Choosing Not To Cry: An Interview with Jane Munro

The following interview is part four of a seven-part series of conversations with BC poets which I released between January and April 2023. All seven interviews were originally posted at ReadLocalBC.ca. This was the fourth year of my collaboration with Read Local BC (you can read all my Read Local BC interviews in one place here).

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MacKay Creek

I cleared a shelf close to its flow

left hemlock cones, smoothed stones

heard the water’s poem

without knowing

as water knows

swayed on vine maple trunks 

arched over pools and rapids

felt safe in a place where I had nothing 

to achieve, no one to please

the creek withheld nothing from me

Reprinted with permission from 

False Creek

(Harbour Publishing, 2022)

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Rob Taylor: I wanted to open this interview with your poem "MacKay Creek” because to me it stands in stark contrast with the titular creek in your new poetry collection, False Creek. Unlike North Vancouver’s MacKay Creek, downtown Vancouver’s False Creek doesn't flow like a creek at all, and its history—especially its pre-colonial history—was withheld from you. Could you talk a little about False Creek? How did you come to see it as a focal point for the various concerns you explore in the book?

Jane Munro: False Creek came first. I walked around this strange but fascinating element of the city I’d come back to, my home city. Like so much in my relationship with this place, False Creek epitomized contradictions. 

As a child I’d followed MacKay Creek as far up and down its flow as I could go. That creek was a real creek—one with fresh water (though maybe not potable) and traversed by bears. I played there, felt safe there, prayed there: left gifts, arranged offerings. I didn’t have the same reverence for False Creek. I studied what I could learn about its life and history trying to understand what had happened to this inlet to the heart and values of Vancouver. The city exploits land and water ways, corrupts, and reduces the natural environment.

For me, False Creek was a naked image, something odd and plain—a kind of haiku of Vancouver. My home.

RT: In your 2021 memoir Open Every Window, which describes your struggle with your husband's Alzheimer's, you write "We live in a time of dementia: its tsunami hitting persons we know, society's forgetfulness, even the earth losing mind with the extinction of species." In many ways, False Creek feels like an attempt to directly address "society's forgetfulness"—a repudiation of dementia and unlearning in all their forms. Would you say that's true? 

JM: I am part of society; I am forgetful and ignorant. Going through Bob’s battle with dementia was anguishing. I project my “keel of grief” onto Vancouver by saying False Creek is Vancouver’s keel of grief. But a keel keeps a vessel upright. A keel allows one to steer – stay on course. 

RT: Did experiencing Bob’s Alzheimer's make you hungry for new learning?

JM: I’ve always been curious about life, our co-species, our relationships—the vastness of everything I do not know. So, yes, new learning feels urgently necessary as we face the increasingly cataclysmic impacts of our ignorance and forgetfulness. My years face-to-face with Alzheimer’s sharpened my craving, but it wasn’t a new hunger.

RT: You take on those cataclysmic impacts directly in False Creek, which feels like your most bluntly political book to date. It's notable, then, that it comes on the heels of a book called Open Every Window, which itself felt like a straight-forward response to your more delicate approach to Bob's Alzheimers in Blue Sonoma (described on the back of that book as "render[ing] difficult conditions with the lightest of touches"). Do you feel that "opening every window" in your memoir opened you up to new ways of writing the poems in False Creek?

JM: That’s an astute question. Yes, it probably did. I’ve always felt compelled to be as honest and accurate as possible in my writing. The tricky part is not knowing how someone else will take what I say. It took time to work through my delicacy about things I say in Open Every Window. I wanted to make the best art I could make. I wanted to write a book only I could write. I wanted to give others a clear sense of my experiences as a particular person living in a particular place and time.

For at least the past fifty years I’ve felt we, as adults, need to change—we are in crisis. It’s too late to educate children and trust that coming generations will remedy the past. That need was my motivation for doing a doctorate in Adult Education. I wanted to learn how to facilitate transformative learning—in myself, for starters. Art was crucial—a gateway to heart and imagination—essential for transformative learning. So was story. How to change the story in our minds, in our hearts. How to open us to new ways of thinking /feeling/relating/acting. So, yes, Open Every Window laid the groundwork for False Creek though I hadn’t thought of it in those terms before. I had changed. My story had changed. The times had changed. Our crises are extreme. What I had to write had changed. 

RT: What you had to write didn’t just change, it seems to me it expanded. For a book titled after a single location, False Creek ranges widely. This is attested to in the "Notes" section of the book, where facts on black holes press up against information about Aboriginal art, the Great Pyramid of Giza, the Squamish and Hebrew languages, and more. The book's opening poem, similarly, begins in Pompeii and Herculaneum before ending in Vancouver. To what extent was this wide lens a choice you made, as opposed to simply what happens when you sit down to write, the whole world rushing in behind the single image?

JM: It’s hard to imagine any one location without including its relationships with other places and times. False Creek (as we name it now) calls up a range of other places and times—geologically and historically. The poems in the book range widely but when I was writing these poems, I did too. As the embedded point of view, I felt it only fair to sketch my own changes of location—where I go to, come from, bring to mind—in relationship with False Creek today. 

The title, False Creek, appeals to me for its irony and contradictions. “False” is a loaded word these days. We have “false news,” the politics of what is “true” to one person may not be “true” to another. I feel irony and contradiction are part of the book even when the content is not focused tightly on the inlet in the heart of Vancouver. 

RT: False Creek is full of information about Vancouver and its history, both the kind of knowledge we learn from books and the kind we gather through experience (in your case, often from walking through the city). Could you talk a little about how those two types of learning informed or fueled one another? Does one usually come first (a fact altering how you navigate the world; a lived experience motivating research)?

JM: An interesting question. Walking around what we now call False Creek led to studying old maps, reading books and online articles, going to the Beattie Biodiversity Museum, other museums, libraries, galleries. I awakened, through these experiences, to the fact that I’d grown up here not knowing, grasping, or taking to heart the ongoing violence of colonial abuse. This led me to the Decolonial Aesthetics course at ECUA+D. It was mind-opening. Reading and listening and thinking about all this happened as slowly and incrementally as walking around False Creek and composing the poems. Book learning and walking the seawall and the poems inhabited me and informed one another.

 

This kind of information has helped to ground me, to stand me on something closer to a more accurate understanding of what I’m doing, where I am, what I’m part of, and how I might improve the situation. Learning what I can with the resources I can access and am capable of using—curiosity and my love of learning—continue to activate me.

I learned on my last trip to India that this is a privilege. Even in my financially difficult years, I was the lucky woman: happy and safe enough to be curious about things not related to securing my basic needs. Highly intelligent people who lack food, water, shelter, or safety, focus their attention on survival. My curiosity is a luxury. 

RT: That’s an important point—how fortunate we are when we have the time and ability to indulge our curiosity. In Open Every Window, you write about an earthquake in 1946, when you were three-and-a-half, which spurred your interest in the earth and stars: "My father moved an orange around a grapefruit on the table to explain how the earth circled the sun. My mother got a book from the library with pictures of volcanoes." Bless your parents! In some ways it feels like they planted the seeds of this new book that day in 1946. Do you see a straight, or crooked, path between that event and this book? 

JM: It’s a continuous path, but wending. A climb. Switchbacks. Tricky rock ledges. Long days wandering in forests, trudging beaches.

RT: When did poetry become a part of that wending?

JM: It’s hard to say. I loved and memorized nursery rhymes. My mother read my brother and me poems from an anthology called Silver Pennies. I remember her reading one of my favourite poems from it (“The Moon’s the North Wind’s Cookie”) at lunch while we were sucking up canned spaghetti, both of us taking turns choosing poems to hear and urging her to read more. By the time I was six, the children’s librarian told my mother I’d checked out (and read) more books than any other child user of the Vancouver Public Library. That was the old Carnegie library downtown at Main and Hastings.

