The Silence of the Woods: An Interview with Rodney DeCroo

The following interview is part two of a seven-part series of conversations with BC poets which were originally published between January and April 2024 at ReadLocalBC.ca. This was the fifth year of my collaboration with Read Local BC (you can read all my Read Local BC interviews in one place here).

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Six Bottles of Wine - Rodney DeCroo

I haven’t washed the dishes for over a week.
The sink and counter a precarious pile
of dirty pots, plates, bowls and glasses.
The whole mess on the verge of slippage,
of shattering into mundane but dangerous pieces.
I haven’t bathed in five days or brushed
my teeth. I can barely stand the sight or smell
of myself. I am a riot of self-pity in a filthy apartment.
And yes, yes, I’ve been drinking. I’m gloriously,
hideously drunk. I’ve been reading poetry
out loud, shouting through walls
at my neighbours. Every night the landlord pounds
on my door, tells me to shut up. I will
have to pay for my behaviors with sickness,
debt and shame. But I have six bottles of wine
before I have to remember that she is dead.

Reprinted with permission

from Fishing for Leviathan

(Anvil Press, 2023).

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Rodney DeCroo is the author of two previous books of poetry, Allegheny, BC and Next Door to the Butcher Shop. His poems have been published in Canadian publications such as subTerrain, Geist, Event, BC Bookworld, The Vancouver Province, Discorder Magazine, and The Georgia Straight, among others. His poetry has appeared in Beyond Forgetting, an anthology celebrating the work and life of legendary Canadian poet Al Purdy, and as part of BC’s Poetry in Transit. He has appeared on CBC to read his poems and is also a well-known, touring singer-songwriter with eight albums to his credit. His solo plays Stupid Boy in an Ugly Town and Didn’t Hurt have toured across Canada and the US. In 2019, Moniack Mhor, Scotland’s National Writing Centre, awarded him an International Poet in Residency.

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Rob Taylor: Near the end of Fishing for Leviathan you write about the poets (Sylvia Plath, Charles Bukowski, Al Purdy, John Keats) who provided the “thinnest thread of light” in some of the darkest periods of your life. In those times, you were also sustained by writing your own “wonderful, worthless poems.” Where do you think you’d be today without poetry’s thread of light? From that perspective, are the poems really “worthless”?

Rodney DeCroo: I was seventeen years old when I encountered poetry in a high school English class. I’d only recently arrived from Pittsburgh to live with my father in Surrey, B.C. He was the manager of the infamous Newton Inn and wasn’t around much. I spent most of my time pilfering from my father’s considerable cache of drugs and getting high, so I made it to school maybe three out of five days a week. No one at school seemed to notice or care and I was good with that. My English teacher—I can’t remember his name—didn’t like me much. On one of the rare days I attended class he was teaching T.S. Eliot’s poem, “The Hollow Men.” I had no idea what was going on. I knew nothing about poetry. He kept asking me to explain for the class what various lines of the poem meant. I felt humiliated by him and whatever this indecipherable fucking thing poetry was. 

A year later my father moved us to Cranbrook and I had to take an English literature course taught by a man named Mr. Fossey. The first poem he taught was Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale” and that was it. He talked about the poem in the context of Keats’ life when he wrote it and I was hooked. I didn’t necessarily understand the poem, but I loved the sounds and it made me feel something I could relate to even if I couldn’t articulate it. I kept repeating lines from the poem to myself. After school that day I rushed back to my room in the Tudor House Hotel (my father was the manager so we lived there). I grabbed some paper and a pen from the front desk and started writing poems. They were horrible, unintentional parodies of the poems I was reading at school but they were pure magic to me. I’d nothing going on in my life. I’d drink alone almost nightly in my room and/or get high depending on what I could get my hands on. My dad didn’t care what I was doing as long as I wasn’t causing trouble in the hotel, and it wasn’t too hard getting booze or dope surrounded by drunks and addicts. My father ignored me and I had no friends. So I’d lock myself in my room, get wasted and write poems.

When I dropped out of high school and ran off to Vancouver—even when I lived on the streets—I carried around an old battered briefcase filled with pages of my poetry. I used to give free poetry readings on the bus for my fellow commuters. One time a man stood up on the #14 Hastings Street bus to applaud and I was thrilled. Hey, an appreciative audience is an appreciative audience! I’ll take it! And throughout that time I was reading all the poets you mentioned. They all excited me in different ways. At the time Bukowski spoke to me the most because his poems were so accessible and used language that was similar to the way I spoke. When I started reading his poetry I felt like hey, maybe I can actually do this and I began to try and write the way I spoke. 

Poetry gave my life purpose— I was part of something fine— and that made me feel like I mattered in some way. I was a poet, goddamn it! By my late teens when I dropped out of school I was already a drunk and a drug addict. I lived on and off the streets and worked horrible, humiliating jobs and got fired regularly. I got into fights and often got my ass kicked. I spent many nights in the Vancouver drunk tank. So while my poems were awful they kept me going. I was betting everything on them. Now, I think differently about those poems. Sure, they weren’t much but learning to write poetry is a long, unbroken process that is never finished. The poems I write now contain the DNA of those early poems no matter how awful they were. So yeah, my wonderful, worthless poems. Without them I wouldn’t be here. 

RT: I see two distinct styles in the poems in Fishing for Leviathan. One is Purdy-esque story-poems, akin to what you just described, which flow with a natural speaking rhythm. The other style is these more tightly-packed, non-linear, associatively linked poems written in couplets, reminiscent of John Thompson’s ghazals in Stilt Jack. The content of the poems in these two styles is distinct, too, with the subject matter of the story-poems more raw, ala Bukowski, and the others more abstract and lyrical, seemingly removed from the harshness of your early years. How did you come to write in these two modes? Do you see a clear distinction between them, or do you move between them more fluidly? 

RD: I’ve always had these two approaches both as a poet and songwriter. As a young poet I found it difficult to control the non-linear poems. I didn’t trust them because I didn’t have a process, or enough craft, to work with that material. When I did write those poems they tended to be more like automatic writing that went on and on and on. Song lyrics allowed me to experiment more because a song doesn’t necessarily live or die on its lyrics. You can get away with things lyrically in a song that you never could in a poem. 

As I grew as a poet, and as I got used to working associatively with song lyrics, I became more confident in my ability to shape non-linear content into what I feel are cohesive poems. Honestly, after writing a bunch of narrative poems I get bored and switch gears. I relish the freedom and magic non-linear material offers, and yet the storyteller is always there. I think that’s part of how I’ve learned to control those poems. I tend to write in bursts. I’ll write several of those poems over a couple weeks, but I’ll start craving solid ground to stand on—and so, back to the narrative poems. I can’t prove it but I think these styles are in dialogue with each other. You know, like how our dream lives and our waking lives are in conversation. And I think the satisfying change in rhythm those poems provide me as a poet do a similar thing for the reader. 

RT: Steven Heighton referred to his job as a poet as being a “stenographer to my nightmind,” and told me that he hoped engaging with his dream mind allowed his poems to move “more vulnerably and associatively.” That seems to be the case for you, too. How do you think your non-linear poems have influenced the nature of your narrative poems? Do you sense that how you tell your life’s stories in poems has changed over the years?

RD: As a multi-disciplinary artist I find that when I work in one medium— say, street photography, for example—that it effects how I approach my poetry when I’m back on the page, whether it’s in my writing process, or the poem’s content or form. The changes are often subtle, just small shifts in perspective, but sometimes they’re big. Writing song lyrics helped me to start writing the non-linear poems which I write a lot of now. I’d say writing non-linear poems have made me less rigid in how I approach narrative poems that tell my life’s stories. I used to feel that I had to stick to the facts—to what actually happened—but I’m not writing an autobiography, I’m writing poetry. I realized that, for me at least, having to adhere to the facts limited where the language could take the poem. I was limiting my poetic imagination. I’m more interested in getting at the emotional truths below the details. What I called the “facts” of a story added up to a story I was already telling myself. If I wanted to get at something deeper I needed to allow new ideas into the poems. Also, we’re always trying to say in poems what is unsayable within ourselves—otherwise we wouldn’t need poems. My hope is that some of the more associative movements of the non-linear poems can begin to work into the narrative poems to allow for deeper, unseen currents to move within/ under the narrative.

RT: Wonderfully put: poems as existing to say something beyond the story we tell ourselves; to say what we couldn’t otherwise say. Perhaps connected to these realizations, you dedicate Fishing for Leviathan to acclaimed BC poet Russell Thornton, “for helping me stand up to myself and write better poems.” Could you talk a little about the role Russell has played in your development as a poet? 

