That Prism of Perspectives: An Interview with Barbara Nickel

The following interview is part seven of an eight-part series of conversations with BC poets which I released in April 2021. All eight interviews were originally posted at ReadLocalBC.ca. This was the third year of my collaboration with Read Local BC (you can read the 2019 interviews here, and the 2020 interviews here).

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12 (Door) - Barbara Nickel

To let you find another place and shadow,
hollow in my old backyard, before 
the summer’s gone, let’s set out before dawn
to get the sun and mist past Hope. I know
the route. You whistle, off and on. Hours
allow us the braided streams and blackbird, ditch garbage, wet faces
of rock, paintbrush, wild vetch and, after a day, a glacial
snout too far away, discharging milky water. Rock flour
I say as if I still know more than you.  
Doritos on the floor. Even at night the wheat
stays waiting near where your grandpa hated
picking rocks from the soil and now he’s moving
toward the door to us— 
I wish. We can’t. Too dangerous. 

September 10, 2020

 

Excerpt from the long poem “Corona.”
Reprinted with permission
from Essential Tremor 
(Caitlin Press, 2021).

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Rob Taylor: Your last poetry collection, 2007’s Domain, was structured around a house – each section opened with a sonnet named after a different room (“Master Bedroom, ” “Utility Room,” “Storage Room” etc.) It seems telling that your new book, Essential Tremor, opens with a poem about an abandoned house, “seen-through, its thin frame all pane-/less windows.” Then we continue into a book which seems to have left the house behind and moved into a more fundamental vessel: the body. 

Essential Tremor features long sequences on body parts (scientific, biblical), poems on autopsies and accidents, and of course the long poem on COVID-19, “Corona,” of which “12 (Door)” is one part: our bodies as sites of disease and distance. The book’s title, too, is drawn from the quavering of a body breaking down.

Could you talk a bit about this focus on the body in Essential Tremor? Did you intentionally frame this book in response to Domain, or was this just where your writing naturally took you in your more recent writing? 

Barbara Nickel: That’s an insightful perception—what you say about the house focus and structure of Domain connected to Essential Tremor’s opening poem, “Saskatoon to Coaldale, July, Highway”—leaving behind an old house and moving on. I wish I could claim your insight as being part of my master plan, but it absolutely wasn’t! Yes, to your second question, though, about the body being where my writing has naturally taken me in the last thirteen years. 

That opening poem is set on a road trip. I still can’t explain it and it keeps changing on re-readings, a bit like when you’re in the car and looking out at a landscape in flux. Now that I think of it, exploring the body in its various forms (i.e. human body, world, divine) in this manuscript happened in a road trip sort of way. I remember reading “Onychomycosis”—a poem inspired by my infected fungal toenail—at the Vancouver Writers Fest in 2007, only months after Domain’s release. During the reading I was only able to stand straight because I was on morphine to kill the pain from a herniated disc for which I later had surgery (that occasioned the poem “Hospital Room”). Since that time, poem projects about the body in its various forms just seem to have arisen, even as late as November 2020, right down to the wire a few days before I had to submit the final manuscript to Caitlin. 

Over the years my feelings about the body have intensified. For instance, Essential Tremor contains two poems of that name: the first was written as a portrait/tribute to the caregiving of my father-in-law for his wife, while the second was written years later for my husband, who’d been diagnosed with an illness. So the tremor moved as it were from an earthquake happening at a distance, to occurring in the body of my own spouse, a major disruption within my own family. The title Essential Tremor was a working one (interchanged with other possible titles) long before the second poem was even written. I was thinking about the body in a general sense all along, but specific outside events kept intensifying over the years of the manuscript’s journey. 

RT: Looking back, can you see other broad changes between your three books?

BN: In my first book, The Gladys Elegies, I was taken up with family history—stories of aunts and uncles and distant ancestors in events such as the Russian Revolution and the Great Depression in Saskatchewan. Domain, as you mention focussed on a house in the past—more specifically, concerns of my childhood home and what branched from it. I’d say Essential Tremor is much more concerned than the other two with the present—what’s happening in the body (be it planet, spouse, family, friend) I’m living and breathing in now, although in many poems obviously I draw from the past. 

RT: The book is concerned with the present, no doubt! I’m not sure I’ve encountered a book that was so current: Essential Tremor contains a long poem on Coronavirus (a “Corona corona”), a poem on Donald Trump’s election defeat, and more (some of them are tagged as having been written mere weeks before I received my electronic review copy!). On the other hand, as you say, some of the poems are quite old, dating back to just after the publication of Domain. This results in some significant chronological leaps in the book.

It feels like you had this “body” (Sorry! Couldn’t help myself!) of writing you’d accumulated slowly over more than a decade, and then the “outside events” of 2020 crashed in and shifted everything about (even after, I assume, you’d signed your book contract with Caitlin Press!). My guess is that you usually work slowly and methodically, and writing so much new content in the months before publication was unusual. 

Could you talk about the slow-fast way the book came into being? Did bringing together the book’s old and new parts give you insight into how your writing style (or substance) has shifted within the relatively large span of time in which this book was written?

BN: If you can believe it, I’m grateful in this case for rejections. I thought the manuscript was ready years ago. This was just under a decade past Domain’s publication; I admit I’m a slow cooker writer at the best of times. But this time around, placing the manuscript was much more difficult than placing my first two collections. The reasons for this are many and varied and complicated—the current publishing climate, time and place and circumstance, manuscript queues and less availability—everyone is booked; the wait times can be years. 

But perhaps also, Essential Tremor simply wasn’t ready when I thought it was. After some rejections occurring over a span of years, I began to look at it carefully and as objectively as I could. I took out poems and even sequences I thought weren’t working anymore. When the pandemic hit last spring, I began the “Corona” series and although it was still in process, I included most of that sequence in the full manuscript I sent to Caitlin in early June. After I received Caitlin’s book offer in late summer 2020, I was still finishing the “Corona” series and added a few new poems in the fall while working to prepare the manuscript for publication.  

As a result, you have these bizarre juxtapositions in time: old poems that I felt had staying power alongside new responses to what was happening in the world out my window at a very specific and disruptive time. This unusual, often really discouraging and sometimes exhilarating timeline in the evolution of a manuscript was such a gift in the end.

Essential Tremor wouldn’t be complete without the “Corona” series. I’m grateful to Caitlin for taking the risk of accepting a book that was in flux right down to the final deadline. “From Beethoven’s Autopsy” was published in CV2 in the spring of 2014; its companion poem, “Beethoven’s Ninth (Finale),” which is partly a response to Trump’s election defeat, was completed a few days before I turned in the final manuscript in mid-November! As I write this, I’ve just posted a tribute poem on my website for a musician and friend who died suddenly last week after complications from brain cancer surgery. If it weren’t so late in the game, I’d probably want to include that poem as well.     

RT: Writers seemed to divide into two camps during the first year of COVID-19. One group wrote prodigiously while the other wrote little or nothing. You’re certainly in the former group, writing all these new poems (especially, of course, your thirteen-part crown sonnet, “Corona”). What drew you to writing about COVID-19 head-on and with such energy? 

BN: The “Corona” sequence was the main work I completed during the first part of the pandemic. With the exception of four other poems written in 2020, most of the book had been written years before.

Maybe I was poetically prepared for the series when COVID-19 came along because I’d already written a sonnet corona for Domain; the “room” sonnets you’ve mentioned formed a sort of circular foundation to my book about the reach of my childhood home. Like so many households across the planet at the start of the pandemic, ours was stressful and chaotic. Suddenly everyone was home at the same time and space felt limited. Computers (including mine) were in high demand. I was constantly washing my hands and reading the news and stressing about it.

The idea of writing a “corona for the Corona” had been simmering for a little while. Looking at images of the spherical virus with its spiky crown, I knew that these physical and poetic shapes would need to merge; how couldn’t they? Then late one night I couldn’t sleep for desperately itchy hands (from all that washing), and I decided enough is enough, this project needs to begin.

I stayed up all night and emerged in the morning with a draft of the first sonnet. From then on, you could say that I’d found a container for all the stress and overwhelm, but also for the current events daily grabbing my attention. My “new” office was the walk-in closet, a fitting space to write in the sonnet form at a time of isolation and fear. It felt safe in there, even with the smell of dirty laundry wafting up. Every week or two, I’d start with a page, blank except for the last line of the previous sonnet. Potential topics abounded; everything was new. Should I write about those one-on-one classical music concerts taking place in airports in Germany (I never did), or that tragedy at the Cargill meat-processing plant in Alberta, the queen’s speech in green, Dr. Bonnie Henry’s latest stats, or Trump rejecting the WHO? 

Tied to this current was the current of how I was publishing the work. Having spent years sending only very polished and long-worked-over poems to journals, waiting sometimes for the good part of a year to hear back and then, if accepted, possibly another several months before a poem would appear in print, I’d decided at the project’s conception that I would publish on my website each sonnet as soon as it was “finished,” then send out an email alert to my subscribers. It felt momentous at first, to press “Send” on MailChimp, watch the chimp’s big hands applauding, know that within seconds people would be reading my poem. (I’ve taken all the sonnets down now because of the book, though the first five sonnets have just appeared in subTerrain.) 

Rob, I also want to say that in the midst of this I had to think of your book The News and its tying together of news and the body, and the inspiring Pound quote (“news that stays news”). That led me to an article I found online in NiemanReports, “Poetry: The News that Stays News,” by Stephanie Burt, where she discusses a long tradition of poetry, and sonnets in particular, being used to react to the news. She writes that the “supposed oppositions between poems and news just dissolve on scrutiny…” I kept all that in mind when the content of my project wanted to stray from the virus to, say, Black Lives Matter (“8 (Ghost)”), or the environment (“13 (Smoke)”). It gave me assurance that it was okay to go beyond the confines of COVID-19. 

RT: Oh! Well, I’m glad I could be of help, though I think Pound and Burt did the heavy lifting in this case. I wonder, also, if your pre-existing theme of “the body” (and captivity, in the “Anchoress” poems) helped make the transition to writing about the virus feel more natural? 

BN: It never felt like a transition but more an inevitability, a natural extension of the work I was already doing. For instance, long after I’d finished the series and was working with my editor, David O’Meara, on order and rewriting, I discovered the connections between the “Anchoress” series—poems about a medieval sister who sealed herself because of religious conviction into a cell for life—and the themes of isolation, desire and the body present in “Corona.” That felt like a surprise gift.  

