As a poetry reviewer, and as someone who writes eco poetry, my curiosity was piqued by reading Yvonne Blomer’s new book of poems, especially in terms of her larger body of poetic work in protecting the environment. It feels, to me, as if The Last Show on Earth is really the third part of an eco poetry ‘trinity’ that was started with her work in editing Refugium: Poems for the Pacific and Sweet Water: Poems for the Watersheds.
This conversation is the result of my curiosity about Blomer’s poetry in terms of her persistent commitment to using her poetic voice to speak up for the protection of the natural world. Parts of our conversation also delved into ekphrasis, poetic form, as well as love and grief.
Kim Fahner: You’ve been working as an eco-poet for a while now. You’ve recently edited two anthologies, Sweet Water: Poems for the Watershed and Refugium: Poems for the Pacific. When did your concern for the environment begin, and when did that concern move into your work as a poet?
Yvonne Blomer: I became a vegetarian at the age of twelve. At that point, it was about not liking meat, but then I stopped eating fish at eighteen when, on a snorkeling trip, the guides caught a fish, and I was so offended and appalled. I think it’s been a concern for a very long time. My first book, a broken mirror, fallen leaf, was set in Japan. I lived there from 1997-99 and the book came out in 2006. I was already noticing climate change in Japan, so that concern has been swimming along in my work for a while. Then, when I came to having a political position, as Poet Laureate of Victoria (2015-18), I felt I should do something meaningful, that I had a platform, and that gave me the courage to do the anthologies, and really ask what literature can do—what poetry can do—to help save the ocean.
KF: When you talk about the ocean, I wanted to ask when you came to live on Vancouver Island? Is that when you fell in love with the ocean?
YB: Yes, I guess it is, because I wouldn’t have known it before we moved to Vancouver Island when I was a teenager. Before that, I lived in Alberta, and we visited lakes. Once we moved, my dad was really into sailing, so we sailed around the islands a lot—around Vancouver Island—when I was a kid.
KF: Why choose poetry, and not another genre, to raise awareness of the climate crisis?
YB: I think poetry has the ability to sneak up on you, and it’s multi-layered, and so I could just be talking about a walk in the fog, for example, but underneath that, I could also be talking about things that are vanishing. There are probably lots of amazing essays about this. I love Alanna Mitchell’s book about climate change, Dancing at The Dead Sea: Tracking the World’s Environmental Hotspots, which is a book of essays. I like incorporating research into poems, which essays also do, but I think poetry is my number one genre. In poetry, you’re playing with multiple true things and events, and then you’re layering ideas and images in there, too. It’s true that you can do that in non-fiction, but perhaps the poetry page is also very welcoming.
KF: You’re taking part in a panel about eco poetry at the Word Vancouver Festival in mid-September. I’m curious about your connection with science, in terms of how you see poetry and art relate to science. It’s a choice to focus on science poetry, don’t you find, as a poet?
YB: Yes. There’s a quote in Refugium from an essay by Tim Lilburn, who was attending a huge conference with artists, writers, and scientists. The scientists there wanted the writers to go out and write about what was going on with climate change because they felt they couldn’t really share their fears and opinions, that they had to be very scientifically based. There’s this ability in poetry, in literature, to speak out against things more, I think. But we must write about it. I’ve written in Refugium that “The consequences of remaining silent out of fear are far more grievous.” I think certain people are more open to that play of language, in poetry, than others who might be more science-based. I love going to the science of things, or the research, for the language available for a species or creature I am writing about.
KF: The Last Show on Earth makes me think of circus rings and spectacle, of illusion and reality, and of surfaces and depths. I wondered about the role of illusion in your work here, if you were thinking that people seem to avoid or turn away from the human threat to the environment. I wonder if you’d speak to the title of the book and the poems in terms of the circus motif.
YB: It’s true that circuses are a distraction. I think they were most popular during the 1920s and 30s when people really wanted distracting from The Dirty Thirties. The circus in the The Last Show on Earth is playing as a metaphor, but I had to be careful. One of the threads in the book is not only the notion of animals, but also of neurodiverse creatures. My mom was neurodiverse because she had dementia. My son is neurodiverse because he’s on the autism spectrum and has Prader-Willi Syndrome. And animals, of course, don’t think like humans, and were very much used and abused in circuses. There was the Bearded Lady, people who were mute, or who were conjoined twins, the Elephant Man, and I was also heading towards this idea of the world as circus where my son and mom could be pulled in to entertain, but that horrified me and there was the worry it would seem like I was saying this is okay, so I shifted, and made it more subtle. I left the poems in, of course, and the circus there as a suggestion rather than labelling it.
