still doing the same old thing, getting married, getting divorced. That’s what appals me about gay marriages, the desire to fall into a worn-out mode. But it won’t wear out, it still has a lot of life. </p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>JR:</b> You were politically active early on, running for the CCF, and you were later involved with Amnesty International.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>PW:</b> I started a group on the Island [Salt Spring] but I burned out after two or three years. That was in the 80s. We had a very good group going here but then I moved to Victoria. </p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>JR:</b> It seems that your poems became more political the more you wrote; more overtly political in poems like “Prison Report” and “Treblinka Gas Chamber” and much of <i>Hanging Fire</i>. Was that a conscious decision?</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>PW:</b> No. I’m always preoccupied with these things. Some of it did come out of the Amnesty work. I met Jacobo Timmerman in Toronto at an Amnesty meeting and I was struck by his gentleness and his good humour after what he’d been through. I read part of his book that was reprinted in <i>The New Yorker</i> and then I wrote the poem. There was a direct Amnesty connection for “Prison Report,” but I wrote “Treblinka Gas Chamber” in the 70s. When I look back at earlier titles from the fifties and sixties they do seem more personal.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></p>
<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 36px;">I probably wanted to become more overt. I wanted to expand. It was a movement away from the personal, private kind of poem. And also I was maturing. </p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>JR:</b> I wonder if it has anything to do simply with the world you found yourself in. You were brought up through the war. But my sense is that politics are even more desperate now.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>PW:</b> I’ve always felt desperate about social conditions. </p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>JR: </b>Why write poetry then? Did you have to wrestle with the idea that you were writing poems rather than being a social activist?</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>PW:</b> I felt, and still do feel, that I ought to be doing something. But I wasn’t made for that kind of public life. I was too private and too easily damaged and the use of the language is so offensive in its rhetoric and cliches... how do you live from day to day speaking that way? All that fed into my nausea at the thought of entering public life. But I still feel guilty. I feel I should be doing more. But that’s puritanical and protestant. Social good has always been something I’ve cared about. </p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>JR:</b> Do the poems serve a social function?</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>PW:</b> Yes. Poetry “makes nothing happen” as we know, but there’s a slight consciousness raising. </p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>JR:</b> And you were directly involved in politics. You can’t always be the one chained to the tree. </p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>PW:</b> My time with Ideas at CBC, my work generally at CBC, was very important and that was certainly political. We were a radical bunch and a lot of our programs dealt with very very important social issues. That’s probably when I was most effective in a public way.</p>
<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 36px;">Teaching too. That’s also socially useful. </p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>JR:</b> When did you stop writing? <i>Hanging Fire</i> was the last book of poetry.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>PW:</b> That was 1990. It came out in ‘91 but it’s dated ‘90. There’ll probably never be another book.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>JR:</b> You say probably.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>PW:</b> Well, you never know! I think it’s very unlikely. </p>
<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 36px;">I psychologically date it from my mother’s death, which was in ’92 I think. And in ’93 I started painting. <i>Hanging Fire</i> has a lot of anger in it. I wonder if it scared me that I had revealed my anger so openly. John Hulcoop did a review in which he emphasized the anger in the book. There’s a lot of feminist anger, social anger and other kinds.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>JR:</b> It’s more subversive.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>PW:</b> But there wasn’t much attention paid to it when it came out. </p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>JR:</b> I sent you a question about what Joseph Beuys said, rather famously, that the “Silence of Marcel Duchamp is Overrated.” I think he was referring to the anti-art sentiment implied in Duchamp’s reported decision to turn away from art and just to play chess, and also to the ego involved in that decision. As though Duchamp wanted to see whether the world could do without his art. But I don’t think, when you’re not writing, that it has anything to do with ego. </p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>PW:</b> That sort of hit me. Silence and seeing if the world can go on without your art. It’s like, “Well, fuck you if you’re not going to read my book and give me a prize or something.” [Laughs] <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>I realize I don’t want to be forgotten, and not just my work. </p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>JR:</b> That’s understandable but Duchamp was quite ego-driven I think. </p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>PW:</b> What artist isn’t? The Dada movement certainly tried to get an effect and be noticed.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>JR:</b> There’s a story about Satie and his piece called “Entr’acte” It was performed at an intermission for some other event and everyone stopped to listen, so he had to run around and tell everyone to `Quit listening, quit listening’. It was not at all about what happened inside the concert hall where everyone was supposed to listen politely. </p>
<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 36px;">I don’t know if Duchamp really intended just to stop and play chess. </p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>PW:</b> I realize what also fed my withdrawal. It was not so much about stopping writing as withdrawing from being a “poet”. I made a trip to author festivals in Australia and New Zealand and I wondered `Why am I doing this to myself?’ It was so difficult. I always had quite a bit of ham in me, I did like performing, but I thought `I’m too old for this, running around, getting up on stages and showing off’. When I came home I decided `No more public appearances’ and I’ve pretty much stuck to that except for memorial occasions or ecological ones. And that led to the examination of the problem of the ego and identity and the poetic identity. I wanted to see if I existed apart from my identity as a poet. That was an important part of who I thought I was. So, gone, gone, gone.</p>
<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 36px;">All those things combined, the non-reception of <i>Hanging Fire</i>, the death of my mother–which in some ways was a great relief because she was a hundred and one and our relationship was painful and there’s been a hangover from that–those things and this decision to cease being a performer more or less, hiding away here. That’s when the painting erupted. </p>
<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 36px;">Then I had to go through the ego problem again with the painting because you want to show your work. You want to show that you’ve done something. Here I am again. Sign it. Peek-a-boo.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>JR:</b> Well, it’s a process that involves reception at some point.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>PW:</b> Yes. At the moment I’m wondering if I’ll exhibit in the summer show this year with the Alliance of Salt Spring Artists. I think my painting is getting worse.</p>
<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 36px;">I got very excited about painting because I had to teach myself everything. There was a great excitement about learning. I seemed to be so hungry for knowledge about painting. I’d always been passionate about painting. I’d known a lot of painters and so on.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>JR:</b> Some of the prose pieces in <i>Nothing But Brush Strokes</i> were written since you started painting. But it’s interesting that one of the first problems you were dealing with when you started painting was the problem of the ego.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>PW:</b> Yes, and I’m still struggling with it although I feel much freer now. I do feel I worked through something. I’ve just been reading a short essay in Brick by Jim Harrison on Zen practice which throws some light on my perhaps misguided struggle to escape myself. He says, “In our practice the self is not pushed away, it drifts away.” Which shows I’m not much of a Buddhist. </p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>JR:</b> Maybe you had a sense that some of the work would become public and it would be easy to anticipate that someone would say `Here’s Phyllis the poet and she’s trying to paint’.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>PW:</b> There’s nothing false about that statement. She’s trying to paint. I’m aware that there’s a lot of bad painting in the world and I’m just adding to it.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>JR:</b> I don’t know about that. Can I ask you about collage? It seems to be a disorderly medium. It naturally, I think, moves toward abstraction. You begin with what may be a recognizable image or a bunch of them and by putting them together in unique ways and altering perspectives you make the familiar unrecognizable or at least you force people to see those images in a way they wouldn’t have otherwise. It sounds a little like what a good poem ought to do.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>PW:</b> I’m getting myself to see. Not necessarily with any sense of an audience. </p>
<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 36px;">I’m not sure that collage necessarily tends toward abstraction. It disrupts habits of perception, as you say. There’s an element of the puzzle about it–and in fact I’ve been working recently on some paintings with pieces of crossword puzzles, acrylic combined with collage on canvas.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>JR:</b> There’s a kind of breaking down involved in collage–cutting up photos you’ve taken. And then a reconstruction. Do you find the process ameliorative, maybe transformative?</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>PW:</b> Yes. There’s a thrill in that double-take, knowing what the original images were and seeing them deconstructed, or reconstructed, into something new. I think I’m only beginning to understand Pound’s dictum: Make it new.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>JR:</b> The idea of deconstructing and reconstructing sums up the pleasure there is in making any kind of art.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>PW:</b> I had a conversation recently about literary theory which aesthetic appreciation has been torn from. Most theoretical dissertations are not concerned with beauty or an aesthetic sense of the work. They are much more subject-related or structure or technique related but not a lot to do with the pleasure that’s part of our pleasure of writing, of production, of making things. There’s all that pleasure. “The pleasure of the text” Roland Barthes’ phrase. For me, there’s a lot of pleasure in writing and painting and collage, and you want to give pleasure as well by producing something splendid. </p>
<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 36px;">I’ve been interested in the spatial problems I have to solve. I guess there is a sense of an audience because obviously in order to make a work coherent somehow, if I choose to show anybody, there’s a slight sense, like writing a poem, that you have to engage or interest or involve and reveal. But it’s not terribly deliberate. It is somehow just there at the back of the mind that someone might want to look at this or happen to look at it and then see something or just appreciate my aesthetic sensibility which is another aspect of the poetic production–that you are the maker of possibly beautiful things.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>JR:</b> In “Might Have Been: The Tedious Shores” [<i>Nothing But Brush Strokes</i> 84] you say that at first the creative activity of painting seemed meaningless, and yet it appears to have great meaning for you to the extent that it put off depression.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>PW:</b> I had a problem with the meaninglessness of it all. That was a feeling of being a novice and therefore insecure. And not being very good at it. </p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>JR:</b> You were excited to be learning.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>PW:</b> As you say in <i>your</i> essay [“Writing On The Wall”, <i>Brick</i> 53], “the meaning of life is being here.” The meaning of bad painting is it’s fun to do.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>JR:</b> At some point you were beginning to write. Do you remember having the same feeling about that?<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>PW:</b> No. I don’t think so. That’s the difference between feeling like an amateur in painting and deeply knowing that writing poetry had a profound meaning for me that is inexplicable, really. You ask where does it come from; I don’t know but I’ve always had a great respect for my writing life and I don’t have that as an attempting painter. I just enjoy doing it and it keeps me out of depression. It’s my anti-depressant. I hate the idea of art as therapy but there is a therapeutic aspect to it.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>JR:</b> There always is.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>PW:</b> I don’t think we’d go on doing it if it didn’t cure us in some way, heal us, make us more whole. Then you smash up again, put it all together again.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>JR:</b> It’s the process of sorting through, the self-questioning and trying to find answers. If that wasn’t happening it wouldn’t be worth doing.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>PW:</b> The major impulse that led me to write was depression and it also led me to the silence. Depression was a profound part of my life for most of my life and writing was a way of surviving in a sense. Not that all my books are depressive.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>JR:</b> In fact the opposite.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>PW:</b> Yes, joyful and funny sometimes. But my constant struggle with breakdown and depression through the years was a way of making sense of what was going on, fighting suicide and all that.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>JR:</b> You were saying in the car that you weren’t sure that you wanted to talk about poetry.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>PW:</b> When you asked me about how I felt when I was writing in my twenties I thought `I’m seventy-four, I can’t remember that far back’. How did I feel? I don’t know. It was very inspirational. I just got hit and zapped by poems.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>JR:</b> You say in “Might-have-been: The Tedious Shores” that you had something like an ecstatic experience that drove you to write. Something happened in Montreal that made you know that you should write.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>PW:</b> I went there <i>because</i> I was writing. I was walking through the grounds at McGill. It’s in one of my early poems, “The Colour of the Light” [<i>The Vision Tree</i> 21]. These are the pigeons: “how clear were the colours of pigeons / and how mysterious the animation of children / playing in trees.” It was one of those moments. I worked as a secretary and I was also a student. I would walk through the grounds a lot. That was a very memorable experience but it’s hard to recall the process of writing. It was a cluster of images. It was a moment. </p>
<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 36px;">You said ecstatic?</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>JR:</b> I’ll read it: “I moved to Montreal and had not a mystical experience but something like it which revealed to me that my destiny was to be a poet” [84].</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>PW:</b> How interesting. I was already writing, I’d been writing before I went to Montreal. But that’s about “Earth Decending” [<i>The Vision Tree</i> 25]. That was the poem. Do you know it? It’s about the planet earth tumbling. This was a turning point poem for me because of its cosmic dimensions.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>JR:</b> Which has been a continuing obsession.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>PW:</b> I was very existentialist at that time and it <i>was</i> the existentialist time so it has that impulse in it. </p>
<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 36px;">I lived in a basement apartment and I remember writing “Earth Decending” in the bedroom. It was a turning point although I’d been serious about writing before.</p>