My first memory: waking up from a nap in my cot with sun baking my belly and hearing my mother talking with a friend around the corner in the living room. I realized that I was awake and my mother did not know. I understood then that we were not the same person, and that I had to cry if I wanted her to know I was awake. I remember choosing to not cry. Lying there, magnificently bathed in warm late afternoon sunlight coming in through the kitchen windows. It had to be winter in my first year of life because we moved out of that house before I turned one. I think it was before I could sit up or roll over because I wasn’t thinking about moving myself.

 

Talking, and then writing, were ways I could attempt to give my experiences to someone else. Words were more effective than crying, and they interested me. Plus, poems were words that could dance. I liked to dance. My mother saved a poem I composed and printed out in a little notebook when I was five. She carried it around in her purse. I think of it as my first poem.

RT: In your memoir you describe how in your childhood you were allowed to "disappear" for the day to "explore the North Shore from ski cabins to the ocean." In some ways, False Creek's poems drawn from your walks around the city feel like a return to your roots. Though there are of course major differences between 1950s North Shore and 2020s downtown, do you see parallels between these two places? Between the two people who explored them?

JM: I still love to “disappear” and “explore” the world around me, off on my own without an agenda, free to attend to whatever interests me for as long or as short a time as feels right to me for that exploration. My parents assumed – early on – that I could look after myself wherever I might be. My father gave me instructions in bushcraft: choose your way down when you’re going up; if you’re lost, follow water. My mother made sure I knew which buses to take and where they stopped. 

My wandering and exploring as a child in North Vancouver was in places where I would rarely meet other people. Walking in the city, I’m almost always around people, watching and listening to them, learning in that way more about where I live and with whom I share life. That child had an innate sense of being able to cope—of trusting herself wherever she was. I think I still do trust that I can cope.

RT: In False Creek you write of breaking your foot and despite this still walking around False Creek in a walking boot (through Leg-in-Boot Square, no less!). Did that shift in your walking rhythm affect the nature or volume of your writing?

JM: My writing mind dwells in my body and arises as surprises from an unconscious—often actually dreaming—mind. The words come through me. The gestation period of revising and finishing writing is held in me but it starts as a mysterious gift.

Walking daily refreshes my mind, stocks my body with details and experiences, feeds my creativity. I give myself over to whatever is there. I’m curious, relaxed, active, trusting. Walking in a boot was sometimes clumsier than walking without a boot, but I adapted. It gave different imagery, new happenstance, more learning. How slowly, incrementally, bone heals and we repair our bodies. So, you can’t rush it. You can’t rush reconciliation. Step by step, day by day, a little by a little, we can heal. That’s what bodies can do. 

RT: Vancouver's neighbourhoods have been the subject of a surprising number of poetry books: George Bowering's Kerrisdale Elegies, Daphne Marlatt's Steveston, Michael Turner's Kingsway, and Bren Simmers' Hastings-Sunrise all spring to mind (and those are just books which, like yours, have neighbourhoods in their titles!). Did particular books on the city inspire or inform you in writing your own?

JM: I’ve loved Daphne Marlatt’s Steveston ever since she wrote it and, yes, it no doubt influenced False Creek, at least obliquely. Her poems flow across the page, influenced more than mine by the poetics of field composition articulated and practiced by Black Mountain poets such as Charles Olson and Robert Duncan. The deep, wide flow of her poems embodies the Fraser River at its mouth, meeting ocean and its tides—a confluence shaping Steveston. False Creek is not a river – not even a creek – it’s an inlet of ocean in the heart of Vancouver. It’s tidal. My poems, like Daphne’s, are shaped by breath, but my lines are shorter. The music is different. 

RT: In Open Every Window, and also in your 2020 collection Glass Float, you write extensively about the vital role yoga has played in your life, providing a place of centering, rest and rejuvenation. By comparison, the importance of writing and reading in your life is less emphasised. Did you make a conscious choice to downplay the role of writing in the memoir? 

JM: It felt self-conscious to address, when writing, how central writing is to me, and how my practice as a writer has evolved. Perhaps I have a similar reticence about yoga; I’ve never wanted to become a yoga teacher. But I have written about yoga.

RT: Do the two practices—yoga and writing—affect your life in similar ways, or do you find they work quite differently?

JM: BKS Iyengar said he wanted to bring intelligence to every cell of his body in his yoga practice. This parallels my writing practice where I want to bring intelligence to each element of my writing: each word, phrase, punctuation, space, each image, each thought. I want to unite them (another yoga principle) and make them intelligible. I think of Patanjali’s yoga sutra 2:46 sthira sukham asanam (“Asana is perfect firmness of body, steadiness of intelligence and benevolence of spirit”) and want my writing to be like that: the flow of it as keenly surprising and engaging as the flow of a good yoga practice. 

I might not do a daily yoga practice if I didn’t need it to keep me pain-free and calm enough to do the writing. Writing takes me a long time so I need stamina and patience. Both writing and yoga build on layers of insights and clarities from the unconscious as well as the conscious mind. They both engage my whole body—my full self. 

RT: You've been a member of the writing collective Yoko's Dogs for many years, writing the Japanese collaborative poetic form renga with poets Jan Conn, Mary di Michele and Susan Gillis. Often enough in reading False Creek, poems opened in a way that felt similar to the hokku opening of a renga (the "hokku," separated from its longer poem, being what we now call a haiku). One such example, the poem "Moving Water Does Not Hold," opens "the leaf it carries / moon / now gibbous." How has your work with Yoko's Dogs and renga shaped how you think about a poem, both its nature and the nature of its composition?

JM: One of the first and fiercest things working with Yoko’s Dogs taught me is that just because something seems clear to me does not mean it’s clear to another reader. Our collaborative practice has motivated me to strive for clarity. Yoko’s Dogs has led me to appreciate what I think of as “the naked image.” Renga and haiku do not employ metaphor or narrative and use few modifiers. Matsuo Bashō said the bones of haiku are plainness and oddness. At least, that’s the usual translation of what he said. I’ve learned how incredibly challenging it is to create poems that are plain (clear to the reader) and odd (memorable, resonant, fresh).

I’ve come to see poetry as architecture for the imagination. My job as poet is to create space for the reader’s imagination—a habitable apartment they can furnish with memories, thoughts, and feelings. Ideally, my poem will invite them to refresh their habitual relationships to stuff they carry around. And hopefully it will stay standing long enough to serve other readers as well.

RT: Speaking of Bashō, in the very moving closing poem of Blue Sonoma you draw a comparison between your parting from your husband Bob and Bashō's parting from his traveling companion, Sora, on his famous journey in Narrow Road to the Interior. Sora was forced to abandon the trip due to illness. Of their parting, Bashō wrote, "He carries his pain as he goes, leaving me empty. Like paired geese parting in the clouds." 

Bob wasn't only your life partner, but also your writing companion (you thank his "fine editorial eye and faith in my writing" in the acknowledgments of Point No Point). The effect of losing Bob from your life is well documented in Open Every Window, but how did losing that editorial eye, and that faith, affect your writing? 

JM: Thank you for that quote from Bashō. I’m missing Bob’s editorial eye now since I am wrestling with a novel. He edited and published many novels. He read. And read. With intelligence, passion, compassion. I might ask him for feedback on something I was struggling with or discuss what I was dithering over, but mostly he read what got published. I rarely shared drafts with him, at least not until I was ready to send it out.

As Alzheimer’s destroyed Bob’s capacities, more and more of the tasks of domestic life fell to me as well as earning income, commuting, and caregiving for him as his health declined. He wanted me to be around more, had difficulty understanding, and hated being dependent. 

