CONCRETE & RIVER

Arrested by Art: Gjertrud Schnackenberg's St. Matthew Passion

2024-12-31T13:04:00.008-05:00

Gjertrud Schnackenberg has been a good friend of Concrete & River over the years, so it seems fitting to wrap things up with some passages from her compelling new collection, St. Matthew Passion.

This book was my constant companion as I travelled back and forth from country to city every week this fall for work.

In eight that poems that move through the story developed in Bach's great oratorio, Schnackenberg embodies -- in luminous, musical language -- the experience of being arrested by art and ultimately expanded by it.

Here are some of the passages that keep singing to me. I hope they inspire you to go get this treasure of a book.

...

from A Rising Minor Sixth

Put out my eyes, and I can see you still

--Rilke

I try to pull away, but can't,

My coat drawn halfway on

And hanging crosswise in the back,

The empty sleeve fallen aslant,

Brushing the floor--I have to leave,

It's time, I've set

The afternoon aside for "taking care

Of things"--my scribbled lists

Of valueless, inconsequential errands,

Rounds of chores, and unavailing tasks

I can't put off, all things forgotten

Instantly as soon as taken care of.

But haunting me if left undone.

I have to leave. But when I try

To make my hand reach for the door,

It doesn't move. As if it isn't able to.

As if I had forgotten you, Jerusalem.

As if I could. Instead I stand

Arrested at the door, held in abeyance

By the music I left on.

Erbarme dich.

A rising minor sixth unseals the sound.

The violin, engulfed

By what has happened, brings the room

Into another state of being. A seventh sense.

Its aria, self-crucifying, brief,

Is trying to extend

A wordless vocal line

As if the violin caught sight

Of bonfire-lit Jerusalem

...

Aus Liebe

Each of us must bear our part

-- Chris Zimmerman, The Bruderhof

I need a heart of bronze for hearing this,

And not the lost wax melting off

Beneath a molten pour of sound

When, out of love,

A solo flute appears--

Appears, whether or not I've grown

Sick of the world, sick of the things

That people do, sick of the ache, and in the end

What difference does it make

That He has cast out every sickness,

Given what has happened.

Given this--

Why summon from the air the oxygen

That's needed for a last

Outflowing breath

Above a slowing pulse? And what

Can flutes accomplish? What do

Flutes have the ability to do?

Why draw a breath

Not even deep enough

For blowing out a candle flame

That cleaves aus liebe

To the wick it carbonizes

As it writhes, why take

Repeated shallow sips of oxygen,

And why array

The fragile respirations of a flute's

Expiring appoggiatura sighs

Against the site of massive violence

And abandonment at Golgotha,

And why apply circular breathing

To a frail lament that seems

To breathe itself into existence

For my joy and pleasure,

While Thou must suffer--

Though it's true

That, lifted to the lips, Bach's flutes pursue

The anguish to its source,

With tongue-assisted embouchure,

The way a tongue will touch,

Draw back,

Then touch again

A welling gap of sudden blood

No gauze can stanch

After an aching truth

Is torn out by the roots--

I take a breath, and move

To turn the music off, but stop myself,

Relenting, giving up

Because it's clear it doesn't matter

Whether I concede

The miracle that flutes,

For all their frailty,

Can overflow with truth

When human beings are themselves

Incapable of saying it--

The truth that each of us,

However frail, must bear our part--

The truth that he has held

The lead weight of your heart,

And weightless notes are capable

Of weighing it

Before they vanish off

To go wherever music goes

When nobody

On earth is playing it.

...

from Cataract Surgery, 1750

An oboe, nameless, bodiless, and footless,

Blind, alone,

Disworlds itself, intent

On moving past the end, intent

On following footfalls

Of steps another takes for us.

Nearly unheard. I have to leave--

But having overheard a fragile oboe

Drawing near its purpose--

A spirit passing through a wall, unhurt--

And without any feet can go to you--

My footstep stalls, midair, unable to.

...

Heartfelt thanks to all who have enjoyed, shared, and responded to Concrete & River over the years. I'm grateful for the community.

...

Find Gjertrud Schnackenberg's St. Matthew Passion at Arrowsmith Press or your favourite independent bookstore.

Posted by kind permission of the author

Sort of Sorcery: A Brief Q&A with Jessica Moore

2023-12-29T11:56:00.003-05:00

SUSAN GILLIS: The poem “In ten minutes, aside from what you write down on this paper, all your memories will be erased” emerges from a speculative proposition, assembling a wonderful (and achronological) catalogue of touchstones, playing with ideas of keeping and categorizing. I’m curious about how the poem works as assemblage. Does the act of remembering locate things in place and time for you, or does it dissolve those boundaries?

JESSICA MOORE: I do feel a specificity of place and time with each memory evoked. But I love this question about dissolving boundaries. The question of porousness – and motherhood, art, love, self, integrity – is foremost in my mind since giving birth to my twins and thinking about what it means to be so open, as a mother, and about the dangers (physical and otherwise) that loom when there are no boundaries. In the poem, the act of remembering does the work of locating, of situating specifics, but the poem does the work of dissolving boundaries. The poem places all these touchstones achronologically, as you say, leaping around in time and space, from four years old to forty, from the desert to a far-off continent to the furnace in the basement of my childhood home. And the you in the poem is every you, dissolving boundaries between people. The poem brings all these entities and moments and people into one assemblage of brightest, strangest, most joyous points.

In terms of keeping and categorizing, what interested me was that by choosing to keep certain memories, I was also choosing which ones to leave behind. And it really did feel like a sort of sorcery: if I could keep this but not this other part (the whales, but not my mother’s remove, for example), I could smooth out some of the most ensnaring moments and keep the euphoric ones. Poem as edit to life. But at the same time, by including on the page the memories that are ‘left behind,’ the poem becomes the kind of container I aspire to be myself – spacious enough to hold it all.

Re-reading it, I can really feel my mind moving around, roving over memory like a riverbank, peering around at first, and then becoming more breathless. But even as the poem picks up speed I see my mind pausing in pleasure, sitting down for a moment with this one or that one.

Poem as spell, to cast off the power of what was banal or painful; poem as a reminder of the shockingly sweet and simple pleasures of life – not abstract “life” but this one, this life I’m living.

