Monday Morning Required Reading. I should begin with apologies for my hiatus. I just moved, and so my life was in boxes and chaotic and internet-less for a substantial period of time. And when you combine moving and job hunting and thesis writing and grant applications and choosing a PhD program and that pesky need for a social life, I somehow managed to be completely absent from blogging for quite a while. I think I have returned to some semblance of normalcy though. Or, at least, I am attempting to establish some kind of routine for myself so that my life doesn't spiral into complete madness. Thus my return to this delightful forum.

CBC announced the finalists for its Poetry Prize today, and to my delight a work by Stephanie Bolster is on the list. Last semester I took a class on ekphrastic poetry, and this particular piece by Bolster is an example of just that. (In case you don't know what ekphrastic poetry is - hey, I didn't until I took the class - it is basically poetry that is based on or responding to visual art in some form.) Working with photos taken by Robert Polidori after Hurricane Katrina, Bolster has crafted a poem that is deeply moving. I also find the way that she addresses issues surrounding photography as art fascinating. So, here's Stephanie Bolster's "Long Exposure":

The snapshot is of a moment that will never occur again, and the long exposure is of a moment that never occurred to begin with.
                               -- Robert Polidori, paraphrasing Dieter Appelt




He didn't move the dress.
Moved himself to make the dress
the centre of regret.

He saw it, so we see.




The world in the form of a storm
sent them out of the room.
They ran for their lives. They ran
with their lives. They lost
their lives or left their lives
to fill with water and wind
or peel from the walls.

What they think of the room, if
they think of it, if they have lived
to think of it, doesn't look like
this. Just ordinary
voices, TV, coffee.

[KEEP READING]

We carry the futile hope that by attempting to represent experience, we'll capture what's there, even if it's hidden; that we will somehow be able to render the invisible visible, like the painter who learns the geology of a landscape before he attempts to paint it.

This latent knowledge enters the poem mysteriously and is received by the reader just as mysteriously. Often such "knowledge" feels like memory, the way love often feels like memory; as if the poem ouches the body just where an experience is carried, autonomic, at a depth beyond language, unknown until named. Just as light or certain weather is inseparable from qualities of emotion. Parts of our selves are exposed, and like the latent image on film, develop; silver bromide of knowledge darkening. A poem can give us night vision; getting used to the dark we begin to make things out. The invisible rendered visible; breath on glass.

The poem is poised between knowing and mystery; for who can ever explain the answering of the body to experience?

-- Anne Michaels, "Cleopatra's Love"