RT: In 2004, Books in Canada published a discussion between you and Elise Partridge about the poetry of Margaret Avison. In it, Partridge expressed gladness that Avison avoided writing in a confessional mode, and you replied that “A voice that avoids the “I” can take on an authority it otherwise wouldn’t,” and you go on to say that:

“Part of the reason I’m convinced by the voice [in Avison’s poems] is because it’s not trying to support [its] observations… with personal experiences, emotions, and anecdotes… the distant, omniscient narrator can become a presence for the reader over a space of many poems. You come to simply accept that there is no poetic “I” here – and with that, after reading many poems, comes an acceptance of the authority of the all-knowing voice.”   

I know—egads—that that was 17 years ago, but I wonder to what extent you currently aspire to Avison’s all-knowing voice in your own writing, and to what extent you might resist it. I wonder because certain sections of Essential Tremor seem to be channeling personal experience and emotion (and often the lyric “I”), while others present an all-knowing voice of sorts (the “Anchoress” poems, the Haydn sequence, etc.). 

Could you talk about the role of the “I” in this book? Did you feel it particularly necessary, or unavoidable, in the “Corona” sequence? What effect do you think this mix of the personal voice and the more “distant, omniscient narrator” has on the way the book operates as a whole?

BN: That’s such an interesting and important question. What’s present but not stated in that interview with Elise is a piece of information given by Avison at the end of her Foreword to Always Now, the first volume of her Collected. She mentions her debt to Gladys Story, a teacher she only knew for one term in grade nine. Avison writes, “It was she who…gave me this valuable counsel: ‘For the next ten years do not use the first person in any poem you write.’ The impact of that advice is likely perceptible down through the years.”

It’s timely to think about Avison and voice just now because only a short time ago, I “attended” an extraordinary reading at Concordia in Montreal, part of their “Ghost Reading Series,” where a group of people on Zoom listened, on January 27, 2021, to a recording of a reading given by Avison in Montreal on January 27, 1967. As you can imagine, the juxtapositions, questions of present or absent, time and place, here or there, especially as listened to remotely, loomed eerily and thought-provokingly and might require an essay! In the recording, Avison read “Thaw,” one of my favourite poems and a classic example in her work of the absent “I.” I was surprised by her deadpan, casual voice that was somehow disappointing but at the same time highlighted the music of her lines, the articulation of her consonants. I feel the absent “I” gives her voice a kind of neutrality that allows you to hear the music better than you would otherwise. 

Avison is a huge influence, and I’m sure that counsel from Story via Avison stuck with me as well, even long before the publication of Domain. I think in poems like “Passport,” “Nickel Mines,” “Essential Tremor (Her shaking),” even “Hospital Room,” my intent was to become so absorbed in the presentation, observation and reflection of the subject so as to lose the surface self, the “I,” entirely. (In “Hospital Room,” the “I” appears but only at the end, in a statement about Avison.) 

I’m realizing just from thinking about it now that Elise also influenced me in this regard. Consider “Everglades,” the first poem of her first book, Fielder’s Choice. The “I” is invisible and yet we learn so much about the “I” because of the choice of diction and detail of observation. Christopher Patton, Stephanie Bolster and I talked about this poem, its great seeing, at length in the opening of “For Elise,” our conversation about Elise published in CV2 (Fall, 2015). Paging through her Collected Poems now, I see poem after poem about other people or even things (“If Clouds Had Strings”) that use this “I-less” sensibility to render poems filled with close-seeing.

I can’t leave this question without talking about Elizabeth Bishop, who I know was a huge influence for Elise and whose Complete Poems are never far away. I find it’s difficult sometimes to avoid the “I,” and obviously some of the poems in Essential Tremor absolutely need it. But then there’s the option of using the “we,” this sort of collective consciousness you find all over the place in Bishop. I’m thinking of a poem like “The Moose” (“Moonlight as we enter/the New Brunswick woods”) or “Questions of Travel.” What is it about the “we” in these poems? Somehow it allows the poet to travel as an “I” but to lose oneself in the crowd and give voice perhaps to the concerns of the collective. That’s a comfort, sort of like the moment I discovered that I could hide “Self View” on Zoom and still speak and be seen by others. A self-consciousness, all those awkwardnesses, can be lost although the voice is still there. 

And then there’s the address to a “you” found in, for example, “12 (Door),” the poem you’ve published here. And a different use of “you,” the second-person, where the “I” is the “you” but somehow more distant, in “The Milk River.” And the persona poems, taking on an “I” for another in “Onychomycosis” and the “Anchoress” poems. All these ways of getting around the “I”! But really, it’s not so much avoiding the “I” as simply finding the voice that the poem needs. Perhaps all along, unconsciously, I wanted the book to speak from a lot of different angles, to resonate with da Vinci’s voice from his anatomical manuscript in the found sequence “Body in a Mirror”: “I have looked/from/outside from inside/from/outside from/behind…” I wanted that prism of perspectives.    

RT: That prism of perspectives spreads out over the book’s various themes, too. In addition to the body, Essential Tremor is also concerned with the spirit. Two longer sequences are built out of/around biblical passages, most notably the sequence which looks at references to body parts in the Gospels. How did thinking about the spirit shape how you thought about the body, and vice-versa?

BN: By “spirit,” I’m assuming you mean a divine spirit (as opposed to the human spirit, poetic spirit, etc.), since you mention the sequence referencing body parts in the Gospels? 

RT: Yes, though I think those other “spirits” are in there, too.

BN: It’s interesting, when I was writing a book description for Caitlin, I wrote about the spirit as a body I was exploring in the book, along with the body of the world and the human body: “…and the divine body, questioned, encountered and not, sought by people from the margins in the body of a biblical palimpsest.” 

I hope that readings of this sequence (previously titled “Consider the Ear,” though it’s now untitled) and other poems in Essential Tremor might render body and spirit not as separate themes but as inextricably entwined and even as one. 

“Consider the Ear” was a response, years ago, to a poem I heard at a reading that seemed, at least to me, to mock what I hold sacred. As a person of faith, I wasn’t so much offended as thinking there’s more to it than that, layers beneath the laughter in the room. In the weeks and months and years following that experience, I was drawn to stories from the Gospels about marginalized people—women, a servant, a blind homeless person—whose encounter with the divine occurred in a part of their body—ear, eye, hair, uterus. In trying to discover the poem, I’d zone in on the word for a particular body part—say “hair”—and research its etymology. This, in turn, called up a palette of possibilities in terms of narrative, diction and tone. In addition, a new form for these poems emerged, giving me a poetic body for this confluence of body and spirit. 

In my previous books, not wanting to be misunderstood or boxed in, I think I’ve tried to hide my thirst for the spirit inside music or my Mennonite family history or even in the sometimes convenient obscurity of language. In these poems—even visually there’s a lot of bare space—there’s really no place to hide, and so I suppose it’s no surprise that I tried to sequester “Consider the Ear” in the manuscript when trying to find a publisher, maybe hoping editors wouldn’t notice and therefore (I imagined) I’d have a better chance of acceptance. Yet I couldn’t take the sequence out. In the end, David came up with the excellent suggestion of nesting them within the “Anchoress” series; I felt suddenly they’d found a place to be unashamedly themselves, I like to think perhaps part of this woman’s lifetime of meditation in her cell on scripture and spirit not bound by time or place.

RT: I share your frustration with how some writers, and publishers, treat religious themes: as though all religious thoughts and beliefs are of a kind and easily dismissed. So much richness is discarded in the process, richness you’ve explored with great success in Essential Tremor. I’m sorry you felt a need to hide it away. But, as is often the case for you, form offered a solution!

Like your previous books, Essential Tremor features a wide range of poetic forms, both traditional and of your own devising. You’ve spoken about how you decided to write a “Corona corona” in advance of any of the poems being written – to what extent is that your standard approach? Do you more often say “I’m going to write a [insert form here],” or do you start writing and somewhere along the way the content moves into a pre-established shape?

BN: Most often I start writing and find a form along the way. My poems usually begin with images and ideas and maybe a kind of tone, and after I’ve been playing around with these for a while, a voice will emerge that seems to reach out for a form. For example, “Cyclist Killed in Collision on Highway 22” was conceived at a time when I was emotionally distraught at the sudden loss of a very close friend. It was inspired in part by a newspaper article and photo of his accident. A reporter’s voice that holds emotion at a distance emerged and needed a container. Years before, I’d been reading Maggie Nelson’s Bluets and thought after the accident that the numbered, prose poem-like sequence that she uses might be a way forward for this poem. I tried it and knew that the form was serving the voice; it felt right. The voice seems to know if it will need an expansive container or a tight one, one that uses meter or if things can be looser. 

In a number of poems in Essential Tremor, I believe I started out writing a sonnet and then found that I needed shorter lines—iambic pentameter roughly cut in half—to get key images and verbs on the ends of lines. So these “thin poems” emerged, still roughly metered but with only two or three beats per line. Somehow these poems seemed to let the voice out of a container so that it could almost float down the page. 

RT: I love that idea—building containers so you can later release your poems from them. I sense an increase in this kind of formal experimentation—making new shapes out of, or in response to, traditional ones—in Essential Tremor. It feels like something that comes with time and experience writing formal verse (knowing the rules to break them, knowing the container to throw it open, etc.). Do you think that’s true? Have you sensed your relationship with form shifting over the years?

BN: I’d definitely say that I feel more free and confident formally since my first two books. As I mentioned earlier, there was this new form that emerged with the “Consider the Ear” sequence. I call it “sound scaffolding.” I was choosing from word hoards I’d developed where consonance seemed important. Take a word like “plucks,” that opens the poem “Hair.” That word got me “chicken,” followed by “lily” then “hair, fear, guitar.” It was a stanza—k, k, l, r, r, r; all the little words in between didn’t count. That set the stanza pattern I’d follow for the rest of the poem. Those poems probably come across as loose and free, spatially on the page as well, but actually they’re sonically very tightly structured. 

I like your word “experimentation.” I think even with the sonnets, I felt bolder in Essential Tremor to play with the form, to trespass against the rules. I felt free to relax the voice and vary the pentameter, let a line find hexameter or tetrameter or even trimeter if I felt the poem needed it, especially in the “Corona” series but even, when I look now, in the “Anchoress” poems. If you look at the line that ends “Anchoress (2)”—“Kneel for lauds. Confess.” I wouldn’t have tried that in previous books, especially for the last line! But I wanted it short and terse to reflect the anchoress’s sparse conditions, the way she’d stripped down her life to the bare bones. 

