John Barton’s Lost Family: A Memoir (Signal Editions, 2020) is his twelfth book of poetry and was shortlisted for the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry. Past Poet Laureate of Victoria B.C., in this book he explores how being queer rewrites and expands society’s sense of lineage, both given and chosen, in sonnets both crowned and uncrowned.
Terese Svoboda’s Theatrix: Poetry Plays (Anhinga, 2021), her eighth book of poetry, plays with an absurdist tone that combines the surreal, the political, and broad slapstick, often in one fell swoop. Virginia Konchan says: “Not since Beckett has an existential soliloquy defined the task before us with such bravura: the way forward is brilliantly, bracingly clear.”
Svoboda and Barton commenced meeting in a coffee shop near Fisherman’s Wharf in Victoria where Svoboda took up residence in the early days of the pandemic, and Barton haunts. Molly Peacock introduced them.
Terese Svoboda: Theatrix is the feminization of theatrics, my coining. If you're going to play, you'd better start early and own it! I have at least learned that as a woman. The reader hears “tricks” which introduces the notion of play without the “dramatic” overtones, and maybe prostitution? You pinned it by suggesting that the action takes its inspiration from language, but also in the leaps between words as they appear on the white space. Things happen in the eye in that supposed silence. And insinuations! The head turns while trying to tell the truth, told in space.
JB: What was the inspiration for Theatrix: Poetry Plays? Did it grow out of past work or was it a departure breaking new ground? Have you ever written specifically for the stage?
TS: I've had a couple of plays produced and written several libretto, one of which was performed at L.A.'s Redcat Theater in Disney Hall. But it wasn't the dramatic form that attracted me so much as expanding the reach of voice in poetry. My previous book, Professor Harriman's Steam Air-Ship contained a few poems that dropped the quasi-confessional voice of the 70s and tried to move beyond the page's fourth wall. This was not too unlike my practice in my fourth novel, Pirate Talk or Mermalade that was written entirely without description, using only the voices of 18th century Nantucket. But what really excited me was Mac Wellman's plays, the impossibility of his characters, let alone his stage directions, which expanded my idea of how words could em(body) and push a different poetic reality. Oh, yes, and I wrote a 30-page Faust using Christopher Marlowe's setting in my book Mere Mortals.
TS: Has Molly Peacock commented on her undue influence with regard to your taking up the sonnet?
JB: I find this seemingly either-or question more complicated to answer than it should be. As I explain in the acknowledgements section of Lost Family, in March 2016, I accompanied Molly on a visit she made to a second-year poetry workshop at the University of Victoria, where she introduced the students lucky enough to be in attendance to the barebones of sonnet-writing. Even though I had to borrow a pen in order to complete the writing exercise she gave us, I discovered to my amazement that I could write a sonnet in under half an hour. This was a eureka moment because, up until then, I’d been having trouble finding time to write. The thirty minutes to an hour that it appeared I needed to scribble down a decent first draft looked like something I could fit once or twice into my busy work week and this realization led me, after having written a number of sonnets, to set as my goal the composition of the same number of sonnets that Petrarch wrote—366 (a number I have now surpassed)—and to do so with increasing proficiency. Molly and I have of course since discussed what she’d set in motion, but she’s been far too discreet to claim any influence on me other than as a catalyst. Her pragmatic and elastic approach to the form clearly fell on receptive ground. What drew me to the sonnet was its brevity; I’d long wanted to master the composition of a short poem. I may not now be writing new sonnets with the frequency I did when I was in the throes of matching and surpassing Petrarch, but this spring I am publishing a chapbook of sonnets with Emergency Flash Mob in Fredericton called Stopwatch, and before the end of 2024, I plan to assemble a second book-length collection of sonnets called View Street. I would have written none of these poems if I’d not made the time to sit in on that workshop Molly gave at UVic in March 2016.
JB: While there are identified and identifiable cast members in Theatrix, your characters, including your narrators, often seem to step into the poems’ background, with the atmospheres of each poem often taking centre stage. Your poems clearly are not standard verse plays that your characters are tasked to rhyme off. Instead they come across as dioramas where the action of reading them takes place before carefully designed props, with readers having to break through the fourth wall as active, interpreting participants, almost literally leaping on stage, so to speak, to declaim their own insights into the action. Does this strike you as a fair observation and how consciously were you striving for this set of [special] effects? Care to elaborate? (Note my single use of square brackets.)
