Deep In Snow

On Sunday, 15 February 2015, the Maritimes were hit with a classic "raging blizzard." It started in the morning and lasted all day and night. By Monday, 16 February, the snow had stopped but the fierce winds continued all day. Snowfall amounts varied across the province, but an average of perhaps 50cm fell, and it was whipped around causing huge drifts. Many roads were closed and it will take days to dig out (keep in mind, the Maritimes already had several feet of snow on the ground from previous storms). Most of these storms came up the eastern seaboard, hitting New England hard, including Boston, which has had its snowiest February ever on record. Elizabeth Bishop's "Boston States" and her Maritimes are both groaning under an immense amount of snow. Great Village did not escape. And I pass on a couple of photographs sent by our faithful village correspondent Patti Sharpe, taken this morning, 17 February. The sky has cleared, the wind has diminished and the temperature is moderating -- but the roads are still treacherous. Many of the back roads still impassable. We will get through this severe winter, with its abundance of snow -- keep our thoughts focused on The Elizabeth Bishop Festival on 8 August 2015 -- surely it will be warm then!

Elizabeth Bishop and her dachshund Betsy playing in the snow circa February 1916 (AUA)

Starting the Elizabeth Bishop Festival with a Laugh

One of the abiding qualities of Elizabeth Bishop’s art – and of her self, too – was a lively sense of humour. She once commented to an interviewer that she was fortunate to have good friends who made her laugh, to the point of crying, and her Aunt Grace Bulmer Bowers could tell a joke as well as anyone. As The Elizabeth Bishop Festival committee pondered how to kick off the day, we decided that what better way to start things rolling than to have “stand up” at breakfast. The “In the Village Café” will be providing a delicious festival breakfast (we’ll be talking about all the good food that will be on offer in later posts), but you won’t be having only toast and coffee. The EBSNS is delighted to announce that you will be getting a hearty dose of laughter with Kenzie Gunn, a young comedian from Cape Breton (he’s now living in Halifax). We think perhaps this is the first time a stand up comic has entertained Bishop fans in Great Village – certainly over bacon and eggs! Just look at that happy face!

Kenzie Gunn is a comedian, film-maker, and NSCAD graduate. He runs the podcast company “CBK Halifax” and the weekly comedy game show “Tonight’s Hootenanny!” (https://www.facebook.com/CBKtonight) with his old pal Colin. Kenzie’s comedy style is surreal, goofy, and thoughtful – just the thing to get you thinking and laughing at 8:00 a.m. on a Saturday morning in Great Village, Nova Scotia! You won’t want to miss it!

Kenzie’s Facebook page

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Kenzie-Gunn/164035527022203)

Kenzie’s Soundcloud page:

https://soundcloud.com/kenzie-gunn

Kenzie’s YouTube channel:

https://www.youtube.com/user/kenziegunn

Suzie LeBlanc sings her Bishop songs in New Brunswick

Suzie LeBlanc will perform with Symphony New Brunswick this month in a concert series entitled "Celebrating Our Heritage" (http://symphonynb.com/events/celebrating-our-heritage/) February 16-18, 2015. She will be singing sone of the Elizabeth Bishop songs that were created for her during the Elizabeth Bishop Centenary in 2011, the song-cycles by Toronto composer Christos Hatzis and Nova Scotia composer Alasdair MacLean. These songs are part of her award-winning CD "I am in need of music" (http://www.musiccentre.ca/node/77772) Suzie has a busy year unfolding. To find out more, check her website: http://suzieleblanc.com/site/

“I caught a tremendous fish….” in Maine

Our Maine correspondent Gregory Greenleaf, teacher at Greely High School (https://sites.google.com/a/msad51.org/greely_high_school/ & http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greely_High_School), reports that in January “after finishing a unit on Bishop,” his students created “a post-it note Fish.” On the fish were “lines from Bishop’s poetry, critical essays, and their [the students’] own journals.” The fish measured eight feet long and it was up for a week in the school. “Rainbow, rainbow, rainbow! / And I let the fish go.” Bravo to the students of Greely High.