Same thing with rhyme. I’ve always been drawn to slant rhyme but sometimes, at least in the “Corona” sonnets, there was something that I wanted to say and the “right” rhyme just wasn’t available to me, so I pulled in what I could at the time. I’m looking at “6 (Doctor)” in “Corona”—I mean, really!—“foil” and “circles” as rhyming pair? But then, I’d used “frail” (with “until”!) earlier in the sonnet so maybe I argued with myself that the echo counted for something, especially in such a small space. 

I think back to an essay that was formative for me—“The Triggering Town,” by Richard Hugo. It explores the question: what comes first, the truth or the music? He answered—and I wholeheartedly agreed—that the music should lead the way. And that’s how it’s always been for me, especially at the start. I’d agonize for weeks over a single syllable or rhyme and somehow that would lead me to what I wanted to say. It’s still like that to some extent but I think mixed in with that now—especially with “Corona”—is a need to say something, and I was just reaching into a bag and pulling out what I required to say it right. Maybe as a result the newer poems don’t take themselves as seriously although they are still serious poems, if that makes any sense. 

RT: Yes, entirely. I love that Zach Wells’ book of Canadian sonnets was entitled Jailbreaks. Some level of trespass is almost required these days. I suspect few contemporary Canadian poets have thought about the constraints and opportunities of the sonnet as much as you do: I did the math, and one-quarter of the poems in Domain, and almost half of Essential Tremor, are sonnets and sonnet sequences. And as mentioned above, sonnets make up the foundation of your book on houses, and the spine of your book on the body! 

What is it about the sonnet that keeps you returning to it? The shape, the structure, the tradition, the length-of-thought? 

BN: Your mention of Jailbreaks takes us back to Avison, as Zach titled that anthology after a word from her sonnet “Snow”! It’s probably telling that The Gladys Elegies—the title of my first book—is also the title of its opening sonnet sequence; there are a lot of sonnets in that book as well. I started writing sonnets almost at the same time that I started writing poetry, inspired by a sonnet sequence published in PRISM international by the British poet Selima Hill. As a musician, I resonated with the form; the sonnet gave me a very tight structure to follow and was so closely tied to music—the word comes from the Italian sonetto meaning “little song.” I could let music lead the way and because I was just starting out, I could let the form shape a voice that wasn’t very confident at the time. I needed something tangible to hang on to, and found the dissonance of slant rhyme energizing—I remember the satisfaction of coming up with “ice” and “face” for a couplet in my first book, for instance. 

The sonnet’s brevity has always challenged me to work for every syllable; the form itself is a kind of editor. And a sonnet’s sensibility seems to embody many of the themes I’ve been drawn to—restriction and release in music and faith, family, the body, love, death, travel, landscapes, time and its various puzzles. The sonnet allows me to explore these things from the outside in and the inside out; it’s a form equally suited to inward and outward moments, and it allows the poet to move between the two. There’s enough space to do this, but not so much that the move gets old after a while. It’s really marvelously flexible and versatile. 

I spoke earlier of current events in the “Corona” series, how the form became a medium for the news that always seemed to be breaking in the early stage of the pandemic. They were a bit like news shorts with some reflection and observation twisted in. Burt, in the article I mentioned earlier, says “The form of the sonnet, so often associated with erotic love, has become so prominent in English in part because poets use it to react to the news…” and then goes on to mention Milton, Wordsworth, Gwendolyn Brooks, and others. Without meaning to, I’d fallen into a tradition that was somehow risky and stable at the same time. Which again reflects the pandemic—the humdrum activity of going to the store or staying at home suddenly felt new and dangerous.

New—I think in the end that’s what keeps me coming back to the sonnet. It’s like writing on those old chalkboard school slates—you can erase it and come up with something entirely different every time, but always within the same small frame. In the “Corona” series, inspired by Donne’s “La Corona,” I switched from the Shakespearean sonnet that I’d used exclusively since the start, to the Italian form. It was really refreshing—suddenly I had this new shape to work with. I could play with the octave and the sestet, and use the “gulf” of a stanza break between octave and sestet to evoke different worlds (the world of the family, the world of the news). And the “new” rhyme pattern was liberating as well—the freedom suddenly of a rhyming pair in consecutive lines! 

RT: Are there particular subjects that you find you can’t quite fit into the little slate of a sonnet? 

BN: Yes, for example the poem about the cyclist friend, which I mentioned earlier. I had this garbage bag full of his bike parts that had been strewn all over the ditch, which a bunch of us had collected in grief a week after his accident. It all was much too raw and sprawling for a sonnet, at least that’s how it felt at the time. 

RT: A form that makes a small, but powerful, presence in both of your last two books is the triolet, a dense and twisting French form. With rigorous rhyme and repetition requirements, most notably that the same line is repeated three times over a mere eight lines, it’s a form I suspect is rarely attempted and even more rarely satisfactorily completed. And yet here you are, writing them so very well! The triolet “Five Years” in Essential Tremor closes the book. It’s in response, and tribute, to Elise Partridge’s “Vuillard Interior,” which is the finest triolet I’ve ever read. You’ve touched upon Elise’s influence on your writing already, but could you talk particularly about her effect on your thinking about form, and specifically the triolet?

BN: In that conversation about Elise in CV2 with Christopher and Stephanie, we talked at length about “Vuillard Interior,” Chris quoting the poem in full. I noted at the time that it’s the only triolet in Elise’s oeuvre, and called it “a form that seems to circle endlessly like the ouroboros eating its tail…” I mentioned Elise’s masterful rhyme and meter, the way it all blends so seamlessly as to make the poem’s subject, the servant, vanish, and yet this very success ensures she’ll never disappear—it seems no one can forget this poem.

And sure enough, here she is showing up in “Five Years.” As with so many occurrences in the process of bringing this book together, it wasn’t something I planned. After years of indecision about what the last poem in the collection should be, this poem came as a gift shortly after the fifth anniversary of Elise’s death. 

Elise was a dear friend. We met decades ago at the Vancouver Poetry Dogs, a group of mostly scholars and poets devoted to reading and discussing poetry not our own. She gave so much of herself to everyone she knew; she was a formidable scholar as well as a great poet, and tirelessly shared her wisdom with others. Writing in form was such a huge part of her work, and she was devotedly interested in my sonnets and other work in meter and rhyme. When I was working this past fall on editing the book, I came across lengthy comments she’d given on two of the “Anchoress” sonnets. What a treasure trove! There was her voice in my ear—praising, questioning, drawing connections and highlighting allusions I’d forgotten. I made some late changes to the poems based on comments she’d given years earlier! She also suggested that I consult her husband, Steve, so I did; he offered valuable help as well. 

I’ve never stopped learning from Elise; hearing her voice, reading her essays and looking up words I don’t know, puzzling over the intricacies, subtleties and images in her work. The “stone in your book on my desk” in the last line of “Five Years” refers to “Algaed Stones: Prayer” in the Uncollected and Unpublished section of her Collected Poems. Elise’s stone is both ancient and currently alive, an observation I used in my triolet to try to get at both my grief for her absence and wonder at her ongoing presence. 

I listened to an amazing podcast “at” the Vancouver Writers Fest this past fall, a conversation between Marilynne Robinson and Ian Williams. Robinson near the end says, “I believe in the reality of dead people.” For me this both startled and resonated, especially in the context of Elise and her work.   

RT: Oh wow, what a gift to find those notes on your poems! I wish I could stumble upon the same from Elise—few things lifted me as a writer more than a note from her on some poem of mine. 

Two other poets who have profoundly influenced your writing life are Stephanie Bolster and Christopher Patton, who we’ve referred to at various times throughout this interview. The second-to-last poem in Essential Tremor is dedicated to them, and you thank them in your acknowledgments for their “decade plus years of sustained dedication to these poems.” Flip open Domain to its Acknowledgments page and there they are again, similarly being thanked for “a decade of commitment to these poems.” That’s 23 years of commitment, Barbara! These two are in it for the long haul! Could you talk a little about your triangular friendship? What role have they played in making your books happen? 

BN: Chris, Stephanie and I met in my first poetry workshop, with George McWhirter in UBC’s Creative Writing Program. For me it was an incredibly formative class; friendships I made with several of its members have lasted for years afterwards. At first, the triangular friendship you mention wasn’t as prominent; it was more like three strongly bonded pairs. Then at some point along the way—I’m not sure how or when—this “we three” thing happened. We worked together to give presentations at several conferences and maybe that helped to solidify it. Chris and I launched books together in 2007 and Stephanie was there to give an introduction. In it she said something jokingly about the three of us starting a school, which of course couldn’t happen because our work is so vastly different. And yet there’s a common sensibility, a deep understanding about where the other is coming from and what they’re trying to do. 

These two friends have always been my first and last and everything-in-between readers, and I’ve been the same—in different ways—for them. You can’t measure the kind of trust that develops over years of this kind of working relationship. And we’ve rarely lived in proximity to each other, so it’s formed over decades of email correspondence along with those rare times we can actually meet in person. Just the other day, something came up with a line break when I was going over the page proofs for Essential Tremor. I immediately emailed the two of them with the small dilemma. Within hours, I’d received responses—of course they had different opinions, that always happens, and that’s part of the strength of it. 

And it’s not just about the work—all of those crises and joys life tosses at you through the seasons and years—Chris and Stephanie are there. How to express gratitude for this ineffable thing? A gift poem for them, about the gift of the body of a book, is what I can offer. 

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Essential Tremor is Barbara Nickel’s third collection of poetry. Her first, The Gladys Elegies, won the Pat Lowther Award. Her work has appeared in many publications including The Walrus and Poetry Ireland Review. Barbara is also an award-winning author of books for young people. She lives and writes in Yarrow, BC. 

Gesturing Out to Different Horizons: An Interview with Dallas Hunt

The following interview is part six of an eight-part series of conversations with BC poets which I released in April 2021. All eight interviews were originally posted at ReadLocalBC.ca. This was the third year of my collaboration with Read Local BC (you can read the 2019 interviews here, and the 2020 interviews here).