RD: I initially met Russell because he invited me to appear on a poetry show he hosted on Vancouver Co-op Radio. I’d heard him read on a couple of occasions and admired him as a poet. With the exception of Al Purdy, my few interactions with older, accomplished poets hadn’t gone well. I’d an enormous chip on my shoulder and was deeply insecure, so I was pretty belligerent. I was a high school dropout, I’d no publishing history except in zines and underground publications, and outside of the local underground scene I was unknown as a poet. The truth was my poetry didn’t merit much attention then and—when I was willing to be honest— I knew that, but I didn’t know what to do. I was in my early forties and still writing like a young, unrealized poet. I was getting a little long in the tooth for that and was deeply afraid that maybe I wasn’t capable of more. I was experiencing some success as a singer-songwriter, I was touring regularly with my band and was with a label that enthusiastically supported my releases, but poetry was my first love.

I was surprised by how gracious Russell was when I came on his show. He asked questions about my poems that made me feel like a peer. He was coming from a place as a much more accomplished poet, but he didn’t talk down to me. I liked him immediately. He easily cut through all my usual defenses. Russell and I have some stuff in common in our backgrounds and he recognized that in me. We slowly became friends and I started sending him my poems. He would comment on them kindly. He pointed out what he liked, but he also was direct—without putting me down—about what he felt wasn’t working. I was able to listen because of his approach and gradually started internalizing the things he taught me about craft. Just being aware of basic elements of craft forced me to dig deeper, and my poems quickly showed improvement. 

He also taught me—I feel this is the most valuable thing I learned from him—to trust the language. He would say it to me over and over again. He’d show me where my poems broke down. I’d ask him what he thought they needed and he’d say, I don’t know, it’s your poem, trust the language, Rodney, it knows. He encouraged me to go inwards and to find my poethood which is about—in my opinion—listening for the language to speak and letting it guide me. So when I found myself resorting to clichés or trying to force an ending I learned how to sit patiently and wait for the language to show me the way through the seeming impasses I’d reach in poems. I could hear it and feel it. It was visceral. When I lost that feeling I knew to stop and try later. Previously, I’d had few tools or the confidence to write fully realized poems. I truly believe that without Russell’s help I wouldn’t have made the transition from an undisciplined young poet to a reasonably competent poet. 

RT: Is that what you mean by “standing up to yourself”? That discipline to listen to the language and wait?

RD: Yeah, that was part of it. Giving up the bad habits I’d developed as a poet which had to do with my ego and getting down to the real business of writing poems, which requires humility. But also, I was a recovering drunk and addict dealing with untreated C-PTSD. I was very damaged and very reactive. Without alcohol or drugs to numb what I was feeling I simply couldn’t cope. I reached a point, in sobriety, where I had a total breakdown. I abandoned a cross-Canada tour with my band and hid in Montreal with a friend who was a writer. He let me stay at his place rent free. It was an incredible act of kindness by my friend. All I did was go to 12th step meetings a couple times a day (where I made many friends), walk around Montreal for hours, and talk to Russell on the phone. I don’t know where he found the patience. He helped me recognize and stand up to a lot of the self-destructive behaviors that were ruining my life and hurting my friends and colleagues. I eventually got professional help, but in the initial stages Russell provided understanding support. He also challenged me. He said to me once, “We have to stand up to ourselves, Rodney,” and that became a kind of mantra for me. And of course the personal changes I went through improved my poetry. 

RT: Russell sounds like as good a friend as he is a poet, which is really saying something. That patience in waiting for a poem’s language to explain itself to you seems echoed in a few poems in Fishing for Leviathan. In “The Buck” you write about a boy waiting in a hunting stand for hours until “the silence… is not an absence but a living / presence both outside and in.” Were you consciously drawing parallels there between hunting and your evolving writing practice? What role has welcoming silence played in your development as a writer?

RD: “The Buck” is based on a strange experience I had as a teenage boy hunting for the first time by myself. I was in the woods for several hours and it had snowed the night before so everything was covered in fresh snow. I slipped into some sort of trance or something and had an encounter with a buck that seemed—for lack of a better term—mystical. The buck was gone before I realized I hadn’t raised my rifle. It didn’t even occur to me. The embodied silence I talk about brings me a deep sense of wholeness and connection to something much larger than me. It’s fleeting of course. It’s why I write poems. If a poem I write is successful there’s a silence that resonates after the final line. It’s a distant echo of that silence I felt in the woods that day. I mostly experience that sensation both as a poet and a reader of poems and sometimes— though rarely—while performing certain songs for an audience: it’s like there’s a silence underneath the song that holds both my performance and the attention of the audience. It becomes so intimate that it’s impossible for me to describe. If I was able to experience that silence without poetry—who knows—maybe I wouldn’t bother to write anymore. I think I write poems out of the various conflicts within myself. Maybe in those brief moments at the end of poems I experience a truce between internal adversaries, and it results in what feels like silence. 

RT: The silence being the reason you write the poems—I’ve never heard it put quite that way, but it feels very accurate to me. Thank you. And the idea of a truce between adversaries, too. A central theme of Fishing for Leviathan is working to break generational trauma. 

In “Tying the Centuries Together Like a Funeral Wreath,” you write, 

I want a eulogy that says
it stopped with me, this line of broken labourers,
shattered soldiers, depressed housewives,
schizophrenics, suicides, alcoholics, criminals…

Later, you close the book with a loving embrace between speaker and child, and so many of those destructive cycles appear broken. Yet Fishing for Leviathan is also filled with declarations of personal and career disappointment, such as:

My therapist says given my childhood
I’m lucky to be alive. Maybe next life let’s set
the bar a little higher.

I’m curious how you define “success” in your life and writing. Are you able to appreciate your accomplishments in stopping some destructive multi-generational patterns? 

RD: I think we all deal with patterns of multi-generational trauma to varying degrees. Hell, life is traumatic at times for nearly everyone. I think sometimes higher social class status and the stability that comes with that can take the edges off it, but it’s still there. Unfortunately, because of the poverty, violence and neglect I experienced as a daily reality during my childhood I have struggled most of my life to simply survive. That looked like years of extremely self-destructive behaviors, such as addiction. I was a petty thief, highly dishonest and violent at times. I’m a high school dropout and so on. I’ve never had any financial security or a professional career. This isn’t about self-pity, it’s just a statement of facts. I’ve had some amazing opportunities come to me—like a budding successful career as a singer-songwriter—that I self-sabotaged in very dramatic and public ways.

I’ve been learning one day at a time for the last fifteen years to manage C-PTSD flashbacks effectively. I’ve been free from alcohol and other drugs for 23 years. But I don’t think the destructive cycles are ever fully broken—I’ll always have C-PTSD and I’ll always be an alcoholic / addict—but I can have a daily reprieve contingent on my willingness to be accountable to myself and those around me. I have to engage in regular self-care, to become more aware of my negative patterns of thought/ behavior conditioned by years of childhood trauma and make different choices. I have to be willing to stand up to myself or, as an old 12th step sponsor used to say, “Strive to have an asshole free day, Rodney.” The same patterns conditioned by years of trauma still present themselves to me, but I make different choices now and as a consequence my life looks much different. That changes how I feel about myself, which strengthens my desire to keep doing the work. The child I refer to in the poems, Lucy, isn’t my daughter, so I can’t say I’ve broken a multi-generational cycle of trauma, but I’m close to her and being a care-giver and an “uncle” (her term) for over a decade has changed me in ways that helped me break through some of my destructive tendencies. At the risk of sounding cheesy, I feel like I’m living now, rather than just careening through the wreckage that I was creating. 

RT: Not cheesy at all, and it should be a point of pride. How about when it comes to career success, now that you have this third book of poems now out in the world (enthusiastically praised by Russell Thornton and Claire Askew, no less!)? Is “success” achievable for you, or will you inch your bar higher with every accomplishment? 

RD: I don’t know. I’d like to have some stability that comes from a certain level of financial and professional success, but those things aren’t given out for free, they’re earned. I am fifty-six. I wasted a huge portion of my life, so that may not be a reality for me. Who knows, maybe my artistic pursuits will help eventually in that regard, but it’s highly unlikely. I am thrilled however to have published books of poetry that poets I admire like Russell Thornton and Claire Askew have said good things about. The same goes with my other work. And in the moment—when I’m performing and connected to an audience—well, that’s a special thing that I don’t think everybody gets to experience. But the truth is, I was imprinted as a small child with messages that I didn’t matter, that I was unlovable, that I was a piece of shit, and so on. And I’m not talking about not getting held enough. I’m talking about stuff that people go to jail for now. If I could ever silence those voices that would be something. I don’t think writing any number of books of poetry or playing any number of shows or getting accolades will ever do that for me though. I’ve had some small successes and found that they are fleeting and don’t impact those feelings much for long. 

Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful that folks like Silas White at Nightwood Editions, and Brian Kaufman and Karen Green at Anvil Press, have been willing to publish my books. I wouldn’t trade that away for anything, and I hope to publish more. But I suspect that no matter what I achieve as an artist, I will always be inching that bar higher as you suggest, because that’s not going to solve the core dilemma, is it? The irony is that the conflict I have with how I feel about myself in my core is the source of my poetry, and that same thing drives my desire to be recognized, which is ultimately not going to resolve the problem. But I don’t think it’s about resolving the problem, I think maybe it’s about learning to live with it. 

RT: In “My Self-Pity Is Bigger Than Yours” you write “Oh someday poetry / is gonna explode out of me like a truck / full of fireworks on the darkest night / of the year.” You wrote this in your third book—you’ve already exploded quite a bit! What do you aspire to in your poetry that hasn’t yet exploded out? 

RD: Well, thanks, but my inner critics disagree! They demand more exploding! But really, I don’t think I’m any different from most artists whether you’re a poet, a mime or a painter. I think we’re always persuading ourselves that someday we’re going to paint our masterpiece! I read this a while ago in a Wikipedia post about Dylan’s song “When I Paint My Masterpiece” and it made so much sense to me: 

Douglas Brinkley, while interviewing Dylan for the New York Times in 2020, noted that “When I Paint My Masterpiece” was a song that had grown on him over the years and asked Dylan why he had brought it “back to the forefront of recent concerts”. Dylan replied, “It’s grown on me as well. I think this song has something to do with the classical world, something that’s out of reach. Someplace you’d like to be beyond your experience. Something that is so supreme and first rate that you could never come back down from the mountain. That you’ve achieved the unthinkable. That’s what the song tries to say, and you’d have to put it in that context. In saying that though, even if you do paint your masterpiece, what will you do then? Well, obviously you have to paint another masterpiece”.

RT: Oh, I love that song. You’re in good company with Bob, eh? Ever dissatisfied poets/singer-songwriters.  You’ve touched a bit earlier on the influence of your music on your poetry, but I was wondering if you could expand on that a bit before we wrap up. How has your work in other fields influenced your approach to the writing and performance of poetry?

RD: At the heart of everything I do, I’m a poet. Through my late teens and early twenties I only wrote poetry. A little past my mid-twenties I started memorizing and performing my poems at poetry readings. In the mid-nineties Vancouver had a thriving underground poetry scene. There were readings nearly every night in cafes across the city, but mostly in East Vancouver. I became part of a poetry performance group called the Ducktape Platypus Poets Coalition. Honestly, we weren’t very good, but I guess we were entertaining because we had a local following. Bernie Radelfinger was part of that group and had been in the band Bob’s Your Uncle. He helped me write songs using lines from my poems and we’d perform them together with Bernie playing guitar. When I was in my early thirties I taught myself to play guitar and a couple years later I put out my first album and began touring. 

RT: What about playwriting? I understand that a play you wrote will be performed later this year?

RD: Yes, my first two act play (which I co-wrote with Samantha Pawliuk and David Bloom) will open the fall season at The Shadbolt Centre. 

I mostly write one-person plays which are long monologues, really, and they’re a form of dramatic speech that works partially through the use of poetic devices to a moment of personal discovery / transformation, which isn’t a far cry from the type of poems I write, I guess. So I think they’re extensions of my being a poet. 

RT: Do you have any other artistic “extensions” of your poetry?

RD: My latest obsession is street photography which I’ve been doing for four years now. Anvil Press commissioned a book of street photography from me that will be published in the fall of 2024. Like my poetry, my photography attempts to take a moment and freeze it. To make time stop. There’s something in that. And also my poems tend to—I hope—conjure strong images, and street photography is an attempt to capture a compelling image pulled from the chaos of the street. 

RT: I can’t wait to see more of them in the book next year. It should be a nice companion piece to Fishing for Leviathan.

Becoming More Visible: An Interview with Meghan Fandrich

The following interview is part one of a seven-part series of conversations with BC poets which were originally published between January and April 2024 at ReadLocalBC.ca. This was the fifth year of my collaboration with Read Local BC (you can read all my Read Local BC interviews in one place here).

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Sockeye - Meghan Fandrich

People are fishing today
the Nlaka′pamux
dipping their nets into strong water
hanging deep red flesh
to dry in the wind
almost like
life goes on

my neighbour brought me a salmon
heavy gift
almost like she had always been next door
almost like her house
didn’t burn

I washed the dishes
sat down outside
watched a dry leaf shake
in the wind

almost like
I was ok

 Reprinted with permission
from Burning Sage
(Caitlin Press, 2023)

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Meghan Fandrich lives with her young daughter on the edge of Lytton, BC, the village that was destroyed by wildfire in 2021. She spent her childhood and much of her adult life there, in Nlaka’pamux Territory, where two rivers meet and sagebrush-covered hills reach up into mountains. For almost a decade, she ran Klowa Art Café, a beloved and vibrant part of the community; Klowa was lost to the flames. Burning Sage is Meghan’s debut poetry collection.

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Rob Taylor: Burning Sage is your debut poetry collection, written about the 2021 Lytton fire which destroyed your café, most of your neighbours’ houses, and almost your own. To say the least, it’s not your typical debut. Could you talk about the way this book came into being? 

Meghan Fandrich: When the fire destroyed our little village, it wasn’t just the buildings that were gone. It was my community, the place of my childhood memories and my daughter’s, and the future I was building for us there. It was everything that was normal in my life, everything I trusted would always be there. Past, present, future. All gone.

About a year later, summer meant another fire was burning homes and farms near Lytton. Support and stability, and even a precarious “new normal,” were still impossible. I was living in fear and trauma and knew I had to focus on something, a distraction, so that I could be a present parent—a present person—again. I decided I would do an art project for a friend (a love), the “you” of the poems: I would write out some memories and musings from my life, things we hadn’t talked about yet, little pieces that make up who I am. I decided to start with a memory from the fire.

Up until that point, I think, I had just been focused on survival, on single-parenting, on adjusting to life in an isolated burned-out place that kept getting hit with natural disasters, even after the first fire. I hadn’t stopped to think about it; I probably couldn’t have. I couldn’t have acknowledged the depth of the experience when I was in the worst of it.

So I sat down at the typewriter on the living room floor, and memories came pouring out. They weren’t the memories I expected, but instead subconscious memories, scenes and feelings that I had never put words to before, even in thought. When I took the page out of the typewriter and read the words, I started crying—for almost the first time since the fire.

RT: Was poetry something you’d written a lot before? Did it feel natural to find yourself processing your trauma in this way?

MF: I was surprised that the words emerged as poetry. I’m not a poet. I’d never written poems (other than the rhyming poems of Grade 6, of course). For the past decade, I hadn’t written at all, not even in my journal; I had only recently begun to journal again when I met the friend, the love, six months after the fire. There was no reason that the memories would come out as poetry. But they did.

And then, maybe an even bigger surprise: I felt the intense need to share what I wrote. I’ve never shared my writing before, and with that first poem, “Entrails”—and all that followed—there was the absolute need to share.

Instead of working on the art project for that friend, I kept writing. Each time a little memory of the last year would surface, I would write it out. And cry it out. I started writing poems as events happened, too, letting the emotions out immediately instead of suppressing them. The stack of pages beside the typewriter kept growing.

In one of the first poems in Burning Sage you write, of watching the fire burn, “we stood together / in silence // and then looked away.” So much of the book takes place in the personal and collective aftermath of the fire, showing what happened after the rest of the country “looked away.” You’ve spoken about how writing these poems was a way for you to be a more “present person.” How did poetry help you not “look away”?

For me, looking away was never an option. The fire was just a moment, and yes, in that moment we had the eyes of the world on us; but when the world looked away, we were still here, and the trauma was just beginning. We had to keep going. We had to keep living, even though everything had changed. And because the world looked away—because we existed as just that one moment in the eyes of others—we became invisible.

Trauma is isolating, even collective trauma. We all experienced that with the collective trauma of Covid, right? How we were all “in it together,” but each of us felt so alone. And it was the same with the fire. As we kept going, as we started to realize that there would be no immediate rebuilding, no quick return to normal, no “better than ever,” as the reality of the situation set in, we were each alone. Alone and invisible.

