Roll of Nickels

your hand on someone else's heartbeat

2026-02-09T09:00:00.001-08:00

When my husband was in the late stages of his terminal illness, he asked me to read him poetry. He didn't ask for short stories, or essays, or news articles, or the first crisp pages of a novel, with its unfolding narrative weight. The request was unexpected. Despite his five (almost five and a half) decades on this earth, he'd never been much of a reader, though he was incredibly knowledgeable about the world, often serving as my first editor, catching errors or incongruities in my poetry or prose, the wrong slip of a word. And so, without much thought as to why poetry, most evening I obliged him: ferrying a few collections from my study to the living room where he lay on a rented hospital bed, largely paralyzed from both his brain tumour and the muscle-weakening trudge of a year and a half of medications aimed at keeping him alive. From an old loveseat, under faerie lights, our three dogs sleeping around us, I'd read a poem or two from each book, never welling too long on one poet in case the poems I'd selected didn't speak to him in the way he hoped, in that moment, to be spoken to. I suppose, in a strange way, I was curating an anthology for him.
What strikes me now, about the poems I chose to read to him in late 2018, is how steeped they were in tenderness and knowing. There was one poet's knowing of his own impending death, there was another poet's Buddhist knowing of love - what it means to try at that beautiful and hopeful thing, whether that light is directed at the self, or another, or the world. I've thought a lot about "why poetry" this past year. Why it is, to my mind, the most powerful and instantaneous of the arts. The feeling I get from encountering a good poem is like turning around on a busy street only to discover I've nearly collided with a stranger: the two of us suddenly very close in an unexpected and vivifying way. I admire the visual arts - galleries are one of my life's great pleasures - but in apprehending an artwork there still seems to be a kind of mediating distance that is greater than the intimacy felt when reading a poem. Poetry's cousin, music, is immediate in its own way, but often the maker of the music seems distant - on the other side of the swelling strings and swirling oboes and the musicians playing the composer's notes. In poetry you have your hand on someone else's heartbeat.

- Aislinn Hunter, from her introduction to Best Canadian Poetry 2025.

a reckoning by fire

2026-02-01T14:31:00.001-08:00

As David St. John—a longtime friend of Levis and one of the figures instrumental in bringing his posthumous work to light—points out in his afterward to Levis’s The Darkening Trapeze (2016), Levis often closes his poems with a reckoning by fire, whether that be a purifying, revelatory fire, such as in “Elegy with an Angel at Its Gates,” or an inferno of damnation, as in “Poem Ending with a Hotel on Fire.” Even the tender poem about his son that concludes The Darkening Trapeze, “God Is Always Seventeen” (which throws us back to “The Poet at Seventeen,” the opening poem of the 1985 collection Winter Stars), ends with this disclosed, stricken sense of loss and an ache for penance:
there was
Some music playing & something inconsolable

And no longer even bitter in the melody & I will never forget
Being there with [my son] & hearing it & wondering what was going to become of us.
This ability to elevate personal vulnerability into lyric is one of the many ways I see Levis’s influence echo through the poems written by my generation. Since his death, poetry has moved ever more visibly toward the personal, especially in poems rooted in identity. While the convention of the “speaker” still exists as a kind of protective veil, many contemporary readers assume, or even crave, a closeness between poet and poem. If this has become a hallmark of twenty-first-century poetics, then Levis can be read as a blueprint of how to draw from one’s inner life—even the ugly parts—with emotional precision that doesn’t tip into self-indulgence.

- Jacques J. Rancourt, from his essay "Destroying Time: On the Lasting Legacy of Larry Levis" from the January/February 2026 issue of Poetry. You can read the whole thing here.

the 2025 roll of nickels year in review

2026-01-03T16:10:00.001-08:00

2025 was a very quiet year here at Roll of Nickels, as life and work demands derailed my grand ambitions. I only managed to post five quotes on writing, and archive three of my favourite pieces of critical prose that I've written in recent years: an essay on poetry and companionship; my companion piece to my book Weather, "Some Notes on Writing Haiku"; and my recent interview with Ben Robinson for the Hamilton Review of Books (which, in the months that followed, shut its doors - more motivation to archive old material!).

The aforementioned Weather had a very nice year, being named a finalist for both the Raymond Souster Award and the Fred Cogswell Award. A new poem of mine, "Harrison River, November" was also a finalist for the Arc Magazine Poem of the Year competition. In addition, I published nine interviews with authors, which appeared in Read Local BC, The New Quarterly, and EVENT. I will (god willing) post those here over the coming year.

2025 was also exciting for me as, for part of an upper level Creative Writing course I was teaching at the University of the Fraser Valley, my students each conducted an interview with a Canadian author. Look for those interviews (25 in total!) in lit mags and reviews in 2026. (Here's the first student interview - Xavier Ibraheem interviewing John Terpstra for The Woodlot - to give you a sense of what's to come.)

I will be publishing seven or eight of my own interviews this year, too. I'm very happy to help get more of what I think of as the supreme form of both poetics and literary criticism out into the world!

As I posted so little this year, I won't be listing the "highlights" of the year at the end of this post, but I will share this article I gathered of writing in praise of Sandy Shreve and this photo of some of my favourite books I read in the past two years:

The books:

the berry takes the shape of the bloom, andrea bennett

Entre Rive and Shore, Dominique Bernier-Cormier

After That, Lorna Crozier
Midway, Kayla Czaga
Hello, Horse, Richard Kelly Kemick
Devotional Forensics, Joseph Kidney
Shadow Blight, Annick MacAskill
We, the Kindling, Otoniya J Okot Bitek (read my little essay on it here)
Fine, Matt Rader
People You Know, Places You've Been, Hana Shafi
The Work, Bren Simmers
Wellwater, Karen Solie
Existing Music, Nick Thran

I highly recommend giving them all a read, at least while you wait for me to get my act together and post more content here!

The 2025 Fraser Valley Writers Festival - November 7 and 8 in Abbotsford!

2025-10-03T09:39:00.001-07:00

I'm in my third year coordinating the Fraser Valley Writers Festival, and we're very excited about this year's lineup! The festival will take place on November 7th and 8th at the University of the Fraser Valley's Abbotsford campus.

To open the festival, we'll have keynote addresses by Charlie Demers and Evelyn Lau. The next day we'll have an array of panels, workshops and two Page Fright podcast live recordings. Poets involved will include out-of-towners Kayla Czaga, Nick Thran and Brian Bartlett and local poets Joseph Dandurand, Daniela Elza, Taryn Hubbard and more.

You can learn more, and register for (free!) tickets, at the festival website: https://fvwritersfestival.com/

Towards the Unsaid of the Blank Page: An Interview with Rob Taylor

2025-07-28T09:00:00.001-07:00

The following interview was originally published in the Hamilton Review of Books in August 2024. I am archiving it here, along with a number of my other essays and interviews which have yet to be included on this site.

---

Ben Robinson: I’m curious about the origins of this book in relation to your earlier work. You have a haiku in your first collection that begins:

I can’t help but hate
haiku. They end abruptly
just as they’re getting

How did you go from publishing that poem in 2011 to 2024’s Weather, comprised almost entirely of haiku?

Rob Taylor: Ha! Yes, it’s been a journey. A long one in some ways, and a short one in others. Back in my first book, I was reacting against the syllable counting that dominates how haiku is taught in North America. Poems that follow that one rule alone are often treated as haiku — any old set of words could count. A favourite recent “haiku” discovery of mine, for instance, is the beauty pageant “Community Chest” card in Monopoly:

“you have won second / prize in a beauty contest / collect ten dollars.” It can get silly quickly, eh?

When I wrote my poem I didn’t really have issues with actual Japanese or English-language haiku — I was largely ignorant of them. But my favourite poem at the time was William Carlos Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow,” which I’ve come to see as a haiku prefaced by an invocation to readers to pay haiku-like attention to what follows: “so much depends / upon.” So in some ways I was already on my way to the form.

I’ve kept an interest in minimalist writing and, increasingly, haiku over the intervening years: I quote two haiku, one by Matsuo Bashō and the other by Kobayashi Issa, in The News, and I included haiku about my father’s books as section breaks in Strangers.

I was already researching haiku prior to the COVID outbreak (Robert Hass’s translations in The Essential Haiku were a revelation, and opened many doors for me, as did Hiroaki Sato’s essay collections 100 Frogs and On Haiku), but our time in quarantine, in which I worked mostly in the park near our apartment, was a period of intensive study and experimentation for me. That was where the haiku in Weather came into being.

BR: In thinking about your use of time constraints across your last three books — the 40 weeks of pregnancy in The News, your life from age three until your son’s third year in Strangers, and the first three years of your daughter’s life here in Weather — to what extent are the different characters and forms of these books a result of the time spans they encompass in your and your family’s lives?

RT: A great question! In both The News and Weather, I set their poem-a-week time constraint in order to capture a fleeting moment in my family’s life. I don’t think I would have written time-constrained books otherwise. The constraint proved vital to the creation of the forms and “voice” of each. I normally write quite slowly (Strangers took me a decade), so to produce poems at that rate required me to devise a structure I could more consistently place my observations in.

For The News, the form I struck on was more of a formula, the mixing together of three types of “news”: political, poetic/philosophical, and personal. The poems became these sort of condensed glosas, with quotes from poems and philosophical texts snaking through the other content. For Weather, obviously, I adopted/adapted an existing form, but I also used the pressure a haiku poet puts on language (“If even one syllable is stale in your mouth, give it all your attention.” - Bashō) to write minimalist free verse poems. So the formula this time around was to communicate small, discrete subject matter while using no unnecessary syllables.

Strangers was quite different, written slowly over a longer time span, each poem its own “formula.” The work I did on the other two books is visible in some of the poems in Strangers, but I also do things in there that bear little resemblance to either. Strangers is more the type of book I thought I would write when I started out as a poet, believing I was a writer of individual poems, not books. The other two coming along has been a welcome surprise.

BR: You mentioned above that the haiku form allowed you to communicate small, discrete subject matter. In keeping with thinking about constraint, to what extent does haiku, along with form, constrain or suggest content? To what extent were you writing haiku because you were “venturing outside to work in peace” versus writing about nature because you had decided to write haiku?

RT: I sometimes think of myself as an uncreative writer (not in the Kenneth Goldsmith way, though). Other than a few poems in my first book, everything I write is autobiographical and, more often than not, born out of an event or observation I experienced that day. Poems are often a way for me to process my life or unpack why I am drawn to a particular image or scene. The language takes over and a poem can move away from that starting point, of course, becoming less autobiographical along the way. But I’m not someone who writes in response to prompts, or assembles poems from assorted lines in a notebook, or prints the internet in an art gallery in Mexico City. I live a thing and I write it down.

In an essay in her tremendous collection, alfabet/alphabet, Sadiqa de Meijer talks about the Punjabi concept of jugaad, or “mak[ing] do with what is at hand.” That struck me as speaking directly to my poetics. Yes, sure, a poem can be about anything, but I’d rather work with what’s at hand, hopeful that I might discover something surprising in the process. And if I’m surprised in writing the poem, it increases the chances that you might be, too, in reading it.

Which is all a long way to say that my first instinct in answering your question is: no, the form doesn’t dictate the content. I wrote about birds and trees and a crying baby because that was what I was surrounded by at the time. But really that’s too simplistic. The “formula” I talked about earlier in writing my haiku wasn’t just “no unnecessary syllables,” it was also “look up and attend to this world before it passes you by, you fool.” And some of that — that “so much depends upon” level of haiku attention — is definitely connected to the form, and a major element of my attraction to it.

BR: I can certainly see that attention to what is at hand in your work, and in Weather in particular. While we have many excellent mother-poets in this country and increasingly collections from gender-diverse parents, there aren’t many other Canadian poets I can think of who have engaged with fatherhood the way you have across your last three books. What does a poetics of fatherhood mean to you? And do you have any models?

RT: You’re right that there aren’t too many role models out there for me, which is bleak. Male writers have inherited a long legacy of men who shunted parenting responsibilities off to their wives and partners, and whose children hardly made appearances in their lives, let alone their poems. There’s no question that being an attentive parent reduces the time available to you to write, but I also reject the idea that a writer is here exclusively to write. We’re here to live full lives, and as a result we can hopefully write fully-lived poems. Fewer poems in total, perhaps, but that seems like a fine tradeoff. I wrote about this in a poem in Strangers called “Cemetery”:

My son pulls my pen to his mouth
and chews it awhile.

I watch, contented, as some magnificent
stretch of my poem disappears.

That said, I don’t think I write about fatherhood as some great statement, some middle finger to the canon. I just write what I live, and becoming a parent has been the single most transformative event of my life — how could I avoid it, and why would I want to? I’m aware, though, that my interest in writing about fatherhood is tied in some way to my loss of my own father at age eleven. A “presentiment of loss” — a term Stephanie Bolster used to describe Don Coles’s poetry — infuses many of my parenting poems, as it did in Don’s, such as “Flying,” a poem from his final collection which I was lucky enough to publish while poetry editor at PRISM international. You can read that issue here, which also includes a wonderful fatherhood poem by Russell Thornton (“Picking Blackberries with My Daughter”). I suppose I had some role models after all! Other contemporary writers whose fatherhood poems have shaped my own include Todd Boss, Raoul Fernandes and Matsuki Masutani.

As I suggest, my twinned interest with fatherhood poems is dead-dad poems. My role models for these are far more plentiful — Kayla Czaga writes such damn fine ones in her new book, Midway, for instance. My biggest dead-dad poem influence is Larry Levis, whose collection Winter Stars, especially its title poem, gets me every time.

And motherhood-poets! Mothers writing about pregnancy and raising young kids have had a great impact on me as well: Adrienne Gruber, Elizabeth Ross, Fiona Tinwei Lam, Sadiqa de Meijer, Jennica Harper...that one, too, is a very long list.

BR: Yes, many of my own favourites are in that list as well. Staying with fathers for another moment, both in your own experience as well as your experience as a son, I’m wondering if you have any thoughts on this question from another rob — that of rob mclennan from an Open Book Ontario editorial he wrote a while back on Writing Fatherhood:

What are the perspectives that fatherhood can bring that aren’t already inherently there from the perspective of motherhood? Perhaps little, perhaps nothing at all; perhaps something that I can’t quite articulate or shape. Perhaps something that requires far more study than I have space and time for here.

RT: Lower-case rob! What a force. There’s no one I’d rather be constantly confused with in the writing world. (I also once had the strangest conversation with a poet over dinner. Only at the end did we figure out she’d thought I was Rob Winger the whole time. But I digress...)

I think the distinction between motherhood and fatherhood (or child-bearing and non-child-bearing parent) is most obvious during pregnancy — the perspective of the happening-to and the happening-beside. I would have loved to have been a mother, but I also quite like the “happening-beside” perspective. I often encourage my short fiction students to rewrite their stories from the perspective of a peripheral character, or an animal or inanimate object, that is involved in the action only peripherally. What do they see that the central characters cannot? It can transform a writer’s sense of a story. Writing on pregnancy as a father feels like that — you are unable to access so much of what’s happening, but that’s what makes it interesting. It’s a creative restraint, not unlike many of the others I’ve mentioned already.

Some amount of that “happening-beside” continues after the baby is born — breastfeeding, for instance — but it diminishes with time. Or, really, all parenting becomes a happening-beside as the child gains independence. So maybe the non-child-bearing parents just get an earlier taste of what’s to come. That shapes the whole relationship for some fathers — they remain buffered from the intimate lives of their children, nearby but never a part of — but thankfully not all. One of the joys of fatherhood, I think, is your ability to draw closer to your children over time. Lacking an umbilical bond spurs the need to forge some sort of emotional equivalent. And it can be physical too: my son was a restless baby, and would only fall still in his mother’s arms, usually when breastfeeding. When he was nine months old we moved into the Al Purdy A-frame. Shortly after, he caught a cold — a mild fever, nothing too serious, but it calmed him. I lay on Al’s old couch for a whole afternoon, Harvest revolving on the record player and dust drifting slowly through the spring light, my son resting in the crook of my arm. It was a euphoric feeling (I’m welling up even now, as I type this), one I’d waited for for months, years, in some ways my whole life. It wasn’t superior to a mother’s experiences, just adjacent. Alive in its own light.

BR: Lovely. I’m reminded of your lines in The News, “Our journeys / are not the same.” Many different ways of parenting and connecting with children, each with its own character.

I’d like to ask about your thinking around the layout and pacing of the book. There are times when a single haiku appears on the recto between two blank versos; at other times there are three haiku on both page and page-facing. Weather largely forgoes individual titles, at least for the haiku, and so sections of it also read something like a long poem or a sequence, as almost one poem. When did you begin to think about how the poems would appear in book form and what were your considerations around how to lay it out? How were you thinking about the tension between a collection of individual poems and something more like a sequence where those haiku start to blur into tercets?

RT: Robyn Sarah, who edited my first book, once told me in an interview that “sequencing a collection is like writing one last poem,” but I’ve always thought that was an understatement, especially with a book like this — 156 poems! When I was nearing the end of the three years of writing, I went away for a weekend to a friend’s family cabin to try to figure out how to bring everything together. I had maybe 300 haiku and 30 short poems. I knew I wanted to hew as close to the chronology of their composition as possible, one-per-week as in The News. I also wanted to emphasise seasons and seasonal change, which play such an important role in haiku. So I culled what I had down to 156 poems and divided them into twelve thirteen-poem groupings. That part was largely just math, but it brought with it another math problem: how do you arrange thirteen poems evenly? I drove myself a bit crazy trying to figure it all out. (Did I mention I developed shingles that weekend?) I like the quietude of a single haiku on a page, but a book that exceeded 200 pages felt ridiculous and potentially monotonous. I eventually struck upon a balance: in each section two haiku get their own page, one to start the season and one to close it, while the others are gathered in groups of three and paired with a couple longer poems. I fully expected Andrew Steeves at Gaspereau to suggest compressing the book further (even this more condensed version reached 120 pages), but he liked it as it was and was willing to give it that space. Yet another way in which Gaspereau is generous to its authors and our words.

Beyond maintaining the chronology, I wasn’t overly concerned with how the poems would come together as a book. I trusted they would, as I had with The News, the narrative in each being the narrative of my life, the arc of my witnessing a child’s slow becoming. You’re right to say that in many ways it’s a long poem (we chose to emphasise this by not including a table of contents). But the micro-sequencing — gathering together the best possible groups of three haiku, picking the poems to open and close each section, etc. — took me forever. I’m obsessed with the way one image, or thought, or colour, or sound, might carry forward and flow into the next poem — the generative space between two poems, in which the reader creates a ghostly third poem. Robyn gets a lot of the credit (blame?) for this obsession, having gotten me to think deeply about it with my first book. I couldn’t move the poems too widely in the manuscript — poems written in the fall of my daughter’s first year, for instance, always stayed in that cluster — but within a given group I would rearrange the sequence endlessly. The process wasn’t wildly different from the process of writing some of the individual poems, swapping out poem for poem (word for word) until something clicked. I love that search, that kind of being lost, perhaps as much as the eventual finding.

BR: I love that idea, that the sequencing is its own kind of creative act. I think you achieved that here, the variety keeps monotony at bay.

Staying with the idea of searching and lostness, throughout the collection there’s this sense that many of these poems are just barely wrested from the void, from the blank page — “no notebook—/ running home past the dog park/ a poem in my mouth” or “the explainable poem/ evaporates” or “too cold to write down/ the poem about clouds.” I’m thinking of David McFadden’s late haiku as he contended with Alzheimer’s — is the haiku the closest poetic form to silence?

RT: I didn’t know of McFadden’s haiku. I’ve ordered the book! I love his poems–his “Country Hotel in the Niagara Peninsula” is an all-time favourite of mine.

I’m pulled in conflicting directions when thinking about haiku and silence. On the one hand, yes, for sure, for me haiku has felt part of a long winnowing of my poems, shifting the balance away from the said of the ink towards the unsaid of the blank page. A form of sweeping up as I back out of the room. (I wrote an essay on this for EVENT and The Tyee.) But at the same time, there is something quite loud, even boisterous, about a haiku. There are fewer words, but the ink is thicker, you know? Concentrated with thought and image. The gulf between even a handful of words and silence is so much greater than that between a haiku and an epic poem.

This divide plays out in debates within the haiku community: is haiku connected to Zen? Can all that talking in haiku really be a path to enlightenment? (13th-century Zen Master Yueh-lin: “Ninety percent accuracy is not as good as silence.”) I know little about Zen, but my own attitude on haiku’s potential role on the path to inner peace is: yes and no. It is close to silence, it is miles from silence. If I wish to achieve true silence I will have to one day leave it behind.

BR: After “almost whispering” for more than a hundred pages, is there something of this tension between silence and speech in your decision to turn to prose in the afterword?

RT: Ha — yes, I’m lousy at this silence stuff! In the original manuscript the four page afterword was accompanied by six pages of notes on the haiku form. Collectively, those two paratexts contained half of the words in the book! Every early reader who looked at the manuscript said that I should take out the notes, but I clung to them until my editor very gently suggested the same. I’m a stubborn man, but even I will come to my senses eventually. I pulled out the notes, expanded on them a bit, and published them as an essay on The Woodlot in May.

The two essays were byproducts of all the new learning I was doing around the haiku form. They were also inquiries into my restlessness: Why take on this new form and write it so feverishly? Why, still, was I choosing poetry instead of silence? (The EVENT/Tyee essay is really the third in this little navel-gazing triptych.) The notes were a form of self-defence, my “showing my work” as I ventured into a new form, one originating in a different language and culture. “I’m not just messing around! I did my homework!” That was the anxious element that needed to go.

The afterword you see in the book earned its place, I think, because it wasn’t really trying to do that. It frames the book a bit, but mostly it’s a love note to my late father, and to poetry. And to how poetry might (might!) bring me closer to mental peace and reconciliation with my past. In many ways I think of the afterword as approaching the same big questions the haiku tackle, but from the other side of language, letting words flow freely after having concentrated them down for so long. Hopefully it creates a pleasing balance for readers.

BR: Yes, I think there’s a kind of balance there — both in form and also the way it brings in the past so explicitly.

Lastly, I’d like to ask you, what is Rob Taylor’s radish?

RT: Ha! I’ve wondered about that myself. I open the book with a Kobayashi Issa haiku, translated by Robert Hass: “The man pulling radishes / pointed my way / with a radish.” I tell myself I included it as a nod to that jugaad-ian sense of making do — we make the world legible with the tools we have at hand. For me that meant my family and the natural (and occasionally man-made) world around me. But also, hell, I don't know. Why does anyone do anything? I loved it and it felt right, even if certain elements of the poem will always exist beyond my reach. The radish could be anything. The man could be pointing it anywhere. Where is Issa even trying to go? But I like the thought of a man with more knowledge than Issa showing him the way, then Issa unknowingly doing the same for me, and now me here, 200 years later, attempting my own version in guiding my kids. Radishes in all our hands, whatever radishes are. Maybe even the same damn radish this whole time.

---

Ben Robinson is a poet, musician and librarian. His first book, The Book of Benjamin, an essay on naming, birth, and grief was published by Palimpsest Press in 2023. His poetry collection, As Is, was published by ARP Books in September 2024. He has only ever lived in Hamilton, Ontario on the traditional territories of the Erie, Neutral, Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee, and Mississaugas.

a kind of deep empathy machine

2025-07-21T14:50:00.003-07:00

Karan Kapoor: Your poems live inside questions — and often leave them unanswered. “Where do we go from here?” you ask, before pivoting into a description of clouds, oil changes, and personal injury law ads. I love that refusal to resolve. Do you think poetry should resist the impulse to provide answers? Is uncertainty an aesthetic position for you?
Chris Banks: I like uncertainty in poems and I think there are things one needs to communicate through language and metaphor that cannot be said otherwise in prose. Basically, I want to smash all the frosted windows inside words so the great mysteries of this life shine through. But as for providing answers to why we are here? I’m not sure I can do that except to say I am here, and you are here with me, and this is what I see and feel, and hopefully you see and feel some of that too. Poetry is a kind of deep empathy machine. Almost like one of the massage chairs. Sit with a poem long enough, and you always feel better.

- Chris Banks, in conversation with Karan Kapoor over at Only Poems. You can read the whole thing here.

the poem as a river

2025-07-07T19:20:00.006-07:00

The long poem has a somewhat singular history in Canadian literature. It proliferated among my generation of poets in the 70s and 80s, and Michael Ondaatje's and Sharon Thesen's anthologies of the Canadian long poem attest to its abundance. VIU's own student poet Délani Valin's Malahat Review prize-winning long poem "No Buffaloes" is evidence of its continuing popularity.
There are several formal aspects of the long poem that have informed much of my own work. A major facet of its aesthetic is its resistance to closure, its desire not to end - the poem as a river. It also resists closure in the syntactic unity of the sentence, thus affording a variety of constructions we can also locate in another hybrid form, the prose poem. These elements have been a major attraction for me, particularly informed by the improvisational possibilities of making poetry like making jazz.

- Fred Wah, from his 2017 VIU Ralph Gustafson Distinguished Poets Lecture. As published in On My Way to Get a Pail of Water (Arbutus Editions/Gaspereau Press).

the value of suggestion

2025-06-24T09:00:00.003-07:00

The great masters both of the East and the West never forgot the value of suggestion as a means for taking the spectator into their confidence. Who can contemplate a masterpiece without being awed by the immense vista of thought presented to our consideration? How familiar and sympathetic are they all; how cold in contrast the modern commonplaces! In the former we feel the warm outpouring of a man's heart; in the latter only a formal salute. Engrossed in his technique, the modern rarely rises above himself... His works may be nearer science, but are further from humanity. We have an old saying in Japan that a woman cannot love a man who is truly vain, for there is no crevice in his heart for love to enter and fill up. In art vanity is equally fatal to sympathetic feeling, whether on the part of the artist or the public.
Nothing is more hallowing than the union of kindred spirits in art. At the moment of meeting, the art lover transcends himself. At once he is and is not. He catches a glimpse of Infinity, but words cannot voice his delight, for the eye has no tongue. Freed from the fetters of matter, his spirit moves in the rhythm of things. It is thus that art becomes akin to religion and ennobles mankind.