<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 36px;">I was encouraged to write by Frank Scott and being taken seriously means you take yourself seriously, you feel some responsibility. Louis Dudek also helped me a lot and I began to move with other writers and people who belonged to that group in Montreal. When you have like-minded people who are committed it becomes a way of life.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>JR:</b> I suspect that these days it might be easier to find that community of like-minded people. There simply weren’t that many people writing then.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>PW:</b> There are thousands now! I had a more organic literary life. It was attached to my life and it was immediate and was about getting together. You mentioned Toronto but I was too busy in Toronto.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>JR:</b> Was the atmosphere different in Toronto?</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>PW:</b> Yes, and I didn’t really have time. I worked very hard at the CBC in public affairs for five years. I was thinking that the difference was immense. I didn’t produce a book in that time except <i>Naked Poems</i>. I resolved the technical problem of using the question form in the final section. That was published while I was there. I was frustrated as a poet.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>JR:</b> How do you mean you resolved the problem? What was the nature of it?</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>PW:</b> The sentence structure was either/or, and/but; these diadic structures which are part of our thinking unfortunately. I remember where I was sitting in my apartment and I thought “Ah! Questions!” It just broke through and I was able to finish it.</p>
<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 36px;">Later I wrote an essay on the question as an instrument of torture.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>JR:</b> Which made me nervous about coming here to talk to you!</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>PW:</b> I used to do a lot of interviews too so I know about that business of asking questions.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>JR:</b> Who was part of the community in Toronto?</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>PW:</b> I occasionally saw Ray Souster, and Al Purdy, and Earle Birney. Victor Coleman, Michael Ondaatje, Eli Mandel–he was a dear friend. In my work I ran into a lot of writers.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>JR:</b> Gwendolyn McEwen?</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>PW:</b> Yes, of course! There was a reading at the Bohemian Embassy, which was a coffee house. Al Purdy and I read each other’s poems. We hated it. I hated the way he read my poems and he hated the way I read his. I suppose I did have literary connections. Joe Rosenblatt too. </p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>JR:</b> Have you seen the NFB film about Gwendolyn McEwen? It was based on Rosemary Sullivan’s book [<i>Shadow Maker: The Life of Gwendolyn MacEwen</i>]. There’s some good old footage from the Bohemian Embassy. A very young Margaret Atwood and so on.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>PW:</b> Gwendolyn was always there and her husband, Milton [Acorn]. I knew Margaret Atwood because I did a series of CBC television programs and I had up-and-coming poets on the final one. I must have been more connected than I thought but it felt very different from Montreal.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>JR:</b> When did you meet Leonard Cohen?</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>PW:</b> That was in the fifties. I met him at Irving Layton’s when Louis Dudek brought him. He was Louis’ protegé. That’s where we became friends. We aren’t now. I didn’t hear from him after I moved out here until I went to his concert in Victoria.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>JR:</b> I saw you at that concert. Did you go back and see him?</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>PW:</b> Yes. I don’t think he quite recognized me and I teased him about it but he said, “Of course I did darlin.”</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>JR:</b> Did he become part of that circle?</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>PW:</b> Yes. Then he went to New York, to Columbia. He came back and forth but I was moving around too. We were good friends and I saw a fair amount of him when we were both in town.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>JR:</b> The friendships you had with that group, did that involve a sharing of work?</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>PW:</b> That’s what it was all about actually. Mainly we met at Irving’s house which was out in the suburbs and also at Frank’s [Scott’s] house. Occasionally I met Irving or Louis at a restaurant. They were quite large gatherings. Al, Irving, Frank, Louis, Eli, Leonard, Miriam Waddington, Betty Layton and kids.</p>
<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 36px;">But we didn’t workshop.</p>
<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 36px;">Irving was a very strong personality. Even when you consider the others who were in the room. He was so expansive and so ideologically focused. He knew what he was doing. Contact Press was in formation so that was also a subject of interest. And <i>CIV/n</i> which was a magazine that Louis and Aileen Collins published. There was a lot of small publishing. Louis believed in small presses and literary magazines and wrote his thesis on small presses. There was a lot of commitment to poetry. </p>
<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 36px;">We sometimes attempted to meet with French writers, Québècois writers, and we’d get together once and then nothing more would happen. I guess it was the language.</p>
<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 36px;">There were these efforts. Frank was translating. He translated Anne Hébert. I’ve lost touch with Québècois writing. I read Nicole Brossard in English now. </p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>JR:</b> Someone who is starting to write now probably reads contemporary Canadian writers. If they go to university there are classes in Canadian Literature and Creative Writing. It’s not very difficult to become part of a literary circle simply by showing up. It must have been very different for you.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>PW:</b> I was just lucky to land in this milieu.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>JR:</b> Another twenty years earlier it would have been even more difficult.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>PW:</b> Yes, but when you think about A.J.M. Smith, F.R. Scott and that McGill group, that was thirty years before.... I think people do find each other. It’s a kind of radar that writers and artists have.</p>
<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 36px;">That reminds me of <i>Contemporary Verse</i> which Dorothy Livesay was involved in. I published there and that was a kind of gathering place. Not physically, but once you’d published in that magazine or <i>Northern Review</i> you felt part of that community and you sort of knew people even though you didn’t know them. All across the country. I knew all the poets in the country at one time I think. It wasn’t very hard. You did meet them.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>JR:</b> Which is not possible now. There are thousands of people writing. Every now and then I come across a poet and realize that this person has seven books! I’ve never heard of them and I wonder why.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>PW:</b> I can’t keep up. I do try in some kind of way. I get the <i>Malahat Review</i>, <i>Capilano Review</i>, and <i>West Coast Line</i>. Visually things are getting very interesting with other languages coming in, Mandarin and so on, and I get excited about that. I never know where poetry is going. Where can it go?</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>JR:</b> I notice in <i>Hanging Fire</i> and also in <i>Water and Light</i> that there are references to what I might call popular culture sneaking in: “the Home Hardware catalogue”, “Toad of Toad Hall”, “the aisles of Safeway” of “Pharmasave”. Were you conscious of those references to such contemporary mundane things? They don’t seem as present in the earlier poems.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>PW:</b> Maybe that’s brand-naming or something. Perhaps I was keeping up with the times. That kind of pop culture or mass culture reference is permissible. Maybe a bit trendy. The Pharmasave thing of course happened. The Safeway sign was just an emblem. They come out of my experience.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>JR:</b> But they root things in the present in a particular way.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>PW:</b> They will be passé very soon. That was probably a kind of loosening up, less high-seriousness. Letting those things in; I wonder if Sharon Thesen was of some influence there. It was around me. People write like that now and perhaps we didn’t before. It was not high art to refer to movies and television programs. </p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>JR:</b> I couldn’t imagine Rilke talking about the grocery store.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>PW:</b> He probably never went to one. I imagine he was always looked after.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>JR:</b> He talks about going to a farm to get a glass of whole milk every day and about going to a vegetarian restaurant in Paris which wouldn’t have been fashionable. Maybe it’s more a reflection on the culture than on your writing; television, film, and advertising are a bigger part of the experience of living now.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>JR:</b> I was supposed to talk to you about reviews and awards. You talked a little about the non-reception of <i>Hanging Fire</i>.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>PW:</b> Competition. Is it good, is it bad? I don’t know. But winning prizes does help financially, that’s the big thing, and it gives you a little stroke, several strokes. I like what Erin Mouré says about the artist’s life, how artists finance the production of art with their lives. I think that’s wonderful that we finance and subsidize with our lives. </p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>JR:</b> I love your idea that the correct response to a poem is another poem.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>PW:</b> The <i>proper</i> response to a poem is another poem. Actually, it was someone else who said that and I can’t remember who it was. Maybe Oscar Wilde. People seem to think I made it up.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>JR:</b> Do you still think it’s true?</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>PW:</b> That is an ideal response and it would be lovely if it happened but I don’t think it happens often. Very rarely.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>JR:</b> There is a dialogue that goes on. Mark Strand talks about the “secret life of poetry” where a poem refers to another poem. You might not have to know that but it adds another layer.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>PW:</b> In a way that’s what I’m saying; that is the proper response to a poem. </p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>JR:</b> It’s a dialogue, these poems talking to each other through the ages.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>PW:</b> It’s true. Even with the anxiety of influence, or maybe out of the anxiety of influence, the influence of anxiety. The tradition in action in liveliness.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>JR:</b> Is it an anxiety? I get students to write an imitation. One doesn’t want a student to become someone else but there’s the response that some students have that they don’t want to read anything because they don’t want it to influence them.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>PW:</b> Yes I know. I laugh but you know I had to stop reading Dylan Thomas in the fifties because he had such an incredible influence on me. I loved him and I read him a lot, over and over again, and it kept coming into the poetry so I had to put him away, cast him out.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>JR:</b> Putting him away is different than...</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>PW:</b> Not having read him at all.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>JR:</b> I was thinking about Rilke. I’m asking about him because you refer to him enough times that you must think he’s important.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>PW:</b> He was for me. I read him in the fifties. I was blown away and I didn’t understand very much either. Knowing it’s in translation you don’t know what you’re getting. That so much should come through in translation is amazing; they become English poems or at least they did for me. There’s a kind of romantic sense to those poems and still a lyrical impulse there, very strong. They were so different from anything I’d ever read. The way he talked about relationships was so extraordinary, archetypal, the angels and all that. They had a huge influence on me. Huge. </p>
<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 36px;">I did a radio program on his letters. This was for “CBC Wednesday Night.” I really got down to the nitty gritty of old Rainer. Karl Seigler has translated the <i>Sonnets to Orpheus</i>. It’s a lovely translation. </p>
<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 36px;">I love everything he did. I read <i>The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge</i> when I was in Paris. I should read him again now.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>JR:</b> Have you done that a lot, reread people?</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>PW:</b> I reread something of Henry James every summer. It’s so odd that I keep going back to Henry James but I can reread him forever. My memory is so bad it’s like reading something fresh.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>JR:</b> In another essay you mention that you were reading Canadian literature when you were a student at UBC.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>PW:</b> There was Ira Dilworth’s anthology which we used. He was a Vancouver person, a local book. It had Birney, Pratt, Livesay, Page, Scott and all those people. It was my introduction, yes.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>JR:</b> Would you say they were as much of an influence on what you were writing early on as Thomas, say.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>PW:</b> Oh yes. I don’t know how much they influenced my style but they allowed me to write. That was a world I could perhaps enter. Those poems influenced me enormously: Earle Birney’s “Vancouver Lights”, and P.K. Page. Dorothy Livesay was also very important. I was very political then. It aimed me in my direction. There was a Canadian literature there. </p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>JR:</b> Were there creative writing classes at UBC when you were there?</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>PW:</b> Earle Birney had started his classes then but I didn’t take them. I didn’t think I was a real poet. I was writing poetry but I didn’t take myself that seriously. So I never took a creative writing course.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>JR:</b> You’ve taught them.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>PW:</b> Yes. And you want to know if it can be taught.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>JR:</b> No. Of course it can be taught. It’s a ridiculous question isn’t it? If nothing else it teaches people to be better readers and there are tools and things you can learn about technique. I don’t know if you can be taught to have an eye for recognizing what to write about but you can certainly teach people a thing or two about expression. </p>
<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 36px;">I’m interested in what the process of teaching was like for you. Was it inspiring?</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>PW:</b> It was inspiring and stimulating. It didn’t stop me from writing as I thought it would. One year I did teach full time and that was a bit tough, but the way I taught which was not every year, helped me because I liked to keep in touch with young people and with the university and see what’s going on so I enjoyed it for the most part except for the occasional horrific moment in teaching which we all have had. I just enjoyed teaching. Or maybe it’s not teaching, leading a class, letting a class happen, whatever you would call it.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>JR:</b> In “A Long Line of Baby Caterpillars” you say “Take away my wisdom and my categories!” which strikes me as a very Taoist or maybe Buddhist idea. What is real is inexpressible. I wonder if there is a connection there to silence.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>PW:</b> That is why I take a lot of pleasure in painting. It is a release from language and meaning. But also “take away my wisdom” points to my sense that there is no end to learning and understanding and experience. Wisdom sounds so final. “Categories” refers, of course, to that rationality and ordering with which we are imbued from a very early age. Our filing system minds–all very useful and efficiency-making but again tending towards finality, the false sense of security that goes out the window the moment our expectations and plans are upset, undone.</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>JR:</b> In your essay “On the Line” [<i>Nothing But Brush Strokes</i> 20] you discuss the importance of sound in your poems. Have you always had a sense of language as music? Did you read aloud to yourself as you composed? Did you listen to music when you wrote? Do you do it now when you paint?</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><b>PW:</b> I don’t suppose I would have written poetry if I hadn’t had a good ear. I’ve often said that when I write a poem “I play by ear”–which I did when I played the piano long ago. A way of composing poems, crooning along. I would work over a poem by reciting it over and over, if only in my head, until I thought I’d got it right, a sound-haunting for perhaps a week. And then it could go fly a kite and so could I. The poem was done.</p>
<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-indent: 36px;">I don’t think I listened to music while writing. I sometimes do when I paint. I love opera and chamber music, though I’m not very knowledgeable even after all these years. I always went to concerts wherever I lived–Montreal, London, Paris, Vancouver–before I got phobic about public spaces. Now it’s CDs and tapes and of course the radio, but I do live a lot in silence. I can’t take too much speech coming from me. Silence is my natural mode. </p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">– Salt Spring Island, BC - June 6 and August 31, 2001</p>
