Focusing on the word at Wintergreen Studios

Sep 06, 2012

Photo: award winning Canadian poet Patrick Lane at Wintergreen Studios on August 24.

The written word appears to have become the focus for the summer season line up of special guests at Wintergreen Studios. The majority of presenters recently have been either writers or poets, which is perhaps not so surprising since the studio recently entered the realm of publishing with its Wintergreen Press. The press has put out four titles to date.

Rena Upitis, founding director and president of Wintergreen, which is located on Canoe Lake Road just east of Godfrey, said the predominance of writers for this season just naturally evolved. “We were really lucky this year to attract four great writers: Steven Heighton and Helen Humphries of Kingston, poet Patrick Lane and upcoming in September, Lawrence Hill. We love having writers come and it seems to be just a growing thing,” she said at the public dinner and reading given by lauded Canadian poet Patrick Lane on August 24.

Lane, who has no less than 899 poems to his credit, headed up a four-day poetry workshop at Wintergreen that was attended by 12 eager poets. Louise Carson from St. Lazare, Québec, explained what Patrick had stressed so far in the workshop. “We worked on punctuation, which can often be a huge bug-bear for poets. But what he seems to be focusing on is relating the concrete to the abstract and getting us to understand that how, if you go too far in one direction or the other, you can either overstate or over mystify the reader. The idea is to get that balance and to use the concrete as a way to underline the abstract,” Carson said.

Lane is a master poet who has been practicing his craft for over 50 years and who has achieved that magical balance. His most recent collection called “Witness-Selected Poems-1962-2010” won the Governor General’s Award for Poetry and is a testament to the fact that he knows of what he speaks. His poems brought forth gasps from the audience who seemed to hang on his every word.

Lane opened the evening with a poem called “The Mad Boy”, an account of a developmentally challenged young man who lived down the street from him and who Lane would often see escaping from his caregivers. “As he goes he keeps looking back at his pursuers who follow him into the light, in the boy’s face is both glee and terror, he knows they will catch him, they always do…and the boy will wait for them just short of where the road breaks, and now he is happy as they hold him in their hands. He laughs at the run he has made again, his face lifted up into the sun reflects the knowledge he knows is his, that for him, the only escape is surrender, that giving himself up is his whole life…”

Lane ended his reading with a poem he read by heart called Antelope in the Snow. It came from an event in which he said he had in his “classic Patrick Lane way", endangered his own life, the life of his wife, and the lives of a herd of antelope by making a car trip on a fiercely cold day in the prairies many years before. Temperatures had dipped to below -40 degrees Celsius, and Lane described how he got out of his car and disturbed a group of concentrically circled antelopes, who unbeknownst to him were in a protective formation to shield them from the cold. They scattered when he ventured too close. “I felt terrible about that incident for a long time but not so much anymore.”

The poem reads, “This too the antelope in snow. Is it enough to say we will imagine this and nothing more? Who understands that failing, falters at the song. And still we sing, that is beauty. But it is not an answer anymore than the antelope, most slender of beasts, most beautiful, will tell us why we go, going nowhere, and going there perfectly in the snow.”

Lane’s advice to poets: “Read. Good writing comes out of good reading. Good readers make good writers. Really good writers are writers who have read a great deal and who have come out of a great tradition.”

For those wanting more of that tradition,

Lawrence Hill, author of The Book Of Negroes, will be leading a workshop at Wintergreen from September 14-17. There will be a dinner and public reading on September 15 at 6pm. For information visit www.wintergreensdtudios.ca or call Wintergreen Studios at 613-273-8745