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Finding the Form with Becky Blake

My essay “Scratch” actually began as two essays. One was about obsessing over cougar attacks while I was on a writing retreat in Banff. The other was about losing my apartment in Toronto and deciding to live without a home base for a while. I had written multiple drafts of each, but when I was creating an outline for my memoir-in-essays, I noticed that the chronology of these two pieces overlapped significantly. That made me curious to see if they might also overlap in other ways. 

When I stuck the two essays together, back to back, they didn’t fit. But I wondered what would happen if I braided them together—a common creative nonfiction technique that I enjoy reading in other people’s writing but had never tried myself. To see if it might work, I printed out my two essays and cut them into segments. Then I laid these scraps of paper on my floor and photographed them in different configurations. In the end, the braids were pretty lopsided; the two stories didn’t want to neatly alternate. But I decided to combine the essays anyway because, during the photoshoot, I had noticed one striking resemblance. Both essays had cats in them. Why am I writing about cats? I wondered. I don’t even like them! And why are these feline characters so polarized: predatory cougars in one essay and adorable pet kittens in the other? 

After a few days of thinking about the differences between wild and domesticated animals, a lightbulb went on, and “Scratch” is the essay that resulted. In final draft, it feels more like a single woven cloth than two braided strands. But working to combine these essays highlighted some resonances that I wasn’t consciously aware of. Which makes me wonder if there may be other pairs of essays in my memoir that are waiting to be placed beside each other, or even intertwined—stories that, when given the chance to interact, may begin to have a lively conversation. 

Becky Blake is a two-time winner of the CBC Literary Prize (for non-fiction in 2017 and short fiction in 2013). Her debut novel, Proof I Was Here, was published by Wolsak & Wynn’s Buckrider Books in 2019. Becky teaches Creative Non-Fiction at the University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Education, and she holds an MFA from the University of Guelph. She is currently working on a second novel and a memoir-in-essays.

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Photos courtesy of Becky Blake; Ihtesham Ismail; and Richard Kidger.

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Ian Roy’s Writing Space

I’m an itinerant writer, insomuch that I move around the house from place to place, like a cat seeking those sunny spots on winter afternoons. Though what I’m seeking is a quiet, out-of-the-way place where I can work. In the spring and summer, I usually convert our uninsulated back porch into a writing space. I haul out a desk and a chair, and attach my whiteboard to the wall. The whiteboard generally goes wherever I go: on it, I keep track of deadlines. I’m someone who likes to keep track of deadlines. 

Last summer, I was lucky enough to rent a small studio a few blocks from my house. That was a dreamy summer. I’d ride my bike to the studio every morning with a thermos filled with black coffee. Once I was settled at my desk, I’d drink coffee and write all day. Sometimes one of my sons would stop by and we’d visit outside on the steps; sometimes I’d break early to go skateboarding at the skatepark down the street. But always, I’d meet my minimum daily page count. I do have some rules of engagement when it comes to my writing day. I wrote the first draft of my story “Big Yellow Taxi” in that studio. At the end of the summer, I moved my desk and whiteboard back home.

These days, I write in my eldest son’s room. He moved out some time ago, but I’m still in no way ready to convert his room into anything but his room. Some of his clothes are still in the closet; some of his books are still on the bookshelf. I’ve cleared some space on one of the shelves for a few of my books, and I’ve hung up my whiteboard in the corner. His bed is still in here; it’s right behind me, in fact. You might think it would be a distraction having a bed in the room where I write. You might think I’d be napping on that thing all day long. But I’m not a napper. Instead, I use the bed as just another flat surface upon which to place more books.

What is a major distraction for me is wildlife, or more precisely, birds. Birds are a big distraction. My desk is next to a window that looks out into our backyard. I keep some binoculars on the window sill, and I use them to scan the trees every time I hear a bird call. Sometimes my cat joins me in watching the birds, though we have very different ideas about bird-watching. A few weeks ago, we saw two northern flickers and a pileated woodpecker. That was a good day. For me, anyway.

When my son comes home to visit, I gladly pack up my things and move to another part of the house. I might work at the dining room table or in the basement; if it’s warm out, I’ll head out to the porch. I’m not as precious about where I write as I used to be. I just try to keep my head down and meet my daily page count. If I can catch a glimpse of some of the birds passing through the yard, that’s just an added bonus.

Ian Roy is the author of four books, including his most recent collection of stories, Meticulous, Sad, and Lonely. He is currently working on a novel for children. 

Photos courtesy of Ian Roy and Bob Brewer.

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Finding the Form with Heather Debling

“Count Your Blessings” started as most of my short stories do. After the initial flush of the idea and writing out the first few hurried, blurry pages, I stopped and focused on structure. I wrote down scene ideas, figured out the arc, tried to make sure it was a thing, a logical, solid, sound thing, as if orderly post-its on my wall could guarantee that this faintly-beating heart I held in the palm of my hand would one day find a life outside of me. 

One of the first decisions I made was writing the story in the second person. I’d been reading the Ancrene Wisse, a manual for anchoresses written sometime between 1225 and 1240. In it, the anonymous author addresses their readers as “you” as they outline all their rules for a life of contemplation. I realized there was a quality in that voice that I wanted for this story—and that it also captured a dissociative quality that was crucial for my protagonist.

I wrote the first draft and then several more drafts, each time trying a different scene order, alternating between past and present, telling the story chronologically, having the past scenes interrupt the present, going back to alternating between the past and present but messing with the chronological order of each timeline. Nothing I tried quite worked. At one point I cut up the then 10,000-word draft into individual paragraphs and re-arranged them on the floor.

I was working on a new draft in March 2020 when my story of a young woman isolating herself from the world started to take on an entirely different resonance, but I was, still, completely stuck. 

I was about to put it back in the drawer when I read some stories in Lorrie Moore’s Self-Help and realized quite suddenly that the story needed to be written like a manual, and within an instant of having that realization, I also felt a kind of bemused embarrassment because the story, since the very first draft, had had the word “Guide” in the title. How could you not see it? I asked myself. It was right there, all the time. 

But gratitude outweighed my embarrassment, and it was a reminder that a story will take as long as it needs to take, and that even four or five or more years later, the breakthrough moment can still come. It felt like one of those moments Annie Dillard describes in The Writing Life: “At its best, the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace. It is handed to you, but only if you look for it. You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain and then — and only then — it is handed to you.”

Heather Debling is a fiction writer and playwright based in Stratford, Ontario. Her work has appeared in Room, The Antigonish Review, and Agnes and True.

Photos courtesy of CHUTTERSNAP.

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Journeys: What is Tanya Bellehumeur-Allatt Reading?

I’m a picky reader. I read as much for character as for plot. I have a passion for narrative, but I read only literary novels and non-fiction. I love a finely crafted phrase where every word has earned its place. Geraldine Brooks gives me all these things.

