POETRY TRANSCENDS THE PAGE

Kate Hoogendam, Saskia, Tomkins and Shannon Linton, bring the poetic up a notch.

Spotlight is the evening our community hits pause, plugs out, and enjoys immersive creativity fueled by Organic Intelligence (OI). Or as the Art Gallery of Northumberland explains, “Each year, Spotlight brings the community together for a powerful evening of live, multi-media performance featuring local artists – emerging and established – who open up their creative process in real time.”

This is Spotlight 7

It was an especially inspiring event organized by Kate Hoodgendam with Shannon Linton and Saskia Tomkins. It was a magical collaboration of poetry, music, and the Great Lakes watershed. It was about my birth turf, and the birth turf of Katie, who was born and raised in Michigan on the shore of a great lake. The sustained metaphor was the Morel, a shroom with the configuration of a pale plant brain, that was carried through Kate’s journey.

Many of Katie’s references triggered my childhoodlum experiences, when four free-range small town boys, aged 13, walked the shoreline to Port Hope and hitched-hiked back. We were without adult supervision all afternoon, hours. Poof! I’m back in the art gallery, and Shannon’s voice enters my consciousmess like rich warm syrup and sweeps me away. Just to top it off, it was powerful. I like powerful things, poetry, art, music, voice.

Saskia’s handling of a violin produced sounds incredibly appropoetic to the images of morels and more, more species, plant and animal. It was mesmerizing. But not as mesmerizing as the closing performance dedicated to the naming of all the endangered species that inhabit the Great Lakes Basin.

Get a load of this: Kate does a bunch of diligent research to gather all the names of endangered species within the Great Lakes Basin. Then, she provides the names to several children to hand-write each name on one white card. In some instances, the child looked for an image of the named species and drew it onto the back of the card. These cards were distributed to the audience members. As Saskia and Shannon provided a soundscape that felt like warm steam rising off calm water, and Kate asked the audience members to speak out the name on a card, on our own individual impulse. And so it happened. There were no loud words, just softly spoken from each member. It was a gentle cacophony. I can still feel it reverberating in my sensibilities.

That was a well-performed work of conceptual art, well-applied, well presented. So Wow!

At the first instance of a question, I raised my hand. I was so over the top about that performance that upon behalf of POETCHRY, I invited her to collaborate on a picnic table top that will contain the names of every endangered species around the Great Lakes Basin. The names will be written by children in handwriting, scanned in, and formatted appropoetically onto a picnic table. The table top will remain raw, and Kate will paint the bench, legs and cross beams appropoetically to her vision.

The unveiling of this table will take place at the next WOW, Words On a Wire, a biannual Textravastanza of poetry performances this coming fall.

Kate, Shannon and Saskia, what a great gang of collabs.