Below you can listen to Catherine read the poem Return by Robinson Jeffers

Above there’s a podcast of Catherine reading The Strangest Things in the World - one of her own poems.

You can see Catherine reading in person in her upcoming Cross Canada Tour for Frenzy if you live in or near a major Canadian city. Check out the Facebook page for dates and times. For more info on Catherine, including her books, music, collaborations and photography - go to her website.

The Edith Piaf song mentioned (and played) in the interview is the one in this vintage clip - Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien.

This montage of Egon Schiele’s work is set to the music of Pamina Blue. You can find more of Schiele’s artwork at his online image gallery.

This is one of the only recordings of Robinson Jeffers reading his poetry. The poem is Wise Men in Their Bad Hours.

Tony and Tia - the protagonists of the 1975 Disney live action movie Escape to Witch Mountain - have supernatural powers, as demonstrated in this clip.

And now, let’s look at some works of visual art connected with Catherine in various ways.

Above is Jenny Keith-Hughes’ illustration for Catherine’s first

children’s book.

And to the right is

another one by the

same artist,

incorporating some

of Catherine’s text.

copyright Jenny

Keith-Hughes, 2009

These are two collages by Karen Moe, using Catherine’s text.

Karen did the photo below, too.

copyright Karen Moe, 2009

These three works are by Paul Saturley, featuring Catherine modeling.

Copyright Paul Saturley, 2009

These two pieces are by Catherine.

The photograph beneath is titled The Poet’s Dustpan.

copyright Catherine Owen, 2009

                                                                Poems by Catherine Owen

Categories of Muses: a prelude - from the book Frenzy

There’s the one that got away before

a poem could be written, the accidental one

from whom a poem emerged, rare &

a bit awkward like a swallow laying a turkey’s egg,

the one wholly unlike the others who, as

lightning on a sunny day, gives you a new form, an

entire book, somewhat embarrassing as, usually,

they’re not your type,

the deceased muse whose pursuit involves

a library card, nature as muse for which

one needs sturdy walking shoes, the muse of self

entailing memory, perhaps a mirror, the muse

who seems so well cut out to be one but never,

somehow, produces a poem,

and then there’s the muse

who reverses everything, taking you back always

to the same raw place where poems arrive,

incessantly, out of the encompassing & nothing they are,

the muse at the top of the food chain who, in

consuming all, lets fall so many glinting words

that you forgive them for tearing you down to your bones,

laud them, those hawks of language, for their hard

dark nests, their long flights

inside you.

6

No one had noticed him before, then,

when there were cities and now,

the crucifixions dissolved, he has the fields

of the world to wander.

What one can do, a misplaced clochard,

is endless. Yet, the grasses are incognito to him,

the flowers mute their faces and he bellows

for water in the vast prairies

with the terror of escaped meat.

Without the sticky deliverance of garbage cans,

he has only his mind to rummage in.

There are laces, yes, a busted spinning top,

eight scrounged pennies. All useless

in this wilderness with its quiet scoops of cloud,

those still, sufficient shadows death makes.

The poem to the right is part of a collaborative project with Paul Saturley - he did the photo below, Catherine wrote the poem to go with it - from the website Quadrants.

Catherine plays bass, writes lyrics and sings for the metal band Helgrind. She’s also in the band Inhuman, and you can see a clip of them on their Facebook page.

These three pieces (one to the left and two below) are part of a collaboration with Sydney Lancaster entitled Archives of Absence which combines poems, lists, GPS coordinates, found objects, photographs, classifications, videos and gel transfers. The focal point of the piece is The Berm - a “geographically liminal realm” behind Catherine Owen’s house in Edmonton.