This fall, I’m reading People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks for the second time. The book begins in Sarajevo in the 1990s during the Bosnian war and moves backwards in time, chronicling the journey of a rare illuminated manuscript—a Jewish haggadah—through centuries of exile and war. It’s a work of fiction inspired by the true story of the Hebrew codex known as the Sarajevo Haggadah. 

At a time when all my travel plans are cancelled until at least next summer, People of the Book promises to take me to Vienna, Venice, Tarragona, Sevilla and Jerusalem. A wonderful, often exotic trip. 

I’ve also been enjoying Sujata Massey’s The Widows of Malabar Hill, a 1920s mystery set in Bombay, a city that fascinates me.  

Next in line on my bedside table is A Burning, by Megha Majumdar.  Sue Monk Kidd wrote a fabulous review of Majumdar’s first novel in the latest issue of Poets and Writers. I immediately raced out and bought it. 

And lastly, for my devotional reading, I’m in the final quarter of Thomas Merton’s seminal The Seven Storey Mountain: An Autobiography of Faith. It’s a wonderful, luminous book; an interior journey. 

Tanya Bellehumeur-Allatt has been published in Best Canadian Essays 2019 and 2015, Grain, EVENT, Prairie Fire, Malahat Review, Antigonish Review, and Room. She holds an MA from McGill and an MFA in Creative Writing from UBC.

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Photos courtesy of Tanya Bellehumeur-Allatt and Simon Fitall.

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Finding the Form with Jessica Block

When I first started working on Garden Man, I was trying hard not to write a story at all.

I’d been going through a difficult period with my writing and had disconnected from the pleasure of the act itself.

Each time I sat down to write Garden Man, I told myself this was not a story, there was no pressure to complete a story. I was here to have fun, to play around with images and language for the sake of playing around with images and language, and maybe work through some of the things that were circling my mind at that time.

I usually like to have some sense of narrative before I begin to write, but I needed this mental trick to soften the pressure I‘d placed on myself, to help displace the disappointment after the failure, or maybe a postponement, of a troublesome longer project.

There were two things I was thinking about when I played with the first bits of my non story. 

First of all, I’d woken from sleep one night in my new apartment to hear noises in my back garden. In my disoriented half-awake state I became convinced it was a man. I’d woken in the middle of the night in my old apartment to hear a couple of guys shooting up outside my kitchen window. The two things must have conflated. (This time it was raccoons.) 

The second thing I was thinking a lot more about was my mom’s deteriorating health.

I immediately, instinctively wrote in the first person, imagining what it feels like to be in a body that is breaking down.

To remedy the discomfort I felt imagining such ill health, I wrote descriptions of an erotic garden man. 

It’s difficult to remember the precise moment when I could see the garden man was becoming Garden Man, a story. It’s hard to tell from my initial notes because I started writing in the middle of the notebook, then went back to the beginning of the notebook to fill up the blank pages that were interspersed with other writing; so the pieces are very out of order. 

Once I realized the garden man was going to have a finite life cycle that was tied to the seasons, that became a defining element of the story’s structure that helped to connect the fate of the garden man and the protagonist together more clearly, turning Garden Man into a truly fun and healing story to work on.

Jessica Block has published short stories in PRISM international, Event, and the anthology In Other Words. She always carries snacks in case you’re hungry.

Photos courtesy of Gabriel Jimenez and Alex Makarov.

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An Interview with Anne Swannell

Anne Swannell’s poem, “On Not Seeing Rocher Percé,” shared third prize in the 2020 Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse Contest. The poem recounts three disappointing moments: a trip to the Gaspé peninsula to see the famous rock formation rising from the ocean, had it not been hidden by fog the one day they were there; a trip to Versailles, only to discover that “every mirror in The Sun King’s Hall/ had been taken for renovation—(We were not, as we’d imagined, multiplied)”; and a venture into Gormley’s Fog Box in London’s Hayward Gallery (“we thought it would be fun—a lark”) which was, instead, disorienting and unnerving.

The episodes seem, at first, disconnected but are instead tightly structured, a set of expectations and reversals, like an echo and a response. Or—a more comically apt metaphor—like smoke and mirrors. These three disappointing excursions are framed by the words “Expectations.” and “Absences.” at the start and “a sound     and a silence” at the end.  “One shackles us, one sets us free,” we’re told. The listeners feel both bound to one another and free to let imagination take flight.

Swannell is a West Coast poet, visual artist, and set designer. I asked her how these occupations resonate. 

“For me,” she said, “poems always begin with the visual, with something I’ve seen…[that’s] the artist in me, I suppose. When we came to visit the huge rock out in the ocean, it was totally obscured by fog so—though I couldn’t actually see it—I saw it in my mind’s eye. One fog simply conjured another. The last line, “one shackles us, one sets us free,” insisted on being there, though I rewrote it several times. Eventually, I decided to shut up my editor and let the line be.”

While we were on the subject of the imagination, I asked, “What is the poem that made you want to become a poet?” She responded with this early memory:

I was four years old when I first heard Browning’s “Home Thoughts from Abroad.” We were living in Essex, northeast of London. It was 1944: my father was away. My mother had two other children, younger than me: she was frightened because of the V2 rockets (buzz bombs), and lonely, and I suppose reading poetry in the light of a hurricane lamp to a little girl who was pleased to be allowed to stay up and have Mum all to herself was some small comfort. I could clearly picture the “blossomed pear tree in the hedge” that leaned to the field and scattered on the clover “blossoms and dewdrops—at the bent spray’s edge” because we had one too! I had heard our own “wise thrush” sing each song twice over, “lest you think he never could recapture/that first fine careless rapture.” I certainly didn’t think of becoming a poet then, but hearing those words gave me an appreciation for what language could say—and do.

I like that addendum, the conviction that poetry is a force in the world, that it can comfort the listener in hard times or set before the mind’s eye things that are absent or hidden. Also, that an occasion is what we (poet and reader) make of it.

Photos courtesy of Erica Nilsson and Phylls Gerard.

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Candour and Grace: An Interview with Mia Anderson

Mia Anderson’s poem “Rim” is the second place winner in this year’s Occasional Verse Contest.  Her bio is as engaging as her poetry.  Mia has published six books of poetry.   She has been an actress, organic grower and market gardener, shepherd, priest, poet and translator.  Several of these things she still is.  And, Mia has the unique distinction of being the only poet to have had four poems chosen for the short list in our Occasional Verse Contests thus far.  When Mia was informed of her unique record, she quipped: “Always did like the number 4.  I once had a licence plate MIA444 and my brother, the one the poem “Rim” is about, would call my car “Mia on all fours”. It is that quirky accent on detail that makes interviewing Mia both a delight and a challenge.  One has the feeling that Mia is always one step ahead of her.  What follows in this interview is our dialogue about “Rim” and Mia’s other three recognized poetry submissions. Be ready for her candour and her grace.

