I have a plugin on the website to give various statistics about usage. I’ve noticed a couple of things this last week. When I look at the countries that people are visiting from, Ukraine, Russia, & Khazakhstan are in the top 10. There are usually just a handful of vistors that are not from Canada, the United States, or the United Kingdom.
Similarly, there are stats for the top referrers, usually topped by Google. This past week, however, the top referrer by far has been from McMaster University, although I can’t see from which department as you need login information to get any further in to their site. I know that sometimes my site is used in courses. I know, for example, that Niagara University has a course on Niagara Literature that uses the website, and also that the stats generally spike in September-October and again in January-February, coinciding with the beginning of academic terms.
Stats also spike when an individual who has a poem on the site is in the news. When Priscila Uppal, a well known poet and novelist died, I had about 1,200 hits on her poem Niagara Mermaids on the day her death was announced, and they stayed high for a few days afterwards.
So if you’re dropping in from McMaster or anywhere else, I’d love to hear how you are using the site. You can drop a note in the comments, or email at aporteus@niagarapoetry.ca.
I’m in the process of making the move to bluer skies with both my regular account and the Niagara Falls Poetry Project account. If you have an account over there, please feel free to follow either or both of my accounts – the personal one and the Niagara Falls Poetry Project one. I will be winding these accounts down over time.
The Niagara Falls Poetry Project website (the one you’re looking at now) will remain as the main site of the NFPP.
Today I got a huge compliment from Terry Trowbridge, a sociolegal scholar with many poems and scholarly articles published in a number of diverse journals. Terry commented on my Major Research Project (MRP), completed at Brock University as part of the requirements for my Master of Arts degree, which I received in 2020.
The MRP is entitled The Development of the Poetry Walking Tour of Niagara Falls Using Mobile App Technology, and is available on the Brock University website, my website, on ResearchGate, and Google Scholar. It details some background information on Niagara poetry, the use of mobile apps in tourism, crowdsourcing, print and electronic anthologies, and a detailed explanation of how the Poetry Walking Tour was conceived and executed.
Terry wrote on ResearchGate:
Andrew Porteus is the most dedicated scholar of Canada’s Niagara region culture who I know. I strongly recommend this MRP to anyone who is developing projects in public history, multimedia literature, and interactive tours.
I take this as a tremendous compliment from a scholar who encouraged me tremendously (often at local poetry readings in pubs) in the early phases of the development of the Niagara Falls Poetry Project, and encouraged me to go to Brock University and bring some serious scholarly insight to the site.
I just discovered that two Niagarapoems that are on the NFPP site have been set to music by Harris Loewen, a retired Brock University professor. For a delightful treat I’ve embedded the recordings to At Niagara Falls by Anson G. Chester and Niagara in 1882 by John Macdonald. The Macdonald poem was named Peaceful Niagara for Loewen’s choral version.
Andrew Porteus Presenting at the PCA conference Photo courtesy of Katie Manning
The last few days my wife, Louise and I have been in San Antonio, Texas, for the 53th annual Popular Culture Association / American Culture Association 53rd annual conference. I was presenting “The Niagara Way of Death: Depictions of Death and Near-Death in the Poetry of Niagara Falls,” a more academic, but briefer version of a presentation that I had done at the Lundy’s Lane Historial Society meeting earlier in the week. The panel that I was on, “Poetry Studies & Creative Poetry IV: Forgetting What the Fox Says: Nature in Pop Culture” included presentations by Li Zhuang, Marlon Fick, and Gwen Hart. and the whole poetry stream of the PCA conference (8 sessions over 2 days) had been organized by Professor Katie Manning. It was a good combination of creative poetry and more theoretical presentations. One of the interesting discussions that followed was about overcoming imposter syndrome, the feeling that despite skills, talents, and accomplishments people have an internalized feeling of being a fraud. That feeling is what prompted me to get my MA degree in Popular Culture after I retired, to give solid academic credentials to the work that I have been doing for decades with the Niagara Falls Poetry Project. The stream ended with dinner at the Iron Cactus Mexican Grill, on the San Antonio RiverWalk.
Mission San José
Louise and I had never been to San Antonio before, so after the PCA sessions finished, we took the opportunity to explore the surroundings somewhat. The most notable feature was the RiverWalk, designed in the 1920s to control the flooding that happened on the river that snakes through San Antonio. The river is controlled by a series of sluice gates that can divert flood water from the area, keeping the water level stable even after torrential rains, which we did experience on the first two days of the conference. The RiverWalk is lined by bars, restaurants, shops, and some cultural attractions, including the Briscoe Western Art Museum which features great paintings, statues, and artifacts of Texan culture, one of the highlights of our visit there. San Antonio was founded on the backs of 5 Spanish missions, including the Alamo. We took a tour of the 4 outlying missions in the rain one day, which included a stop at an aqueduct crossing the San Antonio River, notable because I say a yellow-crowned night-heron, a lifetime sighting for me. The next day the rain had stopped, the temperature was higher, and we took a guided tour of the Alamo, including the collection that Phil Collins, who has been fascinated by the Alamo since he was a young boy, had donated.
Unfortunately, our time had to come to an end, so after a boat tour on the RiverWalk and a visit to the Mexican market, we headed to the airport.