There is a draining of the body when a lover goes and will not be replaced. I am hugely grateful for the fullness of life I have been given. But now solitude is to my soul what food is to my body. I feel a profound need, and gratitude, for the solitude that has come lately into my life, giving me time and space to write. 

RT: Two writers who played prominent roles in helping you develop this book—one as an early reader, the other as your editor—are Roo Borson and Jan Zwicky. If only every poet could be so lucky! Could you talk a little about how each of these poets has influenced your writing life over the years? 

JM: Impossible to count the ways! I feel extremely lucky. 

Roo and I met in George McWhirter’s graduate student poetry workshop at UBC fifty years ago. That’s where Roo and Kim Maltman met, too. I had three small children, mothering full-tilt—faculty wife with a home in West Van. I wanted to write and was juggling it all. I liked Roo immediately, but I wasn’t sure how she felt about older-and-more-tied-down me. One afternoon, I summoned my courage and asked her formally if she would be my friend. Annie, my then two-year old youngest child was with us. To my delight, Roo said yes and we’ve been close ever since. 

Jan arrived in my life as the editor, at Brick Books, for Grief Notes & Animal Dreams. Doing that editing involved considerable back and forth, mostly by email. Then Jan and Don McKay moved to Victoria and they both became my close friends. I wanted Jan to edit False Creek when Harbour accepted it because I knew she would rigorously challenge my thinking and be acutely sensitive to the political aspects of those poems. 

I trust both Roo and Jan to be honest and straight-forward with me. They take my concerns seriously, respect my feelings, and trust me to do the same for them. They’re both highly intelligent, wonderful poets, and long-time close friends. We’ve seen one another through thick and thin over many years. I am enormously grateful for the gift of these friendships.

RT: People might wonder how you wrote so much during the difficult years of your husband's Alzheimer’s. My sense is part of the answer might lie in the consistency of some elements of your writing practice: your regular return to a writing retreat at St. Peter's Abbey, your long-term writing and editorial relationships with Yoko's Dogs, Borson, Zwicky, etc. All these things feel like steadying forces in a turbulent time in your life. Do you see them as such? What has that consistency allowed you to do that might not have otherwise been possible?

JM: You are right. There has been consistency: Yoko’s Dogs, close friendships with other writers, twenty-five years of writing retreats at St. Peter’s Abbey, other writing or yoga retreats, supportive friends and family, a daily yoga practice. But I think the unspoken and essential thing is that I feel most fully myself when writing. I desperately needed to write in those difficult years. 

I went out of my way to look after myself. I can’t sing worth beans, but I took singing lessons and maintained a daily singing practice through some of the hardest years. It opened my chest, freed my voice, lifted my spirits. Served as a kind of meditation. I found an Alexander Technique practitioner and went to her for weekly massage treatments. I needed hands-on touch for stress relief. My “old ladies” group met once a month in one another’s homes to discuss a chosen topic. We spoke freely about things not talked about in most polite conversations. I was a subject in a study of Alzheimer’s spousal caregivers done by a psychologist at UVic. She was very worried about my level of acute grief but said I could give classes on how to look after yourself when caregiving. 

My hard-won, hard-built, yoga practice taught me to value and work with a practice. That has allowed me to make routine my crutch. I keep daily to-do lists, record how I spend my time, am obsessive about getting steps, tracking dreams, drafting proto-poems, working on whatever writing projects I have going, keeping up with yoga, correspondence, deskwork, chores, and whatever else needs doing. 

RT: In False Creek you avoid using both punctuation and capitalization, which well-compliments the poems' unvarnished nature. Your previous books have also channeled particular forms, such as Glass Float's prose poems or Active Pass’ sonnets—forms you've rarely used outside those books. At what point in the creative process do you consider the form of your poems in a given book? Is the form part of the initial creative impulse, or do you find your way to it later, when you have a better sense of the nature of the content?

JM: I listen. As the words come, their music is shapely. Olson’s dictum, Form = Content, makes total sense to me. The sonnets in Active Pass respond to Mary Pratt’s formal paintings. And to the inner arguments of their content. The presence of conflict in its apparent absence. There’s a contradiction in a sonnet—it shows you its other side. The prose poems in Glass Float are little poetic narratives. And False Creek’s tidal music ebbs and flows. It’s changing. I listen to each poem and it tells me how to punctuate and shape it: where the breaks come, what its pattern is.  This does evolve. As the poem comes clear, I’ll get a stronger feel for what it’s saying, what it is—its form and its content. 

That said, sometimes I’ve gotten interested in a form for how it shapes content. Renga do that. So do ghazals and sonnets. Working within limits hones imagination. A fabric artist I knew who made monumental sculptures told me he had a rule that he could never sew anything together. All his work, which had intersecting panels angled out, had to be something he could weave on a loom. He said, he needed that limitation to spur his imagination.

RT: As mentioned, Glass Float is composed almost entirely of prose poems, but the final ten poems are written in the style you employ in False Creek: short-lined, multi-stanza poems without capitalization or punctuation. I find there's often a poem or two in one book of mine, written near the end of its composition, which hint at what's to come: a testing out of a form before I fully dive in. Is that the case here? In that sense, do you think of your books as discrete entities, or as a long overlapping sequence?

JM: Both. I deliberately shape a book, not only for links in content and between adjacent poems, but also for the overall shape and dramatic arc of the book. I think of the book as a poem. But I’m also thinking about the sequence. 

Grief Notes and Animal Dreams has a lot of poems about my mother whose death in a house fire was central to that book. Point No Point focuses on my father, who, as it happened, died seven years to the day and hour after the house fire. Active Pass is more about my life, work, commuting, menopause, meditation—a lot of stuff but not specifically about my parents. Then Blue Sonoma returns to the theme of grief—in this case, caregiving for Bob as his Alzheimer’s Disease and other health problems relentlessly erased his well-being and memory. After his death and the Griffin Prize win for Blue Sonoma, I found it difficult to write poetry and turned to prose. 

Open Every Window took many years to complete, but it was in that period after I’d left Point No Point and moved back to Vancouver that it became my top writing priority. Glass Float’s prose poems, which I was also working on in those years, may be partly reflective of my immersion in the rhythms of prose. But Glass Float’s focus on yoga, retreats in India and in other parts of the world—which had been consistent parts of my life and of significance to my writing—makes it another discrete work that is part of the continuum. 

RT: Is there a hint, then, hidden away in the poems in False Creek, of what might come next? 

JM: Yes, funny you should ask. The poem “The Tongue, the Penis, the Brain” in False Creek is an unintentional direct hint at the novel I’m working on. Whether or not it comes next is an open question. I must finish it for starters, and then it has to find a publisher, and become a book. The whole poem could be seen as a hint but the ending is most directly: 

in your hands, the weight of bone

what is left of a father

when you wash his armature 

where to inter love

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Jane Munro is a Canadian poet, writer and educator. Blue Sonoma (Brick Books, 2014) won the 2015 Griffin Poetry Prize. Munro’s recent books include Open Every Window: A Memoir (Douglas & McIntyre, 2021) and the poetry collection Glass Float (Brick Books, 2020). She has taught creative writing at universities across BC, led writing workshops, and has given readings around the world. She lives in Vancouver, BC.

Uncooperative with the Expected: An Interview with Dale Tracy

The following interview is part three of a seven-part series of conversations with BC poets which I released between January and April 2023. All seven interviews were originally posted at ReadLocalBC.ca. This was the fourth year of my collaboration with Read Local BC (you can read all my Read Local BC interviews in one place here).

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Learning to Feel Full

I pluck petals with a dirty garden glove.
That daisy’s stained like newsprint—
who reads daisies anymore?
Still, the mouth, yellow, opens, and not to say
“I love you.”

