Melanie Dennis Unrau : How does a poem begin?

How does a poem begin?

 

 

 

In March 2026, seven versions of my poem “My Lullaby” from my book Goose (Assembly, 2025) were displayed in the Rooster Town Poetry Shed, a sidewalk poetry display in a part of Winnipeg that was built on land the city cleared by evicting the Métis community of Rooster Town. Bernie Kruchak, a white-settler resident who created and curates the Shed as a reconciliation project, went through the early drafts and alternate versions of my Goose poems to put together this series. The text below is adapted from the six artist’s statements I wrote for displaying in the Shed.

This is my first draft of “My Lullaby.” I made it by hand-tracing words and images where they appear in the source poem, using fine-tipped pens on tracing paper. The source is “My Lullaby” from the 1956 edition of Northland Trails by “father of the tar sands” Sidney Clarke Ells (1878-1971), a mining engineer who devoted his career to building a tar-sands industry in the Athabasca region on Treaty 8 territory. Ells’s works are in the public domain. In this version, I test out words and patterns I might want to work with, seeking to convey both Ells’s earnest claims to love the land and my sense that those claims are disingenuous.

 

In this second draft, I lean into the lullaby. Instead of reproducing full words, I break up Ells’s often-cloying language and trace lullaby-like sounds. The effect is satisfyingly silly and ironic.

The third draft narrows the constraint of the previous version to trace only the lullaby-sounds “oo,” “lu,” and “la.” I made a mistake when tracing but continued to see how it would look; the next version would be one of the layers in the version that went in the book.

 

In this version, I trace part of Ells’s illustration for his poem. Eventually, I will end up layering images like this one with the word-layer of my poem.

 

This version combines a word-layer and an image-layer; it’s similar to the way the poem is built in layers over five pages in Goose. I would call this an alternate version of the poem rather than a draft.

 

Another alternate version combines a word-layer with two image-layers.

 

This photo, taken by Bernie Kruchak, shows one page from the five-page version of the poem “My Lullaby” that is published in Goose. Many tracings are layered on top of each other in this version—not so much a “final” version as one variation of a changeable poem.

 

 

 

Melanie Dennis Unrau is a white-settler poet, editor, scholar, parent, and climate organizer from Treaty One territory and Métis homeland in Winnipeg. She is the author of the poetry collections Goose (Assembly, 2025) and Happiness Threads: The Unborn Poems (The Muses’ Company, 2013), and the literary study The Rough Poets: Reading Oil-Worker Poetry (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2024). She co-edited the poetry anthology I’ll Get Right On It: Poems on Working Life in the Climate Crisis (Roseway, 2025).

 

Bernie Kruchak : Rooster Town Poetry Shed — Displaying Poetry, Reconciling History

 

 

 

My name is Bernie Kruchak. I’m a Winnipeg poet and writer. Let me introduce you to Rooster Town Poetry Shed, my personal reconciliation project.

Rooster Town Poetry Shed is a streetside poetry box that displays works by Canadian and international poets while honouring the families of the historical Métis Road Allowance community of Rooster Town, who were forced from their south Winnipeg homes in the 1950s to make way for civic expansion. The Métis community had existed on the fringes of southwest Winnipeg from 1901 to 1959.

The shed is located in my front yard, which is a rooster’s crow away from the final shantytown site. For more information about Rooster Town, check out my website, www.roostertownpoetryshed.ca.

Rooster Town Poetry Shed launched in August, 2025, with an illuminated installation by Jennifer Still, Winnipeg's Poet Laureate. Since then, the shed has showcased poems by Susan Alexander, melanie brannagan frederiksen, Cendrine Marrouat, and others, including a series of successive poems by Melanie Dennis Unrau that demonstrate the poet’s process of writing and illustrating her poetry book, "goose.”

During Truth and Reconciliation Week in September, poems by Indigenous poets, Bethany Whiteknife and Terry Copenace (Kinew Gaabo), were presented. To commemorate the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, the shed displayed Cree-Métis poet Duncan Mercredi’s poem that bears witness to the 215 unmarked graves of Indigenous children discovered on the grounds of the Kamloops Indian Residential School in 2021.

I believe reconciliation is essential to a progressive society. I’ve been an Indigenous ally since 1963, the year that the public school in Sioux Lookout, Ontario, was integrated with children from Pelican Lake Indian Residential School. As an 11-year-old, I knew that what my Anishinaabe classmates were enduring before and after school in their residential setting was wrong. These experiences — theirs and mine — have been a guidepost in my allyship ever since.

To help move reconciliation forward, I want to showcase more magnificent and meaningful poetry by Indigenous and Métis poets. If you are an Indigenous or Métis poet living on Turtle Island who would like to display your work in Rooster Town Poetry Shed, I invite you to contact me, and together we can decide how best to display your poetry. Of course, I have one caveat: No pretendians allowed.

Email me at roostertownpoetryshed@gmail.com. Find out more about the shed at www.roostertownpoetryshed.ca. The shed is on Instagram @roostertownpoetry and Facebook @roostertownpoetryshed.

I’m looking forward to hearing from you.

 

 

 

 

Bernie Kruchak is a writer and poet living on Treaty 1 Territory in Winnipeg, Manitoba. He retired after 35 years as a professional writer to become a re-emerging poet, taking up the torch of literature he'd dropped on his career path. He is currently working on a series of concrete poems and a chapbook, subdivision: broken burb poems, that shines a light on the pretentiousness of suburbia.