Barb: Mia, I confess that when I read the poems in this year’s short list for The New Quarterly Occasional Verse contest, “Rim” would not leave me be.  I was moved by the poem on first reading and returned to it again and again.  It haunts me still… the most pleasurable kind of haunting.  I think part of that haunting comes from the rhythm and the cadence of the poem.  The poem is a pleasure to read out loud. The end rhyme is subtle, gently underlying the poem’s occasion, the speaker’s recognition of the irony of her brother’s attitude toward death as it contrasts the feelings of the family as they lay him to rest. Do you think of the poem as an elegy?

Mia: I don’t think it began as an elegy, though it certainly works now as one. It began as the opening move (and still is) of a larger sequence, about all sorts of different types of edges, and from a deeper aquifer than just the one well. This was almost four years ago. It was written, as was the whole sequence, in a kind of calm – which I think you and your fellow readers responded to, as I see by your and their remarks; but you may be interested to know that it was written actually while my husband was dying – he of “The Body’s Dues” – though of course we couldn’t be sure he was dying at the time. So: almost two years after my brother’s death.  But there was a feeling of the ending of things. That came from more than death of partner or brother, came, and comes, from – I am a great fan of Greta Thunberg – the sense of the rite of passage of the green world itself.  How much moreso now, with the West Coast fires! Hence my deep attraction for the green burial movement, which is hinted at in the poem “Rim”, as my niece had found this wonderful ‘green cemetery’ for her Dad’s burial.  “Green’s innocence”: I think that’s an article of faith, for me.

There’s an irony here, though. The green burial movement comes from the urge to save our natural world, that “green innocence’’, from disappearance by destruction. And I’m all in for that. Yet I echo with what’s beyond; do you know the Gaia theorist, James Lovelock? he who said in 2008, “Enjoy life while you can. Because if you’re lucky it’s going to be 20 years before it hits the fan.” And then said this summer, as he turned 101 years old, bless him, “I would say the biosphere and I are both in the last 1% of our lives”. Yet despite that, he is slightly more optimistic than he was in 2008. Hmm. Well. I was feeling my way, in “Rim”, to something (among other subjects in the poem) about that sense of green’s survival beyond its destruction, if that makes any sense. Which it doesn’t. But hence the “Wrapped”and “rapt”.       

Odd coincidence: someone has only just introduced me to the soundtrack of Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, and while I never, but never, do video games and shan’t be doing  this one (though I deeply love Shropshire), the soundtrack by Jessica Curry is marvellous and exudes something of this ‘rapt’ mood we are maybe talking about, or I am muttering about.

Can I just say what a pleasure it is to be read so carefully and caringly as you folks did my poems?    

Barb: Mia, your diction invites a careful reading of your poem. I like the clever word play in the poem, the careful repetition to reveal the brother’s frame of mind and the interplay with the speaker and his family’s acceptance: “He had no talent for belief, he said. /And I believe him.”  The word echoes underline the interplay and help build to the conclusion: “a great capacity for love…and how we loved him; the earth unconsecrated as /he would have wished it… and thinking earth was consecrate despite /all he could say…”  Your word choice is effective and deliberate.

Yet, several of the adjudicators were jarred by your use of the word “dumped”: “and how we loved him as we dumped his cas-/ket into the earth unconsecrated.”

Mia: They are of course right that the usual verb is ‘’lowered”. But the situation was not usual. The grandsons carried the (exquisitely) homemade coffin, something of course that they had never done before, and as they neared the grave it slipped. They were slight and it was heavy. If I had said “slipped” it would have sounded gentle, even graceful. I once wrote of ocean liners, where I live, “slipping down to sea”. Graceful it was not, but I had and have no intention of castigating anyone – everything that happened was fitting, for me – a point I appreciate that the readers grasped. The coffin sort of got out of their hands, and chuntered or galumphed or careened towards the trench, and then got put right, sort of, and made it. Finally.

As you see, I picked a different verb from those. And because you will see from my bio that one of my hats is (Anglican) priest, I want to be quick to say that I played almost no priestly role in this – as befit the situation. And I become more and more comfortable with this effacement as time goes on!

Barb: And I do too, with each reading. Tell me about the title of the poem.  To me, it is perfect as is its placement in the poem. I suspect the title came after the poem was written?  As the reader or listener, I am standing with the speaker on the rim, there in the intimacy of the moment of the brother’s burial. What sparked the title’s choice?

Mia: Oops, I honestly don’t quite remember when “Rim” turned up as its title, though you’re right it’s likely after the fact. You and I were commiserating the other day about the death of the Notorious RBG, and then I enthused about hearing Rabbi Lauren Holtzblatt intone the 23rd Psalm, after the casket had arrived at the Supreme Court, and I added, “Yet even at the grave we make our song” – which is a line from ‘The Commendation’ found in my Church’s funeral rite. It’s followed by the words “Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.” (Believe it or not, I’m answering your question! Bear with me.) You’re right: we are standing on the rim, as any edge of a grave is – in all possible senses. Alleluia is the veritable song-at-the-rim. One of my books was titled Practising Death and that was written, like, over 30 years ago; I think all my life I have been aware of each one of us as Heidegger’s “a being unto death” – long before knowing his name –  from my childhood, really. So that rim figures largely. Then, as I was saying earlier, a whole series of poems tagged along with this one, with a whole series of rims. But in this poem particularly, that Commendation line exercised a subterranean pull within the poem, I reckon. And you saw how the alleluias made it into the poem, too. I’m very big on alleluias. Yay, Leonard Cohen!

Barb: Your deft conclusion with its rhyming couplet and its sparse final two lines wow me:  

            that green cemetery, our imperfect lives,

            our hunch that all green’s innocence survives.

 

            And he.                                  

            And we. Wrapped in it. Rapt.

You have spoken of what inspired you to write these lines.  May I ask now about their craft?  I suspect that the structure of your poem is as deliberate as its word play.                          

Mia: I know I had been reading 2 or 3 different British poets about that time who were doing some writing in sonnets. There was Michael Symmons Roberts, maybe John Burnside, certainly Don Paterson, I mean why wouldn’t I read Don Paterson? – he’d judged and awarded me the Montreal International Poetry Prize!! – but I cannot say that I ever said to myself, ‘I will now betake me to a sonnet’. Roberts made some ‘super-sonnets’ as someone dubbed them, i.e. pushed the 14 lines to 15, and as you see, I too did not always feel bound by the 14, though they certainly flexed their ropes, as did the more or less pentameters of more or less iambics chugging along. (I played years of Shakespeare on stage: it’s in my blood stream. I also studied Robert Browning’s sort-of mobius strip-work with iambic pentameter during my M.A.)

I enjoyed flirting with breaking the rules with, say, my split-word enjambments, or assonance instead of rhyme. Sonnets were not something I had done a lot of, before. But up they bubbled. And as you see, bubbled over into “Lazarus Saturday”, and in some sort into the quatrains of “The Body’s Dues”, which keeps the final couplet convention, where “Lazarus Saturday” adds an extra line to the third one of its three sonnets, to make a triplet ending.