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<p style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><br /></p><div><br /></div>Jay Ruzesky - Writerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04098750284045352513noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3018238076858556459.post-27709750057869164212017-06-14T18:30:00.002-07:002017-06-14T18:30:51.314-07:00A Flashback Review of Malahat Review 123<h1 style="clear: both; color: #262128; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 26px; font-weight: normal; line-height: 30px; margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 0px;">
Our Back Pages</h1>
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Issue 123</h1>
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<strong>Issue Date: </strong>Summer 1998<br />
<strong>Editor:</strong> Derk Wynand<br />
<strong>Pages: </strong>128<br />
<strong>Number of contributors: </strong>21</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNit0PIFzzIdC-_JDQhXzZTbSg5rT1HYxHrsExQYn8TG5AhCYKxA03oTKE3d652rqHNPsDzSypr32hfrwMOS642VpfOxuuAcKKwdLYYj5YotJx0ehC_lOltU3oFCKaKUFXJozmL1kRS3hw/s1600/123_cover_144.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="300" data-original-width="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNit0PIFzzIdC-_JDQhXzZTbSg5rT1HYxHrsExQYn8TG5AhCYKxA03oTKE3d652rqHNPsDzSypr32hfrwMOS642VpfOxuuAcKKwdLYYj5YotJx0ehC_lOltU3oFCKaKUFXJozmL1kRS3hw/s1600/123_cover_144.jpg" /></a>Derk Wynand taught in the University of Victoria’s Writing Department from 1969 to 2004 and had a long association with <em>The Malahat Review</em>. In 1979, he guest-edited a special issue (#37 January 1979) on “Austrian Writing Today” and in the 1990s he was editor of the magazine for six years. This issue—the last under his editorship—also marks a sort of independence for the magazine. Until the end of Wynand’s tenure, the editor was always also a professor at the university. Marlene Cookshaw, who was Associate Editor for this issue, took over and the Malahat editorship has been an independent position since that time. </div>
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The issue opens with Séamus Ó Ceallaigh’s 1998 Novella Prize-winning story, “O’Sheen’s Flu” which is a lyrical, smart, often funny romp through the beginning (or maybe the continuation) of a relationship. Ó Ceallaigh is not a prolific writer and this issue of <em>Malahat</em> is the only home for it. The story is worth the price of the back issue, if only for brilliant flourishes such as a silent conversation that takes place through the gestures of each character over an Irish breakfast:</div>
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Fiachra brought two segments of black pudding together in a way that said, <em>You don’t know everything. </em></div>
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Bridgette coughed into her napkin.<em> You’re awkward and childish, and your hair is a mess, and you’ve a hole in your sweater. </em></div>
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Fiachra scraped egg from the knife to the fork.<em> I read his diaries. </em></div>
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Bridgette spread her napkin across her lap. <em>Honey, I wrote his diaries</em>. </div>
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Pain Not Bread (the collaborative<strong> </strong>poetry writing collective of Roo Borson, Andy Patton, and Kim Maltman) are back in <em>Malahat</em> with eleven more poems from what will become their important work, <em>The Introduction to the Introduction to Wang Wei. </em></div>
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Toward the end of the issue, there is a story by Sean Virgo called “Introduction to <em>The Undiscovered Country</em>, a collection of stories” which is the same length as the Novella Prize winner and which cleverly questions structures since the introduction also <em>is </em>the story. </div>
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David Solway, Ryan Knighton, Kathryn MacLeod, and Adam Chiles have poems included in #123 and there is a good selection from Patricia Young’s <em>Ruin and Beauty</em>, including the titular poem from that book in which she says that we are like our ancient ancestors with wolves foraging among us, “just another species / looking to the stars and howling extinction.” </div>
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—Jay Ruzesky<br />
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You can read this review on the Malahat website:<br />
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http://web.uvic.ca/malahat/issues/featured/issue123.html<br />
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Jay Ruzesky - Writerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04098750284045352513noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3018238076858556459.post-49620356557584001502017-05-31T07:52:00.001-07:002017-05-31T07:52:47.829-07:00A Quick Review of Maudie (Dir. Aisling Walsh) <div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 11px; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;">I went to see Maudie last night — it has been playing for weeks in Victoria which made me think there must be some reason why it was so stubbornly taking up screen time. There is. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Maud Lewis was a self-taught Nova Scotian painter. Aisling Walsh, the film’s director, is a self-taught Irish film maker. Lewis’ paintings were simple, popular, bright, colourful, sometimes funny, and deeply authentic. Where some people see a lack of style (“My kid could do better,” says one character in the film) others see truth. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The film works in much the same way. What could have been a sentimental biopic, becomes a rich portrait of a woman who painted away in poverty all her life and became fairly well-known while she was still alive. Much of the film’s success is due to the acting talent of Sally Hawkins who portrays Maud in a way that seems so honest that the audience doesn’t have time to pity her. We also don’t feel that we need to. As her aging aunt says, Maud is the only one in the family who managed to turn out “happy”. Ethan Hawke is brilliant too. He screws up his face in a funny way throughout the film which may seem odd, but it helps him to “become” Everett. it strikes me as a sign of a great performance when I no longer see the well-known actor and instead see only the character. One of his best moments is when a photographer asks him to smile for the camera and it’s as though no one has ever asked Everett to smile before in his life. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">So… female director, female writer, great story, fabulous acting and, as an Irish/Canadian coproduction, we all get to see it before it goes down to American (where so many of Maud Lewis’ paintings ended up). </span></div>
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Jay Ruzesky - Writerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04098750284045352513noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3018238076858556459.post-76984513272156777762017-05-31T07:49:00.001-07:002017-05-31T07:49:10.202-07:00<br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "times" , "georgia" , serif; font-size: 36px; line-height: 42px; text-align: left;">Bold combo of memoir, travelogue</span><br />
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Reviewed by: <span style="font-weight: bold;">Ariel Gordon</span></div>
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">IN ANTARCTICA: AN AMUNDSEN PILGRIMAGE BY JAY RUZESKY</span></div>
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">NIGHTWOOD EDITIONS, 240 PAGES, $25</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px;">On his mother's side, British Columbia poet and professor Jay Ruzesky is a cousin, twice-removed, of Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen.</span></div>
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Ruzesky's compelling new memoir, <em>In Antarctica</em>, tells the story of his trip to the Antarctic a century after his ancestor became the first person to set foot on the South Pole.</div>
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Ruzesky, who now teaches in Duncan, spent his childhood dreaming of the polar expeditions. But his adult life had been consumed by writing three collections of poetry and a novel, teaching and having a family.</div>
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As the 2011 anniversary of Amundsen's achievement approached, Ruzesky tried to reconcile himself to not following in his ancestor's footsteps.</div>
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He failed. Instead, Ruzesky found himself online, booking a berth on a ship that would take him from Patagonia to the Antarctic.</div>
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What's more, he convinced his brother Scott to come along, even if his sibling's first question was, "Which one of us is Amundsen?"</div>
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Ruzesky knew he was incurring tens of thousands of dollars of debt but thought there might be a book in his trip across the ice. (Which, in case you're wondering, makes perfect economic sense to a poet.)</div>
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<a href="http://media.winnipegfreepress.com/images/240*361/5158326.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" border="0" height="320" src="https://media.winnipegfreepress.com/images/240*361/5158326.jpg" style="border: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding: 0px;" title="" width="212" /></a>Structurally, <em>In Antarctica</em> parallels Ruzesky's 2011 trip with episodes from Amundsen's 1911 voyage on the Fram and his earlier expedition to the Antarctic on the Belgica in 1887. His title is obviously an homage to the late Bruce Chatwin's classic 1977 travel memoir, <em>In Patagonia</em>.</div>
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The sections from Ruzesky's point of view meld travel writing with memoir, which effectively sets the stage for the writer's month-long voyage.</div>
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For instance, though Ruzesky has called B.C. home for 20 years, he spent his childhood in the cold-weather climes of Winnipeg, Thunder Bay, Saskatoon and Calgary.</div>
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One story that would be familiar to anyone who grew up on the Prairies details how the entrance collapsed to the quinzee he and his schoolmates had built in their school playground in Thunder Bay.</div>
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This is meaningful, given that Amundsen's crew spent more than a year in a large hut connected to a series of snow caves on the Ross Ice Shelf before making their attempt on the pole.</div>
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Also interesting is Ruzesky's anecdote of a failed dog-sledging lesson in Whitehorse in 2002. Knowing that Amundsen's success in reaching the South Pole was largely attributed to his use of dogs instead of ponies, like his English rival Robert Falcon Scott, supercharges this story.</div>
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Ruzesky also includes meditations on exploration and cartography and provides context for Amundsen's journey by providing thumbnail sketches of other voyages to both the North and South poles.</div>
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The other half of <em>In Antarctica</em> is in Amundsen's voice, an incredibly detailed account that Ruzesky somehow cobbled together from the explorer's journals and photographs.</div>
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More importantly, these sections are very finely written. Ruzesky illuminates Amundsen's dreamy childhood and his possible motives for devoting his life to exploration instead of medicine, as his mother would have preferred.</div>
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Ruzesky's description of Admundsen's affair with the married Sigrid Castberg that preceded the 1911 voyage, however, read like the best historical fiction.</div>
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All of which is to say that <em>In Antarctica</em> is a bold and satisfying composite of creative non-fiction, memoir and travel writing.</div>
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<em>Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg poet whose paternal great-grandfather died on the shores of Antarctica's South Georgia Island in 1914.</em></div>
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http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/arts-and-life/entertainment/books/bold-combo-of-memoir-travelogue-218195082.htmlJay Ruzesky - Writerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04098750284045352513noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3018238076858556459.post-23605185100737691832015-06-11T14:30:00.000-07:002015-06-11T14:30:39.616-07:00Tattoo<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 11px;">
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<span style="font-size: large;">I am getting a tattoo for my 50th birthday. Two stylized penguins will forever grace my left shoulder with their presence. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">The buzz of the tattoo needle reminds me of the sound of the electric razor my dad’s barber used on the sides of my head and the back of my neck, only the razor was louder and more painful. I give blood routinely and that involves having a nurse insert a nice thick spike into my brachial artery, so I don’t have to pretend to be a tough guy as Dave, my tattoo artist, works away on my shoulder with with the little machine as it pokes black ink into my dermis. It’s annoying more than painful. My body responds to this invasion by sending white blood cells to the rescue to absorb the foreign matter, but the pigment is too much for the white blood cells to carry, so instead they remain there in stasis. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">This is my first, and probably my only tattoo, and I gave a lot of thought to why I want it. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">The practice of making designs on human skin with ink, or ash, or pigment goes back about 6000 years. In 1991, some tourists hiking in the Italian Alps took a detour off the main trail and found Ötzi the Iceman, the corpse of a man who lived sometime around 3300 BCE. Ötzi bled to death from an arrow wound and was then preserved frozen in a glacier for thousands of years. He was tattooed and his tattoos were created from incisions rubbed with charcoal. Scientists think the purpose of the tattoos was therapy for body pain rather than decoration. The word tattoo may have its roots in the Samoan “tatau” but in one way or another, the practice of marking the body is global and goes back a long time. Tattoos have been used as punishment, to mark criminals or undesirables, as spiritual practice, as war paint to instil fear, or to delineate royalty. At their worst, we can imagine the power of the tattoo on prisoners in Nazi Death Camps, but tattoos have also long been an art form, as in the example of the horimono in Japan. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Love potion, good luck charm, funereal marking, clan designation, or rite of passage—one of the reasons people have had their skin marked over the centuries is that it looks good and that it means something to the tattooee. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">In my case, the tattoo is about my personal mythology — the stories that most significantly contribute to my understanding of who I am. One of those stories is the myth of Castor and Polydeuces who are the twins of Gemini. Leda, the swan, was their mother, but Polydeuces’ father was Zeus and Castor’s father was Tyndareus although they both hatched from the same egg. Castor was mortal, and Polydeuces, being the offspring of gods, was not. When Castor was slain in battle, Polydeuces begged Zeus to restore him and make him immortal too, and though Zeus was not known for his sympathy, he gave Castor his wish on the condition that the two would have to take turns living in the underworld on alternate days and would not be together again, but would pass each other every day as they changed places, as the stars in the constellation Gemini seem to do on the horizon. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">For me this story is meaningful not just because I was born in June, but because the Gemini myth is about finding ways to live with paradox. How can you live in the underworld <i>and</i> in the heavens? How can you be mortal <i>and </i>immortal? </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">I have never been someone who is able to bear dichotomies. If my choice is this or that, my answer is “both.” If I have to have black or white, I’ll have black now, and white later. All my life I have found ways to solve problems. When someone says, you can’t be in two places, I usually find a way. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">The other important story for me is the story of my ancestor, Roald Amundsen, the polar explorer who was first to the South and then the North Poles. He was my grandfather’s cousin and I was brought up hearing stories about him and his travels. It was the pursuit of his story that took me to Antarctica in 2011 — 100 years after his arrival at the South Pole — and it is his spirit of adventure and exploration that is sending me to the high Arctic this summer. As Amundsen looked north again after Antarctica, so will I.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">So for me, my gemini penguins have a lot of meaning and represent my will to embrace paradox in life and to push toward personal adventure. The image on my skin is adornment, it’s true, and it’s swashbuckling and sailor resonant, but it is also laced with meaning. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">I was not brought up in a particularly religious way, and in my late teens and early twenties, I struggled to find what I thought was a sense of meaning and purpose in life. I investigated Catholicism, Anglicanism, Buddhism, Sufism, and Taoism and at this stage of my life, having just turned 50, prefer the label that I once saw in a bookstore: “Miscellaneous Spirituality.” I’m open to the wonders of the world, but don’t follow a particular practice to make meaning from them. Having lived a mere half-century, I know I have a great deal more to learn, but it seems to me from here that unlike my younger, searching self, I don’t need to forage for meaning in my life, I need only to see the meaning that is already there. </span></div>
