Kate Rogers : Notes from the Field : Poetry of Witness

 

 

 

“Notes from the Field” with its journalistic association seems a good category for my piece on poet-journalists and poetry of witness. Being a poet myself, Co-director of Toronto’s Art Bar poetry series and a frequent emcee, brings me into contact with poets from Toronto and around the country. I listen to and read a lot of poetry. I was away teaching in Hong Kong for just over 20 years and I have been actively catching up on Canadian poetry and other writing since I re-patriated just before the pandemic. That is the primary way I have learned that many Canadian poets are or have been journalists. Here is a list of those I have met or discovered in other ways. (I am sure there are other poet-journalists who I am not aware of.)

- Alice Major (Edmonton, Alberta )
- Joe Fiorito (Toronto, Ont)
- Marsha Barber (Toronto, Ont)
- Anita Lahey (Ottawa, Ont)
- El Jones (Halifax, N.S)
- Mohammed Moussa (Turkey /Gaza)
- Rosa Deerchild (Winnipeg, Manitoba)

And there’s me: trained as a journalist although I became an academic—a college and university instructor. I include a poem of witness of my own from my new collection, The Meaning of Leaving, near the end of this piece.

In her 2015 interview with Quill and Quire Canadian poet Emily Pohl Weary shared her thoughts on ‘poetry of witness’:

 

“We are all observers, in the sense that living is a process of witnessing. As a writer, I’ve always had an insatiable need to understand the why of situations that might seem senseless. The first time I encountered the term was in the work of human-rights activist and poet Carolyn Forché, whose brave and beautiful collection The Country Between Us inspired me at a critical time.”

It interests me that poetry can be a kind of witnessing, just as journalism can be. Not all journalists are advocates, although advocacy journalism is a growing trend in Canada. Some of the poems I have chosen for this article advocate for a point of view.

With this as my premise I have hunted for one poem of witness by each of the poet-journalists featured here. As I write this during another Canadian summer where our forests and nearby communities are ravaged by wildfire it seems appropriate to start with a timely poem of witness about the fire storm that devastated Fort McMurray, Alberta in May 2016. In her powerful poetry collection, Knife on Snow, poet-journalist Alice Major describes residents’ struggle to escape:

From “A fate for fire”

Ninety thousand   now in flight
through the choked throat   and thick smoke
of that one road out,   walls of fire
on either hand.   Hell-mile, hellscape—
vehicles draining   through a downpour of flame,
raining embers,   the roaring lungs
of flames fifty feet high.   Fire-whirls of dust. …
… Meanwhile the monster   makes its weather.
Perilous updrafts   lift pyrocumulus—
that cloud-fist,   inferno’s club—     
into the air.   Arrows flicker
of dry lightning,   but no downpour follows,
no rain-relief.   Only the roil
of Thor’s thunder   thrashing the landscape
with a hazardous hail,   hot ember-seeds
that sprout new shoots.   Fire’s spawn spreads
ever further   into green forest.

And the long road   logjammed
with crawling trucks,   creeping cars.
Drivers gaze   at dropping gauges,
emptying tanks.    
                        How ironic!
Stranded for fuel   in forest terrain
that floats on petroleum.   This fragile thread—
the one route out,    the one-horsed
engine of economy—    all encircled
by boreal forest   designed to burn.

***

With a deft touch journalist Anita Lahey writes about how the climate crisis is altering our seasons. (She is also co-author of the collaborative graphic-novel-in-verse Fire Monster, co-created with artist Pauline Conley.)

Seasonal Affective Disorder

An altered season’s
having her way
with every shapely
cloud. She’s got all
this stuff to throw at us:
midnight furies, fervour
and floods, white-hot
rends in afternoon skies.
Summer’s never been
so cumulo-
nimbus-charmed.
She blows
through the window, simmering
bodies to a salt broth.
Wouldn’t we
fall over ourselves
to be like that, devastating,
once in our lives?

