rob mclennan : 2024 VERSeFest interviews: Armand Garnet Ruffo

 

Armand Garnet Ruffo is from remote northern Ontario and is a band member of the Chapleau Fox Lake Cree First Nation with familial and historical roots to the Sagamok Anishnawbek First Nation. He is recognized as a major contributor to both contemporary Indigenous literature and Indigenous literary scholarship in Canada. His books include Norval Morrisseau: Man Changing Into Thunderbird, and Treaty #, both finalists for Governor General’s Literary Awards. His latest work includes Reclamation and Resurgence: the Selected Poems of Marilyn Dumont (2024), which he edited, and his own book, The Dialogues: the Song of Francis Pegahmagabow, 2024 winner of “The VMI Betsy Warland Between Genres” Award. He currently lives in Kingston and teaches at Queen’s University.

Armand Garnet Ruffo reads in Ottawa on Saturday, November 30, 2024 as part of Fall into VERSeFest.

rm: When did you first start writing?

AGR: High School. I guess it was poetry, although if anyone asked me what I was doing I said I was writing songs, which I’m happy no longer exist. It wasn’t something that I advertised.

rm: What did those first attempts look like? Were they modelled on anything?

AGR: They were muddled. I spent a lot of time, like most younger writers I suppose, just trying to figure it out. Later when I got to York (and then Ottawa U) and was reading widely, and I was basically sounding like whomever I read. Then one day while I was visiting my grandmother who was living with my aunt in Toronto, we got to talking about my studies and for some reason I mentioned poetry. Then out of the blue she recited me a poem that she had written called “Lost In My Native Land.” ( I later published it in a magazine I was working for in Ottawa called The Native Perspective. She was thrilled.) The form was rather archaic, in the style of Pauline Johnson, but the content blew me away. That’s when I realized I needed to write about my heritage and my own experiences. The writing developed from there. You have to remember that back in the 70s there were very few Indigenous people getting published, very few role models. Not like today.

rm: How did you get from there to the publication of your first book? What was the process of putting an eventual manuscript together?

AGR: Getting published was not straightforward. Most of the work I sent out came back to me with the standard responses, too political, too polemical, etc. (I later learned that other Indigenous poets had experienced the same thing.) As for readings I hardly did any. You have to realize it was a period when Canadian nationalism was still in full throttle. The scene was basically unwelcoming, and I even stopped writing for a period in the early 80s. Then in 89 I sent my work to the Banff Centre and to my utter surprise I got in. Adele Wiseman was the Head of writing. I also met Alistair MacLeod there who invited me to study with him at Windsor U. My first book, consisting of mostly earlier poems, was published by Theytus Books in 1994. It should come as no surprise that it took an Indigenous publisher to get the first book out. At the Banff Centre I had met the editors of Coteau Books, and they published my second book Grey Owl: the Mystery of Archie Belaney, which came out in 1996 and is still in print. The 90s saw a huge shift in the general response to Indigenous writing, and it was a green light from there.

rm: Were there other Indigenous writers you were encountering during this period?

AGR: I guess it was the 80s when started going to hear readings. There was a pretty good poetry scene in Ottawa in those days, as there is today, but I really wasn’t a part of it and, as far as I can recall, there were no other Indigenous writers giving readings either.  I do remember giving a reading at a cafe called The Stone Angel with the great songwriter Willy Dunn. That was an honour.  Songs such as “The Ballad of Crowfoot,” “Son of the Sun,” and “I Pity The Country” were certainly an inspiration.  

At that time I was also writing plays and going to see productions in Toronto by Native Earth Performing Arts. I met Drew Hayden Taylor, Daniel David Moses and Tomson Highway there, but, again, I really wasn’t part of the scene, and I got to know them better in later years at festivals, conferences, etc.  As for Indigenous poets in Ottawa, in the early 90s  I met Anne Acco, Kateri Damm, Greg YoungIng and Joseph Dandurand. We hung out and even formed a poetry group we called W.I.N.O. (I hope you can see the humour.) Ann Acco provided funding for an anthology we put together, which was published in 1994. I also met the novelist Richard Wagamese, who was living in Ottawa and working on his first book Keeper’ n Me. We would meet for coffee and talk about writing. He was incredibly well read.