TS: Very fair observation!! For too long have readers lolled about, being fed line after line and merely absorbing meaning. Make the reader get up and dance! Didn't everyone experience the Living Theater so long ago, loosed upon the audience and naked? It wasn't for everyone but it did open up the possibility of another theatricality. And I loved your brackets where you have cleverly noted that “special” is made more special – perhaps whispered? -- just the way caps can shout. The brackets also have the effect of setting off language, creating an interplay that bounces the meaning. At the very least, twice the meaning, the way Emily Dickinson used her “alternates.”
TS: Lost Family boldly declares itself a memoir. Were you constrained by dark secrets? Or did you have the confidence that family members wouldn't read sonnets? Or that they would, and forgive everything, admiring your facility?
JB: Since I began writing, I have never felt daunted by what members of my family thought of what I chose to write about. It never occurred to me that I should worry about their feelings. This must sound callous to the contemporary reader, but misgivings of appropriation were not quietly or loudly aired when I started to write poetry seriously and even if any such concerns were ever bruited, they never articulated in order to police what one said about one’s personal life and the people you shared it with. A writer’s personal life was theirs to write about; it never occurred to me or my peers that we should obtain the blessing of our friends, lovers, parents, siblings, extended family, or enemies to make public through our writings what they may have or may have “done” to us. To echo second-wave feminism, the personal was political and should not be toned down or even rendered mute to protect our subjects’ potentially fragile scruples. Silencing was viewed as another form of exploitation. As a gay writer, I have written against this tendency as a badge of courage: At times, I have felt obliged to do so, in the service of the truth, against the still-extant prejudices of a smug, sometimes uncomprehending, and often vengeful majority. As to the very personal poems I have written that involve them, my family has said very little. My father once told me that he didn’t wear bifocals and my mother admitted that there were some poems she liked and some she did not, to which I replied that she was no different than the majority of my readers.
JB: In the dedication you quote George McWhirter’s wry observation that “the line is a stage.” I infer from this that, in this book at least, if not in all of your books, the poem is self-consciously a performative space. Care to elaborate?
TS: In that a poem exists outside the poet, and has its own life, it will always occupy a space of performance in the minds of innocent readers. The poem declaims, no matter how small the stage, the poet tiptoeing or stamping across a tightrope of line that may end stop or teeter and swerve on to another suspended rope or trope. In Theatrix, I was trying, like a language poet, to release the words into a world of their own making, not mine.
TS: You enumerate the number of sonnets from which these were selected – 366 – but you don't say how long it took you to produce them, and whether they still inspire you. I'm certain one can think in sonnet form, as I recall Jonathan Galassi, now president of Farrar Straus, once won a stand-up extemporaneous sonnet contest at Oxford. Would you enjoy competing?
JB: I wrote my 366 sonnets between March 2016 and August 2019, a span of almost three-and-a-half years. Often, I wrote up to four per week, unless it was a crown, and I wrote all seven sonnets in each crown in as many days. To compile Lost Family, which is 180 pages long, including all the front and back matter and section pages, I harvested the most polished sonnets and have spent the years since its publication bringing the rest up to snuff. I do now think in sonnet form and length—it’s the perfect container for my thoughts—“perfect” in the sense that it prevents me from windily overplaying my hand and taking for granted the reader’s willingness to give me their attention—but I don’t think I could go toe to toe with Jonathan Galassi. I need a keyboard under my fingers, with a delete key and the words slowly materializing in front of me on the screen.
JB: In the last line of “Stage Manager: Lights Up,” the book’s first poem, you as the poet (“Me” in the list of cast members) urge all involved to “Becket-it”—which of course is an amusing reference to the Franco-Irish playwright, Samuel Becket. There are also multiple references throughout the book to Shakespeare and at least one to Sheridan. These references point to three distinct theatre traditions (and I am confident that there are other references to traditions that I missed). In what tradition or traditions would you situate these “theatrical” poems?
TS: Like all writers, I need springboards to make sense of the air I've catapulted into, where a reader might understand from their previous experience. The invocations are meant to signal some allegiance to the era of the individual poem, an historical gesture if you will, to tradition in general. I see history, at least in the context of the arts, as simultaneous, that we as an audience experience 17th century plays and Quixote's playfulness and the startling poems of Joyce Mansour at the same time in our present. I don't have to disavow its cumulative nature but try to celebrate what is foregrounded.
