What belongs to all came out of a masters research project at the University of Waterloo. Below is the accompanying essay.

1. Introduction

I have to say at once that I am uneasy with commentary.

My insights on what I perceive to be the themes of this poem are already expressed:

the poem embodies them. I can’t add anything;

what I can do is make the implicit explicit, which exactly reverses the poet’s ambition.

Perhaps the best alternative is to begin in circumstance.  

- Louise Glück [1]

I feel Glück’s uneasiness. I began in academia at the University of Manitoba, in their school of music. The one year I took in the program conveyed a very strong message that songwriting and academia (at least 20 years ago) would be complicated partners. I spent the next two years travelling around the world, seeing things. Upon returning home to Manitoba, I took on an undergraduate degree in International Development Studies at the University of Winnipeg. If I couldn’t build songwriting skills in University, I wanted to build knowledge and skills that would complement my songs’ writing.

During that degree I met my would-be bandmate. Upon our graduation, we both hit the road playing folk music. With that band, amicably dubbed Crooked Brothers, we released 3 LPs and one EP and toured extensively in UK, Europe and North America. In folk music, as with the punk music of my earlier years, lyrics were always central. Furthermore, there was a true DIY ethos to the lifestyle that comes with the cultures surrounding these musics: a strong focus on community, equality, activism and inclusion. Skill and musical proficiency were often secondary.

The reason I began this paper with a commentary on commentary is because it is not natural for me to comment on my work. I doubt it is natural for most artists. For me, songs come from a space that is more channeled than planned, more experienced than practiced, more attuned than created. I agree with Glück, who says that whatever needs to be said is already in the work. So, I will begin where she suggests: with circumstance. The following is the context for the song What Belongs to All which was written between the months of August and November 2021 for PACS 621 at the University of Waterloo.

The thematic focus of the project was the interplay of stones and other beings. This included interactions between stones and: trees, moss, grass, snails, bees, mushrooms, soil, air, water, noise, humans, birds, cars, planes, rivers and creeks, dynamite, other stones. Focus was given to interactions between stones and humans. Specifically, the project traces my own interactions with specific stones, which in this essay I call “rock beings”.

3. Data Collection 

Data was collected through nine trips into wooded areas with significant stony outcrops, escarpments, or cliffs. The main site was a walking trail in RARE Site, a private conservation project north of Cambridge, Ontario. This site was visited six times. Data was also collected at three other sites, which were used as a contrast to the principal research site.

·       Principal Research Site: RARE Site in Blair, Ontario [2]

·       Contrast Research Sites 1: Algonquin Provincial Park, Ontario

·       Contrast Research Site 2: Whiteshell Provincial Park, Manitoba [3]

·       Contrast Research Site 3: Waterloo Park, Waterloo, Ontario[4]

Principal Site

RARE Site in Blair Ontario (near Cambridge) provided a perfect setting for exploring human relationships with stones. Along the west side of the Grand River, there are multiple escarpment cliffs which rise into limestone alvars. These alvars create a rare ecological environment, home to many unique species of plant, bug, funghi and animal.

The focal point of my research was a valley near the trailhead of the blue trail, near the south end of RARE. This valley housed a small limestone promontory that I visited regularly. As mentioned earlier, in this essay, I will refer to this promontory as a “rock being”. I use this term because it better describes them: not as inanimate beings but as animate beings with whom we share our space and time. The beings that make up this rock face were subjects as well as contributors to this research. 

Contrast Sites

Because of the nature of the observations in this research, contrasting sites were useful in determining distinct aspects of the stones at RARE. In the same way that engagement in diverse cultures allows one to observe differences, engaging with different types of rock formations was useful in determining unique qualities of the stones at RARE as well as being able better to attune oneself to the specificities of a site.

3. Methodology 

Research was conducted as Artistic Inquiry, specifically Musical Inquiry (musical composition) and Poetic Inquiry (lyrical composition). Methods also included data collection through empirical observation and immersion through phenomenological engagement. This section will focus mainly on the phenomenological engagement, as it was the most important method in composing the song. Phenomenological observations were made from my time in the wooded areas. This included: walking trails (with or without shoes), sitting and sensing (sight, sound, feel, etc...), and energy exchanges with stones. It also included building cognitive connections through multiple interactions with rock beings. Phenomenological engagement was necessary for internalizing and channeling energies and observations into musical and poetic outputs.

