Behind the Poem with Shannon Webb-Campbell

Today, we invite Shannon Webb-Campbell to the blog to share the story behind the writing of “Her Eros Restored”, one of the poems in her latest collection Re: Wild Her. Read on for stories and insights form an artist residency in France where Shannon conceived of and wrote the poem! Take it away Shannon! 

(Shannon Webb-Campbell, France April 2024)

Gérard Deschamps 
(1937, France)

Les Chiffons de La Châtre – Corsets roses

printemps 1960

https://www.centrepompidou.fr/fr/ressources/oeuvre/6UBnhzb

In autumn of 2022, I travelled to Paris to saturate myself in art, architecture, and beauty as part of sketching out my next poetry collection, Re: Wild Her, and I encountered Deschamps’s Les Chiffons de La Châtre at the Centre Pompidou for the second time.

The first time I visited the work was on a solo trip to Paris in 2009, which was after selling most of my belongings, including my clothes, and hosting a small lomography art show, Moving Pictures, at Love, Me Boutique on Dresden Row to help fund my trip. Deschamps’s Les Chiffons de La Châtre left an impression in my mid 20s, but what struck me was how different I felt experiencing the work for a second time, which all these years later still bears the traces of the bodies who wore the rags and discarded women’s underwear. “Her Eros Restored” is a poetic attempt to overthrow the patriarchy, subvert the male gaze, and set these bodies and their discarded under linens and corsets that have been under Deschamps’s glass since the 1960s free.

(A room with a view. Photo by Shannon Webb-Campbell)

I don’t think I had the poetic tools to draw upon when I first encountered Les Chiffons de La Châtre. In fact, the only piece of writing I published from my first trip to Paris are two letters included in When The Nights Are Twice As Long: Love Letters of Canadian Poets, an anthology edited by David Esso and Jeanette Lynes (Goose Lane, 2015). The anthology features over 129 love letters by English Canadian poets P.K. Page to F.R. Scott, Leonard Cohen, Louis Riel, Milton Acorn’s letters to his former wife Gwendolyn MacEwen, and Susan Musgrave’s letters to her late husband Stephen Reid.

While I was in the process of writing Re: Wild Her, I took an introductory letterpress printing class through NSCAD University’s Extended Studies at the historic Dawson Print Shop in Kjipuktuk/ Halifax during fall 2023. A group of us first time letterpress printers gathered every Monday night, and learned all about the history of the printing press and letter press printing, which is arguably a rather antiquated technology but an important one. 

Not only was I intrigued by the course description describing letter press as “an explosive force of the 21st century,” but I learned all about setting wood type by hand, how to lock up plates, and use a Vander cook press. As I was hand cutting my carefully selected Clare Fontaine natural paper, a French stationary company founded in 1858, I was dreaming and scheming up poems like “How Do I Reach for the Wild (Three Graces),” “Generations Meet in Epwikek” and “Stardust Woman” while inking the rollers and creating my first ever letter press poster.

(PHOTO: FRANCE WRITING STUDIO, Photo by Shannon Webb-Campbell)

I initially imagined writing “Her Eros Restored” as a long poem but got distracted. Other poems interrupted the flow of that idea. Initially, I conceived of it as a numerical poem, but that’s evolved recently through the editing process with my fabulous editor, Sandra Ridley. The version of “Her Eros Restored” that won the first-ever Ellemeno Visual Literature Prize 2024 through the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia has gone through its own rewilding process and appears slightly altered in the published book.

(PHOTO: CHATEAU DU LA NAPOULE, Photo by Shannon Webb-Campbell)

Re: Wild Her is divided into three sections: Wild-Life, Connections and Recovery. From the Japanese philosophy of wabi sabi to the Kew Gardens, these poetics span Cuba, California, Mexico, Iceland, Italy, Nova Scotia, western Ktaqmkuk/ Newfoundland and southeastern France.