TS: The opening section is titled “Misophonia” yet you don't define it. Perusing Google, I see it's a disorder in which certain sounds trigger emotional or physiological responses that some might perceive as unreasonable, given the circumstances. A term useful for poets. In your case, I'm assuming it's the anticipation of rhyme which you do so gracefully, especially in the poem “Misophonia,” but please elucidate further.
JB: I can’t remember where I first encountered this word, but etymologically, it means “hatred of sound.” The poem recounts a childhood memory of being driven to near insanity by the spoon that my father used to stir his tea would summon up each morning, letting it hit the side of his cup contemplatively, I assume, while he read the morning paper over a sodden bowl of puffed wheat, which in itself was so horrific in its slow, slurping consumption that I would turn away from him in my chair to avoid seeing the line of milk that inevitably materialized between his lips while he chewed (I’m sure that I could write a long series of sonnets about this on its own…). His spoon tap-tapping his teacup sounded like the faint unpleasant tinkle of a single, asynchronously shook jingle bell, the wished-for cessation of which was unpredictable, and even when it did stop, I couldn’t assume it wouldn’t restart after he’d taken a sip of tea while turning to the continuation of the story he’d been reading on the front page. My response , though doubtlessly unfair, illustrates the incomprehensible suffering that children experience when forced to put up with the unconscious habits of their parents. I am delighted that you’ve connected misophonia to rhyme, though the only rhymes in this poem are within the line. I chose to resist end rhymes to dramatize my child-self’s resistance to (and fury at) the tortures imposed on me by my father’s tap-tapping spoon. The only two lines with end rhymes are the first and last, ending respectively on “chime” and “rhyme,” which I find especially cheeky since they are also synonyms.
JB: Over what period of time did you write the poems in Theatrix and were any of them influenced by other writing projects you were working on at the same time?
TS: The oldest poem in the book was written in 2014. I suppose I was recovering from my foray into the pirate world some years earlier. After a few years of these strange poems trickling out, I staked out the premise: the immateriality of theater. Its composition was easier than other less defined collections -- but my editor at Anhinga nearly despaired of my changes in the book's final production. Writing it was much like the animator drawing the tree bough while sawing it off.
TS: “Snubbed rubbish of boyhood” “flesh aging absurdly” “retouched branch” – not only do you unobtrusively draw the readers through your end rhymes but you tease us along by way of internal rhyme and assonance galore. Tell me about your previous books, whether you gave them similar sonic attention or whether the sonnet brought forward this delightful practice.
JB: Polari, the book before Lost Family, which was published in 2014 (now almost ten years ago!) is a book of set forms ranging from more recognizable forms, like the sestina, pantoum, and villanelle, to lesser known ones, like the English rubaiyat and the quintain. Around 2005 or 2006, I’d become progressively more bored by the looseness of free verse (I once described its variable lines and stanzas as the equivalent of tracing the shapes that spaghetti makes when it’s thrown against the wall to see if it’s al dente) and wanted new challenges. When I’d studied with Robin Skelton at the University of Victoria in the late 1970s, early 1980s, he’d assign forms, including complicated Welsh forms, to his students; unlike most of my workshop mates, I’d not roll my eyes and was instead determined to get a decent poem out of each exercise he set. I wrote my first sonnet for his class, a poem called “St Joseph’s Hospital, 1937,”and it may be the most perfect sonnet I have ever written, in that I respected every rule of the form. (I later collected it in my 1987 book, West of Darkness: Emily Carr, a Self-Portrait.) When I began working on the poems that eventually became Polari, I regularly consulted Robin’s guide to formal poetry, The Shapes of Our Singing, in which he summaries the rules of over 300 forms that he’d drawn from multiple poetry and language traditions, providing for each a poetic example that he’d composed himself in order to demonstrate how the rules worked. I also wore out a copy of the Oxford Rhyming Dictionary (by far, the best rhyming dictionary available); the rhyming words it offered me—ones I would likely have never thought of on my own—pushed the poems in welcome, unexpected directions. Once a rhyme scheme had been established, I’d often choose the next rhyming word from the ORD first and then write the line toward it, all the while respecting the syllable count and the scansion. In this way, rhyme influenced meaning. Having to respect the rules of the forms I chose to work with made my approach to writing more nimble and increased my vocabulary by adding words that either rhymed or helped me keep to the syllable count, all in an effort to come up with the most idiomatic, natural-sounding lines possible. I suppose all the internal rhyming and half-rhyming you’ve noted is a natural consequence of the attention I paid to end-rhymes, and I’ve learned how to make the faintest rhymes work to a poem’s advantage as robustly as the most exact and noticeable ones. People who read my poems see the internal rhymes far more quickly than often I do, which has led me to conclude that I’ve long have a very intuitive sense of rhyme, hearing and responding to it subconsciously. Working in form for as long as I have has simply made me more aware of an inclination to rhyme that’s been with me from the start.
