Mckenzie Strath : Notes from the Field : Letter from a Dirty Trowel

 

 

 

More often than I would like to admit, I find myself headfirst in a dirt hole, toothbrush in hand, wondering what exactly I am doing with my life. But as an archaeologist and a poet, I have found that you should always expect the unexpected, and sometimes the most wonderful things emerge from the mess.

People often imagine the life of an archaeologist as glamorous. In reality, I spend ten-hour days standing in the pouring rain on the side of a highway, giving an excavator driver a thumbs-up to remove another thirty centimetres of gravel. And when I am not roadside, I am in a lab, agonizing over whether the Italian soil in front of me is 7.5Y 4/2 or 7.5YR 4/3, only to discover that the Munsell chart has classified both, simply and mercilessly, as just brown.

Yet when I sit down to write poetry, it is these mundane moments of asking myself, what am I doing? that create the work I love the most. Just brown dirt, after all, is never just brown dirt. Under a microscope, it becomes a thousand different things: evidence of past living floors, traces of human activity or, occasionally, a reminder of the day a foreman decided it would be funny to bury one of my shoes in it. Just brown dirt holds many different possibilities, from social interaction to the scientific breakdown of what it is or once was. Of course, that perspective might also be influenced by sleep deprivation; graduate students after all, are not widely known for sleeping.

When Rob asked if I would write a note in the field, I thought it would be great, given my experience writing notes in literal fields and various other environments on a regular basis. It made me think about the process of writing outside traditional settings. Sometimes, the best pieces of writing come from a tiny note on a Rite in the Rain journal covered in mud that has a scribbled-out drawing of a rusted penny with the word “too modern” found underneath it. Sometimes it's about the secret conversations you overhear with people who don’t realize you are 3 feet below them in an excavation unit. And other pieces are about the haunting silence that settles in when you realize your compass stopped working more than a kilometre back.

Poetry for me is shaped by my experiences and emotions, drawn from snapshots of my life. In fact, I see poetry and archaeology as similar, both involving experimentation, trial and error and revision until a final hypothesis emerges. One that sits comfortably on the palette while still inviting others to question, interpret and keep thinking. In Archaeology, we do something called experimental archaeology, in which one tries to recreate what modern humans and early hominins may have done to survive in the past. In other words, one must go sit in a dark cave to truly understand what happened thousands of years ago — or at least, that is what my professors seem to believe. In poetry, we do the same. We copy forms and themes from century-old texts and invent entirely new lines of thought. I believe that sitting at my laptop with all the lights off, staring at a blank Word document, is eerily similar to sitting in a cave.

On top of that, humans are adaptable creatures, and so are the poets who borrow words from outside their disciplines. Poetry can force us to adapt to discomforts we never expected to encounter. Viewing science and academic research through a creative lens transforms meaning, reshapes our thinking, and reveals the biases within our interpretations.

I can sit for hours pondering whether a thin section holds a sparkling piece of pyrite under the microscope or whether it is simply a void filled with resin. In much the same way, I wonder whether those who read my poems will recognize the voids within my writing as spaces they may never be able to fill. But I suppose that is what makes both disciplines so compelling: analyzing the unknown and accepting that we may never fully understand the true meaning behind the past, or behind someone else’s words.

 

 

Mckenzie Strath is an archaeologist who occasionally doubles as a poet. She is a Master’s student at Simon Fraser University studying Neanderthal fire use in southern Italy. Her chapbook Inconsistent Cemeteries was published by above/ground press. When she’s not excavating sediments or writing, she can usually be found hiking a mountain or working from whichever coffee shop has the most delicious hot chocolate.

Madelaine Caritas Longman: How a Poem Begins

How does a poem begin?

 

 

 

Poetry comes to me often—while walking, while cleaning, while riding the metro, while having a coffee, while reading others’ poems. Some nights, lines force me from bed every hour, pulsing the black sea between dream and thought. Words coalesce on the first drops of birdsong; rhymes wreathe my forearm in barbs of blue pen. In notebooks and notes apps, on margins and whiteboards, on post-its like bright leaves that bury my desk, words trail me constantly. Whenever I’m thinking, a poem might begin.

Or maybe I should say, a poem might end. Because the lines that bombard me are almost always endings.

*

I write, every day. I quit writing, every day.

For better or for worse, a poem is self-indulgent. For better and for worse, if you are a person at odds with herself.

Some of my friends write their poems in short bursts, sprinting start to finish within half an hour. This must be a very different experience of consciousness: to stand immersed in your thoughts, uninterrupted, for that length of time. Because it is a long time—I can’t do that without some(thing? one?) intruding.