Jay Ruzesky - Writerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04098750284045352513noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3018238076858556459.post-66878812093898381872015-04-15T13:15:00.002-07:002015-04-15T13:16:35.626-07:00After Antarctica -- The Beginning of a New Story<div class="p1">
<span class="s1" style="font-size: large;">I'm going to Svalbard this summer. Not a lot of people can say that but I like the sound of it. "<i>What did you do on your summer vacation?</i>" "<i>I went to Svalbard</i>." The idea gets my Viking blood going.</span></div>
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<span class="s1" style="font-size: large;">My research into my famous Norwegian ancestor, Roald Amundsen, continues. After Antarctica, he began trying to reach the North Pole by air and eventually disappeared on a rescue mission on his way north from Tromso. </span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEus7Uyeik-9HpsLTW6nRmb3beSs_PxKapl6vXlYZesdbpPInztQrcZNckTXhj61Z1B8_Ke4tfsDGVd-GvzB12KuTBa8fwjBYcQOnQIGUDAWIVDh51aDNnfWZtj8TIRaPHsVp9TyX4bvA-/s1600/Arctic+Expedition.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><span style="font-size: large;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEus7Uyeik-9HpsLTW6nRmb3beSs_PxKapl6vXlYZesdbpPInztQrcZNckTXhj61Z1B8_Ke4tfsDGVd-GvzB12KuTBa8fwjBYcQOnQIGUDAWIVDh51aDNnfWZtj8TIRaPHsVp9TyX4bvA-/s1600/Arctic+Expedition.jpg" height="320" width="310" /></span></a><span class="s1" style="font-size: large;">I felt a kind of relief when I published<i> In Antarctica</i> because a decades long project was finally between covers. I had needed to bring my own obsession and experience into the text I had been working on for years, and I did that by going to Antarctica. Later, as I traveled to book launches and gave lectures and readings about that work, I thought I would begin to tire of it and would want to put my polar library away for a while. Instead, I began to think that the project was really just beginning. </span><br />
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<span class="s1" style="font-size: large;">Amundsen arrived at the South Pole when he was thirty-nine years old. That success was his greatest achievement, and at the time was quite akin to Neil Armstrong walking on the moon. What does one do as a second act?</span></div>
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<span class="s1" style="font-size: large;">For me, what Amundsen did next is the reason I believe I am not yet finished with his story. Amundsen continued exploring, but his South Polar expedition marked the end of a heroic age of exploration and to some extent, he found himself in a world in which he no longer belonged. He adapted, however, and took to the air and, after a disastrous expedition across the North-east passage in a wooden sailing ship, he learned to fly and began exploring the north from the air from Svalbard, above the Arctic Circle. In 1926, he flew over the North Pole in an airship and became the first verified explorer to make it there. In 1928, his estranged comrade on the 1926 voyage, Umberto Nobile, crashed a second airship and Amundsen himself disappeared shortly after joining the search for Nobile. </span></div>
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<span class="s1" style="font-size: large;">The story of Roald Amundsen is filled with mystery, betrayal, and also romance, and I now believe that after my Antarctic journey, my work is only half-finished. I would like to continue to follow in his footsteps, and to visit Tromso, Norway (which was the staging ground for his final rescue mission), Bear Island (which is near where he is believed to have crashed), and Svalbard (from whence he mounted his northern air expeditions). </span></div>
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<span class="s1" style="font-size: large;">Thanks to some exceptional circumstances, I’m going to be setting sail this summer. Rather incredibly, the expedition ship <i>Polar Pioneer</i> (which is the vessel upon which I traveled to Antarctica) is making an expedition in July 2015 from Aberdeen, Scotland to Oslo, Norway, up the coast of Norway to Tromso, and then past Bear Island to Svalbard—exactly the route I feel I need to travel. </span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpC28Gc_QFZEBos4wp9RvG4N2X4cqM91tiLt0ktbPhVFhkyjCDCgzoZWXIBWIwNw0sT_mMSgZoakST1-OTpFVnxu_vfUuu_D3kiZpo3sbUiKc2XLPWxjwUBpERca-b5RYJQtu-Mz0E-rcr/s1600/Aurora.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-size: large;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpC28Gc_QFZEBos4wp9RvG4N2X4cqM91tiLt0ktbPhVFhkyjCDCgzoZWXIBWIwNw0sT_mMSgZoakST1-OTpFVnxu_vfUuu_D3kiZpo3sbUiKc2XLPWxjwUBpERca-b5RYJQtu-Mz0E-rcr/s1600/Aurora.jpg" height="79" width="200" /></span></a><span class="s1" style="font-size: large;">Perhaps more incredibly, I asked the expedition company, <a href="http://www.auroraexpeditions.com.au/expeditions/expedition/across-the-arctic-circle#itinerary" target="_blank">Aurora Expeditions</a>, if they would sponsor me on the trip and they have agreed to give me passage in return for a lecture onboard the ship. I'm still pinching myself. </span></div>
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<span class="s1" style="font-size: large;">So I’m dusting off my expedition boots and scrambling to get everything I need in place before the end of June. This time I hope not to follow quite so closely in Amundsen’s footsteps (since they disappear in the ice) but I’ll haunt his Northern turf and take notes. </span></div>
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<span class="s1" style="font-size: large;">More soon….</span></div>
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<span style="color: #cccccc;">A Frightening Beauty in Colour:<br />Jay Ruzesky in Conversation<br />with Laura Ritland</span></h1>
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This summer,<span style="font-style: normal;"> Malahat</span> poetry board member <strong style="color: white;">Jay Ruzesky</strong> was able to commandeer the Prime Minister's office in the parliament buildings in Ottawa for an afternoon. There, by a roaring fire to keep out the summer chill, he sat down with this year's <a href="http://web.uvic.ca/malahat/contests/far_horizons_poetry/2014_winner.html" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(102, 102, 0); border-bottom-style: dotted; border-bottom-width: 1px; color: #ccff66; text-decoration: none;">Far Horizons Poetry Award Winner</a>,<strong style="color: white;">Laura Ritland</strong>. </div>
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<strong>Let's pretend you just won the Rogers Open instead of the <em>Malahat Review's</em> Far Horizons Award for Poetry. How are you feeling about the win and what was it about your competitiveness that got you through the semi-finals to triumph in the championship?</strong></div>
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After finding out about the news, I was in dead shock for the first 15 minutes, wildly ecstatic for 30 minutes, desperately nervous for several weeks, and now mostly thankful and happy. Competitiveness…hmm. This is the first magazine prize I’ve entered and for a while I was trying to talk myself out of entering it! I have a thing with rejection. I guess the reason I did end up entering was because of what Julie Bruck said about contests <a href="http://web.uvic.ca/malahat/interviews/bruck_interview.html" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(102, 102, 0); border-bottom-style: dotted; border-bottom-width: 1px; color: #666600; text-decoration: none;">in her pre-contest interview</a> and because a few friends kept bugging me to get going with this whole publication and contest biz. It was almost like I had to take contests less seriously to finally take a chance and enter one. Self-doubt is an awful opponent… but it just goes to show that you can often do more than you think you can.</div>
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<strong>Your poem is a pantoum. What drew you to form and to that form in particular? This year's judge, Julie Bruck, says your poem was “born to be a pantoum” because of the way the circular form is so appropriate for a poem that wrestles with memory. Was form an extension of content in this case or did you fit the subject into that formal mold?</strong></div>
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Form as an extension of content. Although, in my mind those two terms have a more complex relationship than, say, one coming “first” in the creative process before the other. I see a poem’s meaning as inseparable from its form, as an inexplicable synthesis between structure and content. So, in this case, it wasn’t so much that the pantoum form “extended” or “represented” something about Van Gogh’s mental illness and his nostalgia for childhood as that it was the only way to really enact or produce an experience I wanted to convey – through repeated phrases, circulation, variation, and rhyme. The redundancy of pantoums can make them feel a bit like fever dreams or nightmarish merry-go-rounds, and yet this quality, as well as the end-rhymes, can also allow for tremendous songlike beauty. It’s this same beautiful, nightmarish effect that I get from looking at a Van Gogh painting – have you noticed how the brushstrokes of a Van Gogh painting repeat themselves? That kind of frightening beauty about his colour choices? – and it’s the same effect of nostalgia and sadness, that repetitive longing for something lost, again and again, on and on, in circles. I like to believe that forms create experiences for the reader, and so I hope this pantoum produces this particular emotional and psychological state of being.</div>
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<strong>No one is going to take your trophy away, but you sort of cheated with the form. Strictly speaking, the repeated lines in a pantoum should be repeated <em>exactly</em>. Can you tell me how you feel about form generally? What do you (or what does the poem) gain when you put yourself in a box and then poke holes in it?</strong></div>
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Well, Elizabeth Bishop wasn’t disqualified for twisting the villanelle, so I thought I might play around with the verb tense and switch around a preposition here and there. I think it allows the poem a certain amount of independent, organic freedom, and it encourages the reader to pay attention to what the poem is saying rather than mentally tick off all the boxes on the Perfect Form list. For example, the first line of the second stanza technically should have started with “going on,” but instead I chose “that go on,” and that tiny departure, I hope, implicitly alerts the reader that “hey, this isn’t exactly the same line I just read. It is, but it also isn’t.” The mind stays interested; it stays attached to the line, doesn’t get lulled into pure repetition. My theory is that patterns are interesting, but breaking a pattern can be more interesting.</div>
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I’ve often heard forms should enable, not constrict, and I think that’s a pretty sound philosophy; you use them to your own ends, and shouldn’t become “used” by them. Initially, writing form poems can feel like a math exercise, but once you learn the rules, once you learn how to “think” in its terms, you can do anything you’d like with its routine and make it your own.</div>
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<strong>You take on the voice of Vincent Van Gogh. Are you often possessed by the dead? When you read the poem aloud, does your voice get all raspy?</strong></div>
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Sometimes I hold séances with my cats at midnight and try to reach into the deep, dark recesses of the phantom world to make contact with wayward spirits. But so far, no luck with Vincent.</div>
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<strong>How much research went into this poem? Is it important to you to be accurate when writing about historical figures or are they fair game for the imagination? Did you dig up any new dirt on Van Gogh and, if so, can you share it?</strong></div>
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Okay, confession: this poem is based on a specific letter Vincent wrote to his brother, Theo, on January 22, 1889, pretty much describing what my poem is about. Confession #2: the details in line 3, “each path, each field, the magpies in the acacia in the cemetery,” are paraphrased almost directly from the letter. The rest of the poem is drawn from my general sense of Vincent’s character after months of casual research and reading the Van Gogh brothers’ letters. Hmm, I didn’t discover any facts that no one had previously known about. If there’s anything very unique about my depiction of Vincent, perhaps it’s my attention to his childhood, something that’s relatively obscure in the case of many historical figures (it’s not like we can dig up Vincent’s childhood home videos and give them a watch).</div>
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That’s where the “fiction” had to come in a little more; I’m guessing this is what he felt, but I don’t know for sure. And, even if I don’t, does it really matter? I think historical facts are only important insofar as they give us pieces of a never-fully-knowable portrait; the actual process of composition, the imagination part, is far more interesting, because that’s where we have to make decisions about who or what a person was, that’s where we end up adapting a story because it resonates with something about ourselves or our present condition.</div>
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<strong>I'm fond of the line in your poem that goes: “</strong><strong>There is a colour I find sometimes in stories.” Julie also points out that because your poem invokes the paintings of Van Gogh, it seems to be full of colour although you don't name any particular colours. If you made this poem into a movie, would you shoot it in colour or in black and white?</strong></div>
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Colour, definitely. I’m intrigued by the idea that colours can create an emotional experience or that an emotional impression of a person, place or event can manifest itself in a set of colours. I think Van Gogh probably thought of colour in a similar same way. It’s not so much what we “see” as what we “feel” that becomes a “colour.”</div>
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<strong>You recently graduated from UBC and are working on your M.A. so you're probably spending more time in the world of poetry than a normal person. Does that have an impact on your ability to give people simple directions, or to fill out government forms?</strong></div>
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Oh yeah, I bump my head on floating stanzas all the time, it’s awful! Actually, I feel incredibly lucky to be able to do and study what I love, and among people who are so passionate about ideas, art and literature. Poetry can be a very anti-social activity. It involves a lot of reading and writing alone in quiet rooms. But through it, I have encountered people and community that have enriched my life in innumerable ways; if anything, it’s made me feel more connected rather than less connected to other people.</div>
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<strong>What do you hope poetry will do for you in your life and (to paraphrase JFK) what do you hope you will do for poetry?</strong></div>
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I hope that poetry continues to do what it has done for me: make sense of the world, give meaning and significance to the myriad number of ways we live, create vessels for the mind to think, imagine, hope and aspire. If I can make my work resonate for another reader as poetry has done for me, then I’d feel my mission is accomplished.</div>
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This interview was originally published in <a href="http://web.uvic.ca/malahat/" target="_blank">The Malahat Review</a> online. </div>
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Jay Ruzesky - Writerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04098750284045352513noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3018238076858556459.post-44188373619794217902013-10-13T07:17:00.001-07:002015-03-02T09:31:30.083-08:00<br />
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Professor shares
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Ruzesky's
great-grandfather's cousin was Roald Amundsen, the first explorer to
reach the South Pole</b></span></div>
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Julie Chadwick / Nanaimo Daily News
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October 11, 2013</div>
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VIU professor Jay Ruzesky will speak
about his experiences in Antarctica and his famous ancestor Roald
Amundsen in a presentation at the university on Oct. 18</div>
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It was out on the bow of the Polar
Pioneer headed for Antarctica, that Jay Ruzesky got a peculiar
sensation.</div>
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The vast, inscrutable landscape was
stunning, said Ruzesky, and in its presence he struggled to
understand his accompanying emotions.</div>
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The closest he could come to describing
it was that he felt he was home.</div>
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Though it was a completely foreign
locale, Ruzesky may have been picking up on an ancestral affinity:
His great-grandfather's cousin was Roald Amundsen, famous for being
the first explorer to go to the South Pole.</div>
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"Lots of families have their claim
to fame, whatever that might be," said Ruzesky. "That was
kind of our family's fame story, was that we were related to Amundsen
the explorer."</div>
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On Oct. 18 Ruzesky will share the tale
of his ancestor, as part of VIU's Arts and Humanities colloquium
series.</div>
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In his presentation, Amundsen Then and
Now: The End of the Age of Heroic Exploration Ruzesky will look at
his own 100th anniversary expedition to Anarctica and analyze how
exploration has drastically changed in the last 100 years.</div>
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It was on Dec. 14, 1911 that Amundsen
arrived at the South Pole in a five-person, 16-dog expedition team.</div>
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Plunging a Norwegian flag into the
