Winnipeg Free Press

Winnipeg Free Press (Newspaper) - September 30, 2020, Winnipeg, Manitoba <§>bM □ ■e- PAGE C1 Winnipeg free PressARTS • LIFEWEDNESDAY SEPTEMBER 30, 2020 ARTS@FREEPRESS.MB.CA • WINNIPEGFREEPRESS.COM► CONNECT WITH THE BEST ARTS AND LIFE COVERAGE IN MANITOBA SECTION C iHin IBM®! MIKE DEAL / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Chimwemwe Undi, one of the poets selected for the Winnipeg Words project, hopes having her work displayed downtown at the Millennium Library will inspire passersby to explore poetry in their own way. EVA WASNEY POEMS by local writers are being turned into public art pieces, rolling through the city on buses and hanging in the windows of neighbourhood libraries. The Winnipeg Words project is a celebration of contemporary poetry and the brainchild of the Winnipeg Arts Council and Di Brandt, the city’s inaugural poet laureate. Work by Brandt, Shirley Camia, Rosanna Deerchild, Catherine Hunter, Charles Leblanc, Sharanpal Ruprai, Kather-ena Vermette, Duncan Mercredi and Chimwemwe Undi has been selected for the project. “I’m excited to be part of a project that puts poetry in front of people,” says Undi, a 26-year-old poet and recent law school graduate. “I think a lot of people say that they don’t like poetry, but... there’s a huge amount of variety in poetry and the stuff that you learned in high school is not necessarily a great representation of what there is out there.” Undi herself had an atypical high school poetry experience. Drawn to the artform by a love of music lyrics, she became a member of her school’s poetry club, where the focus was on enjoying verse instead of analyzing it. That informal, approachable relationship with poetry has guided her writing and spoken-word performances over the last decade. “I think the benefits of a public art project like this and of spoken word are the same, in that they aim to make poetry accessible,” Undi says. “To bring it out of the classroom and the coffee shop and into people’s daily lives.” In her own life, reading and writing poetry has kept her grounded while starting work as an articling student and throughout the coronavirus pandemic. “For me, it’s really about connecting to other people,” she says “That a poem about what can seem like a really individual and idiosyncratic experience can speak to so many people reminds me that we are all connected.” An excerpt of Undi’s poem, On Naming (after Audre Lorde), will be posted at the Millennium Library as part of the Winnipeg Words project. When she wrote the poem in 2017, she was thinking about Lorde — an American writer, feminist and civil rights activist — and the ways Black women have been excluded from feminist movements. Three years later, the work still resonates. “Frustrations and insights that were expressed by somebody writing decades before I was even alive, still felt really pressing and urgent — and even more so now,” Undi says of Lorde’s work. “I find it actually a little bit sad to think about how the exclusion of Black people from stories, historical and fictional, remains relevant.” Undi hopes having her work posted downtown will inspire passersby to explore poetry in their own way. “I’d love for this to be something that introduces people to a poem that they love,” she says. Duncan Mercredi’s poem Children of the Earth will be installed at the Transcona Library. The piece was selected from Mercredi’s 1992 poetry collection, Dreams of the Wolf in the City, and is a meditation on his connection to the land growing up on Misipawistik Cree Nation, otherwise known as Grand Rapids. “Our ties were with the land,” says the Cree and Métis writer and storyteller. “Everything that we learned was land-based — how to survive, how to honour that connection we had with the Earth.” At least, that’s where he thinks the poem came from. Unlike Undi, Mercredi actively avoids revisiting old work. “I rarely go back to what I’ve written,” he says. “To me, the writing is just a release, it’s something I’m thinking about, so I write it out and then it’s done.” His introduction to poetry came from his kookum, Charlotte Mercre-di, who was a constant and talented storyteller. “The stories that she told were legends and maybe some personal stories, but. the way she told stories was more poetic than the way we tell stories now,” he says. “You influence the way the story is told when you tell it orally as opposed to reading it.” Mercredi started writing poems when he had to leave his community and travel to Cranberry Portage for high school. “I started writing mostly just to remember what it was like to be at home and that evolved into a kind of poetic form.” WHILE Mercredi isn’t convinced many commuters will notice the Winnipeg Words panels while waiting for the bus, he hopes his work resonates with those that do look up from their phones. “I hope it (gives) maybe a little more understanding of the way we think,” he says. “People like to think of Canada as this unified country, and I don’t see it that way. I think we’re more divisive than we are unified.” Mercredi is Winnipeg’s poet laureate for 2020-21, a role that has taken the self-described “isolationist” well out of his comfort zone, but has resulted in a flurry of new writing that can be found on the Winnipeg Arts Council website. A full list of poems included in the Winnipeg Words project can also be found at winnipegarts.ca. eva.wasney@freep ress.m b.ca Twitter: @evawasney Duncan Mercredi, Winnipeg's poet laureate for 2020-21, got his introduction to poetry through his kookum. 'I rarely go back to what I've written. To me, the writing is just a release, it's something I'm thinking about, so I write it out and then it's done' Enterprising commode to become loo with view Cosmetics shipment sets phasers for stunning on space station DOUG SPEIRS IN THE DOUG HOUSE WHAT with being a major nerd, I have always been mildly obsessed with the notion of space travel. When I was a kid, I used to zip around my backyard with a plastic helmet slapped over my head and a makeshift jetpack — two paper-towel rolls wrapped in tin foil — stuck to my back with duct tape. Instead of sports stars and costumed crimefighters, one of my big heroes was Capt. James T. Kirk, as portrayed by Canadian actor William Shatner, who taught me it was possible to be both pudgy AND the captain of a starship. I rarely yell, “Beam me up, Scotty!” these days, but my youthful passion for space travel was renewed this week when I read thrilling news reports about NASA’s plans to launch a private cargo spacecraft Thursday evening to carry tons of fresh supplies to the International Space Station. The cargo rocket will be loaded with the usual food and scientific experiments for the space station, but it will also be carrying two special items that you might not expect, namely: Skincare products and a $23-million space toilet. Let’s start with the fact cosmetics giant Estée Lauder is coughing up $128,000 to become the first beauty brand in space, paying NASA to launch 10 bottles of its nighttime skincare serum so they can be photographed — at $17,500 per hour — aboard the space station. I assume countless space tragedies have resulted from the lack of a proper skincare routine among astronauts, although I hear zero gravity is great for wrinkles. Consider the following out-of-this-world conversation I have just made up: First astronaut: “My goodness! You have such soft skin!” Second astronaut: “Thanks, it’s Estée Lauder. Hey, what does this red button do?” But we don’t have time to ponder the importance of moisturizing while weightless because we need to move on to the brand new space toilet. I should confess here that, along with space travel, I have always had something of an obsession with toilets, which is not what you would expect from someone with a journalism degree and a functioning brain. Over the years, I have written dozens of groundbreaking columns on the sensitive topic of toilets, including contests wherein you can win a toilet equipped with a big-screen TV and a state-of-the-art stereo system, innocent homeowners finding rattlesnakes in their toilets, a Canadian stuntwoman setting a world record for being the fastest human being on a motorized toilet, and motion-activated night lights that transformed one of my personal toilets into a 1970s-style disco ball. Today, however, marks the first time I have been able to use this column to share with readers the excitement of a high-tech commode being blasted into outer space. According to NASA, the new $23-million space throne, known as the Universal Waste Management System, was created with astronaut input, which makes sense, if you catch my less-than-subtle scientific drift. • CONTINUED ON C2 C_01_Sep-30-20_FP_01.indd C1 2020-09-29 5:15 PM I ;