JB: Your poems are not naturalistic kitchen-sink dramas that have obvious fingerholds on the sometimes laughable mundanities of life. “King Leer,” in spite of being emblematic of the book’s characteristically pyrotechnic linguistic sharpness, seems to me to be an exception, in that like Shakespeare’s eponymous, differently spelled protagonist your lead character is recognizable as a physically and mentally failing father in the midst of experiencing growing disappointment with his daughters. Many of the other poems in the book—and please don’t interpret this as a criticism—are less quickly parsed (their virtues, teased out from less direct anchoring details, are therefore appreciated differently). Does this strike you as a fair observation and while you were writing “King Leer” did you perceive it to be different from the other poems in the book? (By the way, I saw a production of King Lear at the Stratford Festival in Ontario last May that was set in a future vaguely near. It struck that more mileage would been gotten out of the play had it been set it in a long-term-care home where residents gradually were conveyor-belted from independent living into full dementia care.)
TS: King Leer was much easier to write than other poems because I wasn't going out on a limb to invent a stage but rather (mis)using Shakespeare's schematic. Consider that his theater is mostly words, the rare physical props mostly swords and wine – and the audience had to imagine the rest. I'm not asking much more. (I loved your quick witted apology for parsing!! Such a politic reader!) And I'm reserving tickets to your fully-mechanized Lear. You could get AI to “forget” Shakespeare as the play progressed.
TS: The book, ostensibly about family in its various constructs, also takes photography as a subject, from its very beginning with “Google Maps View of the House Where I Grew Up” to the last section entitled “Photo Finish,” creating a kind of synesthesia between poetry's sense of sound and sight. Did the photo framework arrive with the early poems and gradually develop or was it discovered threaded among already finished work? Architecture, the houses of childhood and those of the genealogically secure, are also emphasized, giving further linkage between poems. Same question.
JB: The emergence of photography as a subject in Lost Family was not a conscious decision, though photography has always interested me. I have a very impressionable visual memory, if not a photographic memory. My first book is called A Poor Photographer, with two title poems, “The Blurred Memory of a Poor Photographer” and “A Poor Photographer Improves His Vision.” Together, these titles suggest, first, that the effort to make a record of one’s experience leads inevitably to inaccuracies; second, that, despite photography’s limitations, one nevertheless endeavours to get better at taking pictures and, third, the limitations of one’s skills doom the effort to remember from the start and this will remain so despite every effort one makes to turn things around. Perhaps most families’ habit of documenting themselves by snapping pictures may explain why photographs turn up regularly in Lost Family. Looking at the family photos I still possess certainly provided me with inspiration. Listening to my sister recount that she’d found a picture of herself as a girl in the photo album of a Japanese pen pal she’d reconnected with thirty years after they’d ceased exchanging letters led me two decades later to write “Between Bullet Trains.” What my sister described is the equivalent of finding a picture of your great-grandmother as a young girl in a junkshop bin or mounted as décor in an old-time-y restaurant.
Since childhood I’ve similarly been very interested in urbanity and urban life. While growing up in Calgary during the 1970s when it was one of the fastest-growing cities in North America, I watched the tall buildings going up downtown with inexhaustible fascination. The city it’s become today is largely the realization of the long-ranging planning that was drafted during my adolescence. I’d always intended to become an architect, but then got daunted by all the math I thought must be involved. I like to describe poems as built environments for readers to explore and look out the windows of and myself as an architect whose construction materials are words. “A Built Environment,” a poem in heroic couplets that’s collected in Polari, uses the construction of a high rise as a way to obtain perspectives that grow more expansive as the building gets taller.
JB: Among my favourite poems in Theatrix, including “King Leer,” are “Silverware Dialogue,” “Chair Theater,” and “Verona Not Venice.” Which poems matter most to you and why?