During this period, I ended up teaching at The En’owkin Centre in Penticton, B.C.  It was a real hub with all kinds of Indigenous writers and artists, either teaching or passing through. Jeannette Armstrong was the Director; Lee Maracle was there; Greg YoungIng was both teaching and editing Theytus Books; Gerry William (a sci-fi writer) was there, as was the Native American poet Maurice Kenny; the poet Annharte visited, etc.  So it was an exciting place to be.  Once Grey Owl came out things changed for me, and I was invited to do readings both nationally and internationally.  I met Marilyn Dumont, Louise Halfe, Garry Gottfriedson, Joanne Arnott, Greg Scofield and Duncan Mercredi, etc. It was an exciting time because Indigenous literature as we know it today was really just getting on its feet.

rm: Grey Owl felt a huge leap in your creative work. What brought you to working that narrative in that particular form?

AGR: I wrote Grey Owl: the Mystery of Archie Belaney because the infamous Archie Belaney lived with my grandmother’s parents in the village of Biscotasing in northern Ontario.  I had grown up with stories about him, and I knew I could complicate the telling.  As for the writing, I thought initially it was going to be a suite of connected poems at best.  However, once I started writing it bloomed into a full  book. I did struggle initially with the book’s POV.  I tried initially to tell it from Grey Owl’s POV and that didn’t work for various reasons. Then I tried write it using an omniscient narrator, ostensibly the poet’s POV, but it didn’t work either. It felt distant and detached.  Then I started to think about how other poets have handled long, narrative poems.  I went back and read Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Atwood’s The Journals of Susanna Moodie, along with a few Native American poets who were on my bookcase, like N. Scott Momaday, Carter Revard, and Ray Young Bear.  As soon as I had a block of uninterrupted time, I just started writing, and once I got into it it actually kind of wrote itself. The multitude of voices seemed to jump onto the page. It’s a gift when that happens.

A few years later after the book was published, I ran into the Metis poet Gregory Scofield, and he told me he had been on a literary jury and Grey Owl came up in their discussion.  He said that others on the jury dismissed it because they said it wasn’t, quote, “pure poetry.” I have to laugh when you think about that today. The takeaway is just do your own thing and don’t worry about what others think. The book is still in print nearly 30 years later. 

rm: It does seem interesting that Grey Owl is simultaneously a work that holds direct influence from now-canonical works while being well ahead of its time, certainly in terms of structure and content alike. Given you recently won the Betsy Warland Between Genres award, I’d say you’ve been playing with genre for some time now. How aware are you of genre when you are working? How are decisions around structure made?

AGR: We talked briefly about this the other evening. I try not to repeat myself, and in that regard I’m very conscious of genre. That said, I never set out to explore a particular kind of form. Each project takes its own shape. To use a well worn metaphor each project is like a newborn who arrives with its own personality. And to extend that, I don’t create the baby and then give it a personality. I’m really unaware until it cries to be fed.  It’s at that moment that I have that “Ahah moment.”  Take The Dialogues, I wrote the libretto, essentially a long narrative poem, after about a year of doing research on the life of Francis Pegahmagabow, the famous WWI sniper.  And in hindsight I would say it developed rather organically alongside the music.  After a few performances I was asked by audience members if I were going to publish it.  I thought about it, but the libretto was not written for the page and that presented a problem. 

