March Hare!
If The March Hare is half as entertaining as chatting with Randall Maggs, then tonight in Halifax and shows all across Newfoundland (March 7-11) are sure to delight. The Hare kicked off in Toronto this past Friday and will travel as far east as St. John’s. Each venue hosts renowned poets, storytellers and musicians combined with performers that stick with the entire tour. Maggs, an award-winning poet, wood craftsman and author of Night Work: The Sawchuck Poems, who calls Newfoundland home, is artistic director of the annual event. He shared with Arts East his passion for Atlantic Canada’s largest poetry festival.
The humble beginnings…
RM: Rex and Al Pittman are the two guys that really started this at the Blomidon Club. I suspect they had a bad golf game or something and they were sitting down over a beer. They just decided to put on a get-together of a bunch of people, writers and musicians (it’s always had that double focus from the beginning). It’s different from other festivals because it started out as a gathering, and even though we’re expanding constantly, we always try to maintain the initial feel of that idea. I read at the very first one in 1988. It was a few people from the English Department at Grenfell College and a couple local musicians. I recall one guy played the piano and whistled. That was the humble beginnings of it all.
Oh How the Hare has grown…
RM: We do have people that tend to come back each year, performers as well as patrons, and the emphasis has always been for Rex and Al (who died seven or eight years ago) to do something for the people who come to it. We’ve built up a wonderful audience over the years and that’s why so many performers like to come to The March Hare. We started with one venue and now we have 12. One of the wonderful things about it is it brings cultural events into smaller Newfoundland communities. I would say we had at least 2,000 people last year over the course of that period. So, that’s why writers and singers love to come to it. Ron Hynes comes practically every year because when musicians are performing, like writers, everybody is just listening. Really the success of The Hare has to do with the people who attend. For our 20th anniversary we took a crowd to Ireland and we performed in six different cities with various Irish people. The Irish artists have always been a big part of The March Hare. That’s the Irish-Newfoundland connection.
The pattern…
RM: We always open in Toronto at the Brass Taps. Then we fly down through Halifax and come home to St. John’s. We bring people with us, musicians and poets, and we just kind of team up with local performers. This year, we’re taking Jessica Grant, Craig Francis Power and Stephanie McKenzie to Toronto. So they’ll perform in Toronto and then in Halifax on the way and they may or may not continue across the island. This year we’ve got Donna Morrissey and Lorri Neilsen Glenn in Halifax. Matthew Hornell, who is actually a Newfoundlander, is a phenomenon and he’s also playing with us in Halifax. And we’re bringing Andrew O’Brien with us, another very good, young musician, and he’s actually doing the whole tour this year. So that’s just the pattern that we’ve kind of evolved over the years.
Audience-Friendly…
RM: Usually we aim for ten people to perform at a show, so that means you’re going to have about 12 minutes per person with a short introduction before each one. And you’re really trying to limit without gonging people, so that the people are not there until midnight because your patrons will be bored or leave. So it’s great for the audience because you’re going from maybe musician to writer to poet to musician, and I think that’s one of the reasons why we’ve been so successful in building up a larger audience. Patrons now are starting to follow the Hare. They’ll pick it up in St. John’s and come all the way across the island. Even this year I know we’ve got some people coming down from Toronto.
A Gathering…
RM: Have you ever noticed that writers very seldom go to readings or stick around for other people’s readings? Here they tend to come for the whole thing and get to the readings, so it has a different kind of feel to it in my experience with festivals across the country. Alistair MacLeod loves to come to the Hare. I just remember one year that he was here. The show was over and he had just blown everybody away as the last reader, and then the music started. I asked, “Do you want to go back to your hotel?” Alistair said, “I think I’ll stick around for a while”. He was sitting in the outer ring of chairs when it started. But by the time we left, he’d worked his way in closer and closer to the centre where the music was being played. I thought this is just typical of what The March Hare is all about, just enjoying that aspect of being with people in that kind of an informal setting.
RM: Have you ever noticed that writers very seldom go to readings or stick around for other people’s readings? Here they tend to come for the whole thing and get to the readings, so it has a different kind of feel to it in my experience with festivals across the country. Alistair MacLeod loves to come to the Hare. I just remember one year that he was here. The show was over and he had just blown everybody away as the last reader, and then the music started. I asked, “Do you want to go back to your hotel?” Alistair said, “I think I’ll stick around for a while”. He was sitting in the outer ring of chairs when it started. But by the time we left, he’d worked his way in closer and closer to the centre where the music was being played. I thought this is just typical of what The March Hare is all about, just enjoying that aspect of being with people in that kind of an informal setting.
Classic Hare…
RM: Last year, Rex and I got delayed coming out of Toronto. Everybody else was on a different flight than us and we ended up spending four hours in the lounge up there. We didn’t get to Halifax until quite a bit later. So, Matthew Byrne, who has been performing in The March Hare since he was like 10 years old, he just took over and was MC for the whole show. We got off the plane and it must have been 10 o’clock at night. Ron was scheduled to perform last and he has a song based on my book of poems. What we started doing was he’ll actually sing a few verses of the song and I’ll read parts of a couple poems. When we got out of the taxi in front of The Carleton, and I heard him singing, I knew it was the second last song. The Sawchuck song was coming up next. So I ran into the front door, dropped my bag and ran onto the stage. We did the thing together and then said good night to everybody and that was it. So the crowd got a good kick out of it. But, that’s the Hare…stuff like that’s happening all the time.
Traditions...
RM: We have the “New Poet” every year on the Saturday night, second slot of the Pittman’s Fancy performance. This is not always a young writer, just somebody who is kind of coming into the art form. Sometimes we know who it is well in advance, but we don’t put the name in because it’s kind of like a coming out for that particular person. But our audience is the kindest, most welcoming audience in the world. New poets are usually pretty nervous in that situation because you might have Alistair MacLeod or Michael Ondaatje reading first and you’re following that person, and you have exactly the same amount of time to read as that person. It could be an unnerving situation, but the audience is so receptive and looks forward to that slot. So, we continue that tradition. Also, we always dedicate each year to somebody because it’s a family. It’s Adrian Fowler this year. He read at the first March Hare and he’s the one who put together The March Hare Anthology (Breakwater Books) which is quite a wonderful collection of works done by people at The March Hare over the years. Rex is great with the traditions and that’s how you build the mythology around an event.