–from While Supplies Last (Véhicule Press, 2024)

I think many of us are struggling with ecological grief about the fires which regularly rage across Canada’s western forests. Another issue many Canadians are grappling with is homelessness. In our chapbook “Homeless City” poet friend Donna Langevin and I were inspired to write poetry about our encounters with unhoused people we regularly meet in Toronto and Cobourg, Ontario. Former Toronto Star journalist Joe Fiorito has written a whole poetry collection about people living on the streets of Toronto. Here is one poem from that collection:

My Pal Al by Joe Fiorito

To the market once a week
for a week of frozen mini-meals,
a coffee and the paper.

In a puddle of daylight
on white arborite he tore his Star
into long thin strips.

“Nobody reads the news
on my dime.” He was the news
when he came home:

new lock, no key; no microwave,
no plastic fork and spoon, no
coffee pot, no cot.

In a stairwell, blue-eyed, rough,
he said he was – until he was
not – well enough.

-30-

- from City Poems; Exile Editions, 2018

When we discussed which poem Joe would like to share he chose this one based on the death of Al Gosling, who died after being kicked out of public housing for refusing to sign some forms.

***

Marsha Barber, a poet/journalist/professor of journalism at Toronto Metropolitan University, was moved to describe an experience of witness in the following poem set in Israel:

Suicide Bomber —Marsha Barber

“Suicide Bomb Kills 3 in Bakery in Israel” – The New York Times

Somewhere a young man 
the same age as my son
wants to blow me up.

Oblivious,
I apply lipstick, blood red,
the day is filled with hope.

I leave for the market to buy bread:
thick crusted, warm from the oven.
When it happens, I’m thinking how good
a slice will taste after I spread fresh butter
and share it with you. 

I note the boy. He has dark curls just like
my son, which makes me smile.
In a second, the sunshine through the bakery window
becomes too bright, as bright as fire.

Yesterday the boy ate with gusto
the hummus and olives his mother served,
was tender in the way of sons,
teased his mother, told her she was the best cook
in all the world, and she blushed.

He held her tight
when he hugged her close
for the last time.

This morning he shaved carefully,
washed with rose water,
repeated prayers, rhythmic as rain,
the soothing notes
bracing him for the light-filled path ahead. 

In a second
we are on the floor
in pieces,
the bakery now a butcher’s shop. 

How strange that
his blood, muscle, sinew,
last breath,
mix with mine,
in a puddle on the tiles,
which means
he is now
part Jew.

***

Empathy for the suicide bomber, horror at the death and destruction and irony are handled so effectively in these brief lines.

In her unflinching poem, “Canada is so polite,” Halifax spoken word poet and journalist El Jones describes “Canada as so bland, just miles upon miles of stolen Indigenous land.” Her poem is a lengthy, unflinching list of all the ways Canada does not live up to its image as courteous and kind. This poem was shared on the League of Canadian Poets Spoken Word Saturday, May 25^th, 2024. I was unable to find a transcript, so please follow the link to watch and hear El perform “Canada is so polite.”

El Jones is a spoken word poet, an educator, journalist, and a community activist living in African Nova Scotia. She was the fifth Poet Laureate of Halifax. She is a co-founder of the Black Power Hour, a live radio show with incarcerated people on CKDU that creates space for people inside to share their creative work and discuss contemporary social and political issues, and along with this work, she supports women in Nova Institution in writing and sharing their voices. Her book of spoken word poetry, Live from the Afrikan Resistance! was published by Roseway Press in 2014.

Another spoken word poet who performs poetry of witness is Mohammed Moussa. He is a Palestinian freelance journalist, host of Gaza Guy Podcast, and founder of the Gaza Poets Society. His debut poetry collection, Flamingo, was recently published in English. He grew up in Gaza and attended Alazhar University before beginning his career as a reporter for various international news outlets. He is based in Istanbul, Turkey. Here is the Spotify link to his poem, “The Wind doesn’t look like me” which evokes the constant change and instability of life in exile.

