Tag Archives: poetry

Mormon wives “speak” through poems

Poet Marita Dachsel is the author of the new collection Glossolalia, and of the previous collection All Things Said & Done. Glossolalia is a re-imagining of the lives and voices of the 34 wives of Mormon founder Joseph Smith. Julian Gunn interviewed Daschel at the end of April for the Coastal Spectator. See the poet’s blog at maritadachsel.blogspot.ca.

Glossolalia is a long-term project. What was its genesis?

I’ve always been interested in fringe religions, and in 2006 the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints in Bountiful was in the news again. BC has long been home to strange sects and cults, and for the most part they are left alone. I thought that if the FLDS would just give up polygamy, then they could live in peace. I wondered why they practised it, and soon learned that it was a vital part of their faith that had been introduced by Joseph Smith back in the 1840s.

Did you always see Glossolalia as a book about all of Smith’s wives? (Or some version of all, since you mention that the exact count is unknown.)

I could understand why modern women born into Mormon Fundamentalism would choose polygamy—it’s their culture, it’s all they know—but I wondered about those women who agreed, who started it all. I read biographies on Joseph’s wives and began to write poems inspired by their lives. It was perfect timing, as I had finished my first collection, All Things Said & Done, and wasn’t sure what I’d do next with my poetry. I soon knew that I wanted to a whole book on them. At the time, I had no idea it would take six years, but I quickly fell into the rabbit hole of research and obsession.

Often, you have only one poem with which to evoke some aspect of each woman. How did you know what would do justice to each one?

Some were definitely easier [to capture] than others. Some came immediately. I’d “hear” their voice in my head and I knew what they’d disclose. Others took a long time of trial and error—the voice, the form, the story all had to click. “Emma Hale Smith,” for example, was the very first poem I wrote for this series, but it wasn’t right. It was really important to me to do her justice and consequently, it took six years of writing her to finally get her poem work the way I wanted it to.

Despite all the research that I did on the women and early Mormonism, not all the poems are based on biography. In the early years of the project, I was a little too tied to the truth, but learned to let that go. I’m not a historian; I’m a poet. My main goal was to write engaging poetry. Sometimes that meant skimming from the women’s lives; sometimes it meant making things up completely.

You use many different formal techniques in the collection. Was there a process by which you decided what techniques you would use, or was it done by intuition and experimentation?

My process was pretty loose. I’d start by reading about the woman, noting ideas or phrases as I went. I’d write a rough draft or two to see if I could get her voice right. If could, great! Then I’d work on the content and form—one usually informing the other. If I couldn’t get her voice right, then I’d either read some more about her, or move on to another wife. Repeat as necessary.

Like “Emma,” “Lucy Walker” is another [voice] that took a lot of trial and error. A few wives had told their own stories during their lives and I was particularly struck with hers—so full of heartache, confusion, and manipulation. I tried to capture it, but the poem always fell flat. Finally, I realized that I didn’t have to do what she already had done, that I could use her words. I played with her text a lot, but nothing was satisfying. Then I came across Jen Bervin’s amazing Nets and it was like a revelation to me. (She ‘erased’ many of Shakespeare’s sonnets into beautifully spare poems.) What I loved about her take on erasure was that we could still see the original poems, just in lighter text. For Lucy, I wanted her real story to still be available to the reader, but I liked the idea of it being deliberately crossed out, as if she were editing her own story. The private truth versus the public record.

How do you find blogging as a medium, as compared to poetry and conventional essays?

I really enjoy reading other people’s blogs, but I’m a terrible blogger. I don’t make the time to do it properly, so lately my blog has become not much more than a place for shameless self-promotion. A few years ago, I did an interview series with writing mothers that I really enjoyed and it still brings the most readers to the blog. I think that when I find time, I’ll revisit that form—return to interviews and discussions. When done well, blogging is an immediate conversation. It’s topical, yet focused. It creates community. I think I write too slowly and have too many interruptions to do the form justice right now, but I am so thankful that others do.