TS: You are asking the mother of the poems to talk about her favorites? Oh, well. I am very enamored of “Shame Helps” which appeared in Poetry, and led the way;“Sandwich” because it is so dark and strange – you expect people being shut up in closets but dirty sandwiches?; and “House of Atrium” because hotels with their atriums assume an architectural pretentiousness that mirrors contemporary productions of ancient plays. The manuscript was originally called “House of Atrium” because I –and probabaly no one else -- found the idea hilarious. Yeah, they wrote a lot of tragedies, but they were often funny.
TS: The sections, often crowned with sonnet coronas, are easily a series of chapbooks, and progress from youth to age. One key section, “Coda for the Victims,” is a peekaboo of gay life, club, love and losses “Our legs down-slaked and sprawled.” “His scorn prophylactic, unforgiving.” Heart-wrenching. Was this the first time you felt you had perspective on what happened during the AIDS epidemic, or is that a constant reassessment for all gay men?
JB: I like to think of each section of Lost Family as a chapter in a memoir or a book of creative nonfiction. When Molly Peacock came to UVic, she also gave a lecture on the synergy between poetry and creative nonfiction and a workshop on the sonnet as secret essay. Both these topics caught my fancy and influenced how I shaped this particular book of poems, as did Lynne Van Luven, a colleague at the University of Victoria, who’d kept encouraging me to write a memoir about growing up gay in Canada in the middle of the twentieth century. Molly helped make me see that the sonnet could the perfect envelope to house the vaguest and most ephemeral of memories, especially since our fragile recall of our own lives is often a collage of many hazy, hard-to-pin-down impressions of what may or may not have happened to us. To signal that this book was truly a memoir in the best CNF sense, I chose not to include the titles of the poems in the table of contents and instead organized them into an alphabetized index at the back. By doing this, I hoped to give the section titles listed on the contents page the weight and force of chapter headings. I like to think of each section as less a standard chapter of nonfiction than as a personal essay that, according to its own idiosyncratic logic, unfolds and folds in on itself.
It was only natural, therefore, to collect most of the overtly queer-themed sonnets into a single section that recounts the adventures and misadventures I embarked upon as a gay man who’d happened to come out early on in the AIDS crisis. It was a bewildering, existential experience as a young man to claim as mine an identity that could also kill me long before my time—an experience that marked not only me, but most of the gay men of my generation. During Covid, I’d explain to the frightened people around me that it was my second pandemic and quietly bring to their attention that it was only near the end of 2020 that the number of people killed by Covid surpassed the number killed that year by HIV. I was puzzled by how irrational people sometimes got during the Covid pandemic; during the worst of AIDS, we simply learned to be careful because we had no other choice and to get on with life. After all, catching Covid was not an automatic death sentence that catching AIDS was from the early 1980 to the mid-1990s—and today, if you don’t get treatment, it still is, especially in many non-western countries where also it’s often the leading cause of death. I wrote the poems in “Coda for the Victims” to preserve the memory of the bad old days when AIDS claimed the lives of many gay men and was something we stepped lightly around if we wanted to stay alive and still be intimate, if you get my drift. I’d written about the impact of AIDS on me and my peers in past books, most especially in Sweet Ellipsis from 1998 and Hypothesis from 2001, though there are also AIDS-themed poems in Polari. What changed the course of AIDS was the introduction of protease inhibitors in 1996, which are not a cure, but they did turn the disease into something treatable and allowed affected men to resume living productive lives. Today, AIDS is seen as a chronic condition, which I find very disconcerting because it’s a condition that could just as easily kill. There’s much new writing about AIDS and the AIDS era, which, in a very first-world way, is now viewed as a historical period disconnected from the present, but nonetheless worthy of being revisited and studied. The AIDS-themed novels of the 1980s and 1990s that seemed so current when they were first published are being rewritten by today’s young writers as works of historic fiction.
JB: You’d previously published several of these poems in print and online journals. What criteria did you use to match poems up to journals when you were putting together submissions. Do you fathom why particular poems appealed to particular journals and their editors?
TS: I have to say I was surprised that Poetry honored “Shame Helps” with publication. They accepted a poem of mine in 1978 and I submitted again for more than thirty years before they took another. Sometimes it's a mismatch of editor to writer, sometimes it's the writer learning her chops, sometimes it's taste or the wrong poems, sometimes it's kismet. I've now been kismetted a number of times. I thought the more “experimental” Lana Turner Journal under Calvin Bedient would be welcoming, and yes. I imagined two pages of the American Poetry Review, but no. Interim has been very supportive. Being based in Nevada, they either have nothing to lose -- no dinner invites -- or the atomic atmosphere engenders enthusiasm for the explosive! But so is Denver Quarterly, being known for touches of the surreal and for poems that take chances. In other words, I guess and am often rejected.