When I sit down to write, I set aside hours, sort through months of notes. I make dozens of drafts, plan for inner arguments. Take notes, get up, pace.

My poems come in fragments, the way I tell stories: cut to the ending as fast as I can. One breathless sentence before my throat closes. Before I can think what I might have said wrong.

*

I envy the seeming solidity of others. I know it isn’t really that simple, but everyone else looks to be, from the outside, so wholly themself. Even that word, individual: what cannot be split.

I am deeply split. Self-consciousness means being several incomplete people at once: one who acts, one who watches them acting; one who thinks, one who questions the thought. One right now asking, am I making this up?

One who writes and one who edits. Are you doing that right? the Editor asks.

Despite my discomfort praising myself, I will admit: I’m an excellent editor. I have no problem killing my darlings. I can erase the whole day.

*

Sometimes, words arrive as bodily rhythm: dark racing heat, fist palpating my heart. Poems pump my legs all up and down Sherbrooke, walk me through black glowing pinprick-lit streets.

I write to release the sensory pressure. To collimate chains of astigmatic taillights, red and white lights streaming under the overpass. Arterial sky, frost in the air, beer cans, rain pinging on emptiness, leaflitter, rust. The trees burst into vein.

Sometimes, I don’t think I know the difference between beauty and physical pain. There’s only awareness of something too big to keep held in my body.

Poetry comes as chant, bloody colour, as anger and joy, as bad-mannered survival, as raw-nerved insistence. It burns off all shame like a layer of skin, and I hope and worry that I will never be wordless again.

Sometimes.

Other times, poetry is sluggish. I wake with my limbs full of stones, eyes unfocused, grope in the blank word by word for a mind. Force myself into the afternoon daylight, get food in my body, some sugar and steps. Try to put myself back in the world.

I Google the names of grasses and sparrows, writing them down because I know I’ll forget.

Something eats my thoughts and I try to describe it, to write the poem as it edits me out.

* 

My personal definition of depression is the inability to tolerate one’s own mind. Writing, to me, is the opposite (notice I do not say the cure): to believe in the possibility of meaning. To choose one’s thoughts over their absence. To believe in a reader who wants more from a poem than the poet’s erasure. 

The Editor says I should not write this. That it is selfish, melodramatic, trying to be special.

I tell her I write because I’m trying to exist, and the Editor says this is cliché and self-serious. That my reason for writing is also the reason that I should not write.

I have started this essay several dozen times.

* 

I write, Winter sparrow. Clay-coloured sparrow. Fox sparrow, swamp sparrow, dark-eyed junco. White-crowned, white-throated, black-throated, field, common, house, song. 

I often have a hard time thinking. There are times that means it’s hard to form thoughts, and there are times it means the thoughts hurt. Both states shatter my access to language. Clots of ending couplets. Then nothingness.

Then something, again. Where does it come from?

Awake until dawn, my mind runs its hands up and down a thoughts’ splinters, picking a scab. Waiting for birdsong. No sparrows. Grey dawn.

A plow scrapes the edges, a substance, a sound.

There: something outside myself. Write it down.

*

I mean it when I say I am a good editor. But it was through teaching that I realized this didn’t mean what I’d thought it meant.

Working with students, I noticed two things. Firstly, that I was kinder to their poems than my own—in each student’s work, I could find something startling, some image or phrase uniquely alive to an original, inimitable consciousness. And, secondly, that I wasn’t lying.

I had been proud of my unsentimentality, proud of holding myself to a high standard—proud, paradoxically, of my shame. But working with students led me to wonder how much of what I’d considered brutal honesty had been merely brutality.

We live in a world that speaks of intelligence, success, and work ethic as linear and hierarchical. As if these are restricted to one sort of person, inherently deserving, inherently superior. Leaving the rest of us told to try harder, yet told it is shameful to need to try at all.

This worldview cannot comprehend difference as anything other than deficit. One is a person, or one is a person with something subtracted. And who would want to live as a lack?

Yet none of the students were ever deficient in the ways I saw myself. Not because students never shared my traits, but because deficiency was the wrong approach entirely.

Everyone’s work had its own sensory charge. Its own affective pulse, its own cadence of cognition, its own synaesthetic leaps, its own nerves and heartbeat. Each writer’s thoughts had an irreplicable texture that made each person’s voice irreplaceable—that, more importantly, made each person irreplaceable.

There was no one of whom I thought the world would be better if they ceased to write.

However one defines success in poetry, innate talent seems to play little role. The students who went on to write interesting things were, more than anything, simply the students who went on to keep writing.

As a teacher, my work was not to tell a student they had failed. It was to say, come back to this.