Read "In ten minutes, aside from what you write down on this paper, all your memories will be erased"

Jessica Moore: In ten minutes, aside from what you write down on this paper, all your memories will be erased

2023-12-19T09:30:00.008-05:00

JESSICA MOORE

In ten minutes, aside from what you write down on this paper, all your memories will be erased

I would keep the dark basement, and I would keep the eye

of the furnace. I would keep the underwater, the click

of the needle, the soft pulse of toads

inside cupped hands

I would keep laughing till our bellies hurt

on the bus to your grandmother’s farm

The pig who ate the mitten. The weedy passages

between lakes, and that I wasn’t afraid

Stars above and snow beneath

the silent forest and my mother pulling the sled

Stars above and stars beneath

phosphorescence in the nighttime sea

I would keep my grandmother’s voice, you wicked girl

and fighting not to burst out laughing in the taxi

as the ancient driver jolted us to College and Bay

Her pale eyes smiling, the way she said my name

Coffee in tin cups and fire smoke

three crows and the gossamer

wings of clouds

Comfrey at the furthest back corner of the garden

Blue mornings and the shallow sound

of carrots pulling free

I would keep the closeness of women, and the island

where once we docked, brilliant dark blue lake

behind us, climbing up past yellow flowers

into a place all our own

I would keep the whales, but not my mother’s remove that day

I would keep the wolf who held my gaze. I would keep the tent walls beating

all around us but not the rest, not even the night you taught me to two-step

and not the time I wept beside creosote, antelope turning like birds

I would keep John Berger, a skin of water flowing continuously, the paragraphs

I set to memory after the terrible accident

The way I lean into you at the piano

which is the same way you dive into every single body of water

with something more heedless than faith

I would not keep the first kiss

—but I would keep that first kiss, oh god yes

and the worn wood floor in the Junction

and the gift of my own body given back, the spiral of my ear

I would keep the tandem bike, the bus station in Mexico

the wide window in your loft and the smell of bread rising

The night we began, every night we began, the promise

and the moment just before—

Would I keep all I’ve learned since you died?

I would keep that thing I’m always chasing which is the wild aliveness pulsing just behind things, and you can’t look for it, just like the smell of those grasses somewhere in South Carolina so drifting and sweet there was nothing to do but lay down, winds combing us, and wait

I would keep the dream that woke me, pregnant, a shining inside like a lamp

before I remembered the gray

(but really, I have never felt more clearly such joy in a single moment, and it was like a lamp

placed there so I might remember)

I would keep holding you on my chest, two months old, that same light radiating through us

Getting stranded on the sandbank when the tide came in, I would keep that too

I would keep dancing, yes that, and the way the desert sky has blown me open

even to such a keening edge. I would keep singing, every harmony ever swallowed

and every rhythm learned in my limbs, the black dog in the night

and the floors of the barn covered in sweet gale

I would keep almost leaving my body, laughing at the trick

I would keep the edge of the cliff

Read Jessica Moore on porousness and the making of this poem in our brief Q&A.

(First published in Arc 100. Shared by permission of the author)

Conyer Clayton: One Question & A Poem

2023-11-16T08:30:00.006-05:00

Conyer Clayton's beguilingly-titled, award-winning But the sun, and the ships, and the fish, and the waves is a collection of prose poems that visit dreamscape and the surreal.

The title's line-up of items is beguiling in itself, sharpened with hesitation (those commas!) and linkage (those ands!). Then there's that opening But, skewing it all toward hazard: uncertainty, contradiction, protest, resistance.

This poem, for example, swerves through a shifting present with an observing and questioning eye:

I asked Conyer Clayton about the work titles do in their poems, and their process of creating them.

"I am notoriously bad at coming up with book titles, usually relying on my editors or friends or partner to help me figure it out at the last minute, ha! But clearly, I love a long book title. This one simply felt right because it evokes the feelings, for me, of constant continuation, disorientation, and being unsure of one’s safety. Is this a safe haven or a place of danger? All the images could lean either way. I guess the answer for how I come up with book titles is that I fail at it for a very long time, and then someone else suggests a really good one, and I’m like whoa. Yup. That’s it.

"As for poem titles, I find these easier and they usually come quickly in the aftermath of a first draft. I think what they do on a craft level somewhat differs for each poem, but maybe what they have in common is that I’m trying to add something to the overall experience of the poem, not necessarily sum the poem up."

Conyer Clayton (Curtis Perry photo)

Conyer Clayton is an award-winning writer and editor whose multi-genre work explores grief, disability, addiction, and gender-based violence, often through a surrealist lens. They are the author of But the sun, and the ships, and the fish, and the waves (Winner of the Archibald Lampman Award, Anvil Press) and We Shed Our Skin Like Dynamite (Winner of the Ottawa Book Award, Guernica Editions), and an editor for Augur and untethered magazine.

In Memoriam, Louise Glück

2023-10-13T17:27:00.078-04:00

13 October, 2023 -- Today I am mourning, like many, and in the midst of many griefs, the loss of the great poet Louise Glück. Her poems have been my steady companions throughout my writing life. Her last book of poems, Winter Recipes from the Collective, haunts me.

From "Night Thoughts,"

Long ago I was born.
There is no one alive anymore

who remembers me as a baby.

And from "Poem,"

Day and night come

hand in hand like a boy and a girl

pausing only to eat wild berries out of a dish

painted with pictures of birds.

The pared language, the images scoured of excess, yet tender, so tender, those berries in a painted dish, the familiar movement of day and night, the way her thoughts move - how will I manage without any more new Louise Glück poems?

Ten years ago when I started this catalogue of reading poems and trying to speak about them, or at least about the reading, I began with Louise Glück's "Telescope." My second post was Louise Glück's "Summer Night." The third, a few words about "Summer Night."

The friends I had asked for feedback on my project suggested I branch out, in case people thought it was a blog about Louise Glück.

In a way, though, it is. Her poems are among my best teachers and guides. Each poem, each time I return to it, speaks with depth and freshness that seem both familiar and new.

As this, from "Summer Night,"

Desire, loneliness, wind in the flowering almond—

surely these are the great, the inexhaustible subjects
to which my predecessors apprenticed themselves.
I hear them echo in my own heart, disguised as convention.

Balm of the summer night, balm of the ordinary,
imperial joy and sorrow of human existence,
the dreamed as well as the lived—
what could be dearer than this, given the closeness of death?

That great poems speak through the ages is a truism. Louise Glück's poems prove its truth.

Long live Louise Glück!

Hideko Kono: Three Poems for Hiroshima

2023-08-04T01:30:00.004-04:00

Yumie Kono, "Zone of Atomic Blast, Hiroshima, 1945 August 6, 8.15 A.M."

YAKEATO MO

MANATSU NO AME WA

FURI SOSOGU

NURE HIKARERU WA

DARE NO HONE ZOMO

the land is burning

and the middle summer's rain

steadily drizzling

wet and glistening those ones

whose bones are they? I wonder

"What happened immediately after the atomic bombing in Hiroshima needed to be recorded," writes Hideko Kono in the preface to Genbaku no Uta: Poetry after the Atomic Bomb. "I wrote down my Tanka poems in one breath."

Reaching from the smallest details to cosmic vastness, these searing poems map the shock and grief of devastating loss. Personal loss -- Kono's husband and youngest son were killed in the bombing -- merges with loss of place, community, fellow beings; the devastation of land sits beside devastated lives and futures.

