Peggy's Cove

Hey all. I'm going to try to include about 5 poems in my creative project, so I'm going to use this space to sketch out ideas/drafts. As I mentioned in class, this is related to a year I spent travelling and working in Alaska and eastern Canada when I was 20. I'm not sure yet how I will incorporate research/external sources. This is also Prompt #1 (I think).

Peggy's Cove

We meet at one in the afternoon to drive to Peggy's Cove,
a tiny fishing village on the northeastern edge of Nova Scotia.
The day is bright and crisp, early in fall.
The blue sky pounds through my temples.
Dry cherry and mustard-brown leaves scatter the steps
outside the Heritage House Hostel, in downtown Halifax,
our home this week and maybe next.
As we make small talk, getting to know our weekend companions,
our breath draws cloud-rings in the air.
"Hi, my name is Marc." I can be anyone, and you
too. Anxious smiles and cold hands.
Today, a new country to discover.

Louis and Lynda, proprietors, organize road-trips
Bi-weekly excursions.
Sometimes just to a park on the other side of the city.
Always a rush to the clipboard,
but I know
the time it appears, outside the kitchen door, Sunday evenings.
I wait silently.
We can't resist.
Fools for a new piece of land.
I've been here two months now. Each day people coming
in and out.

On the T.V, the Leafs are losing to Montreal.
Louis says there is a storm warning but chuckles
touching his round belly. "You'll never make it
to Peggy's if you wait for calm weather." Lynda stares
absently at the screen. Two dozen people around the long couches
with beer and popcorn. Domi scores and a cheer erupts,
mingled with a few lonely boos. A man with a shaggy blonde beard
waves a Leafs flag.
"Bring an extra pair of socks,"
Lynda says finally, a thin smile, her eyes not moving from the game.

Haven't been to P.E.I yet. Meaning to go.
Louis says maybe November. Hoping this trip
better than last.

Labrador wasn't so good. 6 days might have been
overly ambitious, looking back.
Louis can admit as much
now. We spent the morning climbing in the damp woods of
Grand Hermine Park.
Mid-afternoon, a middle-aged woman
had a nervous breakdown while climbing a rocky waterfall.
She was wearing a shirt that said "Life's a beach and then you die."
Earlier that day, I had talked to her.
Jill, I think
her name was. She'd said she'd left her family,
husband and two kids a year before.
Had been travelling ever since.
"Why did you do it?" I asked. She said her husband
was a first-class jerk and her boys were college-age
(my oldest looks just like you, she said, touching my chin lightly)
She said she had forgotten who she was.
The kids would be there when she got back.

Now she was up there perched on a slick rock
like an injured bird, shouting nonsense.
Bizarre family tangents.
A young man, Jeremy, unofficial leader of our group,
went up to rescue her but he slipped and fell badly,
caught between two sharp slabs. "Oww, fuck," he cried.
Jill was still going off.
A group went up to help Jeremy. I stayed below.
I looked high up, past the noise and pain. The view
was breathtaking.
Light through the leaves. Glinting off the
tumbling water.

Outside the hostel, tapping my feet
no one left to talk to.
Avert eyes from the woman from last week. Spanish with
black braids. I think I told her I fed
tigers for the national circus, was on a mission
always a mission
to find my father, a fall-down drunk and failed poet.
She knows too much.
But she's on the same game, pretends not to see me.
A fat pigeon struts around her feet.

Our van goes clumping up a bumpy road while the sun
lowers behind us, spreading hues of pink and gold.
I'll spend my time getting to know a girl from Germany
she smiles while we talk.
Starting to feel Jack Keuroac. Talk some shit about the banalities
of college, the couped-up life. On the road to Peggy's Cove.
Consider quoting Neil Young, Hey Hey My My
but decide against it.

And when we settle on a hill against the Atlantic pummeling,
I can see the whole of Halifax, the bay splashed with moonlight.
I can hold the small, decent homes in two hands.
The sky is dark, roiling.
Below, the ocean is righteous, tossing two white ships,
a mile from shore, around like toys. "Come in, come in,"
I start to say, but they only twirl and bounce.
Mattias, our driver, a lanky Italian kid not much older than myself,
calls us back into the van.
A light rain, warm on the skin, begins to fall.
Gusts of sea-salted wind gather strength.