frozen ground, the acheivement was the culmination of years of
fundraising and planning.</div>
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Some of those funds were raised through
North American speaking tours, one of which had stopped in Claresholm
Alta., where Ruzesky's ancestors lived.</div>
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It was at that time that Ruzesky's
grandfather received a watch as a gift from Amundsen, a keepsake that
remains in his family today.</div>
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Amundsen was initially inspired by the
Arctic explorer Sir John Franklin.</div>
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"One of the things he said in his
autobiography was that he read about polar exploration when he was a
young man," said Ruzesky. "When he was 14 years old he read
Franklin's accounts of one of his expeditions in the North. .. it was
a horrible expedition and all of the men spent a couple of weeks
barely surviving to get back from where they'd been. They ended up
eating the leather from their shoes because they had no food. So it
was horrible suffering, but what he says in his autobiography is that
he read that and was attracted to it, and thought, 'Wow, I'd like to
go suffer for a cause too.'" Amundsen's experiences in turn
served to inspire Ruzesky.</div>
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"That idea of polar exploration,
of going to the ends of the earth to these stark, cold, lonely places
which was where he really spent his life - that reaches pretty deeply
into the imagination," he said. "I was told those stories
from pretty early on."</div>
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However, travelling to far-flung places
means a very different experience for the modern explorer, he added.</div>
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Ruzesky's own expedition to Antarctica
in December of 2011 - which he detailed in his memoir In Antarctica:
An Amundsen Pilgrimage - highlighted these changes.</div>
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"One goes in rather a different
way now. I was not as interested in suffering, as he seemed to be,"
he said.</div>
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"It's a very hostile and
challenging landscape. .. but it's also a place where modern clothing
and transportation can take a lot of the risk out of it and make it a
lot more comfortable."</div>
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In his talk Ruzesky details how he came
to terms with his own romantic notions of exploration - his visions
of frostbitten cheeks and dogs howling into the wind - to come away
with an appreciation for what remote places like the Antarctic can
offer to one's perspective.</div>
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Ruzesky's talk is free and will be held
in VIU's Malaspina Theatre from 10-11:30 a.m. on Oct. 18.</div>
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JChadwick@nanaimodailynews.com
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Jay Ruzesky - Writerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04098750284045352513noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3018238076858556459.post-39001647373915777022013-09-05T12:45:00.004-07:002017-05-31T07:48:34.824-07:00<h2>
A poem from <i>Painting the Yellow House Blue </i></h2>
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Here's me when I used to spend more money on shampoo; and a little something from the archives -- way back to 1994. </div>
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<iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/KedkIcuLLa0?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div>
<br />Jay Ruzesky - Writerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04098750284045352513noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3018238076858556459.post-76847267852656852202013-08-28T08:43:00.002-07:002017-05-31T07:48:46.965-07:00A Quick Review of Blue Jasmine<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJ0-_AVupOYx6opJ6z-8XzZ0MA8IWAmATBjgBsA0PZT-BIn-yDSJTFs0Z1tbcYJuLZmU2HFg7reqcMIPEZrjvAcch9PPseiD8a_TCnDYqpDmaFGdMX978bRyM15ZxSvHQZfe6dl5qg_Pvb/s1600/blue+jasmine.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJ0-_AVupOYx6opJ6z-8XzZ0MA8IWAmATBjgBsA0PZT-BIn-yDSJTFs0Z1tbcYJuLZmU2HFg7reqcMIPEZrjvAcch9PPseiD8a_TCnDYqpDmaFGdMX978bRyM15ZxSvHQZfe6dl5qg_Pvb/s1600/blue+jasmine.jpg" /></a></div>
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Blue Jasmine – Woody Allen does comedy well, and he does
tragedy better. This provocative film
will make you think about your relationship to money and happiness (don’t kid
yourself – money may not buy happiness, but poverty is no virtue either). Cate
Blanchett should have a temper tantrum if she’s not nominated for best actor in
next year’s Academy Awards – hard to imagine a more compelling portrait of a
woman breaking down. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2334873/?ref_=sr_1">http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2334873/?ref_=sr_1</a></div>
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Jay Ruzesky - Writerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04098750284045352513noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3018238076858556459.post-44758806581472503132013-08-04T07:45:00.000-07:002015-03-02T09:31:48.714-08:00Ariel Gordon's Review in the Winnipeg Free Press makes my holiday weekend:<br />
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<span style="color: white; font-family: Times-Roman, serif; font-size: medium;">Bold
combo of memoir, travelogue</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Reviewed by: Ariel Gordon </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">IN ANTARCTICA: AN AMUNDSEN PILGRIMAGE BY JAY RUZESKY </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">NIGHTWOOD EDITIONS, 240 PAGES, $25 </span><br />
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On his mother's side, British Columbia poet and professor Jay Ruzesky is a cousin, twice-removed, of Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen. <br />
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Ruzesky's compelling new memoir, In Antarctica, tells the story of his trip to the Antarctic a century after his ancestor became the first person to set foot on the South Pole. <br />
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Ruzesky, who now teaches in Duncan, spent his childhood dreaming of the polar expeditions. But his adult life had been consumed by writing three collections of poetry and a novel, teaching and having a family. <br />
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As the 2011 anniversary of Amundsen's achievement approached, Ruzesky tried to reconcile himself to not following in his ancestor's footsteps. <br />
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He failed. Instead, Ruzesky found himself online, booking a berth on a ship that would take him from Patagonia to the Antarctic. <br />
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What's more, he convinced his brother Scott to come along, even if his sibling's first question was, "Which one of us is Amundsen?" <br />
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Ruzesky knew he was incurring tens of thousands of dollars of debt but thought there might be a book in his trip across the ice. (Which, in case you're wondering, makes perfect economic sense to a poet.) <br />
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Structurally,In Antarctica parallels Ruzesky's 2011 trip with episodes from Amundsen's 1911 voyage on the Fram and his earlier expedition to the Antarctic on the Belgica in 1887. His title is obviously an homage to the late Bruce Chatwin's classic 1977 travel memoir, In Patagonia. <br />
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The sections from Ruzesky's point of view meld travel writing with memoir, which effectively sets the stage for the writer's month-long voyage. <br />
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For instance, though Ruzesky has called B.C. home for 20 years, he spent his childhood in the cold-weather climes of Winnipeg, Thunder Bay, Saskatoon and Calgary. <br />
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One story that would be familiar to anyone who grew up on the Prairies details how the entrance collapsed to the quinzee he and his schoolmates had built in their school playground in Thunder Bay. <br />
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This is meaningful, given that Amundsen's crew spent more than a year in a large hut connected to a series of snow caves on the Ross Ice Shelf before making their attempt on the pole. <br />
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Also interesting is Ruzesky's anecdote of a failed dog-sledging lesson in Whitehorse in 2002. Knowing that Amundsen's success in reaching the South Pole was largely attributed to his use of dogs instead of ponies, like his English rival Robert Falcon Scott, supercharges this story. <br />
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Ruzesky also includes meditations on exploration and cartography and provides context for Amundsen's journey by providing thumbnail sketches of other voyages to both the North and South poles. <br />
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The other half of In Antarctica is in Amundsen's voice, an incredibly detailed account that Ruzesky somehow cobbled together from the explorer's journals and photographs. <br />
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More importantly, these sections are very finely written. Ruzesky illuminates Amundsen's dreamy childhood and his possible motives for devoting his life to exploration instead of medicine, as his mother would have preferred. <br />
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Ruzesky's description of Admundsen's affair with the married Sigrid Castberg that preceded the 1911 voyage, however, read like the best historical fiction. <br />
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All of which is to say that In Antarctica is a bold and satisfying composite of creative non-fiction, memoir and travel writing. <br />
______________________________________<br />
Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg poet whose paternal great-grandfather died on the shores of Antarctica's South Georgia Island in 1914. <br />
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http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/arts-and-life/entertainment/books/bold-combo-of-memoir-travelogue-218195082.html<br />
<br />Jay Ruzesky - Writerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04098750284045352513noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3018238076858556459.post-77761484886660525382013-06-24T15:21:00.000-07:002013-08-28T08:39:22.106-07:00Rather a kind review from Colin Holt at the Victoria Times-Colonist<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
Colin Holt in The Victoria Times-Colonist</div>
“A tale worth following to the end of the Earth”<br />
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Times - Colonist [Victoria, B.C] 16 June 2013: D.9.<br />
<br />
IN ANTARCTICA<br />
By Jay Ruzesky<br />
Nightwood Editions, 239 pp., $24.95<br />
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<br />
Vancouver Island author Jay Ruzesky's In Antarctica is a hugely enjoyable tale of a journey to Antarctica, both his own and that of his relative, the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen.<br />
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Ruzesky alternates between his own voyage to Antarctica and Amundsen's historic achievement of reaching the South Pole in 1911, managing to fill each chapter with adventure.<br />
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Amundsen's attempt at the South Pole begins in secrecy as everyone, including the crew, believes he is setting out for the North Pole - one of the Norwegian's many tactics used to get a time advantage over the British as they race to be the first to claim the Pole.<br />
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Amundsen's experience is a hard and dangerous one as he has to battle the elements, the dogs and at times his own crew along the way. The relationship between the crew and the dog teams that eventually get them to their destination is a fascinating, and at times heartbreaking, story all on its own. The fact that he not only successfully made the South Pole, but then went on to be the first to reach the North Pole, makes him one of history's greatest explorers.<br />
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Ruzesky's route to Antarctica is a bit more relaxed, and he and his brother make stops in South America and spend time sightseeing in shorts and T-shirts - a far cry from the wintering the crew of the Fram experienced a century earlier. As Ruzesky points out, "I was taken to Antarctica because that is how one goes these days." And while his route may have been less gruelling, it also allows him time to visit spots like the home of Chilean poet and politician Pablo Neruda.<br />
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If Ruzesky had to go to Antarctica because it was in his blood (Amundsen was his great-grandfather's cousin) it could just as easily be argued that he had to go to Santiago because poetry is in his blood. In Antarctica may not be a book of poetry, but the respect and command of language that makes Ruzesky such a wonderful poet is on display throughout the book.<br />
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He vividly brings to life the beauty of Antarctica, a place that to the unfamiliar may seem like just a white barren wasteland. Ruzesky seems to find himself at home here and treats readers to wonderful descriptions of the animals (he grows particularly fond of penguins) and the many colours of the land that make up our least-populated continent.<br />
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A successful work of nonfiction should do at least two things for a reader: First, it should leave one feeling as though they have learned something, and second, they should want to know more. In Antarctica succeeds on both these counts quite handily, and includes a list of works consulted to point readers in the right direction should they want to spend more time in Ruzesky's Antarctica.<br />
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Ruzesky closes out the book with a nice round of acknowledgements of all the people who helped with the book, and also includes a paragraph that states: "This story, while fiction, is based on actual events." This seems to blur the lines even more than the creative non-fiction classification on the back of the book. It made me wonder just what was it that I had read, but it was immediately apparent that it wouldn't have mattered if the entire story was made up. Ruzesky is such a fine writer - fact or fiction - that he is worth following to the end of the Earth.<br />
-- COLIN HOLT<br />
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<br />Jay Ruzesky - Writerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04098750284045352513noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3018238076858556459.post-70937711751785391222013-06-18T09:21:00.003-07:002013-08-28T08:39:09.217-07:00John Threlfall's Review in CV<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTjpXcOeyjuI3Dq-KbDHkUF92ihY9maMM7heO0ZGSHVApldTaZ4GF13Ae4F4UFarRcVx-ybznpglPlDw6pXvyhqG9BbfOq02YJikrTnr1u7y-lkVj9IF3kq1dFo9Bp0bwsfLEZZ60ZT0Ev/s1600/Threlfall+Review.tiff" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTjpXcOeyjuI3Dq-KbDHkUF92ihY9maMM7heO0ZGSHVApldTaZ4GF13Ae4F4UFarRcVx-ybznpglPlDw6pXvyhqG9BbfOq02YJikrTnr1u7y-lkVj9IF3kq1dFo9Bp0bwsfLEZZ60ZT0Ev/s640/Threlfall+Review.tiff" width="549" /></a></div>
<br />Jay Ruzesky - Writerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04098750284045352513noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3018238076858556459.post-37423279967075795162013-06-12T15:43:00.005-07:002013-06-12T15:44:37.970-07:00From the Cowichan NewsLeader<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://www.cowichannewsleader.com/entertainment/207633221.html"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJfAC3W9Tr1jBwGtaNqDsoJDpUozR5gNqXwilZ-rzqcA8xn3VGHfsZ1-X02kPZJj71w80ZgUF_demd5I7dh7V81XxWukYNM5jGTJobAmo8sTNxd3IGabv8-e7woZ35fww4xNixJ-sZBCFN/s640/NewsLeaderArticle.jpg" width="502" /></a></div>
<br />Jay Ruzesky - Writerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04098750284045352513noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3018238076858556459.post-21971823153451679292013-06-04T07:30:00.000-07:002013-06-04T07:32:10.928-07:00Literary Events<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMmJ7NiGQJRRaJrJOlDZED2o1Jh-ftvDc7feESFgW6EIjf35KeC4CXEBXqGuJHN2idaEuBDBI41RrqOlOfp21gjoSkXgAOYDTQAMR6DXktHELU1ptrGq7kkXHlOKqilrUqZeS3hIOBmo1e/s1600/Jay+at+ten+old+books.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMmJ7NiGQJRRaJrJOlDZED2o1Jh-ftvDc7feESFgW6EIjf35KeC4CXEBXqGuJHN2idaEuBDBI41RrqOlOfp21gjoSkXgAOYDTQAMR6DXktHELU1ptrGq7kkXHlOKqilrUqZeS3hIOBmo1e/s320/Jay+at+ten+old+books.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
There were plenty of events this past few weeks - readings and signings. Thanks everyone for coming out and saying hello. The lecture at the Maritime Museum of BC was wonderful as was the book launch in Duncan with Carol Matthews.<br />
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Coming up: I'll be at Laughing Oyster Books in Courtenay BC on Sunday, June 9th at 2pm; in my old stomping ground at Mosaic Books in Kelowna BC on Thursday, June 20th at 7:30pm; and I'll be giving another lecture and slide show at the Vancouver Maritime Museum on Sunday, June 23rd. Admission for that one is free. Jay Ruzesky - Writerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04098750284045352513noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3018238076858556459.post-9595888174115829442013-05-18T06:28:00.000-07:002013-06-04T07:32:10.935-07:00Race to the End Exhibit<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://explore.royalbcmuseum.bc.ca/" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="242" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgppJTuqjQwp3e7c07QwWtQNu617iYVELNqjGsLcCKsAlJ1n6qGaXoMGzWrJWb5rP3-V81Uah11HFf48A7snWUskT3YSpR26rFoTofd1kYuD_xulfWlZu6PTJlCMcYclC6NNDMonBkdREe8/s320/Race+to+the+end.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