OBITADASHIKU

GYŪBA TAORESHI

KAWASUNA O

MICHISHIO NAREBA

HITASHI YUKUNARI

a multitude of

cows and horses have fallen

in the river sand

as the tide is coming in

they are immersed in water

Originally published in Kono's 1967 collection MICHI (The Road), these poems are now available in a beautifully produced Japanese-English edition, translated by Yumie Kono and Ariel O'Sullivan.

For more than a decade, Hideko Kono's daughter, artist Yumie Kono, worked with poet Ariel O'Sullivan to bring the sixty poems collected here into English. The translation project grew out of a performance piece they developed, together with artist Wendy Skog, incorporating ten of the poems in the original Japanese arranged for multiple voices.

"I always wished to write down my experience of the war for my children," Hideko Kono writes in her original preface. Yumie's inherited urgency, she writes in her Foreword, is "to share her poetry so that readers will gain an understanding of one family's experience of war and the atomic bomb."

IKARI NIMO

TSUKARESHI WARERA

HITOMORI NO

HONE ITADAKI TE

KAERI KITARINU

with anger we are

exhausted and have agreed

to one bowl's amount

of these designated bones

we go back where we came from

Installation by Yumie Kono. Image courtesy of Rebecca Leroux

Ariel O'Sullivan and Yumie Kono at the Victoria BC launch. Image courtesy of Rebecca Leroux

Installation by Yumie Kono. Image courtesy of Rebecca Leroux

"When the bomb was dropped the heat drove the school children into the river," writes Ariel O'Sullivan. "Everything disintegrated except the school uniform buttons. They glistened in the water."

The cover depicts bronze sculptures of the buttons cast by Yumie Kono.

Genbaku no Uta is available from Munro's Books and Amazon. To order a signed copy, use the contact form in the left sidebar drop-down menu.

Hello from the Ocean: Ecotone 33

2023-06-21T09:30:00.001-04:00

Vanessa Barragão, Bleached Coral, 2022
Repurposed/discarded wool & lyocell, jute, LED lighting

"Hello from the ocean," reads the first line of editor Anna Lena Phillips Bell's letter in a recent issue of Ecotone, the North Carolina-based literary journal focused on place.

As a reader and writer born and raised in Nova Scotia ("Canada's Ocean Playground"), ardent tideline shell-seeker, and fan of Sue Goyette's book-length poem Ocean, I opened this themed issue with appetite, and have kept it close at hand for weeks now.

There's a lot of beauty bursting out of its pages, especially Vanessa Barragão's incredibly intricate works in repurposed fibre, and no small amount of sober reflection on the climate crisis in prose and poetry.

The pages I keep going back to, though (so often the journal falls open there), are three poems by poet and novelist Yuko Taniguchi. "Two Views (After Tsunami)", "A House's View" and "Fishes' View" reach inside me the way few poems do. They turn inside out everything I know about tsunami and other other climate events experienced as human disasters. They locate me in the heart of tsunami -- and in doing so, locate tsunami stories in my heart.

I can't imagine a more complete reimagining of place than this. To see more of Yuko Taniguchi's work, and other content from this issue, visit Ecotone 33.

Yuko Taniguchi

A HOUSE'S VIEW

It feels strange to become a boat.

I was the house for a fisherman's family for five generations.

The men got up early while the outside was dark,

fished all day and came home.

They took hot baths in my tub

and slept on my tatami floor.

Sinking down into the ocean, I am filled

with the scent of their hands.

Vanessa Barragão, Botanical (detail), 2018-2019
Repurposed /discarded wool & lyocell, jute

Words and images by kind permission of the editors and makers. Please visit and support Ecotone: Reimagining Place

Also No Fear: On Carl Phillips's "Cathedral"

2023-05-09T07:30:00.000-04:00

Carl Phillips
CATHEDRAL

And suddenly - strangely - there was also no fear, either.

As a horse in harness to what, inevitably, must break it.

No torch; no lantern - and yet no hiddenness, now. No hiding.

Leaves flew through where the wind sent them flying.

(from Double Shadow, quoted in "Politics," My Trade is Mystery, Yale 2022)

____

What strikes me first: the poem's immediacy. "Cathedral" enters its subject without preamble, calls itself from the page directly to my imagination. Something has just happened, resulting in an absence of fear and hiding (along with something else, unnamed beyond “also”). Whatever it is involves breaking, darkness, and, paradoxically, exposure. Event or turn of thought, it happens off stage.

The poem articulates a precise moment of shift by pinning it to stasis, to a now in which a just then is implied. Not a lantern going out; just, no lantern. Not fear rushing out; simply no fear. And "no hiddenness, now."

The only physical movement is seen in the leaves, which have been sent flying. (When? I feel it as just a moment ago.) In this place of stillness, the action of the wind is ferocious: those leaves weren't just stirring, but flying. And not just flying; sent flying.

As if in their wake, the poem begins.

____

As if the force acting on the leaves has acted on the speaker, to remove fear, shadow, hiding.... As if inevitable.

It matters that the self is without fear, not fearless, a term that implies brave action.

____

I'm struck by the poem's voice, its sure-footedness (almost equine) as each line moves through phrase, through pause, towards its end, picks up again at each beginning.

There’s a whole catalogue of resonances this strikes for me: Kinds of transcendence I've read in Cavafy (in translation; it makes me want a Carl Phillips Cavafy!). Formal echoes of the Tang poets (also in translation): situation, recognition, observation. Those leaves, wind-blown not only through place, but through their own flying! And some of the mystery Alice Oswald captures in Nobody, in long lines built on simile; I'm tossed into essential strangeness and set down in the eternally happening moment.

____

I first encountered "Cathedral" in Phillips's essay "Politics," on the fraught subject of poetry and identity. Offering it as a closing argument, Phillips asks, "Is this a Black poem? A queer poem? Why or why not and who says." Read in this context, the poem exceeds such markers, soars into metaphysical realms.

It’s also the closing poem of the intense and intimate collection Double Shadow. In this context, the space of the book, where identity markers are more traceable, where things are at once themselves and other, seeming and shifting, corporeality is more pronounced, and the poem's giving-over feels ultimate.

Which "Cathedral" is richer? The one I’m reading as a stand-alone? Or the one I’m reading in its community of poems about being and the world, the body, love, the wilderness of existence? The poem performs a wonderful illusion, a trick of light: seen from one angle, it's a glossy leaf. Seen from another, it's veined and granular. Each version outshines its particulars.

____

So, a few more notes: Tolstoy's Prince Andrei under a lofty sky, in awe, waiting for his death (which doesn't come just then, only later). The young strongman tied up in Gwendolyn MacEwan's ravishing "Manzini: Escape Artist", the ropes transformed into his very body, the observer's awe "now there are no bonds except the flesh." (In "Cathedral," the stakes are raised; the body itself becomes the means of liberation.)