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Porcupine IV - Dallas Hunt

my kôhkom’s tongue cuts through the air like a helicopter blade
thrumming acerbic nursery mobile a bed fit to curse you with a spell
no roadside crystals can remedy a burial ground full of hipster
dream-catcher tattoos & smudge kits bought off Amazon for $19.99
the cure for existential angst not for sale here vituperative stones fall
from round mouths looking for gemstones millstones she’ll let you
gawk as long as you drown while you do it 

Reprinted with permission

from CREELAND 

(Nightwood Editions, 2021).

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Rob Taylor: I’ve loved your writing for a number of years now, and I’m so glad we get to chat about your first book, CREELAND. I think the first thing of yours that I encountered was your “Cree word of the day” tweets: since 2015, you’ve been sporadically posting Cree words connected to popular topics of the day. Most recently, following Joe Biden’s inauguration, your tweet on the Cree phrase for “Bernie sits” (“apiw Bernie”) was liked over 2,000 times!

The theme of translation between Cree and English is also central to CREELAND. The book presents various forms of translation, from the more traditional glossary of Cree words in the endnotes (which, notably, only translates a selection of the Cree words used in CREELAND), to poems like “Cree Dictionary,” which provide less literal “translations” (“the translation for joy / in Cree is a fried bologna sandwich”, “the translation for evil / in Cree is the act of not calling / your mother on a Sunday”, etc.).

In exploring both technical translations and “translations” that capture the feeling of a word, CREELAND reminded me of the choice the poet Don Paterson once said must be made by all translators between honouring “the word or the spirit” of the original text – if a translator attempts both equally, “we are likely to come away with nothing.” A poem can be “right” in certain ways a dictionary can’t, and vice versa. Could you talk a little about your approach to translation in CREELAND?

Dallas Hunt: I think that in many ways most of the translations are “imperfect” (in “Cree Dictionary,” purposefully so) and that’s fine. I mostly post things on social media to increase my own vocabulary or to work on my verb conjugation. That said, I think there is much about “Cree life” that can’t be fully captured in the language—things spill over and exceed—so I try to get at those feelings with the language I have available to me. It’s never enough, but I’m fine with that.

RT: The limitations of what language can and can’t accomplish is certainly another theme in the book. One of the (darkly) funniest lines in CREELAND comes in “Entry Four”: “Every time I write “kôhkom,” / some settler, somewhere, / cums.” We’re in a time where there is a desire among many settlers to understand and “consume” Indigenous culture, but this engagement happens under the consumer’s terms. Certain subjects/words are fetishized, others ignored (your poem “Curriculum of the Wait” explores how “every ndn poem / is about residential schools” – alongside every novel, play, memoir, etc.). All writers face the mixed blessing that their words will go out in the world, unchaperoned, to be used and interpreted as the reader sees fit, but in your case this process seems particularly fraught. 

Could you talk a little about how you would ideally like the Cree language, as presented in CREELAND, to be engaged with by settler readers?

DH: The language is going to be engaged with however the reader sees fit. One thing I do like, though, is that more people appear to be seeing Cree as a “living language,” so I guess in the grand scheme of things, as long as people see our languages (and us) as alive, there really isn’t much more I could hope for. I do think that there are “particular” forms in which Indigenous peoples are legible (like through language), so that’s something I do try to complicate in the collection. If people take notice of that, great, but I do have a bit of an ambivalence toward it, too (not to be overly obscure or combative!).

RT: Fair enough! Could you talk a little more about complicating the ways Indigenous people are “legible”? 

DH: I think that non-Indigenous peoples are more than willing to interpret us through particular lenses (e.g., language, residential schools, “culture”) but are far less willing to take our political assertions seriously. I think whether we’re in rural, reserve, or urban environments, Indigenous peoples are constantly asserting a politics that is so summarily dismissed, sometimes in favour of something as capacious as “culture,” that we’re not being really heard or engaged with. Engage with us—our politics, our assertions, our communities. We’re not going anywhere, so it might be prudent to do so.

RT: What do you hope for Cree speakers to find in these poems?

DH: The collection is about everyday Cree economies of care. I hope there is some recognition there, disagreement, even contention—we are vast, complex and varying communities, so I hope some Cree people (and other Indigenous peoples) appreciate the writing. But I also hope that, if I were there, Cree and Indigenous peoples would argue with me about some of the articulations or interpretations of things in the collection. That’s what being in community or visiting as a method is all about.

RT: One way language, community and politics come together in CREELAND is in what I think of as your “dictionary” poems: list poems that explore the meaning of a particular term from various angles. Some of the most joyful, and angriest, moments in the book come in list poems like “Cree Dictionary” (“the translation for X is…”), “Mozart, Saskatchewan” (“a white man is…”), and “kôhkom Freedom” (“freedom is…”). 

“Cree Dictionary,” from which I’ve already quoted, is filled with humourous lines, while “Mozart, Sasktachewan” opens with “a white man is a fist / that ends families” and “kôhkom Freedom” closes with “and / fuck them / anyway”—possibly the greatest ending of a book ever! Another, from the list poem “Nathan Apodaca”: “I wish I cared about anything as much as white people care about toilet paper.”

What draws you to these kinds of list poems? Is there something about the non-narrative way they approach their subjects that allows you to tap into a deeper vein of humour and anger?

DH: Wow, Rob, I like how much you’re nudging me to think about form here. Ha ha. Some of the poems you’ve listed here I don’t actually consider list poems, though I do think the repetition might frame them that way—an interesting thing to think about. I guess generally I like repetition as a rhetorical device, and that it may have the potential to “open things up” or really emphasize a particular idea or concept. In a sense that might not be particularly subtle, but I don’t think CREELAND is subtle at points. Sometimes I do feel joy or anger or a variety of feelings, and I guess the repetition of words or phrases articulates that (betraying me in the process).

RT: So many books these days are in one mode: subtle or not, a whisper or a shout. It’s refreshing to read a book that both embraces subtlety and sets it aside when the poet really needs to make a joyful or anger-filled point. 

The joy and anger in the book seem to converge near the end of CREELAND in poems that focus on Indigenous futurities (“futures whose / formation(s) / make another / one hundred and / fifty years impossible”) and, more broadly, desire: desires for a people, and for oneself, both now and in the future (“desire / is a struggling river”). Could you talk a little about desire and futurity as themes in the book, and in your life?

DH: Desire and the future share a particular terrain—I think as Indigenous peoples we’re constantly desiring a different future, one that looks radically different from the present (and orients how we act in the present, hopefully). I’m someone who constantly thinks of the future, but I also understand desire and its entanglements—how in many ways, we have no control over our desires. So the desire I write about in the text is deeply personal, but it also is this gesturing out to different horizons. What do we want, what have we internalized, and how do we disentangle how we’ve got here? They’re massive, capacious, but intensely personal and intimate questions, so I guess if I want the book to do anything in this instance, it’s to get us all to think through these questions a bit more.

RT: You have an obvious love of massive, capacious questions: in addition to being a poet, you are also an academic and activist. Your politics are thoughtfully and powerfully presented throughout the book, and many of the poems – about settler colonialism, the prison-industrial complex, etc. – could easily have been “translated” into essays. In “Small” you write:

yes, i don’t mind
feeling small

’cause you can
see, and plot,
a lot from down here.

That poem isn’t an ars poetica, per se, but I wonder to what extent it ties into your thoughts about genre – choosing poetry over, or in accompaniment to, other forms of writing. What led you to poetry, small as it is, as a way to explore such big ideas?

DH: I started to write poetry when I was reading a lot of criticism and theory. I was trying to finish up my comprehensive exams for my PhD and found my desire for academic writing waning. What I did in response was to start to write poetry, and I found a lot of the concepts I was encountering in my scholarly work were coming through in my poetry. Thankfully, though, some of it was not, and I got to explore issues or themes that I never would have in an academic article. Poetry also enabled me to start writing about myself and using that first-person pronoun “I” (for better or worse). While the speakers in my poems are not always me, I am grateful to be able to use that “I” (or “i”) in poetry now. I guess I have theory to thank for that, which is probably the first time anyone has ever said that.

RT: Ha! It’s interesting that theory brought you to the personal, the “I,” and now the personal in CREELAND returns the favour, helping bring the theoretical concerns that underpin the book to the reader. Poems like “Spiraling (Fine for Now)” and “I Almost Had a Mental Breakdown During My Master’s Degree” firmly place your personal mental health struggles amidst these larger theoretical and political ideas. How do you think these poems shape the poems around them?

DH: I think that it’s a perfectly rational response to the current conditions we occupy to have to deal with mental illness. I have for a while and know personally that a lot of Indigenous peoples deal with these issues in a far more severe way than I do (in ways that are legible or make sense to me). I guess in writing about mental illness, I wanted to illustrate how it’s a part of the colonial process—that these issues aren’t just structural, but rather play a huge part on the personal and collective psyche of Indigenous peoples and communities. We have a lot to contend with here. I also think we’re at a place now where we can talk about mental health openly (or, at least, I hope that’s the case), and I guess I wanted those poems to catalogue how I felt at particular times and how it is okay to feel those ways. One of the things a therapist said to me that still resonates is that “it’s okay to feel anxious,” and that reoriented so much for me. I’m not perfect in any way, but I’m interested in how this world, in a sense, can feel far less lonely. 

RT: Did the learning you acquired while writing CREELAND help you think about your academic writing in new ways?

DH: Interesting question! I guess I’m far more attuned to form while writing academic articles and, depending on the publication, might be far more adventurous in how I write or construct certain arguments. I’m a big fan of the theoretical writing of Saidiya Hartman and Fred Moten and would like to have my critical writing be anywhere near as poetic as their writings are (this is a doomed project, I know, but I love their texts and want to have that wedding of poetics and theory at the base of my writings. I’ll fail, I know, but how lovely it is to try!). 

RT: In one of your poems that could easily have been turned into an academic article, “There Are No Good Settlers,” you write about the problem of “woefully unprepared” institutions deciding if someone is “‘Indigenous enough’ for a title or position” (including people who claim Indigeneity to “help them in this institutional moment”). In the poem you suggest that “perhaps a poetics of accountability can allow us to see each other differently.” Could you talk a little more about a poetics of accountability, and what role poetry, or poetic thinking, can play in dealing with this issue?

