Entre Ville
Contenu
Nature
Titre
Entre Ville
Créateur.ice
J. R. Carpenter
Résumé
SNIFFING FOR STORIES
This is our back alley. This is a walk we walk everyday. It's a long block. Five minutes from bottom to top. Six if you walk slowly. Seven if you walk as if intent on studying every scent. Eight-and-a-half years if you're sniffing for stories.
This is our back alley. This is a walk we walk everyday. It's a long block. Five minutes from bottom to top. Six if you walk slowly. Seven if you walk as if intent on studying every scent. Eight-and-a-half years if you're sniffing for stories.
Entre Ville was commissioned in 2006 by OBORO, an artist-run centre in Montral, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Conseil des Arts de Montréal. Although I had lived in Montréal for 15 years at the time of the commission, Entre Ville was my first major work about my adopted city. It took me that long to learn the vocabulary. I don't mean French, or Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Yiddish or any of the other languages spoken in my neighborhood. I refer, rather, to a visual, tactile, aural, sensorial vocabulary. My home office window opens into a jumbled intimacy of back balconies, yards, gardens and alleyways. Daily my dog and I walk through this interior city sniffing out stories. Poetry is not hard to find between the long lines of peeling-paint fences plastered with notices, spray painted with bright abstractions and draped with trailing vines. Entre Ville is a web-based heat-wave poem presented in the vernacular of my neighborhood, where cooking smells, noisy neighbors and laundry lines crisscross the alleyway one sentence at a time.
Support
Modalité procédurale
Principe d'organisation
Forme littéraire
Thématiques
Montréal
Ville
Habitat
Quotidien
Chien
Lieu de publication
Montréal, Québec
Date
2006
Droits
©J. R. Carpenter
Langue
Anglais