And (in a stretch, maybe too much, but it persists, turns up in more than one poem in this book), Donne of the Holy Sonnets, restless and testing, transcendent, marrying the corporeal to the holy.

____

Years ago in a classroom a student struggling to recall the word body arrived at charnel envelope. Phillips's way of transcendence - through the body - reminds me of this.

____

Carl Phillips's most recent book is Then the War: And Selected Poems 2007-2020, winner of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

Image of Carl Phillips by Reston Allen.

"Cathedral" appears by permission of the author.

Visit carlphillipspoet.com

Frances Boyle: A Poem

2023-04-24T09:40:00.002-04:00

Frances Boyle

The Sky is Unnatural

Shrovetide, the banishing of winter

A morning of dawn-treading,

a rented cottage, a marshy lake.

Yawning noon after sleepwalking. A parade

of tiny ants, redolent of old rites, fears

converted to straw-stuffed rags.

A rough-made doll.

Blue-black vibrations, worn-out moon

wanes. Two fish—no, there’s a third—

whiskery fish invisible in water, bump

against logs.

The abstract shame that surfaces

in memory, a shape filled by twisting

vines that grow along my nerve endings

as a bounty of zucchini spreads

in the cold frame.

I check

my phone the way I used to smoke:

to distract, to pull myself away from intensity

to boredom.

The jar

empties, the jar will refill, and a courgette

seems to be a cucumber when I reach

for it in the crisper.

The sturgeon bright, the salmon bright,

but which is which? The way I look

at the bathing

moon realigns my face to the active crime

of not knowing. The sky is unnatural.

If this shell

is hard to drink from, I’ll scoop up

what’s calm, what’s beautiful. I’ll place

gladiolas on this beribboned doll, the burning

Marzanna, fill her arms

with poppies. But I must not

look upon the effigy, drowned, aflame,

or s\he’ll inhabit me.

I shift

from complicity to focus, a ghostly habit.

Hairy stems, scraps of red

will mark her whelming, and mine.

The Marzanna sits up, ripples wash. And I

surge upward, rise from the shallows, grasping

vines that float upon my palms.

from Openwork and Limestone, by permission

Frances Boyle’s most recent book is Openwork and Limestone (Frontenac House 2022). Her first novel, Skin Hunger, is forthcoming from The Porcupine’s Quill in 2024. Raised on the prairies, Frances has long lived in Ottawa on unceded and unsurrended Algonquin Anishinaabeg territory. Visit her at www.francesboyle.com.

Photo by Miranda Krogstad

Dreamy Liquidity: Frances Boyle Reads Gwendolyn MacEwen

2023-04-24T09:40:00.000-04:00

Gwendolyn MacEwen

Dark Pines Under Water

This land like a mirror turns you inward
And you become a forest in a furtive lake;
The dark pines of your mind reach downward,
You dream in the green of your time,
Your memory is a row of sinking pines.

Explorer, you tell yourself, this is not what you came for
Although it is good here, and green;
You had meant to move with a kind of largeness,
You had planned a heavy grace, an anguished dream.

But the dark pines of your mind dip deeper
And you are sinking, sinking, sleeper
In an elementary world;
There is something down there and you want it told.

(from The Shadow-Maker. Toronto: Macmillan, 1969

and Gwendolyn MacEwen Volume One: The Early Years, Exile Editions, 1993)

Frances Boyle writes: Gwendolyn MacEwen’s “Dark Pines Under Water” has long been one of my favourites but I at first hesitated to claim it. The poem has been so extensively anthologized and analyzed that I assumed everyone must be familiar with it. But, when a thread on Twitter earlier this year highlighted three of MacEwen’s poems as “Forgotten Good Poems”, I realized that collective memory can be short, and that it’s worth re-focusing attention on formative poems.

I love this poem for many reasons. The landscape that is both interior and lushly physical. The way the tempo and syntax changes from verse to verse, from line to line, with dreamy liquidity alongside ponderous weight. The enjambment of “sleeper / In an elementary world” among largely end-stopped lines. The knells of the true rhyme in the first two lines of the last stanza, and the slant and near rhymes throughout. The repetition of phrases and words: “the dark pines of your mind”, “sinking”, “dream” and “green”, all evoking the mirror of the first line’s simile. The reader feels the pull of these psychological depths; from the outset “inward” is paired with “downward”. But what “kind of largeness”, what “heavy grace”, what “anguished dream” did the “you” of the poem make a journey to find before being drawn down to tell, or witness a telling?

Among all the compelling elements of “Dark Pines Under Water”, for me the passionate insistence of the last line and its probing of mystery remains the most resonant. MacEwen’s luxurious imagery coalesces in the urgency of the truth-seeking.

Read Frances's poem "The Sky is Unnatural" here

A Certain Day: Beth Follett and the Intimacy of Voice

2023-04-12T09:30:00.038-04:00

I begin this practice by choosing three poems—the two below, and a third, “Beads,” by Olga Sedakova, translated from the Russian by Martha Kelly. I read each one aloud, to experience the poem through the intimacy of my own voice, my own body.

My Debt (Jane Hirshfield)

Like all 
who believe in the senses,  I was an accountant,  copyist, 
statistician.

Not registrar,  witness.

Permitted to touch  the leaf of a thistle,  the trembling 
work of a spider.

To ponder the Hubble’s recordings.

It did not matter 
if I believed in 
the party of particle or of wave,  as I carried no weapon.

It did not matter if I believed.

I weighed ashes, 
actions, 
cities that glittered like rubies,  on the scales I was given,  calibrated 
in units of fear and amazement.

I wrote the word it, the word is.

I entered the debt that is owed to the real.

Forgive, 
spine-covered leaf, soft-bodied spider, 
octopus lifting 
one curious tentacle back toward the hand of the diver  that in such black ink 
I set down your flammable colours.

—from Ledger (Knopf, 2020)

**
Variation on a Theme by Rilke (Denise Levertov)

A certain day became a presence to me; 

there it was, confronting me — a sky, air, light: 
a being. And before it started to descend 
from the height of noon, it leaned over 
and struck my shoulder as if with 
the flat of a sword, granting me 
honour and a task. The day's blow 
rang out, metallic — or it was I, a bell awakened,  and what I heard was my whole self 
saying and singing what it knew: I can.

— from Breathing the Water (New Directions, 1987)

The two poems included here are the ones to land in me with considerable emotional force, particularly Denise Levertov’s. So hers is the one I choose to write about for Concrete & River.

(I encourage you to read both poems aloud, to see if one opens you up to more subtle responses, either emotional or somatic. Drop any attempt to understand the poem in the reading, and simply pay attention to how it lands. A resonance in the voice, perhaps, a long pause, a concertina-ed awareness of time during the speaking of a phrase, can help us to develop valuable lines of inquiry as we pursue poems further and more deeply.)

