CityScene
Douglas Livingston Our Very Own Existentialist/ Beat Poet By Peter Jabs
Elfarrow Apparel Story by Tara George
“B
rian [owner of the former Red Earth Imports] brought me overseas to shop with him in Nepal, and when it was time to go, I didn’t get back on the plane.” And so began the journey that ultimately lead Kyley Blomquist to open the new Elfarrow Apparel store in the Bay and Algoma district. The multi-dimensional artist spent two years in Nepal, embracing the lifestyle, falling in love with the people, and drawing inspiration for what would eventually become her socially conscious women’s clothing line, Elfarrow Apparel. Upon returning to Thunder Bay, Blomquist devoted herself to her art—designing, producing, and exposing herself to the community through venues such as the Thunder Bay Country Market. With an ever-expanding market, Blomquist found herself drawn back to the Nepal this past January, new ideas and patterns in hand. She worked for two months with locals, designing fabrics, coming up with new concepts, and producing her most recent line, made from all natural fibres. Art among art, Blomquist’s clothing and jewelry designs are beautifully displayed in her new space, which has a gallery vibe thanks to the hard work and input from her artisan friends. Elfarrow Apparel is located at 196 Algoma Street South, and online at elfarrowapparel.com.
Sunday Wilde
Kyley Blomquist teaching new techniques and observing production at a family-operated weaving studio in Kathmandu, Nepal.
I
n the corner of a café on Bay, a soft-spoken man with kindly eyes under a neat beret quotes lines from W. B. Yeats' “The Curse of Cromwell.” He tells me, “I wrote my first poem in first grade.”
One of our most important poets, Livingston has been a part of Thunder Bay’s poetry scene for years, including a stint with Thunder Bay Poetry Workshop from 1982-1983 with Mary Frost, Maynard Bjorgo, and Charles Wilkins, and on the editorial cooperative of Whiskey Jack magazine from 1989-1990. He has published three volumes of poetry—or "hypo real delays" as he calls them. After graduating high school, Livingston attended Ontario College of Art. He still paints— stark, flat symbols on canvasses that have shown at Atikokan's Pictograph Gallery and at Calico Coffeehouse. But his real education commenced after academia. An interest in symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud led to reading Jack Kerouac and other beat writers. He devoured work by existentialist J. P. Sartre, surrealist avant-garde playwright Antonin Artaud, and novelist James Joyce. References and allusions to historical figures
and works of literature and art permeate his work due to constant and continual study. Livingston’s second volume of poetry, The Perplexed Room (2003), is a slow read. The works are dense. It takes wandering with them through the forest a while before light breaks through the canopy. The poem “Memoriam” is a raw and powerful communication of Livingston's experience of his mother's suicide when he was 23. “The Graduate” refers to what he refers to as his “quarantined sleep” at Fort William Collegiate from where he graduated in 1962. The phrase “Guernica moonbeams on a high school desk” is the start of a wave that crashes into the poem “Mentor Paranoic.” The more recent 66 poems of Myoclonus (2011), have themes of “loquition whiskey catastrophe surreal,” as described by Livingston on the back cover. As in a jigsaw puzzle, the picture is not complete until the last piece is read. Livingston is working on a fourth volume of poetry, called Kata Hotus, which is Greek for “way down” that will be published in the fall by Unspeakable Press. He still uses a manual typewriter—can anyone suggest a source for typewriter ribbons?
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