The Hinge Where the Mysteries Lie: An Interview with Donna Kane

The following interview is part five 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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Perennial - Donna Kane

All day, birdsong tills the air.
By evening, stars push through

the loam, perennial, their roots
tapping back to the bulb of their first

blossoming. It’s not the flight so much
as how the sparrow gathers up her body

for the landing, how the ladybug folds
each wing like a napkin inside its lacquered

case. How we are designed to open as much
as we are to close. Listen to the frog’s singing.

How it starts as suddenly as it stops.

 

Reprinted with permission 
from Asterisms
(Harbour Publishing, 2024)

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A recipient of the BC Medal of Good Citizenship, Donna Kane’s poems, short fiction, reviews, and essays have been published widely. She is the author of the non-fiction book Summer of the Horse and four books of poetry including Orrery, a finalist for the 2020 Governor General’s Literary Award. Her most recent book is Asterisms. She divides her time between Rolla, BC in Treaty 8 Territory and Halifax, NS in Mi’kma’ki, the ancestral and traditional lands of the Mi’kmaq people.

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Rob Taylor: The poems in your third collection of poems, 2020’s Governor General’s Award finalist Orrery, largely focused on outer space (an orrery being a mechanical model of the solar system), as do many of the poems in your new book, Asterisms. That’s not the standard preoccupation of most poets! Could you speak a little about what drew you to writing about space, and writing about it via poetry specifically?

Donna Kane: I grew up surrounded by a landscape where other-than-human life vastly exceeded human, so the natural world has always been an intrinsic part of who I am. Northeast BC is quite prairie-like (as Lorna Crozier, one of my favourite people and writers, once said, “It’s the closest BC gets to Saskatchewan.”). As a result, the sky takes up a lot of room. On dark, clear nights, the stars are the main feature. I also grew up during the Space Race. I was ten when Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon. The night sky, space, and the natural world were formative parts of my early years, and they have remained not only of interest, but places of solace. 

I also write about these subjects in my non-fiction work. I’m currently working on a prose manuscript that chronicles my experiences sleeping outside (I’m heading into my fifth summer of sleeping on an old cast iron bed on our uncovered deck in Rolla) while exploring subjects related to the nocturnal world, astronomy, and light pollution.

RT: In both Orrery and Asterisms, you write poems directly about outer space and the science that underpins its study, but in Asterisms we see that scientific language working its way into poems about animals and objects here on earth: a butterfly flies as if “nicked by a gravity well,” a can of Bartlett pears is no less than “the pivotal moment when the first star / formed… deep within their cosmic dawn,” and even the speaker of your poems is transformed, becoming, in one, an “interstellar object / on a mission to a glass of wine”!

I think the instinct of most poets would be to go in the opposite direction, to use more earth-bound, familiar objects (butterflies, pears, wine) to describe the complexity of the wider universe. (He says, knowing full well that metaphors always end up flowing in both directions.) In reading Asterisms, it felt as if the firmer, more grounded of the two worlds for you was not the earthly, but the cosmic. Would you say that’s true? Do you see deep space around you in the forest, just as others might look up at the stars and see, in their patterns, animals?

DK: Great question. It reminds me of the first four lines of William Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence”:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour

I do feel that. And it’s important, I think, especially now, in the face of climate change and an often-divisive world riddled with fake news, to remind ourselves of the discoveries made by science, and how we understand much better the connections between ourselves and the larger universe because of these discoveries. I also think it’s good to be reminded that not only do we depend on the natural world for our survival, we are nature. Our bodies are comprised of one of the universe’s first elements—hydrogen. There is no element in us that does not also exist in the cosmos.

My interest in and knowledge of the night sky and astronomy has deepened since I began to sleep outside. With the stars and the movements of other planets more viscerally a part of my nighttime experience, I have been reminded of the night sky’s natural and cultural significance, and it has inspired me to learn more. When so many of us live in urban centres where light pollution blocks out the sky and where access to natural spaces is limited, we may not always be aware of the deleterious effects of being disconnected from nature and darkness. A study in 2023 claimed that only one in five North Americans can still see the Milky Way. It’s unsettling how our connections to the night sky are being lost, not to mention that with more animals active at night than in the daytime, the greatest impacts of light pollution have been on other-than-human life.

RT: You split time between Rolla, BC and Halifax, Nova Scotia, where, as you say, light pollution blocks out the sky. I’m curious if you write different poems when you’re in the city. When you’re in Halifax, do you look up at the stars with the same frequency? Do you see the same things when you do?  

