The Collected Writings of Michael Snow

Pauline Carey is the author of Magic and What’s in a Name?

Michael Snow has been a part of Canadian lives for more than 30 years.
His Walking Woman image, the Canada geese flying in Toronto’s Eaton
Centre, and the exuberant figures of The Audience sculptures outside
Toronto’s SkyDome are familiar to many. His work in all media,
including his avant-garde films, is shown and heard around the world. In
Toronto, the Power Plant Gallery and the Art Gallery of Ontario recently
collaborated on The Michael Snow Project, of which this book is a part.

Snow rightly says it is a book for browsing. Included are a previously
unpublished poem from 1957; several interviews; a lively piece Snow
wrote on the death of drummer Larry Dubin; the text for the elaborate
musical joke The Last LP; a speech written, recorded, and then
lipsynched in front of an audience; photographs of shooting scripts
bespattered with handwritten notes; the text of Snow’s proposal for
the SkyDome sculptures; and other curiosities from a mind that is
forever curious. Ideas pop off the page, sometimes with seeming
incoherence (a closer read is frequently rewarded), sometimes with a
simplicity of expression that stops the reader cold, sometimes with
humor, and invariably with a pun or two. Snow once said that he wanted
people “to learn how to see and hear, so they can always see and
hear.” These pages will assist in that process.