Circuses seem like violent places. Our desire is to look away from things that make us uncomfortable, yet our eye is drawn. The same thing can be said of the climate crisis. The circus offers us that thing that is kind of scary, but that we’re sort of also really intrigued by. We both want to look, and then look away. I think we’ve created that with climate change—this kind of intriguing, scary thing that we’re just watching.
KF: There’s a dance between love and loss throughout your whole book. This is present in terms of your mum’s decline and her subsequent death, and your son being neurodiverse, and I’m curious as to how you balance your work between personal voice and experience, and the bigger, more global concerns you have for the environmental crisis.YB: It’s really important for me to hold both in the poems. After I wrote my first book, I didn’t want to talk about myself too much in poems, but now I am more relaxed and find my own experiences can integrate with the larger world. My third book was As If A Raven, and I wasn’t in that book, but I am also completely in that book because it’s got my DNA in it. It’s all my perspective on how humans use animals, but there’s no personal story in there, necessarily.
When I think about witnessing, and I think about poetry trying to capture what we’re witnessing, I think I can’t leave all the parts of me out. It’s essential. When I think about climate change, I think it has a lot to do with women’s rights, and I think we are embodying climate change in ways. We know we are because there are cancers that are directly from carcinogens from the human impact on the environment. Our tendency is to think we are separate from the natural world, but I like to think we are part of it. So, the very road we build is still built from materials found on the earth. If we stop separating ourselves out, and bring everything in, we are saying, ‘it’s all part of the magic and part of the problem.’ With this book, I’ve brought everything in.
KF: There’s a very particular awareness of time passing and generations shifting in The Last Show on Earth. You get a sense of your mother aging and passing through, and out, as well as your son growing up, and into, his life. They both have very specific needs and they’re both precariously balanced within society. I think sometimes we think we’re more important than we are. We’re just here for such a brief time. How does the passage of time work in your poetry?
YB: It sometimes feels so desperate—the briefness of it—and the loss of a parent is so catastrophic. All the questions you didn’t ask. My mom died, but for years before that, it had become impossible to ask those questions, as well. The connections were so tentative, so different and evolving.
KF: The way we make meaning is so diverse. That can be as humans, and humans in relationship with humans, and with animals in relationship to other animals…
YB: We shy away from anthropomorphizing animals. I agree. Don’t give animals human qualities, but don’t take away the qualities that they have. We can be so discordant in how we think. As if animals aren’t sentient, or we get to decide if they are, or that there aren’t connections between animals and humans just because we are different. We are doing this with each other now, too, forgetting the basic connection between us. I’m not suggesting that I’d like to go up and stroke a bear, but when I see a bear I can acknowledge its motherhood, its childlikeness—all those things that aren’t necessarily human. It’s very hard to not use human terms, though.
KF: The personal aspects of a poet’s life are mirrors to things that are happening in the world at large. Your poems about family, about the pandemic, about the threat of extinction of species, are all woven into a tapestry that speaks to what really matters. Did you make a purposeful choice, to weave the personal into the global, to create that connectivity in a poetic way? We’re all diverse, aren’t we, so how do we manage together, in a larger sphere of being?
YB: I think that’s true. We’re all unique. We share with the animals. We think, because of religion and patriarchy, that we have dominance over them, but we don’t. It’s a mistake to put ourselves above them because we’re the ones doing the most damage, so that—to me—puts us below them. My editor, John Barton, suggested a re-arrangement of the book’s order. When he got it, it was a little bit too chaotic, and that was part of my desire to throw everything at you at once, but he was exhausted. He created a structure that moved from the personal, with some touches on the environmental, and then gradually opened it out to ending on the stronger climate change, environment poems. It’s a more welcoming structure, and it was a great edit for moving things around a bit. But your question about how we manage together is such a good one. How will we manage together, and by “we” here, I mean the entire planet.
KF: I wanted to ask you about your love of form. I know there are a lot of Canadian poets who teach poetry, but I can’t think of anyone who teaches form as well—or as thoroughly and passionately—as you do. Where did your love of form come from, and what are your poetic influences?