DK: I definitely write different poems when in Halifax. There’s not a lot of natural space in the city, and while I can see the moon, and sometimes a planet, there really isn’t a night sky. If I do see a smattering of stars, I have no idea which ones they are because there isn’t enough context. In Rolla, the constellations and asterisms are clearly defined, though there is still some light pollution. This past fall, I visited a dark sky preserve in southwest Saskatchewan where there were so many stars that the asterisms and constellations I knew were almost overwhelmed by stars I normally never see. It was an incredible experience.

Orrery (2020)

RT: Let’s dwell on that word “asterism,” which will be new to many people (including me before I Googled it). An asterism is a pattern of stars that has not been formally named a constellation. As Orrery formed a tighter circle around the theme of outer space, Asterism feels more eclectic, with many of its poems looking elsewhere: outward at the natural environment where you live; inward at the philosophical underpinnings of your life. 

The covers of the two books, too, suggest a shift (from a space probe to a butterfly’s wing). My sense is that the poems in the new book, like the stars in an asterism, are related, but the connections are more open to interpretation by the reader. Would you say that’s true? 

DK: I think my writing has most often started with a concrete image or experience and from there I have tried to apply that image or experience to abstract ideas. In many ways the concerns of both books are the same, but you are right that they seem to take off from different vantage points. With Orrery it was from the vantage point of a probe in interstellar space, an object we could no longer sense, so ultimately an abstract, and then within that abstract I tried to explore concrete images and experiences. In Asterisms I often started with the particular and then tried to view it through a larger cosmological lens. I love learning about similarities between large structures and small structures, such as the fractal patterns of the universe and that of a brain cell, so I do find myself starting more and more from striking relationships such as these and then applying them to the everyday.

As you suggest, the poems in Asterisms definitely have a greater range of subjects. With Orrery, I focused on Pioneer 10 or else tried to reflect the ideas inspired by the probe—materiality, consciousness, transformation, in the subjects I wrote about. With Asterisms, I was more concerned with patterns and their disruptions, with things we can and cannot know, so I tried to allow for more diverse subjects and more room for interpretation.

RT: If it has one, what do you think of as Asterism’s gravitational centre?

DK: I would say it’s the interconnectedness of patterns. An asterism is, as you say, a pattern of stars. Our capacity to recognize patterns may very well be because everything in nature, including humans, is comprised of patterns—from the Fibonacci series, to petals on a flower, to the tracks of animals. In many of the poems in my book, I explore how humans have interrupted or disturbed these patterns to the detriment of other life.

RT: Your poems are musical and playful, and also grounded and wise: Kay Ryan meets Mary Oliver meets Elise Partridge meets the Lunar Lander Module. You seem to have a firm sense of your place in the universe (if that’s an illusion, then it’s a convincing one!). I’m curious how you feel you learned to be at home where you are. How much of it involved looking at the skies and landscape around Rolla? How much at the pages of books of poetry?  

DK: I love all the poets you mention (I have mixed feelings about lunar landers), so I am flattered. I’m also somewhat calmed by your comment that I seem to have a firm sense of my place in the universe. While I do feel at home when I’m in the natural world, in the human sphere, I am often quite diffident.

I think it hasn’t been so much that I learned to be at home where I am, but that for nearly all of my life, I’ve never lived anywhere else. My place in the universe is so familiar to me I have never felt separate from it. Poetry too, can make me feel at home, particularly poems that embody what Don McKay calls, “poetic attention,” where poets are “readied” to recognize the wholeness that may arise from paying attention to the material world. When I read poems by poets such as Don McKay, Sue Sinclair, or Jan Zwicky, I am calmed. 

RT: Asterisms seems focused on the present, paying attention to the immediate moment before the speaker. In doing so, though, these poems become obsessed with the past and the future. In “On Silence” you write,

music can be disclosed only
by the silence between each note.
And the silence before. And after.

And three pages later, in “On Memory,” you write about,

This memory, which is no longer
that afternoon, but nectar in an uncapped cell,
a sweetness between before and after.

The one poem suggests the material demarcations between all things, and the other the felt connection between them, flowing over everything like nectar. How true both are: the cell capped and uncapped at once! 

I’m curious about how this duality relates to your writing process. You seem able to compartmentalize—to write discrete poems about discrete things—and yet those discrete things (rainbows, comets, singing frogs) are always spilling out to wider concerns or personal revelations. How discrete do you think a poem can be, sitting alone on the page, demarcated by the silence of the blank page around it?