When I imagined it without the music, I saw it full of holes, spaces, absences. I had to fill it up, but how?  I came up with the idea to create a dialogue with the libretto that would ‘open it up’ much like the music does on stage. With that in mind, I started to take chunks of the libretto and explore what it was saying, and what I could say about it – and I extrapolated from there.  That’s when the whole left side, right side page thing developed. At first I was just trying to get my ideas down, but later it got to a point where I was carefully fitting bits and pieces of multifarious text together.  And I soon realized that even the various literary forms of the textual inclusions were in a kind of dialogue with each other.  So, yes, as the project developed I became very aware of what I was doing, but only as it developed.  E.L. Doctorow famously said that "writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the trip that way.” I agree with him, and I think it’s a hopeful sentiment for any writer, certainly for me, because I really only see glimpses when I’m writing.

rm: You mention working a libretto, but how aware are you, more generally, of sound or visual components as you write? How do you see sound exist upon the page?

AGR: Like many people I grew up listening to music, which I’ve written about it in my poetry collection At Geronimo’s Grave (winner of the 2001 Archibald Lampman Award), and when I’m working I tend to have something playing in the background. Because I can’t listen to anything with lyrics – it messes with the writing – it’s usually instrumental jazz, and in fact I’ve become a huge jazz fan because of it.  One of the things that I stress to my students is that when they are writing poetry they should read it aloud to hear and feel the rhythm.  So, yes, I’m very conscious of sound value.  As I say in the “Afterword” to The Dialogues, when I was writing the libretto I had to feel the words just as one feels music.

rm: You mention The Dialogues emerging out of doing research on Francis Pegahmagabow. How do such projects begin? Do you dig into researching a subject and see what writing might emerge, or have you a particular goal or shape in mind? Are you researching simply through your own interest and curiosity, and writing becomes a kind of secondary process?

AGR: That’s a good question. The libretto was originally commissioned by The Festival of Sound in Parry Sound for the 35th anniversary of the festival. They paired me with Tim Corlis, a classical composer out of B.C., and it was literally our job to come up with a musical about Frances Pegahmagabow. I talked about the process we went through in the book’s Afterword. Suffice to say here that we drove together from Toronto to  Francis’ home community of Wasauksing (Parry Island) to meet Francis’ family, and we talked, maybe strategized is a better word, about the project on the trip. Eventually Tim would send me snippets of music, and I would listen to them and write, and sometimes I would send him something.  Back to Doctorow’s quote about driving with one headlight; I had a very basic idea of where I wanted to go with libretto in terms of dividing it into three parts, Francis’ early life, the war, and then his political life after the war, but that’s really all I had.  After that it was all about feeling the music and letting the poetry come.  So, yes, I guess it was about letting the writing “emerge” as you put it.  As for the research itself, whether it’s about Grey Owl, or Norval Morrisseau, or Francis Pegahmagabow, it has always been connected to a writing project. There’s always been something in mind.

Miigwech, thanks, for the questions. 

 

 

 

 

 

Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of more than thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, his most recent title is On Beauty: stories (University of Alberta Press, 2024). He is very excited that 2025 will see the publication of the poetry title Snow day (Spuyten Duyvil), the lyric essay a river runs through it: a writing diary (Spuyten Duyvil) and his follow-up to the book of smaller (University of Calgary Press, 2022), the book of sentences (University of Calgary Press). The current Artistic Director of VERSeFest: Ottawa’s International Poetry Festival, he spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta.

rob mclennan : Celebrate Pride with Lockheed Martin, by Jake Byrne

Celebrate Pride with Lockheed Martin, Jake Byrne
A Buckrider Book / Wolsak and Wynn, 2023

 

 

 

 