I directed a Creative Writing program for seven years at a children’s art camp. Many times I read aloud Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, for the beauty of the lines, yes, and also for its theme of the pursuit of the difficult. He writes, “It is clear that we must trust what is difficult; everything alive trusts in it, everything in Nature grows and defends itself any way it can and is spontaneously itself, tries to be itself at all costs and against all opposition. We know little, but that we must trust in what is difficult is a certainty that will never abandon us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be one more reason for us to do it.” Was difficulty the theme Levertov wished to explore? I wonder. There is her word ‘confront.’ There are her words ‘struck,’ ‘blow,’ ‘sword.’ A confrontation. A disruption. By a being equal to the sun’s immensity.

And what is the sun? Our very livelihood, our clock, our daily bread.

The speaker’s experience is singular. A ‘certain day.’ Not every day or any day, but a profound, life-changing day on which she awakens to capacity, to ‘can.' A bell-ringing awakening, such as on an Easter or Christmas morning. I have read that Levertov considered herself Christian, which may help us as we interrogate the metaphor of the bell, though other religions use bells to call their practitioners to prayer.

The speaker is ‘struck’ by the presence of a being as by a queen who grants knighthood, and by that strike experiences an awakening, an honour bestowed, and a task. What is the task?

Perhaps the speaker’s task is to question the experience of waking into self-knowledge and of the singular transition from ‘ cannot' to ‘ can,' the experience itself being the honour. She felt a presence, she saw it, she heard it. And thereafter she said it, she sang it. She did not overlook it, she did not keep the experience to herself. It may be a poet’s task to say, to sing, to ‘ring the bells that still can ring’ — to be bell.

And how beautiful, that Levertov’s poem, published in 1987, rings down the years to reanimate the reader who comes upon the poem, as I did, unwittingly, on a certain day recently, striking me as the very thing I needed to recommit to ‘my whole self.’

It strikes us, we say. An honour. And a task.

—Beth Follett

BETH FOLLETT lives in St. John’s NL. Her novel Instructor, published by Breakwater in 2021, was longlisted for the 2022 NL Book Award for Fiction, and won Bronze in Literary Fiction, Forward Indies Awards.

The Answer is Purple: Maria Gacesa in Conversation

2023-04-06T09:40:00.001-04:00

Maria Gacesa chatted with me about her creative practice and her poem “Aria on the 3:50 to St-Lambert.”

SUSAN GILLIS: How did you find your way to poetry--or it to you?

MARIA GACESA: Ms Mitchell had a copy of Where the Sidewalk Ends in my grade 3 classroom, so Shel Silverstein very likely had something to do with it. Also, English is not my parents’ mother tongue (though it is mine), so issues around language and word play were a big part of growing up, as was letter writing—I had several long-term pen pals.

Poetry, specifically, is attractive to me because I think it allows access to an expressive mode most similar to dance and music, both of which play into my practice in life and art. Practising life! Yes!

SG: Music “revisits things”, the poem says, and then shows a series of likenesses, both heard and seen, that music seems to be giving shape to, at least in part. I’m curious: when you’re out in the world, does the environment shape the music you’re listening to on a device, if you are doing that? Or maybe the other way around, does the music you’re listening to shape the environment?

MG: Trying to answer this question is a bit like taking that right-brain / left-brain test that asks whether you see the horse walking backwards or forwards. Strange as it is, the answer is purple. I don’t generally listen to anything while I’m walking, but will occasionally listen to music when I find myself on public transit, like I was when I wrote Aria. The music and environment combine into something new, then remain alloyed in my memory.

SG: What’s currently on your am-reading/am-listening list?

MG: I’m hooked on the CBC PlayME podcast. The audio plays are superbly produced—truly "bingeable audio dramas,” just as advertised, and there are SO many.

For the last year I’ve been listening to Ann Southam’s Rivers sets for solo piano on repeat. Its effect on me is grounding; their basic matter must have become as intrinsic to Southam as her own DNA, such was her commitment to this masterwork of endless, painstaking creativity. Infinity in confined spaces, indeed.

Lastly, it must be spring because I’ve also been happily immersed in the gorgeous sensory world of Pluviophile by Yusuf Saadi.

Maria Gacesa is a writer and classical musician. Her poetry has appeared in The Lyric Magazine and her one-act play, “MOTH," was a prizewinner in the 2021 Norma Epstein Foundation for Creative Writing Awards. She works in arts advocacy and education at The Préville Fine Arts Centre, on Montreal’s South shore. Read "Aria on the 3:50 to St-Lambert" here.

Self-portrait by Maria Gacesa

Maria Gacesa: A Poem

2023-04-06T09:35:00.000-04:00

Maria Gacesa

ARIA ON THE 3:50 TO ST-LAMBERT

All of this from two hands one heart

phrases discourse digress

never one direct line rarely

the bombast of surety

music is insecure maybe

it revisits things

like Philip Glass counting

you take for granted a pattern for predictable so turn your head

and you’re somewhere new

The wheels orbit below in time like the aria

deliberate like the one-way signs the piles of snow and the John Deeres lined up in the lot

like the patio set left as though someone just stepped inside for another bottle of wine

then it snowed

___

Maria Gacesa in conversation: "Poetry, specifically, is attractive to me because I think it allows access to an expressive mode most similar to dance and music, both of which play into my practice in life and art..."

Maria Gacesa is a writer and classical musician. Her poetry has appeared in The Lyric Magazine and her one-act play, “MOTH," was a prizewinner in the 2021 Norma Epstein Foundation for Creative Writing Awards. She works in arts advocacy and education at The Préville Fine Arts Centre, on Montreal’s South shore.

Tolu Oloruntoba: A Poem

2023-03-29T09:30:00.010-04:00

Tolu Oloruntoba

AD79

The Vesuvius horse --

a gelding, obviously --

harnessed still and petrified

these 1940 years,

is saddled for the ride

the masters never made

to the mountains.

All that grooming and shoeing,

to be bound still, even in death.

Archaeologists will find us

encased, one in tent city

tarp, the other half

in Styrofoam, chained

to phone cable and extension cord,

winning the penultimate round,

but losing the last together,

obviously, as old stars

and new satellites bear witness

to our time-lapse:

glowing, whisking, gone already.

-- from The Junta of Happenstance, by permission

Tolu Oloruntoba notes that this poem is based on the story of the archaeological find of the Vesuvius horse in excavations at the site of the Pompeii eruption.

Time collapses. Look once, look again. Where are we when the future comes looking? What are we bound to?

Dazzling language here and all through this book. And after the dazzlement, such depths! Thanks to Tolu and Palimpsest Press for permission to reproduce this poem.

Sarah Yi-Mei Tsiang: A Poem

2023-03-17T10:49:00.003-04:00

Sarah Yi-Mei Tsiang

#METOO

"Language is the house with lamplight in its windows / visible

across the fields...."

--Anne Michaels

Language is the house with lamplight in its windows

but the body is a grassy field

filled to the brim with starlight.