DK: Oh, that is so insightful. I am indeed obsessed with the liminal space between one moment and the next. I feel like that hinge, that transition point, is where the real mysteries lie. I hadn’t actually thought about the silence of the blank space or pages between poems as reflecting this same sort of liminal space, but it’s a great observation. Because my poems have always focused more or less on the same subjects—the material world, phenomenology, consciousness—I feel they have always been in conversation with each other. I think any poem we read is in conversation with all the other poems we’ve read or written.

RT: Yes! Very much so. In Hiddenness, Uncertainty, Surprise, Jane Hirschfield wrote that “good poems undercut their own yearning to say one thing well, because to say one thing is simply not to say enough.” Does that resonate with you? 

DK: Yes, that completely resonates. In her poem “February” from Sixty-Seven Ontological Studies, Jan Zwicky writes, “Hello world, you who also know / nothing you can say.” As I get older, this has become ever more evident for me. My work is far from the experimental work of language poets where the process of writing a poem is sometimes seen as pre-cognitive, the poem posing the problem, and the writer working through it until the poem resolves itself. That’s not my approach, but I am cognizant of the impossibility of pat answers, and I hope my poems don’t close in that way. Maybe that’s why so many of my poems do resolve with a kind of “this or that” ending.

RT: Though your poems contain multitudes, they usually do so in small spaces: forty of the fifty poems in Asterisms are a sonnet’s length or less. This goes against the general trend in Canadian poetry publishing, where short poems are fairly rare. Could you talk a little about your attraction to writing these more densely compressed poems? 

DK: It may just come down to a short attention span and an aversion to hoarding. I like things to be spare, and I seem more suited to reading (and writing) contained poems that capture a moment or thought in a way that, hopefully, gives rise to something more, akin to Jan Zwicky’s idea that metaphor works as a gestalt. In this way, I think a short poem can do the work of a long poem. 

RT: Beyond Zwicky, have any particular poets inspired you in pursuing this approach?

DK: The aforementioned Jane Hirschfield, and Louise Glück, too. One of my other favourite poets is Tony Hoagland whose poems are much longer than mine, but I think in his case it’s his candid tone and humour that draws me in, and what holds me is that same resonance of meaning that’s greater than the words on the page.

RT: You note in Asterism‘s acknowledgments that during the depths of the Covid outbreak you enrolled in an online poetry workshop with acclaimed Newfoundland poet George Murray, which proved to be “exactly what [you] needed.” How did Covid impact your writing, and what role did Murray’s class play in seeing you through that time?

DK: You’d think because I’ve lived nearly all my life in a rural, isolated community that Covid wouldn’t have affected me as much as it did. But I wasn’t writing. I had always organized or attended a few writing events each year, and perhaps they fueled me more than I had realized. And also, for reasons I can’t explain, I wasn’t corresponding as much with my writing friends. It got very quiet. I’d always admired George Murray’s writing and his blogs, and when I saw an advertisement for his virtual “Introduction to Poetry” class, I signed up. I think on one hand, I wasn’t sure I did know how to write a poem anymore, but I was also missing camaraderie; I wanted to know what other writers were thinking, who they were reading. The classes not only gave me that, but I began to write poetry again.

RT: Were you reminded that you did know how to write poems, after all? Or did you find some new ways to do it?

DK: Prior to George’s classes, I had resisted form (all those arguments as to whether form drives content, or content form), and I was very averse to prompts. I was abysmal at workshopping poems while doing my undergrad and then my MFA. But many of the poems in Asterisms began from challenges to write in a certain form or to apply particular words. This didn’t change at all the subjects I was thinking about, but it gave me a structure to work in, and suddenly I was writing sonnets and villanelles, something I’d never really been attracted to before. I learned that good prompts (which George seems gifted at) can work like a seam ripper on a poet’s own ideas, opening up the stitches so you can move around in your thinking a bit more. Paradoxically to what I had previously thought, having structure helped me move in directions I might not otherwise have gone. Structure gave me a place and a way to start writing again. And using a bit more form or structure fit with the book’s overall theme of patterns.

A Beautiful Constellation: An Interview with Samantha Nock

The following interview is part four 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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mclean drive, - Samantha Nock

i break loose in isolation
crashing upon the rocks of myself.

i cry for two weeks straight
only stopping for sleep
and water.

long lessons learned
the hard way:
we are only loved
the way spring loves
fresh flowers.

even in endings,
there is renewal.

i break open myself,
to form new rivers.

mwîstas kakî wâpam’tin?