As a writer, my work is to come back to this.

*

I have now prodded and abandoned this essay another several dozen times. 

What’s surprised me the most about writing is how rarely readers can infer the process behind the final piece. Sometimes a poem will arrive all at once, a starburst of thoughts, half-gift, half-crisis. But the bulk of my poems come as scraps.

This must have just poured out of you, say readers. But my poems rarely pour. My work is stitching, gathering, noticing, polishing, listening, researching, living.

A poem does not have to be a deluge. It can be a way to give shape to the day. To hold different parts of oneself in conversation, and in conversation with the world—with other artworks, other poems, other people, the startle of an insect crossing the page.

The work is to continue. To gather the scraps off my desk and reorganize, absorbed for hours in the pleasure of attention, in the startlement of juxtaposition, in the joy of not knowing how it will end.

How a poem begins: again. Again.

 

 

 

Madelaine Caritas Longman's poetry collection, The Danger Model (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019), won the Quebec Writers’ Federation Concordia University First Book Prize and was longlisted for the Fred Cogswell Award for Excellence in Poetry. Her poems have appeared in PRISM international, The Ex-Puritan, Vallum, Room, Grain, and elsewhere. In 2025, she was awarded the Joseph S. Stauffer Prize in Literature. She lives in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal.

Stan Rogal : bagne, or, Criteria for Heaven, by rob mclennan

bagne, or, Criteria for Heaven, rob mclennan
Broken Jaw Press, 2000 

                               “slipping easily to the quick & more banal
                               i refuse to believe this is all accidental”
                               — sorrow side

 

I let my fingers do the walking, across the dusty book shelves, among the yellowed pages, until they fall upon a whack of rob mclennan offerings: acka bracker soda cracker, acka bracker… boo! — a finger drags a volume from the collection, bagne, or, Criteria for Heaven, published in the year 2000. Ouch! Time flies and the fact of it being 26 years later puts my powers of recall and recollection severely to the test, and — no surprise — I come up short in terms of details. On the plus side, it’s as if reading an entirely new book through a present-day lens. I flip to the postscript where the author kindly informs me that the titles of the 93 poems contained are taken from the last lines of another author’s poems. So, new poems sprung from the endings of other poems. A fascinating literary conceit. I’m further led to understand that the 93 poems “are interconnected, moving through history, religion, mass culture, and the immediate ‘I/eye’; through shifting voices and the unknown ‘she,’ who is ever permanent” as mclennan looks backward and forward from his shaky position at the turn of the century and the millennium.

Hm. Intriguing. And what of the title word “bagne”? Well, I discover it means prison or labour camp and mclennan regards this image as a duality; a construction that both frees and restrains us (the book cover is a rough drawing of a pear in a cage, though the pear closely resembles a bird and the cage is shaped like a ribbed human torso, or else one of those sewing mannequins used by clothing designers. I’ll allow you, dear reader, to contemplate the symbolic and metaphoric implications of such an image). A title can be looked upon in such a manner, yes? As something that may both restrain and free? Maybe yes, maybe no? He offers a quote from jwcurry at the outset of the book: “if you start with a title, in a case like this, it would tend to direct things, rather than leave things open.” It’s obvious mclennan wants to explode this proposition, perhaps leaning more toward Hamlet’s pronouncement that: “O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space.” The spirit of which, I believe, mclennan fully accepts and explores with gusto.

Considering his intention further, I can’t help but be reminded of those several folks I’ve come into contact with over the years who write and call themselves poets but admit (proudly) to never reading other poets (except like-minded friends) or taking an interest in the history of poetry as they are afraid that it will interfere with their own unique and individual voices. To which my reply is often tosh and poppycock, or words to that effect. After all, anyone serious about becoming a musician studies and copies other musicians. Beginner artists do the same. Plumbers. Electricians. Joan Didion is known to have copied out pages of Hemingway verbatim in order to discover why and how he was considered the master of sentence structure, yet no one would ever confuse the writing of these two, just as no one would confuse the particular writing style, the voice, of rob mclennan with any of the poets (Victor Coleman, Lisa Robertson, Dennis Cooley, bp nichol, Jack Spicer, Dionne Brand…) he alludes to in his book. But, I digress. Though, not really, not much, as everything — in the words of mclennan — is interconnected, yes?