- Kakuzo Okakura, from The Book of Tea.

Some Notes on Writing Haiku

2025-06-10T09:00:00.045-07:00

The following essay was originally published in the online poetics magazine The Woodlot in May 2024. I am archiving it here, along with a number of my other essays and interviews which have yet to be included on this site.

---

Across the street from my apartment there is a park, and in the middle of that park there are a number of logs, cluttered amongst the living trees which abut the eastern tip of Burrard Inlet. From time-to-time king tides or teenagers will lift them and deposit them a few feet away. Salt-hardened, they seem ancient. I wrote poems while leaning against the big ones or resting my feet on the smaller ones, over and over until I had a book.

Weather, 2024

In May 2024, Gaspereau Press published my fifth poetry collection, Weather. The book contains 156 poems, one for each week of the first three years of my daughter’s life, mirroring the structure of my 2016 collection, The News (one poem per week during my wife’s pregnancy with our son). The poems in this new book are quite a bit shorter, and the majority are what I consider haiku. They follow the rules of the form unevenly—only one of the poems, for instance, has a 5-7-5 syllable count. Many elementary school teachers would be taken aback, as would some haiku purists. I, too, felt trepidation as I stumbled my way into a genre of poetry whose origins lay far from my country, and whose history I was only coming to understand.

August rain—
every bulb
of the blackberry

That might be my favourite thing I’ve ever written. Is it a haiku? Yes, I think so. You might disagree. Oh hell/oh well.

Haiku master Matsuo Bashō once said “Even if you have three or four extra syllables, or even five or seven, you needn’t worry as long as it sounds right. But if even one syllable is stale in your mouth, give it all your attention.” In writing haiku, this is my goal: to include not one unnecessary syllable.

Narrow Road to the
Interior, 1702

That Bashō quote, translated by Sam Hamill in his Narrow Road to the Interior and Other Writings, renders the Japanese word “on” (or “sound,” the measurement under which the haiku’s 5-7-5 count is tallied) as “syllable.” While the two are similar, “on” are more attuned to subtlety than English syllables, which do not differentiate between long and short vowels. Bashō’s own name, for instance, is composed of three on but only two English syllables (the “ō” is a long “o” that counts as two on). As haiku translators such as Hiroaki Sato and Robert Hass have argued, this means that the length of thought in a Japanese haiku is usually shorter than seventeen English syllables (Sato estimates his translations come in at closer to twelve). My primary interest in haiku is the ability to contain both deep meaning and fidelity to one’s perceptions in the briefest of images. The haiku in Weather never exceed seventeen total syllables, but often contain fewer. And again, in the spirit of Bashō and many who followed him, the middle line is not always the longest.

the shortest night of the year
the stars
in no hurry

I played with enjambing this poem so that the middle line held the most syllables, but decided the stars were spacious enough. Two star-syllables with five syllables of night sky around them.

Beyond the poem-a-week structure of The News and Weather, the poems in the two books bear little resemblance to one another. When I wrote the roving, intertextual lyric poems in The News, my time was largely mine; my concerns existential, political, abstract. Now, with two children and a mother many years into a dementia diagnosis, far less time is my own and my concerns are restrained to the limits of my senses: what I see, what I hear, what I touch. What touches me. The weather. My life, like my poems, has transformed from lyric to haiku. It is in many ways unrecognizable. And yet it is the same life. When I catch myself obsessing over form, I remind myself that it is the same life.

Even just there I’ve got it wrong, or not fully correct. Traditional haiku were often political and intertextual. Bashō’s literary allusions are relentless. Court politics abound. And The News, my abstract, political book of non-haiku, itself quotes a poem each from Bashō and Issa. Is there anything more hopeless than a category? And yet every paragraph has a beginning and an end.

Fourteen Weeks

No people in the park today,
one goose—groundskeeper
trimming and fertilizing.
How admirable!
to see lightning and not think
life is fleeting.

I practice what you’re teaching me
until I am a bench or tree
or air and the bird’s snitch
snitching of the grass
replaces engine sounds
accrued at 10th and Fir.
Dry creek
glimpsed
by lightning.
Ancient elephant knees.
Ulna rising from camouflage.
Webbed foot aloft, primaries
doing their steady work on the heel.
And that long black beak.
Grass and then no grass.

The News, 2016

This is that poem from The News. The first italicised part is a haiku by Bashō. The second is a haiku by Kobayashi Issa. I guess I should have seen this haiku thing coming.

Sometimes you search for something for years before finding it. Sometimes you find something and only then realise you’d been searching for it all along.

In addition to rules around syllable length, traditional haiku include a kigo (“season word”), which indicates the season in which the poem occurs, and a kireji (“cutting word”), which marks a shift in the poem (often indicated in English using a long dash: “—”). In my poems I have frequently included my own version of a kigo or kireji, but have not felt beholden to the traditional application of each, many of whose subtleties are lost in the transition from Japanese to English, or from Japan to Canada. A simple example: in Japan, the rainy season (the kigo “tsuyu”) falls in the summer, while on the coast of British Columbia the rainy season is… well… everything but summer.

how reassuring!
waking at midnight
to the sound of heavy rain

In which month does this poem take place? I suppose there are any number of options. But if you live in Vancouver, you probably answered “November,” the month in which I wrote it.

In North America, haiku are often dismissed as child’s play, unserious stuff for adult readers. I, too, once dismissed them. Yet if you say “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” or “In a Station of the Metro” or “The Red Wheelbarrow” you find yourself safely in “the canon.” The imagist movement, built on Eastern traditions, has as some of its foundational pillars poems that were by-and-large haiku. Each does its own unique dance with the tradition. Look at any one of the thirteen “ways,” throw the title in as a line in the Pound poem, lop off the Red Wheelbarrow’s “so much depends upon”: haiku, haiku, haiku. But with time haiku became something else: a way to teach primary school students to count syllables. The essential link between Eastern and Western literary traditions became severed in the popular imagination.

I disliked “The Red Wheelbarrow” when I first read it in high school. It’s so simple, I thought. It can mean anything, I grumbled. Within a year, though, I was carrying a copy of it in a slot in my wallet designed for a credit card. It remained there so long that the text imprinted on the clear vinyl cover, the words lingering after the paper disintegrated. Over time, I had found my way to meaning in the poem. Or I had found my way around meaning. What I had initially rejected about the poem became what I most deeply loved. It’s so simple! It can mean anything!

Haiku 1-4

1
I can’t help but hate
haiku. They end abruptly
just as they’re getting
2
going. See? I need
another just to finish
this simple thought, and
3
maybe it’s true that
all the love in the world could
fit in a matchbox
4
but who would want to
try, and where, in that case, would
one store their matches?

The Other Side of Ourselves, 2011

I published this poem in my first book, The Other Side of Ourselves. I still like it quite a bit. It is right in some ways and wrong in others and maybe that’s why it’s stayed alive for me. The first haiku of the four was turned into a button for a Pandora’s Collective fundraiser and a bunch of people wore it at the party. I got to watch as strangers bowed towards other strangers’ t-shirts to read those words, then laughed, then counted on their fingers and seemed pleased.

In discussing the sonnet, Ken Babstock once spoke of its shape as a “blast shadow from history”: the shape itself communicates meaning, even if the poem otherwise disregards the form’s strict requirements. While the metaphor is apt in considering haiku, to compare the form to “blast shadows,” a term tied to the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima, is wholly inappropriate. The fault there is of course mine, not Babstock’s—no writer can control what others do with his words, transforming them by placing them in a new context. I longed for an alternate term, then one day I was out in the park and I found one.

just north of the fallen log
the frost shadow
of a fallen log

Before that December morning, I hadn’t noticed how morning frost lingers longer in shadows, leaving the shape of the shadowing object in the grass. Paying attention to the natural world gave me the image I needed to make sense of my art.

Whatever these poems were that I was writing, their “frost shadow” was that of the haiku, a form which crystallised for me at a time when my life provided little time or mental space for literature. And yet I was also so much more alive, my nerve endings raw and overwhelmed by the world arriving and arriving with its endless jabs and questions. (The burden of ice on a grass blade, and how it sharpens it.) The haiku’s frost shadow saw me through.

Some bristle at the idea of set form—prescribed rules and shapes—in poetry. I sympathise with them. We turn to poetry to escape life’s little boxes. But there is no escape. The boxes of language always restrain, as do the boxes of our minds: the structures through which we organise the world. No matter the shape or content of a poem, no matter how “formal” it is or how devout its author in following assigned rules, all successful poems both crave restraints and strain to escape them. This makes them feel alive to us, a part of our human experience. All poems, in the stanza (“room,” in Italian) of their restraints, bounce between walls seeking the night’s sky. A formally rigorous poem is simply more familiar with its floor and ceiling, its possible skylight.

As I write this, I’ve recently turned forty and am feeling the first inklings of actual knowledge. But no, if I’m honest, much of what I’m beginning to learn I’ve known since I was a child—it’s only taken time, and a bit of hard living, to confirm these things for me. There’s no straight path to knowledge: it leaves and arrives, leaves and arrives, hopefully enriched with each return. I know a great deal about poetry and then I know nothing, and in that not-knowing, new/old knowledge is already gathering. In the middle of teaching a poetry class, I’m struck by the sense that I know less than my students. It’s been many years since I felt the thrill of being new to poetry, of planting all one’s life experience, all one’s hard-earned knowledge, in the rich soil of our art and watching it take purchase. In following what my students grow, I remember. I learn again.

I have been studying haiku for six years. I’ve barely started. Compared to the great wealth of information on the form, I know almost nothing. But in studying haiku the thrill of poetry returned to me. And I think at moments my knowledges (life, lyric poetry, haiku) aligned to make poems which I knew more than any one of them. Which knew more than me. I will study poetry for the rest of my life and, if I’m lucky, a few more such moments might come. This is Keats’ “negative capability” as applied to poetic craft: to hold simultaneously the faith that you know nothing and everything about how to write a poem. On your best writing days these two forces—nothing, everything—move in tandem, and you can’t tell who was leading the dance until you look back much later. Sometimes it takes years to see. To write a form is a lifelong task with no arrival.

To write a form from another culture and language—oh, the challenge is redoubled. In the face of that, it’s easier to say nothing, to sit in silent reverence. But to fully revere you must eventually engage. To learn you must practise. To worship you must pray.

one arm draped
on the nurse log
dreaming my little poems

Another reason why I, and the majority of English-language haiku poets, do not adhere to a strict 5-7-5 syllable pattern is because when we respond to Japanese haiku masters we are actually responding to their translators, many of whom (such as Hass and Sato) do not attempt to align Japanese on and English syllables. This is our tradition. It is at once an extension of the Japanese tradition and a transformation of it—from certain perspectives, a rejection of it.

In Praise of Shadows, 1933

In his 1933 essay on Japanese aesthetics, In Praise of Shadows, Jun’ichirō Tanizaki lamented the losses that came with the Westernization of Japan, most notably the loss of shadows that resulted from the widespread adoption of electric lighting. Tanizaki felt that perhaps literature could be a place where those shadows could be preserved. “I would call back at least for literature this world of shadows we are losing. In the mansion called literature I would have the eaves deep and the walls dark, I would push back into the shadows the things that come forward too clearly, I would strip away the useless decoration. I do not ask that this be done everywhere, but perhaps we may be allowed at least one mansion where we can turn off the electric lights and see what it is like without them.”

In writing haiku as a Westerner, I am extending its shadow. In writing haiku as a Westerner, I am flicking on an electric light.

These “notes” were originally written as an afterword to Weather. I put it in the manuscript and took it out again many times. Eventually, some fellow poets and my editor, Andrew Steeves, talked sense into me. Take it out of the book. The poems don’t need their author worrying over them. They will be received how they will be received; they will become what they become. I am grateful to them all for that advice. But like a nervous parent on the first day of school, I’m still over here on the edge of the playground, worrying.

too cold to write down
the poem about clouds
keeps changing

I will look back on this essay many years from now and be amazed by all I got wrong. I will look back on this essay many years from now and be amazed by all I knew.

I’ve spent an abundance of time worrying over the faithfulness of my poems as “haiku,” and have come to the conclusion that they are the best offering I can make to the Japanese masters and their long tradition, and also to my family and to our little corner of the wider world—all of which have given me so much.

I remind myself that positioning a certain type of traditional haiku as “faithful” pushes aside all the poets who have experimented with the form in the intervening centuries, be they Masaoka Shiki or Takayanagi Shigenobu or Marlene Mountain or Nick Virgilio. And it also suggests that “traditional” haiku was lowered flawlessly from the heavens, and not itself developed over many years of experimentation. Reviewing the history of haiku—and of poetic form in general—it seems clear to me that to honour a tradition you must be willing to break from it. If not, you are engaging in a practice detached from that of the poets you’re honouring. You become a parody. To honour someone you must be committed to being someone else.

Or, as Bashō put it, never “lick the drool of your predecessor.”

Haiku emerged from the collaborative verse form renga, the “hokku” being the opening line in a renga session, where alternating lines of 5-7-5 and 7-7 on were contributed by the various participants. Bashō worked as a sōshō, or master, who presided over renga sessions and taught lessons on the form. One in seven of his surviving haiku, including his most famous, “the old pond— / a frog jumps in, / sound of water,” were in fact hokku: the opening offerings of expansive collaborations, no sooner recorded than handed off to a neighbour to be transformed.

Haiku in Canada, 2020

The tradition of collaboration in haiku has endured through the centuries. Some of the earliest, and richest, examples of haiku written in Canada come from World War II haikukai (haiku circles) held in Japanese internment camps in the interior of British Columbia—a form of both collective resilience and resistance. “mountain life / gathering fallen wood / the right job for an old one,” wrote Kaoru Ikeda in Slocan, BC in the early 1940s.

Haiku circles exist across the country to this day. This tradition stands in contrast with that of Western lyric poetry: declarations of the singular soul. Though Weather contains 132 haiku, its spirit is still firmly grounded in the lyric tradition: Weather is memoir. The ego-driven “I,” omnipresent in lyric poetry and appearing more sparingly in haiku traditions, looms over the whole project.

Wawa

My daughter’s first
word
for water and
dog
the sign and the
sound
the inlet and the
rain
bow run in
it.

This poem from Weather isn’t a haiku, though in mirroring Williams’ form in “The Red Wheelbarrow,” it shares only a couple degrees of separation. It has been pointed out to me that “Wawa” is a town in Ontario, a US convenience store chain, another name for Chinook Jargon, and a word—in various languages—for an estuary, a baby, a tree, entrails, and a pitiful human being. Some have told me this multiplicity of meaning is a weakness of the poem. Some have told me it’s a strength. My daughter knew none of this when she pronounced the word “water,” or translated the sound of a dog barking into her unique language. For a while there my daughter must have thought dogs were always thirsty. Maybe they are.

Spring and All, 1923

Every word contains within it many others. Every shape, every image, the same. The simpler the word, the more richly filled. Williams’ red wheelbarrow and white chickens. Rilke’s “house, bridge, fountain, / gate, jar, fruit tree, window.” There are edges to words, to things, to shadows, but also there are none, just the slow shifting of light. It’s what makes translation impossible; it’s what makes translation possible. Looking. Saying what you saw. Knowing you could never see it all because part of the seeing will be done by your reader. What I see today is a collaboration with what you will see tomorrow.

I think often of Czesław Miłosz’s pointing hand in his poem “Encounter”—the red wing, the hare in the road. I think both of the many things each item represents and the singular living thing each was. One hand, one wing, one hare. I think of all Miłosz was, that day eighty-eight years ago in Lithuania. No language shared between us. Still almost fifty years until I, his companion in that wagon, would be born. Just a red wing, a hare, a pointing hand beside me, guiding my eye.

Here I sense a seeming contradiction in poetry, made particularly manifest in haiku. Poets who look outward more than inward, who give us first and foremost an account of what their senses perceive, often reveal their unique selves in a more fundamental way than others. I feel I “know” Bashō and Issa more than most other historical poets I’ve read, be they Shakespeare or Keats or Neruda or Frost. Those poets were singing songs, telling tales. They were performing and I was in the audience watching them. Haiku is far more intimate, and intimately social. Reading haiku masters, I feel as though I am sitting beside them and they are pointing at a passing insect, or the way a breeze shifts a tree. At frogs and creeks and lightning. We are together talking casually, often late into the night, of seemingly small things—perhaps the greatest of life’s intimacies.

Whatever people think about my fidelity to the haiku form in Weather, I hope that in reading my poems they will feel accompanied. I’m never lonely when I have a book of poems with me. That can’t be true. There must have been exceptions. But that’s the rule.

low winter sun—
deep in the fallen log
bright moss

---

All poems were written by the author, with the exception of the Bashō and Issa poems, translated by Robert Hass, and the Kaoru Ikeda poem, translated by Keibo Oiwa. The Jun’ichirō Tanizaki quote was translated by Thomas J. Harper and Edward G. Seidensticker. The Bashō “drool” quote was translated by Hiroaki Sato.

Bibliography

Bashō, Matsuo. Narrow Road to the Interior and Other Writings (Trans. Sam Hamill). Shambhala Publications, 2019.

Burns, Allan, Jim Kacian and Philip Rowland. Haiku in English: The First Hundred Years. W.W. Norton, 2016.

Carter, Terry Ann. Haiku in Canada: History, Poetry, Memoir. Ekstasis Editions, 2020.

Fitzsimons, Andrew. Bashō: The Complete Haiku of Matsuo Bashō. University of California Press, 2022.

Hamill, Sam and J.P. Seaton. The Poetry of Zen. Shambhala Publications, 2007.

Sato, Hiroaki. On Haiku. New Directions, 2018.

Sato, Hiroaki. One Hundred Frogs: From Renga to Haiku in English. Weatherhill, 1995.

Tanizaki, Jun’ichirō. In Praise of Shadows (Trans. Thomas J. Harper and Edward G. Seidensticker). Leete’s Island Books, 1977.

Hass, Robert. The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson and Issa. Ecco, 1995.

Welch, Michael Dylan. “The Heft of Haiku.” Frogpond 44.2.

"Why? And Why Now?": On Poetry and Companionship

2025-05-27T09:00:00.001-07:00

The following essay was originally delivered as a talk at the 2021 Fraser Valley Lit Fest. It was later published by the League of Canadian Poets. I am archiving it here, along with a number of my other essays and interviews which have yet to be included on this site.

---

My mother is disappearing. Diagnosed with dementia six years ago, in recent months her confusion has redoubled, her memories leaving and arriving as unpredictably as fish to the surface of a pond. If she goes out of her house for a walk, she can’t always find her way back. If she wakes up after a nap, she might think a new day has started and begin making breakfast. She knows there’s a number you call in an emergency, but usually can’t recall what that number is. She has forgotten much of our family and most of her friends. She has only once forgotten me, her only child, and then only briefly—but it’s a sign of what’s to come.

I should be precise: my mother’s conscious mind is disappearing, not her body or her unconscious mind—the mind of dreams and reflexes; the mind our conscious mind tries futilely to claim dominion over. For now her body is very much present, and for her age, thriving. When I take walks with her, I hardly have to slow my pace. When she accompanies my two year old daughter to story time at the local library, she sits on the library carpet with the kids and young parents, then pulls herself up to standing at the end, to the amazement of all present. This is not how I have come to understand death’s arrival, especially here in our death-averse society, where we whisk away bodies and scrub rooms clean, buffeting ourselves from the reality of what’s happened with expressions like “passed away” or “gone to a better place.” My father died of cancer when I was eleven, his mind sharp up until the final weeks. The day he died, surrounded by family in our living room, I stood by his body and held his hand, still not quite cold. Soon after, the paramedics took him away and I never saw my father’s body again. My mother has been dying for years but her body is, for now, undiminished.

And my body, too, persists, though my conscious mind doesn’t understand quite how. While it worries over prescriptions and home healthcare workers and nursing homes, my subconscious is drumming up lines of poems, or the sentences that I’ve cobbled into this essay. I sometimes find myself with a pen in my hand, with no memory of picking it up. And my conscious mind asks the obvious questions: Why? And why now? Why persist with poems and stories and all this fancy language in the face of unavoidable loss? They’re questions I’ve asked myself often over the years, with no final answer arriving beyond the knowledge that not once in my life has my devotion to writing been a conscious choice. All I did was read, innocently at first, oblivious to what I was getting myself into.

There was Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”:

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

There was Gwendolyn MacEwen’s “Dark Pines Under Water”:

But the dark pines of your mind dip deeper
And you are sinking, sinking, sleeper

There was John Newlove’s “Driving”:

You are by yourself in that channel of snow
and pines and pines,
whether the pines and snow flow backwards smoothly,
whether you drive or you stop or you walk or you sit.

There was Armand Garnet Ruffo’s “Mirror”:

In the end
There is no escape
(Did I say there was?)
It is always me.
No matter what I do
To change
the way I look:
What is inside is inside looking out.

There was Muriel Rukeyser’s “Islands”:

O for God’s sake
they are connected
underneath
They look at each other
across the glittering sea
some keep a low profile
Some are cliffs
The bathers think
islands are separate like them

I read these poems in my late teens and my life was forever transformed. But the change was no more calculated than pulling my hand back from a hot stove or a pin prick. Like a spinal reflex, my body and instinctual mind decided my life for me before the words had fully arrived in my brain. On some intuited level, I’ve known all this since I was a teenager and felt both unmoored and affirmed by these writers’ words. But it’s taken me twenty years, and my mother’s disappearance, to begin to understand the why of what happened. And happens. Why great poems confirm my life so fully, so unescapably, that I feel powerless to do anything but persist in reading and writing and promoting them.

One of my favourite literary puzzles is the short block of text: one paragraph, no line breaks. I love these creatures because no one knows what to do with them: are they prose poems? Flash fiction? Micro-essays? On first glance, the answer can only be Yes, maybe? to all three. Often reading the whole piece through doesn’t help much (if it wasn’t for a “Fiction” label on the back of her books, Lydia Davis’ stories could easily be stocked in three or four different sections of the bookstore). It doesn’t matter, of course, how they’re classified—the words are the words. But thinking about what makes something “poetic” lets you pry open the genre and spy its inner workings. Here’s the Princeton Handbook of Poetic Terms defining a prose poem, and in so doing trying to tease out what, beyond its shape, makes a poem a poem:

The principle characteristics [of a prose poem] are those that would insure unity even in brevity and poetic quality even without the line breaks of free verse: high patterning, rhythmic and figural repetition, sustained intensity and compactness.

Pattern, rhythm, metaphor, repetition, intensity, density. These, to me, are the tools not of the conscious mind, but of the body and the unconscious mind. The lung-breathing, heart-beating, foot-pacing body. The muttering subconscious. The leaping, associative logic of the dreaming mind. Another way to put this: poetic language is poetic language because you feel like it’s poetic language. You know it when your body feels it.

Dennis Lee, in an essay entitled “Body Music: Notes on Rhythm in Poetry,” calls this sensation Kinesthetic Intuition, or “Kintuition.” (Look, he wrote Alligator Pie, let him have some fun with it.) As corny as the name is, the idea feels incredibly accurate to me. Our bodies contain rhythms our conscious minds do not actively recognize. In reading a poem, our bodies are alert to these kindred rhythms before our brains register them. Lee expands on his idea of “Kintuition” by saying:

Body music is the mind of poetry. Its rhythms think who we are, and what the world is… [it] is one alternative to the impasse of modern reason – to the inability of technical thought to know the world, except by shrinking it to its own value-free categories. [Body music] thinks beneath the impasse, within the impasse, beyond the impasse.

The body knows things before the conscious mind, but also beneath it, within it, beyond it.

Former US poet laureate Robert Pinsky reaches similar conclusions in his book Democracy, Culture, and the Voice of Poetry. He writes on the significance of the monotonous chants we enter into when alone and under duress: “keys keys keys keys keys” or “why why why why why.” In a conversation with Phoebe Wang in What The Poets Are Doing, Russell Thornton points to Shakespeare’s similarly repetitive lines—“Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” from Macbeth and “Never, never, never, never, never” from King Lear—as personal favourites, noting that they “achieve… a near-miraculous uncluttered and extraordinarily subtle diction.” Pinsky refers to these types of chants as proto-poems whose “rhythm is like an other, attending to me”—a song we sing to ourselves, from within ourselves, to comfort ourselves. Pinsky says these proto-poems “sharpen and dislocate a feeling, calling it up but transforming it, maybe blunting it a little…”

In this way the process Pinsky describes mirrors one theorized for the utility of dreams: that we dream in adjacencies in order to help our conscious minds navigate trauma. If you lived through a traumatic event like a fire, you might dream of being washed away by a tidal wave: an adjacent trauma that you can more readily engage with, blunting somewhat your extreme feeling and helping you ready your conscious, waking mind to deal with trauma itself. Subconscious metaphor machines. Proto-poems of the instinctual mind.

In harnessing the adjacent rhythms and images that rise up—unbidden, driven by necessity—from the unconscious mind, Pinsky suggests poetic language doesn’t tell a reader how to think or feel, but invokes feeling, the feeling “brought into being by the voice. Incantation rather than the presentation of telling.” The connections a poem makes are “present implicitly in the cadences and syntax of language: a somatic ghost.”

