“The writer must speak (somehow and
always) to the contemporary moment.”
—
Geoffrey
Nilson, “The Poetic Body in Architectural Space”
April is National Poetry Month. A Wikipedia list tells me it’s also Arab American Heritage Month, Jazz Appreciation Month, National Pet Month (in the UK), and Sexual Assault Awareness Month, among others. In Canada, specifically, April has lots of National Days and Observances, including World Autism Awareness Day, Tartan Day, Vimy Ridge Day, World Book and Copyright Day, Holocaust Memorial Day, and Journey to Freedom Day, which I had never heard of until doing this little bit of research for a preambulatory paragraph to a write-up on a chapbook that has little-to-nothing to do with any of these special days. Well, in 2019, a fledgling friendship with another poet, Ashley Hynd, lead to ranting about how distracted we both were and how we hadn’t been able to write as much as we would like. So, logically, during April we both agreed to write a poem every day and pop them into a shared Google Drive folder to hold each other accountable. To up the risk (and reward, potentially) my partner in this month-long project proposed that for every day that we missed writing a poem we’d owe the other person two poems—and this was on top of the poem we had to write for the next day. We forced each other to write poetry—lots of poetry—in April 2019. Turns out the accountability of this grueling practice was more helpful than harmful, and we have kept it up in 2020, 2021 and 2022. It has become our own little month-long observance. Turns out that when you engage with poetry every day for a month, your writing actually benefits from that sustained engagement. (Who knew?)
That first year of attempting to write a poem every day, I composed multiple poems in which raccoons made appearances. This didn’t come out of nowhere. As a child, my favourite stuffed animal was a raccoon I named Ricky. Perhaps because of the stuffed animal, my favourite song by The Beatles was “Rocky Raccoon.” Growing up in Toronto—the traditional territory of many nations including the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee and the Wendat peoples—also meant growing up amongst a large and ridiculously behaved urban population of raccoons, getting into the trash or getting struck and killed by drivers of motor vehicles on highways. Fast-forward a few years, the virality of Toronto’s and Ottawa’s raccoons in the news brought about a new admiration of the procyonid’s antics. Raccoons were and are always just around, and I decided it was time that they were around in more of my poetry.
To be honest, the raccoon poems were a joke. I was trying to find connections to other works that mentioned raccoons, but largely I thought the poems were just amusing. At an event near the end of 2019 that rob mclennan was hosting at his favourite hole, The Carleton Tavern, I debuted a bunch of raccoon poems. The positive response I received in front of a small audience in that beautifully crappy bar motivated me to keep working on the poems, and at the end of 2020 I received a small grant from the City of Ottawa for this project. Fast-forward to the end of August 2022 when rob emailed me with the subject line “hey old man,” as many of his emails are headed, and ended with an off-the-cuff question: “oh, and are we ever doing a second chapbook?” (My first above/ground chapbook, Gravenhurst, was published in 2019.) It’s a privilege to have someone in your local poetry community who makes a point of asking you about your writing, and even more of a privilege when that person is willing to print your work, staple it together, and mail it to hundreds (thousands?) of readers around the world.
some of the raccoon poems is many things beyond a chapbook of poems that feature appearances by raccoons. These poems live in the intersection of nature poetry, confessional poetry, and political/social commentary. Many poems take inspiration from other poets and artists in content, form, or style. Of course Ashley Hynd’s poetry makes an appearance, as does some of my favourite writers from Ottawa’s poetry community. A Bill Callahan song slips in, and so does a poem I discovered through The New Yorker Poetry Podcast. Oh, and the title rips off an Artie Gold collection: some of the cat poems (CrossCountry Press, 1978). Beyond poetic influences, this chapbook is also a snapshot of who I am at this moment, communicated though lines and references that are a sum total of my experiences. That’s how I speak to the contemporary moment in my writing: naming who I am reading and talking to, who I am collaborating with, listening to, learning from, growing with. We’re all a part of a community with shared resources and holidays and communal spaces, and we’re building up that community when we acknowledge the people or places that brought us to where we are. We’re past the age of the lone genius. Let’s start mythmaking a world of collaboration, reconciliation, and respect.
P.S. It seems only fitting to add an end note here thanking Manahil Bandukwala and nina jane drystek for help editing this essay/note/preface/thing.
Chris Johnson (he/they) is a settler poet from Scarborough currently living on unceded Algonquin Anishinabe territory. He is the Managing Editor for Arc Poetry Magazine, a board member at the Ottawa Arts Council, and a member of the creative collective VII.
Author photo credit: Nicolai Gregory
