2020 Governor General's Literary Awards Poetry shortlist interviews: Donna Kane

Orrery, Donna Kane
Harbour Publishing, 2020
The Canada Council for the Arts’ 2020 Governor General's Literary Awards poetry shortlist 

The 2020 Governor General's Literary Awards winners will be announced on Tuesday, June 1, 2021.

Donna Kane, a recipient of the Aurora Award of Distinction: Arts and Culture and an honorary Associate of Arts degree from Northern Lights College, is the current executive director of the Peace Laird Regional Arts Council and co-founder of Writing on the Ridge (a non-profit society that has, for over twenty years, organized arts festivals, literary readings, artist retreats and writer-in-residence programs). Her work has appeared in journals and magazines across Canada. She is the author of two previous poetry titles, Somewhere, a Fire and Erratic (Hagios Press, 2004 and 2007), and the memoir Summer of the Horse (Harbour Publishing, 2018). She divides her time between Rolla, BC and Halifax, NS.

The book description for Orrery offers that “Orrery is a collection that orbits around the theme of Pioneer 10, an American space probe launched in 1972 to study Jupiter’s moons.” What prompted you to write a book around Pioneer 10?

Before Facebook, msn.ca was my go-to place for procrastination. I’d sit at the computer and watch the frames of curated news items roll by, usually on the lookout for some empty distraction like “This Week’s Best and Worst Dressed List.” One evening in 2003, an article on Pioneer 10 came up – “Pioneer 10 Calls Home Last Time.” The source of the CBC article was NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. The media release read, “After more than 30 years, it appears the venerable Pioneer 10 spacecraft has sent its last signal to Earth. Pioneer’s last, very weak signal was received on Jan. 22, 2003. NASA has no additional contact attempts planned for Pioneer 10.” The idea of shutting off communication to Pioneer 10, of this human made object drifting from earth until the earth no longer existed (scientists predict that given Pioneer 10’s trajectory, it could still be travelling long after our sun has consumed the earth), haunted me. This initial fascination grew into a kind of obsession, an impulse to keep track of P10, to keep it in my imagination. I gathered as many facts as I could find, its speed, its trajectory, its weight, the number of instruments it carried. And I started to write poems inspired by the probe, ideas around transformation, materiality, consciousness.

I’m curious about the ways in which you approach a poem, akin to the notion of Dorothy Livesay’s “documentary” poem: composing lyrics that explore and document details of lived experience. What brought you to this approach?

It’s true that my poetry is lyric, and that I almost always use the material world as my launching point. Most of my concerns revolve around the material world and our relationships with each other and with other-than-human animals and life. While I admire all forms of poetry, for me, language is a way to explore these concerns. I don’t think I came to this approach in a calculated way; it is more that this was the approach that, for me, felt the most meaningful. Writing poetry (and reading it) forces me to slow down and to think things through and in so doing, often changes the way I think and perceive the world. I love the jolt of an insight which can be reassuring, surprising, or any number of other emotional responses. I love the mysteries in life, and poetry often helps me feel a bit closer to them.

In an interview posted at Geosi Reads around your prior collection, you respond that “metaphor is the engine, the workhorse of poetry.” Does this still hold true for the poems in this current collection?

I hope so. In Jan Zwicky’s recent book, The Experience of Meaning, she writes about gestalt comprehension, the phenomena of how our senses apprehend the world, and in her previous work, such as Wisdom and Metaphor, she explores how metaphor gives rise to meaning, so that, in some ways, wisdom is metaphor. This kind of thinking rings true for me and feels important to my own work. When a metaphor works (mine or someone else’s), it resonates with what feels like a truth. While I can’t say if all of my poems in Orrery achieve this, it is what I aspire to.

What was the process of organizing the final manuscript for Orrery? Many of your poems feel akin to lyric bursts, which would require a particular order and shape to the final collection. Did this emerge organically, or was there a shape you were aiming toward?

The poems in Orrery are not so much about Pioneer 10 as inspired by philosophical ideas arising from the probe. In ordering the final manuscript, poems that directly reference P10 or space travel were put into the first section of the book as more of a logical choice; the second section accesses more of the human “I” while the third section employs more other-than-human life as the subject. But there was also an organic ordering in each section and as a whole I hoped to build an overall shape of wonder and empathy for the world around us.

I’m wondering your take on nostalgia. How does one write without romanticising the past?

I am not a fan of nostalgia, and I am not a Romantic. When I do address the subject of nostalgia or write in what one might call high lyricism, that is, expressing emotion or reverence for the material world, I find that humour, restraint, and demotic speech help to quell sentimentality.

Have you been writing much in the way of poetry since Orrery was completed? What have you been working on since?

I am currently working on another poetry manuscript that explores the ways Western society continues to distinguish between humans and other animals in ways that suggest we are not the same organism. I’ve been doing a lot of research into the work of philosophers, biologists, naturalists, and writers engaged in animal studies. I’m also exploring the double-edged sword of anthropomorphism, how anthropomorphizing other animals can negatively affect our thoughts about and therefore our relationships with them as well as risks evaluating another animal’s intelligence based solely on our own capacities. But then, on its other edge, denouncing anthropomorphism can deny other animals similar capacities such as emotions, languages, and dreaming, resulting in their exploitation and the loss of their habitat. In my work, I’m considering the sentience, cognition and emotion that exists in all animals and I’m addressing in a more general way the underlying structures of thought that contribute to intolerance and lack of empathy as it affects not only other animals, but also differences in race, class, and gender identity within our own species.