It’s rare that a contemporary poet announces two poetry titles simultaneously (Winnipeg poet Dennis Cooley is the only recent example that comes to mind,when he had three books with two publishers appear in a single publishing season), even more rare if are paired as debuts, such as the case with Toronto poet and editor Jake Byrne’s eagerly-awaited collections Celebrate Pride with Lockheed Martin (Hamilton ON: Wolsak & Wynn, 2023) and The Tide (Kingston ON: Brick Books, 2024). It would be curious to see how these books exist in tandem, but for now, we’ve Celebrate Pride with Lockheed Martin, published as part of editor Paul Vermeersch’s “A Buckrider Book” imprint. “See I never needed // The actual bomb // The bomb was an idea // We deserved what was coming // And because the idea // Prefigured the bomb // The idea of the bomb and the work of the bomb are one.” Byrne writes, as part of the extended opening poem, “A BOUQUET OF KETCHUP-FLAVOURED ROSES.” “I want spring // To bust open on my like a fistful of girls // In yellow dresses // Girls // Drooling hot blood // From full lips [.]” Celebrate Pride with Lockheed Martin is an ambitious collection with a wide scope, examining “the complexities of modern queer life” as well as savage indictments of “capitalism and war, and the co-opting of queer culture by them both.” This is a book of sex and swagger, big targets and large ambition, and Byrne declares their intent from the get-go. There is such a clear-headed fearlessness to these lyrics, one that is self-aware and savage, offering layers of first-person observation, reportage, document and critique. “I saw a man I vaguely wanted,” opens the poem “I SAW A MAN I VAGUELY WANTED,” offering a kind of structural throwback to a poetry from an earlier part of the prior century (alternately riffing off Robert Creeley’s “I saw a man,” perhaps, as well), “Smoking on a concrete planter / An open sore like a USB port / Amid his monochrome tattoos [.]”

Byrne writes of theatre, geography, atrocity and queerness in a layering of sections within sections, each of which feel composed from within very particular cultural and personal moments. “I just did monogamy / At the sex party,” the poem “THE SUN HAS NEVER LOOKED SO LARGE” begins, “I only had sex with two people in four hours / The sun on the train blinded me / I looked right at it / There was a crescent within its light / Now I see nothing [.]” Set just beyond opening sequence “A BOUQUET OF KETCHUP-FLAVOURED ROSES,” the first section provides the collection its title—“DISPATCHES: CELEBRATE PRIDE WITH LOCKHEED MARTIN”—and breaks down into a sequence of poem-clusters set around a variety of geographies: “OŚWIĘCIM,” “MONTREAL,” “CLEVELAND,” “HELSINKI,” “LISBON,” “TORONTO,” “BUDAPEST,” “BERLIN,” “PETERBOROUGH,” “LONDON,” “CFB WING 22 NORAD UNDERGROUND COMPLEX NORTH BAY” and “PANTEX FACILITY, AMARILLO.” Theirs is a lyric blend of dream-space and cutthroat narrative precision, wistful pondering and catty remarks, combined with an air of notebook or journal entries. “First you came for the far-right camerawomen,” Byrne writes, to open the poem “KELETI STATION,” “and I did not speak out, for I was not a fuckwit. / Now, watching the footage, it’s like a foreign film / I watched as a child in a dream, a soundtrack / of moonlight with occasional cicada.” What might this future bring, once the second of these paired collections lands, I wonder? This is a book of anxieties, desire, hardcore declarations, queerness and righteous indignation, composing rebukes as sly offhanded comments that usually find their targets. This is a book of distances, from those travelled to those between, as the piece “POEM FOR KEN” begins:

Is this a love poem? I do not write love poetry
Do not know how
Am motivated to the page
Primarily by anxiety, despair
Occasionally a vicarious mood of luxury. But never love
Which is too intense, too fleeting.
I get swept up in its refrains.
Besides, I did not love you. We did not have time.
It would not have worked if we did.
I already have two boyfriends and live a world away.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of more than thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, he won the John Newlove Poetry Award in 2010, the Council for the Arts in Ottawa Mid-Career Award in 2014, and was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2012 and 2017. In March, 2016, he was inducted into the VERSe Ottawa Hall of Honour. His most recent titles include the poetry collections the book of smaller (University of Calgary Press, 2022) and World’s End, (ARP Books, 2023), and a suite of pandemic essays, essays in the face of uncertainties (Mansfield Press, 2022). Oh, and he has a substack now! He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com

Jérôme Melançon : The Shadow List, by Jen Sookfong Lee

The Shadow List, Jen Sookfong Lee
Buckrider Books, 2021

 