Here we are again, feeling poetic language before we think it. In mirroring our bodies’ natural rhythms and movements, poetic language lets us press up closer to our fundamental biological relationships with ourselves and those around us. And in so doing it makes us feel more fully human, and less alone. This is something we all know intuitively. Poetry, after all, is the neglected art form we rush to in times of social dislocation: loss, illness, pandemic, war. Think of Ilya Kaminsky’s “We Lived Happily During The War,” which was widely shared online in the days following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The ideas in that poem could be, and have been, communicated many times over in unpoetic prose. But the rhythmic repetitions in Kaminsky’s poem open us up to those ideas more intimately and more inescapably: “we // protested / but not enough, we opposed them but not / enough… in the house of money / in the street of money in the city of money in the country of money, / our great country of money, we (forgive us) // lived happily during the war.”

Acute moments of disorientation are when we need a companion, not a treatise. Someone who does not simply tell us about something, but sits beside us in the silence that follows— breathing, alive. This is what those early, beloved poems did for me. Following my father’s death, in the disorientation of my teenage years, poems became my companions. The rhythms and associative movements of the poets’ bodies and subconscious minds, captured on the page, reached out and met mine: in how I read the poems, how I spoke them, how I sewed together the metaphorical leaps the poems made with the thread of my own life, until I found myself shaking hands with that poet, or embracing them, or even merging into one shared body, one set of lungs, one voice.

“If the poem is any damn good at all,” Muriel Rukeyser argued in 1978 (two years after publishing “Islands,” one of the poems that would go on to change my life), “it invites you to bring your whole life to that moment, and we are good poets inasmuch as we bring that invitation to you, and you are good readers inasmuch as you bring your whole life to the reading of the poem. And the process is the same for both of us. In that way, we are exactly alike.”

In the last few years we’ve experienced the heaping of one dislocation upon another—the pandemic, the deepening political divide, environmental collapse, war. All of us have felt, at times, alone or abandoned, even when surrounded by people. I hope that poetry, and poetic language, have been a companion for you during this time. I hope poetry has helped you feel more present in your daily life, and less isolated. I hope—though I doubt your conscious mind would frame it this way—that when you’ve read you’ve felt the somatic ghost presence of another body rising up from the page to greet your own.

My conscious mind didn’t choose to open this essay writing about my mother’s dementia (it dreads the idea—how it longs for a few hours, even, of thinking of anything else!), but my body insisted. And in placing my mother here amidst my thoughts on poetic language—why it most fundamentally matters to me, why it sustains me—I am reminded, with profound gratitude, of what my conscious mind resists acknowledging, projecting and panicking and racing ahead as it is wont to do: my mother has not disappeared. She is still here with me in all the most essential ways, even if she sometimes forgets who I am. I can hold her in my arms. I can laugh with her about the littlest things. We can walk through her neighbourhood and sing the songs of her childhood, or we can sit together in silence, listening to the music of our breathing.

planned obsolescence in all its forms

2025-05-19T21:23:00.003-07:00

Art can be defined as whatever an artist says it is - and anybody can declare themselves to be an artist. This... people find disconcerting, and annoying.

Meantime, certain individuals, anxious to have their unusual artistic practice recognized as falling under the definition of their art form, often announce exaggerated claims for what they produce. Such claims frequently include an insistence that their artistic productions are the newest development in the art, and should receive attention precisely for that reason. Our society at the moment is under the sway of values that glorify planned obsolescence in all its forms: fashions, fads, tends, and disposable products that even twenty years ago were considered repairable. Thus, making a fetish of the new is central to commerce as well as being the rationale for some artistic approaches. A barrage of advertising and other propaganda is directed at consumers by enterprises desiring to encourage the purchase of the latest products, In order for this inducement to buy to be successful, people must believe that we have entered an entirely different era in which previously held attitudes and values do not apply. Hence the urgency and frequency with which the corporate cheerleaders - and some of their artistic followers - declare out times to be postindustrial, postfeminist, postmodern.

...

The term "experimental" for certain kinds of poetry doesn't seem to work either, although that term, too, is in use. "Experimental" is language borrowed from science... In truth nothing is "experimental" about experimental poetry - that is, nothing is definitively proposed, then proved or disproved via reproducible results, as in a scientific experiment. Art, thank God, is neither military nor scientific. It draws from other sources of the human experience. Every sort of writer, in fact, in the act of compositions considers alternative formulations of all the facts of writing - experiments, if you will - and then adopts those nouns, verbs, modifiers, grammatical and formal structures that the author finds will best convey the effects he or she wants to achieve.

- Tom Wayman, from his Ralph Gustafson Lecture Songs Without Price, as published in a book of the same name (Institute for Coastal Research, 2007).

the 2024 roll of nickels year in review

2025-01-01T16:34:00.000-08:00

2024 saw the publication of nine interviews here on the blog - seven originally published over at Read Local BC and one each from Arc Poetry Magazine (with Matt Rader) and The Antigonish Review (with Gillian Sze). I'll have at least as many new interviews coming your way in 2025, as I release my sixth-annual Read Local BC interview series, along with a couple other interviews elsewhere: Rhea Tregebov, Ali Blythe, Cecily Nicholson, Anita Lahey, and more. It's going to be a good year!

Weather, with its "Best
of 2024" sticker!

This year I also added nine quotes on writing, a meagre offering by my usual standard, but I blame the new book, new job, literary festival, and juror duty for that. (The latter also explains why I haven't posted a list of my favourite books of the year... more to come!)

It was a ton of fun launching Weather this year and touring it around southern BC with Kevin Spenst (if you haven't already done so, check out Kevin's new book, A Bouquet Brought Back from Space). Some highlights of releasing the book have included a wonderful "hometown" launch in Port Moody; my essay on the book, "Some Notes on Writing Haiku," reaching many readers in both North America and further afield (it was reprinted in New Zealand!); a couple lovely reviews; and, recently, its being named a Miramichi Reader Book of the Year!

Enough preamble! On to my review of my favourite posts of the year:

October 2024: The Sponsoring Condition: An Interview with Matt Rader

"Pain is very difficult to speak about except in symbols, metaphors, and analogies. It reminds me of poetry: the best poems can’t be paraphrased because how they say what they say is, to be tautological, what they say." - Matt Rader

October 2024: Halting, Slowing, Quickening: An Interview with Gillian Sze

"I love the poetic spaces that the reader can drop into. I remember my first encounter with Anne Carson’s translations of Sappho. I still like falling into those gaps. Reading poetry is like that, I think. The reader enters the poem, ultimately filling those spaces in their own way." - Gillian Sze

October 2024: Becoming More Visible: An Interview with Meghan Fandrich

"I was surprised that the words emerged as poetry. I’m not a poet. I’d never written poems (other than the rhyming poems of Grade 6, of course). For the past decade, I hadn’t written at all, not even in my journal; I had only recently begun to journal again when I met the friend, the love, six months after the fire. There was no reason that the memories would come out as poetry. But they did." - Meghan Fandrich

November 2024: The Silence of the Woods: An Interview with Rodney DeCroo

"Poetry gave my life purpose— I was part of something fine— and that made me feel like I mattered in some way. I was a poet, goddamn it! By my late teens when I dropped out of school I was already a drunk and a drug addict. I lived on and off the streets and worked horrible, humiliating jobs and got fired regularly. I got into fights and often got my ass kicked. I spent many nights in the Vancouver drunk tank. So while my poems were awful they kept me going. I was betting everything on them. Now, I think differently about those poems. Sure, they weren’t much but learning to write poetry is a long, unbroken process that is never finished. The poems I write now contain the DNA of those early poems no matter how awful they were. So yeah, my wonderful, worthless poems. Without them I wouldn’t be here." - Rodney DeCroo

November 2024: A Freely Given Gift: An Interview with Jess Housty

"I get teased sometimes for how often I talk about prayer. I’m not a religious person. For me, prayer is the word I use to describe moments of meditation and communion that ground me in myself and the world around me. In that sense, absolutely—each poem is a prayer, regardless of the title! Because each poem depends on beings and places and ideas outside of myself, and so each poem is relational and connective. I hope that, taken together, they feel like a ceremony or practice grounded in communal blessing, curiosity, and thanksgiving." - Jess Housty

November 2024: A Beautiful Constellation: An Interview with Samantha Nock

"It has been a very strange and absolutely beautiful experience seeing how strangers and people close to me relate and react to my book! I’ve always looked at my poems having a very specific audience: other Indigenous people, specifically northern Cree Métis kin, my family, and the BC Peace Region. But just because that is who I was writing too doesn’t mean that I think my work is not “for,” or inaccessible to, people who are outside of that audience. I absolutely love hearing how people have found themselves in my work and the ways they relate to it or feel called to it. There is a teacher who I am in contact with who teaches some of my poems in their class and they will share their students’ reflections with me. It honestly has made this entire ten-year process of writing this book worth it." - Samantha Nock

November 2024: The Hinge Where the Mysteries Lie: An Interview with Donna Kane

"I am... obsessed with the liminal space between one moment and the next. I feel like that hinge, that transition point, is where the real mysteries lie. I hadn’t actually thought about the silence of the blank space or pages between poems as reflecting this same sort of liminal space, but it’s a great observation. Because my poems have always focused more or less on the same subjects—the material world, phenomenology, consciousness—I feel they have always been in conversation with each other. I think any poem we read is in conversation with all the other poems we’ve read or written. " - Donna Kane

December 2024: You Are Your Own Landscape: An Interview with Onjana Yawnghwe

"It was important [for me] to get at an emotional truth that was authentic to my own experiences. I think that’s sort of the freedom in poetry—there is little expectation to get things “right,” only to get things to feel true... Writing about my parents was a way to get out of my own head, an exercise in empathy and creation, a sort of “negative capability,” as Keats would say. I’m writing about myself, but not really—I’m putting on the page ideas that branch out and become larger than myself, a self that, after all, is an insignificant thing given the scope and nature of life itself." - Onjana Yawnghwe

December 2024: Amphibious Poetics: An Interview with Leanne Dunic

"When it comes to making art, I like to think of the idea of cross-training. Cross-training refers to using various modes of exercises outside of a central activity so that other muscles in the body are engaged and balanced in strength. For me, cross-training is key to my practice and involves me working in one discipline in order to keep my senses sharp in another." - Leanne Dunic

Happy New Year, all!

as we all remember

2024-12-23T09:00:00.001-08:00

I decided I wanted to write poems on July 16th, 1999. I was sitting in my parents’ living room in Chester, Nova Scotia. It was four fifteen in the afternoon (this is Atlantic time); I was helping friends to put on a play that week but had the day free until my call time. My mother was listening to a news article about the decision to rebury the Romanovs. Our dog was sick, but would eventually get better.
I was reading my mother’s copy of Leonard Cohen’s Selected Poems – the M&S one from 1968 with the three heads on the cover – specifically the longish poem “Disguises,” which as we all remember started on page 168 of that book, specifically the two lines near the middle that read “Goodbye, articulate monsters./Abbott & Costello have met Frankenstein.” and these two lines gave me that peculiar mix of reactions I keep coming back to poems to find. To be baffled and laid bare how something that stupendous could be that easy to say.
The poem was profound but self-apparent, it was clearly a constructed object but it felt so casual and so easy. It, and another couple hundred poems since then that I consider my personal canon, was a magic box. A fifteen-year-old theatre nerd is surely a mark for a poem as angry and self-possessed and musical as “Disguises.” “Goodbye, articulate monsters” is a teenager’s phrase. It’s not my favourite poem anymore but I do owe it a great deal.
It rained that day in Nova Scotia. I don’t know if it rained or not in Toronto, where I live now.

- Jacob McArthur Mooney, with a very specific answer to a generic question, in interview with All Lit Up. You can read the whole thing here.

to see the symbiosis

2024-12-19T09:00:00.002-08:00

The work, in the small press, is more than the poem you are trying to write. To be engaged in the small press is to be intimately involved in a network of activities, and it is to direct those activities to a communal project. Small press writers are also small press editors, and publishers, and readers, and booksellers, and reading series coordinators, and audience members, and researchers, and, and, and. To be engaged in the small press is to see the symbiosis of these activities, and not to draw any hard lines between them. Each is part of the work of small press writing because there is no small press without this messy piles of activities (however it is that you ultimately define the small press for yourself). Some years you may be all of them, and others maybe just one or two, but within our individual resources we each endeavour to keep some small corner of the whole thing going.
...
Your thing, the thing you put your best literary self and resources into, is going to be forgotten. The question of posterity is how long that process will take, not whether it will occur. But that's ok. You helped the whole big, unwieldy, dispersed thing along, and because of that work - acknowledged or not - the next kids will show up to find something vibrant and alive and worth investing themselves in. They'll call out all the blind spots from the previous iterations (yours among them) and they'll make their own mistakes, but they'll keep it alive too.

- Cameron Anstee, from his essay/chapbook, Some Silences: Notes on Small Press (Apt. 9 Press, 2024)

a more total silence

2024-12-16T09:00:00.001-08:00

Sitting in Michael [Dennis]'s library [of some nine or ten thousand books of poetry] after he died, I though how different it feels as a reader compared to how it feels as a writer. That was something I wasn't prepared for after my first book came out. I am sitting here in my own library with a stack of books by ______ next to me, and so I have this sense as a reader of an ongoing conversation with their work, but it is one-sided in so far as they don't know that I have these books next to me, they don't know that we are in a conversation even though they're doing all the talking and I'm doing all the listening. Or maybe it is ______, who died decades ago and didn't know (because of course they couldn't have known) that their work would be interesting to some obscure minimalist poet in the twenty-first century. For the reader, the book is present, it is a presence, it is being read and reread, but for most writers there is only silence once it goes out into the world and the hope that perhaps you are in a conversation - or a friendship, really - the depths and duration of which you can never really be aware.
I mean that beyond the feelings most writers have that they don't get reviewed often enough, or their work isn't understood, or their sales are inadequate. I mean a more total silence, a kind of mathematical silence, the silence of one book against the million and millions and millions of books that exist (or existed (or will exist)). Think of the difficulty of keeping a book in print for one decade or two, let along across a century. And I also mean the kind of immediate silence of not knowing whether the book is being read here and now. Someone might have your book open in their hands at this exact moment, they could be sitting somewhere in conversation with you, and you will most likely never know. Even if that reader is the generous type who sends notes to writers saying Hey, I liked your book, that lovely and kind gesture still doesn't communicate the ongoingness of the relationship each of us has as readers to books and writers to whom we frequently come back.

- Cameron Anstee, from his essay/chapbook, Some Silences: Notes on Small Press (Apt. 9 Press, 2024)

Amphibious Poetics: An Interview with Leanne Dunic

2024-12-09T09:00:00.055-08:00

The following interview is part seven of a seven-part series of conversations with BC poets which were originally published between January and April 2024 at ReadLocalBC.ca. This was the fifth year of my collaboration with Read Local BC (you can read all my Read Local BC interviews in one place here).

---

Excerpt from Wet - Leanne Dunic

A singer from Tainan takes the stage. She wears a polka-dot dress.
Between songs she banters about the haze affecting her voice. She says,
Birthdays are not a celebration.
She tilts her bobbed head, wonders aloud why she was born, why she will
die. Is it her birthday today?

She and I both know we are flotsam.

I chew the straw in my drink. With my mind’s eye, I send her an image: an
oceanic cave, tepid water. An invitation.

Blood pounding, I approach and tell her I love her voice. She asks my
favourite singer. I show her photos on my phone of Neil Finn.
Ah, Crowded House.
We grin and laugh. I’m surprised she knows of him.
I’ve used the extent of my Mandarin. Our conversation ends and I return to
my stool.

Reprinted with permission
from Wet
(Talonbooks, 2024)

---

Leanne Dunic transgresses genres and form to produce projects such as One and Half of You (Talonbooks, 2021), To Love the Coming End (Book*hug / Chin Music Press 2017) and The Gift (Book*hug 2019). She is the leader of the band The Deep Cove and lives on the unceded and occupied Traditional Territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səl̓ilwətaɁɬ peoples.

---

Rob Taylor: Wet is a work of poetic fiction inspired by your experience living and modeling in Singapore. In it you describe Singapore as a city of great wealth, but one which often feels highly unnatural: poisoning animals (lizards, birds) and mistreating foreign workers, with shops full of “H-TWO-O isotonic drink” and NEWater (made from recycled urine) which people drink instead of water.

Compounding this, when you were living there Singapore was caught in the midst of a months-long drought and corresponding forest fires, often making the air unbreathable. Midway though Wet you write, “The truth: I think I’m a monster.” To what extent is that “monstrous” feeling connected to your, or your speaker’s, feeling of disconnection with the natural world?

Leanne Dunic: When I was a model in Singapore nearly two decades ago, I was simultaneously the owner of clothing boutiques. Experiencing the real and usually unglamorous side of modelling, I realised how I played a role in the seemingly never-ending patterns of consumption. A few months after I returned from my modelling stint, I decided to sell the business. Of course for all of us, it’s a precarious balance between taking care of self while also considering the ripple effect on other earthkin. I try to do what I can, and I hope this book will help others think of their place in their environments/communities.

RT: As an “American-born Chinese girl” modelling in Singapore, your speaker seems positioned as an outsider everywhere: Chinese in some people’s eyes, American in others’. You, too, move between countries and cultures frequently, and your books often mix prose, poetry, visual art, and music. You not only write in hybrid forms, but you teach them at SFU.

Do you see a parallel between your hybrid life and your hybrid art? Do you think your border-crossing life inspired your genre-crossing art?

LD: Absolutely, I think my mixed-race identity and transnational tendencies have influenced how I create. For my PhD research, I’m exploring the possibilities of something I’m calling “amphibious poetics”—my artistic practice, like an amphibian, moves fluidly between environments and is multiple in genre, form, content, aesthetic, and ecology. This approach allows me to let the content dictate how it wants to manifest as far as form is concerned.

RT: Does your amphibious nature inspire your interest in short blocks of text, which straddle the worlds of “prose poem” and “flash fiction”? What does writing between genres allow you to explore that might be foreclosed to you if you wrote a more traditional book of fiction or poetry?

LD: This is exactly what I’m interrogating with my PhD work. Check back in a few years.

RT: Interesting! Can you tell us a little more—a sneak preview of sorts?

LD: The PhD is a practice-as-research program through RMIT (Australia), but the campus is in Ho Chi Minh City and most of it happens remotely. It’s in creative writing, but much of my research is based on my photographic practice. It’s a great program for me!

RT: That sounds fascinating. I loved how you blended together poetry and photography in Wet. Another genre-blending aspect of Wet is your choice to write a fictional account that often hews closely to your own experience. Your last book, One and Half of You was a poetic memoir, but you made a different choice here. Why was that important for this story? What did ranging more widely from your personal experience allow you to access?

LD: Yes, I needed fiction in order to create a narrative arc. Also, it’s fun to make stuff up to enhance the message and themes. I think it’s a much more interesting book with the characters and their relationships I’ve created.

RT: For me Wet is in part a book about deprivation and desire—social, sexual, environmental—and how deprivation strips away facades, revealing the true nature of the individual (or city, or global economy) hidden underneath. One of the first photos in the book shows the statue of a playful woman in a dress. One hundred pages later, we come to a photo of a near-identical statue, but this time naked.

LD: The first statue is actually of a snail-woman. The dark part is the shell door plate that gets closed during hot, dry weather—I know it’s hard to tell from that angle. The statue at the end is intended to be a contrast to the statue at the beginning, no longer needing a shell door for protection from the elements (metaphorically and literally).

RT: Did you, similarly, get to a place where you no longer need a shell door in Singapore? If so, was this connected in any way to your choice to sell your clothing company?

LD: I think, rather than abandoning, I metamorphosed, as I continue to do. Yes, selling the store was a big part of it. I then decided to pursue writing and other creative works seriously.

RT: I’m grateful you metamorphosed, then!

Your title, Wet, has both sexual and non-sexual connotations. The building pressure of sexual restraint is a theme in the book, which often demurs from direct statements about sex and sexual desire but for stretches of the book it’s also—and I don’t think I’ve summarized a book like this before—relentlessly horny. Do you see this book as exclusively about this one speaker’s experience, or as a broader representation of the pent-up sexuality of Singaporean society and/or the culture of modeling?

LD: Ha! I think there are a lot of things we’re all pent up about, and readers can bring their own experiences to the work. Of course, a big part of the building pressure is desire—to live in a world that’s less-isolated, less-burny.

RT: Wet is built out of a series of discrete vignettes—a carefully curated scrapbook of your speaker’s memories (many of which, I assume, are drawn from your own life in Singapore). The scenes shift in significance from dramatic to ordinary, serious to funny, asides to central narrative events—you never know what will come on the next page! I found it to be a highly engaging reading experience.

I’m curious how you gathered the raw material out of which you built those moments: while living in Singapore were you taking notes in a journal, which you drew from later, or do you just have a tremendous memory? Did you already have the book in mind while you were working there?

LD: I’ve lived in Singapore for several stints over the last two decades. I always kept a pocket notebook and wrote things I found interesting. I guess this is why the country makes an appearance in most of my books so far. I started this book in Singapore in 2015, at the tail end of the Southeast Asia Haze. I wrote most of the book then, and then took another eight years to develop a narrative and fine tune and adapt with the regularity of forest fires and mask-wearing. I remember 2015 had intense forest fires in BC, then I went to Southeast Asia, and it was even worse there. It really shook me.

RT: In Wet, as the Singapore air quality worsens, your speaker orders N-95 masks in bulk from Taiwan to help her and workers near her apartment breathe through the smoke. Was the Covid-19 outbreak, then, a bit of deja vu?

We’re in the window when authors’ “pandemic books” are being published, so I’m curious if Covid spurred you to move this book forward towards publication.

LD: Asians, myself included, have been wearing masks for ages. I recall wanting to wear a mask in Vancouver many years before Covid and being judged by others. I was like, I’m doing this for you! I’d like to think opinions about mask-wearing have changed, but I’m not so sure… I did think the idea of a whole population wearing masks would be a compelling image for readers, and worried that the idea would no longer have an impact now that we’ve experienced a global pandemic, but there are plenty of other things going on in the book to hopefully keep readers interested.

RT: In your acknowledgments, you mention the Singaporean organization HOME (Humanitarian Organisation for Migration Economics), which advocates for the rights of the country’s migrant workers. Could you talk a little about this group, and why it was important for you to advocate for Singapore’s migrant workers in this book?

LD: HOME has been around for twenty years, advocating for the rights of migrant workers. I’ve been following them for years and learned a lot about the gaps between what migrant workers require and aren’t getting. I’ve learned about the traps, barriers, and challenges many migrant workers face in Singapore, and around the world. Singapore is considered a prosperous country, but the cost of this seemingly success story isn’t shared enough. That’s also why I mentioned the writing of MD Sharif Uddin, who wrote poems and nonfiction about his experiences as a construction worker in Singapore. He also wrote a more recent book about his experience during Covid, which was particularly bad for migrant workers, who live in crammed, communal spaces.

One and Half You (2021)

RT: As you touched on earlier, you often combine your hybrid poetry/prose with music from your band The Deep Cove. Your first book, To Love the Coming End, was accompanied by the album To Love the Coming End of the World; your second book, One and Half of You, includes links to download three original songs; and The Deep Cove’s second album The Gift has a companion short story which you published in 2019 with Book*hug. Have you made music to accompany Wet? If so, I look forward to hearing it!

LD: The wetness is all around! From the names of my musical projects, The Deep Cove, to tidepools (who did the instrumentals in One and Half of You), watery bodies are my thing.

I had started writing some music for this book a few years ago, but then began doing more photography and decided to bring that element to the work instead.

RT: What does working in these other art forms contribute to your books?

LD: When it comes to making art, I like to think of the idea of cross-training. Cross-training refers to using various modes of exercises outside of a central activity so that other muscles in the body are engaged and balanced in strength. For me, cross-training is key to my practice and involves me working in one discipline in order to keep my senses sharp in another. In other words, cross-training keeps my artistic muscles healthy and happy. Working on one project will teach me skills that I can then go back and apply to a previous and/or future project. This keeps things interesting for me; I’m rarely bored artistically.

RT: Though you didn’t write new songs for Wet, is there a song you’ve written that might be a good match with the book, or this conversation?

LD: Here’s a song from my last book that may be appropriate: “The Sound of Waves.”

You Are Your Own Landscape: An Interview with Onjana Yawnghwe

2024-12-02T09:00:00.156-08:00

The following interview is part six of a seven-part series of conversations with BC poets which were originally published between January and April 2024 at ReadLocalBC.ca. This was the fifth year of my collaboration with Read Local BC (you can read all my Read Local BC interviews in one place here).

---

Evening Prayer - Onjana Yawnghwe

Between sleep and dream
from the pull of mouth muscle
the twitch of tongue,
into the hum of throat,
down to the column,
solid heart, of self
Buddha saranam gacchami
The nights we climbed
into mom’s bed
sleep tip-toeing
Dhammam saranam gacchami
we would repeat until
the lone-lamped room
rose and filled with
level, deep rumblings
of a language we lost
and didn’t understand

Mouths memorising
mouth-shapes
Sangham saranam gacchami
Remember not the meaning
but the feeling of those words

for the space they open
into cloud and blue sky
like a breeze combing back
to loosen strands of your hair.

Reprinted with permission
from We Follow the River
(Caitlin Press, 2024)

---

Onjana Yawnghwe is a Shan-Canadian writer and illustrator who lives in the traditional, ancestral, and unceded lands of the Kwikwetlem First Nation. She is the author of two poetry books, Fragments, Desire (Oolichan Books, 2017), and The Small Way (Dagger Editions 2018), both of which were nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. She works as a registered nurse. Her current projects include a graphic memoir about her family and Myanmar, and a book of cloud divination.