Although I mostly write a somewhat structured free verse, I actually love the interplay of necessity and invention a sonnet entails – or a rondeau redoublé or triolet or whathaveyou. It reminds me of designing this house where I live. You are confined by certain facts on the ground, like: there’s the road noise, so we’ll put the laundry there on the front of the house, noise to noise, and tuck ourselves well in behind; there’s the fleuve, so we’ll put the bedroom out into the garden over there so as to see it upon waking, but we must put it at an angle so as not to mar the original livingroom’s view, one requirement pushing on another on another etc. and making you discover better things than you otherwise would have. And that certainly happened with the ‘rims’ sequence. Also, I think, it was a rediscovery of a rare pleasure: of writing something complete in so small a package. For someone who has written a lot in the ‘Long Poem’ genre, that is some departure, I can tell you. (Though I got my long distance breath back by making it a sequence.)

Barb: I was surprised to learn that you wrote “Rim” as your husband was dying.  But when I read again, “The Body’s Dues”, the final lines speak to the calm you mention, a brave calm:

                                           Clear enough. I’ve just

 

            to live both our lives now: us, as before.

            I can do that. I begin. I close the door.

There is a wonderful understatement in “I begin. I close the door.” There is a lot riding on the word “just”.  These lines are particularly poignant because of what has come before. Part of the poem’s brilliance lies in its candid narration. The reader is shocked into the physicality of the moment of death and the wife’s sudden thrust into an impossible attempt to save the life of the man she loves by following the instructions of the disembodied 9-1-1 voice. The narration is well-crafted, startling, hard to read, but impossible to ignore for the reality with which it is rendered. One feels that the speaker is wiser than the well-meaning helpers: the 9-1-1 voice, the appropriate help team, the other pro team… the ‘funeral home’, the hovering police woman, the elderly gentlemen who haul the body down the twisting stairs. The ineptitude of the helpers she notes for herself: … “‘Just like Lazarus’, they don’t get the refer-/ence, doesn’t matter.” She is a survivor and through her husband will survive too.

What is it that allows you to write about loss with such candour and grace?

Mia: Ouf! Not sure. Well, I hope it is candour and grace – I’m grateful for your saying so. It’s true I tend to cut to the finish with the word ‘death’; in Quebec in French we usually substitute ‘deceased’ for ‘died’. I tend to buck the trend and stick with ‘died’. I guess that’s the candour part. But then, I feel as if I’ve spent a lifetime honouring the whole natural package, which after all includes death. I studied agriculture at one point, and was especially interested in wine grapes. You know about ‘noble rot’? It’s what gives us something like ice wine: two different ways of putting an end to the grape’s life. But just listen to it: noble rot. There’s a credo for you. We’re back to the green cemetery. A being unto noble rot. You know, it’s funny, I grew up with Dylan Thomas recordings, dearly loved him, learned a lot, but I’m aware that I now totally disagree with him on his most famous line, “Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage…”. That grace you mentioned? That, it seems to me, would be a ‘going gentle’. Some trainers talk of ‘gentling’ horses, not ‘breaking’ them in. I’d pick gentling over breaking and raging any day.

Barb: Once more your aptitude to choose an engaging title occurs in this poem.  Please comment on the title, “The Body’s Dues”.

Mia: It’s just like noble rot. The rot is for sure, and the noble is how you receive it. Once, you asked me “Dare we talk about your intent?” My answer would be “To bear witness”. Noble rot. This is so. So be it. I honour the body. (Do you know the line in the marriage ceremony, “With my body I thee honour”? Isn’t that an extraordinary thing to say? How many people remember they meant to mean that, as they lived it out?) That’s certainly some of what’s packed into the title, “The Body’s Dues”. Body honours body. But also, the dues are death, of course. Which we pay. The cost of participating in this extraordinary project of living a body’s life. I’m supposed to be writing a book I’ve called Being a Body. I don’t know if it will happen or transmogrify into a different title. I thought this poem would be part of it. And perhaps it will. Not sure.

Barb: When did you write “The Body’s Dues”?  Did the calm of which we have been speaking come before or after you wrote the poem?

Mia: Oh, I think before. I don’t think I could have written it without having weathered a certain storm. Not tears. There weren’t many: strange, that (though I have a theory). But nobody had told me you feel like vomiting after the death of a loved partner. I passed 24 hours or so just trying not to throw up. And yet, that containment that occurred as I closed the door was there at the time, i.e. from the beginning. This is how rocks are formed! Like granite – under immense pressure! The pressure was certainly there. Hence the granite. The poem was written or at least begun very very soon after my husband’s death, which is almost 4 years ago. Obviously, it was part of the grieving, part of the working-out, the coming to terms. And a big part of the bearing witness.

What does one bear witness for? one might ask. I guess in the hopes that you will help others see: see the beauty that you see – or the enemies of beauty, perhaps. Lord knows, I’ve written jingles aplenty about Tr*mp. Delighted to learn a book of verse is coming out soon called Trumpty Dumpty Wanted a Crown. But to return to witness: I feel my life is an arm-gesture towards “IT, THAT, LOOK, IT BELONGS HERE, HONOUR IT”. Which can include one’s beloved husband, as well as one’s beloved green world. At RBG’s lying in state taking place right now, the Rabbi has told us she had a plaque on her wall: “Justice, just justice, do it” (my kinky paraphrase of the Hebrew she had). Witness is a part of justice, I think, the poet’s part of it.

And ohmygawd! Look! That wonderful fellow at the Supreme Court who taught RBG her whole strenuous workout for which she is so famous – ya got the book? I got the book – has just done pushups in front of the casket, in Statuary Hall. I love it! I hope someone does something as witty and as fitting at my interment! (You knew it: I want to rot, not burn. I want to feed daylilies.)

I dunno, Barb, if you bargained on so much about RBG in this interview. I didn’t. But we couldn’t know the timing. The world couldn’t. It ain’t over yet.

Barb: I am confident somehow you will feed daylilies, but not for a very long time, I hope.  What I find so refreshing in these poems about death of loved ones is not only  their form – your breaking of rules to augment your craft, but also their voice. In “Lazarus Saturday”, the speaker’s tone carries for me a delightful irreverence for the echoed situation in “The Body’s Dues”.  How is the bearing witness different in this poem? Why did you feel compelled to return to this situation a second time in verse?

Mia: You’re going to laugh: when I first read your “but not for a very long time” there, I thought, “Oh! She must believe in the resurrection of the body!!” A little while in the grave, then, whoosh! gone. Now, I can see what you meant instead. But my mistake is a good jumping-off point. In “Lazarus Saturday”, you can see that I gnaw around the ambiguity of our human-inhuman-inhumed situation.