When I started writing the poems, and more importantly, when I started sharing them, I suddenly saw my own experience reflected in others’ faces. When the poems said, “This is how I feel,” I saw the readers nod in recognition. With tears in their eyes, they saw me. They gave me the gift of their emotions in response to mine, and I started to become visible.

RT: Two sources of invisibility in this book, which draw your anger, are the news media (“aggressive / bloodthirsty / cameras rolling”) and the government crews which cordoned off and leveled the town (“Keep your windows up, / they say… don’t look at us while we stand / and laugh”). Did writing Burning Sage give you a chance to speak back to these groups on your own terms? What do you hope they might take away with them if they read your book?

MF: The poems emerged, one by one, as fragments of that first year. I didn’t write them with any intention; I just had the need to get each of those memories out of me, out of my body, out of my subconscious. But when I read through the stack of poems, I saw that thread of anger and was able to acknowledge how harmful both entities—media and government—have been throughout this experience.

Since the fire, I’ve tried to speak with the media when possible, to advocate for my community and our ongoing struggle. Almost invariably, the reporter would bring the interview back to the moment of the fire, the moment of running from the flames. Reopen the wound and run that footage on the six o’ clock news. And it would feel like I only existed as that sensational moment of June 30, and now, after, I didn’t matter. I was invisible. The reporter would move on to the next story, and I would be left, shattered, to cope with my reopened trauma.

Overall, I wish the media would consider the harm they can cause. But some are doing it right: I’m grateful for journalist Francesca Fionda and the Climate Disaster Project, who are making a difference in how survivors’ stories are shared. 

And government… I don’t even know where to begin. Every level of government has failed us: municipal, provincial, and federal. And more than that, their complacency has augmented the trauma we have experienced. I don’t mean that in an abstract, emotional way, although there is that too. They have also failed to meet our basic needs, the minimum necessary for survival.

For example, between a six-month Do Not Consume Order and a three-month Boil Alert, the homes left in the Village of Lytton and Lytton First Nation’s IR17 had potable water for three out of the twelve months in that first year. It meant that in deep trauma, in an isolated burned-up town, we had to find drinkable water to keep our children alive.

A year after the fire, I attended an unmet needs committee meeting with other Lyttonites, various NGOs, and the Village of Lytton’s recovery team. We stressed that drinking water was still a primary unmet need. I remember very clearly that the recovery manager at the time, who worked for Lytton from the comfort of his home in the Okanagan, leaned back in his chair and said, “Look, you’ll get water when you get water.”

RT: That’s awful. And a window into a dynamic most of us in BC have yet to experience. In focusing on the aftermath of the fire, you offer readers a glimpse into the long-haul effects of forest fire destruction. 

In 2023 we suffered the worst fire season in BC history, and that record’s likely to be broken again soon. What do you wish you’d known in advance about the long road to recovery? What would you like to tell those who experienced losses in 2023, or those who might in the future?

MF: I don’t know if there’s anything I wished I would have known. Would it have helped with any of the trauma if I knew in advance that recovery—of the village, of ourselves—would take years? Would it have helped if I had known that the slow-moving and impersonal systems of government are incapable of adapting to pressing needs? Would it have helped to know that only time would get us through the worst of it, and not everyone would survive that journey? I don’t know. I think I would choose naïveté and have those truths unfold one at a time, as they have for me.

I do have a wish, though. I wish that my little book might help other survivors of climate disasters to feel that they’re not invisible, even after the media moves on. The book shares my very personal experience, but through sharing, through others bringing their own emotions to it or recognizing their own experience in it—their experience of loss and grief of any kind—it becomes universal, and the experience becomes shared experience. Does that make sense?

RT: Yes, very much so. The path to the universal must run through the particular. I think a great number of people will see their lives reflected in your book, even if they’ve never experienced a major fire. 

On this theme, despite Burning Sage‘s dramatic subject matter, relationships—some tender and loving, others strained—sit at the emotional heart of the book. This feels in keeping with the true nature of grief: all loss is personal loss. Could you talk about your decision to widen the scope of the book to include your personal relationships, such as the “friend (love)” you mentioned earlier? Was it a decision at all, or was this the only way you could think of approaching the subject matter?

MF: I think if I had decided, “I’m going to write a book about the fire,” the result would have been very different: less personal, less intimate. But the poems simply emerged as I processed individual memories, and the personal relationships were an inextricable part of those memories. 

One choice I did consciously make was to include the “breakup poems” in the book. I was already writing the book when the relationship ended, and those poems were written in all the pain and agony of that loss; as such, they feel more vulnerable than any of the other poems. But I had to include them, because the breakup, too, was part of the healing. I cried because my heart was broken, and then I couldn’t stop crying—weeks of crying on the living room floor. I couldn’t understand it, the extent of the grief, until a friend pointed out that I was finally crying out the fire and the impossible life after, and all of the struggles from before the fire too. Finally, finally, crying them out.

For me, more than anything, Burning Sage is a love story. I wrote it for and about one person; it’s about the way that one person saw past the moment of the fire, and saw me for who I am. And, feeling seen, I could see myself—no longer invisible—and the network of love and support and community that is all around me. What I mean is that love showed me that I was never, ever invisible.

RT: In “Fabric” you write about knitting something inspired by smoke: “dropped stitches / disrupted fabric / intentional deconstruction / damage.” This made me think of your poems which, in their raggedness and repetitions, convey panic, fear and breathlessness (as in “At Siska,” where “I am not ok” is repeated five times). Could you talk about the style you adopted in writing these poems? What are their dropped stitches and disruptions?

MF: I wish I had a good answer for you—I wish that any of it had been intentional. I didn’t consciously adopt any style; I just wrote the poems as they emerged. But maybe I can explain it a little.

After the first poem or two poured out, and I felt how cleansing it was to finally put those memories on paper, I wanted to keep writing. I would step into my memory just enough to see the flash of an image or the hint of a feeling, and that would be enough. Bare feet on hot asphalt. My daughter Helen covering my eyes. The numbness of the first visit to the ruins of my café. A fireball. A moment of intimacy. In a way, I would hold an emotion-memory in my mind, something that needed to come out, and I would start typing. And often the buried feelings surprised me as they emerged.

Each poem, then, is an emotional snapshot of that particular moment in my experience and in my memory. Does that make sense? So when “At Siska” repeats the hum of “I am not ok,” it’s because at that time—in the first hours and days after the fire—I didn’t know anything except that I wasn’t ok. Or when the nice tidy love-lines of “Highway 12” explode into messy fragmented lines at the reappearance of trauma, it’s because I was ripped out of quiet peace when we turned a corner in the road. It wasn’t intentional, and maybe it all surprised me.

Throughout the whole experience of life after the fire, there was never a smooth, unblemished fabric, except maybe in the briefest moments of love. But no, not even then. I would be ok for a minute, an hour, and then another stitch would come unravelled: at the memory of a mushroom cloud, or the smell of smoke, or the sight of an empty fridge with the closest grocery store now an hour away.

During and after the writing process, I spent countless hours editing the poems. At first they were all on the typewriter, and each set of revisions meant I would retype the whole stack of poems, weighing the changes, reading them aloud, adjusting spacing by a fraction of an inch or travelling a long path of synonyms to find the right word. That’s when I started to notice themes that run through the book, and to find meaning behind so many of the unintentional decisions. And editing, too, more than writing, gave me control over those memories. I could distill them down, refine them, make them beautiful, and they would no longer have control over me.

RT: You mentioned visiting the ruins of your café there. While your house survived, you lost your business, Klowa Art Café, to the fire. Are you planning to rebuild? 

MF: Klowa was a really special place, but I can’t rebuild. I had insurance that was enough to rebuild at the time of the fire; with the bureaucratic delays and narratives of toxicity and supply chain shortages and many other circumstances, though, the quotes a year later were coming in at more than double my policy limit. In other words, I would have had to find an additional $350,000 or more just to rebuild the little building that I had. Impossible. 

My only other option was to hire a lawyer to negotiate a settlement with the insurance company for the subjective “actual cash value” of the building, which was substantially lower than my insurance policy limit and, in the end, was just enough to pay the lawyer and clear the two mortgages that I’d still been paying on that burned-up property. The claim was finally settled in September 2023, two years and three months after the fire, and I own an empty piece of land where Klowa once stood.

RT: I’m so sorry. While you can’t rebuild Klowa, do you see writing Burning Sage as a small way of rebuilding what was lost?

MF: I was going to say no, that it hasn’t been a part of rebuilding what I lost, that it honours the memory but what’s gone is gone… but maybe I’m wrong. 