I was at the opening of the <a href="http://explore.royalbcmuseum.bc.ca/">Race to the End of the Earth</a> exhibit at the Royal BC Museum yesterday and had chills - not just from the Antarctic atmosphere, but from the artifacts and clever displays. One of Amundsen's sledges is there and, maybe my favourite thing, the Kino camera he took to get film footage from Antarctica. Jay Ruzesky - Writerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04098750284045352513noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3018238076858556459.post-56060299786762709872013-05-10T09:46:00.000-07:002013-06-04T07:32:10.932-07:00<br />
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<b>Next Events for<i> In Antarctica</i>:</b></div>
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<b>If you are in the Cowichan Valley, join us on </b><b>Saturday, May 25th at 1pm at </b></div>
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<b>10 Old Books, </b><b>330 Duncan St., Duncan BC (in the Duncan Garage) for a reading and book signing. Nanaimo's </b><b>Carol Matthews will also be reading from her recent work. It's market day in Duncan so if you're from further afield, it's a good reason to come up and say hello. </b></div>
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<b>On Wednesday, May 29th at 7pm, I'll be giving a talk about my Antarctic adventures illustrated with photos. There WILL be penguins. The talk is in the old courtroom upstairs at the Maritime Museum of BC -- </b><b>28 Bastion Square, Victoria BC. Cost is $6 - free for MMBC members and children under 12, especially if they like penguins. </b></div>
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Jay Ruzesky - Writerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04098750284045352513noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3018238076858556459.post-66469060120387523882013-04-17T10:07:00.001-07:002013-06-04T07:32:10.934-07:00<div style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 16px;">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvRcF_hD3eFLapJOt3MVgnHjZYyDG8H4pTzpQWKT4qCqmaQuZ2g6TxXgm4qnfnUta7wz_h3FFC4y1aHI6zNib-zRMyc0Zr6UZHv8atOfSJB-eQPQw_qVzd7PBJ05fbGCGnSOraXrYSqjSR/s1600/In+Antarctica.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvRcF_hD3eFLapJOt3MVgnHjZYyDG8H4pTzpQWKT4qCqmaQuZ2g6TxXgm4qnfnUta7wz_h3FFC4y1aHI6zNib-zRMyc0Zr6UZHv8atOfSJB-eQPQw_qVzd7PBJ05fbGCGnSOraXrYSqjSR/s320/In+Antarctica.jpg" width="320" /></a><span style="font-size: x-small;"><b> </b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><b><span style="font-size: large;">In Antarctica </span></b></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>has arrived!</b></span></div>
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Jay Ruzesky - Writerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04098750284045352513noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3018238076858556459.post-30609193446714496122013-03-26T11:52:00.001-07:002013-06-04T07:32:10.930-07:00<div style="text-align: center;">
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<a href="http://www.nightwoodeditions.com/title/InAntarctica" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8OyTkLYDqYDH9cO7FFMTN5yiSTRunrz0q_8XG4BiU5OTzAVsCiwYZoYvg3p1udj6iVXVIy71rQ3aoLJfCO4ZIMA9eN1NnLXA3rlOZlikp_eTUDW7jG1NLGjzsd1Nq-o20p25gIF6BVWH_/s200/In+Antarctica+-+Uncorrected+Cover.jpg" width="145" /></a></div>
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<b>Sunday, April 28th 4pm Fernwood Inn</b></div>
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<b>1302 Gladstone Ave. Victoria BC</b></div>
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<b>(with Dede Crane and Marita Dachsel)</b></div>
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<b>Saturday, May 25th 1pm 10 Old Books</b></div>
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<b>330 Duncan St., Duncan BC</b></div>
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<b>(with Carol Matthews)</b></div>
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<b>Wednesday, May 29th 7pm </b></div>
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<b>Maritime Museum of BC</b></div>
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<b>28 Bastion Square, Victoria BC</b></div>
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<b>(slide show and book launch)</b></div>
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<b>Here is a book trailer about In Antarctica:</b></div>
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Jay Ruzesky - Writerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04098750284045352513noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3018238076858556459.post-62082127203950081672013-03-12T07:23:00.001-07:002013-06-04T07:32:10.933-07:00At Home at the Edge of the World: Jay Ruzesky Shares Two Epic Voyages at Ben McNally's Travellers Series | Open Book: Toronto<a href="http://www.openbooktoronto.com/news/home_edge_world_jay_ruzesky_shares_two_epic_voyages_ben_mcnallys_travellers_series#.UT86Ntiq-kM.blogger">At Home at the Edge of the World: Jay Ruzesky Shares Two Epic Voyages at Ben McNally's Travellers Series | Open Book: Toronto</a><br />
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<span class="submitted submitted-story" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 0.9em;">Submitted by maeve on March 11, 2013 - 5:29pm</span></div>
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<a href="http://web.viu.ca/ruzeskyj/" rel="external" style="color: #25a3ca; outline: none; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><strong>Jay Ruzesky</strong></a> was fascinated by the diaries of Norwegian explorer <strong>Roald Amundsen</strong> from an early age. The Vancouver poet, author and teacher of English is a descendant of Amundsen, the first man to cross the Northwest Passage and reach the South Pole. Ruzesky spent much of his childhood pretending to be his famous ancestor, navigating the rough waters of his parents’ attic aboard the ships <em>Belgica</em>, <em>Gjoa</em> and<em>Fram</em>, but it wasn’t until he was an adult that he began to think about following in Amundsen's footsteps.</div>
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“I was interested in his role in the heroic age of adventure and wanted to be a part of it in my own way,” he says. In 2011, 100 years after Amundsen’s year-and-a-half-long voyage across land and sea, Ruzesky boarded the 71-metre research vessel <em>Polar Pioneer</em>, beginning the epic journey that inspired the writing of his new creative non-fiction memoir, <a href="http://www.nightwoodeditions.com/title/InAntarctica" rel="external" style="color: #25a3ca; outline: none; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><em>In Antarctica: An Amundsen Pilgrimage</em></a>.</div>
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Ruzesky will be reading from <em>In Antarctica</em> alongside authors <a href="http://www.readings.org/?q=biographies/matthew_goodman" rel="external" style="color: #25a3ca; outline: none; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><strong>Matthew Goodman</strong></a> (<a href="http://www.readings.org/?q=weekly/eighty_days" rel="external" style="color: #25a3ca; outline: none; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><em>Eighty Days: Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland's History-Making Race Around the World</em></a>) and <a href="http://www.readings.org/?q=biographies/iain_reid" rel="external" style="color: #25a3ca; outline: none; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><strong>Iain Reid</strong></a>(<a href="http://www.readings.org/?q=weekly/the_truth_about_luck" rel="external" style="color: #25a3ca; outline: none; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><em>The Truth About Luck: What I Learned on My Road Trip with Grandma</em></a>) as part of <a href="http://www.readings.org/?q=biographies/ben_mcnally_1" rel="external" style="color: #25a3ca; outline: none; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><strong>Ben McNally</strong></a>’s annual <a href="http://www.openbooktoronto.com/events/authors_harbourfront_presents_ben_mcnally_travellers_series" style="color: #25a3ca; outline: none; text-decoration: none;">Travellers Series</a> at Harbourfront Centre. The event, presented by Authors at Harbourfront Centre, celebrates new travel writing by North American authors.</div>
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<em>In Antarctica</em> tells both the story of Ruzesky’s expedition to the South Pole and that of his forefather. He traveled in relative comfort compared to Amundsen, but Ruzesky’s voyage still proved challenging, and took him, just as it did Amundsen, to the very edge of the world and the most isolated continent on the planet.</div>
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“It is like nowhere else on earth and it feels very remote,” he reminisces. “It's more like going to the moon than anything else. There is no infrastructure. No planes fly overhead, there are no wires, no cell towers. You have to cross 1000 kilometres of very nasty ocean to reach it. What surprised me is the way I felt belonging there. Somehow I felt at home in that landscape and I'm still thinking about what that means. How is it that I feel at home when I am so thoroughly away from the world as I know it? In a way, that was a spiritual awakening — a feeling of getting deeper into my essential self than I had before.”</div>
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Ruzesky's voyage to Antarctica took him through Canada, Norway, Brazil, Chile and Argentina, but prior to this adventure, he’d travelled extensively. He notes that travel isn’t important to everyone, but that part of what appeals to him is the vulnerability one feels when they find themselves in a new place for the first time.</div>
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“It helps us become children again, and to see like children — wide-eyed and full of wonder,” Ruzesky offers. “If there is value in travel, surely that is it. Travel takes us out of our comfort and complacency and, in opening our eyes to difference, urges us to reconsider our own lives, values and wants.”</div>
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When asked where he’d like to head next, Ruzesky names more of Amundsen’s turf: the far reaches of the Arctic Circle. “I'm working on a way to get up close and personal with some polar bears,” he says. “Amundsen got to the North Pole in 1926, so that gives me lots of time to make plans.”</div>
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Ben Mcnally hosts the Travellers Series on Wednesday, March 13. Tickets are $10 to the general public and free for supporters, students and youth 25 and under with ID. To reserve a seat, please call <a href="tel://1-416-973-4000" style="color: #25a3ca; outline: none; text-decoration: none;">416-973-4000</a> or visit the online <a href="http://tickets.harbourfrontcentre.com/calendar/view.aspx?id=19870" rel="external" style="color: #25a3ca; outline: none; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">box office</a>. For more information on Authors at Harbourfront Centre's weekly event series, check out their <a href="http://www.readings.org/" rel="external" style="color: #25a3ca; outline: none; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">website</a>.</div>
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Jay Ruzesky - Writerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04098750284045352513noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3018238076858556459.post-9784969700687035102013-03-07T19:14:00.000-08:002013-06-04T07:32:10.936-07:00<br />
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Five Questions with…Jay Ruzesky</h1>
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<strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="http://internationalfestivalofauthors.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/ruzesky-jay-c-scott-ruzesky-cropped.jpg" style="border: 0px; color: #b12930; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><img alt="Ruzesky, Jay (c) Scott Ruzesky (cropped)" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-1725" height="207" src="http://internationalfestivalofauthors.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/ruzesky-jay-c-scott-ruzesky-cropped.jpg?w=160&h=207" style="border: 0px; display: inline; float: right; height: auto; margin-left: 1.615em; margin-top: 0.5em; max-width: 100%;" width="160" /></a></strong><br />
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<b>Authors at Harbourfront Toronto - March 13, 2013</b></h3>
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<span style="color: #111111; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><span style="line-height: 20px;">http://internationalfestivalofauthors.wordpress.com/2013/03/04/five-questions-with-jay-ruzesky/</span></span></div>
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Adventurer and <em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">In Antarctica</em> author Jay Ruzesky answered our five questions.</div>
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<strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">IFOA</strong>: You’ve been interested in Roald Amundsen’s adventures since boyhood. How did you originally stumble upon his stories?</div>
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<strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Ruzesky</strong>: I am an Amundsen through maternal lines, and he is our family’s claim to fame. He visited my mother’s farm and gave my great grandfather a compass which my mom used for show and tell in school, so I was probably imagining his adventures before most kids hear about Peter Pan.</div>
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<strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">IFOA</strong>: What’s one thing you and Amundsen have in common, and one way in which you are different?</div>
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<strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Ruzesky</strong>: We have in common a feeling of belonging in the polar regions. I don’t know what it says about me that I felt at home in Antarctica (a place as geographically hostile to humans as you can get), but I did. A difference is that I am nowhere near as tough as he was. He skied into -50 degree winds for days in a row, and, with his crew, hauled tons of supplies up a glacier to the Antarctic plateau. I wouldn’t have the endurance.</div>
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<strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">IFOA</strong>: What’s your favourite thing about travelling by water?</div>
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<strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Ruzesky</strong>: Maybe it’s the mariner’s genes I have—I don’t get seasick even in rough water. No doubt that was an advantage in Antarctica.</div>
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<strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">IFOA</strong>: Who is your favourite poet?</div>
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<strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Ruzesky</strong>: Depends on the hour and the day: Sharon Olds, P.K. Page, Michael Ondaatje, Don Coles, and bp Nichol.</div>
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<strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">IFOA</strong>: Finish this sentence: Next time I’ll bring…</div>
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<strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Ruzesky</strong>: I’ll bring a good portable audio recorder. I didn’t want to see Antarctica only through a lens, so I thought long and hard about it and then left my film equipment at home. I brought a small digital camera and got some quite good photos with that. What I had not thought enough about is what a powerful aural landscape Antarctica is. There are no planes flying overhead, no trucks on a far highway. There is only the sound of a whale spout way in the distance—like someone catching their breath; or the noise of 20,000 chinstrap penguins raising a flap. Those are sounds I wish I would have been able to record.</div>
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<strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Ruzesky will appear at Authors at Harbourfront Centre as part of the <a href="http://www.readings.org/?q=weekly/ben_mcnally_travellers_series" style="border: 0px; color: #b12930; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">Ben McNally Travellers Series</a> on March 13.</strong></div>
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Jay Ruzesky - Writerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04098750284045352513noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3018238076858556459.post-24374701556214474412012-11-03T10:50:00.000-07:002013-06-04T07:32:10.929-07:00Well, the bad news is that I'm not going to have the publishing adventure I thought I might. In the process of thinking through publishing IN ANTARCTICA, I went looking for a publisher who could help me with distribution. I got in touch with Howard White at <a href="http://www.harbourpublishing.com/">Harbour Publishing</a>, but instead of talking about a distribution deal, he asked to see the manuscript and now <a href="http://www.nightwoodeditions.com/">Nightwood Editions</a>, an imprint of Harbour, is going to publish the book this coming spring. <br />
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It will be its own big adventure -- there is a big exhibit at the Royal BC Museum called <a href="http://www.royalbcmuseum.bc.ca/race_to_the_end_of_the_earth/default.aspx">Race to the End of the Eart</a>h which will be on from May until October so I'm hoping to do all I can to get this book out there. The show looks like it will be fabulous and I'm not above dressing up penguin-like to flog books.<br />
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For me, the gift is that I get to put all my energy into rewriting and making the best book I can over the next few months and that's an adventure I'm up for.<br />
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Stay tuned for updates. Jay Ruzesky - Writerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04098750284045352513noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3018238076858556459.post-34956245366372914682012-04-02T14:24:00.001-07:002012-04-02T14:25:54.709-07:00Leaving Antarctica<br />
December 28, 2011<br />
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As we have travelled north from the
Antarctic Circle, we have seen more evidence of humanity. At
Cuverville Island, two sailboats were moored in the bay. They were
unlikely and vulnerable there anchored among icebergs. They looked,
in fact, out of place. Antarctic glaciers make just about anything
seem puny.