Slip among the dark blades --

you are that creature

who is both prey

and predator. Lamplight is

a caged fury. Wouldn't this house

look brilliant on fire,

an imploding

star,

reaching out?

from Grappling Hook (Palimpsest / Anstruther, 2022), by permission

On David O'Meara's "Days"

2023-02-16T13:41:00.001-05:00

Ottawa poet David O'Meara taking a short break

The question that launches David O'Meara's poem "Days" turns on how we move through time and what we carry with us, as knowledge and memory of place, event and identity. "Something" we've forgotten nags when we go out, like a black box signalling the location of wreckage. That familiar discomfort: what did we leave behind? Not just what did we forget to bring, but what is it, there, that we're putting at a distance?

"Days" is one of a dozen and a half poems in Masses on Radar that take a mirroring four-stanza form, a three-liner followed by a four-liner, then the reverse. Placed among poems whose forms are more open, more like certain kinds of walks, they bring a grounding grace to the collection, rest stops for the mind where it can pause for a short ritual. This formal range -- which includes an elegy composed in quietly chiming couplets -- is one of the many things I admire and enjoy about this book.

In "Days," the not-quite-remembered may not be signalled by the black box of wreckage, but instead by a transforming "high voice" calling down the long streets of the past, across time and place, across experience and gathered knowledge. At the centre, a casual demand for proof of identity and belonging, like a decoy from the poem's recognition that we think we can go out and come back and nothing will be changed. We forget, for awhile, while time is suspended, that it is also passing and has passed, that everything changes and has changed. We go on, the poem tells us, as though nothing has changed. The high voice, like the voice of the dead or the divine, calls out across time and place, across history. The jolt of the particular: "as if we'd rush back," across continents and a decade, to "my father still alive" among the mundane and familiar.

How strange, the way we carry on with our lives after anything happens, loss especially, almost, but not quite, as though it hasn't happened. That's the "ah" of recognition I keep coming back to when I read this poem.

DAVID O'MEARA: A POEM

2023-02-16T13:00:00.001-05:00

David O'Meara

DAYS

We keep forgetting something back there, don't we?

We pop out the door, turn corners, the shops unchanged,

but data nags like a black box has signalled

from the wreckage, or a high voice is calling down

a long street across medians of statued piazzas,

river bends, concert halls (vertigo in the nosebleeds), barista

beards at homogeneous counters, X-rayed luggage,

passport please, carousel fatigue, caffeinated reveries in taxis,

the balcony's very non-sea view, our frugal mattress picnics

watching own-goals in stoppage time, the must-sees we didn't, phone

calls, emails, our return's fine-toothing of apartment vacancies

with thoughts that nothing would change, as if we'd rush back

through traffic, across three continents, a decade, to find

my father still alive, the cat at its bowl, and the iron left on.

from Masses on Radar (Coach House, 2021). Reproduced with permission of the author

SHERI BENNING: FIELD REQUIEM, THREE PARTS

2023-02-02T10:00:00.008-05:00

SHERI BENNING

from Let Them Rest (Field Requiem)

…dies illa

Solvet sæclum in favilla

- Dies Irae

1 Zephaniah

It’s true what they say. We were warned:

everything will be swept away,

everything consumed. Winter-killed

perch, walleye, pike, white bellies,

slack flags. Thousands

washed ashore at Stoney Lake –

fertilizer run-off,

nitrogen, phosphorous,

blue-green algae bloom.

℟. It’s true. We were warned.

Everything swept away.

Everything consumed. Sky bled dry

of midges. Locusts, bees, neurons frayed.

Antiseptic silence of canola

fields at dusk, muted

grasshopper thrum.

℟. Our blood poured out like dust.

Swept away. Consumed.

Empty Barn Swallow nests

in rafters and eaves.

The Western Meadowlark’s throat,

an open grave. Neonic-coated

soybean, canola, sunflower, wheat.

White Crown Sparrows,

migration delayed,

anorexic, compass lost.

℟. A land possessed of nettles and salt.

Psalm 130

Chemical burnoff after frost,

cocklebur, clubroot spores,

flixweed, lamb’s-quarters,

LibertyLink® patent fees,

canola seed treated

for flea beetles,

Longtrel™ for dandelion

and thistle. At night,

the wives sit,

shoulders hunched,

at kitchen tables,

divine

profit margins

with calculators and lines

of credit from Wells Fargo –

If south winds don’t blow in waves

of diamondback moths. If winter kills

the pupae of bertha armyworms.

If sun. If rain.

If crop insurance premium rates.

If 25 bushels an acre to pay input costs.

At night, the wives wait.

They count their bones

as the moon pours out.

NW 18 36 22 W2nd

Gather in the summer fallowed south field.

Winter-stiff furrows. No moon. No snow.

Overcast. Hold hands.

Farm subsidies smashed by Intercontinental Packers,

Big Sky Pork Farms. Our barns now their finishing

pens for 10 000 pigs from 1000 sows.

No moon. No snow. No yard-lights for miles,

like an eye put out. Hold hands. We are

but breath, but chaff, what passes

and does not come again.

Sheri Benning's most recent collection of poetry, Field Requiem (Carcanet 2021) was shortlisted for the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry and the Pat Lowther Memorial Award. Her poems have appeared in numerous North American and European journals. She grew up on a farm in Treaty 6 territory and currently teaches creative writing at the University of Saskatchewan.

FRAGMENT, PUNCTURE, TIME: GILLIAN SZE IN CONVERSATION

2023-01-27T12:34:00.001-05:00

Poet-scholar Gillian Sze's Quiet Night Think fuses prose and lyric into a hybrid whole that meditates on place, identity, tradition, adaptation, what to hold and how, and the language these things are filtered through. We chatted recently by email about how the book took shape and what's ahead.

SUSAN GILLIS: I’m struck by your ease of movement through the book’s meditations in prose and poetry on its interwoven subjects of language and culture, family, transitions and becoming. Where did this collection begin for you, and at what point did you begin to conceive of it as hybrid whole? (aside: autotype called it a coolection)

GILLIAN SZE: The collection (coolection!) began with the title essay, “Quiet Night Think.” I was asked to write about writing and I found myself thinking about that early encounter with poetry. Li Bai’s poem clearly made an impact. I was working on my dissertation at the time, and I found it so enjoyable to write something that wasn’t purely poetry nor purely academic. The essay just felt like an easy wandering into languages and time.
When I proposed the book to the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, I envisioned it as a book of essays. In the end, when I was putting the essays together, I discovered that the poems I was also writing during this time intersected well, both in tone and subject. So much of writing during early motherhood is fragmented and interrupted. It felt right that the essays would also be punctured with these slivers of poems.

SG: There’s a passage in “The Hesitant Gaze,” on looking at art and writing from that looking, that could be about the guiding project of this book: “while my looking was stuck in our own linear time...in poetry, I could fold, replay, imagine and extend the lines of time and movement any which way.” How does this way of writing in conversation with art inform or overlap for you with writing as a new mother?