Suzie LeBlanc will sing at The Elizabeth Bishop Festival on 8 August 2015

To mark Elizabeth Bishop’s 104th birthday, which was yesterday, the Elizabeth Bishop Society of Nova Scotia is making an exciting announcement. In fact, this will be the first in a series of regular announcements about The Elizabeth Bishop Festival to take place on 8 August 2015 in Great Village, Nova Scotia.

We commence with the exciting news that renowned soprano Suzie LeBlanc (http://suzieleblanc.com/site/) will present the festival’s evening concert. Suzie is the Honorary Patron of the Elizabeth Bishop Society of Nova Scotia and recently received the Order of Canada. Her CD “I am in need of music” (http://www.musiccentre.ca/node/77772), settings of Elizabeth Bishop poems by four Canadian composers (Emily Doolittle, Christos Hatzis, Alasdair MacLean and John Plant) won an East Coast Music Award and was a finalist in the Lieutenant-Governor’s Masterworks Arts Award, both in 2014.

We are thrilled that Suzie will be presenting:

MUSIC FROM THE 45TH PARALLEL NORTH

The 45th parallel north crosses Nova Scotia, New-Brunswick, New York, Maine, New Hampshire, as well as France and Italy. It crosses many other places in Asia and Europe, but we will focus on places that have a connection to the French Acadian settlers of the Cobequid region in the 17th and 18th centuries. The 45th parallel can also be connected to Elizabeth Bishop, who had a profound interest in geography, maps and places, and who lived in areas crossed by this latitude.

The performers :

Suzie LeBlanc, soprano

David Greenberg, violin
(http://www.davidgreenberg.ca/)

Nick Halley, percussion and keyboard
(http://www.nickhalley.com/)

Kiya Tabassian, setar and percussion
(http://constantinople.ca/musiciens/kiya-tabassian-3/?lang=en)

Though not the first time Suzie has performed in Great Village, it is an honour that she will bring to “Wille Les Cadets” (as Great Village was known to the Acadians) her ancestral music, mixed with music from across the 45th Parallel.

The Acadians in Great Village

“The French were said to have prosperous settlements at Masstown, Chignoise, Debert, Great Village and Little Dyke, also a small village of six or seven families up the Folleigh River, three and one-half miles from Glenholme. These villages comprised the territory the Indians named Cobequid, “End of Flowing Water”; there were mills at Chignoise (now Belmont), one at Great Village, and another at Debert. About two hundred and fifty families were residing in Cobequid at the time of the expulsion in 1755.” (History of Great Village, Women’s Institute, 1960, page 17).

The History of Great Village also notes that the Acadian families in Cobequid were deported on 5 September 1755, part of one of the darkest chapters in the history of Nova Scotia. In 1948, in Great Village, part of an original Acadian dyke was uncovered on the share of “Farr Marsh.”

As a child, Elizabeth Bishop was told of the presence of Acadians in Great Village and read Longfellow’s famous epic poem Evangeline. Though not of the same scope or sorrow, Bishop often referred to herself as an exile, and told Alexandra Johnson that the poet carries “home” with her, as many of the Acadians did as they spread across the globe. Some returned to Acadie (Nova Scotia) and we are delighted that Suzie will return to Great Village and bring such an exceptional trio of musicians with her.

**********

As mentioned above, this is the first of a series of posts about The EB Festival. We will be profiling many of the artists who will be participating and describing some of the many activities that will happen that day. We will be setting up a Festival Facebook page and a Twitter account. There is lots to come. Stay tuned! You will want to be "In the Village" on 8 August 2015!

Happy Birthday!

 

 

On Elizabeth Bishop's one hundred fourth birthday perhaps I may be permitted a few lines about one of the great joys this blog has brought to me personally: the continuing opportunity to while away an hour or so out of each twenty-four, enjoying a Miracle for Breakfast. Not (or not only), as you will surmise, the poem of that name, but the quotidian wonder of le petit déjeuner or the Full English itself, bolted down in haste or savored at leasure, but always, always with her writing at my elbow and her language lingering in my mind.