Reprinted with permission
from A Family of Dreamers
(Talonbooks, 2023)

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Samantha Nock is a Cree-Métis writer and poet originally from Treaty 8 Territory in the Peace Region of northeast British Columbia. Her family is originally from sâkitawâhk ᓵᑭᑕᐚᕽ (Île-à-la-Crosse), Saskatchewan. Samantha currently resides on unceded xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səlilwətaɬ Lands in so-called Vancouver. She has had works published in Maisonneuve, Vice, Prism International, and Best Canadian Poetry, among others.

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Rob Taylor: The second section of A Family of Dreamers focuses on your life with, and loss of, your grandparents, to whom the book is dedicated. Near the end of the section you write about experiencing sleep paralysis, and sensing that something is staring at you from the corner of the room: “this is the dreamworld / entering the waking world, i know this is grief / coming to collect.” Could you tell us a bit more about that experience? What effect has writing about it, and your memories of your grandparents, had on your experience of that grief?

Samantha Nock: A lot of my poems tell stories of me learning to look at my grief and the grief of my family head on instead of avoiding it. That poem, “the lord’s prayer,” walks through me describing the immediate moments after my grandpa Johnny’s passing and my first time being confronted with a big grief like that. I feel like experiencing sleep paralysis, and connecting it to my buried grief, was a way for me to show the physicality of grief as its own being. I literally look at it and share a room with it. 

Writing about my grief in this way has helped me move through some of the more tough parts of grief and learn to work and live with it. It’s also served as a way for me to honour my grandparents, both the ones that have passed and the ones still alive. It has allowed me to show my family the ways we share in this grief. It’s also been a way for me to talk to my grandparents who have passed. I never read the poem “grandma on the farm” out loud because I’m truly not sure I could get through it without crying. It’s a conversation for me and my grandma. 

RT: I appreciate that, and sense the intimate nature of some of these poems. How has it felt to see your book go out into the world and reach people close to you (and strangers, for that matter)?

SN: It has been a very strange and absolutely beautiful experience seeing how strangers and people close to me relate and react to my book! I’ve always looked at my poems having a very specific audience: other Indigenous people, specifically northern Cree Métis kin, my family, and the BC Peace Region. But just because that is who I was writing too doesn’t mean that I think my work is not “for,” or inaccessible to, people who are outside of that audience. I absolutely love hearing how people have found themselves in my work and the ways they relate to it or feel called to it. There is a teacher who I am in contact with who teaches some of my poems in their class and they will share their students’ reflections with me. It honestly has made this entire ten-year process of writing this book worth it. 

RT: What about your own response to your book, looking back over those ten years?

SN: Many of these poems have existed in some form throughout years of my life and they’ve been edited and changed as I changed. In a lot of ways the poems grew with me as I was navigating the growing up that happens in your twenties. They’re like old friends that know everything about me and the time we spent together has been very cathartic. 

RT: You mentioned the Peace River region there, which is a recurring subject of the poems in A Family of Dreamers. You write about the region, and the Peace river’s tributary, the Kîskatinâw, with a sense of love, loss and longing. In “kîskatinâw interlude pt. II,” for instance, you write:

she never apologizes

takes you as an offering
and continues to flow…

i wish there were a better way to say
that i am jealous of a river

You write about “working hard in high school because i’m a / cliché of wanting to leave my small town,” and being warned that “you can never come back.” You’ve lived in Vancouver for some time now: have you been able to return to the region? Is this book a return of sorts to both the region and the rivers that sustain it?

SN: This is a very beautiful question. I return home often. In recent years I’ve been trying to return at least twice a year (in the summer and in the winter). Growing up in the north wasn’t easy and along with the deep, deep love I have for it, there is a lot of hurt and grief there. I feel like in a lot of ways this book is an ode to the BC Peace Region, because it really did raise me. But it’s also a way for me to say goodbye to a complicated childhood and teen years so I can let go and discover a new part of myself. There is grief in this, too, and I feel like that comes out in a lot of the poems I write. 

For a long time, I held onto being the northern girl who came to the city, but I’ve lived in Vancouver for fourteen years now, nearly as long as I lived in the Peace. I will always be Sam Nock from Dawson Creek, BC but I’m also Sam Nock from Vancouver, BC. 

RT: Speaking of letting go of that teenage self, in the poem “letting go” you write about being young and “feeling 13 / and 45 at the same time.” That resonated with me both as the way many of us feel in high school, but also as the natural condition of the poet: a childlike wonder meeting an old soul. Do you still feel like you’re living those two lives simultaneously, even if the years have shifted a bit?

