I was seven when I ran into my first real poet, Pierrette Requier, whose day job involved being my second-grade teacher. I was already well on my way– having been exposed to Dennis Lee’s work and having been challenging authority for some time. Incidentally, she was the first– and not the last– teacher to send me to the office for telling a boy to shut up. While the majority of the kids (Group 1) were reading a Dick ‘n Jane knockoff (Cherry Hill), she had the Group 2 kids make a poetry chapbook. It was a galvanizing moment. I was thrilled that our Group 2 chapbook was photocopied, and went home with a copy believing I’d hit the big time. Another key takeaway from my time that year was the science experiment involving moldy bread and fermented orange juice (which I occasionally replicated in my fridge years later).
I had no idea she was a poet herself until decades later (she became the Poet Laureate of Edmonton in 2015); however, a telltale indicator was that she wore one of those long overcoats artists wear (this was the early 80s) while standing on the school field during recess at 25 below while my classmates and I thrashed around on plastic snowshoes.
Some thirty years later I read her first book, details from the edge of the village (Frontenac House, 2009), and it struck me how her prose poetry moves with finesse and vigor– skating effortlessly between French and English– and rich with earthy and humorous renderings of its inhabitants. It’s an ambitious volume, a book of slow transitions beginning with Requier’s early life growing up in the fifties and sixties as one of eleven children in a Franco-Albertan family from the Peace River region, and ending with her mother’s death.
That early encounter with my first poetry teacher planted a seed. I felt seen, and on some level, I grasped that poetry (and stories) offered a portable refuge in a turbulent world– along with the freedom to dream and to forge my own path.
Merci, Mme Requier.
Christina Shah is a member of Vancouver’s Harbour Centre 5 Poetry Collective. Her work has been published in numerous journals, and was selected for Best Canadian Poetry 2023. rig veda, her first solo chapbook, is forthcoming with Anstruther Press.