Certainly Miss Bishop did not neglect the most important meal of the day in her work. I don’t just mean there on the wrong balcony with its buttered crumb of bread and single drop of very hot coffee, or in her “Breakfast Song,” or the sad account in her story “The Country Mouse” of munching soda crackers while her maternal grandfather made his way to the dining car for breakfast as she was being spirited away to Boston from the beloved Great Village of her childhood. Her correspondence, too, is littered with breakfast trays and marmalades (the former having been upset by foraging cats with consequential burnt noses, the latter her sine qua non: “…breakfast without marmalade isn’t breakfast, to me,” as she once wrote to her Aunt Grace, although admitting that “my last batch isn’t very good – in Rio I could get grapefruit and different kinds of oranges – here one can just get the local oranges and limes and they don’t have nice skins”), Ovaltine and Cuban coffee (freshly-ground just in time for every meal), occasional oatmeals when the bread ran out in Brazil, and even bacon in cans (yuck!...). None of these things, though, is exactly what I have in mind.

No, I’m afraid I must confess that I am not, in contrast to Bishop’s estimation of literary scholar Wallace Fowley, that rare person who can sit at the breakfast table and not talk about aesthetics. They are frequently in my thoughts when, week after week after week, – fifty two slithery little volcanoes' worth of them – I spend a pleasant few minutes each morning looking through whatever Bishop or her many friends and correspondents might have written on that particular day years or decades ago, searching out quotations for “Today in Bishop.”

Oh, the things I learn! – the dietary habits of the red-legged Seriema, or the odd fruiting patterns of the Jabuticaba tree, for example. And the characters I meet! – the tiny lisping poet cheerleader (“Give me an ‘ETH’!”) during an S-T-R-I-K-E at San Francisco State University (March 10, 1969), or the equally short and almost as pathetic little thirteen year old boy who the next day (but four years earlier) peddled Bishop in Brazil “a crude potato-peeler, cruder flint gadget for lighting the gas-stove, a blue plastic barrel to keep something in, and a huge dead-looking cake of yellow soap, like a small monument, that I'm sure the maid will turn up her nose at,” – to mention just two. Painters I might never otherwise have looked at, novelists I might never have read, music I might never have listened to, recipes I might never have botched – all in rich abundance and often comical juxtaposition.

And speaking of botched recipes: this morning I woke up in an especially foul mood, as it had suddenly occurred to me late last night just as I was subsiding into blessed unconsciousness that I had unaccountably forgotten to get eggs during my weekly Saturday foray to the Oakland City, Indiana IGA to purchase the few staples I require to survive in the culinary wilderness that is very rural Hoosierdom, thereby condemning myself five or six hours thence to cold cereal grown soggy in skim milk instead of enjoying a lovely, toothsome, butter-glazed omelette aux fines herbes.

Or so I thought...

For imagine my astonishment and gratitude as I staggered through the kitchen to find in the midst of clamorous birds and matin bells and white gold skies, smack dab in the middle of the dawn-lit Sunday dining room table, a beautiful blue-glass-lined silver dish containing three of the freshest, loveliest, most ovoid answers to the riddle of which came first that one could possibly imagine. My heart fluttered, and then I drew closer...

… and then I stared again, and then rubbed the last remaining crumbs of sleep from my eyes, and then stared again, and then I looked and looked my infant sight away...

A thousand words could not describe what I spied next, inscribed on the surface of each gleaming white shell. Fortunately, in this age when one really can see oneself in freshly-washed dishes, ever-encroaching technology means that a pocket camera is always to hand. I shall, therefore, allow the picture below to speak for me:

Try it yourself! Open a copy of Miss Bishop’s prose, poetry, or letters at random tomorrow morning and see what she has in store for your breakfast. Perhaps you will find yourself on the right balcony after all…

All best wishes,

John Barnstead