(PHOTO: MY STUDIO Photo by Shannon Webb-Campbell)

Through divine timing, I finished writing Re: Wild Her in my little studio at Chateau de La Napoule during a month-long Canadian Artist Residency in Mandelieu-la-Napoule, France in April 2024. While I swam every single morning in the sea, I’d spend the afternoons finalizing the order of Re: Wild Her by pinning each of the poems on the white studio wall in the second floor of the castle. I also wrote one of the final poems “Tender Was the Night,” which is partially inspired by the lovers ritual Henry and Marie Clews created for their spirits to meet one hundred years after their deaths at Chateau de La Napoule, and reading F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel Tender Is the Night (1934).

(PHOTO: STUDIO KEYHOLE Photo by Shannon Webb-Campbell)

My studio had a keyhole view of the pink villa where the Canadian artists in residence and I lived. During my residency I shared time and space with some incredible visual artists like filmmaker Emily Pelstring, painter Dona Park, documentary artist Mira Burt-Wintock, and fellow poet Shannon Quinn, who asked me to photograph her wearing a paper bag dress with a poem she’d written on it in black marker. Quinn writes: “Time in any life is short. Be brilliant. You already are. All your flaws. Staggering perfection.” Then she elegantly walked into the sea as her paper dress dissolved.

(Poetic performance by Shannon Quinn. Photo by Shannon Webb-Campbell)

During my residency, I also defended my PhD in Creative Writing through the University of New Brunswick in my studio on the full moon in Scorpio on the Côte d’Azur. My artistic kin threw me a post-defence party with champagne and drew me a banner: “The Doctor Is In” with my initial S on the flag of the castle.

Part of our Canadian Artist Residence included an Open Studio Night on April 27, 2024, where the community was invited to see our work installed throughout the chateau. It was amazing to see work by my cohort; who included: Pelstring, Park, Burt-Wintock, Quinn, Iranian-Canadian artist Leila Zelli, Amélie Jodoin, Francine Lalonde, Founder, multi-media artist and Director and Curator of VibraFusionLab David Bobier, and sculptor Scott Rogers.

(PHOTO: THE DOCTOR IS IN)

For my installation, I projected the cover of Re: Wild Her, designed by Tree Abraham, above the hearth of the fireplace in the dining room and read from the collection for the very first time. Organizer Nelcy Mercier translated some of the poems into French and distributed them amongst the mostly Francophone audience. 

(PHOTO: RE: WILD HER KEYHOLE Photo by Oly Zarapina)

While the month on the French Riviera changed my life, it also embodied the intentions behind writing Re: Wild Her. I will never forget our last evening together as a multidisciplinary cohort in the isolated tower studio with a private balcony overlooking the Mediterranean. 

We sat cross-legged amongst Rogers’ “Altar of Exorcism and Séance (2024)” which was made of cork oak, local rose bottles and eucalyptus, above the crypt of Henry and Marie Clews, a wealthy American couple who constructed the castle during the interwar period. Beneath us were the bodies of the Clews and above us was a hermetically sealed apartment that the couple planned to occupy with their spirits in 2050. 

Together, we were in the liminal tower studio space between the Clews bodies and the resting place of their souls, burning candles and dried eucalyptus leaves, pulling cards from my French tarot deck.

As my poetry tends to take on many forms, the poems “A Cove is a Coven,” “Dark Years Offshore” and “Cosmic Woodland Guidance” appear on the forthcoming album Pine, a musical collaboration between Canadian hip hop artist Ice Tha One and rapper Junia-T, whose album Studio Monk was longlisted for the 2020 Polaris Music Prize. I recorded the poems with producer Junia-T at It’s OK Studios, an independent Black-led and operated interdisciplinary multipurpose arts space in Toronto on Queen Street West in the fall of 2024.

(Ice tha One, Junia-T and Shannon Webb-Campbell, Toronto, Fall 2024. Photo by Wendy Beattie)