Tag: tourists

The Local Tourist by Amanda Leonard

leonard
Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip Arrive by Car at Niagara Falls, October 14, 1951. Image courtesy of Niagara Falls Public Library

Niagara. She is my favourite painter.

Because I taste limestone on my eyes’ parched lips and swim with carelessness in her urgency in constant motion

Because she is felt on the back of dawn
And not popping within of free fireworks, as she holds a much deeper secret

Her body, decaying with duplicitous effigies of her story, a story of erosion, of two bodies of water, meeting

A story lost without capture, lost outside the frame

Dipping my toes in such honeymoon
Of past loves
More luxurious than any fiberglass tub dripping with scarlet passion
And more than his thick hands on the steel beams hoistening up more divide, parking meters

She is beneath me, underneath those man-made islands
And searchingly, meandering to lower ground,

And its because her sound reverberates on the other side of the world

She sits still, in her royally crescent moon as time flowing through her like silk, changes her

Until, high beams flash in my rearview mirror
Telling me to move along
I have been staring at her for far too long

Source: Amanda Leonard, 2020

Amanda Leonard is an English/Visual Arts teacher who enjoys writing and sketching. She was born and raised in Niagara Falls, but has been nomadic for the last decade.
She is currently writing a novel that is set in modern day Niagara Falls.

The Development of the Poetry Walking Tour of Niagara Falls Using Mobile App Technology by Andrew Porteus

mrp
Brock University conferred on me the degree of Master of Arts in Popular Culture at the virtual convocation ceremony held in mid-October, 2020. Part of the requirements was to complete a major research project (MRP). My MRP was the development of a poetry walking tour of Niagara Falls using mobile app technology. The tour is available for android users (iOS will be coming) – click here for the instructions for using it.

I had previously posted about the Poetry Selection Event that was part of the development of this tour. Here’s a link to that post.

In addition to developing the walking tour itself, an academic paper had to be written about the project. This paper is now in the Brock University Digital Repository and can be accessed using this link. I have included the abstract below.

Please feel free to send feedback if you use the walking tour app or read the paper.

Abstract:

The Niagara Falls Poetry Project (NFPP) has been an ongoing research-creation project for many years. In addition to being a site of poetry of place it is also a site of recovery and discovery of Niagara poetry. This MRP used social construction of technology and of literature theories as a framework to develop the Poetry Walking Tour of Niagara Falls (PWT) to extend the NFPP. Twenty-four points of interest were selected following a route along the Niagara River, passing Niagara Falls. Content analyses and close readings of the poetry on the NFPP website were conducted to preselect suitable poems to present to a panel of poets, academics, and end users at a Poetry Selection Event. Using the participatory design techniques of crowdsourcing and a modified Delphi method, the “best” poem for each of the points of interest was selected. The poem, explanatory historical and literary material, images, and multimedia were added to the Interpretours platform website, which was then used to populate the GuideTags mobile app for smartphones and tablets. The end result is a fully functional mobile app GPS guided walking tour of Niagara Falls that alerts users to points of interest that highlight the poetry and history of Niagara Falls. The role of the PWT in the local economy as a tourist attraction, particularly for the heritage and literary tourism sectors are contributions of the project

John’s Trip, or, A Visit to Niagara by John R. Barlow

John
Cover of a reprint edition of John’s Trip

A Serio-Comic Poem, in Four Cantos.

This is a 96 page, book-length poem about John, from Rhode Island, who takes a trip first to New York City and then to Niagara Falls by boat and train. His romantic encounters are described, as well as the adventures he has in Niagara Falls with hackmen, swindlers, and hustlers. At the same time, he is impressed with the natural beauty of the Falls.

Read the full poem at Hathi Trust 

 

 

Citation: Barlow, John R. John’s Trip, or a Visit to Niagara. A Serio-Comic Poem in Four Cantos. Niagara Falls: William Pool, Printer, 1871

Canadiana 2000 by Kevin McCabe

mccabe2

mccabe2
The Castle Souvenir Shop in Chippawa. Photo courtesy of the Wilfred Hicks Collection, Niagara Falls Public Library

The plastic Mounties come in five sizes
With prices adjusted to every pocketbook.
They are drawn up in ranks of prancing horsemen,
Proudly displaying their little Canadian flags,
And marshalled under a sign which reads “Canadiana”.
The Mounties are ready to march:
To take their places on ashtrays, mugs, key-chains, T-shirts, and underwear;
To serve their country at souvenir stands, gift shops, motel lobbies, bus terminals, information
booths, and gambling casinos;
To form a guard of honour for Wayne Thompson, Mike Harris, Jean Chretien, Marilyn Monroe,
Angela Mosca, and Arnie Swartzennegger;
To go forth from here all over the world as little symbols of Canada.
And, standing in front of the display, in the fever of the moment,
I am rapt in an epiphany:
It seems to me that I am witnessing
The birth of a nation.

Source: Kevin McCabe. Canadian Topics: Poems About Canada, 1967-2017. St. Catharines: Blarney Stone Books, 2017

N.B. This poem was inspired by a souvenir market on River Road (not the Castle Souvenir Shop) – personal note from the author.

 

 

Niagara by Bruce Bond

And then the husband, head bowed, eyes closed,
a tourist pamphlet in his lap, says,

bond
Bruce Bond. Courtesy of the author

did you know the green color of the water
is the color of the falls coming to an end.

And the bride says, you do not look good, love,
pale as an angel. Are you sleeping well,

eating well. Did you know, he says,
sixty tons of salt and rock flour drain

each minute, a foot each year, and in a thousand
lifetimes, there will be no falls at all.

And the bride takes the pamphlet from his hands
and folds it tenderly as if it were a thing

she loved and worried over. Did you know,
he says on the verge of sleep that never arrives,

the end of his sentence carried out to sea.
And the rainbow comes and goes according

to the clouds. And when it comes, the petals
of the cameras open, as they did just now.

And somewhere in a stranger’s photograph,
the man turns to the woman and says, did you

know. And she says, no, dear, I did not.
Or was it, yes, I did. Either way

her palm on his brow is a bridal veil
of water. It cures the sleepless, that sound.

It is the angel in the downpour, the coin
so old it passes faceless through our hands.

And with that, the couple vanishes.
And a thousand tons of mist rises and falls.

Source: Prairie Schooner, Spring 2018

Bruce Bond is the author of twenty-three books including, most recently, Immanent Distance: Poetry and the Metaphysics of the Near at Hand (U of MI, 2015), Black Anthem (Tampa Review Prize, U of Tampa, 2016), Gold Bee (Helen C. Smith Award, Crab Orchard Award, SIU Press, 2016), Sacrum (Four Way, 2017), Blackout Starlight: New and Selected Poems 1997-2015 (L.E. Phillabaum Award, LSU, 2017), Rise and Fall of the Lesser Sun Gods (Elixir Book Prize, Elixir Press, 2018), Dear Reader (Free Verse Editions, 2018), and Frankenstein’s Children (Lost Horse, 2018).  Presently he is a Regents Professor of English at University of North Texas.