---

Rob Taylor: On its back cover, We Follow the River is described as “a work of over twenty years.” My sense is that the initial writing of many of these poems was connected to your father’s death in 2004, and your return to them spurred by your mother’s death in 2022. Would that be accurate?

Onjana Yawnghwe: The initial manuscript of We Follow the River took shape and gained purpose with my father’s death—I was in my twenties, and the timeline from the diagnosis of a brain stem tumour to his death was an interval of less than four months (though in lived experience it felt endless), and it was all very baffling in my mind. I just remember being so confused. I think there was so much shock—and it was, in all honesty, a terrible death to witness—that many memories of that time were entirely absent or just blank. My father’s death became a very deep wound, and writing about it helped me make sense of it (it also caused me to eventually go back to school to study nursing).

Alternately, my mother’s death was a surprise—I came home from work past midnight and found her sitting on the couch, looking like she was sleeping—but she had been struggling for a few years with dementia. Compared with my dad, hers was a much more peaceful death.

RT: Those both sound very difficult. And as someone who lost his father young and now has a mother many years into a dementia diagnosis, you have my sympathy and my understanding that while the shocks may get a bit easier to take, they are still shocking. I’m curious if, and how, you’ve processed these two losses differently.

OY: Age certainly changed the way I received death. As we grow older, death certainly becomes more present in our lives and the lives of our friends. There is a kind of acceptance of the inevitability of death, our own mortality, and the fact that we, as living beings, are destined to lose our loved ones, one by one. But not only is there acceptance, there is also consideration of the beauty of life, its fragility and our own complete vulnerability. With regards to my own parental losses: when it came to my father’s death, I wanted to forget, but with my mother’s recent death, I wanted to remember.

RT: I was struck by an image you provide in one of the poems in We Follow the River: grief as water in a river (“the heart / breaks / upriver”) which travels its set course but eventually spills out into the ocean; into everything. How did the fact that the ocean was already filled with grief influence how you received this new loss from “upriver”?

OY: The river/ocean imagery emerged naturally out of the book. I’m drawn to bodies of water. I think of our family crossing the Pacific to settle in Canada. I think of our proximity to the same ocean when we lived in Mount Pleasant, often visiting Stanley Park on weekends. I remember staring at the ocean as a child and being riveted by its rhythms. When we moved to Coquitlam when I was a teenager, our kitchen window had a distant view of the vast Fraser River. I heard the underlying roar of traffic which seemed to me similar to the sound of a river rushing past.

It is important for grief to become like a river, always kind of moving and flowing, allowing emotions to pass and evolve versus having them fossilized and fixed into place. And of course I see the ocean as full of grief: the sea as being full of tears (see the song “Tiny Tears” by the Tindersticks), but what is lovely is that these are tears from each and every one of us, our collective grief, which serves as a kind of reminder that everyone who’s human has gone through or will go through loss, which is comforting, in a way, to know that you are not alone in this.

RT: Yes, lovely. And that you’ve chosen to approach that grief, that ocean, in poetry. Miroslav Holub once described poetry as “almost the instinct against death crystallized,” and Ted Hughes once said, “poetry is a way of talking to your loved ones when it’s too late.” Do either of these quotes ring true to you in thinking about the writing of this book?

OY: Yes, these quotations very much resonate with me, though I don’t see the act of writing as a movement against death; resisting death is like resisting the sun or the rain—potentially interesting (at times worthwhile in the effort) but mostly futile. Writing and art are ways to remember someone who has died, a kind of reimagining of them, a way of organizing memories and feelings you’ve had with the dead. It’s impossible to remember someone as they exactly were—after all, there are so many different ways of knowing a person that you only have one part of who they were—but it is a retelling of the person in a way that will honour them in the most unique way that you knew them. Writing is a way for someone to exist in another person’s imagination, even if briefly. I really like the idea that readers of this book will get to know my mother even a little bit, and since she was a very social person who loved talking, it tickles me to think that she’ll be spending time with people she didn’t even know through this book.

The Small Way (2018)

RT: Ha! Chatting away in the literary afterlife. Can we talk a bit more about how we remember people? Large portions of We Follow the River document your family’s exile from Burma to Thailand, and subsequent move to Canada, all of which happened before you turned eight years old. In your long poem “Moving Earth,” you write “as long as I’m touching earth I’m planting home // seeding memories, even those that are not my own.”

Did you feel a responsibility, in writing this book, to get “right” your parents’ memories, even though, as you say, there is likely no such thing? It feels like a daunting task (it’s hard enough to try to wrangle one’s own “truth” onto the page). Was this, perhaps, part of the reason for the long-laboured writing of the book?

OY: I definitely have no illusion that I’m getting anything right in terms of what my family went through, and it’s my default belief that whatever I write about our family and their memories is inherently slanted in some way. (That being said, I’m working on a graphic memoir/history of the family and Burma that is a sort of non-fictional text!)

I didn’t feel a pressure with this book, but I did feel that it was important to get at an emotional truth that was authentic to my own experiences. I think that’s sort of the freedom in poetry—there is little expectation to get things “right,” only to get things to feel true. I don’t know exactly what my mother felt coming to Vancouver, or what my dad experienced in Chiang Mai feeling like his life was in danger; I can only imagine. Writing about my parents was a way to get out of my own head, an exercise in empathy and creation, a sort of “negative capability,” as Keats would say. I’m writing about myself, but not really—I’m putting on the page ideas that branch out and become larger than myself, a self that, after all, is an insignificant thing given the scope and nature of life itself.

RT: Many writers have waited to publish autobiographical books until after one or more family members has died, sometimes because they know that person would be uncomfortable with the attention and/or the author finally feels able to speak freely (I doubt that was the case with your mom!). Other times it’s because the loss sharpens the author’s attention, and sense of urgency, to remember and record. In many cases, I suspect, it’s a mix of all these things.

In your acknowledgments, you note that after your mother’s death in 2022 “it seemed time to put the poems out into the world.” Could you tell us a little more about that instinct to publish the book now, and not earlier or further down the road?

OY: First of all, I feel no caution with regards to writing about a living person I’ve known (as long as it’s done sensitively I suppose), so that wasn’t a factor. I sort of feel art is fair game. Living is the material of art, after all.

The thing about this book’s twenty-plus-year journey is that I’d given up on it many, many times. When I first finished the manuscript all those years ago, I felt a lot of hope for it. I sent it around, and no publisher wanted to take it on. Then I put it away, then returned to it after a year or two, revised it, sent it off to a couple places unsuccessfully, then repeat. Again and again. I eventually figured it must be complete crap and abandoned it. It became a sort of ghost.

After my mother died in 2022, I was thinking about her memorial and I remembered the poems I’d written about her and, well, I was very into my solitude at that time, and I felt the most alone I ever had, and the house was a mess with all the decluttering I was doing, and I figured let’s look at the old manuscript. It had been years since I’d read it, and I had forgotten a lot of the poems. So what I reread surprised me, and I found it worthwhile. What was interesting was that I found that I instinctively knew how to revise and refine and reorganize the book to make it a lot more cohesive. And I thought, why not give it one more go at it having a life? Luckily, the publishing world had changed in the intervening years; diverse voices were more present in the literary world than they ever were. I thought the book finally had a chance. My publisher, the wonderful Vici Johnstone of Caitlin Press, accepted it right away.

It was important that the book come out sooner than later—it had been so long, and I felt I had squandered the time I had with all my insecurities about it over the years. I do wish the book had come out while my mother was alive; I feel sad that neither of my parents are here to see this book get published, but then again, it was my mother’s death that compelled me to return to the book in the first place….

RT: What did returning to, and rehabilitating, these poems teach you about your mother, and about yourself, which you’d perhaps forgotten in the intervening twenty years?

OY: Tenderness, I think. Coming to these poems in my middle age brought a sort of sadness and knowledge about the nature of the world. I have so much more compassion for what my parents went through, and how insanely brave they were, and how in many ways, life must have been a disappointment with all their losses, and yet they persisted and tried very hard to make a good life for my brother and me. I don’t think I fully understood that twenty years ago. Life is difficult, and we live blindly with little glimmers of other lives in the distance. When I think of my parents the way they were, coming to Canada in their forties with two children, I just want to embrace them and love them and tell them that they tried their best, and that it is very, very okay.

In terms of the craft of the poems, what I learned about myself was how skilled I’ve become at writing, which actually surprised me. I felt like a musician who’s played their instrument for decades and knew exactly what notes to hit and how to hit them to achieve certain effects. So revising these poems was a sort of joyful experience of exercising all that I learned about line, diction, music, and space. It was technical, acute, and incisive.

RT: What about you as a child to these two people? Did you find yourself revising what you had once said about them, from your new vantage point as someone similar in age to them when they moved to Canada?

OY: I don’t think I was a difficult child from an outsider’s perspective—I didn’t get into trouble and always did well in school—but do think I was a challenging child. I was very shy and withdrawn, I never spoke in public, and all I did was stay home and dream. Our parents left us alone for much of the time, so I came to appreciate solitude and learned how to occupy myself. But as a teenager and young woman I was so, so angry; I learned I could hurt with words. I was super broody and intense. I thought my parents could have done a better job with us—they were so strict, and there was no affection, and sometimes our father was harsh with us. But I think as I moved away from them, I eventually began to see them as people who were just trying to survive in this strange place and whose dreams disappeared literally overnight after catastrophic violence.

When I was 18, I left for a backpacking trip through Europe that I had spent years at my summer job saving up for. I remember being at the airport gate and looking back at my parents and noticing how frail they looked, and it dawned on me that they were going to die someday. This made me immeasurably sad. A few years later, on a Greyhound bus from Vancouver to Quebec, I started reading Peace is Every Step by the Zen Buddhist monk Thích Nhất Hạnh, and as if by miracle, all my anger and resentment from growing up kind of just slowly faded. I can’t imagine taking the risks as they did when they were approximately my age. They made big choices that I didn’t have to make. And looking back, I think our parents leaving my brother and I to our own devices worked out pretty well; both of us developed rich inner lives, and we fed ourselves with art, books, and ideas. It can be hardly a coincidence that my brother, Sawangwongse Yawnghwe (who created the painting on the cover of this book) is a visual artist and I’m a writer.

RT: You mentioned a while ago how the publishing landscape has changed since the mid-2000s, when you first tried to publish an earlier version of this book. One of those changes, perhaps obviously here, is the elevation of more stories from the lives of immigrants and refugees. When reading We Follow the River, I thought particularly of a book like Souvankham Thammavongsa’s Found, published around the time you would have first been preparing this manuscript, or, more recently, books on growing up split between languages and cultures, such as Isabella Wang’s Pebble Swing, Gillian Sze’s Quiet Night Think or Sadiqa de Meijer’s alfabet/alphabet.

While acknowledging, of course, that all inspiration need not be from those with similar life experiences, I’m curious which writers inspired you to initially write these poems in the early 2000s?

OY: Interesting you bring up Thammavongsa—I remember encountering her first book Small Arguments in 2003, and feeling an odd resonance, because here was a poet, who was around my age, from the country I was born. It was incredible, because nearly all of the Asian Canadian writers I knew of were of East Asian descent, but here was a South East Asian poet—from Thailand no less! Not only that, her work wasn’t explicitly about her race or identity or belonging. I loved Small Argument’s minimalist, expansive poems, and I liked that she had the guts to publish a work that wasn’t a sort of self explanation (nothing wrong with that, obviously, but it felt different to me). I admire Found because of its sense of withholding. She is writing about her father and his notebook, and writes about it, but doesn’t reveal much of its content. It’s defiant and risky—a hell of a way to tell a family/ethnic narrative without spilling one’s guts about every racial trauma.

Growing up, the writers I studied in school were all White, and it was only until I came to university that I was exposed to Black, Indigenous, Asian writers. That being said, I fell in love with classic literature, and that included those classic White writers, like Whitman, Dickinson, and Keats; I mean, I loved English literature enough to do a Master’s degree in it. As for the poets that shaped my writing in the early 2000s, there have been many: Dionne Brand, Marilyn Dumont, Jeannette Armstrong, Fred Wah, Phyllis Webb, Betsy Warland and Wayde Compton to name a few. For the music of poetry I was influenced by Galway Kinnell (a book I was obsessed with was his The Book of Nightmares) and Dylan Thomas (his music is unmatched). I was particularly entranced by the idea of the long poem, and the idea that a poetry book doesn’t have to be a collection of poems, but one whole narrative, so I was impressed by Louise Bernice Halfe’s Blue Marrow, all of Anne Carson’s books, and Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid and Running in the Family.

RT: Yes, yes! What a wonderful assortment of poets to have come to early in your writing life. Did other poets come along in the intervening years who helped inspire the revised book we see today?

OY: I’ve found inspiration in Claudia Rankine (both Citizen and Just Us) who uses mixed essay/poetry forms to delve into the microaggressions and intricacies in race and culture, and Ocean Vuong, who has a deeply lyrical and beautifully tender voice. I enjoy the language and music of Billy Ray Belcourt and Jordan Abel’s Empty Spaces, and the distilled essences in Ali Blythe. I love the simplicity and openness of Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit. I love the essay forms that Maggie Nelson writes. Poetically, T.S. Eliot remains a perpetual influence.

RT: I see many of those poets in your work, and perhaps will be seeing others more clearly in future books.

Returning to this idea of “seeding memories, even those that are not my own,” one can also read that line in the opposite direction, not looking back at family memories, but looking forward to readers and their own remembrances, especially those readers whose families were forced to leave their home countries. I can see this book drawing up all sorts of memories in its readers. Was the reader, and the space you were making for them to seed their own memories, a consideration for you as you wrote or revised this book?

OY: The reason a lot of us write is to share stories and communicate experiences. I know that what I’m writing isn’t a unique narrative at all, that there are variations of my story that echo in others’ experiences. Your idea of seeding memories in readers is a very beautiful one. There is a commonality to immigrant experiences, especially people turning away from their home countries and starting anew. We face similar difficulties, especially with questions around belonging and how to be in a new land that seems ambivalent of our presence. So I do hope that We Follow the River becomes a kind of welcoming to those folk who feel they don’t necessarily fit in much of anywhere, and who feel alone and isolated.

That being said, I want to emphasize the immense variation and diversity in Asian immigrant experiences, and being Asian Canadian; these stories tend to be lumped into one narrative by the dominant culture, or as Cathy Park Hong writes in her wonderful book of essays Minor Feelings, “Of course, writers of color must tell their stories of racial trauma, but for too long our stories have been shaped by the white imagination,” and “non-white writers must prove they are human beings who feel pain.”

Personally, I have struggled with writing racial identity politics because yes, it is what the dominant culture expects, and these narratives traditionally have taken on similar, familiar and comforting shapes: the accepted shapes, the non-threatening shapes. As Christina Sharpe says in the excellent Ordinary Notes, “stories are not innocent” and “what kind of consciousness is being shaped? Whose? How?” It’s so difficult to navigate racialized narratives—one can almost get trapped in these stories with no room to maneuver. At times, we find ourselves building our own narrative cages. I ask myself: what stories are being rewarded, what narratives are given more spotlight than others, and why?

As an Asian-Canadian writer, I can’t help but write about my own racialized and immigrant/refugee identity because it is such an integral part of who I am, but a part of me has also resisted this urge. It’s sort of been an ambivalent push and pull. (My first two books were about love, for goodness’ sake, and I have an unpublished book of poetry about Buster Keaton, of all things.)

I think, how wonderful would it be if a writer of colour can have the freedom to write whatever they want—whether it be love poems, or sci-fi or literary fiction—without carrying the burden of their race or ethnicity. Without the need to represent a people or culture. On the other hand, how amazing that more and more writers of colour, and queer writers, and other writers who have traditionally been in the background are telling their stories. I guess what I’m saying is that I hope these voices are encouraged to tell whatever stories they want to tell, regardless of expected ethnic or racial narratives.

RT: Yes, wonderfully put. I hope for that, too. And I want to read that Buster Keaton book!

At the centre of We Follow the River is a poem entitled “Vancouver City Map.” The poem “maps” the city’s history of arrivals and exclusions, from George Vancouver, to Chinese railway labourers, to the Komagata Maru. Why was it important for you to include this poem in the book?

OY: It was important in this book to expand the lens. There is so much inward gazing and looking back, but it’s important to place an individual in her context, and placed within her world. Also, expanding one’s view is necessary in expanding one’s own identity. So in including “Vancouver City Map” I was situating myself. It’s work to negotiate who you are in the context of where you are. It’s important to find that “You Are Here” ideolocator in the map of yourself, see the lay of the land, see where you are so you can know where you’re going.

Also, I think there is that common narrative in our Western culture: immigrants coming from a less fortunate land to a more fortunate, advantageous one, making a new life, being grateful. It is important to realize that Canada has its own problems, especially in dealing with Indigenous folk and people of colour, and that there has been and still is systematic racism here, with profound impacts of colonization and imperialism that are still at play to this day.

The book moves around geographically quite a lot, from Burma to Thailand to Canada and Italy, yet in the end, the only constant is that you are with yourself, and you end up with the same questions, you know? You are your own landscape, no matter where you end up on a map.

RT: I love that! The landscape, or perhaps soundscape, of you in We Follow The River involves a mix of languages, chiefly Shan, Thai, and English. In the aforementioned alfabet/alphabet, Sadiqa de Meijer wrote that “the sound of Dutch exists like a faint carbon shadow in my English.” You write something similar in your poem “Learning”: “I hear the vague ghost / of my own voice speaking Thai and Shan.”

de Meier believes Dutch is still a “major sonic current” in her writing, while in “English Lesson” you write that English “gives me life and swallows me up.” This seems to suggest that Thai and Shan may be less active influences in your poetry. Do you hear that ghostly presence of Thai and/or Shan in the poems in this book? Is some legacy of those languages present in what you think of as “poetic” sound or structure?

OY: At its heart these two poems refer to the unique feeling that many immigrants who’ve come to a new country as young children have. There is a profound problem of language and, along with it, identity. Those who immigrate between the ages of six and twelve are referred to by sociologists as the 1.5th generation immigrant. So the problem is one of being in between: in between cultures, languages, lands.

My family was a little different—my parents were multilingual, speaking English, Shan, Burmese, and Thai. Burma had been a British colony from the nineteenth century until the end of World War II, and my father’s family went to English-run schools and were entirely fluent in the language. I was born in Thailand, and Thai and Shan were my mother tongues, and I started school full-time in Chiang Mai at the age of three. When we came to Canada our parents forbade us to speak Thai or Shan (a common immigrant survival strategy to better assimilate to the dominant culture), and it worked: I forgot my native languages. (From my parent’s perspective, I imagine there was a lot of trauma from the military coup in 1962 and subsequent waves of genocide in Burma.)

We were so culturally isolated at that time: no family and no other Shan families in Vancouver. Growing up, I knew no one from my culture. That is to say, the loss of language has been a profound source of shame for me. There was certainly self-hatred (both racial and the ordinary kind). I felt a profound disconnection, felt sort of like a fraud in Thai society, in Shan society, in Canadian society, everywhere I went. I really envy people who have knowledge of their ancestral language—I imagine they can access a kind of knowing that a person like me wouldn’t ever have.

The thing is, I do think the Thai and Shan languages are still woven into my fabric somewhere, whether it’s just a background like the sky or a backdrop that you don’t really notice. What sticks with me is the music of the languages, their particular tones and melodies. I think there is a lyrical, musical quality in my work that is due to my exposure to the sounds of various languages when I was young (Vancouver is a great place for this kind of music as well). I hear Shan in my dreams sometimes. I still understand a bit, Shan more than Thai, because it was how my mom spoke to me, especially in her later years (she actually encouraged me to speak Shan when I was an adult, but by then, it was much too late—I had forgotten how to bring forth those words, the disconnection complete). Strangely, I understood her perfectly when she spoke to me in Shan, even when I couldn’t understand other people speaking the same language. It makes me sad to think that the language (the version of Shan from my mother’s mouth), will now be forever lost to me.

RT: That doesn’t seem strange to me, and I’m so sorry for that loss—one among many. In the book, you make a return to Chiang Mai to help reconnect some of those lost connections. You write about returning to your old home in Chiang Mai after twenty years and feeling like “an elephant in a doll house.” Could you talk about that experience a little?

OY: It was a weird time. Growing up, we never returned to Thailand as a family—we could never afford to go on vacation—and it was only when I had finished my Master’s degree, around the age of twenty-four, that I returned to Thailand on my own for about six weeks. I don’t know what I’d expected. I think I’d been trying to find something, because I’d felt so unsettled in Canada. I thought I would feel at home when I returned to Thailand. But I didn’t; I felt so foreign, but also not foreign enough to make friends with fellow travellers who assumed I didn’t speak English. I was mistaken for Thai a lot, but I couldn’t read the language, couldn’t properly speak it. Those were mostly solitary days of travel, often getting lost, feeling hot and sweaty, but eventually settling into a comforting rhythm of sight-seeing in the morning, buying food, then returning to the hotel room for an afternoon nap when the sun was at its strongest.

During the trip, I met up with my dad in Chiang Mai for a few days, because he was coincidentally there for work. (It’s a bit odd to think back how the four of us in the family never travelled with each other, but always separately, on our own.) I saw old family friends who eventually took me back to our old house, where we were allowed inside. It was disorientating, being back there—I had sort of a doubling of experiences, of myself as a six-year-old, and of my adult self, and these could not be reconciled. I felt a lot of loss. I realized that the version of myself left behind all those years ago was gone. That trip was when travelling started to lose its bloom on me, I think. I felt so strange, so out of place, and this surprised me, but I missed Canada. I missed the evergreens, I missed the air, I missed the English language.

RT: Did you have a similar feeling, returning to some of these poems after twenty years, that the home they’d once been had changed? If so, what did the remodeling of those “houses” entail?

OY: The manuscript went through a lot of changes. I got rid of many, many poems and trimmed it heavily. I bulldozed sections of poems, cleared things out, pulled them apart and put them back together again. When I first started writing these poems I was such a passionate, fervent person about writing. Writing was my everything, it was the most important thing in my life. I was a kind of poetic acolyte, completely devoted. And I was so precious with my work—it was a pain to even consider changing a line or getting rid of elements that didn’t work, and critical feedback was a stab wound. I was very, very enthusiastic, but probably too single-minded. Twenty plus years on, I have more of a balance; I’m a lot less exciting as a person but probably a little wiser and more measured.

I now have more of the mind of a craftsman, knowing how to use tools to make and discard the unnecessary. I guess if one were to envision a house, it would be one that was still beautiful, but functional and harmonious, instead of a mess of amazing decorative ideas. What is important to me is the work, and allowing the work to be what it wants, which requires a lot of attention and listening. I don’t know where the work comes from, or the nature of inspiration, but I think I know to let the self, my ego, get out of the way of the work. To allow the work to just be what it wants to be.

4 Poets (2009)

RT: Some of the poems in We Follow the River were among your earliest publications, such as the aforementioned “English Lesson” in the 2008 anthology Rocksalt, and “Moving Earth” in 2009’s 4 Poets (both published by Mona Fertig’s Mother Tongue Publishing). It was interesting to compare the early versions of the poems to those in your new book. I noted that you didn’t change the wording of the poems much, but you did a lot of work on their spacing: adding more stanza breaks, spaces between words, and indentations. What motivated you to make these changes? Are these examples a good representation of your evolving feelings around pauses, blank space, and/or breath in your poetry?

OY: I think so. When I started writing everything was left indented, because that was what I had seen in books, but the more I got exposed to poetry, the more I was inspired by different forms, and particularly the way spacing, line breaks, or lack of grammar would feel like a little bit of resistance to tradition or dominant modes of thinking and being. It was only until I met writer Betsy Warland (who was an instructor for a poetry workshop at the writing retreat Sage Hill that I attended twenty years ago), that I learned how the page was a sort of visual score for poetry, and that words and the blank spaces marked breath and sound. It was pretty revolutionary for me. This was made even more powerful by listening to Betsy read her poems (she’s a powerful reader, with so much presence and being present, giving the time for each word or line) because I saw how her reading performance was reflected in how the printed page looked.

I think every time I went back to the poems, I read them out loud, and sort of tweaked how I felt they should have sounded, and tried to reflect that on the page. I also like the gesture of openness on the page, how we sometimes visually move from more conventional looking lines to disassembling into a kind of freedom, sort of like the feeling when you’re divesting yourself of work clothes after a long day, or when you finally step into a forest after a long time in the city.

The Hinge Where the Mysteries Lie: An Interview with Donna Kane

2024-11-25T21:05:00.008-08:00

The following interview is part five of a seven-part series of conversations with BC poets which were originally published between January and April 2024 at ReadLocalBC.ca. This was the fifth year of my collaboration with Read Local BC (you can read all my Read Local BC interviews in one place here).

---

Perennial - Donna Kane

All day, birdsong tills the air.
By evening, stars push through

the loam, perennial, their roots
tapping back to the bulb of their first

blossoming. It’s not the flight so much
as how the sparrow gathers up her body

for the landing, how the ladybug folds
each wing like a napkin inside its lacquered

case. How we are designed to open as much
as we are to close. Listen to the frog’s singing.

How it starts as suddenly as it stops.

Reprinted with permission
from Asterisms
(Harbour Publishing, 2024)

---

A recipient of the BC Medal of Good Citizenship, Donna Kane’s poems, short fiction, reviews, and essays have been published widely. She is the author of the non-fiction book Summer of the Horse and four books of poetry including Orrery, a finalist for the 2020 Governor General’s Literary Award. Her most recent book is Asterisms. She divides her time between Rolla, BC in Treaty 8 Territory and Halifax, NS in Mi’kma’ki, the ancestral and traditional lands of the Mi’kmaq people.