DH: These issues can be touchy or hard to talk about at times. There’s something about the obliqueness of poetry, of how it can come at an issue from a different or interesting angle (a parallax view), that I think allows us to be able to have hard conversations that we might not in alternate arenas. I do think we’re in a particular moment (this “reconciliatory” moment) that has allowed people to attain a certain level of peace, but has also enabled others to attempt to capitalize on the violences Indigenous peoples have endured historically. And while I know that might be an incendiary statement, I think all of us, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, might recognize this to be true. In fact, there have been a few high-profile cases of this recently in the art world and I think, ultimately, it hurts Indigenous peoples a great deal more than people think.

RT: Not incendiary at all. One of the many downsides to these false claims is that they eat up space that should be given to deserving Indigenous artists. It’s wonderful to see that, in addition to publishing your own book this year, you’re also making space for another Indigenous poet who is well worth celebrating: (Re)Generation: The Poetry of Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm, a selection of Akiweznie-Damm’s poetry which you edited, will be published in August from Wilfred Laurier Press. Could you talk a little about that book and the influence Akiwenzie-Damm’s poetry has had on your own writing?

DH: Kateri is a great writer. It was an enjoyable process to inhabit someone else’s thinking and poetic works and try to think through how they wrote a piece—the why and how of it. In many ways, Kateri’s project has been great because I’ve been given the chance to become more familiar with a writer I wasn’t completely familiar with before. If you have a chance, read Kateri’s work, especially her erotic work, because I think it’s incredibly generative and courageous (a lot of us don’t write about sex, but Kateri has no qualms about it and I really admire it).

RT: In your introduction to (Re)Generation, you talk about Akiwenzie-Damm’s connections to spoken word and performance. While most of your poems seem designed for the page, one way the spoken and sung makes its way into your book is through rock music: Daughters, Sufjan Stevens, Talking Heads, Chris Gaines, and even Fleetwood Mac (via-Nathan Apodaca’s-Cranberry-Juice-Skateboard viral video), all make appearances in epigraphs, poem titles, etc. What role do music and lyricism play in your thinking about poetry, and your writing process? Is something always playing in the background as you write?

DH: Interesting question! I’m responding to these questions while listening to Tei Shi’s “Even if it Hurts” on repeat. Ha ha. Sometimes, I think, I write to music, but other times I’m in bed in total silence or having a morning coffee and reading something. The weird thing is that my musical interests verge towards hip hop or R&B, so I guess the rock bands are a surprise to me (though not untrue). I like music, I play music occasionally, and I guess I wanted to acknowledge what I was writing to at particular times (I learned this from Richard Van Camp—who you should read if you haven’t already!—because I think he lists what he was listening to while he composed certain pieces). Leanne Simpson also borrows from songs for titles and other things (I’m thinking of “It Takes an Ocean Not to Break,” Leanne’s short story which is titled after a song by The National). Anyway, I guess those are gestures to particular writers who have influenced me.

RT: Do you see a through-line there of some sort, from Indigenous oral traditions, to performance-oriented poets of previous generations (like Akiwenzie-Damm), to Richard Van Camp’s notes and Leanne Simpson’s songs and stories, to your listening to Tei Shi on repeat? 

DH: That could be true, yes. I mean, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that both Kateri and Leanne have made musical renditions of their written, creative works. Richard, too, acknowledges the music he has written to as well, and I think what this might all speak to is the way we acknowledge one another and pay respect to inspiration and its sources. Generally, for Indigenous peoples, we gesture to where particular forms of knowledge come from, and song is a form of knowledge. 

RT:  In CREELAND you make far more use of the blank space on a page of poetry than many poets. Poems shift from left to right margins, or are split between the two, creating huge gaps in the middle of your lines. Other poems are simply presented with very short lines, a handful of words running down the left margin. What is the importance of line breaks, gaps and silences in your poems? What do they allow you to say/do in your poems that would be otherwise unavailable to you?

DH: Some of this is aesthetic—I like the sparseness. Part of that is reflected in the cover as well. But I also think particular words or lines function better as standalone phrases or even objects. I like the idea of dwelling, and I think sometimes it’s easier to dwell in a particular narrative or spatial sense if a word or line is on its own. It’s an invitation to dwell.

RT: Circling back to Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm, in addition to being a poet she is also an organizer: in the early 1990s, she both founded the Indigenous publisher Kegedonce Press and co-founded the Writers Independent Native Organization (WINO). These organizations helped foster a generation of Indigenous writers (and Kegedonce continues to do the same to this day!). Here in 2021 we see another generation of Indigenous poets, thriving perhaps like no other, many of whom you thank at the back of your book (Jessica Johns, Selina Boan, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Brandi Bird, Jordan Abel…). There’s a tendency to treat these cultural “moments” as spontaneous, almost magical occurrences, overlooking all the work done by previous generations to prepare their coming.

DH: There are so many amazing Indigenous poets at this particular moment. That said, I think you’re right in saying that there is a long lineage of Indigenous writers who have paved the way for many of us. Also, there is this term that emerges in relation to Indigenous writing—”renaissance”—that I think is deeply problematic and doesn’t gesture to the peoples who have been writing for decades (Linda Hogan, Chrystos, Eden Robinson, among others). I also think we need to be attentive to this moment, and why audiences might be interested in this particular work at this time (that reconciliatory moment I spoke to before). I don’t say this to disparage anyone’s writing, but rather to get us to think about Indigenous knowledge and cultural production and its palatability at this point. Why are readers engaging with us and how, and what affective attachments, investments, or desires might they have? Will they be reading us in ten years?

RT: Do you think Indigenous creators can transform this reconciliatory moment into something more lasting? Or do you think that will come down to the will and desires of settler readers, funders, etc.?

DH: In many ways, this is the conversation or question facing many Indigenous peoples, both academically and in artistic circles. I think we’re starting to write for one another, outside of the eyes of settler readers, and I think it’s a beautiful thing. I’m happy I get to read Indigenous poets and writers while listening to Jeremy Dutcher or Black Belt Eagle Scout—it’s a wonderful space to dwell in. I think I’ll stay here awhile. 

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Dallas Hunt is Cree and a member of Wapsewsipi (Swan River First Nation) in Treaty Eight territory in northern Alberta. He has had creative worked published in Contemporary Verse 2, Prairie Fire, PRISM international and Arc Poetry. His first children’s book, Awâsis and the World-famous Bannock, was published through Highwater Press in 2018, and was nominated for several awards. Hunt is an assistant professor of Indigenous literatures at the University of British Columbia.

Wherever We Are Going, We Are Going Together: An Interview with Terence Young

The following interview is part five of an eight-part series of conversations with BC poets which I released in April 2021. All eight interviews were originally posted at ReadLocalBC.ca. This was the third year of my collaboration with Read Local BC (you can read the 2019 interviews here, and the 2020 interviews here).

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The Uncertainty Principle - Terence Young

          —with apologies to Werner Heisenberg

At the beach
you move a stone 
the size of a football and 
the world beneath it panics,
runs in all directions.
You want to apologize 
for the intrusion,
consider returning the boulder to its place,
the damage that might do,
pause instead to watch
crabs scuttling, 
other creatures that bring to mind 
a word from high school science,
annelids, you think, and more words,
radial symmetry, 
then the briefest glimpse of a classroom,
some girl you sat across from,
who recorded observations
in her small neat hand,
history now,
like your intention
to become a marine biologist,
all those days of sandwiches in wax paper,
an apple or an orange,
the kinds of things that disappear
the very second you expose them
to the light. 

 

Reprinted with permission

from Smithereens 

(Harbour Publishing, 2021).

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Rob Taylor: Multi-page narrative poems, written in couplets, make up about 40% of the contents of Smithereens (Yes, I counted!). Could you talk a little about what draws you to that combination: the long line of the narrative running North-South through the poem, and the intermittent bursts of couplets running West-East? 

Terence Young: I am not much of a formalist when it comes to poetry, by which term I mean someone who is drawn to certain forms as a way both to contain and to stimulate writing. Yes, I have dabbled in the pantoum, the palindrome, the sonnet, the villanelle, the glosa, but never for long – I guess I’m one of those people who does not mind “playing tennis with the net down.” More than that, though, I write the kind of poetry I like to read, poetry that is generous with space, that focuses the reader’s eye on just a few words or lines at a time. I’m thinking of writers like Tony Hoagland and Stephen Dunn, whose poems are often in short stanzas with three or four lines. No wonder, then, that I find the couplet appealing, either in lines that cross the page or in shorter bursts. Maybe it’s a kind of intellectual laziness, but I find poems that fill up the page, offering few or no stanza breaks, a little daunting to enter – sort of the way I feel in novels where I find myself in need of a couple of pages of dialogue, some airiness where I can breathe.

RT: Not intellectual laziness at all—I think part of the joy of turning to poetry (and away from the suffocation of a page of prose) is savouring that breathing/thinking space the blank page provides. Some poets don’t agree: your wife, poet Patricia Young, for instance.

Patricia has often put her narrative energies into prose poems, a form you avoid in Smithereens. A few years back, in an interview with me, she said: “My feeling is: if you’re writing sentences, acknowledge that, let your sentences have their day and be what they are.” Though I wouldn’t say you’re “writing sentences” per se, there does seem to be a bit of a family disagreement there.

TY: Actually, there were quite a few prose pieces – a couple of long-ish suites – that I did not include in this collection for the simple fact that the book would have been far too long with them. I tend to prefer poetry books that are shorter rather than longer, and now I have a fair amount of material for a subsequent book. But, to your point about writing sentences, it’s true that many of my poems are narratives, sometimes to the extent that they might as well take the form of the prose poem. And I will often re-shape them by removing the line breaks to see whether they might work better that way. Again, though, because I like the sense of space that comes with short lines or couplets, I often find myself putting them back into their original form. It seems that if I set out to write a prose poem, it will stay that way, and the reverse is also true. There is a common criticism that many poems are really just sentences cut up with arbitrary line breaks that lend the language an undeserved tone of gravity, and my writing may well merit such a reproof. I don’t know. But if the reader takes pleasure from the words on the page, whatever their form might be, the argument is moot. 

I remember Patricia making the shift into prose poems, as well as her observation that one should acknowledge and even celebrate the sentence, if that is what one is writing.

RT: You spoke about Patricia’s role in your writing life in a “Falling in Love with Poetry” essay you wrote for The New Quarterly (“Before I fell in love with poetry, I fell in love with a poet”), and at the end of Smithereens you note that without her “inspiration, love and encouragement” the book wouldn’t have come into being. Could talk a bit about how that encouragement manifests day-to-day? To what extent have Patricia’s attitudes on poetry (or her poems themselves) shaped your own?