***

 

In her poetry of witness about her mother’s life in residential school poet-journalist Rosanna Deerchild got to know her mother in new ways. That collection of poems became calling down the sky.

 

In Prairie Fire Magazine (2016) Deerchild shared some of those poems from calling down the sky:

 

“It is a poetically and narratively powerful collection in which Deerchild bears witness to her mother’s experience in residential school, the long-term impacts of that trauma, and both women’s resiliency. From the opening pages of the collection, she encounters the difficulties of telling a story long kept silent, of witnessing the story as it is told, and of living the consequences of that story. In addition to telling the residential school story, the work of the collection strengthens the connection between mother and daughter.

The first poem, “mama’s testimony: truth and reconciliation,” opens with the following lines: “people ask me all the time/ about residential schools/ as if it’s their business or something” (5). Deerchild makes an important political and cultural statement by highlighting the implicit violence we do in insisting that Indigenous people put their pain on display for the sake of white settler education.

In calling down the sky, she encounters the trauma, and she simultaneously resists voyeurism, in part by drawing attention to the difficulty of speaking and of hearing.

In that first poem, Deerchild’s mother goes on to say why this request that she speak now, after so many years, is so presumptuous and so intrusive. From the speaker’s childhood, community denial has accumulated on official denial:

don’t make up stories
that’s what they told us kids
when we went back home
told them what was going on
in those schools (7)

Furthermore, empty apologies pile words onto an already “unnameable” experience (9):

there is no word for what they did
in our language
to speak it is to become torn
from the choking (9)”

(https://www.prairiefire.ca/calling-down-the-sky/)

 

***

Writing poetry of witness does not mean poets who choose to write it presume to speak for others. Rosanna Deerchild collaborated with her mother on the story of her Residential School experience.

Sam Cheuk, Vancouver-based poet and Hong Kong Yan (Hong Konger), wrote brilliantly about the 2019 Hong Kong pro-democracy protests in his collection, Postscripts from a City Burning. I was glad to have Sam Cheuk as my sensitivity reader for the Hong Kong poems of witness in my new poetry collection, The Meaning of Leaving. Although he is not a journalist, Sam helped shape my poetry about Hong Kong both directly, and indirectly through example.

After teaching in Hong Kong for twenty years myself I can relate to Sam’s remorse about leaving his former students behind. “I used to be a teacher,” he tells us (55), “What am I to say / when a student responds, / after confessing  I am / too chicken shit to stay / ‘We’ll fight for all of us’?”

In the next stanza of the poem Sam Cheuk shows us the bravery of young protesters facing possible reprisals in prison: “They announce their names, / yelling ‘I will not kill myself’ / while being dragged away.”

Cheuk’s guilt and grief come through strongly in the final stanza of that poem: “The student is still / messaging me via / an encrypted app, assuring / he’s safe for my sake.”

Here is my poem about witnessing student protests among other responses to the crackdown on freedoms by the Hong Kong government, especially in 2019:

 

Migration                                                                            

 I hope to exchange my life for the wishes
of two million—we can never forget our beliefs, must keep persisting….
--“Lo”, 21 year-old Hong Kong pro-democracy protester

The moths are most active at night.
Their black-clad bodies
swarm the streets,
like a miracle hatching
defying extinction.

A black moth trembles
on a window ledge,
framed by a police spotlight.
“Never give up!”
she shouts, falls backwards,
merging with dark sky.
Well-wishers leave pots
of night-blooming jasmine
on pavement
where she fell.

One month ago, another black moth
wings torn by the teeth of the wind
probed a vein, painted
her last composition
on the wall in blood. At 21
she must have felt old,
her lungs singed
by tear gas and pepper spray.
Careful to slip past the webbing
of the stairwell net,
she jumped.

A few students come
for my nine o’clock class.
Shuffling in their black hoodies,
barely whispering “Here”
when I call their names.
I let the absent ones
hand in their essays late.
They might graduate.