Afghanistan service captured in poems

Kanina Dawson was a master corporal in the Canadian military when she spent 10 months, 2005 through 2006,  serving  in Afghanistan. Her first book of poetry, Masham Means Evening, published by Coteau Books in Regina, Saskatchewan, explores the vivid images and stark experiences of that time. Dawson entered the armed forces right out of high school, she says, because she “wanted to do something that counted.” Now 37, living in Ottawa with her family, Dawson runs her own small business, The Blue-Eyed Bunny, which distributes environmentally sound pet supplies. Forever affected by her experiences in Kabul and Kandahar, Dawson recently linked her business with a foundation that helps women in Pakistan, www.acidsurvivorspakistan.org, to support themselves by making and selling scarves and blankets. “It’s a small thing,” says Dawson, “but the women are paid per scarf, and it’s their livelihood.” Dawson spoke recently with Lynne Van Luven about her writing and her life post-Afghanistan.

Kanina, why did you decide to use poetry, not prose, to explore your deployment with Canada’s military in  Afghanistan?

I think largely because the time in which those moments occurred was so very short, sometimes a matter of minutes. I viewed those experiences as heartbeat moments that, while connected to each other, existed for a split second in isolation. For me that doesn’t translate into prose. I didn’t want those moments getting lost in lost in the longer thread of a narrative. I wanted–needed–each of them to stand out on their own. Protected in a sense, from the peripheral noise of a longer story–and yet unprotected in that they stand alone. In fact, that may be an accurate comparison to the way in which conflict is experienced.

Were there poems you could not write, ideas you could not explore, due to issues of national or military security?

Not so much, no. Obviously, there are things we’d all be hesitant to discuss–like the way in which troops might conduct a patrol or what sorts of drills they might do–anything that might negatively affect the outcome of their situation. As we say, “that’s just common dog,” and most soldiers instinctively abide by that code. But for me, those kinds of mechanics were largely irrelevant to what I wanted to convey–what the sky looked like in the minutes after we lost someone. What evening smelled like–or heat–or Kandahar airfield in November. How grief can taste like a weedy-bottomed lake. Those were the more crucial truths for me.

Do you stand out among your military peers as a “scribbler,” or is that quite common amongst members of the armed forces?

Am I allowed to use LOL here? Me as a “scribbler” was something I definitely hid–especially when I first joined the Canadian Forces. Otherwise, yes, I likely would have stood out. I feared it would earmark me as a loner, or perhaps as someone too “artistic” to be a good soldier. The people that know me, know better. Although, yes–I did swallow hard when I told [military friends] it was a book of poetry that was getting published. Scribbling is one thing–soldiers do that in email form all the time–but poetry? In practical, mission-focused circles, that kind of thing tends to generate a lot of preconceived ideas. I think there’s the antiquated notion that war poems need to involve rhyming couplets and heroic verse, neither of which holds any interest for me. Despite the odd, raised eyebrow, I actually find today’s environment in the Forces so much more open to creativity and diversity among its members than it has been in the past. I think Afghanistan generated quite a bit of that–unnecessary rigidity is more likely to fall away in the face of conflict.  And it’s clear from the government’s War Artist program that there is both a need and a place for artistic corporate memory.

You describe your poems as “snapshots” of lives lived in the midst of conflict. Are there specific pictures, such as those in “Disconnected,” and “A Night in Hospital,” that you wish you had never seen?

That’s a hard question to answer. I can tell you I took no enjoyment out of seeing those things. But did it make me a deeper, more focused person? Did it give me a perspective I wouldn’t otherwise have had? Absolutely it did–and that’s not something I would want to undo. But that still doesn’t stop me from wishing the same effect could have been achieved differently. I believe in the value of experience, but when I think of the far more horrible images that so many in this conflict have been left with, I can’t help but want to undo it for all of them. Since I can’t, I prefer not to be ignorant.