SN: Yes, but now I feel like I’m sixteen, thirty-two, and eighty-five. There were parts of my teens where I was unsure if I’d see eighteen or twenty or twenty-five. I was severely depressed and struggling. I feel like “old soul” can also be a way to describe kids who had to grow up too fast, and it’s in that way that I felt like I was 13 and 45. It’s also why I feel sixteen, thirty-two, and eighty-five now. This book let me look at the ways I am healing my child self, my current self, and my future self. 

RT: Yes, very true. My father died when I was eleven, so maybe that’s what’s at work in this shared feeling of ours, even more so than the poetry. 

A Family of Dreamers is full of memorable lines. One that stood out for me was “my spine is my greatest love story” (from “my body remembers”). Could you talk about it a bit?

SN: “my body remembers” is a blunt poem about being sexually assaulted when I was twenty and the ways in which I felt isolated and alone as a scared kid who didn’t know how to process the experience. Through somatic therapy, my therapist asked me during one session where I thought I held my resilience, and I imagined it being stored in my spine. Writing this poem allowed me to look at what happened through a lens of the way my body knew how to keep us going. Even at a time where I felt like my autonomy was stolen, my body was there to remind me that it could never be taken away.

RT: In A Family of Dreamers you use romanized Cree words and phrases within English-language poems, including using the Cree words for the numbers one to six to title your book’s six sections. Unlike many poets in recent years who have integrated Indigenous words into their poems (Jess Housty, Dallas Hunt, Wanda John-Kehewin, etc.), you’ve chosen not to provide a glossary of terms at the back of the book. Could you speak a little about that choice, and what you hope it signals for both Cree and non-Cree readers?

SN: I wanted to be able to put in my poems the parts of my language that I was able to. That it’s limited to certain words and phrases speaks to where my level of language knowledge is at right now. It is an absolute dream to me to maybe one day be able to write a poem fully in my community’s dialect. 

I chose not to translate because I wanted non-Cree speakers to stumble on the words, let them feel heavy and awkward in their mouths as they try and sound them out. I wanted them to have to Google the words or phrases and find out what they mean, much like the process a language learner has to go through. For Cree speakers who are familiar or fluent, I wanted there to be parts in there that felt comforting. I know how I felt the first time I got to read a poem with Cree in it; I got so excited and felt welcomed.

RT: Your endnotes point to a number of contemporary Indigenous poets whose influence you can see in your work: Selina Boan, Marilyn Dumont, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Dallas Hunt and Jessica Johns. Could you speak a little about your main literary influences in writing this book, either from this list or outside of it?

SN: I would be absolutely nowhere without being in this beautiful constellation of other Indigenous poets and writers. It feels impossible to even name them all. The biggest influences on my work, though, are Marilyn Dumont and Rita Bouvier. Dumont’s A Really Good Brown Girl was the first time I had read poetry by a Métis woman and in it I saw my family, and my lived experiences, too. Bouvier, who is from Ile-a-la-Crosse and also literally a cousin. I haven’t met Rita in real life but who I sent a very funny message to while writing this book. I was like, “Hey! I think maybe my kokum is your aunty or something like that, anyway we’re related and I love your work.” Her poems are such an inspiration because I feel like through them I am able to connect to family and places that I haven’t been able to connect to in other ways. 

RT: You also thank Emily Dickinson, who feels like a natural fit alongside the more “ghostly” and gothic elements of the book.

SN: I’m a formerly pretentious teenager who devoured the works of Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, Dorothy Parker, and Mary Oliver. I feel like they allowed me to dream of poetry. I still return to their work often. But if I’m being very honest, one of the biggest poetry inspirations for me is my dad. He’s a wonderful poet who writes gorgeous pastoral poems about the Peace Region. He doesn’t publish or share his work with anyone but family, but he was the one that taught me that there’s poetry in nature and the places we call home. 

A Freely Given Gift: An Interview with Jess Housty

The following interview is part three 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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September - Jess Housty

We are in the time of radiant rot;
berries drop from the stems
when we shake them and salmon
eat up the daylight
as their flesh falls away from
their living bones.

We can feel the full weight
of our grief now
as everything that surrounds us
is shot through with final gold
and the world lays down its work
to rest.

The stillness is like a fresh layer
of humus on the ground.

We are hushed
as though we’ve entered a house
where someone is dying:
we hear nothing but the thuds of crab apples
falling into the yellowed grass.

