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HOSTING TEXT

I’m EJ; This is Liz; This is Sanna.

We are so grateful to be here together with you, so grateful to Philip, Avalon, and Natalie, of Xpace, to Emily from TPW for the bean bags, Nik for the poster, Sal for printing, Vi-An and Trynne for coming all the way from Montreal. There are so many love people here. It feels like a celebration! It feels kind of like a birthday.

I am thinking about birthdays, because, okay, to be honest, March is birthday season in my world. It was my birthday this week, it is Lee’s birthday today, Nicole’s on Tuesday, Nivi’s last Saturday – But mostly I’m thinking about birthdays because I’m thinking about origins. How, even though everything is made of everything else, an opening, a gap, makes it such that something goes out from something. Such that something goes toward.

In the gap where meeting begins, first, there was Sanna. It was the second poetry reading I had ever done; and I had driven five hours to be here, in this place, called something like “meeting place.” sanna stood, in the deep hum of her, and said, there are dreams here, under my knees, under this wood, beneath this house and the house built behind it.

When Sanna speaks, it is with the entirety of a step: the gentle lift, the certain, precise land of the heel. When she lifts, we stop. When she opens her hands, daisies and daisies.

Many years later, when I was two weeks old here, in this place called something like “meeting place,” or “where the trees are standing in the water,” when I had just swum in the shallow of lake huron, Karegnondi, I met Liz. In the soft whisking of her keeping people, Sanna had gathered so many people in a room united by love for her. It felt like a birthday, a wedding. A love party. Liz said, say yes, if I ask you to dance, and there will be light and water coming from our pores.

Liz, knower of delicate tipping. The hold of a comma at the end of a line, a dimple to the rush of propulsion. Liz knows everything, no, she does, but she always receives things as though they have just been said for the first time.

Today’s poems, too, come from somewhere. A form called ekphrasis, a writing about, between, toward. That sees the gap between itself and the world – and runs, dog eared, towards it.

Sanna’s poem comes from a photograph of her mother.

Liz’s from Ariana’s Fraser’s exhibition, Seeking something missing, Missing something left behind In the project space at the far end of the gallery.

From this ekphrasis, more and more, poems we wrote over and over in riffs as we rehearsed. Their words, spoken by heart. Our hands under a rock, the ground echoing underneath us, bringing us, all of us, here. To this place, called something like “meeting place,” “where the trees are standing in the water,” a dish with one spoon. Shared and stewarded by the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Haudenosaunee, the Anishinaabe, the Huron Wendat for centuries.

In the gap where meeting begins, we begin to turn to each other. A degree of separation turns into a meeting place. The love in a portrait, a secret object, folds into a long conversation.

All of us coming from each other, peering around to look.

This is where we come from, meaning,

This is where we are going.