Ludwig Wittgenstein said: “Think of the tools in a tool-box: there is a hammer, pliers, a saw, a screwdriver, a rule, a glue-pot, nails and screws. The function of words is as diverse as the functions of these objects.” Which leads me to commend mclennan’s practice, for not only does he admit he reads other poets, he openly acknowledges and even exalts in the fact, offering a tip-of-the-hat to all and sundry who have influenced and/or inspired him and his craft; expanded and improved his collection of tools; a practice which (in my humble opinion) has served to broaden his poetic world view rather than kept it narrowed to the shape and size of his own navel. I mean, how pretend to offer poems that move through history, religion, mass culture, and so on, if you refuse to widen your scope; hone your craft; expand your vocabulary?

In the poem “with dark coming on and the cold” (fr August Kleinzahler), mclennan takes us back to 1999 when all manner of end-of-world disaster scenarios were being promoted: “dancing like the sky is falling, / like its 1999 // catching the quill of myth.” Note the clever allusion to the popular Prince song, “Party Like It’s 1999” even as the threat of doomsday looms nearby, a doomsday that only survives today as newspaper footage written by the “quill of myth.” As for religion and its close relationship to exploitation and scam artists, read “and how we slowly began to look like her” (fr Linda Rogers): “hundreds of believers appear / to pay homage,/ pray / as psychic hotlines go under / in quebec & elsewhere,” the word “pay” operating in its monetary sense, the personage of Jojo Savard next mentioned — a popular Montreal-based psychic of the 1990’s famous for her infomercials and pay-per-call phone line — followed by “who says religion / is a fading negative” wherein “negative” can stand for a photograph or an attitude or an entire belief system, Jojo relocating to greener pastures in Miami where she hosted an astrological  hotline program known as The Power of Love. Taking a quick poke at history’s habit of repeating itself (or, perhaps, remaining unchanged through the decades), mclennan writes in “shards, fragments, detritus” (fr David Arnason): “being canadian, that inherent racism / we all have but do not talk about / i just keep quiet.”

Of course, many of the major themes in the book overlap in single poems, and no way to example this without including and examining a poem in its entirety, as they are generally short, limited to a page or less. Maybe take my word for it. Better yet, find yourself a copy of the book and give it a read. You’ll discover that mclennan not only tackles big issues, he also has a deft hand when it comes to documenting the everyday or banal, able to make such keen observations seem almost transcendent, as in “like a moon among all things” (fr Don Coles): “today i have marks on my forearms / , an unfamiliar script / that none of my friends can read / & i don’t know how they got there.” How what got there, the marks or the friends? 

Returning to jwcurry’s comment, I wondered if mclennan ever circled back and made reference to the original poem, apart from the final line, or to the poet’s history/biography? While I’m familiar with many of the names in the book, as well as with some of the poetry, I’m at a dead loss to determine which final line belongs to which poet’s specific poem. Except in the case where one of my own final lines was employed: “the dream dreaming itself out of control” which I managed to track down and identify as “The Corruption” in my book Geometry of the Odd, 1999, and after re-reading (several times) I can honestly say that mclennan’s poem bears no resemblance to my poem whatsoever, nor do I myself appear on any recognizable level (though there is the ghostly (re)appearance of the unknown “she,” spooky, and who is this mysterious “she” anyway?). The new poem is entirely separate and fresh: all mclennan all the time! I can’t offer the same insight about the other 92 poems.   

I mentioned earlier my slight digression, while providing a sort-of disclaimer, even walking back a step or two as I enlisted mclennan’s notion of interconnectedness. And what is this interconnectedness that allows me to compare the art of the poet with the slap-dash of the poetaster? Let me once again return to mclennan where he writes in the poem “into remarkable clouds” (fr Steven Heighton): “free // as a word, she croons. that bird. / these wings / she gives me // cant lift me nearly high enough.” Meaning, I surmise, that the work of a poet is not easy, in fact, it’s goddamn difficult, and requires some not small amount of knowledge and expertise. As mclennan posits in his postscript: “you have to learn the rules before you can break them.”

Bravo to rob mclennan for showcasing this fact (these facts) in this book and those many books that followed. And thanks for his generosity and inspiration to others. Oh, should I add that I stole a title from one of his books, If Suppose We Are a Fragment, and used it to create a poem, after which the title morphed into If Suppose We Are a Figment, which grew to a second poem? Paying it forward, as it were, and why shouldn’t he be made aware? I expect he’ll be tickled with the news. As he reminds us at the end of his postscript: “here, we can get away with anything we want.”

Cheers to that.

 

 

 

 

 

Stan Rogal lives and writes in Toronto along with his artist partner Jacquie Jacobs. His work has appeared almost magically in numerous magazines and anthologies. The author of several books, plus a handful of chapbooks, a 13th poetry collection was published in March 2025 with ecw press. Co-founder of Bald Ego Theatre and former coordinator of the popular Idler Pub Reading Series.