Your daughter was five and six when you were in the military, and she’s now 12. How will you share these poems, and your “visuals” with her when the time comes?

We actually kind of joke about that–I’ve dedicated this book to her and yet have laughingly forbidden her to read it until she’s 16. She was quite young when I left for Afghanistan. Consequently, she has sort of grown up with this idea of international conflict and my participation in that. She’s very motivated by issues of social justice and quite knowledgeable in terms of some of the problems facing the world. I use my experiences to feed that interest and to inspire her to do things she might not have thought possible, so I think she will take this [book] in stride.

I’ve let the water out of the dam slowly on this one. I think it’s likely that my language will shock her more than my experiences. Ultimately, as a parent, my job is not to shield her from everything, but to give her a safe place in which to feel.  So when she finally makes herself that cup of tea and sits down to read, I hope that’s what I’ve done. I also wouldn’t be surprised to see a swear jar appear on the kitchen counter . . .

Collaboration results in seamless poetry

Every now and then, a book turns up that is immediately intriguing. Such was the case with the beautifully produced Whisk, published by Pedlar Press. But what/who are the authors, identified jointly as Yoko’s Dogs. It was no big mystery, once Lynne Van Luven took a closer look. The collective consists of Jan Conn, Mary di Michele, Susan Gillis and Jane Munro. They live in different cities, and yet are truly collaborative. The group can explain itself, and its process–and does so below, speaking with one voice. 

I was intrigued to learn about your group of poets called Yoko’s Dogs. Can you tell me its history: how it got started, how long the pack has been together, and what you hope to achieve?

The idea for Yoko’s Dogs came about in 2006 around a small tin table in Montreal when the four of us, living in different places and time zones, decided to explore collaboration in an engagement with new forms to expand our individual practice.

In 2008, we met for a three-day writing party in “Marshland,” Ontario where we composed our first site-specific poem. At this meeting we found our name in one of our early images: “Yoko’s house is dark, her dogs/ tied in front, too cold to bark.”

Following tradition, which we happily and radically break to invent anew, the Doggies’ practice is rigorous, exacting, challenging, and exuberant.

I notice many, many animals make appearances in the poems in Whisk. So does the natural world.  Was that intentional, or do you all just happen to slant that way?

Our focus on animals and the natural world is deliberate and purposeful. Many of our verses are composed while walking outdoors. We want to think and write about the world outside ourselves, the animate world we humans are part of. Other animals sense and know the world differently from us; by observing and interacting with them, we learn about these other ways of knowing. Again and again, we’re reminded that the world carries on without us.

We tend to think of poets as writers terribly invested in personal voice, so I find it really interesting that readers may not know who wrote what poem in the collection.  What did you hope to achieve with this sort of “anonymity”?

We’ve moved towards anonymity in our public work in an effort to accurately represent our process. We sign verses as we compose, mostly so we know where we are in any given sequence. We follow a standard rotation when composing, taking turns with who starts a poem, linking and shifting in various ways as we go. The order doesn’t change, though the kinds of links and shifts we make do. Any one of us might send someone’s verse back to the drawing board if we feel it isn’t working. So even in the earliest stages, composition is collaborative. Removing signatures from our published work, as in Whisk, is a reflection of this process, and of the fact that we work on revisions together. By the time we’re done, no one “owns” any particular verse.

Japanese linked verse is traditionally composed by a group of poets. Some methods of composition put a lot at stake for individual poets within a group: to have the host or master of a cycle choose your verse, well! We didn’t compose that way with Whisk, though we have experimented recently with this kind of selection process as a discipline to sharpen our chops. In the form of kasen composition we’re now practicing, we all offer verses and only one gets chosen. Even this approach leads to collaboration in the revision and shaping; our first kasen “Yellow,” appearing soon in Room, was composed this way but prepared for publication collaboratively. We learn from and inspire one another–it’s work, but it’s also a lot of fun.