TS: The section “Melittology,” the study of bees, buzzes around the queen mother, and her demise, and is moving and intricately set. Each road trip sonnet in the last series is a location in 1986, the last being “Royal Stewart Dining Room, Prince of Wales Hotel, Waterton,” in which the “willful son raised on grit/You instilled” shares a meal with his mother. Did you keep notes back then, or has this road poem been a long-term project?
JB: I have never kept a diary or notebook, so “Road Trip, Southern Alberta, 1986” is drawn wholly from memory and recounts a week-long camping trip that in late April took my mother and me to Head Smashed-In Buffalo Jump, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, which had recently opened; to Writing On Stone, a provincial park on the Milk River close to the American border; and to Waterton, a national park in the mountainous southwest corner of Alberta that shares a border with Glacier National Park in Montana. I’d never been that far south in the province as an adult and haven’t been since, and the holiday was also memorable because my mother and I, though regular verbal pugilists, never fought once. It had never occurred to me to write about this mother-son détente until I embarked on the Lost Family project and there were a sufficient number of phases to the trip to justify devoting a sonnet crown to it. Who knows how accurate my memories of the trip are, but I’d argue that the sonnet and the compositional drive of poetry in general furnished the resulting seven linked sonnets with a verisimilitude that truly comes across as lived experience.
JB: By contextualizing the poem as a tricky theatrical space, how does this reshape—or continue to shape—your sense of what poetry is? Is it informing the poems you are presently writing?
TS: Play is poetry's chief attraction, followed closely by emotional revelation. Few have taken poetry smack up to the theatrical. Voice is making a comeback over spoken word, see the declaiming of Rodrigo Tascano. I wrote the manuscript Ark before Theatrix, about the destruction of the planet, and although I've published nearly all its contents, in an as upbeat a voice as possible, it languishes. My newest manuscript, That Plastic Place, riffs off the use of plastic in art, the expressiveness of whatever medium.
TS: In the poem “Emily Carr, Synecdoche” the poet's mother reads aloud about the terrible devastation of Haida Gwaii via deliberate infections by settlers, “the carvers not gone but made sick.” It ends: “What we know: wet, socked-in coast adzed of names.” The synecdoche refers to your mother reading to the poet, being part of that whole, or Emily Carr's work being part of the devastation “contrived as elegy?”
JB: I think that all those elements can interpreted to be the synecdoche alluded to in the title, but it also can mean that Emily Carr’s work, however much she may have painted each of her pictures out of a true admiration and concern for Indigenous peoples and however much we may or may not appreciate the results as the achievements of a gifted artist, can be seen as standing in place of Indigenous peoples’ own representations of their experience, that her art, as a subset of the art produced on the West Coast, is viewed by the majority to represent the whole of Indigenous art and experience. Certainly I doubt that this would have ever been Carr’s intention—if anything she’d have wanted non-Indigenous people to see and love Indigenous art as much as she did and to view her art as a gateway drug to their art—and if she were alive today, I think that she would engage very intelligently and imaginatively with issues of cultural appropriation and produce art mindful of those issues. That said, however much she may have seen herself as an outsider, she was working within a Eurocentric art practice and her paintings were purchased by predominately by non-Indigenous people and displayed in non-Indigenous institutions like the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and the National Gallery of Canada. For many, her paintings of Indigenous villages and her later writings about her painting trips to “remote” places along the B.C. coast, influenced how they saw and understood Indigenous experience. Certainly, I encountered the Indigenous peoples of the Northwest Coast (as it was once called) first through her paintings, in tandem with visits I made as a child to the Royal British Columbia Museum in Victoria, where so many deracinated totem poles are still on display. I became so enamoured with Carr in my twenties, I spent seven years writing a book of poems in her voice, a book that’s been so successful, it’s been published in three separate editions in 1987, 1999, and 2006. It’s not for nothing that Lawren Harris, Carr’s putative mentor, encouraged her to find totems of her own. For a decade or more she turned her attention to the forests themselves. Posthumously, Carr has sometimes been charged with cultural theft; in this poem I wanted to explore that problematic legacy and my own investment in it.