---

Rob Taylor: The poems in your third collection of poems, 2020’s Governor General’s Award finalist Orrery, largely focused on outer space (an orrery being a mechanical model of the solar system), as do many of the poems in your new book, Asterisms. That’s not the standard preoccupation of most poets! Could you speak a little about what drew you to writing about space, and writing about it via poetry specifically?

Donna Kane: I grew up surrounded by a landscape where other-than-human life vastly exceeded human, so the natural world has always been an intrinsic part of who I am. Northeast BC is quite prairie-like (as Lorna Crozier, one of my favourite people and writers, once said, “It’s the closest BC gets to Saskatchewan.”). As a result, the sky takes up a lot of room. On dark, clear nights, the stars are the main feature. I also grew up during the Space Race. I was ten when Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon. The night sky, space, and the natural world were formative parts of my early years, and they have remained not only of interest, but places of solace.

I also write about these subjects in my non-fiction work. I’m currently working on a prose manuscript that chronicles my experiences sleeping outside (I’m heading into my fifth summer of sleeping on an old cast iron bed on our uncovered deck in Rolla) while exploring subjects related to the nocturnal world, astronomy, and light pollution.

RT: In both Orrery and Asterisms, you write poems directly about outer space and the science that underpins its study, but in Asterisms we see that scientific language working its way into poems about animals and objects here on earth: a butterfly flies as if “nicked by a gravity well,” a can of Bartlett pears is no less than “the pivotal moment when the first star / formed… deep within their cosmic dawn,” and even the speaker of your poems is transformed, becoming, in one, an “interstellar object / on a mission to a glass of wine”!

I think the instinct of most poets would be to go in the opposite direction, to use more earth-bound, familiar objects (butterflies, pears, wine) to describe the complexity of the wider universe. (He says, knowing full well that metaphors always end up flowing in both directions.) In reading Asterisms, it felt as if the firmer, more grounded of the two worlds for you was not the earthly, but the cosmic. Would you say that’s true? Do you see deep space around you in the forest, just as others might look up at the stars and see, in their patterns, animals?

DK: Great question. It reminds me of the first four lines of William Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence”:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour

I do feel that. And it’s important, I think, especially now, in the face of climate change and an often-divisive world riddled with fake news, to remind ourselves of the discoveries made by science, and how we understand much better the connections between ourselves and the larger universe because of these discoveries. I also think it’s good to be reminded that not only do we depend on the natural world for our survival, we are nature. Our bodies are comprised of one of the universe’s first elements—hydrogen. There is no element in us that does not also exist in the cosmos.

My interest in and knowledge of the night sky and astronomy has deepened since I began to sleep outside. With the stars and the movements of other planets more viscerally a part of my nighttime experience, I have been reminded of the night sky’s natural and cultural significance, and it has inspired me to learn more. When so many of us live in urban centres where light pollution blocks out the sky and where access to natural spaces is limited, we may not always be aware of the deleterious effects of being disconnected from nature and darkness. A study in 2023 claimed that only one in five North Americans can still see the Milky Way. It’s unsettling how our connections to the night sky are being lost, not to mention that with more animals active at night than in the daytime, the greatest impacts of light pollution have been on other-than-human life.

RT: You split time between Rolla, BC and Halifax, Nova Scotia, where, as you say, light pollution blocks out the sky. I’m curious if you write different poems when you’re in the city. When you’re in Halifax, do you look up at the stars with the same frequency? Do you see the same things when you do?

DK: I definitely write different poems when in Halifax. There’s not a lot of natural space in the city, and while I can see the moon, and sometimes a planet, there really isn’t a night sky. If I do see a smattering of stars, I have no idea which ones they are because there isn’t enough context. In Rolla, the constellations and asterisms are clearly defined, though there is still some light pollution. This past fall, I visited a dark sky preserve in southwest Saskatchewan where there were so many stars that the asterisms and constellations I knew were almost overwhelmed by stars I normally never see. It was an incredible experience.

Orrery (2020)

RT: Let’s dwell on that word “asterism,” which will be new to many people (including me before I Googled it). An asterism is a pattern of stars that has not been formally named a constellation. As Orrery formed a tighter circle around the theme of outer space, Asterism feels more eclectic, with many of its poems looking elsewhere: outward at the natural environment where you live; inward at the philosophical underpinnings of your life.

The covers of the two books, too, suggest a shift (from a space probe to a butterfly’s wing). My sense is that the poems in the new book, like the stars in an asterism, are related, but the connections are more open to interpretation by the reader. Would you say that’s true?

DK: I think my writing has most often started with a concrete image or experience and from there I have tried to apply that image or experience to abstract ideas. In many ways the concerns of both books are the same, but you are right that they seem to take off from different vantage points. With Orrery it was from the vantage point of a probe in interstellar space, an object we could no longer sense, so ultimately an abstract, and then within that abstract I tried to explore concrete images and experiences. In Asterisms I often started with the particular and then tried to view it through a larger cosmological lens. I love learning about similarities between large structures and small structures, such as the fractal patterns of the universe and that of a brain cell, so I do find myself starting more and more from striking relationships such as these and then applying them to the everyday.

As you suggest, the poems in Asterisms definitely have a greater range of subjects. With Orrery, I focused on Pioneer 10 or else tried to reflect the ideas inspired by the probe—materiality, consciousness, transformation, in the subjects I wrote about. With Asterisms, I was more concerned with patterns and their disruptions, with things we can and cannot know, so I tried to allow for more diverse subjects and more room for interpretation.

RT: If it has one, what do you think of as Asterism’s gravitational centre?

DK: I would say it’s the interconnectedness of patterns. An asterism is, as you say, a pattern of stars. Our capacity to recognize patterns may very well be because everything in nature, including humans, is comprised of patterns—from the Fibonacci series, to petals on a flower, to the tracks of animals. In many of the poems in my book, I explore how humans have interrupted or disturbed these patterns to the detriment of other life.

RT: Your poems are musical and playful, and also grounded and wise: Kay Ryan meets Mary Oliver meets Elise Partridge meets the Lunar Lander Module. You seem to have a firm sense of your place in the universe (if that’s an illusion, then it’s a convincing one!). I’m curious how you feel you learned to be at home where you are. How much of it involved looking at the skies and landscape around Rolla? How much at the pages of books of poetry?

DK: I love all the poets you mention (I have mixed feelings about lunar landers), so I am flattered. I’m also somewhat calmed by your comment that I seem to have a firm sense of my place in the universe. While I do feel at home when I’m in the natural world, in the human sphere, I am often quite diffident.

I think it hasn’t been so much that I learned to be at home where I am, but that for nearly all of my life, I’ve never lived anywhere else. My place in the universe is so familiar to me I have never felt separate from it. Poetry too, can make me feel at home, particularly poems that embody what Don McKay calls, “poetic attention,” where poets are “readied” to recognize the wholeness that may arise from paying attention to the material world. When I read poems by poets such as Don McKay, Sue Sinclair, or Jan Zwicky, I am calmed.

RT: Asterisms seems focused on the present, paying attention to the immediate moment before the speaker. In doing so, though, these poems become obsessed with the past and the future. In “On Silence” you write,

music can be disclosed only
by the silence between each note.
And the silence before. And after.

And three pages later, in “On Memory,” you write about,

This memory, which is no longer
that afternoon, but nectar in an uncapped cell,
a sweetness between before and after.

The one poem suggests the material demarcations between all things, and the other the felt connection between them, flowing over everything like nectar. How true both are: the cell capped and uncapped at once!

I’m curious about how this duality relates to your writing process. You seem able to compartmentalize—to write discrete poems about discrete things—and yet those discrete things (rainbows, comets, singing frogs) are always spilling out to wider concerns or personal revelations. How discrete do you think a poem can be, sitting alone on the page, demarcated by the silence of the blank page around it?

DK: Oh, that is so insightful. I am indeed obsessed with the liminal space between one moment and the next. I feel like that hinge, that transition point, is where the real mysteries lie. I hadn’t actually thought about the silence of the blank space or pages between poems as reflecting this same sort of liminal space, but it’s a great observation. Because my poems have always focused more or less on the same subjects—the material world, phenomenology, consciousness—I feel they have always been in conversation with each other. I think any poem we read is in conversation with all the other poems we’ve read or written.

RT: Yes! Very much so. In Hiddenness, Uncertainty, Surprise, Jane Hirschfield wrote that “good poems undercut their own yearning to say one thing well, because to say one thing is simply not to say enough.” Does that resonate with you?

DK: Yes, that completely resonates. In her poem “February” from Sixty-Seven Ontological Studies, Jan Zwicky writes, “Hello world, you who also know / nothing you can say.” As I get older, this has become ever more evident for me. My work is far from the experimental work of language poets where the process of writing a poem is sometimes seen as pre-cognitive, the poem posing the problem, and the writer working through it until the poem resolves itself. That’s not my approach, but I am cognizant of the impossibility of pat answers, and I hope my poems don’t close in that way. Maybe that’s why so many of my poems do resolve with a kind of “this or that” ending.

RT: Though your poems contain multitudes, they usually do so in small spaces: forty of the fifty poems in Asterisms are a sonnet’s length or less. This goes against the general trend in Canadian poetry publishing, where short poems are fairly rare. Could you talk a little about your attraction to writing these more densely compressed poems?

DK: It may just come down to a short attention span and an aversion to hoarding. I like things to be spare, and I seem more suited to reading (and writing) contained poems that capture a moment or thought in a way that, hopefully, gives rise to something more, akin to Jan Zwicky’s idea that metaphor works as a gestalt. In this way, I think a short poem can do the work of a long poem.

RT: Beyond Zwicky, have any particular poets inspired you in pursuing this approach?

DK: The aforementioned Jane Hirschfield, and Louise Glück, too. One of my other favourite poets is Tony Hoagland whose poems are much longer than mine, but I think in his case it’s his candid tone and humour that draws me in, and what holds me is that same resonance of meaning that’s greater than the words on the page.

RT: You note in Asterism‘s acknowledgments that during the depths of the Covid outbreak you enrolled in an online poetry workshop with acclaimed Newfoundland poet George Murray, which proved to be “exactly what [you] needed.” How did Covid impact your writing, and what role did Murray’s class play in seeing you through that time?

DK: You’d think because I’ve lived nearly all my life in a rural, isolated community that Covid wouldn’t have affected me as much as it did. But I wasn’t writing. I had always organized or attended a few writing events each year, and perhaps they fueled me more than I had realized. And also, for reasons I can’t explain, I wasn’t corresponding as much with my writing friends. It got very quiet. I’d always admired George Murray’s writing and his blogs, and when I saw an advertisement for his virtual “Introduction to Poetry” class, I signed up. I think on one hand, I wasn’t sure I did know how to write a poem anymore, but I was also missing camaraderie; I wanted to know what other writers were thinking, who they were reading. The classes not only gave me that, but I began to write poetry again.

RT: Were you reminded that you did know how to write poems, after all? Or did you find some new ways to do it?

DK: Prior to George’s classes, I had resisted form (all those arguments as to whether form drives content, or content form), and I was very averse to prompts. I was abysmal at workshopping poems while doing my undergrad and then my MFA. But many of the poems in Asterisms began from challenges to write in a certain form or to apply particular words. This didn’t change at all the subjects I was thinking about, but it gave me a structure to work in, and suddenly I was writing sonnets and villanelles, something I’d never really been attracted to before. I learned that good prompts (which George seems gifted at) can work like a seam ripper on a poet’s own ideas, opening up the stitches so you can move around in your thinking a bit more. Paradoxically to what I had previously thought, having structure helped me move in directions I might not otherwise have gone. Structure gave me a place and a way to start writing again. And using a bit more form or structure fit with the book’s overall theme of patterns.

A Beautiful Constellation: An Interview with Samantha Nock

2024-11-18T09:00:00.002-08:00

The following interview is part four of a seven-part series of conversations with BC poets which were originally published between January and April 2024 at ReadLocalBC.ca. This was the fifth year of my collaboration with Read Local BC (you can read all my Read Local BC interviews in one place here).

---

mclean drive, - Samantha Nock

i break loose in isolation
crashing upon the rocks of myself.
i cry for two weeks straight
only stopping for sleep
and water.
long lessons learned
the hard way:
we are only loved
the way spring loves
fresh flowers.
even in endings,
there is renewal.
i break open myself,
to form new rivers.
mwîstas kakî wâpam’tin?

Reprinted with permission
from A Family of Dreamers
(Talonbooks, 2023)

---

Samantha Nock is a Cree-Métis writer and poet originally from Treaty 8 Territory in the Peace Region of northeast British Columbia. Her family is originally from sâkitawâhk ᓵᑭᑕᐚᕽ (Île-à-la-Crosse), Saskatchewan. Samantha currently resides on unceded xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səlilwətaɬ Lands in so-called Vancouver. She has had works published in Maisonneuve, Vice, Prism International, and Best Canadian Poetry, among others.

---

Rob Taylor: The second section of A Family of Dreamers focuses on your life with, and loss of, your grandparents, to whom the book is dedicated. Near the end of the section you write about experiencing sleep paralysis, and sensing that something is staring at you from the corner of the room: “this is the dreamworld / entering the waking world, i know this is grief / coming to collect.” Could you tell us a bit more about that experience? What effect has writing about it, and your memories of your grandparents, had on your experience of that grief?

Samantha Nock: A lot of my poems tell stories of me learning to look at my grief and the grief of my family head on instead of avoiding it. That poem, “the lord’s prayer,” walks through me describing the immediate moments after my grandpa Johnny’s passing and my first time being confronted with a big grief like that. I feel like experiencing sleep paralysis, and connecting it to my buried grief, was a way for me to show the physicality of grief as its own being. I literally look at it and share a room with it.

Writing about my grief in this way has helped me move through some of the more tough parts of grief and learn to work and live with it. It’s also served as a way for me to honour my grandparents, both the ones that have passed and the ones still alive. It has allowed me to show my family the ways we share in this grief. It’s also been a way for me to talk to my grandparents who have passed. I never read the poem “grandma on the farm” out loud because I’m truly not sure I could get through it without crying. It’s a conversation for me and my grandma.

RT: I appreciate that, and sense the intimate nature of some of these poems. How has it felt to see your book go out into the world and reach people close to you (and strangers, for that matter)?

SN: It has been a very strange and absolutely beautiful experience seeing how strangers and people close to me relate and react to my book! I’ve always looked at my poems having a very specific audience: other Indigenous people, specifically northern Cree Métis kin, my family, and the BC Peace Region. But just because that is who I was writing too doesn’t mean that I think my work is not “for,” or inaccessible to, people who are outside of that audience. I absolutely love hearing how people have found themselves in my work and the ways they relate to it or feel called to it. There is a teacher who I am in contact with who teaches some of my poems in their class and they will share their students’ reflections with me. It honestly has made this entire ten-year process of writing this book worth it.

RT: What about your own response to your book, looking back over those ten years?

SN: Many of these poems have existed in some form throughout years of my life and they’ve been edited and changed as I changed. In a lot of ways the poems grew with me as I was navigating the growing up that happens in your twenties. They’re like old friends that know everything about me and the time we spent together has been very cathartic.

RT: You mentioned the Peace River region there, which is a recurring subject of the poems in A Family of Dreamers. You write about the region, and the Peace river’s tributary, the Kîskatinâw, with a sense of love, loss and longing. In “kîskatinâw interlude pt. II,” for instance, you write:

she never apologizes
takes you as an offering
and continues to flow…
i wish there were a better way to say
that i am jealous of a river

You write about “working hard in high school because i’m a / cliché of wanting to leave my small town,” and being warned that “you can never come back.” You’ve lived in Vancouver for some time now: have you been able to return to the region? Is this book a return of sorts to both the region and the rivers that sustain it?

SN: This is a very beautiful question. I return home often. In recent years I’ve been trying to return at least twice a year (in the summer and in the winter). Growing up in the north wasn’t easy and along with the deep, deep love I have for it, there is a lot of hurt and grief there. I feel like in a lot of ways this book is an ode to the BC Peace Region, because it really did raise me. But it’s also a way for me to say goodbye to a complicated childhood and teen years so I can let go and discover a new part of myself. There is grief in this, too, and I feel like that comes out in a lot of the poems I write.

For a long time, I held onto being the northern girl who came to the city, but I’ve lived in Vancouver for fourteen years now, nearly as long as I lived in the Peace. I will always be Sam Nock from Dawson Creek, BC but I’m also Sam Nock from Vancouver, BC.

RT: Speaking of letting go of that teenage self, in the poem “letting go” you write about being young and “feeling 13 / and 45 at the same time.” That resonated with me both as the way many of us feel in high school, but also as the natural condition of the poet: a childlike wonder meeting an old soul. Do you still feel like you’re living those two lives simultaneously, even if the years have shifted a bit?

SN: Yes, but now I feel like I’m sixteen, thirty-two, and eighty-five. There were parts of my teens where I was unsure if I’d see eighteen or twenty or twenty-five. I was severely depressed and struggling. I feel like “old soul” can also be a way to describe kids who had to grow up too fast, and it’s in that way that I felt like I was 13 and 45. It’s also why I feel sixteen, thirty-two, and eighty-five now. This book let me look at the ways I am healing my child self, my current self, and my future self.

RT: Yes, very true. My father died when I was eleven, so maybe that’s what’s at work in this shared feeling of ours, even more so than the poetry.

A Family of Dreamers is full of memorable lines. One that stood out for me was “my spine is my greatest love story” (from “my body remembers”). Could you talk about it a bit?

SN: “my body remembers” is a blunt poem about being sexually assaulted when I was twenty and the ways in which I felt isolated and alone as a scared kid who didn’t know how to process the experience. Through somatic therapy, my therapist asked me during one session where I thought I held my resilience, and I imagined it being stored in my spine. Writing this poem allowed me to look at what happened through a lens of the way my body knew how to keep us going. Even at a time where I felt like my autonomy was stolen, my body was there to remind me that it could never be taken away.

RT: In A Family of Dreamers you use romanized Cree words and phrases within English-language poems, including using the Cree words for the numbers one to six to title your book’s six sections. Unlike many poets in recent years who have integrated Indigenous words into their poems (Jess Housty, Dallas Hunt, Wanda John-Kehewin, etc.), you’ve chosen not to provide a glossary of terms at the back of the book. Could you speak a little about that choice, and what you hope it signals for both Cree and non-Cree readers?

SN: I wanted to be able to put in my poems the parts of my language that I was able to. That it’s limited to certain words and phrases speaks to where my level of language knowledge is at right now. It is an absolute dream to me to maybe one day be able to write a poem fully in my community’s dialect.

I chose not to translate because I wanted non-Cree speakers to stumble on the words, let them feel heavy and awkward in their mouths as they try and sound them out. I wanted them to have to Google the words or phrases and find out what they mean, much like the process a language learner has to go through. For Cree speakers who are familiar or fluent, I wanted there to be parts in there that felt comforting. I know how I felt the first time I got to read a poem with Cree in it; I got so excited and felt welcomed.

RT: Your endnotes point to a number of contemporary Indigenous poets whose influence you can see in your work: Selina Boan, Marilyn Dumont, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Dallas Hunt and Jessica Johns. Could you speak a little about your main literary influences in writing this book, either from this list or outside of it?

SN: I would be absolutely nowhere without being in this beautiful constellation of other Indigenous poets and writers. It feels impossible to even name them all. The biggest influences on my work, though, are Marilyn Dumont and Rita Bouvier. Dumont’s A Really Good Brown Girl was the first time I had read poetry by a Métis woman and in it I saw my family, and my lived experiences, too. Bouvier, who is from Ile-a-la-Crosse and also literally a cousin. I haven’t met Rita in real life but who I sent a very funny message to while writing this book. I was like, “Hey! I think maybe my kokum is your aunty or something like that, anyway we’re related and I love your work.” Her poems are such an inspiration because I feel like through them I am able to connect to family and places that I haven’t been able to connect to in other ways.

RT: You also thank Emily Dickinson, who feels like a natural fit alongside the more “ghostly” and gothic elements of the book.

SN: I’m a formerly pretentious teenager who devoured the works of Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, Dorothy Parker, and Mary Oliver. I feel like they allowed me to dream of poetry. I still return to their work often. But if I’m being very honest, one of the biggest poetry inspirations for me is my dad. He’s a wonderful poet who writes gorgeous pastoral poems about the Peace Region. He doesn’t publish or share his work with anyone but family, but he was the one that taught me that there’s poetry in nature and the places we call home.

A Freely Given Gift: An Interview with Jess Housty

2024-11-11T09:00:00.002-08:00

The following interview is part three of a seven-part series of conversations with BC poets which were originally published between January and April 2024 at ReadLocalBC.ca. This was the fifth year of my collaboration with Read Local BC (you can read all my Read Local BC interviews in one place here).

---

September - Jess Housty

We are in the time of radiant rot;
berries drop from the stems
when we shake them and salmon
eat up the daylight
as their flesh falls away from
their living bones.
We can feel the full weight
of our grief now
as everything that surrounds us
is shot through with final gold
and the world lays down its work
to rest.
The stillness is like a fresh layer
of humus on the ground.
We are hushed
as though we’ve entered a house
where someone is dying:
we hear nothing but the thuds of crab apples
falling into the yellowed grass.

Reprinted with permission

from Crushed Wild Mint

(Nightwood Editions, 2023)

---

Jess Housty (‘Cúagilákv) is a parent, writer and grassroots activist with Heiltsuk (Indigenous) and mixed settler ancestry. They serve their community as an herbalist and land-based educator alongside broader work in the non-profit and philanthropic sectors. They are inspired and guided by relationships with the homelands, their extended family, and their non-human kin, and they are committed to raising their children in a similar framework of kinship and land love. They reside and thrive in their unceded ancestral territory in the community of Bella Bella, BC.

---

Rob Taylor: The opening poems in Crushed Wild Mint establish parallels between prayer, ceremony and poetry. For instance, from “Nearshore Prayer” (one of four poems in the book with “prayer” in their title):

This is a prayer that extends
in the direction of the ocean:

it is not a story; nothing
is apocryphal in prayer

Do you consider poetry to be a form of prayer? A poetry book a form of ceremony?

Jess Housty: I get teased sometimes for how often I talk about prayer. I’m not a religious person. For me, prayer is the word I use to describe moments of meditation and communion that ground me in myself and the world around me. In that sense, absolutely—each poem is a prayer, regardless of the title! Because each poem depends on beings and places and ideas outside of myself, and so each poem is relational and connective. I hope that, taken together, they feel like a ceremony or practice grounded in communal blessing, curiosity, and thanksgiving.

RT: Yes, that’s so well put. I think of poetry books as spaces of (usually non-religious) communion, though we rarely talk about them as such. Connected to this, in “Bowing to Yarrow (1),” you write about “the directionality of prayer,” which “is moving all around us and through time,” so that a prayer given by an ancestor to a licorice fern or a cedar is returned to you anew by the plant in the present day.

I think something similar about poems—that they are not simply given to the reader by the writer, but co-created with the reader, then they are passed on to others and the process begins again. What is given is always traveling out and returning. I’m curious, now that Crushed Wild Mint has been published, how you think of your poems moving through the world. What is their directionality? How do you hope they might come back to you, or the generations that follow?

JH: I love this. I learn different complexities of my own poems when they’re reflected back to me by readers who are generous enough to share with me what they felt when they read my words. People who take in Crushed Wild Mint from a distance pull out themes and ideas I can’t always easily see when I’m so close to my own writing. The most surprising part of offering a book to the world is realizing that there is no final iteration—there’s always a chance that the light will refract in some unexpected way for someone, or that a new echo will bounce off the walls of the valley causing me to see and hear and feel my own words in a deeper way. I’ve had to learn to be comfortable knowing that I can’t control how my writing lives in the imaginations of others and to trust that this brings unpredictable nuance and richness to the practice of poetry. When I take a deep breath and trust that the world will be tender, it feels incredibly liberating to think of poems as conversations.

RT: Poems as conversations in a tender world—yes, that feeling is very present in your work, perhaps no more so than in your poems about/for your Gwani (Granny). You thank her at the end of Crushed Wild Mint for “the peace of rewriting poems while you napped beside me in sunshine,” which is just about the most lovely thing I’ve ever read in an acknowledgments page.

In “Luáɫ” you write about the different poems you would compose in different rooms of your Gwani’s house, and in a later poem you note that, after she died, “the land… stopped speaking to me.” Could you talk a little about your Gwani? How do you think she shaped your relationship to poetry, and the poems themselves?

JH: My Gwani was the embodiment of nurturing love. She raised and loved four generations of descendants before she passed, and I think all of us would say the same thing: she made us feel safe and held and nourished. In the last years of her life, my family cared for her at home around the clock, and in my shifts with her I got to witness her softening into our care and shifting our sense of time to become nonlinear as she began to slip mentally into her girlhood again. Loving her and taking care of her was an exercise in being present and grounded in a reality I couldn’t direct or control, and it required trust and curiosity that became a practice extending far beyond elder care. I wrote or edited much of Crushed Wild Mint sitting beside her and she anchored me and my words in ways I didn’t fully appreciate until after she was gone.

RT: As someone who has a parent living with dementia, I’m very moved by your description of the illness as “slip[ping]… into her girlhood again.” My mother, who has forgotten so much of her life, is also always discovering things anew, and there’s joy mixed in there with the loss.

The acts of living with a person with dementia and of writing a poetry book both cause us to think a great deal about memory: what we can hold on to, and what we have to let go of. When you wrote poems beside your napping Gwani, you were engaging with both at once, which may in part explain why the final word in Crushed Wild Mint is “memory.” What did your time writing poems in the sunshine teach you about memory?

