Moved to poetry by artwork

ERIC O'DONNELL

Last Thursday, the Sidney and Gertrude Zack Gallery at the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver hosted a well-received evening of poetry writing and reading inspired by the current exhibit, Telescoptic, a collection of collage artwork by Assia Linkovsky.

Organized collectively by the gallery and the charitable outreach group Pandora's Collective, the show featured readings by a number of local poets who had been invited to a viewing on Feb. 1 and asked to write poems for Collage: A Night of Connection in response to what they had seen.

An overflow audience listened attentively to the poems, which were remarkable in their breadth and originality. Organizers Sita Carboni and Bonnie Nish of Pandora's Collective encouraged those in attendance to write their own responses as they viewed the collages and to share them later in the open-mic format. A significant number took up this opportunity, including several people doing their first public reading.

This is the second collaboration between the gallery and Pandora's Collective and it follows the very successful Echoing Voices in November 2008, which featured the work of three artists and several poets. The Vancouver Artists' Collective provided the talent pool from which the performers came. Reisa Schneider, cultural arts director of the JCCGV, recalled it as "a fabulous warm evening," noting that the poetry inspired by the artwork had deeply moved the artists.

Schneider places a strong emphasis on multi-disciplinary events at the gallery. She was confident that the blend of powerful images and creative poets would produce an evening to remember and her confidence was not misplaced.

The evening represented another triumph for Pandora's Collective, of which Carboni and Nish are co-founders and executive directors. The collective was started in 2002 as a weekly writing group, the Kitsilano Writers, meeting at Nish's house. From that modest beginning, they branched out to facilitating poetry workshops in schools and libraries.

By 2004, Pandora's Collective was a nonprofit society. Two years later, they became a registered charity. One of their main mandates is outreach through writing. They work with groups as diverse as adults going through drug and alcohol rehabilitation and children and teens at inner city schools. Their goal is to motivate the people with whom they work to embrace literacy, while building a sense of self-esteem.

Pandora's Collective runs the Word Whips writing series, a monthly event encouraging individuals to write in a group setting. They sponsor numerous poetry readings and have undertaken a scholarship program for adults and children interested in formally developing their writing skills.

The work they do was recognized in 2008, when the collective won the Griffin Award for contributions to Canadian society through the craft of writing, presented at the Surrey International Writers' Conference Oct. 24, 2008.

A featured poet at Thursday's Collage: A Night of Connection was Daniela Elza, a teacher completing her doctorate in philosophy at Simon Fraser University. She is a regular at the Word Whips series and was one of the poets at the Feb. 1 viewing.

She saw Linkovsky's work as dealing with the question of identity. "Who am I and who am I in relation to the world I live in?" she asked. Elza lamented that, as early as kindergarten, children are made to distinguish between animate and inanimate objects, thus creating a barrier between them and the earth around them. One of the poems she read was inspired by the piece "Moon in the Man" by Linkovsky. "It's always the 'man in the moon,' " Elza pointed out. "We're self-centred that way. This piece turned it around and put the moon in us. It takes us away from 'I-I-I,' and makes us conscious of our connection to the world."

Her poem, "Earth Interface," partially excerpted below, speaks to this.

"See the moon in the man with the marble face.

"See the roots in the man with no face.

"This tree is my head 'thinking and spreading its knowledge of trees'

"Spreading its dendrite limbs to read the palms of memories

"Re-imagined between our bodies

"The map we got at the corner store is useless here ...

"Where the rock in the mouth of the earth sleeps its geode dreams...."

Elza's doctoral thesis will speak to the connection between poetry and philosophy – and it will be written completely as a series of poems.

One of the audience members who was moved to write and read a poem was Julia Clark, a teacher at Eric Hamber School in Vancouver. She described Linkovsky's work as "provocative" and her piece reflected that. Clark was accompanied by Joan Muir, the librarian at Eric Hamber, who noted that Nish comes to her school once a week to work with five aspiring writers in Grade 8. "They write with such clarity," she said. "It's amazing what Bonnie does with them."

Linkovsky, whose work was the subject of all the poems, attended the evening and, when introduced, was greeted by sustained applause from the audience. She spoke briefly, saying that she was thrilled to hear the reaction to her work, and praised the multi-disciplinary approach the gallery has taken. "It's exciting what results when you put art and poetry together," she told the audience.

Eric O'Donnell is a retired secondary school teacher. Recently relocated to Vancouver from Toronto, he now focuses his time on photography and writing.

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