3.1 Energy Exchanges: Vibration and Pulsation

Because of its affect and its influence on my musical composition process, it is worth elaborating on the phenomenon of energy exchanges. Through multiple encounters with stones, I was able to perceive nuanced shifts in my own energy (ie. how a certain group of stones changed my emotional, psychological, spiritual or physical state). Often this depended on context or what I was doing. Was I barefoot or not? Was I walking or still? Was I walking up on a plateau or down into a valley? Was I with my three-year-old daughter Emmanuelle or not? I perceived many of these exchanges as vibrational in nature. There is an observable pulsation that I associate with the presence of stones. Often these pulsations are what inform the rhythm of a composition. Often these stones pulsate in a frequency that directly correlates to a musical meter. In this case, it was a rhythmic pulsation, related through the limestone cliffs and alvars at RARE Site, that informed the rhythm of the song. Specifically, this one rock being at RARE was particularly influential (the one that is featured in most photos in this paper).

3.2 Cognitive Connections

It was in the presence of this rock being that the meter of the composition was solidified as well as certain cognitive connections that were formed through interaction. These cognitive connections could be described as subconscious memory extractions, or evocation of recollections, that informed the lyrical composition of the piece. Interestingly, these connections spoke to the relations between beings (of which I was quite consciously aware during these sessions) and to the political conflicts between humans and non-humans. One theme blanketed the conscious landscape like snow: the idea of non-human beings as property. This idea, largely discussed in literature, sculpted the lyrical topography of the composition to the point where it became a refrain.

3.3 Poetic Inquiry

As a principal research method, this project used a combination of musical and poetic inquiry. During one of my discussions with Dr. Ball, however, I realized that the process of songwriting, though an inherently musical art, is easier to verbalize as research through the lens of poetic inquiry. The poetry (the lyrics) is the conscious connection to a certain topic or point of research. Of course, there are the aforementioned musical methods of exploring a topic, but in songwriting, I find, that it is in the lyrics where conscious communicative aspects meet the more subconscious ones. In many ways, the musicality of the song requires that the lyrics (and verbal language) help to amplify (or resonate) the “feel” of a song. So, it’s here, in poetic inquiry, that I focused my academic method.

            For a bit of background on this method, there is a great paper called “Poem is What?” written by Monica Prendergast which is based on a compliation of poetic inquiry found in research and journals.[5] Predergast’s article outlines many of the major questions surrounding poetic inquiry and its uses. It includes insights such as those by Sandra Lee Faulker, another proponent of poetic inquiry, who says “Poetry and poetic inquiry can be an active response to social issues, a political commentary, and a call to action.”[6] Also, Piirto’s suggestion that arts-based inquiry may not easily be taken up by underqualified researchers and suggests that those taking up these methods are also trained in the arts.[7] This suggestion was especially relevant to me because, at this point, I consider myself to be a more qualified songwriter than academic. Neilsen, a professor of literacy education and also a published poet, claims that poetry can not only provide a “form of representation (data poems, for example) but [can also be a] legitimate form of inquiry itself.”[8] She sites reasons such as the ability to listen deeply, the inadequacy of language, rhythms in inquiry and poetry, less is more, and never-ending apprenticeship as rationale for poetic inquiry. These reasons resonated for me as well. Overall, I’ve noticed that the way I learn about a topic differs greatly depending on what medium through which I am learning about it. Poetry and songwriting have different affects than non-fiction or an academic inquiry.

In her analysis, Prendergast also notices three categories in which poetic inquiry is “distinguished by the voice that is engaged”: Vox Autobiographia/Autoethnographia – Researcher-voiced poems; Vox Participare- Participant-voiced poems; Vox Theoretica – Literature-voiced poems[9]. She also cites other methods of poetic inquiry, such as sifting: “Sifting through data, whether researcher data from field texts of various kinds, or participant data, is the process of intuitively sorting out words, phrases, sentences, passages that synthesize meaning from the prose.”[10] Or the creation of relevant and specific self-constraining factors in data collection forms and the methods used to achieve a dataset from which poetry can be created as poetic inquiry, such as the Canadian Poet Christian Bök’s Eonia which is “limited by words containing only a single one of the five vowels used once or more per word”. She describes poetic inquiry as creative, something that is a “performative act, revealing researcher/participants as both masked and unmasked, costumed and bared, liars and truth-tellers, actors and audience, offstage and onstage in the creation of research.”[11] Or interview methods, such as Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead, where she interviewed West Virginia miners and wrote poems based on these interviews.[12] This project could fall under Prendergast’s categories of Vox Autobiographia/Autoethnographia as well as Vox Participare. Some methods I used could be categorized as ‘sifting method’, through data that I collected, as well as a quasi-‘interview method’: with rock beings.

4. Other Observations of Note

4.1 Drone

Roads are made of stones. Could we describe this as a violation of these beings? A rape of the land? Road noise was one of the main drones at RARE (also engine sounds, made of stone-like materials, mined materials). The sounds of an infinity of violated stones.

