Finding the Form with Anne Hopkinson

“Testimony, March 3 2011”

I attended the Truth and Reconciliation hearings in Vancouver. It was overwhelming; the survivors, the stories, the crowd of indigenous people, the tears. At home I wrote pages and pages, all raw writing, a flood of sentences. I wrote by hand in a semi-legible scribble, drew arrows to connect ideas, doodled, crossed out words, and kept going until I was toast.

I read it over and remembered what Alex Leslie, Vancouver poet, had said years before in a writing workshop. She said, “Shrink your stories into poems.” Cut five pages of wild prose into three, then two, then one. The shrinking process makes you select the strongest words, clearest images, and most compelling ideas. At one page the writer decides either to write it as a poem or prose piece. I chose poetry. Which form brings out the theme, sound, and rhythm best, without dominating the meaning? I experimented with a few traditional forms first: pantoum, ghazal, sonnet. Betsy Warland says in Breathing the Page that to find the intrinsic form of your poem you must find a word or phrase that encapsulates the poem. Becoming an ally was my phrase. The skating theme was clear, and I chose which details of testimony I would use. Free verse felt right, content uppermost in the poem. Finding form includes finding voice. Because it was a personal day of reckoning, a day of remorse and shame, I had to write in first person. I had to face the truth myself in lines of poetry.

“Mother’s Day, Kigeme Refugee Camp”

This poem came from a diary I wrote while volunteering in Rwanda in 2014. I filled three notebooks in three weeks, some of it teaching material, some shopping lists, letters, Kinyarwanda vocabulary, and my observations of peoples’ lives in Rwanda after the genocide. I remembered what Ray Hsu, Vancouver poet, said about generating poetry. He said, “repurpose your work.” Take text you have already written and distill it into poetry. This worked well as I had already examined those feelings, sensations, and ideas in prose. My prose piece on the same material won the Non-Fiction prize for the Victoria Writing Society contest in 2019. I repurposed the text into poetry by focusing on one mother and her child. The time I spent in Kigeme refugee camp provided a bank of sensory information from which to draw. I chose free verse because of the gravity of the story. Denise Levertov calls it “fidelity to experience” when form and content integrate. The serious circumstances of women and children in that part of the world can’t be lightened by rhyme or compressed into a sonnet. There was too much to say for 14 lines. Free verse allowed me to make simple statements of the tasks she must do to survive – no clever wording or extended metaphor, no literary devices or tangents to dilute the meaning.