A little while ago, I was telling a dear friend—someone who lost her home to the fire—that a surprising part of sharing my experience with the world has been how people then share theirs with me: their story, their grief, their emotion. It’s as if through honesty and vulnerability and a raw form of beauty, the book makes them feel safe to be vulnerable, to be themselves. And she answered, “But Meghan, don’t you know that Klowa was that for us, too?”

Halting, Slowing, Quickening: An Interview with Gillian Sze

This interview was first published in the Fall 2023 issue of The Antigonish Review.

Kindling – Gillian Sze

And after days of rain, it suddenly stops and we peer out the window, watch the grey lift. Across the street, someone from the city has set up around an old stump. The grinder whirrs away as chips spit out, amass into a velvet pile. My son, who has learned to climb, clambers onto a stool and plays the radiator like a piano. On tiptoes he regards the man in goggles, the slow work of shredding years and smoothing out land. Damp grass encircles an open wound. When he was just learning to crawl, my son and I sat on the kitchen floor counting knots in the wood. Now it’s just the two of us, each on two feet: one startled by how swift and brute the uprooting, another contemplating how to fly.

from Quiet Night Think

(ECW Press, 2022).

Reprinted with permission.

---

Gillian Sze is the author of multiple poetry collections, including Peeling Rambutan, Redrafting Winter, and Panicle, which were finalists for the Quebec Writers’ Federation’s A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry. Her new collection of poems and essays, Quiet Night Think, won the 2023 Pat Lowther Memorial Award. She resides in Montreal, where she teaches creative writing and literature.

Gillian Sze

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Rob Taylor: Quiet Night Think brings together poems and essays, which felt like a rarity in Canadian publishing until very recently (in addition to yours, new titles by Jonina Kirton, Nick Thran and Wanda-John Kehewin all mix the two). Why did you choose to bring the two together? 

Gillian Sze: I intended to write a book of essays, but, in the end, I found an important relationship between those pieces and the poems I was writing during that same period. So much of Quiet Night Think is about fragmentation—across identities, languages, times—and it made sense to embrace those fissures and leaps between genres. I think the point of the hybrid form was to give readers that same sense of halting, slowing, and quickening that I was experiencing as an anxious new mother. The winding of the sentence, the hiccups of the verse.

RT: Did you receive any resistance from your publisher about mixing genres in this way? 

Quiet Night Think (2023)

GS: No. I’ve worked with Michael Holmes at ECW on two other books, and he has always been supportive. Panicle, for example, also has a bit of everything: prose poems, long poems, creative translations, sketches… Quiet Night Think seemed like a natural place to go in our writer/editor relationship. 

RT: In the book's titular essay you quote William Carlos Williams, who defined a poem as "a thing made up of... words and the spaces between them." Later in the book, you provide your father's counterpoint: looking at your MA thesis of poems (and all the space around each poem), he declared "There's nothing here - it's empty!" Throughout the book, you embrace the "space between"—between words, between languages, between cultures. It's even right there on the cover: those big gaps between each of the words in the title! 

At the same time, your move towards essays feels like a filling in of that space, that "emptiness," which bridges a gap between your father's expectations and your own. Was that part of your motivation towards non-fiction? Does it allow you to navigate, or fill in, the spaces between languages and cultures?

GS: I certainly felt more exposed when I was writing the essays. Even on the page, the essay appears as solid blocks of text. I felt like there was nowhere to hide. I couldn’t disappear into thin air. The words string along into sentences. The research is revealed. The history is told. In that sense, I think the essay was useful for me. It was a form that best suited the telling of all these threads: history, research, and memory.

I love the poetic spaces that the reader can drop into. I remember my first encounter with Anne Carson’s translations of Sappho. I still like falling into those gaps. Reading poetry is like that, I think. The reader enters the poem, ultimately filling those spaces in their own way.

RT: That’s really interesting. I think many people would assume the opposite is true: that poetry, so spare on the page, is the genre that leaves you no place to hide. But I guess those gaps a poem leaves for the reader can also be hideouts for the poet’s full self.

GS: There is certainly an intimacy with the writing of poetry. I think of my earlier writing as rawer, more of my “full self.” Now I prefer to hide behind a persona, which I felt like I couldn’t do when writing the essays. I couldn’t fully escape the “non” in creative non-fiction. Fanny Howe defines the lyric as “a method of searching for something that can’t be found.” I like that—it feels like the poet invites the reader to search with them, or perhaps the poem launches the reader towards their own private discovery.

RT: In your essay "Sitting Inside the Moon," you write about the custom in Chinese culture for a mother to spend a month housebound after the birth of her child: "You come out of it no longer the same person and no longer the same poet.” Could you expand on that? 

GS: Becoming a mother made me realize the expanse of time I had before motherhood. I’m writing this to you while on a plane, by the way. I was an ocean away last week, alone, just being a poet. I had never been this far from my children ever. I was removed from the demands of them, the domesticity, the routine of a home life. Instead, I was attending translation workshops, performing my work, and discussing my poetry. It was luxurious. Even being able to mull over your questions and write these answers to you, alone on a dark plane somewhere between Sao Paolo and Montreal, is luxurious. 

I soon realized that as a brand new, breastfeeding mother, the time and concentration I once had for poetry was changing. I was following a different schedule, one that was intimately tied to my body and heart, and I was anxious about it all. How can I write when I’m so tired? How can I read when reading is forbidden during the month-long postpartum care? What am I missing out on when my daily life and thought processes have radically changed? 

Chinese postpartum care is essential for the new mother to recover, to heal, to strengthen. It’s only now that I see how this physical healing was also an important transition period for me to accept that writing isn’t always the act of writing. It is also experiencing, thinking, becoming. 

RT: In your essay "The Hesitant Gaze," you write of your desire to, like William Carlos Williams, "write with hesitance," pausing "at the sight of a leg, the taste of cold plums, a red wheelbarrow." Contrasting this desire towards the small and still are your comparatively large essays. Do you think these twin desires are in some way tied to your loss of that “expanse of time”? Some mix of the desire to observe and record a particularly vital time in life, and the lack of a physical capacity to do so? 

GS: I’ve always appreciated the small shapes of poems. I don’t think it’s a surprise that I recently turned to picture book writing (another short form with its own constraints). I wonder if the longer form of the essay came about because I was finishing up my dissertation when I was pregnant. Perhaps those sentences just seeped into my creative work! 

I was also reading about the lyric essay, which continues to fascinate me as a poet. The form straddles the essay and the lyric poem and moves, according to Deborah Tall and John D’Agata, “by association…by way of imagery or connotation…or sidewinding poetic logic.” Moreover, I think I was returning to the word “essay”—not the noun as we know it—but the verb “essayer” (to try). As students, we come to the essay fearfully, reluctantly. We learn it as a rigid form. Imagine my delight when I was learning that Montaigne, in Essais, was seen as playing on all the meanings of the word’s Latin root, “exagium,” which includes “trial,” “attempt,” “risk,” “exercise,” and “temptation.” He calls the essay “a ramble”—and I love the confusion and pleasure implied in that walking/talking description. G. K. Chesterton also calls the essay “the joke of literature.” Suddenly, the essay becomes a place one can wonder and wander and play.

RT: Amidst the changes in your writing, you've consistently written ekphrastic poems in response to works of art. In "The Hesitant Gaze," you write about the importance of a second "look" at a piece of art—a painting, a poem—as you, the viewer, will see it differently, having changed in the interim. This chimes with what you said about writing before/after "sitting inside the moon," and I'm curious to what extent you now think about ekphrastic writing differently. Do you now think about art in a different way than you used to?

Fish Bones (2009)

GS: I’m not sure if I view or think about art in a different way than before. Ekphrasis has always been an exercise of patience, attention, and free association. From the start, I think my approach to ekphrasis has always been loose and tendrilled. When I was working on my MA thesis (the basis of my ekphrastic collection Fish Bones), I wanted to move past pure description and traditional approaches. I chose not to include an appendix in that book because I wanted the poems to stand on their own, to have the artwork disappear, to let the words be the only things on which the reader leans. So I think I’ve always made that space for me to slip in. I continue to search for exhilarating encounters between me and works of art.

RT: In the essay “Perennials,” you write about your futile determination to weed your grass, and compare it with your determination to write: “I accepted [the] mundane hell of always starting over, condemned both at my desk and in my yard.” You close the essay with the image of blowing on dandelions: accepting what you cannot defeat. I’m curious about what you see as the writerly equivalent to that weeding-acceptance? A fallow period of not writing (“I was resting from poetry,” you write in a later essay)? Silence? Or perhaps the transformation from poetry to essay?