JH: I come from a culture where our knowledge systems, storykeeping, and historical records are passed down orally and held collectively. Some of the ideas and knowledge embedded in Crushed Wild Mint felt like a remembering from outside myself. So in some senses, it feels very normal for memory to be fluid and collaborative. Gwani illuminated this for me. Witnessing her showing up authentically as so many phases of herself—and being witnessed by her in so many forms of my own, from grandchild to stranger to someone she simply called “auntie”—made me realize that how we experience ourselves and one another is deeply dynamic, and so of course memory and the stories we tell are dynamic too. And because memory thrives on witnessing, it binds us in a shared experience.

RT: I was angered when I read your poem, “To the scientist who called my beloved salmonberries “insipid.”” This was both due to what the scientist said and the fact that their words caused a (thankfully temporary) rupture between you and my very favourite berry on earth. It made me think about how disconnected many of us on the West Coast are from the plants that surround us. People are often surprised to see me eating salmonberries or huckleberries when out on a walk—they didn’t know you could do that—and sometimes those people have lived here their whole lives! And I am sure I stroll ignorantly past many other plants that could benefit me greatly.

Your book teems with local plant life, with poems dedicated to yarrow, wild crab apples, bog cranberries, salal, wild aster, skuusiid (an endemic variety of potato) and, of course, the titular wild mint. It feels a bit like you’re writing an alternate field guide in response to that scientist—one designed to induce love and curiosity instead of shame. Would you say that’s true?

JH: Plants bring me incredible joy. They nourish and heal. They signal and indicate. They put tools in my hands and structure in my seasons. It brings me great comfort to know that I can walk out into the wilderness of my motherlands and know that I’ll be fed, that I’ll be able to tend to my ills, that what I need most will be provided in exchange for the care I return to what surrounds me. Plants are the reason trust is such a fundamental presence in my life. My grandparents (and my ancestors) knew plants were our relatives, and that kinship engendered a lot of fierce mutual love and care. I was raised with that knowledge too. The only time I’ve ever doubted it is when I listened to people who think we are apart from nature, and that this distance somehow elevates us morally above everything around us. How preposterous! I wanted to infuse Crushed Wild Mint with all the bursting berries and bitter, potent medicines that help me thrive. I wanted to insist on them. I don’t think I could ever tolerate them being diminished to me again.

RT: In what ways would you like readers to think more deeply about their relationship with the plant life around them?

JH: I hope readers become curious about the personalities of yarrow, licorice fern, and every other relative nestled in the book. And I hope that curiosity becomes an invitation into joy.

RT: This book is so intimately bound to the plants—and also the land, language, and animals—of the Haíłzaqv (Heiltsuk) territory in and around Bella Bella that it seems impossible to imagine it being written anywhere else. What do you think your poems would look like if you’d written them in a big city, or simply far from Haíłzaqv territory? Would you be writing poems at all?

JH: I’ve wondered about this. Looking back at my life, the quietest periods—when I’ve felt like I had no stories to tell—were when I lived in urban places, or when I was traveling in other parts of the world. I know my motherlands deeply enough that we can speak to one another, and those conversations often seed stories and poems. I admire people who can ground themselves anywhere and speak those places into the world. I don’t think I’m one of them—and I am learning to love being hyperlocal and in relationship with what surrounds me and holds me close.

RT: The last section of the book is devoted to the story of a historical y̓úzua (flood), and the two mountains, M̓ṇsǧṃx̌λi (Mount Merritt) and Q̓aǧṃi (Mount Keyes) that nearly drowned in it. While the poems look backwards in this way, I couldn’t help but feel that they were also looking forward towards a future of rising sea levels and floods. “How did we miss the signs / of a multiplied disaster?” you write in “Remembering the Flood,” and you seem to be speaking of the past and the present/future at once. How did the looming presence of our oncoming “multiplied disaster” shape your writing about the natural world in Crush Wild Mint? Did it add an urgency to the composition of your poems? A sadness? A sharper appreciation?

JH: My climate grief is so raw. My identity and my ability to thrive are intimately and inextricably tied to my motherland and her thriving. I know, and I repeat through the stories and teachings we hold collectively as Heiltsuk people, that my ancestors have rooted themselves in a practice of resilience and mutual care for places and non-human kin. Through this resilience I have been able to inherit this beautiful world for a moment and then reach down to place that inheritance on my own children. But what am I handing down? Reflecting on the crises we know our people have survived historically does give me strength as I brace myself against a rapidly changing world. But the world is threatened precisely because there are people who don’t believe in that practice of resilience, who hold themselves apart from and above the clean air and fresh water and thriving systems that make me who I am. I need them to feel connected too.

RT: A tall task, but yes, very much one you take on in Crushed Wild Mint. Your poems on the y̓úzua frequently speak of resilience: “we are mountains / that help other mountains / withstand the flood.” What role do you think poetry plays in building our resilience against the flood?

JH: When I think of the poetry that resonates with me the most as a reader, it’s the poems that seem to place their hands on either side of my face, look me in the eye, and say this is who you are. I think it’s possible that poetry and art can help us get out of our own way, to shake off the dissociation of modern existence and get comfortable with the hard work of feeling. Speaking for myself, I have a deep desire to be of service and to be an agent of generosity and care and reciprocity, but sometimes I feel stuck. Sometimes I need the truth to be illuminated and for a shock to be delivered to my system to bring me to life so I can feel and do. It’s easy to feel stuck, but there’s no time. We’re needed. All of us. And I think poetry can help to wake us up.

RT: On the theme of awakenings, in your book’s acknowledgments you thank “Jerry, my Dutch uncle, for being the first one to believe I was a poet.” We all need a “Jerry” in our lives! Could you talk about the process of coming to see yourself as a poet? What did Jerry see in you that you perhaps did not yet see in yourself?

JH: My Uncle Jer has been telling me I was a poet since I was a small child seeing ecosystems in flooded ditches and finding wonder in every stone on the riverbank in Clatse Bay. It was years before I actually put a pen to paper to write a poem. What I value most about how I’m able to thrive in my motherlands is the deep sense I have of being grounded in place, and in relationship to the places and the non-human kin that surround me. I think that poetry, in some ways, is an act of witnessing and then externalizing what you’ve witnessed. And if there’s one thing Uncle Jer and others might have seen in me before I recognized it in myself, it’s the deep joy I find in being present and witnessing the world around me (and feeling seen and witnessed in return).

RT: Many of your poems directly address, or instruct, the reader. In this, and in their invocations to pay better attention to the natural world, they reminded me of much of Mary Oliver’s work, especially her most popular poems such as “Wild Geese.” Your writing also brought to my mind the work of poets such as Wanda John-Kehewin and Selina Boan. Those connections may only be present in my mind, of course! Which poets were the greatest inspirations for you as you were writing the poems in Crushed Wild Mint?

JH: I think if someone ever felt a reason to imagine my writing in any proximity to Mary Oliver’s, I might believe I’ve peaked as a writer! Her poetry teaches me about clarity and devotion, and her words are what I turn toward when I need to be reminded that I am grounded forever in the wildness that surrounds me. I also reach for Joy Harjo for poetry that holds its chin up high and speaks from a universally gorgeous and unapologetically Indigenous worldview. When I think about Crushed Wild Mint, I also feel like I need to acknowledge the vitality and magic realism of Eden Robinson’s writing. Being a reader has shaped me as a writer in ways I couldn’t even begin to untangle, and inspired me to ask myself over and over again with each new text that I encounter, Who can I be in conversation with you?

RT: Near the end of the book, you write “the gift economies of mountains / make us into bridges between peaks.” I was struck by how you brought the idea of a gift economy into the book in that way. I’ve long thought of poets as living and working primarily in the gift economy, in ways not unlike the lives of spiritual and religious leaders (Robert Hass points to the nineteenth century tradition of gift showers for ministers when they would arrive in a new town). This very much feels in keeping with how I sense you’d like your poems to be received by the world. How do you see the relationship between the gift value of a poem and the exchange/market value of a poem (especially as you’re now out promoting a product for sale)?

JH: I grew up in a cultural context where a person’s wealth is measured less by what they accumulate and more by how many people they’re able to take care of. The richest people are the ones who have given everything away—who had the privilege of caring for others and who had others in their life to care for. It feels to me that I have a responsibility to share anything I create or possess, and to do so generously. I can do this trusting that others will also take care of me. So yes, it feels spectacularly weird to bring in a commercial element! What feels true for me is that I’d share my writing freely with anyone who wanted to read it, but the book as an object is a vehicle to share my poetry more widely, and to keep my lights on while I try to create more gifts to share. In the same way, I never take money for plant medicines that I prepare, but sometimes people choose to pay me for the jar or the vial that contains the medicine even as they accept the medicine itself as a freely given gift.

The Silence of the Woods: An Interview with Rodney DeCroo

2024-11-04T09:00:00.001-08:00

The following interview is part two of a seven-part series of conversations with BC poets which were originally published between January and April 2024 at ReadLocalBC.ca. This was the fifth year of my collaboration with Read Local BC (you can read all my Read Local BC interviews in one place here).

---

Six Bottles of Wine - Rodney DeCroo
I haven’t washed the dishes for over a week.
The sink and counter a precarious pile
of dirty pots, plates, bowls and glasses.
The whole mess on the verge of slippage,
of shattering into mundane but dangerous pieces.
I haven’t bathed in five days or brushed
my teeth. I can barely stand the sight or smell
of myself. I am a riot of self-pity in a filthy apartment.
And yes, yes, I’ve been drinking. I’m gloriously,
hideously drunk. I’ve been reading poetry
out loud, shouting through walls
at my neighbours. Every night the landlord pounds
on my door, tells me to shut up. I will
have to pay for my behaviors with sickness,
debt and shame. But I have six bottles of wine
before I have to remember that she is dead.

Reprinted with permission

from Fishing for Leviathan

(Anvil Press, 2023).

---

Rodney DeCroo is the author of two previous books of poetry, Allegheny, BC and Next Door to the Butcher Shop. His poems have been published in Canadian publications such as subTerrain, Geist, Event, BC Bookworld, The Vancouver Province, Discorder Magazine, and The Georgia Straight, among others. His poetry has appeared in Beyond Forgetting, an anthology celebrating the work and life of legendary Canadian poet Al Purdy, and as part of BC’s Poetry in Transit. He has appeared on CBC to read his poems and is also a well-known, touring singer-songwriter with eight albums to his credit. His solo plays Stupid Boy in an Ugly Town and Didn’t Hurt have toured across Canada and the US. In 2019, Moniack Mhor, Scotland’s National Writing Centre, awarded him an International Poet in Residency.

---

Rob Taylor: Near the end of Fishing for Leviathan you write about the poets (Sylvia Plath, Charles Bukowski, Al Purdy, John Keats) who provided the “thinnest thread of light” in some of the darkest periods of your life. In those times, you were also sustained by writing your own “wonderful, worthless poems.” Where do you think you’d be today without poetry’s thread of light? From that perspective, are the poems really “worthless”?

Rodney DeCroo: I was seventeen years old when I encountered poetry in a high school English class. I’d only recently arrived from Pittsburgh to live with my father in Surrey, B.C. He was the manager of the infamous Newton Inn and wasn’t around much. I spent most of my time pilfering from my father’s considerable cache of drugs and getting high, so I made it to school maybe three out of five days a week. No one at school seemed to notice or care and I was good with that. My English teacher—I can’t remember his name—didn’t like me much. On one of the rare days I attended class he was teaching T.S. Eliot’s poem, “The Hollow Men.” I had no idea what was going on. I knew nothing about poetry. He kept asking me to explain for the class what various lines of the poem meant. I felt humiliated by him and whatever this indecipherable fucking thing poetry was.

A year later my father moved us to Cranbrook and I had to take an English literature course taught by a man named Mr. Fossey. The first poem he taught was Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale” and that was it. He talked about the poem in the context of Keats’ life when he wrote it and I was hooked. I didn’t necessarily understand the poem, but I loved the sounds and it made me feel something I could relate to even if I couldn’t articulate it. I kept repeating lines from the poem to myself. After school that day I rushed back to my room in the Tudor House Hotel (my father was the manager so we lived there). I grabbed some paper and a pen from the front desk and started writing poems. They were horrible, unintentional parodies of the poems I was reading at school but they were pure magic to me. I’d nothing going on in my life. I’d drink alone almost nightly in my room and/or get high depending on what I could get my hands on. My dad didn’t care what I was doing as long as I wasn’t causing trouble in the hotel, and it wasn’t too hard getting booze or dope surrounded by drunks and addicts. My father ignored me and I had no friends. So I’d lock myself in my room, get wasted and write poems.

When I dropped out of high school and ran off to Vancouver—even when I lived on the streets—I carried around an old battered briefcase filled with pages of my poetry. I used to give free poetry readings on the bus for my fellow commuters. One time a man stood up on the #14 Hastings Street bus to applaud and I was thrilled. Hey, an appreciative audience is an appreciative audience! I’ll take it! And throughout that time I was reading all the poets you mentioned. They all excited me in different ways. At the time Bukowski spoke to me the most because his poems were so accessible and used language that was similar to the way I spoke. When I started reading his poetry I felt like hey, maybe I can actually do this and I began to try and write the way I spoke.

Poetry gave my life purpose— I was part of something fine— and that made me feel like I mattered in some way. I was a poet, goddamn it! By my late teens when I dropped out of school I was already a drunk and a drug addict. I lived on and off the streets and worked horrible, humiliating jobs and got fired regularly. I got into fights and often got my ass kicked. I spent many nights in the Vancouver drunk tank. So while my poems were awful they kept me going. I was betting everything on them. Now, I think differently about those poems. Sure, they weren’t much but learning to write poetry is a long, unbroken process that is never finished. The poems I write now contain the DNA of those early poems no matter how awful they were. So yeah, my wonderful, worthless poems. Without them I wouldn’t be here.

RT: I see two distinct styles in the poems in Fishing for Leviathan. One is Purdy-esque story-poems, akin to what you just described, which flow with a natural speaking rhythm. The other style is these more tightly-packed, non-linear, associatively linked poems written in couplets, reminiscent of John Thompson’s ghazals in Stilt Jack. The content of the poems in these two styles is distinct, too, with the subject matter of the story-poems more raw, ala Bukowski, and the others more abstract and lyrical, seemingly removed from the harshness of your early years. How did you come to write in these two modes? Do you see a clear distinction between them, or do you move between them more fluidly?

RD: I’ve always had these two approaches both as a poet and songwriter. As a young poet I found it difficult to control the non-linear poems. I didn’t trust them because I didn’t have a process, or enough craft, to work with that material. When I did write those poems they tended to be more like automatic writing that went on and on and on. Song lyrics allowed me to experiment more because a song doesn’t necessarily live or die on its lyrics. You can get away with things lyrically in a song that you never could in a poem.

As I grew as a poet, and as I got used to working associatively with song lyrics, I became more confident in my ability to shape non-linear content into what I feel are cohesive poems. Honestly, after writing a bunch of narrative poems I get bored and switch gears. I relish the freedom and magic non-linear material offers, and yet the storyteller is always there. I think that’s part of how I’ve learned to control those poems. I tend to write in bursts. I’ll write several of those poems over a couple weeks, but I’ll start craving solid ground to stand on—and so, back to the narrative poems. I can’t prove it but I think these styles are in dialogue with each other. You know, like how our dream lives and our waking lives are in conversation. And I think the satisfying change in rhythm those poems provide me as a poet do a similar thing for the reader.

RT: Steven Heighton referred to his job as a poet as being a “stenographer to my nightmind,” and told me that he hoped engaging with his dream mind allowed his poems to move “more vulnerably and associatively.” That seems to be the case for you, too. How do you think your non-linear poems have influenced the nature of your narrative poems? Do you sense that how you tell your life’s stories in poems has changed over the years?

RD: As a multi-disciplinary artist I find that when I work in one medium— say, street photography, for example—that it effects how I approach my poetry when I’m back on the page, whether it’s in my writing process, or the poem’s content or form. The changes are often subtle, just small shifts in perspective, but sometimes they’re big. Writing song lyrics helped me to start writing the non-linear poems which I write a lot of now. I’d say writing non-linear poems have made me less rigid in how I approach narrative poems that tell my life’s stories. I used to feel that I had to stick to the facts—to what actually happened—but I’m not writing an autobiography, I’m writing poetry. I realized that, for me at least, having to adhere to the facts limited where the language could take the poem. I was limiting my poetic imagination. I’m more interested in getting at the emotional truths below the details. What I called the “facts” of a story added up to a story I was already telling myself. If I wanted to get at something deeper I needed to allow new ideas into the poems. Also, we’re always trying to say in poems what is unsayable within ourselves—otherwise we wouldn’t need poems. My hope is that some of the more associative movements of the non-linear poems can begin to work into the narrative poems to allow for deeper, unseen currents to move within/ under the narrative.

RT: Wonderfully put: poems as existing to say something beyond the story we tell ourselves; to say what we couldn’t otherwise say. Perhaps connected to these realizations, you dedicate Fishing for Leviathan to acclaimed BC poet Russell Thornton, “for helping me stand up to myself and write better poems.” Could you talk a little about the role Russell has played in your development as a poet?

RD: I initially met Russell because he invited me to appear on a poetry show he hosted on Vancouver Co-op Radio. I’d heard him read on a couple of occasions and admired him as a poet. With the exception of Al Purdy, my few interactions with older, accomplished poets hadn’t gone well. I’d an enormous chip on my shoulder and was deeply insecure, so I was pretty belligerent. I was a high school dropout, I’d no publishing history except in zines and underground publications, and outside of the local underground scene I was unknown as a poet. The truth was my poetry didn’t merit much attention then and—when I was willing to be honest— I knew that, but I didn’t know what to do. I was in my early forties and still writing like a young, unrealized poet. I was getting a little long in the tooth for that and was deeply afraid that maybe I wasn’t capable of more. I was experiencing some success as a singer-songwriter, I was touring regularly with my band and was with a label that enthusiastically supported my releases, but poetry was my first love.

I was surprised by how gracious Russell was when I came on his show. He asked questions about my poems that made me feel like a peer. He was coming from a place as a much more accomplished poet, but he didn’t talk down to me. I liked him immediately. He easily cut through all my usual defenses. Russell and I have some stuff in common in our backgrounds and he recognized that in me. We slowly became friends and I started sending him my poems. He would comment on them kindly. He pointed out what he liked, but he also was direct—without putting me down—about what he felt wasn’t working. I was able to listen because of his approach and gradually started internalizing the things he taught me about craft. Just being aware of basic elements of craft forced me to dig deeper, and my poems quickly showed improvement.

He also taught me—I feel this is the most valuable thing I learned from him—to trust the language. He would say it to me over and over again. He’d show me where my poems broke down. I’d ask him what he thought they needed and he’d say, I don’t know, it’s your poem, trust the language, Rodney, it knows. He encouraged me to go inwards and to find my poethood which is about—in my opinion—listening for the language to speak and letting it guide me. So when I found myself resorting to clichés or trying to force an ending I learned how to sit patiently and wait for the language to show me the way through the seeming impasses I’d reach in poems. I could hear it and feel it. It was visceral. When I lost that feeling I knew to stop and try later. Previously, I’d had few tools or the confidence to write fully realized poems. I truly believe that without Russell’s help I wouldn’t have made the transition from an undisciplined young poet to a reasonably competent poet.

RT: Is that what you mean by “standing up to yourself”? That discipline to listen to the language and wait?

RD: Yeah, that was part of it. Giving up the bad habits I’d developed as a poet which had to do with my ego and getting down to the real business of writing poems, which requires humility. But also, I was a recovering drunk and addict dealing with untreated C-PTSD. I was very damaged and very reactive. Without alcohol or drugs to numb what I was feeling I simply couldn’t cope. I reached a point, in sobriety, where I had a total breakdown. I abandoned a cross-Canada tour with my band and hid in Montreal with a friend who was a writer. He let me stay at his place rent free. It was an incredible act of kindness by my friend. All I did was go to 12th step meetings a couple times a day (where I made many friends), walk around Montreal for hours, and talk to Russell on the phone. I don’t know where he found the patience. He helped me recognize and stand up to a lot of the self-destructive behaviors that were ruining my life and hurting my friends and colleagues. I eventually got professional help, but in the initial stages Russell provided understanding support. He also challenged me. He said to me once, “We have to stand up to ourselves, Rodney,” and that became a kind of mantra for me. And of course the personal changes I went through improved my poetry.

RT: Russell sounds like as good a friend as he is a poet, which is really saying something. That patience in waiting for a poem’s language to explain itself to you seems echoed in a few poems in Fishing for Leviathan. In “The Buck” you write about a boy waiting in a hunting stand for hours until “the silence… is not an absence but a living / presence both outside and in.” Were you consciously drawing parallels there between hunting and your evolving writing practice? What role has welcoming silence played in your development as a writer?

RD: “The Buck” is based on a strange experience I had as a teenage boy hunting for the first time by myself. I was in the woods for several hours and it had snowed the night before so everything was covered in fresh snow. I slipped into some sort of trance or something and had an encounter with a buck that seemed—for lack of a better term—mystical. The buck was gone before I realized I hadn’t raised my rifle. It didn’t even occur to me. The embodied silence I talk about brings me a deep sense of wholeness and connection to something much larger than me. It’s fleeting of course. It’s why I write poems. If a poem I write is successful there’s a silence that resonates after the final line. It’s a distant echo of that silence I felt in the woods that day. I mostly experience that sensation both as a poet and a reader of poems and sometimes— though rarely—while performing certain songs for an audience: it’s like there’s a silence underneath the song that holds both my performance and the attention of the audience. It becomes so intimate that it’s impossible for me to describe. If I was able to experience that silence without poetry—who knows—maybe I wouldn’t bother to write anymore. I think I write poems out of the various conflicts within myself. Maybe in those brief moments at the end of poems I experience a truce between internal adversaries, and it results in what feels like silence.

RT: The silence being the reason you write the poems—I’ve never heard it put quite that way, but it feels very accurate to me. Thank you. And the idea of a truce between adversaries, too. A central theme of Fishing for Leviathan is working to break generational trauma.

In “Tying the Centuries Together Like a Funeral Wreath,” you write,

I want a eulogy that says
it stopped with me, this line of broken labourers,
shattered soldiers, depressed housewives,
schizophrenics, suicides, alcoholics, criminals…

Later, you close the book with a loving embrace between speaker and child, and so many of those destructive cycles appear broken. Yet Fishing for Leviathan is also filled with declarations of personal and career disappointment, such as:

My therapist says given my childhood
I’m lucky to be alive. Maybe next life let’s set
the bar a little higher.

I’m curious how you define “success” in your life and writing. Are you able to appreciate your accomplishments in stopping some destructive multi-generational patterns?

RD: I think we all deal with patterns of multi-generational trauma to varying degrees. Hell, life is traumatic at times for nearly everyone. I think sometimes higher social class status and the stability that comes with that can take the edges off it, but it’s still there. Unfortunately, because of the poverty, violence and neglect I experienced as a daily reality during my childhood I have struggled most of my life to simply survive. That looked like years of extremely self-destructive behaviors, such as addiction. I was a petty thief, highly dishonest and violent at times. I’m a high school dropout and so on. I’ve never had any financial security or a professional career. This isn’t about self-pity, it’s just a statement of facts. I’ve had some amazing opportunities come to me—like a budding successful career as a singer-songwriter—that I self-sabotaged in very dramatic and public ways.

I’ve been learning one day at a time for the last fifteen years to manage C-PTSD flashbacks effectively. I’ve been free from alcohol and other drugs for 23 years. But I don’t think the destructive cycles are ever fully broken—I’ll always have C-PTSD and I’ll always be an alcoholic / addict—but I can have a daily reprieve contingent on my willingness to be accountable to myself and those around me. I have to engage in regular self-care, to become more aware of my negative patterns of thought/ behavior conditioned by years of childhood trauma and make different choices. I have to be willing to stand up to myself or, as an old 12th step sponsor used to say, “Strive to have an asshole free day, Rodney.” The same patterns conditioned by years of trauma still present themselves to me, but I make different choices now and as a consequence my life looks much different. That changes how I feel about myself, which strengthens my desire to keep doing the work. The child I refer to in the poems, Lucy, isn’t my daughter, so I can’t say I’ve broken a multi-generational cycle of trauma, but I’m close to her and being a care-giver and an “uncle” (her term) for over a decade has changed me in ways that helped me break through some of my destructive tendencies. At the risk of sounding cheesy, I feel like I’m living now, rather than just careening through the wreckage that I was creating.

RT: Not cheesy at all, and it should be a point of pride. How about when it comes to career success, now that you have this third book of poems now out in the world (enthusiastically praised by Russell Thornton and Claire Askew, no less!)? Is “success” achievable for you, or will you inch your bar higher with every accomplishment?

RD: I don’t know. I’d like to have some stability that comes from a certain level of financial and professional success, but those things aren’t given out for free, they’re earned. I am fifty-six. I wasted a huge portion of my life, so that may not be a reality for me. Who knows, maybe my artistic pursuits will help eventually in that regard, but it’s highly unlikely. I am thrilled however to have published books of poetry that poets I admire like Russell Thornton and Claire Askew have said good things about. The same goes with my other work. And in the moment—when I’m performing and connected to an audience—well, that’s a special thing that I don’t think everybody gets to experience. But the truth is, I was imprinted as a small child with messages that I didn’t matter, that I was unlovable, that I was a piece of shit, and so on. And I’m not talking about not getting held enough. I’m talking about stuff that people go to jail for now. If I could ever silence those voices that would be something. I don’t think writing any number of books of poetry or playing any number of shows or getting accolades will ever do that for me though. I’ve had some small successes and found that they are fleeting and don’t impact those feelings much for long.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful that folks like Silas White at Nightwood Editions, and Brian Kaufman and Karen Green at Anvil Press, have been willing to publish my books. I wouldn’t trade that away for anything, and I hope to publish more. But I suspect that no matter what I achieve as an artist, I will always be inching that bar higher as you suggest, because that’s not going to solve the core dilemma, is it? The irony is that the conflict I have with how I feel about myself in my core is the source of my poetry, and that same thing drives my desire to be recognized, which is ultimately not going to resolve the problem. But I don’t think it’s about resolving the problem, I think maybe it’s about learning to live with it.