Still, when I drink my teeth get wet.
My eyes gape, and light gets in.
Don’t they get emptier when the pupils grow?
I’m full of resources, and places to put them.
That doesn’t mean I know when I feel full.

Reprinted with permission from 

Derelict Bicycles

(Anvil Press, 2022)

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Rob Taylor: There are a lot of mouths and teeth in Derelict Bicycles: human and animal; open, devouring, singing, speaking, silent. What draws you to images and metaphors around the mouth? 

Dale Tracy: Mouths get my attention because they are inside/outside things. Mouths are the inside of us, but they open: we can look right into them. These are points of inordinate access, right on our faces. The fact of a mouth can become fascinatingly unreal, even unsettling, if I keep perversely pushing the thought. I surprise myself in poems frequently because I write something that upsets me—not because it threatens harm but because it opens up some strangeness of existence that I maybe am not really comfortable with. These mischievous thoughts are probably at the heart of my poetry. Well, maybe they are the mouths of my poems.

What we say comes out of the mouth, which is relevant for poetry. But teeth also bring the world into us, as we keep making ourselves. Having multi-purpose body parts is such a strange efficiency. Bringing in the material to keep building our bodies has nothing to do with communication, but they cross each other in the hallway all day long.

RT: In channeling “the strangeness of existence,” your poems often lean towards the surreal. I was happy to see you'd worked with Stuart Ross, who's kept the flame of surreal poetry going in this country at times when it otherwise might have been snuffed out. What draws you to this type of writing? Have you always written with a surreal bent? 

DT: Yes, thank goodness for Stuart Ross! My poems often start with something I think or say in the course of my everyday life: the surreal bent is how I think in general, so it is also how I think in poetry. The ways that my thinking is strange matches some of what readers expect from poetry, so poetry lets me explore and communicate my reactions, feelings, ideas, and values most clearly.

RT: I believe poetry is the closest mirror we have to how human beings actually think (not how we like to believe we think, which is far more orderly). I love your awareness, and embrace, of poetry as a path to clarity!

You mention in your acknowledgments that your time in Northwestern Ontario and Kingston informed the poems in Derelict Bicycles. How do you think the book would be different if you'd written it elsewhere? Now that you're here in BC, teaching at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, can you sense your poems changing in any way?

DT: It’s me who would be different: wherever I write now, I’ll always have come from those places. Not so many people are from Northwestern Ontario (it’s not a populous region), so I have a perspective shaped by that—the experiences I had there are not the experiences of most people I meet. Kingston is lively with poetry and arts, and I might not be publishing poetry now if I hadn’t had the opportunity to be connected in poetry community. When I moved to B.C., the trees changed my poems—right away the whole atmosphere of my life (the air’s smell and the whole mood) was different.

RT: One part of the Kingston poetry scene that made a mark in Derelict Bicycles was the m society, "a mysterious group of writers in Kingston," who provided writing prompts that inspired some of your poems. How have prompts helped you in your writing? 

DT: What’s better than something making an opening into the world to follow? I already know the things I know, so it’s boring to think those thoughts. A prompt makes me know again what I know, or reflect on it, or learn something new, or think differently. Whether formally or informally, I’m using prompts all the time—that is, I’m looking for something to prompt me. 

RT: I imagine it must be tricky to move between teaching and academic writing, and your own creative work—do prompts help you make that transition? 

DT: My teaching, academic writing, and creative writing all send prompts to each other, so I would probably find it trickier to write in only one way.

RT: In addition to their embrace of the surreal, the poems in Derelict Bicycles cut against popular trends by rarely being explicitly autobiographical: if we see the poet's life in these poems, it's indirectly. In one you write "Of my ornaments, I can only tell, now show... I'm all style where no one sees," and in another, "I won't look for your life / in your poems, / but can I look for mine?" 

In your monograph, With the Witnesses: Poetry, Compassion and Claimed Experience, you write "I am concerned that an understanding of a poet's corpus does not take the place of hearing what a particular poem has to say." Is there a connection here, between your concern for biography obscuring the poem, and what of you you choose to put on (or withhold from) the page? 

DT: I think “indirectly” is the key. These poems are my most intimate thoughts, the clearest expression of how my mind works. But I’m choosing to explore my thinking through poetry. In a poem, whatever else I’m doing, I’m also exploring how a poem in particular allows me to understand myself and my connections to the world. Each poem is about what that poem that I am thinking in is like. 

So, my poems are autobiographical, in my own way. The “I” is always a version of me. They are also always self-referential, about who the poem is. 

How the life connects to the poem constitutes a main interest for me. I teach life writing at KPU. I teach poems in this course, and I teach them the same way as I do in other courses. I want to see the sets of relationships a poem works through, using what I know about a life or the world, but not in such a way that I can only see what I already know.

RT: Connected to this, in With the Witnesses you write "Meeting a poem halfway means reading it as a poem (responding to its imaginative strategies) rather than as something else (a straightforward historical document)." Similarly, you critique readers who "position a poem as direct evidence of a trauma it holds and passes on," and encourage them to read "poem as poem rather than indexical sign of suffering." This problem is particularly prevalent in some English classrooms, where a poem's secret information must be unlocked by solving the puzzle of a poem. As an English professor, I'm curious how you get around this problem in your own classroom. How can you get students to think of a poem as a poem and not a vacuum-sealed set of facts?

DT: I follow what the poem does and show students how to do the same. I teach a first-year writing course that teaches students about how to communicate, and I think this helps me teach poems in my literature courses: understanding conventions—knowable moves that carry expectations—is helpful with poems to remind us that someone wrote them to communicate something, and wrote them as poems out of an interest in that particular set of available conventions.

RT: In considering "affective and attentive reading methods" for the poetry of others, I assume you must also think about how you'd like readers to approach your own poetry. Do you have an ideal way in which you'd like someone to read your poems? 

DT: Outside of poetry, I worry a lot about misunderstandings and about misrepresenting myself. But communicating with poetry circumvents those worries. There’s always more meaning in art than any one person can arrive at, so I have no impulse for readers that would get in their minds exactly what I have in mine. 

In general, I hope that readers will think with poems instead of using them to achieve or prove a predetermined result for themselves, but that’s more a sentiment about curiosity, openness, and learning than it is about poetry specifically. 

RT: Before we close, I’d like to talk about a favourite poem of mine from Derelict Bicycles,  "A Weird Part of Whatever." There are so many poems out there written about COVID-19, but few I enjoy. This is one I keep thinking about, especially that closing line, "A curtain has been pulled, but I can’t see the curtain." And its mode of composition is as interesting as the content! 

Could you talk a little about how you wrote this poem? Are there ways in which your approach to this poem was different from others in the book? Ways in which it was the same?

DT: It makes me happy for this poem to be most noticed—it’s so in line with my delight in a kind of uncooperativeness with the expected. Since I noted down verbatim what my grandma said to me on the phone about her experience of the pandemic in her retirement home, all I did was choose and order sentences and call it a poem.

And this poem is meaningful to me since it shares my grandma’s thoughts and records some of our conversation. Since it is consistent with the whole collection—in tone, mood, ideas, diction—it makes me think that I’ve inherited ways of thinking from my grandma. I want this poem to keep prompting me when I write poetry, but especially as I do academic writing, through which the inheritances I have are more difficult for me to access.

So my approach to this poem was unlike my usual approach except in a more foundational way: I heard the poem in a spontaneous grappling with living out a situation, the same as I hear the poem in my own thoughts sometimes. 

