Finding the Form with Vivian Hansen
“This Twilight is Strangely Liminal”
Poetry is almost always my creative medium of choice. I wrote this poem in pre-pandemic times, but as the twilight of all we are accustomed to drew near, I am growing closer to this poem. Let’s call it prophetic, as poetry seems always to hold a prophetic element. In my Danish culture, there is a time of dusk called the “Mørkening Tid”. Dusk is simply translated as the Darkening Time. Note the ‘kening’ in both the Danish and the English words. In this strange and liminal time, we grow closer to knowing, to understanding, to grip miracles and hoard them. We can see so much in the full light of day, but the twilight properties of dusk, or the Mørkening Tid, stimulate a gift of knowing and prophetic insight.
“…I spotted the pictographs on a rock wall, the ones he always wanted to see but probably never did, because he would have had to hike hard to find them.”
“Dolly Trout Slayers”
This poem is a small story of my marriage and survival after the breakup. My husband did not like fishing, so he never knew the water of Kootenay Lake as he should have. He claimed that whatever he did not know, I could not know. It baffled him to think of any other reality. About twenty years after the end of the marriage, I found myself in a seaworthy fishing boat catching Trout and Kokanee Salmon on Kootenay Lake. I spotted the pictographs on a rock wall, the ones he always wanted to see but probably never did, because he would have had to hike hard to find them. By then, he had given up on life. I felt sorry for him, then, as what I had accomplished in some small way, he could never own.
I usually always write poetry, and the form suits me for most creations. I have tended to avoid fiction, but I am recently beginning to enjoy writing in that genre. I also write a lot in creative nonfiction, which is a sort of relative to poetry; you just need to examine what ‘process’ works best for getting the lyrical punch in a work.
Vivian Hansen has four books of poetry including A Tincture of Sunlight (Frontenac 2017). She teaches creative writing in Calgary.
Cover image by Rick Medlen on Unsplash