And leading from there, each of you is an established poet, with her own career and fans.  What has the response been, when you explain the project that is Whisk?

Nearly everyone with whom we’ve spoken–in person or electronically–about Yoko’s Dogs and Whisk has been interested and sufficiently curious to ask questions. There’s been some skepticism, of course, but even that comes with curiosity.

How difficult was it to agree upon selection for the book, and upon the style of poems?  Did you each take on a style or a certain number of selections?  

Not difficult at all, and no, the entire book is a collaboration, whole cloth. We all worked on all of it.

We work by email and Skype, normally, only meeting in real time and place about once a year, and that’s how we worked with this manuscript. For the book we decided we wouldn’t tamper with the order the verses were written in, we would only decide where to stop and start. Most of the material resolved neatly into four-stanza poems because that’s how we’d composed them, but we realized as we discussed the manuscript that some of the links carried through more than four stanzas to make engaging and resonant longer poems. Agreement on these divisions was much more easily achieved than you might think–the poems sort of divided themselves, not unlike when you dig up large plants to separate them for propagation and find the root divisions are kind of clear. And titles were just plain fun to write.

It’s hard to remember if there were things we chose to leave out; quite likely we didn’t disagree much about that. Generally if one of us has a strong urge one way or another, the others listen and consider. Learning to articulate our experiences with and responses to any given poetic move has been enormously important; so too has listening.

The thing that often happens around the table as we work through our poems stanza by stanza, the discovery we make together when we hit on the right note in an image or for a move, the aha! of a good fit–might be illustrated by this verse that closes a cycle that has travelled through several landscapes and conditions, settling finally in sub-continental India at monsoon season: “so that’s how the cow/ got in the tree!”

 

 

Poems flare with precise intensity

New Theatre
by Susan Steudel
Coach House Books, 95 pages, $17.95

Reviewed by Karen Enns

A short, untitled poem in the first section of Vancouver resident Susan Steudel’s New Theatre seems designed to look like a typewritten, anonymous message. Words are cut and pasted across the page, slightly off-kilter, but the images are clear and the phrases crisply articulate: “a study of channels”, “the coal bird”, “Grace in the/ noon water.” This sense of shifting ground under precision-tuned language runs like a fine thread through Steudel’s striking debut collection.

From the opening “sound list” translated into russian using both cyrillic and roman alphabets, Steudel invites the reader to listen hard and manage the grand leaps, not only between language and meaning, but between things themselves, the stuff of them. A meditation on time uncovers surprising (and delightful) aural and imaginative connections:

“Noon. A grumble. A black currant.”

“Tea. The stain in the iris.”

“Evening. River ice clinking into water.”

“The hour. Graphite on paper, a blunt guide.”

“Bath. Giant, silent elk.”

Central to the book is the section called Birch, inspired by Robert Payne’s biography of Vladimir Lenin. Steudel gathers points of illumination and lays them out, side by side, to form a kind of collage. Found poems, lists, quotes from Lenin’s own notes, and word games become the “multiple foci/ through which sunlight tapers to flint sparks.” Mayakovsky, Kandinsky, Tolstoy, and Akhmatova make brief appearances in this series of historico/political poems that bears the chiselled starkness of a siberian plain:

he saw in forests the hardness and purity of
a styled movement,
a lone person in a birch forest

closing his stride;
‘organization of professional revolutionaries,’
this one thought like circling wolves.

Scenes, a more autobiographical long poem, focuses on eleven different domestic settings. Stage directions offered in square brackets create a flickering focus; the reader is urged to step in and out of the poem to reconsider, listen, look again as “loose regattas of dark capsize and drift.” The question of what is real or solid is never resolved. Even clarity is fragile: “But here is the tree, bright as limes/ and the pure call of glass owls.”

In the end, Steudel’s committed vision crosses the spaces she creates. We are left with images that are tightly wound and visible, moving toward us from the outskirts:

I wake beneath dark lamps,
my window fractions into deeper darkness.

