Posted on: November 29, 2008
Muddy Waters
A confluence of factors, almost like Delta streams, has me thinking about the Delta Blues and Chicago Blues and the man who did the most to electrify them, Muddy Waters (1913 — 1983).
A new movie due out next week, Cadillac Records, tells the story of a truly revolutionary period in American music. Chess Records was pivotal in bringing great Blues and R&B legends like Etta James, Willie Dixon and Muddy Waters to a larger audience, and is the subject of the film. The brothers Chess — Leonard and Phil — recognized the commercial potential for a wide array of musical genius, and helped set the table for Rock N Roll. The new film stars Beyonce Knowles, Jeffrey Wright and Adrien Brody.
Beyonce Knowles (as Etta James) just rips the heart out of this song and plays it back to us, updated, tremendous:
Cadillac Records
Retrospectives provoke us.…
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Posted on: November 25, 2008
Belle Côte Wharf. Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. Photo by Doreen LeBlanc
We have new poems from Doreen LeBlanc and an essay from Sean Howard on tap. Both authors hail from Cape Breton, though Doreen splits time between Nova Scotia and Massachusetts now. This is her first publication, and we look forward to more poetry from her in the future.
Sean’s work brings together a host of subject fields — psychology, philosophy, linguistics, science, poetry and poetics — to startle us into reading new bridges, new metaphors between them.
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I have some of my own poetry on display in Private, an international review of phởtography and text. You can see them by clicking here.…
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Posted on: November 25, 2008
Poetic Implications: Synchronicity and The Language of Meaning
A Personal Reflection by Sean Howard
Adjunct Professor of Political Science, Cape Breton University
November 2008
A few months ago, I began work on a project I’ve been putting off for over a year: an account of my time in the clutches of what Jungian analysts call the ‘puer aeternus’ complex, or neurosis; an inflated sense of the self as a precious, creative but foredoomed ‘eternal youth,’ destroyed, to quote Jung’s colleague Marie-Louise von Franz, by a chronic “unadaptedness,” which “frequently results in early death“[1] if not shaken off by the sufferer’s mid-twenties — the age, incidentally, I told myself as a teenager that I (like two of my heroes, Shelley and Keats) would die. After struggling through a long, difficult section on the central dilemma confronted (and shirked) in the complex — ‘how to truly be yourself,’ or ‘how to not be someone else’ — I tried to relax with a novel — The Black Book, by the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk — and read, almost immediately, the following:
For by now I knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that none of us can ever hope to be ourselves: that the troubled old man standing in that long line, waiting for the bus — he too has ghosts living inside him, ghosts of the ‘real’ people he once longed to become.…
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Posted on: November 25, 2008
Belle Côte Bog
Nestled in the dense moss
Hanging by threads
In the squishy spongy bog
The ripe fruit
Coated in a
Purple misty fog
Turning bright
Cranberry red
From the warmth
Of my cold fingers
By the Wharf
I stand at the wharf
As the fishermen unload
They know their work
I stand amazed
As my young cousin deftly filets
A mackerel for me
Tossing the guts
Overboard
I know my own work
Back in the city
But it seems stale
As I smell the briny planks
And listen to the water
Lap against the boats
As gulls and terns call out
For their share of the catch
My cousin is a young man
But his hands are
Rough pitted and scarred
Aged by the biting salt
We share Acadian roots
Generations of hard slog
I tuck my cold smooth hands
into warm soft down pockets
– by Doreen LeBlanc
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Doreen LeBlanc lives in Massachusetts and spends vacation time at her cabin in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, where she was born. Inspiration bubbles up out of the river and sea, streams down the mountain, and comes through family stories and the beauty of Cape Breton and her Acadian and Scottish heritage.…
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