Everyone has turned to leave but I wander out
to the cliff's edge, where a man with frosted white hair
and black-frame glasses looks down at the water.
He is from our group. I look back at the blue van.
Heads sticking out windows, unknown faces.
"They're going to start honking," I say.
He nods. "We can't do anything for them," I say.
"I know," he says.
The sky, a tangle of black-blue clouds, is lowering, like
a closing lid. I look back at Mattias, who is making frantic
arm gestures at us, all dramatic.
He calls out, but the wind, firm now, swallows his words.
I can hear the engine kick, wheels grinding on the gravel path
but I don't move. The man beside me looks up.
"It's going to storm," he says,
touching my shoulder. "We should find shelter."

Can Art Grow Out of Theory?

What makes this question really interesting is the word 'legitimately'. Without it, the answer would be fairly straightforward. Yes, good and important art can and has grown out of a theoretical concept of art's role, its specific limitatons and purposes. The French writer Artaud, for example, thought that theatre should be a 'cruel' experience, and in his plays set about jarring the audience out of a comfortable perspective. In his goal of destroying barries (or at least revealing them) between stage and audience, performer and spectator, he would stop at nothing.
Screaming into the faces of unsuspecting viewers, actors bloodying themselves with knife slashes, hurling actual feces, or just sitting on their hands in silence for hours--it was all fair game. And what was the point of all of it? I'm not sure I know, completely. And how does this relate to Blake? Well...
The idea that an author (musician, etc.) will have some contextual framework for their art is hard to dismiss. Even stuff that claims to have no other context than life itself--like say the realist stories of someone like Raymond Carver--is unavoidably making certain distinctions about what does and does not constitute art. Carver would say that all it takes to be a writer is the willingness to stop and stare, and notice the detail of a sunset or the way someone snorts with laughter after a certain joke (bad paraphrase there). But then he would really get his back up when someone like John Barth would talk about formal experimentation in writing, deconstruction, etc.. because that wasn't what writing was, no. Anytime you are devoting entire essays to lecturing people on what art is not then you... are likely operating from a theory of some sort. Sorry Ray, though I love ya. We (particularly my 18 year old poetic self) are often tied to the idea of art being free, or outside, of the conventional definitions of order and logic. And that's fine. I think that good art will always contain some irreducable element--something of the contradiction and mystery of life. When you can reduce a piece of art to a message, no matter how moral and worth stating, that does seem like a lesser result. Actually, this element of 'mystery' is what Flannery O'Connor defined as the highest quality she aimed for in her writing. And to her, like Blake maybe, that was tied to a religous aspect to life, something that always went a little beyond human knowing. Here, the theory itself includes the irrational, so the art remains open. It works.
On my evals last semester, a student, on the suggestions page, wrote simply: "No More Cryptic Stories". I sympathized, a little, and the fact that the printed letters took up the entire page led me to know how serious he/she was about this. Sometimes the stuff we read can be baffling, can make you feel that the writer may be throwing shit at you, at least metaphorically. Going back to what a few people said during the 'poetry' blog, staying with the work, even in its uncertainty and contradiction, seems like one of the more important lessons that reading brings.

Nature and the Imagination

Darling Lake

To be between these cracking brick walls
that catch every wail and child's moan
With cinder dust trapped in the dawn light
and outside my cramped room, a woman,
her skin chalky and creased with anger
at me and who else
banging her tiny fist and shouting my full name
"Marc Angelo", that I haven't heard since I was six.

I had an idea of a quiet place
far removed
where I could read Anna Karenna, finally, or if not,
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintance, again,
and things I had only heard about or seen on TV,
white pebbled sand, trees, an ocean greater than I could imagine.
At Darling Lake, town of 65, in Nova Scotia, Canada,
I lay down on a styrofoam bed for days
and didn't move, didn't make a sound.
trickling river, smells of beech and pine.

blah blah this is a TEST