RT: In “My Self-Pity Is Bigger Than Yours” you write “Oh someday poetry / is gonna explode out of me like a truck / full of fireworks on the darkest night / of the year.” You wrote this in your third book—you’ve already exploded quite a bit! What do you aspire to in your poetry that hasn’t yet exploded out?

RD: Well, thanks, but my inner critics disagree! They demand more exploding! But really, I don’t think I’m any different from most artists whether you’re a poet, a mime or a painter. I think we’re always persuading ourselves that someday we’re going to paint our masterpiece! I read this a while ago in a Wikipedia post about Dylan’s song “When I Paint My Masterpiece” and it made so much sense to me:

Douglas Brinkley, while interviewing Dylan for the New York Times in 2020, noted that “When I Paint My Masterpiece” was a song that had grown on him over the years and asked Dylan why he had brought it “back to the forefront of recent concerts”. Dylan replied, “It’s grown on me as well. I think this song has something to do with the classical world, something that’s out of reach. Someplace you’d like to be beyond your experience. Something that is so supreme and first rate that you could never come back down from the mountain. That you’ve achieved the unthinkable. That’s what the song tries to say, and you’d have to put it in that context. In saying that though, even if you do paint your masterpiece, what will you do then? Well, obviously you have to paint another masterpiece”.

RT: Oh, I love that song. You’re in good company with Bob, eh? Ever dissatisfied poets/singer-songwriters. You’ve touched a bit earlier on the influence of your music on your poetry, but I was wondering if you could expand on that a bit before we wrap up. How has your work in other fields influenced your approach to the writing and performance of poetry?

RD: At the heart of everything I do, I’m a poet. Through my late teens and early twenties I only wrote poetry. A little past my mid-twenties I started memorizing and performing my poems at poetry readings. In the mid-nineties Vancouver had a thriving underground poetry scene. There were readings nearly every night in cafes across the city, but mostly in East Vancouver. I became part of a poetry performance group called the Ducktape Platypus Poets Coalition. Honestly, we weren’t very good, but I guess we were entertaining because we had a local following. Bernie Radelfinger was part of that group and had been in the band Bob’s Your Uncle. He helped me write songs using lines from my poems and we’d perform them together with Bernie playing guitar. When I was in my early thirties I taught myself to play guitar and a couple years later I put out my first album and began touring.

RT: What about playwriting? I understand that a play you wrote will be performed later this year?

RD: Yes, my first two act play (which I co-wrote with Samantha Pawliuk and David Bloom) will open the fall season at The Shadbolt Centre.

I mostly write one-person plays which are long monologues, really, and they’re a form of dramatic speech that works partially through the use of poetic devices to a moment of personal discovery / transformation, which isn’t a far cry from the type of poems I write, I guess. So I think they’re extensions of my being a poet.

RT: Do you have any other artistic “extensions” of your poetry?

RD: My latest obsession is street photography which I’ve been doing for four years now. Anvil Press commissioned a book of street photography from me that will be published in the fall of 2024. Like my poetry, my photography attempts to take a moment and freeze it. To make time stop. There’s something in that. And also my poems tend to—I hope—conjure strong images, and street photography is an attempt to capture a compelling image pulled from the chaos of the street.

RT: I can’t wait to see more of them in the book next year. It should be a nice companion piece to Fishing for Leviathan.

Becoming More Visible: An Interview with Meghan Fandrich

2024-10-28T09:00:00.001-07:00

The following interview is part one of a seven-part series of conversations with BC poets which were originally published between January and April 2024 at ReadLocalBC.ca. This was the fifth year of my collaboration with Read Local BC (you can read all my Read Local BC interviews in one place here).

---

Sockeye - Meghan Fandrich
People are fishing today
the Nlaka′pamux
dipping their nets into strong water
hanging deep red flesh
to dry in the wind
almost like
life goes on

my neighbour brought me a salmon
heavy gift
almost like she had always been next door
almost like her house
didn’t burn

I washed the dishes
sat down outside
watched a dry leaf shake
in the wind
almost like
I was ok

Reprinted with permission
from Burning Sage
(Caitlin Press, 2023)

---

Meghan Fandrich lives with her young daughter on the edge of Lytton, BC, the village that was destroyed by wildfire in 2021. She spent her childhood and much of her adult life there, in Nlaka’pamux Territory, where two rivers meet and sagebrush-covered hills reach up into mountains. For almost a decade, she ran Klowa Art Café, a beloved and vibrant part of the community; Klowa was lost to the flames. Burning Sage is Meghan’s debut poetry collection.

---

Rob Taylor: Burning Sage is your debut poetry collection, written about the 2021 Lytton fire which destroyed your café, most of your neighbours’ houses, and almost your own. To say the least, it’s not your typical debut. Could you talk about the way this book came into being?

Meghan Fandrich: When the fire destroyed our little village, it wasn’t just the buildings that were gone. It was my community, the place of my childhood memories and my daughter’s, and the future I was building for us there. It was everything that was normal in my life, everything I trusted would always be there. Past, present, future. All gone.

About a year later, summer meant another fire was burning homes and farms near Lytton. Support and stability, and even a precarious “new normal,” were still impossible. I was living in fear and trauma and knew I had to focus on something, a distraction, so that I could be a present parent—a present person—again. I decided I would do an art project for a friend (a love), the “you” of the poems: I would write out some memories and musings from my life, things we hadn’t talked about yet, little pieces that make up who I am. I decided to start with a memory from the fire.

Up until that point, I think, I had just been focused on survival, on single-parenting, on adjusting to life in an isolated burned-out place that kept getting hit with natural disasters, even after the first fire. I hadn’t stopped to think about it; I probably couldn’t have. I couldn’t have acknowledged the depth of the experience when I was in the worst of it.

So I sat down at the typewriter on the living room floor, and memories came pouring out. They weren’t the memories I expected, but instead subconscious memories, scenes and feelings that I had never put words to before, even in thought. When I took the page out of the typewriter and read the words, I started crying—for almost the first time since the fire.

RT: Was poetry something you’d written a lot before? Did it feel natural to find yourself processing your trauma in this way?

MF: I was surprised that the words emerged as poetry. I’m not a poet. I’d never written poems (other than the rhyming poems of Grade 6, of course). For the past decade, I hadn’t written at all, not even in my journal; I had only recently begun to journal again when I met the friend, the love, six months after the fire. There was no reason that the memories would come out as poetry. But they did.

And then, maybe an even bigger surprise: I felt the intense need to share what I wrote. I’ve never shared my writing before, and with that first poem, “Entrails”—and all that followed—there was the absolute need to share.

Instead of working on the art project for that friend, I kept writing. Each time a little memory of the last year would surface, I would write it out. And cry it out. I started writing poems as events happened, too, letting the emotions out immediately instead of suppressing them. The stack of pages beside the typewriter kept growing.

In one of the first poems in Burning Sage you write, of watching the fire burn, “we stood together / in silence // and then looked away.” So much of the book takes place in the personal and collective aftermath of the fire, showing what happened after the rest of the country “looked away.” You’ve spoken about how writing these poems was a way for you to be a more “present person.” How did poetry help you not “look away”?

For me, looking away was never an option. The fire was just a moment, and yes, in that moment we had the eyes of the world on us; but when the world looked away, we were still here, and the trauma was just beginning. We had to keep going. We had to keep living, even though everything had changed. And because the world looked away—because we existed as just that one moment in the eyes of others—we became invisible.

Trauma is isolating, even collective trauma. We all experienced that with the collective trauma of Covid, right? How we were all “in it together,” but each of us felt so alone. And it was the same with the fire. As we kept going, as we started to realize that there would be no immediate rebuilding, no quick return to normal, no “better than ever,” as the reality of the situation set in, we were each alone. Alone and invisible.

When I started writing the poems, and more importantly, when I started sharing them, I suddenly saw my own experience reflected in others’ faces. When the poems said, “This is how I feel,” I saw the readers nod in recognition. With tears in their eyes, they saw me. They gave me the gift of their emotions in response to mine, and I started to become visible.

RT: Two sources of invisibility in this book, which draw your anger, are the news media (“aggressive / bloodthirsty / cameras rolling”) and the government crews which cordoned off and leveled the town (“Keep your windows up, / they say… don’t look at us while we stand / and laugh”). Did writing Burning Sage give you a chance to speak back to these groups on your own terms? What do you hope they might take away with them if they read your book?

MF: The poems emerged, one by one, as fragments of that first year. I didn’t write them with any intention; I just had the need to get each of those memories out of me, out of my body, out of my subconscious. But when I read through the stack of poems, I saw that thread of anger and was able to acknowledge how harmful both entities—media and government—have been throughout this experience.

Since the fire, I’ve tried to speak with the media when possible, to advocate for my community and our ongoing struggle. Almost invariably, the reporter would bring the interview back to the moment of the fire, the moment of running from the flames. Reopen the wound and run that footage on the six o’ clock news. And it would feel like I only existed as that sensational moment of June 30, and now, after, I didn’t matter. I was invisible. The reporter would move on to the next story, and I would be left, shattered, to cope with my reopened trauma.

Overall, I wish the media would consider the harm they can cause. But some are doing it right: I’m grateful for journalist Francesca Fionda and the Climate Disaster Project, who are making a difference in how survivors’ stories are shared.

And government… I don’t even know where to begin. Every level of government has failed us: municipal, provincial, and federal. And more than that, their complacency has augmented the trauma we have experienced. I don’t mean that in an abstract, emotional way, although there is that too. They have also failed to meet our basic needs, the minimum necessary for survival.

For example, between a six-month Do Not Consume Order and a three-month Boil Alert, the homes left in the Village of Lytton and Lytton First Nation’s IR17 had potable water for three out of the twelve months in that first year. It meant that in deep trauma, in an isolated burned-up town, we had to find drinkable water to keep our children alive.

A year after the fire, I attended an unmet needs committee meeting with other Lyttonites, various NGOs, and the Village of Lytton’s recovery team. We stressed that drinking water was still a primary unmet need. I remember very clearly that the recovery manager at the time, who worked for Lytton from the comfort of his home in the Okanagan, leaned back in his chair and said, “Look, you’ll get water when you get water.”

RT: That’s awful. And a window into a dynamic most of us in BC have yet to experience. In focusing on the aftermath of the fire, you offer readers a glimpse into the long-haul effects of forest fire destruction.

In 2023 we suffered the worst fire season in BC history, and that record’s likely to be broken again soon. What do you wish you’d known in advance about the long road to recovery? What would you like to tell those who experienced losses in 2023, or those who might in the future?

MF: I don’t know if there’s anything I wished I would have known. Would it have helped with any of the trauma if I knew in advance that recovery—of the village, of ourselves—would take years? Would it have helped if I had known that the slow-moving and impersonal systems of government are incapable of adapting to pressing needs? Would it have helped to know that only time would get us through the worst of it, and not everyone would survive that journey? I don’t know. I think I would choose naïveté and have those truths unfold one at a time, as they have for me.

I do have a wish, though. I wish that my little book might help other survivors of climate disasters to feel that they’re not invisible, even after the media moves on. The book shares my very personal experience, but through sharing, through others bringing their own emotions to it or recognizing their own experience in it—their experience of loss and grief of any kind—it becomes universal, and the experience becomes shared experience. Does that make sense?

RT: Yes, very much so. The path to the universal must run through the particular. I think a great number of people will see their lives reflected in your book, even if they’ve never experienced a major fire.

On this theme, despite Burning Sage‘s dramatic subject matter, relationships—some tender and loving, others strained—sit at the emotional heart of the book. This feels in keeping with the true nature of grief: all loss is personal loss. Could you talk about your decision to widen the scope of the book to include your personal relationships, such as the “friend (love)” you mentioned earlier? Was it a decision at all, or was this the only way you could think of approaching the subject matter?

MF: I think if I had decided, “I’m going to write a book about the fire,” the result would have been very different: less personal, less intimate. But the poems simply emerged as I processed individual memories, and the personal relationships were an inextricable part of those memories.

One choice I did consciously make was to include the “breakup poems” in the book. I was already writing the book when the relationship ended, and those poems were written in all the pain and agony of that loss; as such, they feel more vulnerable than any of the other poems. But I had to include them, because the breakup, too, was part of the healing. I cried because my heart was broken, and then I couldn’t stop crying—weeks of crying on the living room floor. I couldn’t understand it, the extent of the grief, until a friend pointed out that I was finally crying out the fire and the impossible life after, and all of the struggles from before the fire too. Finally, finally, crying them out.

For me, more than anything, Burning Sage is a love story. I wrote it for and about one person; it’s about the way that one person saw past the moment of the fire, and saw me for who I am. And, feeling seen, I could see myself—no longer invisible—and the network of love and support and community that is all around me. What I mean is that love showed me that I was never, ever invisible.

RT: In “Fabric” you write about knitting something inspired by smoke: “dropped stitches / disrupted fabric / intentional deconstruction / damage.” This made me think of your poems which, in their raggedness and repetitions, convey panic, fear and breathlessness (as in “At Siska,” where “I am not ok” is repeated five times). Could you talk about the style you adopted in writing these poems? What are their dropped stitches and disruptions?

MF: I wish I had a good answer for you—I wish that any of it had been intentional. I didn’t consciously adopt any style; I just wrote the poems as they emerged. But maybe I can explain it a little.

After the first poem or two poured out, and I felt how cleansing it was to finally put those memories on paper, I wanted to keep writing. I would step into my memory just enough to see the flash of an image or the hint of a feeling, and that would be enough. Bare feet on hot asphalt. My daughter Helen covering my eyes. The numbness of the first visit to the ruins of my café. A fireball. A moment of intimacy. In a way, I would hold an emotion-memory in my mind, something that needed to come out, and I would start typing. And often the buried feelings surprised me as they emerged.

Each poem, then, is an emotional snapshot of that particular moment in my experience and in my memory. Does that make sense? So when “At Siska” repeats the hum of “I am not ok,” it’s because at that time—in the first hours and days after the fire—I didn’t know anything except that I wasn’t ok. Or when the nice tidy love-lines of “Highway 12” explode into messy fragmented lines at the reappearance of trauma, it’s because I was ripped out of quiet peace when we turned a corner in the road. It wasn’t intentional, and maybe it all surprised me.

Throughout the whole experience of life after the fire, there was never a smooth, unblemished fabric, except maybe in the briefest moments of love. But no, not even then. I would be ok for a minute, an hour, and then another stitch would come unravelled: at the memory of a mushroom cloud, or the smell of smoke, or the sight of an empty fridge with the closest grocery store now an hour away.

During and after the writing process, I spent countless hours editing the poems. At first they were all on the typewriter, and each set of revisions meant I would retype the whole stack of poems, weighing the changes, reading them aloud, adjusting spacing by a fraction of an inch or travelling a long path of synonyms to find the right word. That’s when I started to notice themes that run through the book, and to find meaning behind so many of the unintentional decisions. And editing, too, more than writing, gave me control over those memories. I could distill them down, refine them, make them beautiful, and they would no longer have control over me.

RT: You mentioned visiting the ruins of your café there. While your house survived, you lost your business, Klowa Art Café, to the fire. Are you planning to rebuild?

MF: Klowa was a really special place, but I can’t rebuild. I had insurance that was enough to rebuild at the time of the fire; with the bureaucratic delays and narratives of toxicity and supply chain shortages and many other circumstances, though, the quotes a year later were coming in at more than double my policy limit. In other words, I would have had to find an additional $350,000 or more just to rebuild the little building that I had. Impossible.

My only other option was to hire a lawyer to negotiate a settlement with the insurance company for the subjective “actual cash value” of the building, which was substantially lower than my insurance policy limit and, in the end, was just enough to pay the lawyer and clear the two mortgages that I’d still been paying on that burned-up property. The claim was finally settled in September 2023, two years and three months after the fire, and I own an empty piece of land where Klowa once stood.

RT: I’m so sorry. While you can’t rebuild Klowa, do you see writing Burning Sage as a small way of rebuilding what was lost?

MF: I was going to say no, that it hasn’t been a part of rebuilding what I lost, that it honours the memory but what’s gone is gone… but maybe I’m wrong.

A little while ago, I was telling a dear friend—someone who lost her home to the fire—that a surprising part of sharing my experience with the world has been how people then share theirs with me: their story, their grief, their emotion. It’s as if through honesty and vulnerability and a raw form of beauty, the book makes them feel safe to be vulnerable, to be themselves. And she answered, “But Meghan, don’t you know that Klowa was that for us, too?”

Halting, Slowing, Quickening: An Interview with Gillian Sze

2024-10-21T09:00:00.004-07:00

This interview was first published in the Fall 2023 issue of The Antigonish Review.

Kindling – Gillian Sze
And after days of rain, it suddenly stops and we peer out the window, watch the grey lift. Across the street, someone from the city has set up around an old stump. The grinder whirrs away as chips spit out, amass into a velvet pile. My son, who has learned to climb, clambers onto a stool and plays the radiator like a piano. On tiptoes he regards the man in goggles, the slow work of shredding years and smoothing out land. Damp grass encircles an open wound. When he was just learning to crawl, my son and I sat on the kitchen floor counting knots in the wood. Now it’s just the two of us, each on two feet: one startled by how swift and brute the uprooting, another contemplating how to fly.

from Quiet Night Think

(ECW Press, 2022).

Reprinted with permission.

---

Gillian Sze is the author of multiple poetry collections, including Peeling Rambutan, Redrafting Winter, and Panicle, which were finalists for the Quebec Writers’ Federation’s A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry. Her new collection of poems and essays, Quiet Night Think, won the 2023 Pat Lowther Memorial Award. She resides in Montreal, where she teaches creative writing and literature.

Gillian Sze

---

Rob Taylor: Quiet Night Think brings together poems and essays, which felt like a rarity in Canadian publishing until very recently (in addition to yours, new titles by Jonina Kirton, Nick Thran and Wanda-John Kehewin all mix the two). Why did you choose to bring the two together?

Gillian Sze: I intended to write a book of essays, but, in the end, I found an important relationship between those pieces and the poems I was writing during that same period. So much of Quiet Night Think is about fragmentation—across identities, languages, times—and it made sense to embrace those fissures and leaps between genres. I think the point of the hybrid form was to give readers that same sense of halting, slowing, and quickening that I was experiencing as an anxious new mother. The winding of the sentence, the hiccups of the verse.

RT: Did you receive any resistance from your publisher about mixing genres in this way?

Quiet Night Think (2023)

GS: No. I’ve worked with Michael Holmes at ECW on two other books, and he has always been supportive. Panicle, for example, also has a bit of everything: prose poems, long poems, creative translations, sketches… Quiet Night Think seemed like a natural place to go in our writer/editor relationship.

RT: In the book's titular essay you quote William Carlos Williams, who defined a poem as "a thing made up of... words and the spaces between them." Later in the book, you provide your father's counterpoint: looking at your MA thesis of poems (and all the space around each poem), he declared "There's nothing here - it's empty!" Throughout the book, you embrace the "space between"—between words, between languages, between cultures. It's even right there on the cover: those big gaps between each of the words in the title!

At the same time, your move towards essays feels like a filling in of that space, that "emptiness," which bridges a gap between your father's expectations and your own. Was that part of your motivation towards non-fiction? Does it allow you to navigate, or fill in, the spaces between languages and cultures?

GS: I certainly felt more exposed when I was writing the essays. Even on the page, the essay appears as solid blocks of text. I felt like there was nowhere to hide. I couldn’t disappear into thin air. The words string along into sentences. The research is revealed. The history is told. In that sense, I think the essay was useful for me. It was a form that best suited the telling of all these threads: history, research, and memory.

I love the poetic spaces that the reader can drop into. I remember my first encounter with Anne Carson’s translations of Sappho. I still like falling into those gaps. Reading poetry is like that, I think. The reader enters the poem, ultimately filling those spaces in their own way.

RT: That’s really interesting. I think many people would assume the opposite is true: that poetry, so spare on the page, is the genre that leaves you no place to hide. But I guess those gaps a poem leaves for the reader can also be hideouts for the poet’s full self.

GS: There is certainly an intimacy with the writing of poetry. I think of my earlier writing as rawer, more of my “full self.” Now I prefer to hide behind a persona, which I felt like I couldn’t do when writing the essays. I couldn’t fully escape the “non” in creative non-fiction. Fanny Howe defines the lyric as “a method of searching for something that can’t be found.” I like that—it feels like the poet invites the reader to search with them, or perhaps the poem launches the reader towards their own private discovery.

RT: In your essay "Sitting Inside the Moon," you write about the custom in Chinese culture for a mother to spend a month housebound after the birth of her child: "You come out of it no longer the same person and no longer the same poet.” Could you expand on that?

GS: Becoming a mother made me realize the expanse of time I had before motherhood. I’m writing this to you while on a plane, by the way. I was an ocean away last week, alone, just being a poet. I had never been this far from my children ever. I was removed from the demands of them, the domesticity, the routine of a home life. Instead, I was attending translation workshops, performing my work, and discussing my poetry. It was luxurious. Even being able to mull over your questions and write these answers to you, alone on a dark plane somewhere between Sao Paolo and Montreal, is luxurious.

I soon realized that as a brand new, breastfeeding mother, the time and concentration I once had for poetry was changing. I was following a different schedule, one that was intimately tied to my body and heart, and I was anxious about it all. How can I write when I’m so tired? How can I read when reading is forbidden during the month-long postpartum care? What am I missing out on when my daily life and thought processes have radically changed?

Chinese postpartum care is essential for the new mother to recover, to heal, to strengthen. It’s only now that I see how this physical healing was also an important transition period for me to accept that writing isn’t always the act of writing. It is also experiencing, thinking, becoming.

RT: In your essay "The Hesitant Gaze," you write of your desire to, like William Carlos Williams, "write with hesitance," pausing "at the sight of a leg, the taste of cold plums, a red wheelbarrow." Contrasting this desire towards the small and still are your comparatively large essays. Do you think these twin desires are in some way tied to your loss of that “expanse of time”? Some mix of the desire to observe and record a particularly vital time in life, and the lack of a physical capacity to do so?

GS: I’ve always appreciated the small shapes of poems. I don’t think it’s a surprise that I recently turned to picture book writing (another short form with its own constraints). I wonder if the longer form of the essay came about because I was finishing up my dissertation when I was pregnant. Perhaps those sentences just seeped into my creative work!

I was also reading about the lyric essay, which continues to fascinate me as a poet. The form straddles the essay and the lyric poem and moves, according to Deborah Tall and John D’Agata, “by association…by way of imagery or connotation…or sidewinding poetic logic.” Moreover, I think I was returning to the word “essay”—not the noun as we know it—but the verb “essayer” (to try). As students, we come to the essay fearfully, reluctantly. We learn it as a rigid form. Imagine my delight when I was learning that Montaigne, in Essais, was seen as playing on all the meanings of the word’s Latin root, “exagium,” which includes “trial,” “attempt,” “risk,” “exercise,” and “temptation.” He calls the essay “a ramble”—and I love the confusion and pleasure implied in that walking/talking description. G. K. Chesterton also calls the essay “the joke of literature.” Suddenly, the essay becomes a place one can wonder and wander and play.

RT: Amidst the changes in your writing, you've consistently written ekphrastic poems in response to works of art. In "The Hesitant Gaze," you write about the importance of a second "look" at a piece of art—a painting, a poem—as you, the viewer, will see it differently, having changed in the interim. This chimes with what you said about writing before/after "sitting inside the moon," and I'm curious to what extent you now think about ekphrastic writing differently. Do you now think about art in a different way than you used to?

Fish Bones (2009)

GS: I’m not sure if I view or think about art in a different way than before. Ekphrasis has always been an exercise of patience, attention, and free association. From the start, I think my approach to ekphrasis has always been loose and tendrilled. When I was working on my MA thesis (the basis of my ekphrastic collection Fish Bones), I wanted to move past pure description and traditional approaches. I chose not to include an appendix in that book because I wanted the poems to stand on their own, to have the artwork disappear, to let the words be the only things on which the reader leans. So I think I’ve always made that space for me to slip in. I continue to search for exhilarating encounters between me and works of art.

RT: In the essay “Perennials,” you write about your futile determination to weed your grass, and compare it with your determination to write: “I accepted [the] mundane hell of always starting over, condemned both at my desk and in my yard.” You close the essay with the image of blowing on dandelions: accepting what you cannot defeat. I’m curious about what you see as the writerly equivalent to that weeding-acceptance? A fallow period of not writing (“I was resting from poetry,” you write in a later essay)? Silence? Or perhaps the transformation from poetry to essay?

GS: I think it’s all of the above. There was an obsession, an ongoing-ness, to weeding and to writing that I felt keenly before becoming a mother. It’s still there, but it’s different. I think sitting in the moon, having children, taking a rest from writing, were experiences that were vital for me. I worried that if I wasn’t obsessing, I would cease to be a writer. My husband was far wiser; he was confident that the writing would return. His perspective was, of course, from beyond the moon. The blowing of the dandelion is an act of surrender. It was a gesture of pause, of mercy. It was an allowance to give myself a bit more time.