TY: Patricia is always growing as a writer, and she likes to challenge herself by embracing new forms, new approaches. I’m lucky to be able to observe how she alters her process, how she moved away, for example, from the autobiographical into more fantastical and imaginative realms, areas that allow her to play more. I can still see bits and pieces of our life in such poems, but they no longer take centre stage. They are useful only to the extent that they serve a larger purpose, to add detail and depth to the poem. I still write largely out of my life, but she inspires me to push boundaries a little, to experiment. 

RT: Are you one another’s first editor? 

TY: We will show each other our work when we’re happy with it, but she is far more content than I to sit on a poem for months or longer before she shares it, by which time it is pretty much perfect. I am a little more impulsive, and I probably benefit more from her editorial eye than she from mine.  

RT: Speaking of The New Quarterly, I’ve gotten to know your poetry fairly well in recent years because you keep beating me in their Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse contest! You won it in 2019 (I placed third) and were runner-up in 2018 (I was an honourable mention). So here I am, humble bridesmaid to your bride. 

TY: Ha! I don’t know if you have the same reaction to contests as I do, but whenever I’m fortunate enough to place or win, I read the poems that didn’t place and am certain the judges have made a mistake. I remember reading yours and thinking that. Doubt is essential to the success of any artist, I believe, and once we cease to doubt ourselves, we become less successful. 

RT: I always think the judges have made a mistake, whether I win or lose. It simplifies the thought process considerably. 

When I first entered the TNQ contest I was confused by that word “Occasional.” I’d always thought “occasional poetry” referred exclusively to poems that were written to be read aloud at weddings, funerals, etc. The contest, though, widens the definition to include “poems that make an occasion of something ordinary… by virtue of the poet’s attention.” In my case, that summarises nearly everything I write! Poems come to me, I don’t seek them out. Something happens that I find interesting and I write it down; if nothing of note happens, nothing gets written. 

It seems that this looser definition of “occasional” speaks to your writing practice, too (as you’ve said, “I still write largely out of my life”). Many poems in the book feel pulled out of specific (often minor) events in your life, including the flipping over of a stone in “The Uncertainty Principle.”

TY: I agree that one could easily argue all poems are occasional: a thought, some precipitating incident, some emotion serves as the occasion for the author’s sitting down to explore the experience. More traditionally, though, the occasional poem, at least in my understanding, arises out of a specific event, something that, at the time or latterly, acquires significance in the writer’s mind and merits articulation. Wordsworth’s “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey” is a good example of an experience “recollected in tranquillity.” Because there is often a narrative structure in such poems, the qualities of a good story apply. The reader likes to be engaged immediately, and the elements of the poem – the details, the tone, the imagery, the figurative language – should all contribute, as Poe suggests for the short story, to a single powerful effect. 

Helen Vendler, in her wonderful book, Poems, Poets, Poetry, spends an entire chapter on Keats’ “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer,” and her analysis not only helps students develop the skills that can help them look deeper into a poem, but also demonstrates how coherent and unified the language and structure of the poem truly are. In addition to these elements of technique, the reader must also be drawn to the voice of the poem, which may or may not be the voice of the poet. In Keats’ poem, we can feel the speaker’s astonishment and joy upon discovering Homer’s “wide expanse,” and I believe every good occasional poem should convey as much as possible of the poem’s emotional weight.

RT: On a practical level, how do you start the process of turning your life events into poems? Do you wait for “occasions” to strike, or do you pursue poems a bit more methodically? Another way to ask it: are you more of a “pocket notebook” poet or a “tidy desk” poet? 

TY: I don’t really have a writing process. Like you, I respond to events or experiences, and whether what I write becomes a poem or a story remains a bit of a mystery. Some things just feel like poems, their trajectory shorter, their focus tighter, and others feel like they want expansion, especially if characters are involved. 

I tend to write in the morning, stopping in the early afternoon to garden or walk the neighbourhood. Many people think that COVID should be a writer’s ideal opportunity to get some words on paper, but I have not found that to be true. Alison Flood speaks about “writer’s blockdown” in the Guardian, and it is clearly a real thing. The idea of writing about anything but the plague seems silly, just as it does to try to write a story without including cell phones or computers. But writing about COVID also has its problems. We haven’t enough distance from it to reflect about its implications. Adam Gopnik wrote about that distance recently, the fact that we are living through history without any real perspective of its impact, just as my parents went through WWII living day by day, uncertain of the outcome. Covid is too recent. It’s a kind of limbo where what I write seems a little like historical fiction. I’m sure it will pass.

RT: Hmm… yes, I’m experiencing this too. I feel a need to write around COVID, but how can you? I’ve been writing a great deal about nature; visiting a local park and simply recording what I see. Your “occasional” writing strikes me as observational, too: in certain ways it reminds me of haiku or imagist traditions, in other ways like Frank O’Hara’s self-proclaimed “I do this I do that” poetry. Can you point to any influences in encouraging you to write “occasionally” and “observationally” in this way?

TY: I’m glad you mentioned Frank O’Hara, because one of my favourite poems is “The Day Lady Died.” The poem is really just an itemizing of the things he did, the places he visited – the numerous quotidian acts that make up most of our lives – and one of those acts is his picking up a copy of a newspaper with a picture of Billy Holiday. Then the poem shifts to a single memory of a night at a place called the 5 Spot, where “she whispered a song along the keyboard” and “everyone and I stopped breathing.” He was a friend of the writer John Ciardi, who wrote about the death of JFK in the same manner, exploring all the details of New York city surrounding the day of the president’s death without commentary, without interjecting his own thoughts and feelings. 

I think it’s always wiser to approach a subject through things – at least it’s one way, and, if it’s done properly, the ultimate effect can be very powerful, as O’Hara shows us in his poem. Philip Levine’s poem “Late Moon” also is moving for the same reasons. Here is the opening:

2 a.m.
December, and still no moon
rising from the river.

My mother
home from the beer garden
stands before the open closet

her hands still burning.
She smooths the fur collar,
the scarf, opens the gloves

crumpled like letters.
Nothing is lost
she says to the darkness, nothing.

A son observes his mother arrive home from a night out and relates what he sees and hears with only minor embellishments (“gloves/crumpled like letters,” “hands burning”). It is a devastatingly sad poem primarily because he doesn’t intrude, because he allows the details to say it all for him. Of course, not all of my poetry adheres to this style, but a lot of it does.

RT: Oh, that Levine poem. The first stanza’s a haiku, more or less, and it keeps its energy throughout. Thank you for introducing me to it. It’s obvious from our discussion how much you love introducing poems and ideas on poetry to others. Could you talk a little about the role of teaching in your life-long relationship with poetry? How have you found retirement? Are you delivering lectures to your garden?

TY: I didn’t set out to be a teacher. I don’t think I set out to be anything. In 1978, I applied to law school and was accepted, but our finances were non-existent, and we already had a great deal of student debt, not to mention a one-year-old (Clea), so I forgot about law and registered in a fast-track teaching diploma. By 1980, I was standing in front of a classroom, making it up as I went. Ten years later, I re-invented my teaching by introducing a section of creative writing, which transformed how I taught. By providing students with models of contemporary poetry and fiction – Karen Solie, Louise Glück, Denis Johnson, Ray Carver, Lorrie Moore – and by giving students the freedom to write what interested them, I found a way to help them become invested in what they wrote. They started to care about spelling, punctuation, diction and imagery, and they learned how to use language to express what mattered to them. 

I also found myself sitting down with the class and writing the exercises I had assigned – simple prompts that I made up or borrowed from writers like Natalie Goldberg. I had already published several stories, but the draw of writing poems was irresistible, and I had a good teacher at home. I invited poets and short story writers into the school – Patricia, of course, and Bill Gaston, John Gould, Linda Rogers, Marian Farrant, Mark Jarman, and many others. Pretty soon other teachers wanted in, and before long they were writing and publishing their own poems and stories. I have always believed that writing teachers should also be teaching writers. 

In 1992 we launched a magazine, The Claremont Review, which published poetry and stories from students across Canada and the U.S. It lasted twenty-five years, closing finally in 2017, when we could no longer find the perfect combination of teacher/writers in a school to take it on. During those years, many of those students became friends and went on to explore writing further, writers like Claire Battershill and her brother Andrew, Maleaa Acker, Elizabeth Ross, Emily Yoon, Lyn Li Che. 

I miss the vitality of a writing class, the pleasure of introducing young minds to the works of great writers like Jane Kenyon, Claudia Rankine, Patricia Lockwood. I still dream of teaching, of finding myself nattering away about the power of imagery, even the joy of grammar. I left at the right time, when it was still fun. Now, the thought of standing in front of a bunch of teenagers and talking terrifies me. Once you step out of the river of relevance, you are quickly left behind. 

RT: Sorry to be pulling you back in the river! And thank you for your work on The Claremont Review—I was so disappointed to hear that it was shutting down after all those years.

We’ve talked a great deal about the narrative elements of Smithereens. But it should be noted that the book features two distinct forms—palindromes and list poems—which in their nonlinearity feel like a bit of a response to the rest of the book, almost “anti-narratives.” Could you talk a little about your interest in these forms, and how they complement/resist the narrative poems in the book?

TY: There has to be a little fun in writing, and forms like the palindrome and list poems are a lot like playing. One of the first list poems I encountered was “Loves,” from Stephen Dunn’s book, Landscape at the End of the Century. I liked the poem so much that I copied it, except that my poem was called “Lies.” Since then, I have come back to lists on several occasions. I think I like the way they can jump around from one thing to another without any need for a connection, apart from the title, and how they create a kind of coherence on their own, as though simply by being a list, the elements add up to something larger. As you point out, I have more than a few of these list poems in the current book, specifically in the lighter section “Pranayama” and also in “Epilogue.” One that is not in those sections is the poem “Gary,” about a friend who passed away a few years ago. He was such a collection of contradictions, and I think by juxtaposing certain details of his character, the reader gets an accurate snapshot of the man himself. I’ve also written a non-fiction piece about him, which was shortlisted for the CBC. I think I can safely say that I’ve never met anyone like him before or since. 

RT: “Gary” appears in the second section of Smithereens, entitled “Legacy,” which focuses on death: not only as an abstract concept, but also – and perhaps chiefly – as a bodily experience. You write about the physical process of dying in more than one poem, and in “Fern Island Candle ®” you write about being “happy / for now… to revive / those days when the metaphor of the candle, what it means / to snuff out, to be snuffed out, was still a metaphor.” 