Reprinted with permission

from Crushed Wild Mint

(Nightwood Editions, 2023)

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Jess Housty (‘Cúagilákv) is a parent, writer and grassroots activist with Heiltsuk (Indigenous) and mixed settler ancestry. They serve their community as an herbalist and land-based educator alongside broader work in the non-profit and philanthropic sectors. They are inspired and guided by relationships with the homelands, their extended family, and their non-human kin, and they are committed to raising their children in a similar framework of kinship and land love. They reside and thrive in their unceded ancestral territory in the community of Bella Bella, BC.

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Rob Taylor: The opening poems in Crushed Wild Mint establish parallels between prayer, ceremony and poetry. For instance, from “Nearshore Prayer” (one of four poems in the book with “prayer” in their title):

This is a prayer that extends

in the direction of the ocean:

it is not a story; nothing 

is apocryphal in prayer 

Do you consider poetry to be a form of prayer? A poetry book a form of ceremony?

Jess Housty: I get teased sometimes for how often I talk about prayer. I’m not a religious person. For me, prayer is the word I use to describe moments of meditation and communion that ground me in myself and the world around me. In that sense, absolutely—each poem is a prayer, regardless of the title! Because each poem depends on beings and places and ideas outside of myself, and so each poem is relational and connective. I hope that, taken together, they feel like a ceremony or practice grounded in communal blessing, curiosity, and thanksgiving.

RT: Yes, that’s so well put. I think of poetry books as spaces of (usually non-religious) communion, though we rarely talk about them as such. Connected to this, in “Bowing to Yarrow (1),” you write about “the directionality of prayer,” which “is moving all around us and through time,” so that a prayer given by an ancestor to a licorice fern or a cedar is returned to you anew by the plant in the present day. 

I think something similar about poems—that they are not simply given to the reader by the writer, but co-created with the reader, then they are passed on to others and the process begins again. What is given is always traveling out and returning. I’m curious, now that Crushed Wild Mint has been published, how you think of your poems moving through the world. What is their directionality? How do you hope they might come back to you, or the generations that follow?

JH: I love this. I learn different complexities of my own poems when they’re reflected back to me by readers who are generous enough to share with me what they felt when they read my words. People who take in Crushed Wild Mint from a distance pull out themes and ideas I can’t always easily see when I’m so close to my own writing. The most surprising part of offering a book to the world is realizing that there is no final iteration—there’s always a chance that the light will refract in some unexpected way for someone, or that a new echo will bounce off the walls of the valley causing me to see and hear and feel my own words in a deeper way. I’ve had to learn to be comfortable knowing that I can’t control how my writing lives in the imaginations of others and to trust that this brings unpredictable nuance and richness to the practice of poetry. When I take a deep breath and trust that the world will be tender, it feels incredibly liberating to think of poems as conversations.

RT: Poems as conversations in a tender world—yes, that feeling is very present in your work, perhaps no more so than in your poems about/for your Gwani (Granny). You thank her at the end of Crushed Wild Mint for “the peace of rewriting poems while you napped beside me in sunshine,” which is just about the most lovely thing I’ve ever read in an acknowledgments page.

In “Luáɫ” you write about the different poems you would compose in different rooms of your Gwani’s house, and in a later poem you note that, after she died, “the land… stopped speaking to me.” Could you talk a little about your Gwani? How do you think she shaped your relationship to poetry, and the poems themselves?

JH: My Gwani was the embodiment of nurturing love. She raised and loved four generations of descendants before she passed, and I think all of us would say the same thing: she made us feel safe and held and nourished. In the last years of her life, my family cared for her at home around the clock, and in my shifts with her I got to witness her softening into our care and shifting our sense of time to become nonlinear as she began to slip mentally into her girlhood again. Loving her and taking care of her was an exercise in being present and grounded in a reality I couldn’t direct or control, and it required trust and curiosity that became a practice extending far beyond elder care. I wrote or edited much of Crushed Wild Mint sitting beside her and she anchored me and my words in ways I didn’t fully appreciate until after she was gone.

RT: As someone who has a parent living with dementia, I’m very moved by your description of the illness as “slip[ping]… into her girlhood again.” My mother, who has forgotten so much of her life, is also always discovering things anew, and there’s joy mixed in there with the loss. 

The acts of living with a person with dementia and of writing a poetry book both cause us to think a great deal about memory: what we can hold on to, and what we have to let go of. When you wrote poems beside your napping Gwani, you were engaging with both at once, which may in part explain why the final word in Crushed Wild Mint is “memory.” What did your time writing poems in the sunshine teach you about memory?