GS: So much about time didn’t make sense after becoming a parent. The baby had to sort out day from night. Until then I would just stare up into the dark with a curious wide-eyed baby while everyone else was asleep. In some ways I had a lot of time, taking a break from the demands of a “regular” life, and yet I also had so little, thrust into meeting the constant demands of someone else. I had time to think, but I also wasn’t always awake enough to remember my thoughts. An idea would sometimes return, feeling new or strange or half-understood. And all the while my children, these all-consuming, ever-changing little beings, received my attention. They, like other art objects, became (and continue to be) vital points connecting me to an unforeseeable world.

SG: I love your image in “That Inverted World” of sleep as a ribbon, now punctuated. Now that you’ve returned to teaching, can we assume you’ve conquered the most disruptive influences of sleeplessness ? What’s next for you as a writer?

GS: It’s taken years but my sleeping has certainly improved! I’m still writing poetry but have recently fallen in love with writing for children. Next year I have three picture books coming out, including the board book, When Sunlight Tiptoes.The poem, written in pantoum form, celebrates the new day and is accompanied by Soyeon Kim’s enchanting artwork.

Read Gillian Sze's poem "Current"

HELLO, 2023

2022-12-30T16:02:00.003-05:00

Paul Rode, Brenda Reading (oil on board, circa 1985)

During 2021 and 2022, serving on two Canadian poetry awards committees, I was stirred in wide-ranging ways by more books and individual poems than could be encompassed by lists long or short.

I'm grateful for this wealth of poetry, which is enormous.

Some of those poems will show up here in the coming year.

To close out 2022, here's "Current" by Gillian Sze. Look for our conversation about this poem coming up in January.

GILLIAN SZE: A POEM

2022-12-30T15:17:00.001-05:00

Gillian Sze

CURRENT

And you are ever again the wave

sweeping through all things.

--Rilke (II.3)

In a single gust, it seems,

the leaves yellow

and one evening, I find the maple bare,

the last of summer burnished.

The trees know no vanity.

I walk around a manmade lake

and tell my son

that the birch kept growing

just to meet him.

Pay attention, the boughs sigh.

It is against trees that I measure

the dawning of his life

as an arc of a single ring.

An ocean over,

a mulberry tree stands in the same spot

as it did twelve hundred years ago,

for the most part ignored

until everything around it was replaced

with stones and gods,

and someone ran a hand over its surface,

recognized patience, vast and slow.

Somewhere, as it's done each fall,

a moose rubs its antlers among the trees,

branch against branch.

My son wonders up

at the new starkness of the maple,

the exposed scaffolding of autumn.

You lift a fallen prong of bones

and begin to work,

naming and renaming

each leafless thing.

Gillian Sze notes: "Current" is a poetic response to Shane Wilson's sculpture, Gaia (2009), reproduced by permission of the artist.

"Current" is from Quiet Night Think (ECW, 2022). Read my conversation with Gillian Sze.

FIERCELY LANGUAGE RESISTS: MICHELLE GIL-MONTERO IN CONVERSATION

2022-09-20T08:02:00.002-04:00

Michelle Gil-Montero (photo: Dawn Zacharias)

Earlier this year I found my way to Michelle Gil-Montero's brilliant translation of Edinburgh Notebook / Cuaderno de Edimburgo by Mexican poet Valerie Mejer Caso. The notebook is a body, a landscape of grief and dying, of vanished paths. In the landscape (in the body) are mountains, shadowy ponds, quicksand, clouds compressing time, hallucinatory apparitions and transformations.

SUSAN GILLIS: How did you decide to take on this project? Did the book find you or did you find it?

MICHELLE GIL-MONTERO: I had recently translated Mejer Caso’s This Blue Novel, another book that confronts death and loss, and I really wanted to continue with her work. As soon as I began to read Edinburgh Notebook, I recognized a relationship between the two books that compelled me to translate Edinburgh Notebook next. At first glance, the books are pretty different—formally, and in scope. This Blue Novel is a sweeping long poem that maps generational trauma, while Edinburgh Notebook is a very sectioned, layer-by-layer excavation of loss and grief. But both books approach autobiography in a fascinating, peculiar way: by greeting death. The poem is a strange alternate dimension where the living meet the dead. Both books invite us to know a person, the poet, by befriending the things and people she has lost—as in a line from This Blue Novel:“I will introduce you to my dead, one by one.”

SG: Willis Barnstone has written that translation is, among other things, “the art of revelation.” Do you agree? What are some other ways you would describe the art of translation?

MGM: I love how swiftly this definition flies in the face of the persistently limited thinking of translation as treasonous, compromising—in other words, as a failed, foggy copy of an original work. Yes, I agree that translation is revelatory—and even doubly revelatory, because it illuminates the translator’s reading/writing in addition to the author’s (and I think that the two coexist in weird translation space-time). I’d only add that, in my own practice, I don’t always presume to reveal—I really try to honor a sense of what is unknown and unknowable to me in a text. I love to translate, maybe most of all, because it reminds me of how fiercely language resists becoming fully knowable or settled in meaning. Every translation is touched by uncertainty. I admire translators who find ways to harness some of that uncertainty, make a bit of that mystery palpable—translations that, in making “the unknown known” (as Barnstone also says), find ways to reveal some of the unknown-ness too.

SG: These poems feel wildly revelatory, and sometimes incendiary, even when their materiality is weighty or watery. What are some things you grappled with in bringing these qualities over to the English-language poems?

MGM: I was very interested in the tension between the book’s subject matter and its wild whirling-up of images, echoes. Matter, for all its weight, gets sucked into a kind of “high vacuum,” to use one of Mejer Caso’s metaphors. She writes that, “Edinburgh,” the site of her brother’s suicide, “does not exist, except in a high vacuum.” It (the poem? life?) tosses us around, as swiftly as things are created and destroyed, there is a stillness at its center (death?). One example that comes to mind is “Third,” which was one of my favorite poems to translate, because it feels like an ecstatic vision or violent prayer. It’s phantasmagoric, sonically rich, emotionally charged, but when I step away from it, I’m not even sure what it’s “about”; ultimately, its apparitions shape an eerie sense of absence. In Mejer Caso’s work, I’m often amazed by the combined speed and precision of things flying into view, but there is this deep stillness as well. In my translation, I tried to remain aware of that stillness. I spent a lot of time fine-tuning the sounds, especially the rhythms, because it was important to capture the momentum of her lines, and that feeling of things suddenly stopping short, and also, to create an echo-chamber of assonances and consonances.

SG: The poems occur across vastly different landscapes, some recognizable, others fantastical, fabulous. How might some of these landscapes be read differently by Spanish-speaking and English-speaking readers? (Is this even a fair question?) How did you approach differences in the familiar and the strange, in landscape or imagery, across linguistic and cultural divides?