 

 

 

The poem “Anatomy," from the collection The Shadow List, feels like an exhilarating sprint away from certain death, past scenes that might draw you in and hold you in the thick glue of memory. None of that happens in the poem, mind you – the poem deals with how a woman relates to her bruised body. Jen Sookfong Lee ends the reader's dash through “Anatomy” with a still image, a surprising calm moment of dream-like lack of breathlessness, and punctuates the biting calmness of this ending with a simple line: “You may as well have no skin at all.” (72)

That line, its clear indication that there is skin, its implicit portrayal of brokenness and violence, its blurring of you as speaker speaking to themself, of you as unnamed addressee of the speaker, of speaker and author, of you as reader; it casual harshness, its sadness – that line has come to represent Lee’s collection The Shadow List to me, as I move through it out of order now.

I came to this collection late – even Wolsak and Wynn thought so. I had listened to Lee talk about writing it on Can’t Lit, the fantastic podcast she co-hosts with Dina Del Bucchia, and then talk about the collection on a very special episode of the podcast. I kept meaning to get the collection, request it, read it, and even when I finally received it I let it sit and even when I picked it up I was not ready for it. I had read some of Lee’s novels – I couldn’t help but see her in the lines “You are used to writing novels, / to placing a human in the middle / of a slowly unwinding nighttime dilemma, / darkness hiding her indecisive, rock-heavy feet” (33) – so I was expecting a darkness. But I hadn’t anticipated the confusion in relation between self and self and other that the collection brought about. By confusion, I mean that the poem titled “Third Person Intimate,” where the above lines appear, is about a novelist’s protagonist, written in the second person, about a writer that feels like Lee but, the podcast episode tells me clearly (that is, if I recall it correctly), is another character, one who feels so completely alive and real. Are there different speakers in these poems then, each a different character? Does Lee herself speak? How do they all feel so alive, how do they carry so much sadness and hurt?

These questions are easily reversed into answers: the poems may be an exploration of sadness and hurt, drawing on lived experiences but transformed into other people’s. But I remain awed by the craft, stuck with the question how does she do it? How does Lee give me the sense that there are many real people in all these poems, to the point where I have to force myself to not read her into each character, knowing that would be entirely wrong and missing the point? While the speakers and the addressees feel entirely real, the second person writing annuls any sense of confession, and the fragmentary insight leave out any omniscience. We’re left to observe, and wait.

Looking into moments of anguish in these character-speakers' lives, we’re left with a sense of darkness. While there’s much sadness, loneliness, and aftermaths of violence in the text, these poems respond in kind, bringing into play alternative experiences, active and willful ones, of sadness and loneliness; a violence, a rage, a fury that might end violence by bringing another reality into being: "This violence, this volume / is how you will try to change what seems like fate." (16)

Further, on this darkness: I may never have read a book that takes place so completely at night. Everything is bathed in a worrisome yellow, reminded me of streetlights from before LED bulbs, or bedside lamps before cell phones. The film noir book cover certainly does its part. Silence, loneliness again, the many directions shadows can occupy at once. And through all this fear, the attempt to see: to really focus on what isn't coming to light, to stare so hard the light might direct itself toward it:

"The broken lamp beside the garage buzzing, a raccoon

walking upside down, claws tapping and tapping
on the gutter it clings to. You squint, the continued
watch in the night. The black hurts your eyes.
Do you know what you're watching for?" (41)

Lee places the tumult inside, even as it is projected outside: "The wind is in your mouth now anyway, a cyclone." (42) The shadow list is one that accompanies the expected, imposed list of wishes – a list of desires, not forbidden or hidden, but rather desires that are as ordinary as the shinier, movie-inflected ones we expect to find in other people; desires, however, that are simply not supposed to be spoken even if they are already shared by others.