A flooded road,
faces of the brown deer and limping buck.
From an antler
grass trails by the roots.

 In Theory and Practice, love is “the magic of intersections: street crossings,/ intersecting lines/ converge momentarily then go streaming off.” This may be the most fitting description of Steudel’s poems that flare with intensity as they negotiate enormous distances.

 

Karen Enns is a Victoria musician and poet.

Poet riffs on intersections of humans, animals and machines

The Flicker Tree: Okanagan Poems
By Nancy Holmes
Ronsdale Press, $15.95, 108 pages

Reviewed by Yvonne Blomer

The Flicker Tree’s poems praise the Okanagan’s living creatures, whether they be plants, birds, animals or humans. These poems note the see-er in the ecology of the poem and of the bird, the prickly pear, and the butterfly.

In the book’s opening poem, “Earth Star,” readers are placed in the wilderness where the human hand is ever-present, “Logged two or three times, the woods are grazed and thin,/ wrecked with beautiful litter: lichen-crusted/ branches, broken trees.” As I read, I couldn’t help but think of the poetic form the idyll and its overarching sense of paradise, its desire to praise the rural life. Nancy Holmes’s poems offer one caveat as part of that praise: they cannot ignore the human element, the spoiler in that idyll/ideal. This idyll-like stance holds in other poems, such as “Morning Dove,” “Swans in January” and in “Saskatoons,” where the natural world is imbued with the comparisons to the human–where “fat-ass fruit” is “piling up in the bank account” or in “Finch Feeder,” where the narrator is the dealer and the birds the drug users, “The junkies sit all day/ at the dangling syringe, shooting up black seed.”

Holmes’s use of simile from the human world, a kind of reversal from how poems usually find the wild in the human, continues in other poems.  In “Sagebrush Buttercup” for example, the buttercups are likened to buttons on a machine: “Let’s push these yellow buttons/ and start the spring.”

In the title poem “The Flicker Tree,” Holmes writes, “wracked by their own autumnal cries/ so piercing and sorrowful/ that when I hear them/ I too am candled/ by freshened embers of grief.” Holmes carries an awareness of the natural world as a place of worship in these lines where “candled” and “embers” recall the prayers and incense of other sanctuaries.

These poems reflect Wordsworth’s notions of “emotion recollected in tranquility,” but also convey  grief in what is offered by the window pane, the human observer, the machine. Hers not a poetry of the romantic because reflection reveals emotion centered on the loss inherent in environmental change. Holmes cannot observe the natural world and capture it in poems without also observing other impacts on that world, something Wordsworth did not face.

The first section of the book culminates in a long poem titled “Behr’s Hairstreak: Capture and Release.” This long poem focuses on the notions of “capture” and “release” so that these two things become riffs through the poem. Here, Holmes allows the poem to take leaps and trusts that the reader follows, such as, “bulrushes  brown and velvety/ like newborn foals.” A few lines later, “stiff upholstery/ like your grandmother’s chair/ let’s just stay here, stop moving,” followed by a calendar of things “I line up each day in neat rows (it starts like graph paper)/ inside me the moon waxes and/ withers like a growth (quadratic equation).” Science and poetry, scientist and poet also riff or merge in lines and images.

The other two sections in the book, on Okanagan’s places and people and on Woodhaven, “A Crisis of Place” include strong poems that did not capture me as powerfully. Some teeter too close to the political, leaning toward “message” which tends to bury magic or playfulness. That said, there are gorgeous lines: for instance, “the magpies write notes all over the mountain,” from “Giant’s Head Mountain Ghazal.”

Nancy Holmes is a spirited and wise guide to the Okanangan, its creatures and people, as well as the intersections thereof.

 

Yvonne Blomer is the Artistic Director of Planet Earth Poetry in Victoria, BC.  Her most recent book of poems is The Book of Places (Black Moss Press, 2012). Forcefield: 77 BC Women Poets (Mother Tongue Press, 2013) is forthcoming.