Barbara Weir: Grass Seed Dreaming

Barbara Weir is one of my favorite painters. As an aboriginal artist, she approaches her work with a different set of expectations and intentions than is typical in the Western artistic canon. Like other women from her community (including now-deceased Minnie Pwerle, Barbara’s mother, and international art star Emily Kame Kngwarreye), her work is closely […]

The Self, Undivided

Meditation garden, Osmosis Enzyme Bath If we fall into hell, we go through hell; this is the most important attitude to have. Just sit in the Reality of Life seeing hell and paradise, misery and joy, life and death, all with the same eye. No matter what the situation, we live the life of the […]

Fight, Fiddle, Ply, Muzzle

First Fight. Then Fiddle. First fight. Then fiddle. Ply the slipping string with feathery sorcery; muzzle the note with hurting love; the music that they wrote bewitch, bewilder. Qualify to sing threadwise. Devise no salt, no hempen thing for the dear instrument to bear. Devote the bow to silks and honey. Be remote a while […]

Making Strange

It has been three full days since I saw Guy Maddin’s “documentary,” My Winnipeg, and the ambience still hasn’t left my consciousness. It is quixotic and visually arresting, preposterously absurd and yet quite tender, both epic and lyric at the same time. I was enchanted. My Winnipeg, by Guy Maddin And as the critic Peter […]

Poetry and Truth

Peculiar to poetry is a preconceived expectation of “truth”. David Orr’s essay in the Times Sunday Book Review captures some of this response in spite of cynicism in the culture about literary authenticity, particularly following a spate of memoir writers whose manufactured memories and inaccurate portrayals were exposed and condemned. Orr starts with an anecdote […]