neither trap nor puzzle

In her essay “What Does Poetry Do?” from her collection Experiments in Distant Influence, Nova Scotia author Anne Simpson writes about what’s possible when we give ourselves up to the mechanisms of poetry. She uses the experience of reading one’s way through the brutal wars of the Iliad to illustrate poetry’s effects: “It is not just that after reading Homer’s Iliad we feel as though we’ve been hauled through the burning lands, the ash lands. We haven’t just witnessed war; we’ve participated in it. It’s not simply a case that poetry, that all literature, allows us to be attentive to otherness, to imagine otherness, it is that we enter a world of otherness.”

In that otherness, we see ourselves. That, writes Simpson, is the alternative offered by poetry: “the ability to see oneself,” which is “the beginning of knowing and mastering oneself—the beginning of wisdom.” This leads to the chance, by no means guaranteed, that we might “awaken from the dream of ourselves.” 

Poetry is neither a trap nor a puzzle, and not every poem is all-consuming and urgent. But there’s no mistaking that, when you dare to step into the world of a poem—a successfully executed poem, I mean—from the first line, you are hit full-force by the poem’s sensory cues. You have entered an environment of the poet’s own making, and in that place, you become fully awake. Or differently awake. Awake to the unfamiliar airiness or stuffiness of the poem’s “rooms,” and the light therein. When I enter the strange and only partly knowable place of a poem, I grow tense and alert... I watch myself take the poem in. I let it do its work on me. Who am I, in this space? Is this, finally, the real me, coming to the fore?

Within any given poem lies no clear mystery a reader can solve. They’re engaged, after all, with a poem, not a riddle. (Poem riddles do exist, but they’re a rarity these days.) For those who give themselves over to the poem’s rhythms and sounds, its sights and textures and smells—and to the feelings those cues evoke—there are sure to be moments of recognition that land like soft explosions within, the aftermath of which is often an aura of relief, a potent sense of not being alone in this world... But no triumphant “oh, I get it!” awaits at the end, no code that will, at last, open, with a satisfying click, the heavy padlock on the magic shop’s door latch—nothing that will render the poem, and the effect it had, explainable in simple terms. That’s because poems aren’t for solving; they’re for getting lost inside.

- Anita Lahey, from her introduction to Best Canadian Poetry 2024. 

to extract from them a form

In a talk [Bronwen Wallace] gave in 1987, she spoke of the day when, as a student twenty-one years prior, she’d attended her first meeting about the “women’s movement.” She recalled, “For me, that meeting represented the first time I had ever been in a room full of women talking consciously about their lives, trying to make sense of them, trying to see how the unique and private anecdotes became part of a story that gave each of our lives a public and collective meaning as well.”

Coming up a full generation behind Wallace, I can claim no corresponding turning point. What I remember, as far back as memory goes, is my mother and her friends, my cousins, and me and my own friends talking in exactly that way, fully engaged in sharing and examining the events of our lives, their contexts and substrata, seeking sense and meaning. It’s a gripping, lifelong, all-in kind of project. It’s exactly what Wallace undertook in her poems: not to represent or mimic these conversations, not to make of them metaphors but to stage them in verse, to extract from them a form—and perhaps a new way of being in the world.

- Anita Lahey, from her essay "The Poet Whose Work Helped Set the Stage for #MeToo" in The Walrus (May 2020). You can read the whole thing here.

braced to take in the full force

When I encounter a poem that engages the mind over the senses I really have to force myself to pay attention and work my way through it, even if it’s a brilliant piece of writing (and thinking). I need to feel a thing I’m reading to really become involved with it, and in that way I sometimes have the sense that others would consider me rather old-fashioned, or traditional, or, I don’t know, soft. That needing or wanting to “feel” is a kind of weakness in our post-post-modern era, or whatever this is. But it doesn’t feel soft to me. When I read, I’m braced to take in the full force of the mysteries of our existence. I want to be kicked in the gut, and when I write, that’s what I’m aiming to hit. Not the mind, not the heart: the gut. That doesn’t mean the mind and heart aren’t involved; they’re entwined, actually, rather than one or the other dominating. When I read something really powerful, the sensation is physical, like being bruised.

- Anita Lahey, in conversation with Susan Gillis on Susan's Concrete & River blog. You can read the whole thing here.