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On Deception Island yesterday we
wandered around a haunted whaling-turned-research station whose human
inhabitants were chased away not by ice, but by a violent volcano.
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This morning we are bound for King
George Island—our last stop. I'm on the bridge early, wanting to
be as awake as I can be for my last few hours in Antarctica. The
plan was for a quick breakfast after which we would go ashore and
walk up to the airstrip operated by the Chilean government, and we
would fly out to Punta Arenas. But Antarctica doesn't want to let us
go. There is a strong gale blowing across the tip of South America
and the pilot has decided it is unsafe to take off. It is a two hour
trip from Punta Arenas so they will let us know by radio when the
plane is able to leave. In the meantime, we'll have a chance to
explore this active research station.
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoG42i_4IEuNdc-qpeIdIrTq4_WFuajpJV7jQxpR3GXgtX2boJhxVuV7epJULhQfZGI9KKQzUquuxRkHloA3Bnr5BtZu4hHdMrxxyu4M15aZfSPMXtk6JkBeWTXyFgRGrvSScGU4O3RoOH/s1600/Antarctica+672.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoG42i_4IEuNdc-qpeIdIrTq4_WFuajpJV7jQxpR3GXgtX2boJhxVuV7epJULhQfZGI9KKQzUquuxRkHloA3Bnr5BtZu4hHdMrxxyu4M15aZfSPMXtk6JkBeWTXyFgRGrvSScGU4O3RoOH/s400/Antarctica+672.jpg" width="300" /></a>In fact, King George Island is home to
several research stations. In order to belong to the Antarctic
Treaty Group, a country has to maintain a presence in Antarctica and
even though King George Island is in the South Shetlands and has a
sub-Antarctic climate, it counts. So there is a Russian station
alongside a Chilean station, and everybody else has their toes
planted here too: Argentina, Brazil, China, Ecuador, South Korea,
Peru, Poland, and Uruguay. Provisioning is easier here than in other
places because the airfield is of size and can land relatively large
planes on its gravel tarmac.
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It's cold and misty. A skua clutches
an anchor hold on the bow and looks hopefully toward me. This is a
much more domesticated bird than we have seen further south. It must
have habituated to life around the research station and it knows that
sooner or later, humans mean food. The wind is strong and there is a
little snow in the air although I'm uncertain if it is new snow or if
it is blowing off the island. Everything we do today happens with a
sense of finality. We gear up with coats, boots, and warm gloves; we
decontaminate our footwear in the troughs on deck; and we climb down
the ladder and into the zodiacs to go ashore.
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Robyn is driving our boat and as she
cuts the motor to drift us up onto the gravel shore and another sound
fills the silence. It is a low humming at first, but quickly builds
to a coughing roar and I realize it is only unfamiliar because it is
a sound I haven't heard in a while – a Toyota pickup truck. One of
the scientists from the base has come to welcome us.
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In 2004, an Orthodox Church went up on
a hill above Bellingshausen Station. It was built in Russia out of
Siberian Pine then taken apart and shipped here to be reassembled.
It is one of the star attractions of the island and we haven't been
ashore long when the priest bursts out of his trailer to greet us.
He is wearing a frock and a long open coat which he tries to gather
around himself with one hand, hauntingly like the image of a flasher
on the subway. He's using the other limb to gesture his welcome and
to shake hands. Hairy legs poke out under his frock. His long beard
blows sideways in the wind. I join the line to follow him up the
track to the church. From the top of the hill and in the grey light
and bad weather, the research base looks desolate. There is a muddy
river flowing through the center of it which roughly delineates the
Russian and Chilean buildings that share the space. In winter, snow
would cover the ground and make it brighter and less-dirt-splashed,
but at the moment Collins Harbour could as easily be a lake in the
Northern Alberta tar sands. The priest struggles with the heavy wood
door and when he opens it, God pours out. There is a blast of light
and those at the front of the line begin to glow. The church is so
small that we go in ten at a time and when it is my turn, I see where
the light comes from. There is a gold screen of panels which holds
paintings of Mary and several Saints. There is also an upper section
showing Jesus and the fourteen Apostles.
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiT0FmhvhNuPigVRJ1DQQli4jpHlTBtMzo4jo0lEVU2pb53vTRXXR6p_AcmJYJLK7goswr43HVDtdb_7cMoIJHyOjMGj81-0c6TPaz7iNaxGb0G0_rek2ZClVj_pQOKRkRGRJJR9KGpTjsB/s1600/DSCN1848.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiT0FmhvhNuPigVRJ1DQQli4jpHlTBtMzo4jo0lEVU2pb53vTRXXR6p_AcmJYJLK7goswr43HVDtdb_7cMoIJHyOjMGj81-0c6TPaz7iNaxGb0G0_rek2ZClVj_pQOKRkRGRJJR9KGpTjsB/s400/DSCN1848.JPG" width="400" /></a></div>
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I have a strong sense of spirituality
that comes from my experience with the broadly unexplainable wonders
that are life on earth as a human being, but that sensibility isn't
connected to any particular religion. I understand the power of
ritual and yet these shining relics of veneration seem out of place
here. I have kayaked through castellated icebergs, I have communed
with penguins, I have caressed thousands-year-old ice and allowed the
heat of my fingers to melt it. In Antarctica you have to come to
terms with immensity. The ice at the Pole is three kilometers thick
and it is a desert where snow rarely falls. That fact alone says
something about our how Antarctica shows us time. This place is so
unlike anywhere else on the planet and is so hostile to human life
that coming to Antarctica is as close to travelling to another planet
as we can get. So far anyway. Dante Allegheri's Hell is a place of
smoking sand and burning rain, and of pools of boiling blood in which
the damned must swim. What is the opposite? If you woke up suddenly
in Antarctica with no idea how you got here, I suspect you'd think
you were in Heaven. No lutes though.
</div>
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<br /></div>
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We find out that the plane has left
Chile and is on the way. Down at the beach, three penguins line up:
an Adelie, a gentoo, and a chinstrap and as they flap and preen, it
is as if they have come ashore to wave us off.
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<br /></div>
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<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
It is a 1.5 kilometer hike up the road
to the airstrip and as I make the walk, I already feel absence. I
will be leaving behind this community of shipmates, and I'll also be
leaving something more.
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<br /></div>
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As we're making the walk, the plane, a
BAe-146 touches down and taxis toward a flat open space. By the time
we arrive, the disembarking passengers have been herded into a group.
They're frantically zipping up winter coats and putting on gloves.
We are smug veterans now, and we packed away our cold weather gear.
In a few hours we'll be in Punta Arenas and people will be wearing
summer clothes. We wait to board while the air crew refuel the
plane with a barrel of kerosene and a hand pump, and then we climb up
and fly away and that's it. We rise into the sky and I catch a last
glimpse of King George Island before it disappears under the clouds.
</div>
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<br /></div>
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At the hotel in Punta Arenas, there is
an orange pickup truck parked out front with a sledge strapped to the
roof. The tires are size of hot tubs, and painted on the side it
says “expeditiontothesouthpole.com” so I learn that this truck
set a world record by driving to the South Pole in a day and a half.
Had I made it all the way to my goal, I would have been standing at
90 degrees south when this thing arrived and would have had to try to
come to terms with it invading what I have come to think of as a
sacred space. It's a sign that the “real world” whatever that
is, can not be escaped. And we shouldn't want to escape it. We
should strive to live in it, to see more of it, the be the stewards
of the world as we know it.</div>
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<br /></div>Jay Ruzesky - Writerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04098750284045352513noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3018238076858556459.post-6092065090208149122012-03-07T11:30:00.001-08:002012-03-19T08:02:17.176-07:00Deception Island<br />
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December 28, 2011</div>
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<br /></div>
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People suffer in the polar regions.
Anyone who goes to the far north or the far south knows before they
get there that there will be challenges. Even with modern equipment
there are hazards; frost-bitten noses, fingers, and toes are still
common. And yet many adventurers come <i>because</i><span style="font-style: normal;">
of the challenges, and not only are they prepared to suffer, they
expect to. </span>
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<br /></div>
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Amundsen became
fascinated with polar exploration partly through his reading, as a
teenager, about Franklin's Coppermine Expedition in 1819. Franklin's
account, says Amundsen, thrilled him as nothing he had ever read
before – for three weeks the men struggled to keep going in
horrible snow storms with nothing to eat except lichen until they
were “reduced to eating their own boot leather to keep themselves
alive.” Even as an adult in his fifties, Amundsen admitted that
“the thing in Sir. John's narrative that appealed to me most
strongly was the sufferings he and his men endured. A strange
ambition burned within me to endure those same sufferings.”
</div>
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<br /></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoA-2snyiO-V8K_z5Yjn1ORZZ2IpkgpQSDs4UW2AsJ6z5uXwAbWR3qqqv5xFLFWimdshzeGYOxtbP8m5ytPC-isZmWfviHNkdDBtXmhgi9lOZtYRta-C97a7mfkp8_9RA9QHN93tte9Xxc/s1600/Antarctica+287.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoA-2snyiO-V8K_z5Yjn1ORZZ2IpkgpQSDs4UW2AsJ6z5uXwAbWR3qqqv5xFLFWimdshzeGYOxtbP8m5ytPC-isZmWfviHNkdDBtXmhgi9lOZtYRta-C97a7mfkp8_9RA9QHN93tte9Xxc/s400/Antarctica+287.JPG" width="400" /></a> So for those souls
aboard Polar Pioneer feeling that we have not suffered yet, the sea
graciously provides. We do not collapse under the strain of
man-hauling sledges, we do not freeze our extremities, and we do not
starve, but we do find the rough seas that we escaped in the Drake
Passage and several previously unscathed passengers are bruised,
battered or green with sea-sickness. Overnight, we sail from the
relatively sheltered waters in the lee of Brabant Island into the
more open water of the Bransfield Strait on a course for Deception
Island in the South Shetlands.
</div>
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<br /></div>
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I wake up at two
in the morning and hear my brother Scott saying, in his half sleep,
the word “ridiculous” over and over. The ship rolls and pitches
wildly and his bow-to-stern oriented bunk threatens to roll him off
the edge of his mattress. I once again congratulate myself on
choosing the port-to-starboard bunk because although I am rocking
back and forth, I am not being thrown out of bed. Scott seems less
impressed with my choice and I think about offering to trade and then
think better of it. I should keep myself from getting seasick so I
can help him out later, I reason silently. Later Gary suggests
stuffing a pillow under the side of the mattress to keep from getting
rolled out of bed, but as it is far too late by then, Scott seems not
too impressed with the advice. I doze a little from two until about
four-thirty in the morning and then decide that I might feel a little
less of the ship's tossing if I am on the bridge and can see what is
happening.
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<br /></div>
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It isn't easy to
climb down to the galley to make tea and is harder to climb three
floors up to the bridge with one hand for the rails and one for the
tea mug, but I take it slow and get myself there with only a moderate
number of bumps. If I was on land, this ladder would be set on a
trampoline on the back of a flatbed truck travelling around a hairpin
highway and I wouldn't even think about climbing it, but at sea one
doesn't make such comparisons.
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<br /></div>
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It is the only
time the ship slams into some weather. The sky is light and the sun
is even shining through in places when I get to the bridge, but the
wind is strong, gusting from the northwest and the waves are so big
that when they burst over the bow, they wash the entire deck and
often splash two floors up to the windows on the bridge.
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<br /></div>
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Half of the
passengers are missing at breakfast, preferring to ride it out with
empty stomachs although I note that some of the people who were
seasick in the relative calm that was the Drake are now eating
oatmeal despite rough seas. Thus we adapt.
</div>
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</div>
<br />
When we get to
Deception Island the winds are still strong and it is too rough to
attempt a landing so the ship motors slowly along the shore to Bailey
Head while we take care of a few departure details. Tomorrow we sail
for King George Island and leave the ship, so this down time is our
chance to exchange email addresses, photos, and settle accounts.<br />
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<span style="font-style: normal;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-style: normal;"> After
lunch, Gary decides that we can risk a landing. Bailey Head is
always a challenge and many expeditions don't get the chance to land
here. The sea is often rough and it's a tense “wet” landing.
The beach is steep and rocky and the waves curl and break just at the
shore so landing requires an experienced zodiac driver who can bring
the boat close enough to shore that passengers can get out without
the craft being swamped by breaking waves from behind. It takes ten
trips in the zodiacs and as I watch the operation I see members of
the Russian crew up to their armpits in the Antarctic water as they
struggle to keep the boats from being washed over, but all goes well
and before long the entire entourage is ashore. </span>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqMgNMvXC4pU2Mm_hSOjFzYT0A2rI3oQfIO-hs-tsT0OhKzax4pu4kUsgmkbXnV-rrHUjseO3QLFIi2HDJWanxwZGz0cr-Oqg_4eDKo2XRvTaErclfwoSQJwVGZWYv4lgjyiVjzIguOLio/s1600/Antarctica+364.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqMgNMvXC4pU2Mm_hSOjFzYT0A2rI3oQfIO-hs-tsT0OhKzax4pu4kUsgmkbXnV-rrHUjseO3QLFIi2HDJWanxwZGz0cr-Oqg_4eDKo2XRvTaErclfwoSQJwVGZWYv4lgjyiVjzIguOLio/s400/Antarctica+364.JPG" width="300" /></a> Bailey Head is
home to one of the largest chinstrap penguin colonies anywhere.