The song ‘flits’ with drone. There is a major to minor pendulum, sometimes straying to a small chord progression (a turnaround) with melodic deviations but coming back, always quite quickly, to the center (tonic, major-minor pendulum). In my composition process, I had originally envisioned an instrumental feature in the break (bridge) between the 2nd chorus and the 3rd verse, however, when I tried to compose something musically it didn’t feel right. This is when I settled on sound clips (after some discussion and inspiration from Dr. Ball and Dr. Sunabacka). Sound clips do not need to have an arc in the same way that a melody does, which is to say they do not require an arcing chord progression to move that melody. In retrospect, this is part of why I also felt that poetic inquiry would be more suited to this song in describing its circumstance (rather than musical inquiry): because the drone created a sort of emotional ‘pad’ supporting the lyrics. Of course, it is also worth noting that, in songwriting you can’t actually separate and analyze the music and the lyrics; they all go together.

4.2 Fairy Creek and 1492 Land Back Lane

            For some reason, the Fairy Creek and Land Back Lane protests crept into the lyrics. I explored this phenomenon in a reflective journal, however it’s still somewhat unclear as to why they influenced this composition. Perhaps they ‘storied’ (gave story to) the slave-like relationships of human and non-human beings. Overall, I am guessing it is because of my immersion in wooded areas, areas that aren’t being entirely conformed to human use. Perhaps this is what the rock beings and trees were saying, they were bringing my attention to (and our) relations who are currently enslaved, or under attack, by our institutions.

This is an excerpt from that journal: “So, what of this and why is it coming into my thinking? I’m not on Facebook or Instagram. [...] Perhaps when I look at trees, in rare areas like the alvars near Cambridge, they tell me more than what is there. It’s hard not to think about these giant old growth forests, that are now so rare, being clear-cut for human use. Is this what one of the conversations with trees and stones and trees sounded like?” In the end, this is part of what I was hoping to explore: non-human conversations that happen below the surface.

It is also possible that this thematic issue was the main connector to PACS material. Before engaging in this research, I had spent a year in the MPACS program at Conrad Grebel at the University of Waterloo learning about ways that people deal with violence and conflict. Two of the current non-violent protests, both happening due to area-land use conflicts, were likely to find their way into my thoughts

4.3 A Note on Being Myself

There are many creative restrictions in academia. Consequently however, acting truly as oneself is not always easy. In the case of this project, however, I had no choice but to act as myself. This meant that I needed to follow my intuition: to take notes in certain ways, to log data in certain ways, to walk in certain ways... to let myself be myself as much as I could. For a while, I thought this might be a bad idea. What would happen? Would I offend someone? Would I look unprofessional? Would the research be called ‘pseudo-’ or ‘quasi-‘? Would I drop the ball? What would happen if I were to act like myself?

Fortunately, none of these things happened. I had two great advisors, my supervisors in Dr. Ball and Dr. Sunabacka, who, through our regular meetings, helped to collaboratively create an environment where I could be myself and still work within the parameters of the University. Of course, as my supervisors and I realized, if I weren’t able to be myself, I wouldn’t have been able to write a song.

Alternate version:

References

[1] Louise Glück, Proofs and Essays, Harper Collins: New York, 1994. p. 99.

[2] Situated on the Haldimand Tract, land promised to Six Nations, which includes six miles on each side of the Grand River, traditional territory of the Neutral, Anishnaabeg, and Haudenosaunee Peoples

[3] Situated on Treaty 3 Territory, traditional territory of Ojibway/Chippewa and of the Métis Nation.

[4] Situated on the Haldimand Tract, land promised to Six Nations, which includes six miles on each side of the Grand River, traditional territory of the Neutral, Anishnaabeg, and Haudenosaunee Peoples

[5]   Prendergast, Monica. “‘Poem Is What?’ Poetic Inquiry in Qualitative Social Science Research.” International Review of Qualitative Research 1, no. 4 (February 2009): 541–68. https://doi.org/10.1525/irqr.2009.1.4.541.

[6] Faulkner, Sandra Lea. “Editorial for Special Issue: Using Poetry and Poetic Inquiry as Political Response for Social Justice.” Art/Research International: A Transdisciplinary Journal 3, no. 1 (2018): 1–6.

[7] ibid, p. 550.

[8] ibid.

[9] ibid, p. 545.

[10] Monica Prendergast. “‘Poem Is What?’ Poetic Inquiry in Qualitative Social Science Research.” International review of qualitative research 1, no. 4 (2009): 541–568, p. 547.

[11] ibid.

[12] ibid, p. 548.