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Dale Tracy is the author of the chapbooks The Mystery of Ornament (above/ground press, 2020) and Celebration Machine (Proper Tales Press, 2018), the chappoem What It Satisfies (Puddles of Sky Press, 2016), and the monograph With the Witnesses: Poetry, Compassion, and Claimed Experience (McGill-Queen’s, 2017). Her poetry has appeared in filling Station, Touch the Donkey, and The Goose: A Journal of Arts, Environment, and Culture in Canada, among others. She is a faculty member in the English Department at Kwantlen Polytechnic University and lives on unceded Coast Salish territory. Derelict Bicycles is her first full-length poetry collection.

The Poem's Hum: An Interview with Roger Farr

The following interview is part two of a seven-part series of conversations with BC poets which I released between January and April 2023. All seven interviews were originally posted at ReadLocalBC.ca. This was the fourth year of my collaboration with Read Local BC (you can read all my Read Local BC interviews in one place here).

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Ballad of the Pea and the Shell

Le Testament (67-69)

Once deceived, I came to see how one

object may be exchanged for another –

a gong goozler for a digit

an email for a bum itch

a Kriegspiel for a sailor

a foot long for a banana stick

– & how cheats use slights & devices

to swap verse & vice versa –

a shanker for a charnel house

a deck of cards for a dolly spot

a tavern for a Tappecoue

a sticky bag for a skeleton

– which is how Love deceives & leaves

us banging on the Prison House door.

Reprinted with permission from 

After Villon

(New Star Books, 2022)

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Rob Taylor: François Villon was, to say the least, a character. A criminal and cheat, both his poems and life story are filled with misdirection, subterfuge and gaps. In the acknowledgments to After Villon, you write that you began translating Villon shortly after first encountering his work in 2009. What was it about Villon that drew you in so quickly and so fully?

Roger Farr: It was precisely those things you mention. That and the fact that Villon, a medieval poet, was the first to erase the separation between his art and his life, which arguably makes him the first avant-garde writer. But for some time before I read Villon, I had been interested in political and aesthetic discussions about visibility, readability, and clandestinity, topics I wrote about for anarchist publications. When I was working on a piece for Fifth Estate about the work of the Situationist Alice Becker-Ho, who introduced me to Villon, I learned about his poetic use of coded language, deceit, and slang, and I became deeply intrigued. 

RT: Villon’s influence on After Villon is obvious, but as I read your book I started to think of the title as being composed of two parts, with the "After" actually pointing to Jack Spicer, whose After Lorca—with its loose translations and "correspondences" from Spicer to Lorca—served as a template of sorts for your book. Did you ever feel tension in trying to honour all three "contributors" (Villon, Spicer, you) in one book? If so, how did you manage that?

RF: As soon as I started to see my accumulating translations as a book, I knew I would use After Lorca as a template. I have always found Spicer’s poetics difficult to comprehend, which is no doubt part of my attraction to his work. But I thought the correspondences he writes to Lorca were a brilliant way to elaborate a poetics of translation without resorting to overly expository prose. So he was mostly a formal influence, at the level of the book. Ultimately, my eyes and ears were always attuned to Villon.

RT: In your first “correspondence” with Villon, you note that you "cheat" in your translations, in part in honour of Villon's own manipulations of the truth. One such "cheat" involves frequently zipping Villon from the French middle ages to 21st century coastal British Columbia (one poem opens with biographical details of Villon's life and closes with mentions of "homeslices," "toonies," and Abbostford's Matsqui prison). 

The book opens with an epigraph from After Lorca, "Objects, words must be led across time not preserved against it," which seems to be speaking, at least in part, to this maneuvering. Could you talk about the Spicer quote and your choice to lead Villon “across time”? 

RF: Spicer’s idea of words as objects points to the materiality of language. When I was translating Villon, I experienced this materiality as a profound opacity and “thickness.” Villon was, of course, writing in Middle French, which, like Middle English, I have no grasp of whatsoever. To make matters worse, it’s not always clear when he is using a coded language designed specifically to shut out police and other “hostile informants.” For example, every word attached to the concept of “marriage” potentially refers to being executed: a “bridegroom” is someone who is going to be hanged (this particular example resonated for me on a number of levels). So when I was “leading the words across time,” I was in many cases trying to translate the opacity, rather than the denotative or even connotative meanings of words as such. An indirect or possible reference to prison, then, might turn up in my poem as “Matsqui.” Instead of trying to “preserve” a literal meaning, I would activate a more recognizable “object”.

RT: Your book's jacket copy notes that your translation "refuses the heteronormative assumptions all too often applied to the "gaps" in meaning of the original texts." Would you consider this another of your "cheats," or a correction of an inaccurate record? Was it something you planned on doing from the beginning of the project, or did it happen more gradually as you worked through the poems line by line? 

RF: I would say “correction of an inaccurate record,” and yes, something that happened gradually. The more deeply I read Le Testament, the more the ambiguities around Villon’s sexuality stared back at me. This was undoubtedly linked to my own life and experiences during the period I was working on the book.

But there is also some textual evidence that Villon was queer, or at least “not straight.” Villon’s insinuations that certain police were soliciting young male sex workers, along with his intimate knowledge of where to find them, seemed worth pausing on. There is also what has been called his “trans ventriloquism,” which refers to the manner in which he suddenly speaks as a woman. In one of his most famous Ballads, which I translate—and am quite proud of—he writes from the perspective of an aging female sex worker recalling a bad trick. 

This fluidity in his work was emphasized by Thierry Martin, who published a remarkable and controversial translation of Villon from Middle to Modern French, called Ballades en Argot Homosexuel (“Ballads in Homosexual Slang”). Martin was working with the three-part “queer code” identified by linguist Pierre Guiraud, which holds that every line in the Ballads in Jargon can be read three ways at once: as a warning not to get caught cheating at cards, as a warning not to get busted by the authorities, and as a warning not be outed as queer. I found this fascinating, and it strongly influenced how I read the poems.

RT: How did your choice embrace the fluidity in his work change the way you thought about Villon's poetry?

RF: There was a distinct shift in my “orientation,” in terms of both language and identity. As Foucault has taught us, the categories of “heterosexual” and “homosexual” didn’t exist in the Middle Ages. Villon’s sexuality was therefore a cipher to me, as opaque as his language. In fact, the entire notion of orientation—especially the idea of a stable identity induced from a sexual inclination defined by the gender of one’s partner(s)—seemed increasingly odd, in literature and in everyday life. Eventually I came to experience poetry and desire on a more somatic level, as forces that work to unbind (to use a term from Freud) identity, language, and “orientation.”

RT: How did that shift in orientation shift the translations themselves?

RF: While I didn’t follow Guiraud’s and Martin’s approach exactly, my project shared their desire to “make Villon queer again,” if I can put it that way. To accomplish this, I was guided by Marc Démont’s thesis, in his essay “Three Modes of Translating Queer Literary Texts,” that queer translation “focuses on acknowledging [the original’s] disruptive force and re-creating it in the target language.” This is accomplished by critiquing existing translations, and then developing new linguistic techniques designed “to re-create in the target language the queerness of a text.” The queer translation subverts gender stability and maintains the source text’s “thickness” and opacity, rather than domesticating or normalizing it. That’s what I was after.

RT: Translating poetry from another language is challenging enough, but Villon's work adds the aforementioned challenges of his various “opacities,” most notably his use of thieves' jargon and words of his own devising. Did you find that complicated your work as translator, or did it in some way liberate you, knowing that an "accurate" translation was likely impossible?

RF: Yes and yes! At times I imagined what I was doing as a kind of psychoanalysis—deciphering exquisitely complicated “defense mechanisms” designed to throw me off the case. But the realization that I would never “get it right” was very liberating. I let go of any desire to “master” poetic language a long time ago, and instead learned to enjoy the free play and signification of words. It’s something I notice a lot of my writing students struggle with. For me, difficulty and complexity are an invitation into collaboration and creative problem solving. As a writer I thrive there.