                        Tissued together, rising’s sink or swim

                        for both of them or neither, thick or thin.

I don’t say I know this. Nor understand it. All I can do is gesture towards it, with my life. And my words. You ask why I revisited my husband’s death. Well, I’ll likely continue to; it’s not a choice; it just happens. I know, for instance, there’s another one simmering to be written, called “Scotch Tape” (don’t ask). But in the case of “Lazarus Saturday”, it was quite simply kicked off by a visit to a friend in Montreal just before Easter that same year and going with her to the Cathedral, where the Gospel was the Lazarus story. Lazarus was already in the first poem, as you saw. Funny, my friend turned to me after and wondered if going to that service, two Sundays before Easter, had been a good idea or not, under the circumstances. I thought yes, but didn’t know then how. But the image had come to me during the service, of that kid hopping in a sack, something of the absurdity of the moment we take so seriously in the Lazarus story. Lazarus is one of my heroes; jumping in a gunny sack in no way demeans him for me, nor renders the story any less earthquaking.

But it was interesting to find that having a first go at it in the first sonnet didn’t exhaust what the moment had meant for me. St Francis’s brother Ass. Body talk. Bawdy talk. So: another go. Begin the same. Diverge. Second sonnet – the one that ends up exploring “tissued together”, after acknowledging the particular historical situation Lazarus had been in. And then – I don’t remember this, but I guess – that led easily to the third sonnet: begin the same, diverge, then the Lazarus reference comes full circle to the terrain of “The Body’s Dues”. But I’m saying this after the fact; I don’t claim to have planned the thing; creation is a bit of a hidden mystery, like roots growing underground. One just tries to do it justice. RBG’s tzedek.

Barb: Mia, I had no idea where this interview would take us when we began.  The fact that RBG entered often into our conversation is somehow apt and timely given the subject matter and our mutual admiration.  I will end my questions with one on the final poem in the sequence, “Bones”, another sonnet, this one Shakespearean.  As I read it, I assume it is in the voice of the rector mentioned. “Because the bones were found on church terrain /the job fell to the rector, to oversee /a protocol .…”  The voice seems to be setting up a contrast among the various characters: students, profs, rector, maybe even the city crews.  All have come together in an unlikely shared purpose: to care for the bones.  “Backhoes, city crews, brown paper bags later /the job became the students’ and the profs’ – /and mine: asperges, words and signature.…”  Together they have “a sense of decorum, shared respect, some laughs.”  The students I assumed were the ones who saved for “me” (the rector) “the opening of the first bag”, a privilege in their archaeological world.  I suppose what I am really asking is how am I to interpret the last five lines of the poem?  What is the speaker saying about the “twenty-odd year olds in that lab awed there,” and their faith and their feeling of responsibility for the bones?

Mia: Do we have an hour? First, yes, I was the “rector”, I was the “I”. And by “protocol” I mean it both literally – that is what the Department or in fact the University calls such relationships with an outside partner, in this case the rector of the Anglican parish church in question and by implication the diocese – and, if you like, figuratively, a jeu de mots about how we are to be, and behave, together in this world. Each with his responsibility. En passant, it was a church in Old Quebec which had ceased to function as a church, and whose congregation had moved to my parish – this was years before I arrived – thus that old parish was in my care. It’d have been fun for the poem if the bones had been much older – as so many of the bones such a Dept. would normally study would be – i.e. the contrast between us and them that much greater; but in this case we know the origin: the Protestants (Anglican, Presbyterian, i.e. non-Catholic) in Catholic New France after the British conquest of the Plains of Abraham. I may be telling you more about grasshoppers than you want to know, but it’s fascinating, really. I believe I’ve heard that the nuns of the monastère des augustines even sent British soldiers they had nursed but been unable to save to this gravesite, out of delicacy, honouring them by giving them their faith kin to lie among. (No wonder what the Augustines founded was called Hôtel-Dieu. Another en passant, have you ever read the American writer Victoria Sweet’s book called God’s Hotel? A lovely read.) The gravesite had functioned as such long before it even had a church building, which later became a parish church.

Anyway, you can imagine that the city – which bought it from the diocese – would be involved in the historical dig, done not for archeological reasons but to buttress the foundering old church walls! Talk about necessity and invention. Those dear bones, which gave many a graduate student a dissertation subject, were treated with respect from the first crew on. For me, the contrast of age is only between the young students and the old bones. The other contrasts are more in the nature of church and state contrast, sacred and secular contrast, cleric and laïc, faith and science – the celebrant and the academic. But I rush to say: I think for none of us involved did that really present a contrast, more just a vibration, or a harmonic. Yet again en passant, my husband was a member of something called The Society of Ordained Scientists. You hear and see so much debate about the supposed conflict between faith and science. We never did see the conflict. Neither did Einstein, for that matter. Nor, say, Teilhard de Chardin.

I mention him because my invited role was in some way to ‘sanctify’ their work, given the human remains. And their workspace. At their request. Hence the asperges, hence the words of prayer (and yes, I had to sign something, for officialdom). And hence the ritual I gave them of reading a plaque on the lab wall at, say, the beginning of each week, something like that, when they turned up to work. It was from “Hymn to Matter” which Teilhard de Chardin, a paleontologist, had written. Mygawd, you could say everything I’ve been talking to you about in this interview is about my own attempted hymn to matter! Anyway, that was my contribution to their lovely request of me, re their lab: I chose Teilhard for them to tangle with. And perhaps my involvement stirred up the inscape that makes it into the final couplet.

Oh, and by the way, it was the profs who gave me the honour of opening the first paper bag. (I love the exaltation of brown paper implied!) It was theirs to give. And I believe a ritual sincerely desired by them i.e. that they be at peace with the bones, via the bones’ Church. But I would say – you see? I’m getting to your questions, hah! – that the most awe-inspiring moment in the whole poem is that student at the end, whose words I cite almost verbatim. Come to think of it, I had them put her exact words on the wall of their lab, too, under the Teilhard quote. I find such dignity, such presence, in her statement. Yes, they were not, I think, members of any Church. That didn’t matter. “[W]hat faith they had”, as the poem says, was the taking on of the responsibility of respect, and of protection, and of knowing – a knowing they were going to have after days and years of looking.  What more can we do in life?

So to answer your questions point blank: it is the poet who is awed by the sequence we all (crew, city officials, profs, students, cleric) underwent that could lead to that still small voice of the student beside her microscope.

But I trust the poem stands on its own, and I hope I haven’t ruined it for people by talking so much around it with things they didn’t need to know, but might find interesting. After all, I still love what can be packed into 14 lines! Or rather what is between the lines, which is where poetry happens. Here’s to ellipsis.

Photos courtesy of Danielle Giguère and Mia Anderson.

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Words on the Road: An Interview with Pamela Mordecai

Roderick Spence: What has occasional verse meant to you as a poet and as a reader of poetry? In which ways has that meaning possibly changed, appreciated or developed for you across your career?

