“Don’t grieve. Anything you lose comes around again in another form.” -Rumi
Not all wisdom is meant to be taken literally. Sometimes when we lose something dear to us, it may not appear again in a form we recognize. But it might come around again as a variation on the theme we know and love so well. While we grieve a loss, we may also find that we are presented with new opportunity. That is how the world works. There is no rule that prohibits new growth just because there has been death.
Derek Beaulieu just finished editing the complete fiction of Canadian poet B.P. Nichol. In addition to this, quite astonishingly, he is hand transcribing every page of James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake one page at a time. To do this project, he keeps his eyes on the source material while allowing his hand to draw which often produces
an off-kilter effect. By the end of the project, Beaulieu will have not only read every page of this notoriously difficult book, he will have hand-written it.
Beaulieu’s day job is Director of Literary Arts at
Banff Center.
Beaulieu challenges his students to write work that “I don’t even recognize, I don’t even see the poetic in it, it should be so of this moment. I think that’s where poets should live. They should live in the spaces where they make something so contemporary that it’s barely even seen as writing.”
Pam Glick lost her brother following a long battle with cancer about ten days before she spoke to Praxis. She is presently finishing a painting that she began previously but that she didn’t know how to finish. Shortly after arriving back in the studio following her brother’s death, she knew what to do. Her raw emotions and openness
allowed her to listen to what the painting wanted her to do.
Glick’s paintings are abstract. She begins most of them on the diagonal before incorporating other lines. Many of her recent works are based on Niagara Falls USA/Canada.