The state forbids them
to choose their leaders,
so they seem to be leaderless.
On the streets of Mong Kok
they remind each other,
“Be like water,”
as Bruce Lee said.

Moths do not need the sun,
their wings vibrating
to heat their muscles.
Many moths, their lives
so short, do not eat.

What do they live on?
In my dream, the Prometheus
silk moth eats fire.
It burns from within,
lands on fire
to burn the old city down.

***

In her Quill and Quire interview Emily Pohl Weary refers to Carolyn Forché’s anthology, Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness, which contains writing by poets who had experienced ‘conditions of social and historical extremity.’ She sees writing as a political act. Forché goes so far as to assert that the poem itself is a form of witnessing, and ‘might be our only evidence that an event has occurred: it exists for us as the sole trace of an occurrence.’

 

I agree that our witnessing through poetry is a record of an event and of the feelings it inspires. Witnessing is often a political act, whether through poetry or some other medium. For a large part of her career, Forché, who is now seventy-three, has been described as a political poet. She says she prefers the term ‘poetry of witness.’ Her poems ask again and again, What can we do with what we see and live through? In a New Yorker magazine piece about her, Forché’s writing is described as “a kind of dialectic, one in which the truth of experience burns as brightly as the author’s intuition and imagination.”

As you read this you might have been asking, why poetry of witness and not creative non-fiction or memoir? Traditional journalism has eschewed emotion. Margaret Atwood once said, “Poetry is condensed emotion.” There is a kind of answer.

 

 

 

 

In 2023 Kate Rogers won first place in the subTerrain magazine Lush Triumphant Contest for her five-poem suite, “My Mother’s House.” Her poetry also recently appeared in Where Else? An International Hong Kong Poetry Anthology. Kate’s poems have been published in such notable journals as World Literature Today; Cha: An Asian Literary Journal and The Windsor Review. She has work forthcoming in Writers Resist. Homeless City, a chapbook co-authored with Donna Langevin, launched in the first week of January 2024. The Meaning of Leaving is Kate’s most recent poetry collection. She is Director of Art Bar, Toronto’s oldest poetry reading series. More at: katerogers.ca/

 

Kim Fahner : Knife on Snow, by Alice Major

Knife on Snow, Alice Major
Turnstone Press, 2023

 

 

 

 

 

Alice Major’s latest poetic offering begins with “End times 1: Record of pressure,” a poem that reflects on how her body has felt pressure as it has grown older, how there are “plate techtonics of aging.” She writes of her physical body as a parallel to the earth’s body, making reference to “my thinning crust,” and documenting her hips as “now misaligned plates/like cratons, sections/of ancient basement rock/stable over ages, while tendons/rift and rip around them.” The parallel is clear: there is a physical record of change—of pressure—and of “a slow,/continuous apocalypse.” This poem locates the poet (and reader) as being fallibly and undeniably human. What follows, to begin Knife on Snow, is the sadly prescient “A fate for fire,” which feels as if it is speaking specifically to the horror that is the summer of 2023, but which was written after the Fort McMurray fire of 2016.

The nine-part piece, “A fate for fire,” is a powerful opening poetic sequence. Dawn arrives as a dragon torn straight out of Beowulf, dragging “its grey tail/from sky’s flat surface  and citizens woke/to no blue summer.” Here is a poem with images that haunt the reader. There are people with “burning eyes” as well as “fume-drugged highways,” as “continents consume themselves.” Trees “are torches,  terrible angels,/crests of flame,” devouring trees, but also creatures whose “corpses lie/chase-victims,  charred in smoke.” Around the city, “gripped/in the fist of forest,” large projects have destroyed the Boreal “down to its bones,” and “where forest crowds   construction camps/and paycheques float  on pipelines’ fates.” This was the fire that is still referred to as “The Beast,” forcing ninety thousand residents to flee, “the long road   logjammed/with crawling trucks,   creeping cars.” One road out.