GS: I think it’s all of the above. There was an obsession, an ongoing-ness, to weeding and to writing that I felt keenly before becoming a mother. It’s still there, but it’s different. I think sitting in the moon, having children, taking a rest from writing, were experiences that were vital for me. I worried that if I wasn’t obsessing, I would cease to be a writer. My husband was far wiser; he was confident that the writing would return. His perspective was, of course, from beyond the moon. The blowing of the dandelion is an act of surrender. It was a gesture of pause, of mercy. It was an allowance to give myself a bit more time.

RT: As you returned to writing, did you come upon this book quickly? Did you write a stretch of poems, then essays (or vice-versa), or was the composition itself also intermingled? 

GS: This manuscript came together slowly and with little planning. The Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec supported my proposed essay project, so when I realized they were willing to fund the book, I was more attentive to essay writing. I’m always writing poetry, so that was still going on, albeit more slowly. The first completed piece in the book that really inspired me to consider a full-length essay project was “Quiet Night Think.” The final piece to enter the manuscript was “Babble.” Interestingly, the first version of “Babble” was actually my first attempt at writing poetry after becoming a mother. I returned to the (terrible) scribblings of an early draft, saw it with clearer eyes, and revised it for the book. Time and forgetfulness are useful for a writer. 

RT: Ha! Absolutely. I don’t think I’d be able to edit without forgetfulness. 

A central theme of Quiet Night Think is coming to a better understanding of your parents with age (and with becoming a parent yourself). Poetry was a source of division earlier in your relationship with your parents, but it also seems like it might have offered a path back for you, via your own writing and the writing of others (perhaps Emily Dickinson especially, as explored in "Fricatives," the long poem which closes your book). Could you talk about the role poetry has played in your life as a source of both division and union?

GS: It really took time, experience, and learning, to realize the irony of how poetry found me, how it shaped me, and how it fits into my life. For example, my mother, who was unable to translate Li Bai for me when I was small and who still plays down her language abilities, was really the first poet in my life when she constructed my Chinese name. I don’t think she even considers it a poetic act, but it is: to ponder over and decide on my name’s meanings and sounds. That marked me from birth. My father, so against my literary pursuits, was the one who bought me my first poetry anthology, which I’ve kept close since. 

Growing up, I thought my family’s relationship towards poetry stemmed from their being of and from elsewhere, but I realize now how wrong I was. Chinese culture is full of poetry. The pictorial quality of Chinese characters. The economy and density of meaning. And poetry continues: in the musical Hokkien utterances between me and my children, in their linguistic errors because they live in three languages, in their own Chinese names, which are new poems “written” by my mother. The writing of this book was really a softening of so many parts: myself as a new mother (and a new writer), my relationship with my family, and all of us as imperfect, babbling humans.

The Sponsoring Condition: An Interview with Matt Rader

An excerpt from this interview was first published in the Fall 2022 issue of Arc Poetry Magazine.

Lightwell – Matt Rader

The morning after you

left, the sun

was a dim white light

that didn’t make me 

think of anything,

not angels,

not death. I couldn’t

look directly

at it

but its effects

were everywhere:

the swarm of raindrops

alive in the lilac,

the metallic skyscape

floating

in my truck’s silver paint.

A brightness too bright

to look at

is the true definition

of a thing

beyond me, a white hole

I fall endlessly through

into my body.

Woe, to see the sun,

someone once wrote,

and not think 

of angels,

but I’d like to 

not think

at all, if possible. Just feel

something cosmic

reach through the altostratus

and touch me.

from Ghosthawk 

(Nightwood Editions, 2021).

Reprinted with permission.

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Matt Rader is an award-winning author of five volumes of poetry, a book of non-fiction, Visual Inspection, and a collection of stories, What I Want to Tell Goes Like This. His work has appeared in Best Canadian Poetry, Geist, The Walrus, Wales Arts Review, The Fiddlehead and The Malahat Review. Rader is a core member of the Department of Creative Studies at UBC Okanagan where he lectures in creative writing. He lives on the traditional and unceded land of the syilx/Okanagan people in Kelowna, BC.

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Rob Taylor: In reading Ghosthawk (Nightwood Editions, 2021), I was reminded of your second collection, 2008's Living Things, which opened with a poem whose form immediately grabs your attention, "The Great Leap Forward.” It’s still the only poem I've read modeled after the Fibonacci sequence! As Living Things' title suggests, in that book you focused your attention on the natural world. Here you are thirteen years later with another bold formal choice: almost all of Ghosthawk is composed of haiku-like tercets, with the majority of the poems being exactly eleven tercets long. And the plants and animals of the Okanagan anchor many of them. 

Formally and thematically, then, Ghosthawk feels like both a "leap forward" and a circling back to your enduring themes and concerns. Would you agree with that? How do you place this book in relation to those that came before it?

 

Ghosthawk (2021)

Matt Rader: I’ve lived most of my life outside of large urban centers. I come from families of European settlers.  It’s challenging to write about where you are if you don’t have words for what’s around you. Mostly, what’s been around me have been plants, mountains, water, sky.

 

In 2014 I moved with my family to the Okanagan Valley, 400 kms from the sea. Semi-arid brush steppe. Grasslands and ponderosa pines. Prickly-pear cactus and sagebrush. I’d never lived that far away from the sea. I didn’t know where I was, not really.

 

Ghosthawk is a recapitulation of a method for poem-making and home-making that I first practiced most ardently in Living Things. In both books, the imposed structures of form, whether received or invented, helped focus my attention so my awareness might grow.

 

The naming of the natural world worked the same way: by learning names for plants I attended to them and became aware of the communities in which they lived. It’s important to know your neighbours and whose home you’ve come to live in.

 

RT: You attend to the natural world both by naming and seeing it. In Visual Inspection (Nightwood Editions, 2019), your book of experimental essays on chronic pain, you write, "sometimes searching for something guarantees you'll never find it. Sometimes what you are looking for obscures what it is you find in your search; you have to see not what you're looking for, but what is there." 

When I read that, my mind leapt to the poems in Ghosthawk, published two years later, which very much seem to be born from seeing "what is there." How did your thinking in Visual Inspection manifest in the poems of Ghosthawk? 

 

MR: I started writing Ghosthawk before Visual Inspection, so to some degree Ghosthawk informed Visual Inspection as much as the other way around, perhaps more.

 

RT: It makes a lot of sense that these two books were born out of the same time in your life. How do you think your chronic pain has influenced the way you "look" at the world in your poems?

 

MR: Pain is very difficult to speak about except in symbols, metaphors, and analogies. It reminds me of poetry: the best poems can’t be paraphrased because how they say what they say is, to be tautological, what they say.

 

Seeing “what is there” isn’t an objective action but an ethic of clarity based in humility. Sometimes you see the bitterroot making its star-shape laser-rays on the dry steppe. Sometimes you see, as Stevens has it, the “nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.” Or what I might call the fantasy and the mystery.

 

The vision of the bitterroot is a mystery not a fantasy. That’s the important part. Trust Louis MacNeice to say it plainly: “But dream was dream and love was love and what / Happened happened—even if the judge said / It should have been otherwise.”

 

RT: There's a powerful moment in Visual Inspection where you talk about pain and belief: how others, and even ourselves, don't believe or sympathise with pain until it's diagnosed, named and measured in a medical context. But pain, at its core, is unnameable, unmeasurable. As you put it, "speaking about [pain] in medical terms often does more to undermine personal experience than to illuminate it." You then talk about the joy of having a friend, also living with chronic pain, who simply believes in your pain without needing you to prove it/name it.

 

Could you talk a little more about the connection between your challenges in communicating your physical pain to those around you, and your challenges in communicating your inner self in your poems? 

 

MR: To some degree, I don’t know that pain or poetry can be communicated much at all except through experience. Anyone who reads poetry for years will have the experience of a poem they read twenty years previous suddenly feeling like an entirely different poem even though the words are, obviously, exactly the same.

 

One can learn to communicate pain in limited ways within the contexts of particular relationships because within those relationships one can make use of shared symbols, shared signposts of language that indicate a familiar location within that relationship.

 

Mostly though, writing poems and communicating pain is like saying, “Look, a red thimbleberry.” Some folks will not be moved. Some folks will look at it with curiosity. Some will eat it.

RT: Ha! Yes, the releasing of control over how your work is interpreted is a valuable lesson for writers, applicable to many other aspects of life. A tension runs through Ghosthawk between the ephemeral (the aforementioned bitterroot, thimbleberry, etc.) and the eternal (the sun, the rain, the creek, etc.). You often show great affection for the living, but a distance from the never-ending: the sun "a brightness too bright / to look at," the rocks "pitiless solitude," the water with "nothing but the rush of itself to say," etc. Could you talk about this tension, and if you even see it as one? 