RT: Whenever I read a book in translation, I want to place it beside other translations of the same text to get a sense of this particular translator's style. This was perhaps doubly true of Villon, as the “creative problem solving” involved could take various translators in very different directions.

You've generously provided readers with just such a comparison: in "Compario" you present nine translations of a Villon quatrain (including a "Dictation" version, which delightfully translates "Dont maintz marchans furent attains" as "Don't mate Marshawn's friend okay"). Why was it important to you to include that sampling from other translators? 

RF: In “Compario” I wanted to make my methodology visible. This always involved flipping between the original, several dictionaries, and multiple translations into both English and Modern French. When I was really stumped and felt like I was going to fold, I would use dictation software to kind of “blast” something new out of the source text, and then work with that. I refer to this as “bluffing.” It was a lot of fun. I am aware this would be regarded as complete and utter blasphemy for many translators, but I agree with Nathan Brown, who in his introduction to his masterful new translation of Baudelaire’s Fleur de Mal, suggests that a translator may take creative liberties when confronted with impossibility. Granted, I take more than a few such liberties, which is an index to the degrees of impossibility I encountered. In some cases, I had no choice but to insert poems Villon hadn’t actually written. Lorca accused Spicer of this, too.

RT: Speaking of Spicer, in one of his letters to Lorca he writes that "The perfect poem has an infinitely small vocabulary." What would you say to that? 

RF: That’s one of those provocatively cryptic utterances Spicer is so good at. I think he is referring to the poetics of les mots justes, which requires precision and economy in language, plain speech, and a generally minimalist formal aesthetic. I am slanted more towards poetic maximalism these days – excess, clutter, chaos, colour, noise, etc. 

RT: What do you think Villon would have said to Spicer? 

RF: Interesting. I’m not sure Villon’s work is compatible with the idea of the “infinitely small.” He wrote in popular forms and was very much a poet of the streets and the taverns, albeit a highly educated one. His language is full of excess: carnivalesque, ironic, idiomatic, mocking, oscillating between high and low genre, etc. It was also, for tactical reasons, lexically dense and expansive. 

RT: Let’s add a couple more poets into the discussion: in an essay on his loose translations of Rilke, Don Paterson said, “If we are not prepared to make a choice between honouring the word or the spirit, we are likely to come away with nothing.” 

RF: I’m not sure I understand what is meant by “spirit” in Paterson’s statement. Is he referring to the aporia between signifier/sound and signified/sense, perhaps? 

RT: Yes, I think so. At the level of the word, and also the poem—the spirit of the whole piece.

RF: It’s a constant question for a translator. In my case, I was confronted with signs (sounds) that had no “sense” or “spirit” or “signification”; or if they did, they were literally being deployed as screens to lead interpreters (translators!) away from their referents.

RT: When I offered the Paterson quote to Steven Heighton, who called his own translations "versions," he replied in a way that suggested a choice between word and spirit might be impossible:

“In poetry there’s no Cartesian separation of mind and body or content and form... The poem is its music. Poetry is a form of song in which the words are obliged to create their own rhythmic and musical accompaniment. So, as a translator, you have to try to approximate the poem’s rhythms and, if I can put it this way, melodies. And, if the original is rhymed, well, that’s part of its essence and you need to try to reenact it somehow in your translation.”

I felt in reading your translations, and your correspondences about them to Villon, that you might both agree and disagree with both Heighton and Paterson…

RF: Yes. I might disagree with Heighton’s idea of rhyme as an “essence.” I think demands of syntax and tone, rhetorical and literary devices, etc. can and should sometimes trump the element of rhyme. We’ve all read translations where fidelity to rhyme leads to some pretty clunky language. But I like what he says about trying to “reenact” it, which perhaps points to some other possibility for how we conceive of rhyme. For me, rhyme is simply the patterns of repetition that hold a poem together; they establish its rhythm. This includes repeated vowel/consonant combinations like “home” and “tome,” of course, but also repeated syntactical constructions: for example, ending each stanza with a question, or uttering a warning every few lines. These are also repeated elements and should “count” as rhyme. 

In After Villon, I sometimes tried to keep conventional rhyme operating (both end-stopped and internal), and in some places I maintain a “fidelity” to the original poems (despite the consistent mocking of marriage and monogamy). But I was generally more interested in translating things like addressivity, the conspiratorial tone, the pleading for mercy, the warnings, etc. Even where sound and sense are separated, those rhetorical features and the poem’s overall “hum” remain intact. At least that is my hope.

RT: I love that idea of a poem’s “hum.” I think Heighton and Paterson would like it, too.

In After Lorca, Spicer writes "Loneliness is necessary for pure poetry," and it strikes me that exile is a part of both Villon's story (banished from Paris in 1462) and your own, far more voluntary, "exile" from Vancouver to Gabriola Island. 

Of the bar-hopping social life common to both Spicer and Villon, you write "I am far away from that now & have been for many years." Did you sense a parallel between the change in Villon's life and your own? 

RF: I was part of a rigorous literary bar scene in Vancouver for some time. And I’m not entirely sure if my departing flight from the city in 2004 was with Exile or Banishment. As with Villon’s exit from Paris, I am certain a few people were relieved to see me go. The feeling is mutual. There are some remarkably petty people in the writing scene I once belonged to. I address them in a few places in the book. They seem to find their agency in gossip and rumour. They can be hard to spot, because they only emerge from their holes when there is a little piece of cheese waiting for them. But they know who they are.

RT: Ha! While we know your post-banishment fate, no one knows what happened to Villon—he simply disappeared from history. Were you in some way translating Villon from a place beyond his known history; from that next, quieter, space his life may have entered had he lived long enough?

RF: Rabelais suggests, in an obscure passage in Gargantua and Pantagruel, that a few years after his banishment, Villon emerged in a theatre troupe in a remote village, and lived out his life there quietly and happily. I think that is unlikely, given Villon’s temperament and criminal associations and Rabelais’ tendency to satire and invention. I suspect Villon met his end on the gibbet, in a dungeon, or in a brawl. I hope my fate is more along the lines of what Rabelais imagined.

RT: Yes, sign up for that theatre troupe, already! On the subject of endings, near the close of the book you write of being done with Villon ("For me you are an ancient city bombed..."). This mirror's Spicer's eventual shrugging off of Lorca. Did you really feel done with him? And did that tiring of him go deeper than normal end-of-book fatigue? 

RF: Mostly that was in keeping with the trajectory of Spicer’s “break up” with Lorca. When the book finally went into production, though, I carefully removed all the translations and dictionaries and critical studies from my desk and put them on a shelf in a bookcase in my bedroom, then replaced them with the books I will be using for my next writing project (a collection of essays and translations on anarchism and sexuality). I worked on my slim book of Villon translations on and off for ten years, so I was glad to move on to something else. That said, Villon haunts everything I write now, and remains my poetic Master.

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Roger Farr is the author of five books of poetry: Surplus (2006), Means (2012), IKMQ (2012), a finalist for the BC Book Prize in Poetry in 2013, I Am a City Still But Soon I Shan't Be (2019), and most recently, After Villon (2002). The Amorous Comrade, a collection of essays on anarchism and sexual politics, is forthcoming in 2024.

Listening For My Breath: An Interview with Délani Valin

The following interview is part one of a seven-part series of conversations with BC poets which I released between January and April 2023. All seven interviews were originally posted at ReadLocalBC.ca. This was the fourth year of my collaboration with Read Local BC (you can read all my Read Local BC interviews in one place here).

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Mrs. Clean

Yes, he cooks! He cleans!

He writes grocery lists!