There are between 80,000 and 100,000 nesting penguins here and since
the have an average of two eggs each and it is the height of the
season, there are maybe 300,000 penguins on this edge of the island
right now. The melting glaciers create a stream from the heights of
the island to the sea and this bed is also the highway from the ocean
to the furthest reaches of the colony. I stand by as a freeway of
penguins travels to and from the breaking waves in lane after lane of
determination. It's like being up against the wall at Grand Central
Station at rush hour and the flow of birds is fascinating.
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<br /></div>
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I hike up one of
the small peaks and when I get to the summit, I am standing on the
podium of a huge Greek amphitheatre of penguins that stretches so far
that the tuxedoed audience looks more like snow than individual birds
in nests.
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<br /></div>
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I have not yet
been troubled by the smell of penguin colonies, but this one is a
test. The scent is strong and distinctive. They eat mostly krill
but the waft of the penguin colony is less maritime and, to my nose
anyway, more of a smell of something vaguely burnt.
</div>
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Getting back in
the zodiacs and aboard the ship is as impressive as the landing in
the first place and once we're all accounted for and tagged up, the
captain brings the ship about to make an attempt at Neptune's
Bellows.</div>
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<br /></div>
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Deception Island
is a volcano and the caldera is flooded by the sea so that this
island is one of a very few places on earth that one can sail into an
active caldera. The narrows are the entrance and not only is the
passage narrow, but there is a large rock like a spike or a tooth in
the middle of the narrows that is only eight meters below the surface
waiting to tear a hole in an unsuspecting ship. Despite the still
high winds, the captain decides the passage is worth an attempt and
no one speaks as the crew slowly manoeuvres the Polar Pioneer past
Deception Islands' portals.
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<br /></div>
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The ship anchors
in Whalers' Bay and the zodiacs are lowered again but this time the
landing is uneventful. The beach inside the caldera is one of the
most sheltered bays in Antarctica and has been a refuge for sealers
and whalers since the early nineteenth-century.
</div>
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<br /></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNFLNoKsH7yDK7biGBjpx30QkuATQlszcUjv7X2YDi2_OzaNfYNQaLFrjqzWi2FqB-Wi8mYsVleLBVHnyI07lv5rE247JuwI20RAtXqF9a88eQ6yW4JQ-9Qh1S96mfCZoenuj9qDC2ustA/s1600/%3Cuntitled%3E+52.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNFLNoKsH7yDK7biGBjpx30QkuATQlszcUjv7X2YDi2_OzaNfYNQaLFrjqzWi2FqB-Wi8mYsVleLBVHnyI07lv5rE247JuwI20RAtXqF9a88eQ6yW4JQ-9Qh1S96mfCZoenuj9qDC2ustA/s400/%3Cuntitled%3E+52.jpg" width="300" /></a> Deception Island
is a haunted place. There are the remains of a whale rendering
factory here – great rusted refinery tanks left behind as whale oil
became less valuable, but not before the corpses of thousands of
animals were piled here. The volcano erupted violently in 1968 and
1969 and the large research stations that moved into the space the
whalers left behind had to be abandoned as well.
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<br /></div>
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The beach is
volcanic. Black sand steams in the cool air. I wander around the
rotted buildings feeling a kind of sadness and judgement as I think
about the whalers as marauders pillaging the sea. But it may be that
what I'm really feeling is the human presence here in the form of
abandoned buildings, and also the realization that soon I will be
going back to the world of news reports and politics, of oil spills
and corporate power. It may be that it's not so much what happened
in the past that I'm finding vaguely depressing, it's the fact that
I'll again have to think about what's happening now in what some
people so wrongly refer to as “the real world.” </div>Jay Ruzesky - Writerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04098750284045352513noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3018238076858556459.post-58938653399404363922012-02-22T14:13:00.000-08:002012-03-06T10:38:04.021-08:00Neko Harbour and Two Hummock Island<br />
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December 26<sup>th</sup>, 2011</div>
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I'm thinking about how quickly anything
in life can become “normal.” You have or you don't have, you're
with someone or you're not, it's raining and three degrees or it's
sunny and thirty. You get up to the alarm clock and go to work or
you wake up and put on your gear to go kayaking among icebergs.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
A week exploring Antarctica and being
here feels normal. Last night was Christmas night and because we
feasted in the afternoon, dinner was low key – soup and fresh
bread.
</div>
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<br /></div>
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Before turning in for the night, I
found some space alone at the bow of the ship, looking out at
ice-covered islands, icebergs, and glaciers along the edge of the
peninsula. I was trying to name the feeling I had. Melancholy? I
was missing my family and aware that they were having a very
different Christmas night without me back in Canada. But no, not
melancholy. I wasn't sad or lonesome, wasn't happy or joyful either.
</div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
What I felt was belonging. I felt at
home and it surprised me that I would feel like that. Who would feel
at home in Antarctica where humans have not, historically, lived?
What kind of person feels at peace in a place that is almost utterly
inhospitable to all forms of life, let alone people?
</div>
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<br /></div>
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And yet there I was in my toque (a
word unfamiliar to my Auzzie and UK shipmates), winter coat, boots
and gloves, dressed the same way as I had been on so many mornings
growing up in Winnipeg and Thunder Bay and Saskatoon and Calgary to
go to school or go out to play on days when the wind-chill factor was
minus thirty and skin would freeze in minutes. Being in the cold is
normal for me, but it is more than that. Somehow the landscape seems
familiar. Could be thirty years reading about Antarctica. Just
maybe.
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<br /></div>
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At Neko Harbour we have a quick
breakfast and gather gear for the kayaks. The bay is glass-calm but
full of ice so we have to be carful when we launch. A current pulls
our boat toward the stern of the ship and we have to work to paddle
out of the way of the propeller which is running in case the ship has
to maneuver away from an iceberg heading toward it. Most sailors
need only worry about reefs and running their ships into rocks.
Antarctic mariners have to worry about icebergs running into <i>them</i>.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
We spend the morning on a fabulous
circuit around Neko Bay, past a parade of gentoo penguins on a
iceberg, past a sleeping crabeater seal on another floe, and along
the edge of a magically blue glacier that calves into the sea now and
then. We take a pause to stop and to try to do nothing but listen
for a few minutes. It is an exercise in realizing where we are and
later some of the paddlers will say this is their favourite moment of
the expedition. It is a silence that would be hard to find back in
that other world we come from.
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<iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.blogger.com/video.g?token=AD6v5dw8EJOceqNqngJhkmfgMr9_uwKkNVnMF8bcymLR6W5dzqcohAbuB_PMJhY6UTbL0pqRy02vn2TkdsLDZy2EiA' class='b-hbp-video b-uploaded' frameborder='0'></iframe><br />
We've seen it all before, of course:
ice like blue steel, penguins preening in the snow, whales surfacing
to blow, and glaciers heaving off great chunks of themselves, but I
think this would never get old for me. I think I could spend years
with penguins and every day would be a new day. I think I could
paddle the same bay weeks in a row and it would be different every
time.</div>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
We land on the continent again and
walk among the penguins, comic in our own funny suits. A Waddell
seal has crawled fifty meters up the shore and sleeps so deeply that
I'm sure I could lift its flipper and tickle it without a response.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
We paddle back to the ship and load
the kayaks. Though Antarctica is often represented in photos as a
contrast of white and blue in bright shining sun, it is more often
grey, overcast and foggy or stormy. But you can't take pictures in
the fog so the impression of Antarctica becomes unrealistic. What we
have not yet had on this voyage is a landing while the sun is out. I
have made a very conscious decision to see Antarctica through my eyes
more often than through a lens, but the photographer in me would like
to photograph penguins in the soft afternoon sunlight. However, that
doesn't look likely. For a few hours in the afternoon, we sail up
the Gerlache Strait through cloud and even a little light snow,
heading for Hydrurga Rocks and Two Hummock Island.
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On our way across the Drake Passage, I
told a few people that my brother and I are Amundsens. Robyn said,
“Ah, I had no idea we had Antarctic royalty on board.” Amundsen
may have had his problems later in life but Antarctic folks
understand the skill of his accomplishments in the Polar regions.
When Gary heard about our heritage, he said we'd have to go someplace
special and that's where we're headed. We've been sailing in the
same waters Amundsen was in as a twenty-five year old mat on the
<i>Belgica</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> in 1897</span>. “He
landed at Two Hummock Island,” Gary tells me, “and climbed up to
test his skis and so became the first person to ski in Antarctica.”
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Hydrurga Rocks is a collection of
rocks just off Two Hummock Island named after “Hydrurga leptonyx”
which is the Latin name for the Leopard seal. It is a tiny island
but is home to a chinstrap penguin colony and there is a sheltered
bay big enough for a zodiac to land easily. We anchor in the strait
and load into the inflatables. The clouds are so low now that I
can't see the rocks until we're within a hundred meters of them. We
make land and wander over the rocks among the penguins. A few
Weddell seals have also humped their way over the rocks to the
patches of snow higher up and they snore like middle-aged men. It
begins to snow steadily and the clouds pack themselves in just a
little tighter. My camera isn't weatherproof enough for this so it
looks like I won't get any photos at all. Not only that but I
haven't even had a glimpse of the peaks Gary tells me are across a
short stretch of water—the peaks that Amundsen skied down over a
hundred years ago.
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If the <i>only</i><span style="font-style: normal;">
pleasure to be had this afternoon is to watch penguins waddle to and
from their nests, then that's ok. I'll treasure the time anyhow. </span>
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<span style="font-style: normal;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEje-5RDOZ1JqpQoUuifs0ct7CFW4dFnwSI51-e1DG7l47rbJc7KzbEtY8gUYHz2ZP-1gmLHTrGG-v4izsj6xPJQWhEhTSDWArSB6daKfGtPL5aXdEAU4ox7kPinBEH0jq5big8QhOV_rqMu/s1600/Antarctica+236.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEje-5RDOZ1JqpQoUuifs0ct7CFW4dFnwSI51-e1DG7l47rbJc7KzbEtY8gUYHz2ZP-1gmLHTrGG-v4izsj6xPJQWhEhTSDWArSB6daKfGtPL5aXdEAU4ox7kPinBEH0jq5big8QhOV_rqMu/s400/Antarctica+236.jpg" width="400" /></a><span style="font-style: normal;"> As I'm looking across to where the mystical mountains are on Two
Hummock Island, a little window opens high up in my line of sight.
At first I'm not sure whether I can, in fact, see snow on a peak or
if it's an illusion of cloud. Yes, it's snow and that's land. I
decide it needs to be documented so I get my camera out and snap some
quick pictures before the clouds close back in. </span>
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<span style="font-style: normal;"> But
they don't close in. Instead, it stops snowing and the clouds lift
so fast it's as though someone just removed a tarp from the sky. The
clouds simply disappear and are replaced by deep blue sky and bright
sun. I keep the camera out and go photo crazy in case the light
changes again just as quickly. I shoot Two Hummock Island from every
vantage point I can find, I get penguins from a hundred angles, I
pose by the snoozing seals and have other people photograph me. It
heats up fast and I have to peel off layers. I'm sweating as I run
around the rocks capturing everything I can on film. </span>
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<br /></div>
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And
now the sun is beginning to go down and the last zodiac is about to
leave. I'm not the only one who has been going paparazzi on Hydrurga
Rocks. Andrew, who is probably the most tech-crazy passenger is
getting a little more footage with his iPhone and Craig, an “amateur”
photographer with impressive skills and a treasure chest of equipment
is still snapping away as well. “Penguin silhouette” I say to
them as we're making our way back to the last boat, and all three of
us turn and fire.</div>
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<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"><br /></span></div>
</div>
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<div style="text-align: left;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-wy5y5UJBLcHwTfkUtfDZbtUKuZjUJQFcGkhQrg6df5cSq0Rr3TIvUiZlQkwkaKRmBiSqFG4EFqGiP4xiUVeMMxoOlNBTk8TOZagZ3AHt5qTarEDW4PSIiXTmbA15fyDLVqA3a-Lupi0N/s1600/Antarctica+249.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="183" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-wy5y5UJBLcHwTfkUtfDZbtUKuZjUJQFcGkhQrg6df5cSq0Rr3TIvUiZlQkwkaKRmBiSqFG4EFqGiP4xiUVeMMxoOlNBTk8TOZagZ3AHt5qTarEDW4PSIiXTmbA15fyDLVqA3a-Lupi0N/s400/Antarctica+249.jpg" width="400" /></a><span style="font-style: normal;"> Almost
as soon as we're in the zodiac, the clouds come back and by the time
we're heading for the Polar Pioneer, I can not longer see Two
Hummocks and then I loose Hydrurga Rocks in the fog. </span>
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<span style="font-style: normal;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-style: normal;"> We
swing by an iceberg where a young leopard seal is tormenting anxious
penguins who look down from the heights of ice to see the predator
circling. The seal is curious about the curious humans and lifts
himself out of the water way too close to the edge of one of the
boats. The zodiac lists to starboard as its passengers shift
suddenly to one side. </span>
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<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Back on board, I spend an hour
flipping through the three hundred new images on my camera and I'm
still a little stunned by the coming--and going--of the light. I
don't know what the gods look like, but I know they smiled on us this
afternoon. </div>Jay Ruzesky - Writerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04098750284045352513noreply@blogger.com2