RT: As you returned to writing, did you come upon this book quickly? Did you write a stretch of poems, then essays (or vice-versa), or was the composition itself also intermingled?

GS: This manuscript came together slowly and with little planning. The Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec supported my proposed essay project, so when I realized they were willing to fund the book, I was more attentive to essay writing. I’m always writing poetry, so that was still going on, albeit more slowly. The first completed piece in the book that really inspired me to consider a full-length essay project was “Quiet Night Think.” The final piece to enter the manuscript was “Babble.” Interestingly, the first version of “Babble” was actually my first attempt at writing poetry after becoming a mother. I returned to the (terrible) scribblings of an early draft, saw it with clearer eyes, and revised it for the book. Time and forgetfulness are useful for a writer.

RT: Ha! Absolutely. I don’t think I’d be able to edit without forgetfulness.

A central theme of Quiet Night Think is coming to a better understanding of your parents with age (and with becoming a parent yourself). Poetry was a source of division earlier in your relationship with your parents, but it also seems like it might have offered a path back for you, via your own writing and the writing of others (perhaps Emily Dickinson especially, as explored in "Fricatives," the long poem which closes your book). Could you talk about the role poetry has played in your life as a source of both division and union?

GS: It really took time, experience, and learning, to realize the irony of how poetry found me, how it shaped me, and how it fits into my life. For example, my mother, who was unable to translate Li Bai for me when I was small and who still plays down her language abilities, was really the first poet in my life when she constructed my Chinese name. I don’t think she even considers it a poetic act, but it is: to ponder over and decide on my name’s meanings and sounds. That marked me from birth. My father, so against my literary pursuits, was the one who bought me my first poetry anthology, which I’ve kept close since.

Growing up, I thought my family’s relationship towards poetry stemmed from their being of and from elsewhere, but I realize now how wrong I was. Chinese culture is full of poetry. The pictorial quality of Chinese characters. The economy and density of meaning. And poetry continues: in the musical Hokkien utterances between me and my children, in their linguistic errors because they live in three languages, in their own Chinese names, which are new poems “written” by my mother. The writing of this book was really a softening of so many parts: myself as a new mother (and a new writer), my relationship with my family, and all of us as imperfect, babbling humans.

The Sponsoring Condition: An Interview with Matt Rader

2024-10-14T09:00:00.001-07:00

An excerpt from this interview was first published in the Fall 2022 issue of Arc Poetry Magazine.

Lightwell – Matt Rader

The morning after you
left, the sun
was a dim white light

that didn’t make me
think of anything,
not angels,

not death. I couldn’t
look directly
at it

but its effects
were everywhere:
the swarm of raindrops

alive in the lilac,
the metallic skyscape
floating

in my truck’s silver paint.
A brightness too bright
to look at

is the true definition
of a thing
beyond me, a white hole

I fall endlessly through
into my body.
Woe, to see the sun,

someone once wrote,
and not think
of angels,

but I’d like to
not think
at all, if possible. Just feel

something cosmic
reach through the altostratus
and touch me.

from Ghosthawk

(Nightwood Editions, 2021).

Reprinted with permission.

---

Matt Rader is an award-winning author of five volumes of poetry, a book of non-fiction, Visual Inspection, and a collection of stories, What I Want to Tell Goes Like This. His work has appeared in Best Canadian Poetry, Geist, The Walrus, Wales Arts Review, The Fiddlehead and The Malahat Review. Rader is a core member of the Department of Creative Studies at UBC Okanagan where he lectures in creative writing. He lives on the traditional and unceded land of the syilx/Okanagan people in Kelowna, BC.

---

Rob Taylor: In reading Ghosthawk (Nightwood Editions, 2021), I was reminded of your second collection, 2008's Living Things, which opened with a poem whose form immediately grabs your attention, "The Great Leap Forward.” It’s still the only poem I've read modeled after the Fibonacci sequence! As Living Things' title suggests, in that book you focused your attention on the natural world. Here you are thirteen years later with another bold formal choice: almost all of Ghosthawk is composed of haiku-like tercets, with the majority of the poems being exactly eleven tercets long. And the plants and animals of the Okanagan anchor many of them.

Formally and thematically, then, Ghosthawk feels like both a "leap forward" and a circling back to your enduring themes and concerns. Would you agree with that? How do you place this book in relation to those that came before it?

Ghosthawk (2021)
Matt Rader: I’ve lived most of my life outside of large urban centers. I come from families of European settlers. It’s challenging to write about where you are if you don’t have words for what’s around you. Mostly, what’s been around me have been plants, mountains, water, sky.

In 2014 I moved with my family to the Okanagan Valley, 400 kms from the sea. Semi-arid brush steppe. Grasslands and ponderosa pines. Prickly-pear cactus and sagebrush. I’d never lived that far away from the sea. I didn’t know where I was, not really.

Ghosthawk is a recapitulation of a method for poem-making and home-making that I first practiced most ardently in Living Things. In both books, the imposed structures of form, whether received or invented, helped focus my attention so my awareness might grow.

The naming of the natural world worked the same way: by learning names for plants I attended to them and became aware of the communities in which they lived. It’s important to know your neighbours and whose home you’ve come to live in.

RT: You attend to the natural world both by naming and seeing it. In Visual Inspection (Nightwood Editions, 2019), your book of experimental essays on chronic pain, you write, "sometimes searching for something guarantees you'll never find it. Sometimes what you are looking for obscures what it is you find in your search; you have to see not what you're looking for, but what is there."

When I read that, my mind leapt to the poems in Ghosthawk, published two years later, which very much seem to be born from seeing "what is there." How did your thinking in Visual Inspection manifest in the poems of Ghosthawk?

MR: I started writing Ghosthawk before Visual Inspection, so to some degree Ghosthawk informed Visual Inspection as much as the other way around, perhaps more.

RT: It makes a lot of sense that these two books were born out of the same time in your life. How do you think your chronic pain has influenced the way you "look" at the world in your poems?

MR: Pain is very difficult to speak about except in symbols, metaphors, and analogies. It reminds me of poetry: the best poems can’t be paraphrased because how they say what they say is, to be tautological, what they say.

Seeing “what is there” isn’t an objective action but an ethic of clarity based in humility. Sometimes you see the bitterroot making its star-shape laser-rays on the dry steppe. Sometimes you see, as Stevens has it, the “nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.” Or what I might call the fantasy and the mystery.

The vision of the bitterroot is a mystery not a fantasy. That’s the important part. Trust Louis MacNeice to say it plainly: “But dream was dream and love was love and what / Happened happened—even if the judge said / It should have been otherwise.”

RT: There's a powerful moment in Visual Inspection where you talk about pain and belief: how others, and even ourselves, don't believe or sympathise with pain until it's diagnosed, named and measured in a medical context. But pain, at its core, is unnameable, unmeasurable. As you put it, "speaking about [pain] in medical terms often does more to undermine personal experience than to illuminate it." You then talk about the joy of having a friend, also living with chronic pain, who simply believes in your pain without needing you to prove it/name it.

Could you talk a little more about the connection between your challenges in communicating your physical pain to those around you, and your challenges in communicating your inner self in your poems?

MR: To some degree, I don’t know that pain or poetry can be communicated much at all except through experience. Anyone who reads poetry for years will have the experience of a poem they read twenty years previous suddenly feeling like an entirely different poem even though the words are, obviously, exactly the same.

One can learn to communicate pain in limited ways within the contexts of particular relationships because within those relationships one can make use of shared symbols, shared signposts of language that indicate a familiar location within that relationship.

Mostly though, writing poems and communicating pain is like saying, “Look, a red thimbleberry.” Some folks will not be moved. Some folks will look at it with curiosity. Some will eat it.

RT: Ha! Yes, the releasing of control over how your work is interpreted is a valuable lesson for writers, applicable to many other aspects of life. A tension runs through Ghosthawk between the ephemeral (the aforementioned bitterroot, thimbleberry, etc.) and the eternal (the sun, the rain, the creek, etc.). You often show great affection for the living, but a distance from the never-ending: the sun "a brightness too bright / to look at," the rocks "pitiless solitude," the water with "nothing but the rush of itself to say," etc. Could you talk about this tension, and if you even see it as one?

MR: This strikes me as a question of scale. None of the things you mention are actually eternal, as in “outside of time,” but appear—to me at least—to exist in time-scales that exceed humans in extravagant ways.

At a human scale, the table I’m writing on is solid, but physics tells us that at an atomic level it is mostly space and at a quantum level it isn’t even that. It’s easier for me to identify with the table as a table because the version of me that identifies at all is at the scale of tables. It might be the same with the rain and the mariposa lily.

It’s an astute question though. The distance you note is interesting because I feel it most acutely when I “go inside” my own sensing mind-body. The brightness too bright to look at and the pitiless solitude and the aphasia of the self are all aspects of my attention-awareness when the part of me that can report back, the discreet user of language, is most dissolved or integrated with “what’s there.” In other words, the distance in the poem is an expression of the self as such.

RT: A favourite quote of mine is from Jim Harrison's poem, "Debtors": "Would I still love the creek if I lasted forever?" Does that question resonate with you? Or perhaps its opposite: Would you love the creek more if you shared its scale and lasted (almost) forever?

MR: Love exceeds humans in extravagant ways, thankfully. I love the creek and would love the creek under any condition because that is part of what it means to love. As Auden says, “You shall love your crooked neighbour / With your crooked heart,” and creeks, as the name suggests, are always crooked.

RT: A theme in Visual Inspection is adaptation to the crooked turns life throws at you. Looking back over your books, perhaps especially these six years between Desecrations and Ghosthawk, how have your expectations for the capacities of your own writing, or for writing in general, adjusted?

MR: Yes, adjusting expectations until they aren’t expectations anymore at all but curiosities, possibilities, surprises, quiet revelations. A different orientation toward time, perhaps.

The insight for me, in the years writing Ghosthawk, was that the inner field of my imagination, my mind, was continuous with the field of wildflowers and the star fields. It’s an old insight; it’s nothing special, but it had a profound impact on me nonetheless. All the world in a grain of sand stuff.

There’s that old Buddhist wisdom that goes something like: Before I practiced the mountains were only mountains. After I started practicing the mountains were no longer mountains. Now, after long practice, the mountains are mountains again.

I’m not a Buddhist though. I don’t have a particular spiritual framework guiding me, though I was raised in, and had my imagination shaped by, a very liberal Catholic theology that feels kinship with Eastern practices.

I’ve always been so curious about what I’ll think if I’m lucky enough to grow old.

RT: A Buddhist sensibility is certainly present in Ghosthawk, as is the haiku form. The poems in the book, which pay deep attention to the natural world, are composed of haiku-like tercets. But these poems aren't haiku: they are longer and roam widely, drawing in more connections.

The opening words in Ghosthawk, from the book's epigraph, are "Reading Bashō..." Could you talk about what you took from reading haiku poets like Bashō, and how you applied it to your own work? Did you have any other sources of inspiration in settling on the book's form?

MR: At times, haiku feel to me like astute snippets of reportage, ones that note not only the physical environment but the psycho-social state that accompanies each moment of observation. There’s a kind of selfless objectivity in Bashō’s poems characterized by good humour, clarity, and care. This feels to me like one of the highest ethics not just in poetry, but as a human.

Western poets have been taking cues from this technique for a few generations now: the image as a device for simultaneously collapsing and expanding space-time. However, Westerners, generally speaking, are more interested in the effects than the ethics of a technique. Not just in poetry but in everything. There’s a cost to the magic of collapsing space-time that must be paid. Bashō’s selflessness is part of that payment.

But Bashō wasn’t really the model for these poems, more like a fellow traveler I’ve met at points along the way. My guide was Seamus Heaney’s long poem “Squarings” where he asks “could you reconcile / what was diaphanous there with what was massive?”

RT: Can you tell me more about “Squarings” and how it came to guide you in writing Ghosthawk?

MR: “Squarings” is a long poem in four sections with multiple parts that concludes (with the exception of an epilogue translation from The Inferno) Heaney’s 1991 collection Seeing Things. It’s a book and a poem that has continued to unfold for me over more than two decades of repeated reading. “Squarings” is arguably the apotheosis of Heaney’s poetic vision.

The poems of Seeing Things were composed in Heaney’s middle life after the loss of both parents. The 1993 ceasefire in Northern Ireland was on the historical horizon. The fall of the Communist block had just taken place. Mythological times both world-historically and personally.

“Squarings” is formally iterative. Each part is four tercets of roughly five beats a line. In other words, they’re squares. The lines make a kind of grid through which Heaney looks at his world and what’s beyond his world, what’s beyond the Earthly world.

The poem gathers up themes, ideas, references, and foreshadowings from the first part of the book but also from his earlier work. It’s self-consciously literary. Heaney puts himself in a lineage that rocks between the clear-eyed atheism of Thomas Hardy and the spiritual curiosity of W. B. Yeats. The poem is very much about “seeing” in both a literal and a metaphysical sense. It has an airy, ethereal quality even when regarding the “stony up-againstness.”

I’d had my own mythological encounters with death before and during the composition of Ghosthawk. When I found my own auger-like tercet shape, I determined to keep working it until I found water. And then work it over and over.

RT: I love that idea of finding your auger: how these shapes hold power, allowing us to move more deeply into subjects that are difficult to approach. In Visual Inspection, you write, "When we see a printed haiku by Bashō we immediately, before reading a word, apprehend something different than when we see the first page of a blank-verse epic like Paradise Lost." You then follow this with blacked-out versions of each, proving your point.

This reminded me of something Ken Babstock once said about the sonnet:

I am attracted to its no-holds challenge to composition. It says, “Here’s a squarish block of text on a white field in which something or, more likely, nothing will occur. Are you up to it?” It gets strange here as, obviously, there is no real “block of text” anywhere present before one writes a sonnet–except perhaps there is; a blast shadow from history, a kind of dimly perceived ‘dark matter’-sonnet that can serve as a vessel or threat or foil.

Could you talk a bit more about what you apprehend from the "blast shadow" of the haiku, which you turn into your “auger” in Ghosthawk?

MR: For me, the shape of the haiku is an invitation, a doorway, a portal. It invites me to attend to relationship, between something and nothing, speech and silence, matter and dark matter (to borrow Ken’s metaphor), to remember that the smallest gestures radiate, and are defined by what they radiate into. Which itself is a common image in haiku.

Visual Inspection (2019)

RT: In Visual Inspection, you wonder about "how to create versions of our poems, or even compose poems, that render [the] extra-semantic dimensions available to the non-visual learner?" It's obvious that you think a great deal about how to visually present your poems on the page, but it seems equally important to you to expand non-visual accessibility to poems. Are these two desires unavoidably in conflict? Are there ways we can reach readers/listeners beyond the page while still maintaining a poem's "physical" presence?

MR: The appearance on the page is only one manifestation of the energy of a poem. Poems also exist as physical and mental speech. In these forms poems occupy different but equally true physical presences (Where in your head, for example, do you hear the poems you remember?). Poems can also exist as a kind of touch under the right conditions. Or as three-dimensional printouts. Or trees and grasses. Anything, really.

For me, the lesson of working on Visual Inspection was that no particular rendition of the poem needs to be definitive or given priority. That access isn’t a question of equal availability to all things for all people all the time, but rather a form of love characterized, as I said of Bashō, by good humour, clarity, and care. In this formulation there is no conflict created by difference.

The question for me as an artist isn’t how to expand non-visual access to poems, but rather how to expand my own aesthetic preferences, how to make art that imagines difference from the beginning. Rather than thinking about what non-visual folks don’t have access to and how I might deliver that access to them, I find it generative to think of how I might be in better relationship with my non-visual friends and families and how I might care for them.

I hope I’m getting better at imagining difference in general. I hope I’m getting better at bringing my own values in line with my actions both in and outside of writing. As Wallace Stevens says, “poetry is a violence within protecting us from a violence without.” I’ve not always lived up to “poetry.”

RT: What do you mean when you say you haven’t lived up to “poetry”? Do you mean outside of the writing, or within it?

MR: Both. Poetry for me has been a process of trying to find a way to be ever more honest—though a writer I admire told me that in an earlier draft of Ghosthawk I was still ducking saying what needed to be said. I don’t know if I agree with him but it was instructive for me about how even honesty and clarity look different from different positions.

Within writing, I’ve at times not lived up to poetry by becoming too enamoured with my powers of description or my wielding of craft. I’ve not lived up to it when I’ve cared more for the performance than the audience, more for the praise than the simple truth.

Outside of writing, my failure is more difficult to talk about because its ramifications are to particular people and relationships that didn’t agree to be put into print. I didn’t always understand that to my shame.

I’ve been thinking a lot in the past years about redress, restitution, and reconciliation.

RT: The vices you laid out there in poetry (becoming too enamoured with one’s own powers, caring for the performance not the audience, seeking praise instead of truth) are too often the vices that lay us low outside of poetry, too. Perhaps that’s why both are lifelong pursuits, rarely mastered. Perhaps—and forgive me if I’m reaching wildly here—they’re the same pursuit.

MR: No, I don’t think that’s a wild reach. Often enough the obvious thing is the most important thing to say yet the thing left unsaid. So thank you for saying it.

There are other grand vices with familiar names (racism, misogyny, colonialism, etc.) that amount to the same things: ego, will to power, fear. For me, “poetry” is one of the words for what stands against those vices, for what invites a human transcendence of our hurt and our hurting. It’s aspirational, an animating vision, even when the poem itself is about hurt and hurting.

Great poems are to be lived with. They are inexhaustible. They are ongoing invitations to becoming. Which is why a Japanese maple is a poem, why a friendship is a poem, why birdsong is a poem.

RT: Yes, let’s stick with this idea. Earlier you mentioned that a poem can be “trees and grasses. Anything, really.” In the acknowledgments to his new book of essays, The Tree Whisperer: Writing Poetry by Living in the World, Harold Rhenisch thanks you as the person who "saw the trees in my poetry and urged me to write this book." In what ways were Rhenisch’s poems trees?

MR: What I recognized was the rhyme between Harold’s approach to fruit trees and his approach to composing poems. Harold taught me to care for fruit trees and poems by watching where the light falls. It is an invaluable lesson with ongoing ramifications for both my poems and my fruit trees.

RT: Rhenisch writes so well about just that – making space for light in the orchard, and on the page. At one point in The Tree Whisperer he writes, "To use an intellectual tradition and the conceit of individual consciousness to speak of an Earth that is the body of all people who have touched the Earth is to lose the Earth."

It feels to me that in your books there is an ongoing dance between intellectual traditions and “the Earth,” but which partner is leading the dance shifts from book to book (Ghosthawk, perhaps, being the book in which “The Earth” is most firmly in control). Would you say there's truth to that? How do you see your own work in relation to that quote from Harold?

MR: I think Harold’s correct and in this global historical moment that polemic is necessary. In a more philosophical mood I’d make one adjustment: "To use only an intellectual tradition and the conceit of individual consciousness to speak of an Earth that is the body of all people who have touched the Earth is to lose the Earth." The mind and the body are one and any tradition that denies this explicitly or implicitly summons trouble.

I think you’re also correct about my books. There’s a function of attention that feeds awareness and a function of awareness that directs attention. I don’t know if “The Earth” is most firmly in control of Ghosthawk, but it does seem to me that this book has a new sense of harmonics to it than in previous works. Harmonic being a word used, naturally, by music, physics and astrology.

RT: Could you speak a little more about this “new sense of harmonics” in Ghosthawk?

MR: I’m thinking of Don McKay’s use of the term “rhyme” to describe the relationship of his poems about birdsong to actual birdsong. My good friend, the Tahltan artist Peter Morin, told me once that he liked the idea of me going out into the hills to eavesdrop on the flowers. I don’t mean to say that I can actually hear the flowers like I can hear birdsong, but I mean to say that I can actually hear flowers like I can hear birdsong.

The process of making poems—at least the poems in Ghosthawk—isn’t burdened by questions of metaphysics, by what is and isn’t. The question of whether one can “truly” hear flowers is immaterial. What matters is that going out to listen to the flowers is different than going out to look at the flowers or pick the flowers or smell the flowers or pass them by. Intention matters. Openness matters. Attentiveness matters. This is what I mean by “harmonics.”

RT: Though almost all of Ghosthawk is in tercets, the book's middle section features two ghazals, spread out one-stanza-per-page, with a longer poem between them (also spread out, in 10-line sections): three relatively short poems over 24 pages! I'm struck by how they speak to one another: the radif (refrain) of the first ghazal is "one" and the second is "gone," and between them you write "I'll never be able to say everything I want / to say, is what I want, finally, to say."

There seems to be a disappearing here—someone sweeping their footprints behind them as they walk out of a room—as evidenced in part by the preponderance of white space on these pages (usually containing only a single couplet). Could you talk about that middle section: how you devised it and how you see it functioning as part of the larger book?

MR: I’m sensitive to some degree about claiming genre-forms like haiku and the ghazal for my poems. There’s a strong cultural argument against such claims. On the other hand, I certainly want to show the respect of acknowledging the influence these poetries have had on me. The ghazal appears to me to suggest something important about coherence and the primacy of the body, of form. The middle section is an experiment with that insight.

Conceptually, the middle part of Ghosthawk happens in the slackwater between in-breath and out-breath. Breathing is an important trope for me because I have had difficulties breathing my whole life. But breathing is also involuntary. In this sense it is pure form and each breath repeats the breath before. There’s a rhyme I think between that idea and the formal insights of the ghazal.

RT: Yes, absolutely. Moving forward while also circling back. And the quiet of that “slackwater.” The closing poems in Ghosthawk speak with increasing frequency of silence: "I'd like to / not think / at all, if possible," "The more I breathe,/ the less I have / to say // about the mariposa,”, "I was nothing once / I was happy." Do you see this book, with its white space and quietude, as a motion towards silence? Towards a return to happy nothingness? Do you see a time when you may stop writing books entirely?

MR: Writing poems is fun. As Mary Ruefle says, if you haven’t tasted the sweetness of writing poetry then you’re not writing poetry. It can be clarifying and ramifying and transformative. It can mystify and delight and console.

I see myself continuing to write poems in one form or another, but making books is another matter. At the very least, reflecting on my reasons for making books is important. Silence is not only one of the enduring themes of poetry but the sponsoring condition.

RT: If not books, then what? How would you find your way to readers? Or are readers (at least a wide audience of readers) of less importance to you now than in the past?

MR: What is a wide audience of readers for a Canadian poet in 2022? My relationship with readers is important to me, but that importance isn’t predicated on the size of my audience—it never has been for me.

Books have acted like a psychological clearing house for my obsessions: publishing books has let me move on to the next set of problems and puzzles. But I’ve always felt that if I didn’t publish another book it was only because I was doing something more important to me.

Living Things (2008)

RT: As naming and honouring sit so near the heart of Ghosthawk, I’d like to end our interview with a remembrance. A poem in the book, "Spring Azure," is dedicated to Elise Partridge and Patrick Lane, and I was struck in reading the back of Living Things to see blurbs by both Elise and Steven Heighton. Three meticulous poets and generous human beings, all lost to us too soon. My sense is that these three played distinct roles in your life - as friends, as teachers, as fellow poets on the page. Could you talk a little about these three, and the different ways poets have influenced your life and writing?

MR: Patrick Lane was my first poetry teacher. Meeting him showed me that poets are living people, and that they could look and sound like the blue collar working class men I grew up with on northern Vancouver Island. Patrick was one model of what a poet might be and a very important one. There was wilderness inside Patrick that I recognized from my own life. Great love and great suffering, as the Franciscans say. He changed my life.

Elise was one of the most humble and private people I’ve ever known. In a sense that I think she’d object to out of modesty and embarrassment, she most resembles the ethic I ascribed to Bashō. She deserves a wider and ongoing readership. Elise once apologized to me because she felt that endorsement on Living Things wasn’t effusive enough. Anyone who knew Elise would recognize this as typical of her character. She passed on a wisdom about care as a poet and a person that I count among the greatest treasures I’ve received.

Like Elise, Steve was a tremendous citizen of and for poetry. He was another kind of model: warm, serious, sincere, disarming, generous, not afraid to be goofy. He had a way of making everyone who knew him feel like they had a special connection with him because, I believe, they did. Steve seemed to have a heart the size of Lake Ontario. I feel his loss deeply. The possibility of seeing him again was something I cherished.

Maybe I can take this opportunity to send my love and regard to the families and loved ones of Patrick, Elise, and Steve. Thank you for loving our friends as you did so that they could be in our world as they were.

"Weather" updates

2024-10-09T09:00:00.003-07:00

I had a wonderful time launching my new book, Weather, across BC in May, culminating in a hometown launch in Port Moody, hosted by Raoul Fernandes and featuring a reading by Kayla Czaga from her new book, Midway.

Raoul Fernandes' hosting was so entertaining that
hardly anyone was playing Monopoly when he spoke.

Thank you to everyone who came out to any of my events or picked up a copy of the book. It really means the world to me.

A highlight of the summer was being interviewed by Margaret Gallagher for CBC's North by Northwest in August. You can listen to the interview here.

Another highlight has been the reception to my essay "Some Notes on Writing Haiku," which was published at TheWoodlot.ca (Chris Banks' new poetry review site!) in May. I've received really positive responses from both folks who were new to haiku and haiku devotees (I worried a bit about the latter). The essay was even picked up by the New Zealand Poetry Society, who reposted it on their blog in September. What a thrill!

If you haven't read the essay, and are curious about haiku (either in general, or my take on the form), I encourage you to give the essay a read. And, of course, if it piques your interest at all, I encourage you to pick up a copy of the book from Gaspereau Press or your local bookstore!