Pamela Mordecai: Occasional poetry is kind of a spectral category, isn’t it? In a way, all poems are occasional, so it’s hardly a category I consider when reading poetry. I am not thinking of celebratory poems for great occasions–Elizabeth Alexander’s “Praise Song for the Day,” written for Barack Obama’s inauguration, for example. There’s a poem by Jacqueline Woodson called “Occasional Poem” that better describes my idea of the genre (let’s call it that), one that I think fits the occasional poem as the Nick Blatchford competition regards it. In that interpretation, any occasion fits, and if any occasion might do, then tons of children’s poems are occasional poems, beginning with nursery rhymes like “Humpty Dumpty,” and “Little Miss Muffet,” going on through “The Owl and the Pussycat,” and “The Spider and The Fly,” to “The Mountain and the Squirrel,” “New Scholar” and “There was a Naughty Boy”. Sometimes the occasion is quickly there and gone, as say, in “New Scholar” or “Buckingham Palace”. Sometimes it extends over rather a longer period of time–it must have taken the Naughty Boy a day or two to get to Scotland, more if he was on shanks’ pony. By the same token, many poems for big people fit the category, though I confess that I do not think of, say, Hopkins “The Windhover” as an occasional poem. Even Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” or Longfellow’s “The Day is Done and the Darkness” don’t shout ‘occasional poem’. Wallace Stevens’ “Sunday Morning”, James Weldon Johnson’s “The Creation”, Derek Walcott’s “A Letter from Brooklyn” and Kamau Brathwaite’s “Stone” all speak about occasions, though of very different kinds. In sum, many occasional poems, according to the larger definition, are favorites of mine, but I have not thought of them as occasional. I suppose it is like Black people in the modern world. They built it. It exists because of them, though no one says, “Here is the modern world, occasioned by the toil and the oppression of the enslaved.”

I cannot, therefore, say the meaning of the term has changed, appreciated or developed for me, across my career except insofar as an original strict definition of the term, according to which it meant “a poem celebrating a great event” has acquired a more relaxed meaning. A new definition of a word, especially if it expands the significance, is always a good thing. I don’t believe in defining words anyway. Definitions are cages, and words, like birds, are always in flight.

RS: Given the occasion of “Sword on the Road”, it is all the more compelling to hear you voice this parallel of what is often unacknowledged in poetry, its occasion or inspiration, to the too-often unsung brilliance and struggles of black and oppressed peoples’ contributing to humanity and artistry. To extrapolate this parallel generally, the occasion for this poem is a tragedy of the unacknowledged and a celebration of the unacknowledged: Tommy Barnett. What do you see as some of the most essential unacknowledged occasions in this poem and for Tommy Barnett?

PM: What is unacknowledged is that for some people (indigenous people, black people, disabled people and we now know, older people), the act of simply being is inherently unsafe. Any combination of these incarnations exacerbates the unsafety exponentially. The community frequently acts not to ensure but against their security and happiness. Add to that any “untoward” behaviour (high spirits, loud laughter, playing mas, erratic performance of any kind), and the threat to their bodies can escalate to mortal— indeed, it may be a mortal threat well before that. Breonna Taylor was asleep in her own bed! What is also in need of recognition is that these are often the people whose work (economic, social and cultural) has made and continues to make possible the wellbeing of those who threaten them. In toto, the wholeness, the freedom, the thriving of all persons in society, of society itself, is compromised by this arbitrary withholding of the possibility of goodness-of-life from some. What is unacknowledged and needs to be celebrated (as I hope it is in this poem) is the wanton courage displayed by those who insist on breathing, despite all the above.

In the case of my fictive Tommy Barnett, what is not acknowledged is his value as a known and unknown quantity. Beyond his “simple” humanity, his culture, ethnicity, language, capacity for song and celebration, for the antic behaviour of street performance, all bespeak a person who should be regarded with awe: one who is, in common parlance, awesome–indeed, one who might lead. What is not affirmed and celebrated and should be is the fact that he has existed and continues to exist, in spite of the determination of those whose lives he enriches, and might enrich so much further, to destroy him, and those like him: “…downpressor can’t keep Rasta back/no mind how Rasta poor and black.”

RS:  I am so grateful for how your fictive Tommy Barnett acknowledges both the tragic and awesome in his life. That celebration of his unalienable dignity and artistry in personhood, to me, is one reason I find his Rasta voice so awakening each time I revisit “Sword on the Road”. I can’t do a Rastafarian accent if I tried (nor do I personally think I should aloud as a white person), yet the voice you articulated through rhythm, diction and rhyme sings so clearly in my head. In the refrains and sound work I can hear him, and his song is simultaneously a defiant protest song, a keening, a crooning and exalting celebration. I first took time to hear him as best I could, but I’m compelled to sing along in support of him with each reread. Thank you for providing a recording of you reading this poem. What do you feel a reader might gain by becoming a listener with this poem read aloud?

PM:  To hear “Sword on the Road” makes all the difference. Not all my poems have a voice as compelling as Tommy Barnett’s in this one. I have another poem, “Thomas Thistlewood and Tom” where the persona in the poem, an enslaved man, also commands a hearing. Tommy is describing his death as he dies, rather like Mikey Smith in Kamau Brathwaite’s “Stone.” He speaks, in his language, revelling in that gladness-to-be, that very livity that will give police the excuse to kill him. It is hard to be unmoved. True, the energy in Creole and Dread Talk can translate into loudness that some people may find disturbing. Shelia (sic), in a story of mine called “Alvin’s Ilk Rides the Subway,” tells her adopted brother, recently come to Canada, “These white people don’t talk loud, Alvin. They think if you talk loud, you looking argument.” Her position is substantiated by a (1974) paper written by linguist, Thomas Kochman, entitled “Orality and Literacy as factors in ‘black’ and ‘white’ communicative behaviour.”
In “Bad Card,” Bob Marley declares: “I want to disturb my neighbour”. But that disturbance is, at least on the face of it, not to inveigh against the person next door nor to “bring argument”. The next lines say:

“‘Cause I’m feelin’ so right.

I want to turn up my disco

Blow them to full watts tonight…”

Listen to it again, and again. Understand Tommy Barnett in his cape and with his sword on the street the day that he was shot. 

Voice seduces me in what I read and is paramount in what I write, prose or poetry. To understand a poem, the first thing is to experience its sounds and images, to hear it and to “see with it”. I cannot disentangle this hearing-and-seeing. Together they make the soundscape, to steal a term, of the poem. The voice paints the picture; the image enables the voice.

“Rastas were in the beginning shunned in Jamaica, oppressed by their own “bredren and sistren”, a thorn in the side of the colonial system from the beginning, producing responses from law-and-order forces that cost life and limb.”

