In
response to the self-isolations, my friend, Ottawa poet Stephen Brockwell has
instigated a series of 35mm portraits of poets through windows. He stands
outside, as his subjects remain safe in their houses. He wishes, as he writes me
over email, “to document in physical, material ways the Coronavirus.” He asks:
do we get evening or morning light?
Our
front window faces west, and the backyard, east. Late March: our yard is still a
variety of snow, ice and water, so I suggest the front window, pushing his opportunities
into the afternoon.
Today
is warm, and the sun is out. Soon, he stands in our driveway, headset attached
to his cellphone, speaking to us in real time. Christine puts him on
speakerphone, so we can all hear. A half-second delay between watching and
hearing him speak. From within our living room, the girls mug at the front
window; Stephen requests we lean in for the sake of proper light, and framing.
He
catches us all, but within days is forced to abandon the project, given stricter
directives around social distancing, and remaining home. We all remain home.
Stephen
has been engaged with photography the entire time twenty-plus years that I’ve
known him; he prefers the results of film over digital, for the sake of
texture, of depth. Through preparation for this project, he told me that he came
upon a whole array of photographs he took of us in 2002, during a reading tour
we did of Ireland. A photograph of myself, brooding, in front of Yeats’ Tower, Thoor
Ballylee, the 15th century Hiberno-Norman tower house in County
Galway, once owned and inhabited by the poet William Butler Yeats. “What shall
I do with this absurdity, / O heart, O troubled heart —” Yeats wrote, opening the
title poem to The Tower (1923), writing on age and experience and
hard-won truths. More recently, Ottawa-born American poet Paul Legault reworked
his own translelation of Yeats to compose his own volume, The Tower
(2020), overwriting Yeats’ lines to seek his own discoveries. A transelation,
as Erín Moure coined it, from her own exploration of creating new work through
translating, Pessoa-esqe, within the language. As Legault wrote the first lines
of his own title poem: “How will I do being old when I’m old – / having to use
this same heart in its place.”
What
I recall of that day, driving though Galway, was the amount of time he would take
to set up his tripod each time, staring down into the top of his camera to set
up each shot. As we travelled across Ireland, multiple stops at ruins, churches
and fields where as he set up his camera. He had a whole sequence of photographs
from that trip. I did also, deciding to take snapshots with my digital camera
of Stephen from behind, as he set up his camera and tripod, although with only
Stephen in view. My joke was that it looked from his stance that he wasn’t taking
photos, but peeing. My photo-sequence of Stephen Brockwell, seemingly peeing at
important sites all over the country.
What
I recall of that day: the tears in his eyes as we pulled up to the Tower.
Does
peace, in truth, come dropping slow?
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