This video
poem, completed two years or so ago, is made from edited scrap Super 8 footage taken by my grandparents —
mostly by my grandmother — during a return visit to Nova Scotia in the summer
of 1962. I composed the texts for the two poems, "Voiceover" and
"Shoring," and read them. Geoff Mitchell composed and performed the
music and constructed the soundscapes from field audio he recorded around the
Bedford Basin in Nova Scotia. The voice and music were recorded at a studio in
Montreal in June-July 2017. The texts form part of an ongoing series around the
idea of the nostos, the return journey, and address, for me, something like
what Svetlana Boym has called off-modern nostalgia.
This
video was made as an addendum to my four lectures on David Chariandy's I've Been Meaning to Tell You (2018),
for my first-year undergraduate course at UBC on approaches to non-fiction,
"Displaced Persons." I discuss key themes in the book, and offer an
array of descriptive registers of race, particular around the figuration of
blackness. The course website is here: http://faculty.arts.ubc.ca/kmcneill/111_2019.htm
This is a test video
for a series of video-podcast discussions of poems and of media for my courses
this fall. In April, for National Poetry Month, I decided to discuss and then
read one of my favourite poems, the sonnet “Fourteen” by Marilyn Hacker. (A blog post here re-types the text of the poem.) There is plenty that I leave out in what I say: the poem is a brilliantly
complex and resonant piece of writing, a kind of “presentation piece” as Hacker
might have put it. The last line always moves me in ways that are difficult to
capture in any formal analysis. And here I don’t really broach the difficult
gender-politics that the poem interrogates. I have taught this poem a number of
times in first-year lecture courses, introductions to literary studies, so the
video is pitched as a kind of introduction to the text.