JH: I come from a culture where our knowledge systems, storykeeping, and historical records are passed down orally and held collectively. Some of the ideas and knowledge embedded in Crushed Wild Mint felt like a remembering from outside myself. So in some senses, it feels very normal for memory to be fluid and collaborative. Gwani illuminated this for me. Witnessing her showing up authentically as so many phases of herself—and being witnessed by her in so many forms of my own, from grandchild to stranger to someone she simply called “auntie”—made me realize that how we experience ourselves and one another is deeply dynamic, and so of course memory and the stories we tell are dynamic too. And because memory thrives on witnessing, it binds us in a shared experience.

RT: I was angered when I read your poem, “To the scientist who called my beloved salmonberries “insipid.”” This was both due to what the scientist said and the fact that their words caused a (thankfully temporary) rupture between you and my very favourite berry on earth. It made me think about how disconnected many of us on the West Coast are from the plants that surround us. People are often surprised to see me eating salmonberries or huckleberries when out on a walk—they didn’t know you could do that—and sometimes those people have lived here their whole lives! And I am sure I stroll ignorantly past many other plants that could benefit me greatly.

Your book teems with local plant life, with poems dedicated to yarrow, wild crab apples, bog cranberries, salal, wild aster, skuusiid (an endemic variety of potato) and, of course, the titular wild mint. It feels a bit like you’re writing an alternate field guide in response to that scientist—one designed to induce love and curiosity instead of shame. Would you say that’s true? 

JH: Plants bring me incredible joy. They nourish and heal. They signal and indicate. They put tools in my hands and structure in my seasons. It brings me great comfort to know that I can walk out into the wilderness of my motherlands and know that I’ll be fed, that I’ll be able to tend to my ills, that what I need most will be provided in exchange for the care I return to what surrounds me. Plants are the reason trust is such a fundamental presence in my life. My grandparents (and my ancestors) knew plants were our relatives, and that kinship engendered a lot of fierce mutual love and care. I was raised with that knowledge too. The only time I’ve ever doubted it is when I listened to people who think we are apart from nature, and that this distance somehow elevates us morally above everything around us. How preposterous! I wanted to infuse Crushed Wild Mint with all the bursting berries and bitter, potent medicines that help me thrive. I wanted to insist on them. I don’t think I could ever tolerate them being diminished to me again.

RT: In what ways would you like readers to think more deeply about their relationship with the plant life around them?   

JH: I hope readers become curious about the personalities of yarrow, licorice fern, and every other relative nestled in the book. And I hope that curiosity becomes an invitation into joy.

RT: This book is so intimately bound to the plants—and also the land, language, and animals—of the Haíłzaqv (Heiltsuk) territory in and around Bella Bella that it seems impossible to imagine it being written anywhere else. What do you think your poems would look like if you’d written them in a big city, or simply far from Haíłzaqv territory? Would you be writing poems at all?

JH: I’ve wondered about this. Looking back at my life, the quietest periods—when I’ve felt like I had no stories to tell—were when I lived in urban places, or when I was traveling in other parts of the world. I know my motherlands deeply enough that we can speak to one another, and those conversations often seed stories and poems. I admire people who can ground themselves anywhere and speak those places into the world. I don’t think I’m one of them—and I am learning to love being hyperlocal and in relationship with what surrounds me and holds me close.

RT: The last section of the book is devoted to the story of a historical y̓úzua (flood), and the two mountains, M̓ṇsǧṃx̌λi (Mount Merritt) and Q̓aǧṃi (Mount Keyes) that nearly drowned in it. While the poems look backwards in this way, I couldn’t help but feel that they were also looking forward towards a future of rising sea levels and floods. “How did we miss the signs / of a multiplied disaster?” you write in “Remembering the Flood,” and you seem to be speaking of the past and the present/future at once. How did the looming presence of our oncoming “multiplied disaster” shape your writing about the natural world in Crush Wild Mint? Did it add an urgency to the composition of your poems? A sadness? A sharper appreciation?

JH: My climate grief is so raw. My identity and my ability to thrive are intimately and inextricably tied to my motherland and her thriving. I know, and I repeat through the stories and teachings we hold collectively as Heiltsuk people, that my ancestors have rooted themselves in a practice of resilience and mutual care for places and non-human kin. Through this resilience I have been able to inherit this beautiful world for a moment and then reach down to place that inheritance on my own children. But what am I handing down? Reflecting on the crises we know our people have survived historically does give me strength as I brace myself against a rapidly changing world. But the world is threatened precisely because there are people who don’t believe in that practice of resilience, who hold themselves apart from and above the clean air and fresh water and thriving systems that make me who I am. I need them to feel connected too.