Could you talk about your current thinking on death as a metaphor and a bodily reality? Have your thoughts on “death,” in all its manifestations, changed in recent years? Has the concept of “death” become more clouded or clearer?

TY: Yes, well, not a happy subject, certainly, but one that has gripped all of our imaginations in the last year, and, by all, I mean the entire world. Both Patricia and I are truly orphans now, since our parents have all passed, my mother being the most recent in 2012 at 97 years. We are also grandparents, a demographic that has us taking over the role that our parents played for our own children. Everywhere, we encounter signposts that tell us where we are heading: the various grades we pass through at school; the hats we don as husbands, fathers, wives, mothers; our status as retirees, pensioners, grandparents. We somehow acclimatize to each change in our job description, possibly because the shifts happen so slowly that we almost fail to see them until we turn around and look at the distance we have travelled. 

Initially, when we are young, the idea of death is appalling. It is “absurd,” as Camus wrote in The Myth of Sisyphus, and we read books like The Outsider and Heart of Darkness with alarm and indignation – “the horror, the horror!” Later, we lose ourselves in work and family, and forget about death for a while, only to be reminded when a friend or relative leaves the earth too soon. The ages cited in obituaries always seem far in the future, and we still hold in our minds our flexible understanding of what old people look like, which is anyone over twenty, then thirty, then forty, then fifty… 

I remember sitting on the back porch of the family home when I was quite young. It was a summer day, the big apple tree in blossom and the neighbourhood alive with the sounds of spring. I leaned over the railing and looked down at the backyard lawn – I might have been eight or nine – and I tried to imagine what it might feel like not to exist. The effort overwhelmed me, as it does when I try to comprehend an infinite universe, and I think I changed a little that day. I have never followed any religion, never accepted any articles of faith, any of the promises of immortality, an afterlife. There have been no miracles to sway my conviction that there is more to this world than meets the eye, because – as one exceptionally bright student pointed out in a screed he wrote – this world, this solar system, this galaxy, should be miracle enough for anyone. What need have we of angels or heavens when we have this? 

The strange thing about death is that we seem to fear it more when we are farthest from it, when we are young. Existential dread is a young person’s malady, and our fear subsides, moderates as we grow older. More and more, I feel the way I do when I board a plane. I look around at all the passengers and tell myself that wherever we are going, we are going together. The universality of death makes it easier to accept somehow.   

RT: For all the sadness in Smithereens, there is also a great deal of levity. In my interview with Patricia, she spoke of the virtues of serious humour (she quotes Donald Hall, who describes it as humour which “carries discomfort with it”). I think here you might have some agreement! There are so many funny moments in these poems, including my personal favourite “The Party,” in which two people debate the value of going to a party: 

They were told the party was on.
They were told everyone would be at the party.

They should come. They should really come.

But they were of two minds.

It’s a party, they said in one mind.
It’s a party, they said in the other mind.

The fun of Smithereens is most often “serious,” and “carries discomfort with it.” Could you talk about the role of humour in your poems? What does humour allow you to access that you’d otherwise have difficulty reaching?

TY: Poets have long been criticized as taking themselves too seriously. One has only to think of the oft-satirized “poetry voice” to feel a shudder of agreement. The thing is, though, many of the poets we revere, like Shakespeare and Donne, are actually quite humorous. How can we not laugh when Shakespeare laments being “in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes” and wishes to possess “this man’s art [talent] and that man’s scope [intelligence]”? Shakespeare? Really? You want to be more talented and smarter? Now, that’s funny. Donne, too, who borders on blasphemy when he attempts to seduce a woman by comparing both lovemaking and the Holy Trinity to a flea whose body contains his blood and that of his mistress. Never mind Marvell, who argues to his mistress that “The grave’s a fine and quiet place, / But none, I think do there embrace.” So, I always like to keep my own tendency to “lament” in perspective by recognizing how privileged I am to have the leisure to set words on paper, and how my problems stack up in comparison to the world at large. 

One way, as you suggest, is to leaven the light with a little dark, as Burns does in “To a Mouse,” in which he apologizes for breaking up the small creature’s burrow with a plough. His apology seems overblown, too much, too ardent in relation to his subject, a small mouse, and thus humorous, but the second stanza’s faux erudition and departure from the broad Scottish accent make it clear that he’s targeting a larger issue, the displacement of the poor by Progress. In my own mouse poem – another list poem – I shift from the concrete details of the various items that have been damaged to the more abstract ideas of ethics and our belief that we sit at the top of the Great Chain of Being, the kind of belief that crumbles when one looks at how “speciesism” has damaged the planet and caused untold suffering to other animals. 

Of course, having children deals a fairly heavy body blow to one’s self-importance, too, and in a poem like “Younger Than That Now” (thank you, Bob Dylan), I reduce the worldwide imperative for immediate changes in the ways we do business on this planet to the efforts of a single child in her quest to educate her father. In that context, the poem is humorous, but its overall message is serious. I may have learned this tactic from Patricia who mined the lives of our children for details almost from the moment they were born, but I think it’s also a universal experience to discover that certain aspects of our lives – the concerns over appearance, fame, money – take a comic backseat once we become parents. I think Patricia has been far subtler in her poems with regard to this change, and in many ways funnier. In her poem, “The Fire,” she describes our son’s obsession with keeping a campfire going, and her portrait is both loving and absurd: he sits “at the edge of a pit in a derelict lawn chair— / an old man chewing tobacco and staring at nothing.” 

RT: I’m glad you brought up “Younger Than That Now,” where the daughter implores her father to leave behind certain bad habits (cigarettes, white sugar, leaf blowers): “What spell will wake you from / your sleep?” 

While I can easily see my children growing up to think of me as “asleep,” I can’t imagine them becoming writers, as your daughter Clea Young has (her first collection of short stories, Teardown, was published in 2016). How did you feel about Clea taking up the family addiction (I mean writing, not cigarettes or leaf blowers)? 

TY: Yes, Clea writes fiction, and she also writes amazing poetry. It is wonderful to see her incorporating the elements of her own life as a mother and wife and daughter into her own work. I now know how my mother felt when she would see parts of our shared family history pop up in my poems and stories. She called me a “magpie,” a term of endearment, but it also refers to the way I would steal little gems of moments to line my own nest. 

Luckily, Clea’s childhood was not the series of character-crushing traumas that some children experience, and while I may wince to see some comical aspect of myself in her lines, I also know that both Clea and Liam, like the child in “Younger Than That Now,” have been very tolerant and have taught me a lot. 

RT: Returning to “The Party,” now that we’re a year into COVID quarantines, have your attitudes about parties changed at all? Are you feeling a bit less ambivalent about getting out of the house?

TY: Ha! I don’t really know. This period of enforced isolation has had some fairly strange effects, some of them quite serious. For someone like me – retired, a homeowner with access to a summer cabin the woods – this hiatus in the busy calendar of socializing, of “getting and spending,” as Wordsworth puts it, has actually been reasonably tolerable, even pleasant at times. As you suggest, though, it may also have reinforced certain tendencies to avoid the world, to shut the door on humanity. 

It’s hard to imagine how we will react to the return of parties, theatres, pubs, poetry readings and unexpected knocks on the front door, but I think it will take some getting used to. Getting older means a more limited life simply because many of the reasons for social interaction are no longer relevant – networking, sex, the urge to go a little crazy, let off steam – and perhaps this transformation has been a little more precipitous because of lockdowns and social distancing. But I have also noticed how eagerly people now chat with each other when they have a chance, at a distance or over media like Zoom, and this enthusiasm, almost desperate in its intensity, suggests to me that the transition back to a more convivial life may not take all that long. Nevertheless, I think the idea of blowing out birthday candles, then serving our guests with a piece of potentially infected cake, is a tradition that may be gone forever.  

RT: What about leaf blowers?

TY: Lord! Is there anything more annoying? A local municipality has gone so far as to ban them. Has no one heard of a rake? Those and power washers, two of the most horrible machines ever invented. There has to be some kind of Freudian connection, the way you see their operators waving them about, but really…

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Terence Young recently retired from teaching English and creative writing at St. Michaels University School. He is the author of several books: The Island in Winter, shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award for poetry and the Gerald Lampert Award; Rhymes With Useless, a runner-up for the Danuta Gleed award for short fiction; After Goodlake’s, a novel and winner of the City of Victoria Butler Book Prize; Moving Day, nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and the City of Victoria Butler Book Prize; and The End of the Ice Age, a collection of short fiction. Young lives in Victoria, BC.

Achieving An Equilibrium: An Interview with Cicely Belle Blain

The following interview is part four of an eight-part series of conversations with BC poets which I released in April 2021. All eight interviews were originally posted at ReadLocalBC.ca. This was the third year of my collaboration with Read Local BC (you can read the 2019 interviews here, and the 2020 interviews here).

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Manitoba - Cicely Belle Blain

I found Black people between groves of wheat
drove hours along open road back to Winnipeg
heard whispers in the topography
Ta-Nehisi said I could go anywhere
he told me in two hundred pages that Black folks could travel
said seeing the world is not a luxury
reserved for white men

we do travel though

some of us are still
on ships

Reprinted with permission
from Burning Sugar 
(Arsenal Pulp Press, 2020).

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Rob Taylor: You grew up in London (the big one that people outside of Canada know about) and moved to Vancouver for university. It’s been a relatively short amount of time, then, in which you’ve established yourself in the political (Black Lives Matter Vancouver, Bakau Consulting) and literary (Burning Sugar) life of the city. Could you talk about coming to Vancouver and learning to navigate those particular worlds? What do you think made it possible for you to establish yourself so quickly? 

Cicely Belle Blain: I came to Vancouver to attend UBC. I had never been to Vancouver or even Canada before so it was a pretty nerve wracking experience. Aside from the mountains and beaches, the main selling point was the Karen McKellin International Leader of Tomorrow Award that UBC offered me: a scholarship that makes it possible for international students who cannot afford the high tuition prices to attend. 

I have always been someone who gets involved in a lot of things. As someone with ADHD, the academic side of things is really challenging, so from a young age I’ve thrown myself into extra-curricular activities, especially if they were centered around politics and social justice. In addition, coming from a family of activists and change makers, helped me feel really primed and equipped to jump into activism, no matter the city. 