But oh, how low

the bar is set.

I should be lucky,

after all most men

aren’t used

to scrubbing a toilet.

My husband’s muscles

bulge against the cotton

of his skin-tight bleached

t-shirt. I’m told he’s ideal

in every way. He won’t touch me

without wearing his yellow rubber

gloves. Yet he plucks hairballs

with bare hands from the neighbour’s

drain. I’ll spike his club soda

with lemon and Clorox. Watch

his bald ass Magic Erase that.

Reprinted with permission from 

Shapeshifters

(Nightwood Editions, 2022)

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Rob Taylor: The first third of Shapeshifters is devoted to persona poems, such as “Mrs. Clean.” It’s not until page 32 that we encounter a speaker who resembles some approximation of “Délani Valin.” In your acknowledgments, you thank poet Marilyn Bowering for “suggest[ing], during a time of deep struggle, that I play with different personas as a way to access different experiences.” How did persona poems help you better access the experiences you were struggling with?

Délani Valin: When I came to my writing instructor, Marilyn Bowering, I was in my early twenties and had been writing since I was a child. My problem was that over time, I felt my poetry had become one-dimensional. I was writing the same poem over and over, if I could write at all. In retrospect, I see that I had cornered myself into the narrow identity of Sad Person. I think this was protective: a Sad Person isn’t caught off guard by suffering—she suffers preemptively by numbing out all the time. Yet seeing this numbness reflected back to me again and again in my work didn’t provide me catharsis. I felt alienated from my work and from my body, like I was existing at arm’s length from my own life.

Marilyn assured me that my creativity hadn’t dried up, but that perhaps I needed another point of entry. She suggested writing from different perspectives and personas to avoid the trap of circling around the same poem (and pain) over and over. She gifted me Carol Ann Duffy’s The World’s Wife, which was really helpful. Duffy is so witty and I was enamored with the vibrancy in her work.

RT: Why did you choose to focus on corporate mascots?

DV: I grew up with corporate mascots invading everywhere from my school to my pantry and living room. They’re ubiquitous, and many a marketer has hijacked humanity’s gift for stories and fascination with archetypal characters in order to sell yet another variety of cereal. These corporate archetypes are Heroes and Maidens and Mothers. Yet, they’re devoid of agency. My experiment with them was an empathetic effort to imagine their inner lives distinct from the marketers who breathed them into being. But of course, I only substituted my own breath.

Marilyn’s advice about exploring topics through personas brought me closer to myself by opening up a wider breadth of possible expression. After trying on a multitude of masks, I was able to glimpse the grounded wearer at the centre of them all.

RT: In a sense, you pass that journey on to your readers: we access the biographical details of the “grounded wearer at the centre” by traveling first through the persona poems. Was it always important for you to put the persona poems at the beginning? What effect do you hope for that to have on your readers?

DV: This was an area in which Silas White and Emma Skagen at Nightwood Editions were indispensable. When I put together the manuscript, I was unsure about its shape. I thought about putting all of the poems in the exact order I wrote them so that maybe some progression would unfold, but they rattled against each other. I think that it was a case of me being too close to the material to pull back and make sense of it. Once I read it in the order Silas and Emma suggested, it clicked. The shape of the book mirrors the process I had undergone to access my own experiences. It’s like a map.

RT: The poem “Telogen Effluvium” sits, quite literally, at the centre of your book. Named after a hair-loss condition that can sometimes be triggered by psychological or emotional stress, the poem pushes close to discussing a traumatic event, but stops short. On exactly page 48 of a 96 page book, you write, “We just need to know the whole story. Ok, here it is,” but then the next section of the poem is a recipe for a hair mask, and we never fully circle back (though a poem later in the book fills in some details). The result gives a well-like shape to the book: poems stacked carefully around the edges of a dark centre.

I’m always interested in poems where the author is actively wrestling with something on the page (I think of Elizabeth Bishop’s “Write it!” in “One Art“). On the one hand these moments feel emotionally raw and honest, and on the other of course there is always some level of artifice: the poem, even if written in a moment of intensity, was edited and prepared for publication slowly over many months. Could you talk about “Telogen Effluvium,” both how it came to you and how you positioned it within the book?

DV: I wrote “Telogen Effluvium” six months after a traumatic event involving a sexual assault while I was visiting Cotonou, Benin in 2018. What’s interesting is that the other poem that deals more directly with the assault, “Magic Lessons,” was actually written while the event was unfolding and in the immediate aftermath.

They both deal with the circumstances differently. With “Magic Lessons,” my intention had been to write an extended letter to my partner in the form of a travelogue. (As an aside, Benin is an incredible country to visit.) But hell broke loose for me while I was there, and my poem necessarily took a turn.

When I got back from Benin, I was in a bit of a trance and related my story to others many times. I felt this urgency to be seen, to be witnessed. I wanted confirmation that I was still alive and still me. But this also led to me sharing more than was safe for me to do in some cases. Not everyone believed me about what happened, and nor did everyone have the space for my difficult story.

Therefore, when I wrote “Telogen Effluvium,” I was curious about how I could share my story while still protecting myself. I had already absorbed most of the truth of my situation, so I wanted to create a controlled experience where I could anticipate judgement, deflect, and pull back. If I circled around the truth enough, would it come through? Would it be more palatable?

RT: That’s so interesting, that you wrote more directly about the assault initially, but then circled back to a more cautious approach in “Telogen Effluvium.” And then made the choice to present them in the opposite order in the book, like something is being drawn out from you, when really you were reeling it back in. Could you talk a little about the form of “Magic Lessons,” with its six sections, each containing seven tercets, and its many repetitions?

DV: Because I was writing without the benefit of any temporal distance, I knew it was important that I ground the poem in form so that it wouldn’t spiral into a journal entry. The repeating lines served as an anchor, and finding some kind of “lesson” for each section of the poem was actually a helpful tool for meaning-making when the ground beneath me was crumbling at the time of the writing.

RT: It’s fascinating how form can drive meaning-making, pushing you to new and necessary places. “Magic Lessons” isn’t alone in doing this: poems in Shapeshifters are striking in their formal rigour. In addition to more traditional forms, such as glosas, haibun, prose poems, and set stanzaic forms, the book includes forms of your own invention.

One poem, “The Geologist,” is a formal tour de force: it features italicized lines which both can be read as part of the rest of the poem and as its own standalone poem. And if you pluck out the italicized lines, the remaining poem still works! I’ve never read anything quite like it. Could you talk about your interest in form? Does it function for you in some way like the persona poems, a path to access experiences that otherwise prove elusive?

DV: I think that’s right—form serves a similar function to the persona poems, in that forms give me a framework that I can explore and subvert. It also helps the writing stay playful for me. If I’m exploring a difficult personal topic, the form becomes a sort of puzzle. I know I have to hit certain lines or conclude a stanza in a specific way, so in a sense there is a right answer to my “poetry riddle.” It creates a bit of safe distance for me while making sure the writing process is fun.

I also do this in an attempt to care for the reader. It’s a deeply humbling experience when a reader says they connect with what I’ve written. But if what they’re relating to is a difficult experience or emotion, I want to do my best not to leave us both in that space. Pain is inevitable in life, but as someone who has complex trauma or Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (C-PTSD), I feel like it’s my responsibility to be mindful about transferring my particular trauma onto anyone else.

Some of the ways I try to do this are through form, narrative, strategic avoidance, being disciplined about which details I share, and, in some poems, through directly naming this intention. It’s an aspect of my writing that I want to keep developing.

RT: What a generous way to consider your readers, and an interesting way to think about form. One formal element you play with a lot, both in “Magic Lessons” and elsewhere, is long lines—so long they spill over to a second line when squeezed onto the printed page. In this they are reminiscent of poets such as Walt Whitman, Jorie Graham, and C. K. Williams. What inspired you to take on the writing of such long lines? How did long lines affect your sense of what you could say in your poems?