RS: I hear that seductive voice of Barnett and I “see with it” a call to both lively action and contemplation. I also recognize an intersecting scene of race, visibility and body politics within our contemporary English/es and culture/s of poetry, for example: the progress of “make I-self seen” in the first stanza becomes “we-self” in the last or “chant down ignorance behold I-and-I”.  In elements like those, the politics of recognition and poetic language are so enthralling to behold for me–how an “I” and an “I” are the same and not, crossed and not. Another judge wrote of Barnett’s voice and your poem: “Timely and powerful and a song, joyful and defiant in the manner of its expression, its language taut and alive, reactive; a poem that actually works, does work, as protest song and rallying cry.”  I, too, “see with it” Barnett and the poem’s greater connection to the present moment and history within the poem’s language and imagery of the sword, crusade and Bible. Why did you include these poetic tensions across time and cultures into your fictive Barnett’s Dread Talk?

PM: I wrote this poem long ago. It is heartbreaking that it speaks to circumstances that currently obtain. If there are tensions across time and cultures in the poem, some of those tensions are attributable to the language. We are accustomed to English. Perhaps sadly, we forget that it is alive, remaking itself every day. Let us say the history of its coming to be is the history primarily of one people, the English. We hardly think of that history when we speak English. That is not the case for any Creole, nor especially for Dread Talk. Creoles say language and cultural contact. They say “oppression”. They say “these codes are what enslaved peoples first made when they were stolen”.  Dread Talk is oppression at a further remove. Never mind that things have radically changed, Rastas were in the beginning shunned in Jamaica, oppressed by their own “bredren and sistren”, a thorn in the side of the colonial system from the beginning, producing responses from law-and-order forces that cost life and limb. 

Tommy Barnett meets his end in Canada, so his story includes immigration: in many cases that amounts to deracination and, to understate it utterly, discomfort in the new country, especially if it is racist, as Canada is. His story may well include mental illness, for studies of the incidence of “unstable behaviour” in male adolescents of colour from the Caribbean in North America are, to understate again, concerning. His behaviour was antic, a performance, perhaps a joyful one, perhaps one of protest, perhaps one that was aggressive. Regardless, none of these things warranted his death.

I have elected increasingly to write poems in Creole and, in this poem, a modified Dread Talk, and so insist on these histories. Dread Talk is informed by the philosophy of Rasta: the I-and-I it employs is not the hyper-individualistic Western I but one connected to spirit, community and insight. Tommy Barnett in the poem is harmlessly performing who he is, what he believes in, the mood of his moment, proclaiming freedom, justice and peace. That celebration occasions his murder. The Tommy of the poem knows his killers for who they are: Babylon, everything opposed to freedom, justice and peace. In a way, I did not knit together any of the things you identify. I used a language that by its nature evokes a history, to tell a story about a person whose ethnicity is the embodiment of a history. That story indicts another history: the history of a stolen land that treats its former keepers as nothing, for Babylon is the ultimate product of that theft.

Histories brood in language, hold us hostage, judge us. As for the sword, crusade and Bible… that’s a whole other discussion and this answer is already long!  

RS: It’s a significant, on-going act to recognize that our colonial languages carry within their very structure and essence the history of oppression. I feel listening to your voice is a grace-full opportunity to do some of the work to mend our tapestry of cultures, something for which I’m grateful. I also better appreciate how both a creole and colonial language are not just tools to record history and memory but they’re also a living memory bank. What might be initially dismissed by a shortsighted outsider as an oddity, or even insanity, of syntax, spelling etc. is actually an expression of an embodied history and culture. Just as Tommy Barnett has an inalienable right to life, witness and value, so do creole languages and arts. Thank you for your storied poem and answers. I also want to thank you for your brilliant essay in TNQ’s “Falling in Love with Poetry” series. Uniquely code switching from English to Jamaican patois, it also recreates the life and poetry of an embodied cultural inheritance. You opened my world up to the likes of the great Jamaican poet, story-teller, folklorist and educator Louise Bennett-Coverley, known affectionately as Miss Lou, and the Barbadian poet and cultural theorist, Edward Kamau Brathwaite. It seems little can keep you back from sharing your important and alluring voice. Before we end this interview can you please tell me a little bit about your forthcoming book, A Fierce Green Place: new and collected poems and your current project, “de book of Joseph: a performance poem”.

PM: Before I do that, Roderick, many, many thanks for taking so much time over dis one shaat poem. I appreciate it.

 A Fierce Green Place: new and collected poems is the brainchild of Stephanie McKenzie, a wonderful poet and academic who is Professor of English at Memorial University of Newfoundland, Corner Brook. She worked on the book with a co-editor, a Jamaican academic, Carol Bailey, Associate Professor of English at Westfield State University in Conn, USA. Teri-Ann McDonald, a professional editor and fellow Torontonian, came on board to handle the “technical” aspects of the project, and Tim Reiss, Emeritus Professor of Comparative Literature at NYU, now resident in Hawai’i acted as a kindly godfather. We made an amazing team! They had not gone far with selecting poems from my six books of poetry when it seemed that the addition of new poems would be a good idea, hence, New and Collected Poems. It is to be published by New Directions Publishing in New York, a special press with a prestigious list. I am the third Canadian poet (joining Anne Carson and Irving Layton), fourth Canadian author, second Caribbean poet (joining Kamau Brathwaite) and fourth Caribbean author on their list, so I feel mighty lucky!

 “de book of Joseph: a performance poem” on which I am currently working, a project supported by Recommender and Works-in-Progress grants from the Ontario Arts Council as well as the Canada Council, completes a trilogy on the life of Jesus. The other two books in the trilogy—which I am writing backwards—are de Man: a performance poem (Sister Vision, 1995) and de book of Mary: a performance poem (Mawenzi House, 2015). The three books are ground breaking in that they are book-length works on a sacred subject that are entirely in Jamaican patwa. de Man has been performed in several Canadian cities as well as in Jamaica, and is part of the poetry archive at CITL.

Photos courtesy of David Mordecai and Kelly Sikkema.

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An Interview with Anne Marie Todkill

Kim Jernigan in conversation with Anne Marie Todkill, whose poem “Afterbirth” was the hands-down winner of the 2020 Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse Contest

“Afterbirth” is a joyful, near-perfect poem occasioned by the birth of a grandchild whose “nuchal hand”—a hand held beside the cheek or neck—makes the delivery “a little dangerous.” The poem turns on the juxtaposed images of the scarred placenta and the footprint on water left by a breaching whale. The one of our adjudicators who has spent some time studying whales at sea wrote, “I like and relate to the scary and magic moment of witnessing the breaching of a whale—an experience you thought YOU were looking for, but perhaps, in fact, the whale was following you, quite aware, first hiding, then almost taunting you with the breach. I loved the poet’s taking that feeling and moment to talk about things arriving in life, long anticipated, dangerous, scary but magic.” Asked about the pairing of a child’s birth and a whale breaching, a word that makes us think also of “breech,” and hence the hazards of childbirth, Todkill responded:

There are moments of anticipation when time seems to gather itself for a big reveal—whale-watching is like this; waiting for a birth most certainly is. (Let’s make this easy and stick to happy events.) Aside from our reaction to the outcome—delight, joy, relief, wonder—sometimes there’s also a super-charged sense that the event has always been held in time, waiting in the wings, already built into our lives. A baby arrives with her ancient newness and you think, ‘Well, of course. There you are.’ Besides, is there anything more gigantic, more whale-like, more space-taking and boat-rocking than a baby?