I think my ability to grow my business, literary career and activism work is a combination of some of the privileges I hold as a light skinned, educated, British person and also the fearlessness I was taught by my grandmother and mum. I have always been instilled with the tools and confidence to stand up for myself and go for every opportunity.

RT: What major roadblocks stood in your way?

CBB: A lot of the road blocks I have experienced are tied to my race, gender and age. Especially in starting my business, I felt so many doors were closed to me because I did not have the intergenerational wealth and business acumen to understand all the complexities of running a business. Especially in the beginning, I felt clients looked down on me and undervalued my intelligence and knowledge. 

RT: In “Hollywood, Florida” you write of “cross-Atlantic love” and it feels possible that you are speaking both of your own cross-Atlantic life and the Atlantic-spanning triangular slave trade. Indeed, in the first section of the book, “Place,” you travel in and around Europe, West Africa, and North America—all homes to either yourself or members of your extended family. 

I’m obviously not equating the two “triangles”, but are there ways in which your travels caused you to think about the slave trade, and its ongoing legacy, in different ways than you would have if you’d stayed put in London?

CBB: Yes, definitely. Moving to North America and the opportunities I have had to travel have really exposed to me the unending and global nature of anti-Blackness. It has allowed me to connect the dots between my experiences growing up in London, the histories of colonialism and slavery, (which didn’t necessarily happen on British soil but were driven and enacted by Britain for centuries), and how my experience as a Black British person is a result of both the wealth generated by the Empire and the creation of anti-Blackness.

RT: Assuming the poems with place names as titles (like “Manitoba”) were written in those places, you traveled over half the planet in writing this book! At one point you mention that your browser has “thirty flight search tabs” and that you own “more bathing suits than underwear,” so I suspect travel has been central to your life and identity (you note at one point that travel “becomes my greatest escape”). 

CBB: The ability to travel freely to so many places is definitely a huge privilege and something I understood to be a privilege from a very young age. My family made a concerted effort to provide us with the opportunity to travel, even at the sacrifice of other luxuries. I remember in ninth grade my teacher asked me why I didn’t choose geography as a subject to pursue and I replied that I felt like I already had front row seats to the best geographical education. I have always valued and appreciated my parents’ willingness to take risks—they’ve moved from the Netherlands to Italy to Kenya in the time I’ve lived in Canada.

RT: We’ve all had to live life differently since the onset of the pandemic, but I wonder if that isn’t particularly true for you, having lost your ability to travel. How has your time been during the pandemic? Has the requirement to stay in one place caused you to look at the world, or yourself, any differently?

CBB: Over the past year the value that travel holds has changed. It is no longer about exploration and fun and leisure, but about connecting or reconnecting with people, ancestors or culture. This has allowed me to view travel less from a Western perspective of ticking things off a bucket list and more as a sacred opportunity to find parts of me that are missing. I hope when the pandemic is over, I can dedicate my future travels to places like Gambia, Jamaica and other lands where my ancestry lies.

RT: In addition to your physical travels around the world, the poems in Burning Sugar also travel the internet in their explorations of racial injustice. “How many white people can say their death will end up on YouTube? Nestled between Ariana Grande and reruns of Ellen?” you write so powerfully in “Dear Philando Castille.” As an activist and organizer, what do you think the internet has enabled you to do that was unavailable to previous generations? 

CBB: I think the unique experience of millennials is that we were the first to grow up almost entirely online. For older generations, it’s something that came along later, while Gen Z are getting to learn from our mistakes and successes. From as young as 6 or 7, I have pretty formative memories that revolve around the internet; by 10 I was using MSN to talk to friends (and strangers) online and so much of my self-exploration around my queerness, race and gender identity is thanks to the internet. While it’s not always safe, I think it is truly influential and I am so grateful to have grown up in this age (I often try to imagine what people did in the Spanish flu pandemic with no technology…). 

RT: You mention that it’s “not always safe” on the internet (to say the least!). In what ways do you think he internet has made activism and organizing more difficult?

CBB: The main issue with the internet in my experience as an activist is the exposure to harm and violence from strangers. Many of the poems in Burning Sugar I wrote in 2017 after I left Vancouver for 6 months because of the hate and death threats I was receiving as a result of speaking up against police involvement in Pride.

RT: I’m so sorry that happened to you. You write about your experience at the Pride parade in the long poem “Toronto” (“We asked for recognition, safety, compassion, empathy and freedom. What we got was dismissal, hypervisibility, vilification and violence”). “Toronto” sits at the centre of your book and is, essentially, a short essay. This kind of genre-mixing is happening more frequently in Canadian poetry, perhaps most notably in your editor Vivek Shraya’s collection, even this page is white, which places a series of interviews at its centre. 

Could you talk about the choice to put the essay (essay-poem?) at the middle of the book? More broadly, can you talk about what ways Shraya helped shape Burning Sugar (which she says “had all of the elements there by the time it reached me”)?

CBB: Working with Vivek was magical. As a young queer person of colour I was completely clueless on how to publish my work, and the opportunities and wisdom she provided were invaluable.

I knew that I wanted to explore different styles and genre. I really love all kinds of writing, and always have, and didn’t want to limit myself to just poems. I had intended to include more essays but they were the most time consuming, to play with the delicate balance of being beautiful and educational.

RT: “Toronto” explores the simultaneous desire to be at once visible and invisible—the desire to stand out (as queer, as black) and to blend into the crowd. Your jobs as a diversity consultant and a writer are very “public facing,” to say the least! How are you feeling now about that balance in your life? Has the nature of the balance you desire shifted at all since the time described in “Toronto”? Do you feel like you’re better able to achieve it?

CBB: I am currently feeling good about this balance. I think that has come from a boost in confidence over the past year; with the release and success of Burning Sugar, I can really feel the validation and affirmation that my work is important and people actually want to read it or hear me speak. 

I have always struggled with impostor syndrome, especially after spending four years in a predominantly white academic institution. To achieve success in my writing and in my business feels like I am finally doing what I am good at, and it is appreciated and admired by others. This allows me to feel like less of a fraud when I post online or appear in media interviews. People are genuinely looking to me for my knowledge and expertise and that allows me to feel less anxious and awkward about it all. Although I am still a very awkward person—but most people who know me say I pull it off well.

RT: Ha! Well, you don’t show it in interviews, at least.

The second section of Burning Sugar, entitled “Art”, explores art exhibits by Black artists, and features letters (“epistolary poems,” if we’re being fancy) to the artists themselves. Your mother was a visual artist, and you note that you spent “many a weekend trawling the galleries of Europe”. How do you think visual and performance art has informed your writing? Your activism?

CBB: Art was definitely my first introduction to politics and activism. My mum, who is an artist and art teacher (she was even my art teacher in school), has always taught me that art has meaning and the power to make change. Almost all of the exhibitions mentioned in the book, I went with my mum and she has always provided spaces for critical thinking and exploration of creativity.

RT: Your speaking to/with visual art by Black artists reminded me of Chantal Gibson’s wonderful collection, How She Read (you can read my interview with Gibson, from a previous iteration of this interview series, here). In addition to exploring the art, you both also focus on the overwhelmingly white spaces (the walls and the people) in which visual art is usually displayed. In your letter-poem “Dear Selina”, about UK performance artist Selina Thompson, you write:

Under the dim lights, I felt the vibrations of white people. Consumed by an intergenerational fascination with you/me/us. Enraged at their ancestors and counterparts—but never at themselves. Oblivious, mostly, to their complicity in the story you tell.

I also felt the Black bodies—some were my friends; others were people I wished I knew. Most were tense, leaning forward, metaphorical arms outstretched to hold you or be you or something else.

You obviously think a lot about space and audience: how they influence the art; how the various parts of an audience receive a work differently. A poetry book, like a gallery, has a lot of white space and is predominately consumed by white/straight “viewers,” though the reading of a poetry book is usually a private act, invisible to the poet. What were your thoughts about audience as you prepared Burning Sugar for publication? How do you think the unavoidable whiteness of a large portion of your audience shaped, and shapes, the book? Who do you imagine are the various members of your invisible “room” full of readers, and what do you hope they’re taking away from it?

CBB: I definitely had the potential whiteness of the audience in mind when writing, which is one thing I regret about the book. It is only very recently as people start to question and critique diversity and inclusion consulting or anti-racism training, that I realised a lot of anti-racism education is directed towards white people. We simplify big concepts, or sometimes even exploit our own trauma, to educate white people (I write about this here). 

When I was writing Burning Sugar, I was doing this—writing for white people to understand me better, when really I wanted to be writing for myself and other Black queer people. I think I did achieve an equilibrium but I’m not sure.

RT: The last section of Burning Water, “Child”, is about – surprise! – your childhood. The default assumption would be that one would put their poems about childhood at the beginning of their first book, not the end. Could you talk about that choice to close the book with it? Is it connected in any way to that equilibrium you were seeking?

CBB: I put “Child” at the end of the book because I felt like people had to do the hard work to get to the most intimate part! As a British person, I am not accustomed to being overly vulnerable with my emotions and even though I think there is so much power in emotional intimacy—with one another and with our readers—it does not come naturally! I felt it was important for people to first understand the larger systemic issues I was referencing and understand my adult experience, which is also a reflection of so many other Black queer people’s experiences. Then we could go down the rabbit hole into my past!

I also saw it as a reflection of how much access people have to me. As a “public figure” (I still cringe at the idea of this but I also have to recognize the responsibility and privilege that comes with my social position and capital), I constantly feel exposed, easily accessible to everyone at any time. This is extremely exhausting—people feel they can ask me anything, comment on everything I do and say and wear, even when it’s unsolicited. I felt with the this structuring of the book I was able to take back some control—assuming people read it in order—and invite people into my deepest memories and truths at my own pace.

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Cicely Belle Blain is a Black, multi-racial, queer writer, activist and CEO from London, UK. Cicely Belle is noted for founding Black Lives Matter Vancouver and subsequently being listed as one of Vancouver’s 50 most powerful people by Vancouver Magazine twice, BC Business’s 30 under 30, and one of Refinery29’s Powerhouses of 2020. They are now the CEO of Bakau Consulting, an anti-racism consulting company with over 1000 clients worldwide. Cicely Belle is also an instructor in Executive Leadership at Simon Fraser University and the Editorial Director of Ripple of Change Magazine. They are the author of Burning Sugar (Arsenal Pulp Press and VS Books) which was recently longlisted for the 2021 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and the Pat Lowther Memorial Award.