 

MR: This strikes me as a question of scale. None of the things you mention are actually eternal, as in “outside of time,” but appear—to me at least—to exist in time-scales that exceed humans in extravagant ways.

 

At a human scale, the table I’m writing on is solid, but physics tells us that at an atomic level it is mostly space and at a quantum level it isn’t even that. It’s easier for me to identify with the table as a table because the version of me that identifies at all is at the scale of tables. It might be the same with the rain and the mariposa lily.  

 

It’s an astute question though. The distance you note is interesting because I feel it most acutely when I “go inside” my own sensing mind-body. The brightness too bright to look at and the pitiless solitude and the aphasia of the self are all aspects of my attention-awareness when the part of me that can report back, the discreet user of language, is most dissolved or integrated with “what’s there.” In other words, the distance in the poem is an expression of the self as such.

 

RT: A favourite quote of mine is from Jim Harrison's poem, "Debtors": "Would I still love the creek if I lasted forever?" Does that question resonate with you? Or perhaps its opposite: Would you love the creek more if you shared its scale and lasted (almost) forever?

 

MR: Love exceeds humans in extravagant ways, thankfully. I love the creek and would love the creek under any condition because that is part of what it means to love. As Auden says, “You shall love your crooked neighbour / With your crooked heart,” and creeks, as the name suggests, are always crooked.

RT: A theme in Visual Inspection is adaptation to the crooked turns life throws at you. Looking back over your books, perhaps especially these six years between Desecrations and Ghosthawk, how have your expectations for the capacities of your own writing, or for writing in general, adjusted? 

 

MR: Yes, adjusting expectations until they aren’t expectations anymore at all but curiosities, possibilities, surprises, quiet revelations. A different orientation toward time, perhaps.

 

The insight for me, in the years writing Ghosthawk, was that the inner field of my imagination, my mind, was continuous with the field of wildflowers and the star fields. It’s an old insight; it’s nothing special, but it had a profound impact on me nonetheless. All the world in a grain of sand stuff.

 

There’s that old Buddhist wisdom that goes something like: Before I practiced the mountains were only mountains. After I started practicing the mountains were no longer mountains. Now, after long practice, the mountains are mountains again. 

 

I’m not a Buddhist though. I don’t have a particular spiritual framework guiding me, though I was raised in, and had my imagination shaped by, a very liberal Catholic theology that feels kinship with Eastern practices. 

I’ve always been so curious about what I’ll think if I’m lucky enough to grow old.

 

RT: A Buddhist sensibility is certainly present in Ghosthawk, as is the haiku form. The poems in the book, which pay deep attention to the natural world, are composed of haiku-like tercets. But these poems aren't haiku: they are longer and roam widely, drawing in more connections.

The opening words in Ghosthawk, from the book's epigraph, are "Reading Bashō..." Could you talk about what you took from reading haiku poets like Bashō, and how you applied it to your own work? Did you have any other sources of inspiration in settling on the book's form?

 

MR: At times, haiku feel to me like astute snippets of reportage, ones that note not only the physical environment but the psycho-social state that accompanies each moment of observation. There’s a kind of selfless objectivity in Bashō’s poems characterized by good humour, clarity, and care. This feels to me like one of the highest ethics not just in poetry, but as a human. 

 

Western poets have been taking cues from this technique for a few generations now: the image as a device for simultaneously collapsing and expanding space-time. However, Westerners, generally speaking, are more interested in the effects than the ethics of a technique. Not just in poetry but in everything. There’s a cost to the magic of collapsing space-time that must be paid. Bashō’s selflessness is part of that payment.

 

But Bashō wasn’t really the model for these poems, more like a fellow traveler I’ve met at points along the way. My guide was Seamus Heaney’s long poem “Squarings” where he asks “could you reconcile / what was diaphanous there with what was massive?”

 

RT: Can you tell me more about “Squarings” and how it came to guide you in writing Ghosthawk?

MR: “Squarings” is a long poem in four sections with multiple parts that concludes (with the exception of an epilogue translation from The Inferno) Heaney’s 1991 collection Seeing Things. It’s a book and a poem that has continued to unfold for me over more than two decades of repeated reading. “Squarings” is arguably the apotheosis of Heaney’s poetic vision.

The poems of Seeing Things were composed in Heaney’s middle life after the loss of both parents. The 1993 ceasefire in Northern Ireland was on the historical horizon. The fall of the Communist block had just taken place. Mythological times both world-historically and personally. 

“Squarings” is formally iterative. Each part is four tercets of roughly five beats a line. In other words, they’re squares. The lines make a kind of grid through which Heaney looks at his world and what’s beyond his world, what’s beyond the Earthly world. 

The poem gathers up themes, ideas, references, and foreshadowings from the first part of the book but also from his earlier work. It’s self-consciously literary. Heaney puts himself in a lineage that rocks between the clear-eyed atheism of Thomas Hardy and the spiritual curiosity of W. B. Yeats. The poem is very much about “seeing” in both a literal and a metaphysical sense. It has an airy, ethereal quality even when regarding the “stony up-againstness.” 

I’d had my own mythological encounters with death before and during the composition of Ghosthawk. When I found my own auger-like tercet shape, I determined to keep working it until I found water. And then work it over and over. 

RT: I love that idea of finding your auger: how these shapes hold power, allowing us to move more deeply into subjects that are difficult to approach.  In Visual Inspection, you write, "When we see a printed haiku by Bashō we immediately, before reading a word, apprehend something different than when we see the first page of a blank-verse epic like Paradise Lost." You then follow this with blacked-out versions of each, proving your point. 

This reminded me of something Ken Babstock once said about the sonnet:

 

I am attracted to its no-holds challenge to composition. It says, “Here’s a squarish block of text on a white field in which something or, more likely, nothing will occur. Are you up to it?” It gets strange here as, obviously, there is no real “block of text” anywhere present before one writes a sonnet–except perhaps there is; a blast shadow from history, a kind of dimly perceived ‘dark matter’-sonnet that can serve as a vessel or threat or foil.

 

Could you talk a bit more about what you apprehend from the "blast shadow" of the haiku, which you turn into your “auger” in Ghosthawk? 

 

MR: For me, the shape of the haiku is an invitation, a doorway, a portal. It invites me to attend to relationship, between something and nothing, speech and silence, matter and dark matter (to borrow Ken’s metaphor), to remember that the smallest gestures radiate, and are defined by what they radiate into. Which itself is a common image in haiku.

  

Visual Inspection (2019)

RT: In Visual Inspection, you wonder about "how to create versions of our poems, or even compose poems, that render [the] extra-semantic dimensions available to the non-visual learner?" It's obvious that you think a great deal about how to visually present your poems on the page, but it seems equally important to you to expand non-visual accessibility to poems. Are these two desires unavoidably in conflict? Are there ways we can reach readers/listeners beyond the page while still maintaining a poem's "physical" presence?

 

MR: The appearance on the page is only one manifestation of the energy of a poem. Poems also exist as physical and mental speech. In these forms poems occupy different but equally true physical presences (Where in your head, for example, do you hear the poems you remember?). Poems can also exist as a kind of touch under the right conditions. Or as three-dimensional printouts. Or trees and grasses. Anything, really.

 

For me, the lesson of working on Visual Inspection was that no particular rendition of the poem needs to be definitive or given priority. That access isn’t a question of equal availability to all things for all people all the time, but rather a form of love characterized, as I said of Bashō, by good humour, clarity, and care. In this formulation there is no conflict created by difference.

 

The question for me as an artist isn’t how to expand non-visual access to poems, but rather how to expand my own aesthetic preferences, how to make art that imagines difference from the beginning. Rather than thinking about what non-visual folks don’t have access to and how I might deliver that access to them, I find it generative to think of how I might be in better relationship with my non-visual friends and families and how I might care for them.

 

I hope I’m getting better at imagining difference in general. I hope I’m getting better at bringing my own values in line with my actions both in and outside of writing. As Wallace Stevens says, “poetry is a violence within protecting us from a violence without.” I’ve not always lived up to “poetry.”

 

RT: What do you mean when you say you haven’t lived up to “poetry”? Do you mean outside of the writing, or within it?

MR: Both. Poetry for me has been a process of trying to find a way to be ever more honest—though a writer I admire told me that in an earlier draft of Ghosthawk I was still ducking saying what needed to be said. I don’t know if I agree with him but it was instructive for me about how even honesty and clarity look different from different positions. 