What I remember from the births of my three (all unaided and unfraught even though the last child, a boy, was a lunker, two feet tall from the get-go) is that the experience of labour was aptly named. Thinking of it as work rather than pain really helped me through. It was only later that I thought about the miracle of it. Todkill’s poem, in contrast, conjoins throughout the workaday and the miraculous aspects of childbirth. The midwife holding up the afterbirth, for instance, is compared to a grocer holding up a slab of meat, but she expounds with both awe and respect on the placenta’s uniqueness as an organ—single use and shared between two distinct bodies. I asked Todkill when that image came to her, in the moment or afterwards?

The midwives gave me the poem, really. My husband and I met them right after the delivery, and they were, like the rest of us, on a high. Tired as they must have been, their enthusiasm spilled over into a very informative “tour of the placenta,” as they called it. Examining the placenta is of course an important protocol, but the midwives were enthusiasts who clearly loved their job—the moms, the babies, the skill, the science, the art of midwifery. One particular thing they pointed out—the place where the placenta detaches from the womb—stuck with me for reasons I couldn’t figure out until considerably later. A piece of writing often starts for me that way, in a detail or image that mutters in some corner of my mind until I attend to it properly. Finally, I got to the memory of a whale’s footprint on water—another learning moment, during a camping trip across Newfoundland with my then eleven-year-old daughter. And I realized that memories of those days would now always have the future overlaid upon them. I guess this mirrors the way very young children see the world—as if it has always been theirs to occupy, and with no sense of an era “before baby.”

Todkill’s other poem on our shortlist, “Flight delay with telephoto,” has a very different theme and subject, a Cooper’s hawk eviscerating a pigeon. What connects them is a child. As the poet is photo-documenting the dismemberment, a mother walks by with a baby in a stroller. The juxtaposition raises (or it did for me) the spectre of what all parents face, how to mediate between the perils and dog-eat-dog/bird-eat-bird nature of existence and the desire to protect a child from, or prepare a child for, difficult truths. I asked her to say something about the choices she made in giving this occasion an embodiment in verse.

Take one birder and uncommon chance to observe a hawk for several minutes at close range, toss in an incurious passer-by, add the social awkwardness of the urban birder (there she is again, prowling around with her camera and binoculars) and you have the ingredients for an outburst of some kind. The default container for a birdwatcher’s excitement is, alas, comedy. But, truly, the woman with the stroller was stranger to me than the ravening bird—especially since I had the impression that she was travelling in a don’t-make-eye-contact capsule rather than consciously whisking her child past a gory sight. Ah, but the child. This adds a complication. But, while the baby is sleeping, let us agree—photographer and neighbour, poet and reader—to take a careful look at the thing and appreciate, for a moment, its startling beauty. This is what every birder wants—to leave the comic realm and draw the uninitiated closer; to say, Come look at this with me.

In general you seem the kind of poet for whom poems originate in the world of experience rather than ideas. An occasional poet! I know you have a collection coming out with Brick Books in 2022. Can you say something about it? Its title and arrangement? Would it be right to call you a nature poet as well?

It wouldn’t be wrong to call me a nature poet, as far as that goes, but I would ask the reader to leave in a basket by the door, along with her cell phone, all notions of nature as sanctuary or escape, and of the nature poem as a soothing interlude, even though these things can certainly be true. We are not tourists on the earth, and nature is where we are, not a place we go to (although wilderness may be). Some find terms such as “environmental poetry” and “ecopoetry” more satisfactory, reflecting attention to systems, habitats, human responsibility, and interconnectedness—and also, sadly, the difficulty of contemplating “nature” without also contemplating its ruin. (The loss of Eden is an old theme, but our present angst is undeniably acute.) Redefinitions of “wildness” and “wilderness” and concepts like “geopoetry” (see Don McKay) and “biophilia” (see a forthcoming issue of The Dalhousie Review, edited by David Huebert) might deliver us more precisely to our subject. Perhaps “biopoet” would serve to help jettison the baggage of nostalgia, privilege, and even colonialism that weighs down “nature appreciation.” One thing that nature poetry can’t do is escape its own historical moment—even as it contemplates the timeless or recurring. By that logic, can there be a pure category of “nature poetry?”

Al Purdy described the region of Ontario where I live—“The Country North of Belleville”—as “a little adjacent to where the world is.” I think of it as a little adjacent to the wild, and that’s what a lot of my poems are about: degrees of wildness and their proximity to the human-modulated world. Paying attention to this is important to me. But I’ve been thinking lately that my core subject is perhaps not “nature” so much as “time.” I often think about how socio-historical forces shape individual lives, and that comes up in some of the poems in the collection I’m working on with Brick Books. I’m at the very beginning of the process, so I don’t want to get ahead of author–editor discussions by being too specific. But the collection contains many adjacent-to-wildness pieces, various poems on familial and interpersonal relationships, and also—a departure for me—a sequence of dramatic monologues by real and imagined historical figures. Mind you, one of those characters is a famous nature-lover, and another is a wolf …

Photos courtesy of Anne Marie Todkill and Lawrence Wardroper.

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What is Kelsey Andrews Reading?

I’ve read many books lately that I’ve loved, but I’ll mention two here. One is the end of me by John Gould. A collection of very short fiction (“sudden stories” – great term!) each dealing in a different way with the question of mortality. It’s a funny and uplifting book despite the serious theme. There are so many great lines, I spent all my time reading bits of it aloud to my family, who were in line to read it next so I had to be careful not to spoil anything.

The other book I want to mention is Quarrels by Eve Joseph. I read it all in one sitting (in bed, when I should have been sleeping, a moth circling the bedside lamp). I couldn’t stop reading these short prose poems, each word carefully placed and faceted so that it shines, each poem running back into itself so it seems much bigger than its footprint on the page. They’re worthy of many rereads, and I’ve started a second go-through, giving myself a day or two between each poem so that I can really sink into them. The problem is they’re so more-ish it takes a real act of will not to turn the page.

Kelsey Andrews writes poetry and short fiction. She lives on Vancouver Island and loves, in no particular order, the moon, crows, getting a line exactly right after many drafts, and chocolate. Recently published in Prism, The Dalhousie Review, and The New Quarterly, her book of poetry, Big Sky Falling, has been accepted for publication by Ronsdale Press.

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Photos courtesy of Kelsey Andrew and Hoover Tung.

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