/Artists collaborate on island over found objects and garbage poems
A poetry reading and artist talk with Anna Swanson and April White based on their collaborative project “The Garbage Poems” was well-received at Haliburton Highlands Museum on July 14. Swanson and White are taking part in the Halls Island Artist Residency program. Learn more about the Halls Island Artist Residency program at hallsisland.ca and interact with Swanson and White’s work at www.garbagepoems.com. /SUE TIFFIN Staff

Artists collaborate on island over found objects and garbage poems

Artists collaborate on island over found objects and garbage poems

 
By Sue Tiffin
Artists
Anna Swanson and April White have come to Haliburton County from
Newfoundland to take part in the Halls Island Artist Residency, and they
joked that they’ve packed some garbage along with them. 
But
they really have travelled with litter. It’s what they need to
collaborate on The Garbage Poems, a multi-disciplinary project about the
experience of swimming that brings together Swanson’s found poetry,
White’s painting and illustrations and Matthew Hollett’s interactive
website.
“We
knew we probably wouldn’t find garbage on Halls Island so we came
prepared,” Swanson told a crowd of people attending a community
engagement session offering a poetry reading and artist talk by the
award-winning, established artists at the Haliburton Highlands Museum on
July 14. 
Garbage at a swimming hole caught Swanson’s attention while she was swimming during a writing retreat in Flatrock, Nfld.
“I
can’t remember how it happened but at some point the worlds collided in
my head and I thought, well what if I take all the garbage, lay it out
on the kitchen table, take all the words off all the pop cans and all
the chip bags and beer cans and soap bottles and all these things, and
use those words to make poetry?” she said. “That’s what I did, and
that’s how it started.” 
Swanson
gives herself freedom with the titles of the poems, titles like For the
boys cliff-jumping by the memorial stone; In which skinny dipping
temporarily fixes a life; In which we replace garbage with love. But
otherwise, she said every other single word in her poems is taken from a
piece of garbage. 
“When
you’re looking for something like the word had, or have, or was, or me,
and it’s not in there, then it makes you do some interesting things,
which is wonderful, I was glad that not all the words were in there,”
she said. “It forced me out of some of my usual habits of writing which
was a really fun exercise and part of what found poetry does and why
it’s kind of valuable as a starting place for people coming to poetry.”
It’s
why, when Swanson was looking for a way to say “cliffjumping,” a word
that didn’t show up on any of the garbage that she had collected, she
instead described the act with “Adidas punch into the water.”
“Sometimes you just look until you can find a word that you can bend to your purposes and will,” she said.
Swanson
and White came together after Swanson saw an exhibition of White’s
work, which, according to White’s artist statement, “questions societal
understandings of emotion, vulnerability and control through commonly
experienced involuntary actions such as yawning, waking up, sneezing,
laughing and crying.” 
“As I sat with her work longer and longer I couldn’t imagine working with anyone else on this,” said Swanson.
White’s watercolours and animation show what she called a self-portraiture into vulnerability.
“At
the time I wasn’t too impressed with my daily existence, so this was
sort of a way, this exhibition was sort of a way, to take back control
over my narrative, my time,” she said. “It felt really powerful to say,
I’m actually going to become an observer of my day, instead of being
stuck in the grind and then step outside of it and look into it.”
Swanson ended up with one of White’s pieces on her fridge. 
“So
I sat with this on my fridge for several months and I hadn’t thought
about illustrating and working together on this project, but during that
time, the idea developed and by the time the idea developed, having
looked at the picture every day, I couldn’t imagine anyone else doing
it,” said Swanson. “I loved the qualities of the work, I loved that it
was recognizable but not photo realistic and that it was … it just had
that quality of the everyday body and the quality of the everyday
object and not elevating garbage so it was unrecognizably garbage, but
that there was sort of a beauty in noticing what was, and I loved that
quality.”
The
artists began working together, and then Hollett’s work expanded the
idea to bring the work to an interactive website in which users can
scroll over each of the words of Swanson’s poems, showing an
illustration or watercolour by White of the piece of garbage that each
word came from. The website also enables users to try making their own
“garbage poem,” an asset to teachers offering students a sort of easy
entry into poetry. A cut and paste option allows for potential poets to
add their own text to the site – Swanson suggested text that has a
particular language to it, such as text from the Indian Act, a press
release from an oil company or an 1860s etiquette guide. 
“That
was our invitation to people to try their hand at it, and to kind of
see both how easy and how hard it is, because it sort of is both,” said
Swanson.
While
on the island Swanson and White are working toward a book-like
manuscript of poetry, to have The Garbage Poems published as a combined
illustrated poetry book.
“I don’t think about it as a problem with
littering, so much as I think about it as a much wider problem of how we
consume natural resources in the world and how our system of commerce
is set up and stuff like that, so you know it’s not just the person who
leaves their garbage there, it’s the whole chain of how it gets there,”
said Swanson. “In a way, going to a place where you swim and put your
body in the water and coming face to face with it, that is a bit like
looking in the mirror, how we affect the places that we love but at the
same time, how those places in turn affect me and how they change my
relationship with place and myself and other people.”
For more information on the Halls Lake Artist Residency, visit hallsisland.ca. To learn more about The Garbage Poems, visit garbagepoems.com