Within writing, I’ve at times not lived up to poetry by becoming too enamoured with my powers of description or my wielding of craft. I’ve not lived up to it when I’ve cared more for the performance than the audience, more for the praise than the simple truth. 

Outside of writing, my failure is more difficult to talk about because its ramifications are to particular people and relationships that didn’t agree to be put into print. I didn’t always understand that to my shame.

I’ve been thinking a lot in the past years about redress, restitution, and reconciliation. 

RT: The vices you laid out there in poetry (becoming too enamoured with one’s own powers, caring for the performance not the audience, seeking praise instead of truth) are too often the vices that lay us low outside of poetry, too. Perhaps that’s why both are lifelong pursuits, rarely mastered. Perhaps—and forgive me if I’m reaching wildly here—they’re the same pursuit.

MR: No, I don’t think that’s a wild reach. Often enough the obvious thing is the most important thing to say yet the thing left unsaid. So thank you for saying it. 

There are other grand vices with familiar names (racism, misogyny, colonialism, etc.) that amount to the same things: ego, will to power, fear. For me, “poetry” is one of the words for what stands against those vices, for what invites a human transcendence of our hurt and our hurting. It’s aspirational, an animating vision, even when the poem itself is about hurt and hurting. 

Great poems are to be lived with. They are inexhaustible. They are ongoing invitations to becoming. Which is why a Japanese maple is a poem, why a friendship is a poem, why birdsong is a poem. 

RT: Yes, let’s stick with this idea. Earlier you mentioned that a poem can be “trees and grasses. Anything, really.” In the acknowledgments to his new book of essays, The Tree Whisperer: Writing Poetry by Living in the World, Harold Rhenisch thanks you as the person who "saw the trees in my poetry and urged me to write this book." In what ways were Rhenisch’s poems trees? 

 

MR: What I recognized was the rhyme between Harold’s approach to fruit trees and his approach to composing poems. Harold taught me to care for fruit trees and poems by watching where the light falls. It is an invaluable lesson with ongoing ramifications for both my poems and my fruit trees. 

 

RT: Rhenisch writes so well about just that – making space for light in the orchard, and on the page. At one point in The Tree Whisperer he writes, "To use an intellectual tradition and the conceit of individual consciousness to speak of an Earth that is the body of all people who have touched the Earth is to lose the Earth." 

It feels to me that in your books there is an ongoing dance between intellectual traditions and “the Earth,” but which partner is leading the dance shifts from book to book (Ghosthawk, perhaps, being the book in which “The Earth” is most firmly in control). Would you say there's truth to that? How do you see your own work in relation to that quote from Harold?

 

MR: I think Harold’s correct and in this global historical moment that polemic is necessary. In a more philosophical mood I’d make one adjustment: "To use only an intellectual tradition and the conceit of individual consciousness to speak of an Earth that is the body of all people who have touched the Earth is to lose the Earth." The mind and the body are one and any tradition that denies this explicitly or implicitly summons trouble.

 

I think you’re also correct about my books. There’s a function of attention that feeds awareness and a function of awareness that directs attention. I don’t know if “The Earth” is most firmly in control of Ghosthawk, but it does seem to me that this book has a new sense of harmonics to it than in previous works. Harmonic being a word used, naturally, by music, physics and astrology.

RT: Could you speak a little more about this “new sense of harmonics” in Ghosthawk? 

MR: I’m thinking of Don McKay’s use of the term “rhyme” to describe the relationship of his poems about birdsong to actual birdsong. My good friend, the Tahltan artist Peter Morin, told me once that he liked the idea of me going out into the hills to eavesdrop on the flowers. I don’t mean to say that I can actually hear the flowers like I can hear birdsong, but I mean to say that I can actually hear flowers like I can hear birdsong. 

The process of making poems—at least the poems in Ghosthawk—isn’t burdened by questions of metaphysics, by what is and isn’t. The question of whether one can “truly” hear flowers is immaterial. What matters is that going out to listen to the flowers is different than going out to look at the flowers or pick the flowers or smell the flowers or pass them by. Intention matters. Openness matters. Attentiveness matters. This is what I mean by “harmonics.” 

 

RT: Though almost all of Ghosthawk is in tercets, the book's middle section features two ghazals, spread out one-stanza-per-page, with a longer poem between them (also spread out, in 10-line sections): three relatively short poems over 24 pages! I'm struck by how they speak to one another: the radif (refrain) of the first ghazal is "one" and the second is "gone," and between them you write "I'll never be able to say everything I want / to say, is what I want, finally, to say." 

There seems to be a disappearing here—someone sweeping their footprints behind them as they walk out of a room—as evidenced in part by the preponderance of white space on these pages (usually containing only a single couplet). Could you talk about that middle section: how you devised it and how you see it functioning as part of the larger book?

 

MR: I’m sensitive to some degree about claiming genre-forms like haiku and the ghazal for my poems. There’s a strong cultural argument against such claims. On the other hand, I certainly want to show the respect of acknowledging the influence these poetries have had on me. The ghazal appears to me to suggest something important about coherence and the primacy of the body, of form. The middle section is an experiment with that insight.

 

Conceptually, the middle part of Ghosthawk happens in the slackwater between in-breath and out-breath. Breathing is an important trope for me because I have had difficulties breathing my whole life. But breathing is also involuntary. In this sense it is pure form and each breath repeats the breath before. There’s a rhyme I think between that idea and the formal insights of the ghazal.

 

RT: Yes, absolutely. Moving forward while also circling back. And the quiet of that “slackwater.” The closing poems in Ghosthawk speak with increasing frequency of silence: "I'd like to / not think / at all, if possible," "The more I breathe,/ the less I have / to say // about the mariposa,”, "I was nothing once / I was happy." Do you see this book, with its white space and quietude, as a motion towards silence? Towards a return to happy nothingness? Do you see a time when you may stop writing books entirely?

 

MR: Writing poems is fun. As Mary Ruefle says, if you haven’t tasted the sweetness of writing poetry then you’re not writing poetry. It can be clarifying and ramifying and transformative. It can mystify and delight and console.

 

I see myself continuing to write poems in one form or another, but making books is another matter. At the very least, reflecting on my reasons for making books is important. Silence is not only one of the enduring themes of poetry but the sponsoring condition.

 

RT: If not books, then what? How would you find your way to readers? Or are readers (at least a wide audience of readers) of less importance to you now than in the past?

 

MR: What is a wide audience of readers for a Canadian poet in 2022? My relationship with readers is important to me, but that importance isn’t predicated on the size of my audience—it never has been for me. 

Books have acted like a psychological clearing house for my obsessions: publishing books has let me move on to the next set of problems and puzzles. But I’ve always felt that if I didn’t publish another book it was only because I was doing something more important to me. 

Living Things (2008)

RT: As naming and honouring sit so near the heart of Ghosthawk, I’d like to end our interview with a remembrance. A poem in the book, "Spring Azure," is dedicated to Elise Partridge and Patrick Lane, and I was struck in reading the back of Living Things to see blurbs by both Elise and Steven Heighton. Three meticulous poets and generous human beings, all lost to us too soon. My sense is that these three played distinct roles in your life - as friends, as teachers, as fellow poets on the page. Could you talk a little about these three, and the different ways poets have influenced your life and writing? 

 

MR: Patrick Lane was my first poetry teacher. Meeting him showed me that poets are living people, and that they could look and sound like the blue collar working class men I grew up with on northern Vancouver Island. Patrick was one model of what a poet might be and a very important one. There was wilderness inside Patrick that I recognized from my own life. Great love and great suffering, as the Franciscans say. He changed my life.

 

Elise was one of the most humble and private people I’ve ever known. In a sense that I think she’d object to out of modesty and embarrassment, she most resembles the ethic I ascribed to Bashō. She deserves a wider and ongoing readership. Elise once apologized to me because she felt that endorsement on Living Things wasn’t effusive enough. Anyone who knew Elise would recognize this as typical of her character. She passed on a wisdom about care as a poet and a person that I count among the greatest treasures I’ve received. 

 

Like Elise, Steve was a tremendous citizen of and for poetry. He was another kind of model: warm, serious, sincere, disarming, generous, not afraid to be goofy. He had a way of making everyone who knew him feel like they had a special connection with him because, I believe, they did. Steve seemed to have a heart the size of Lake Ontario. I feel his loss deeply. The possibility of seeing him again was something I cherished.

 

Maybe I can take this opportunity to send my love and regard to the families and loved ones of Patrick, Elise, and Steve. Thank you for loving our friends as you did so that they could be in our world as they were.