Major moves from Fort McMurray to the landscape and geography of Iceland, a “fire-formed land,   lava-layered,/where Earth’s plates pull  at the planet’s crust.” Tourists—ten million a year—move through Iceland’s Keflavik Airport, and the poet takes note of the fact that “the birds’ road     roars with metal,/soot and particulates,   unlocked sulfates,/high-sky contrails.” It seems we humans can only ever think of ourselves, too often not realizing that “our fates are bound/by actions of others    wanting only/to save their skins.” Where to go, the poet asks the reader? From Alberta to Iceland? Then where to? “Fire keeps coming  closer to home/in the warming world.” From here, where I sit and write on an early July morning in Northern Ontario, more than a few days through late June have been days where breathing outside, where walking outside, is almost impossible. That smoke comes from fires in Quebec and Northern Ontario, and it feels as if the world is on fire. Alice Major captures that overwhelming sense of sad inevitability in “A fate for fire.”

In “Knife on Snow,” again a sequence of poems, the poet wonders how a knife has been thrown into a yard full of snow. Has it been thrown down from the heavens? Major suggests the ways in which humans have historically always been at odds with one another, how countries have destroyed other countries to colonize them, and how humans “always seek for portents/in the changing patterns of heaven.” There are thousands of landscapes that have been “claimed, colonized,/borders blurred by blood and burnings, blasts/of man-made armament, tanks massed,/rifle barrels and barrel chests/and borrowed time. Weapons rain,/the sky grows deadly.” The result is that “All war is civil war,/internal to ourselves.” The question is how do we stop ourselves from ruining ourselves and, more importantly, from ruining the planet for future generations?

It would be strange not to address the ways in which the world has changed in the recent pandemic years, how people have become less and less tolerant in so many cases. Major writes a series of poems that focus on anger and on how anger grows and spills over into the world in an unchecked manner. In “Paths integral,” she writes “Where do we/locate the sullen burn of grudge?” and “Where is that/ narrow territory where unnecessary rage roars up when I’m/hurt by something as minor as a stubbed toe?” In “Anger’s arithmetic,” she ponders the ways in which one person “shouting on the corner is a man/haunted by some demon” can morph into “nineteen people might become a mob/primed to lynch.” In “Alarums and excursions,” Major writes of how “now voices rise   uncivil   shouts/disorderly noise   from a nearby street/urgent fragments   profanity/indistinguishable angers    breaking out/in emergency    break glass.” Then, in “Immune response,” she writes of random Zoom bombers who enter virtual rooms to spread racism: “Anger’s/inflammatory response takes down the whole organism.” In the face of the pandemic and the climate crisis, dovetailing tellingly as they did, poems like “Progressive” also speak of how taking a stand for the environment and community can now be a firestarter of its own sort.  

Alice Major’s Knife on Snow is a call to awareness and hope in so many ways. In “Tales of the apocalypse,” she states honestly: “we know we’ve launched this ship ourselves.” So many of us have become “accidental gods,” though, somehow believing that we are above the natural world when we are actually part of it. Forgetting that interwoven aspect of life on earth is egocentric and narrow-minded. Some kind of world will last, she tells us, but what will remain? As if to offer a possible notion, the last section of the collection is titled “Travels in the solar system.” A beautifully crafted series of haibun poems that end with reflections on our self-centredness: “Morning. Social media/the first light we turn to./Brain chemistry changes.” and “One more item ticked/off the bucket list. What to post next/on the photo feed?” Perhaps not much will remain after we disappear, as we’ve become so solipsistic as a society. Perhaps we ought to learn from the natural world before it’s too late.

 

 

 

 

Kim Fahner lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario. Her latest book of poems is Emptying the Ocean (Frontenac House, 2022). She is the First Vice-Chair of The Writers' Union of Canada (2023-25), a member of the League of Canadian Poets, and a supporting member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada. Kim’s first novel, The Donoghue Girl, will be published by Latitude 46 Publishing in Spring 2024. She may be reached via her author website at www.kimfahner.com