DV: I think the long lines come up for a few reasons. Sometimes it’s to try to capture the way I would tell a story orally—I’m listening for my breaths as I’m writing. Another reason is to give myself space. In conversation with others, it’s often when we stay on one subject just a beat too long that a surprising twist happens. Perhaps we’re discussing something political on a fairly surface level and someone starts to say, “Well, anyway…” but if we stay on the subject just a touch longer, we might discover that they were pivoting because things were actually getting real. It happens to me all the time in conversation, and I try to give a little space for these sorts of insights when I write.

In other places, such as “Magic Lessons,” the long lines were an attempt to instill a frantic undercurrent to the poem—though the form is tight, it was a stressful time, so something should reflect that! Beyond that, because the poem deals with magic, the lines are written as a sort of incantation or spell. Ultimately, it’s a spell of self-protection and survival.

RT: The closing poem in Shapeshifters is a similar type of spell. In it, you have Cinderella write in her diary, “I killed / my first stepmom but you all // have me clap with songbirds / and cry.” To what extent do you see Shapeshifters as a response to the popular narratives around women’s trauma? In what ways were you trying to tell that story differently here?

DV: The thing about Cinderella is that in some versions of the archetypal story, she does kill her stepmother or even her mother. In others, she flees from advances from her father. Cinderella is afforded more agency in these tales than in most modern retellings.

In the same way that I was sick of my repeating Sad Person poems, I think I was tired of a lifetime of hearing sanitized frail damsel stories. I grew up with Disney and the Bible as a kid, and then I came of age during a time when the damsel was replaced by a stoic “tough chick” trope—a plucky girl who could punch her way through any foe. Essentially, both of these tropes can be summed up as Victims or Survivors. But in either case, these identities comprise ways in which we are totally defined by what happened to us. I don’t think either label suits me. I don’t see myself as a victim or as a survivor. A traumatic event that happened to me is just a thread in a much larger tapestry. I’m not that thread, and nor am I the tapestry. I’m the weaver. I think I wanted to speak to different possibilities.

RT: Beautifully put. Another major part of your “tapestry” is your Métis identity. In “No Buffalos,” you write about your mother, who only at age 40 rediscovered your family’s ancestry (her great-uncle Donald Ross was a member of Louis Riel’s Exovedate and was killed on the final day of fighting at Batoche). You note that despite her lineage and commitment to teaching Métis culture and history, she was still questioned for not having “lived Métis experience.” “Who counts and who decides?” you ask near the end of the poem, “We all have stories, we’re all legitimate.” Can you talk a little about your journey to that last statement?

DV: Being Métis is wonderful. Because of the work my mom does, I’ve been able to embody this truth earlier in life than she had a chance to. She got me involved in jigging when I was a child, and because she became a cultural presenter, I grew up with access to a lot of artifacts and stories.

Still, I have struggled with feelings of displacement. My grandmother was born in Meadow Lake, Saskatchewan, but my mom was born in Hay River, Northwest Territories. My parents met in Edmonton and then moved to my dad’s birthplace, Québec City, which is where I was born. We moved to B.C. when I was nine. There’s been a pervasive feeling of rootlessness threaded through my life, and part of that had contributed to a sense that perhaps I didn’t belong anywhere or to anyone. My family is scattered, and I will always be a guest on Snuneymuxw territory, where I currently reside.

I’ve long had the sense that being Métis isn’t a checkbox we tick off, nor does it end with the knowledge of Métis ancestry. Being Métis is an ongoing process: a way of seeing, being, knowing and connecting. Being in relation with other Métis people helped me see this, and made me realize the validity of my own experience. It echoed the experiences of others, and was in some places distinct.

When I started to live that from my heart, I stopped wondering whether I was Métis “enough.” I work with what I have, I create and maintain relationships wherever I can, and I endeavour to know more, but not because I’m striving to be anyone’s ideal Métis—whatever that is—but because my heart is calling out for it.

RT: While you were rooting yourself in your family’s Métis heritage, did a similar process play out for you in literature? While reading Shapeshifters, two other Métis poets kept coming to mind: in your mix of formal considerations and Métis history, your poems reminded me of Marilyn Dumont‘s work (especially poems like her sestina “Fiddle Bids Us”), and in your humour and efforts to reconnect to a broken chain of ancestry, they reminded me of Molly Cross-Blanchard‘s poems, such as “First-Time Smudge.”

Those are quite likely just my readerly associations, of course, and you have entirely different ones! “I am also in the broth,” you write in one poem about Métis belonging. Could you talk about the literary broth you see yourself a part of?

DV: Those are great picks. While writing “No Buffalos,” I still mired in self-doubt and was constantly afraid to offend or to get things wrong. I worried that I had no right to speak on any form of Métis experiences, even though I was exploring my own stories. It helped immeasurably to read Indigenous writers like Marilyn Dumont, Louise Bernice Halfe – Skydancer, Daniel David Moses, Gregory Scofield and Lee Maracle for questions of perspective, form, and language.

Writers like Molly Cross-Blanchard, Jónína Kirton, Selina Boan, Jordan Abel and Joshua Whitehead have helped orient me whenever I’ve felt isolated in my explorations. I’m grateful to be able to read so many funny, brilliant, generous, and surprising Indigenous writers. It’s a great time to be reading and writing.

RT: Keeping with Dumont for a minute, like you she had the experience of discovering in her youth that she was related to a prominent Métis leader (in her case, Gabriel Dumont). She waited until her fourth book, The Pemmican Eaters, published twenty years after her debut, to write in detail about that connection. Of this delay, she wrote that her journey to understanding her family’s past “was a lengthy process of historical enquiry and gradual acceptance,” and that perhaps “loyalty to my mother was part of the reason for not writing about Gabriel Dumont before now.” To what extent does Dumont’s slow journey through divided loyalties resonate with your own experience?

DV: I actually see this articulation as a kind of foreshadowing for myself. There are bits and pieces of my personal experience and of my family’s histories (on both sides) that I haven’t explored. I feel the histories still unfolding within me in my day-to-day life, and I’m trusting their timing to float up and be written. I think stories have a say in when they want to be told.

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Délani Valin is neurodivergent and Métis with Nehiyaw, Saulteaux, French-Canadian, and Czech ancestry. She studies for her master’s in professional communications at Royal Roads University, and has a Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing from Vancouver Island University. Her poetry has been awarded The Malahat Review’s Long Poem Prize and subTerrain’s Lush Triumphant Award. She is on the editorial board of Room and The Malahat Review, and lives on traditional and unceded Snuneymuxw territory (Nanaimo, BC).

everyone who has ever used those words is there in the language

When I teach, I often tell my students, "The writing knows more than we do." What I mean is that language is a vast repository, a great archive, a word hoard, a storehouse of accumulated knowledge and experience. Everyone who has ever used those words is there in the language. Or is pointedly, not there. Language can be a Stolperstein, a stumble stone. A marker which remembers, which reminds, which draws your attention to time, place, history, culture, to the world. Just by virtue of being a speaker of the language, you have access to this knowledge. You have access to something much larger, much deeper than just yourself. You're a tree connected to the rest of the forest by its roots. Or maybe you're a leaf on a tree, connected to a trunk, connected to a system of roots, which connect you to the entire forest. And as the song goes, the green grass grows all around and around, the green grass all around. But you can see the forest because you're a tree. You're an antennae upside down in the ground.

- Gary Barwin, from his essay "Writing as Rhizome: Connecting Poetry and Fiction with Everything" in the Summer 2023 issue of The New Quarterly.