MGM: Your question has me looking back to some of the landscapes in the book and wondering—for the first time, I admit—about this! How these landscapes present as “familiar” or “strange,” culturally—but also, as you point out, how many of these spaces appear otherworldly. There are just so many landscapes in the book—it’s not, as we might incorrectly assume from the title, a book “situated” in Edinburgh. On the contrary, the title names that city, I think, as a place that (for the poet) “does not exist”: she was never there. That city came to her from afar, via a horrible phone call about her brother and suicide note. Describing that city—the place where her brother lived, a child playing outside across the street, etc.)—she invents it, contours its absence, as an exercise in grief. I think many of the landscapes in the book are similarly speculative. They take shape through imagined scenarios—often, when picturing a distant friend or loved one across impassible stretches of time or space. Encountering the landscapes in the book, to me, usually feels like jumping into a photograph or painting, which becomes suddenly animated by an urgent need to search for someone, something—not like travelling to an actual place in the world. Which is not to say that culture is not present or relevant—only to say that feelings of dislocation are very prominent, and endemic in the Spanish, and probably shared—in different ways, no doubt—by readers in different cultural contexts.

SG: There’s perhaps no closer reading than in the practice of translation. Working so closely with poetry of such passionate intensity as this: what challenges and what gifts did you find?

MGM: In this book, maybe more than in any other book I have translated, I was left with the sense of having navigated deeply through someone else’s life—her memories, dreams, and trauma. It’s a profoundly autobiographical book, and as I worked on it, Valerie shared a lot with me about the experiences in her life that informed it. This knowledge was a unique gift, and challenge. My task wasn’t just to translate the language—I also felt a sense of responsibility to the intimate world “behind” the book, and really, to the poet herself. This deeper sense of responsibility really stretched me.

Read "Echo | Eco" here

Find Edinburgh Notebook here

Claire Caldwell: A Poem

2022-08-15T14:28:00.000-04:00

Claire Caldwell

SOUNDS A RIVER MAKES

Gas leak, ventilator, bear clicking its teeth.

Twelve hundred caribou hooves on frost.

Lips around bottle, bottle slurring

on bar. Rattling aspen, dusky grouse,

sheets drying outside. Grandmothers

stuffing envelopes in a high school gym.

Sex in a sleeping bag, house on fire.

A children's choir after one kid

faints, before the rest start to sing.

from Gold Rush by Claire Caldwell, Invisible Publishing, 2020

WHAT SHIFTS: A CONVERSATION WITH BREN SIMMERS

2022-06-14T09:00:00.034-04:00

SUSAN GILLIS: How did you first come to poetry - or poetry to you?

BREN SIMMERS: I grew up in a household of readers. We went to the library once a week and loaded up on books. My dad, d.n. simmers, was a poet and he encouraged me to write. For two hours every weekend, he would shut the door to his office and we knew better than to disturb him. From an early age, I knew that writing meant quiet, reading and muttering to yourself – all things I loved to do. Later, when I moved out, my dad had a book box by the door, his recently read pile. I could take anything I want. Having that kind of unfettered access to books and family support to pursue writing was key to my finding poetry.

SG: One thing I admire in If, When is the way you’ve made time and place almost porous; lives lived a century ago seem as present as those being lived now. In exploring those earlier times and places, what surprised you, what changed you (or, changed for you, in your sense of place and connectedness)?

BS: I like that word, porous. Living in Squamish, surrounded by glaciers and igneous rock older than human history, I started to think about time differently. My life is one brief layer of strata layered on top of the generations who came before. Their decisions affect me, just as my decisions will affect those that come after. While researching my great-grandparent’s history at Britannia Mines, I noticed that for the last century people in this community have asked similar questions: How to make a living? How to protect the places and people we love? I wanted to ask another question: Can we do both?

SG: Another effect of this porosity is that individual experience, wherever and whenever it’s located, feels part of a greater whole. What about the threats to this whole? The poem “Spring Conditions at Best” leans this way in its wish for a reprieve from environmental anxiety. What other threats or tensions do you navigate in the poems?

BS: Living in an intact ecosystem, you see how all the parts contribute to the whole. For example, the fall rains raise the river levels for spawners to return. Bears drag these carcasses into the woods and fertilize the trees and overwintering eagles teach their young to scavenge the fish. The forests and minerals in Howe Sound have long fed families too. Now, tourism is also a big employer. As housing prices rise and more people move to the area, the natural ecosystem is being heavily impacted. The construction of new subdivisions bisects wildlife corridors. The cultural landscape is shifting too. One aspect that I explore in the book is this tension between insider and outsider, the old Squamish and the “new.”

The poem “Spring Conditions at Best” began as a lament about larger ecological issues but in the revision process, I ended up losing that element. The idea that emerged was that we can’t always live in a state of eco-anxiety and extinction grief. I wanted to shift the focus away from what is disappearing and toward what is still here. Instead of mourning, how do we appreciate and protect?

SG: What’s on your immediate horizon, what are you reading/writing/ thinking about these days?

BS: I’ve been thinking a lot about uncertainty and grief. I lost my dad a couple of years ago, and my mother lives in a long-term care home in order to receive the attention that her Alzheimer’s requires. My writing tends to be informed by lived experience, so it makes sense my work would explore these ideas. But learning how to write about these topics without retriggering emotional wounds has been tricky. I’ve had to adapt my writing process to work in shorter stints and take lots of breaks. Right now, I have a draft of the new poetry manuscript taped to my wall, but I’m letting it percolate a bit longer to gain a more distanced perspective. That way I can try to approach it as a reader would, to see what needs shifting, and to open it up from a personal narrative to one that speaks to others' experiences.

During this time, my reading pile has naturally gravitated to the topics of grief, illness, anxiety, and uncertainty. Recent favourites include Obit by Victoria Chang, Music for the Dead and Resurrected by Valzhyna Mort, Hesitating Once to Feel Glory by Maleea Acker, These Precious Days by Anne Patchett, and A Funny Kind of Paradise by Jo Owens.

Bren Simmers's most recent book is If, When. She lives in PEI. Read her poem "Spring Conditions at Best".

BREN SIMMERS: A POEM

2022-06-08T13:30:00.000-04:00

Bren Simmers

SPRING CONDITIONS AT BEST

We're tired of headlines, of doomsday

pessimism, of ponying up for a season

pass at Whistler only to get spring

conditions at best.

We want fresh pow and bluebird skies.

We want can, not can't.

Don't tell me what we've lost, show me

what we've still got left.

from If, When (Gaspereau Press, 2021). By permission of the author

Bren Simmers is the author of If, When (2021), Pivot Point (2019), Night Gears (2010), and Hastings-Sunrise (2015), which was a finalist for the City of Vancouver Book Award. Her work has won the Arc Poem of the Year Award. She lives on Prince Edward Island.