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Poetry Places

Stampede and the Westness of West

by (author) Aritha van Herk

Publisher
Frontenac House Ltd.
Initial publish date
Apr 2016
Category
Places, Women Authors
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9781927823491
    Publish Date
    Apr 2016
    List Price
    $15.95

Classroom Resources

Where to buy it

Description

As Artist in Residence at the Calgary Stampede, Aritha van Herk had a privileged insider’s view of the Greatest Outdoor Show on Earth. This is her resulting work, a prose/poetry book that is meditative, imagistic, historical and speculative. From Siena, Shakespeare and the Vogelherd Cave to the history of pancakes, and the word stampede, van Herk speculates on lust, love, fences, Guy Weadick and more. “Stampede. There is only one, and that is Calgary’s,” she says. "You never know why you love something, but when you do, you cherish its faults as much as its strengths."’ This is the kind of serious homage that the Stampede, in all its richness and variety, deserves.

About the author

Aritha van Herk teaches Creative Writing, Canadian Literature and Contemporary Narrative. Her novels include Judith, The Tent Peg, No Fixed Address (nominated for the Governor General's Award for fiction), Places Far From Ellesmere (a geografictione) and Restlessness. Her critical works, A Frozen Tongue (ficto-criticism) and In Visible Ink (crypto-frictions) stretch the boundaries of the essay and interrogate questions of reading and writing as aspects of narrative subversion. With Mavericks: an Incorrigible History of Alberta (winner of the Grant MacEwan Author's Award) van Herk ventured into new territory, transforming history into a narratological spectacle. That book frames the new permanent exhibition that opened at the Glenbow Museum in 2007. van Herk is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and is active in Canada's literary and cultural life, writing articles and reviews as well as creative work. She has served on many juries, including the Governor General's Award and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. She is well known in the broader community of the city, the province, and the country as a writer and a public intellectual.

Aritha van Herk's profile page

Awards

  • Short-listed, ReLit Awards

Excerpt: Stampede and the Westness of West (by (author) Aritha van Herk)

The dreaming

On the pages of winter, horses gallop through the darkness that is our heirloom, here on the grasslands bent and whispering under the hibernating season. Invisible, those ghost hooves raise the dust of summer, the sweetness of heat while thunderclouds stockpile the fervor of broil. A snowstorm tempts us to remember July, its sweltering grandstand thick with beer and cotton candy, blurred clamor of the announcer through a babel sound system, the cries of hucksters, the stripe of fireworks. Stampede coming. A certain anniversary that will arrive despite resistance or annoyance, despite the strange thrum of “until.” Not tomorrow, but always in the seventh month, the off-centre pivot of the year turning on its axis, saturnalia biding its time. Who counts the days to Stampede? Caterers, accountants, special events coordinators, straw bales, beer bottles, window painters. And who leaves town? The curled lip, the shoulder-shrug dismissing this déclassé debauch, this faux fiesta, with its ragbag history and bricolage of excess. The sniffy contempt: primitive. As if that were an insult. Some say you’re not a true Calgarian until you leave town to avoid the Stampede. Let’s admit it. Joy gets no respect. Popular jubilation and unfettered diversion are suspect, not to be trusted. Never indulge the instability of the mob, its desire to kick the traces, massing the streets in that social deformity known as fun. Am I trapped in a synthetic documentary? Do I breathe a brief trace of what Stampede might have been or what we will remember tomorrow? Am I artist or patron? Or just someone practising disguise? Is this the west then, legend or performance, the old west, the new west, the wild west, the faint west, the dusty west, the wicked west, the uncultivated west, the dishevelled west, the tempestuous west, the unkempt west, the turbulent west, the tousled west, the complaining west, the anarchic west, the restless west, windswept, rumpled and unironed and messy, its depiction as wildly unpredictable as its chaotic generation, a shambles and a jumble and a pandemonium of hope. Stampede or else.