YB: The love of form was there, and in the writing program that I did at UVic, we did get introduced to some forms like the ghazal, and I loved it. Then I went to do my Masters in the UK, and in the UK, there wasn’t this big break towards imagism that occurred in the US and influenced Canada. The UK is still very tied to its own traditions and so form was a huge part of poetry there. First of all, poetry is a normal part of life in the UK, and people aren’t afraid of end rhyme or metrics. Many of the poems in As If A Raven were part of my dissertation and it’s a very formal book. That’s because I was in the UK and so I was just eating it up. Every event I went to, the language just had that cadence and I loved it. We had an excellent library in Norwich, and I think In Fine Form had already come out, so I was already playing with those forms.
Form was already around. Glosas and pantoums were very popular at the time, but for me, the real ignition for my passion for form came when I was studying in the UK. I read the love letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning. I had this great library. We didn’t have a television, we didn’t have a child, and Rupert had left his job for a year so I could do my degree, so I was pretty intense about it all, in a ‘suck the marrow out of it’ kind of way. It was 2004-5. I came back to Canada pregnant with Colwyn.
KF: Robert Bateman’s artwork plays an important role in your poetry. The chapbook Ravine, Mouse, a Bird’s Beak is a collaboration with Bateman. It’s beautiful. What drew you to his work?
YB: I was coming into my final year as Poet Laureate of Victoria, and I’d done so much running around the city, and my contact person at the city and I were chatting. I’d edited Refugium, but I didn’t have any of my poems in Refugium, so she suggested I contact the Bateman Centre— ‘Why don’t you do something with Robert Bateman?’—because he’s a well-known painter who also paints from the environment. The plan was that I would see all his work and pick the paintings I wanted to use, but his health wasn’t very good at the time, so they gave me access to all his paintings online. I read his memoir and I walked around the gallery in Victoria. I always loved “Circus Train—Nighthawks.” I chose paintings that drew me, including a wolf one because I’m vehemently against the wolf culls. Not all of these poems are in the new book, but many are. Some of Bateman’s more recent paintings have a little bit of garbage in the corner, like a rocky outcrop with a crushed tin can, which feels very true—as well as alarming—in nature painting.
KF: What other visual artists draw you in, ekphrastically, as a poet?
YB: I really like response and ekphrasis, so in my project that I’ve just recently finished, I looked at a lot of art. I really love Blake, his lithographs. I wrote a long poem after Banksy for Death of Persephone. The city in the book is loosely based on Montreal, so I have poems written after some sculptures in Montreal, and then some Dali, and a few things that could be commenting on the Persephone myth.
KF: What is your next project?
YB: I’ve just finished Death of Persephone. A segment of it just won the Gwendolyn MacEwen Prize, which hopefully will come out later this year in the magazine, Exile. The whole book needed an exterior set of eyes, so it’s with Kimmy Beach for editing right now because it’s not just a book of poems, it’s also a mystery novel. I’ve just begun to dive back into looking at Virginia Woolf—looking at women, and history, and changes in women’s lives through, among other things, women’s clothing—and just exploring that right now. I think I would like it to be a kind of mixed thing of lyrical essays, poems, and maybe interviews.
KF: What are the big questions you have in your mind right now, as a poet, that you’re trying to answer through these projects? Or maybe ‘curiosities’ is a better word…
YB: I do closely tie climate change to sexism, inequality, and patriarchy—inequalities to women over time, as well as racism and colonialism. I’m interested in looking at a series of ‘what if’ questions: “What if women had been allowed to be in the trenches? And would they have still been in tea gowns”, and “What did it feel like to be able to wear boots instead of little high heeled shoes all the time, and how did that enable you to run away, when you needed to?” I’m kind of in that space right now.
I’m just re-reading Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and underlining like crazy, and just really thinking about what was going on for women in other cultures, outside of England. In matriarchies, that didn’t mean that women were any less beaten down; the money or the property passed to the female’s son, so I’m kind of curious about that. I’m curious about history, and about humanity’s slow change, I guess…and a little fed up.
I also just started an essay writing about getting my hair cut after my son Colwyn’s back surgery. I’ve been pulling in hair lore and thinking about what it means to have your hair cut. He just had his hair cut and, afterwards, he said he wants it all shaved off, which is interesting. I wonder what he’s thinking about. Is he just being silly or is he thinking “I want it all cut off. I need a fresh start”?