This shadow list is also a matter of diction: among children, dogs, bunnies, and raccoons (more than one and more than once!), Lee places words that slice: sliver, cracking, pyrite, scythe, chrysanthemums; slip/scream placed near each other; "fractures thin as threads"; "secrets, indecent and jagged"; "the skinniest shadows"; "the knife edges of paper"; "the edges of your longwear lipstick like scalpels" – and as with "edge," a careful repetition of words here and there in the collection, visible threads that hold the assemblage together.

One poem spells out a task, perhaps inherited as fate: "The lights are what people want to remember. [...] Only you will remember." (43) Only you, however you, as in a fate or mission of sorts; Only you, you alone, as in the loneliness and withdrawal within oneself that creeps through the collection. I could keep quoting from this immense poem, “Tornado,” that stands in the middle, at the top, of this collection. Others reach further into various pasts, some slow down to describe the bodies of men, the softness and vulnerability around their hardness. Some, only a few, indicate the possibility of futures by lingering on the obliviousness of children to their present.

The future isn't within the scope of this book, which is solidly set in the present and what we make of the past. The Shadow List is very much what it has to be: its length gives us a sense of plenty, but no bounty, only satisfaction. There’s pain, but no exposure, no room to stand as a voyeur. And the more I read these poems, the more riveting they become – what a feat it is to make non-narrative poems so riveting, so revealing of what we keep to ourselves.

 

 

 

 

 

Jérôme Melançon writes and teaches and writes and lives in oskana kâ-asastêki / Regina, SK. His most recent chapbook is with above/ground press, Tomorrow’s Going to Be Bright (2022, after 2020’s Coup), and his most recent poetry collection is En d’sous d’la langue (Prise de parole, 2021). He has also published two books of poetry with Éditions des Plaines, De perdre tes pas (2011) and Quelques pas quelque part (2016), as well as one book of philosophy, La politique dans l’adversité (Metispresses, 2018). He has edited books and journal issues, and keeps publishing academic articles that have nothing to do with any of this. He’s on Twitter mostly, and sometimes on Instagram, both at @lethejerome.

Kim Fahner : Nothing Will Save Your Life, by Nancy Jo Cullen

Nothing Will Save Your Life, Nancy Jo Cullen
Wolsak and Wynn, 2022

 

 

 

 

Nancy Jo Cullen’s collection of poems, Nothing Will Save Your Life, is rooted in everyday rhythms and routines, during what has become an extraordinary time in human history. She searches for meaning in a world that sometimes seems to have lost its way. In “Humans on Mars,” she writes of the climate crisis: “And now, the hottest month yet recorded/While fire creates its own wind & takes flight/And the eternal shore waits, endangered/And (again) we have sinned through our own faults.” The children of climate change and crisis have “become students of commerce.” In “Nothing Beside Remains,” Cullen writes of a generation of children who “have Instagrammed themselves,” forgetting what was here “before we were the lost,” when “we were the living things.” In “Bubble,” she examines the solipsism that is central to social media these days, the superficial illusions of lives that are carefully curated: “Everything we want is on our timeline/& all our fifty thousand thoughts per day/are a limbic reactivity feed.” This sense of how we have fallen, at the work of our own hands, and how we destroy not only ourselves but the world within which we live, is a thematic thread that runs clearly through Nothing Will Save Your Life.

A series of poems that are all titled “Current Mood” are placed throughout the collection, as if the poet is taking a temperature, checking in on state of being or thinking. In the first, the poet writes of the “collision of songbird with windscreen/Immanent or occurring thunderstorms/A dog, alone and shaking in the dark.” All images are signs of impending or current upset, a frisson of static electricity before something woeful arrives or happens. Further in the collection, another “Current Mood” poem asks: “Who gets to be angry, Fish Face, why you so sad?/This grey weather will be the end of you//Yes, there are women all over the Internet/Yes, there are mothers immersed in nostalgia/But you have to stop thinking/Whatever!” It would be easier to not worry as much, to not notice the world falling apart, but it is impossible not to care. Part of our humanness, the poet seems to be saying, is that we must care, even if it upsets us.