RT: A tall task, but yes, very much one you take on in Crushed Wild Mint. Your poems on the y̓úzua frequently speak of resilience: “we are mountains / that help other mountains / withstand the flood.” What role do you think poetry plays in building our resilience against the flood?

JH: When I think of the poetry that resonates with me the most as a reader, it’s the poems that seem to place their hands on either side of my face, look me in the eye, and say this is who you are. I think it’s possible that poetry and art can help us get out of our own way, to shake off the dissociation of modern existence and get comfortable with the hard work of feeling. Speaking for myself, I have a deep desire to be of service and to be an agent of generosity and care and reciprocity, but sometimes I feel stuck. Sometimes I need the truth to be illuminated and for a shock to be delivered to my system to bring me to life so I can feel and do. It’s easy to feel stuck, but there’s no time. We’re needed. All of us. And I think poetry can help to wake us up.

RT: On the theme of awakenings, in your book’s acknowledgments you thank “Jerry, my Dutch uncle, for being the first one to believe I was a poet.” We all need a “Jerry” in our lives! Could you talk about the process of coming to see yourself as a poet? What did Jerry see in you that you perhaps did not yet see in yourself? 

JH: My Uncle Jer has been telling me I was a poet since I was a small child seeing ecosystems in flooded ditches and finding wonder in every stone on the riverbank in Clatse Bay. It was years before I actually put a pen to paper to write a poem. What I value most about how I’m able to thrive in my motherlands is the deep sense I have of being grounded in place, and in relationship to the places and the non-human kin that surround me. I think that poetry, in some ways, is an act of witnessing and then externalizing what you’ve witnessed. And if there’s one thing Uncle Jer and others might have seen in me before I recognized it in myself, it’s the deep joy I find in being present and witnessing the world around me (and feeling seen and witnessed in return).

RT: Many of your poems directly address, or instruct, the reader. In this, and in their invocations to pay better attention to the natural world, they reminded me of much of Mary Oliver’s work, especially her most popular poems such as “Wild Geese.” Your writing also brought to my mind the work of poets such as Wanda John-Kehewin and Selina Boan. Those connections may only be present in my mind, of course! Which poets were the greatest inspirations for you as you were writing the poems in Crushed Wild Mint?

JH: I think if someone ever felt a reason to imagine my writing in any proximity to Mary Oliver’s, I might believe I’ve peaked as a writer! Her poetry teaches me about clarity and devotion, and her words are what I turn toward when I need to be reminded that I am grounded forever in the wildness that surrounds me. I also reach for Joy Harjo for poetry that holds its chin up high and speaks from a universally gorgeous and unapologetically Indigenous worldview. When I think about Crushed Wild Mint, I also feel like I need to acknowledge the vitality and magic realism of Eden Robinson’s writing. Being a reader has shaped me as a writer in ways I couldn’t even begin to untangle, and inspired me to ask myself over and over again with each new text that I encounter, Who can I be in conversation with you?

RT: Near the end of the book, you write “the gift economies of mountains / make us into bridges between peaks.” I was struck by how you brought the idea of a gift economy into the book in that way. I’ve long thought of poets as living and working primarily in the gift economy, in ways not unlike the lives of spiritual and religious leaders (Robert Hass points to the nineteenth century tradition of gift showers for ministers when they would arrive in a new town). This very much feels in keeping with how I sense you’d like your poems to be received by the world. How do you see the relationship between the gift value of a poem and the exchange/market value of a poem (especially as you’re now out promoting a product for sale)?

JH: I grew up in a cultural context where a person’s wealth is measured less by what they accumulate and more by how many people they’re able to take care of. The richest people are the ones who have given everything away—who had the privilege of caring for others and who had others in their life to care for. It feels to me that I have a responsibility to share anything I create or possess, and to do so generously. I can do this trusting that others will also take care of me. So yes, it feels spectacularly weird to bring in a commercial element! What feels true for me is that I’d share my writing freely with anyone who wanted to read it, but the book as an object is a vehicle to share my poetry more widely, and to keep my lights on while I try to create more gifts to share. In the same way, I never take money for plant medicines that I prepare, but sometimes people choose to pay me for the jar or the vial that contains the medicine even as they accept the medicine itself as a freely given gift.

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.