KF: Do you have hope for us, as humans, for the well-being of the world? In terms of what is happening with the climate crisis? I feel disappointed by us, all the time, with how we behave as a species, and as individuals. I keep thinking: is there more kindness and less selfishness since the advent of the pandemic, or is it actually the reverse? I’m not sure, to be honest. Do you have hope for us, with the environment?
YB: I really want to, but I’m so frustrated by governments and large corporations and I keep thinking ‘why won’t they just do it?’ and I understand that it’s complicated. I think I really felt hopeful, funnily enough, at the beginning of the pandemic because it did seem like we were all trying to look after each another. But I think that wasn’t true of impoverished places, and that wasn’t true of Black lives, and—you know—there wasn’t equal access to the vaccines. We didn’t get the vaccines everywhere. Why not? And then I also felt like ‘Of course we have a pandemic because humans’ reach is too large.’ I mean, we all watched Greta Thunberg, and I was her age when I worried about climate change, so that’s disappointing.
KF: And it hasn’t changed much, has it?
YB: No, no, and people think ‘well, we’ll probably all be okay’…but there are already people who aren’t okay. Do I have hope for the future? Hope is tricky because hope suggests you have no control. You have to think: who is that hope being pointed towards? We need to have hope, though. Writing poetry is a great act of…a call to the future, so I keep calling to the future.
My cover, those three people…originally it was four people, but I had the designer take one person out because one child is less of a future for humanity, but also, one child is less damaging.
KF: Yes. Because you’re thinking that people still have big families…
YB: People do, and then we have this kind of semi-borderline crisis now where the Baby Boomers—which is a big population—are retiring and we have all these shortages for everything, so that’s scary as well. We’ve really not thought things through well…
KF: There’s a selfishness about us, too, right? We think of ourselves first, individually, and not as a group?
YB: There’s a belief that we’re at the top, as humans. If we put the Earth at the top, then we’d all serve her. That would be better.
KF: You do this thing in your poems where you name things. Are you aware of the fact that you’re doing this? It feels like you’re naming things to pin them down, to anchor things with certainty, to protect or keep them safe. You use lists of really vibrant images in your poems. I’m thinking of “One Blue Bowl,” and the owl poem in particular, but others as well.
YB: Yes. Years ago, poet Susan Stenson wrote her book called Nobody Move. She wrote that after her mum died with that notion of ‘Nobody move! I don’t want to lose anyone else!’ and I think that notion resonated, and I think my parallel is ‘Name it! Name it! Name it! Name it!’ Partly, that came from doing Refugium. It was such a huge thing, and the title is such a big title. The notion for me is that, when all the creatures are gone—I’m going to get upset now—all we’ll have left is this book with them in it, and I think that’s so tragic, and so important.
KF: Well, the monarchs are at risk now, too, which is heartbreaking…
YB: Yeah. Everything is at risk.
KF: You wrote about Covid. Was that a conscious decision, to include the pandemic poems in this book of work?
YB: I did. I know that publishers are a bit wary about that, but…
KF: But you talk about poetry as a form of witness, so it makes sense to me that you’d write about the pandemic. It feels honest to me.
YB: This is the moment we’re in.
Kim Fahner lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario. Her new book of poems, Emptying the Ocean, is being released by Frontenac House in October. She’s a member of the League of Canadian Poets, the Ontario Representative of The Writers’ Union of Canada (2020-24), and a supporting member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada. Kim may be reached via her author website at www.kimfahner.com
Yvonne Blomer [photo credit: Nancy Yakimoski]
lives on the traditional territories of the WSÁNEC´ (Saanich), Lkwungen
(Songhees), and Wyomilth (Esquimalt) peoples of the Coast Salish Nation. Her
most recent book is The Last Show on Earth, Caitlin Press, 2022. This
fall Palimpsest Press released Book of Places 10th Anniversary Edition
with new poems and layout. Yvonne’s poetry books also include As if a Raven
(Palimpsest Press, 2015), and the anthologies Refugium: Poems for the
Pacific and Sweet Water: Poems for the Watersheds (Caitlin Press,
2017 and 2021). Sugar Ride: Cycling from Hanoi to Kuala Lumpur is her
memoir exploring body, time, and travel. She is this years winner of The
Gwendolyn MacEwen poetry prize for her excerpt from Death of Persephone: A Murder
Mystery. Yvonne is the past Poet Laureate of Victoria, B.C.