The title poem, “Nothing Will Save Your Life,” is a reminder that humans—despite wanting desperately to be in control of our lives—never will be. It begins with a statement of fact: “Fifty percent of the Beatles are dead.” A meditation on youth and aging, and on how we are shaped by our parents’ and families’ beliefs and expectations, “Nothing Will Save Your Life” is full of beautiful echoes as the poet reflects on the fact that “I lost the one faith I thought I had./but first I was a child of devotion.” References to Catholicity are present throughout the book, and this is reflected in the archetype of a statue of Mary on the cover itself. If you have been raised Catholic, whether you practice now or not, you’ll recognize the references and nod to yourself. In the final stanza, the poet writes: “Yeah, yeah, yeah, we danced & we were redeemed/but not even poetry will save our lives.” Poetry will perhaps help us get through them, though, especially in difficult times such as these ones.

In “Slip,” the poet creates a reflective meditation about the passage of time, writing: “In less time than you can imagine I was four years old; was I five?” And then there is a reference to being fourteen, and later, the speaker talks of how loneliness “can travel for generations in a pair of commonsense shoes.” In “A Thing of Beauty,” there is a consideration of aging and how women must deal with society’s erasure of their worth, based on how their physical body ages: “You, now without the qualities that are typical of beauty,/find your individual unit of capital is no longer in demand…Your individual unit of capital is no longer in demand/& women have been burned for far less than that hair on your chin.” Despite this natural aging process that we are all a part of, “each year the birds get drunk on summer.” There is a return, a natural cycle and system, that we cannot ignore or defeat. Better to learn to accept the aging process, but still fight against the misogynistic stereotypes that a patriarchal society has fashioned around women and aging. Better to speak up, through poetry and art, than to be silent.

The poems in Nancy Jo Cullen’s Nothing Will Save Your Life are full of references to pinpoints in memory, with specific references to tiny details of lives lived. In the specific images, the reader sees time passing, people living and dying, all of us passing through this place and not being here for long. There is an awareness of how family influences personal evolution, and how the women we come from form us, and how we must also push back against those patterns that were introduced to us by family, as well as by patriarchal structures of school, church, and society. The final poem, “Evensong,” as a counterpoint to the warnings in the collection, offering hope for the present and the future. Cullen writes: “—on the other hand, we’re still alive &/lilacs, behind the elm, are uncurling…The monks move slowly into the temple/& our hands, our mouths, rise in exaltation.” Yes, this is a key lesson of the poems Cullen offers us here: despite the struggle—despite our falling repeatedly—we must also always get up afterwards. That’s what poetry does. It helps us rise.

 

 

 

 

Kim Fahner lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario. Her new book of poems, Emptying the Ocean, was just released by Frontenac House in October. She’s a member of the League of Canadian Poets, the Ontario Representative of The Writers’ Union of Canada (2020-24), and a supporting member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada. Kim may be reached via her author website at www.kimfahner.com

Kim Fahner : Straggle: Adventures in Walking While Female, by Tanis MacDonald

Straggle: Adventures in Walking While Female, Tanis MacDonald
Wolsak and Wynn, 2022

 

 

 

 

If you’re a woman who loves to walk on her own—in urban or rural areas—Tanis MacDonald’s Straggle: Adventures in Walking While Female is a collection that should most definitely be on your bookshelf. A hybrid compilation of personal essays and poetry, Straggle broaches several pertinent themes. MacDonald adeptly considers the act of walking in nature “as disability writing, as a feminist world view and as an assault survivor narrative.” She also clearly positions herself as a settler, taking white privilege into account, writing: “Wherever I walk, I know it’s my responsibility to consider the history of colonization in Canada and not just be overwhelmed by the beauty of the land.” This is not just a book of ‘look at the lovely herons and red-winged blackbirds I’m seeing on a morning walk through a regional conservation area.’ Rather, it’s a collection that calls the reader to task, asking them to question their own place as a walker, as a settler, as a human. The multiplicity of Straggle is what makes it so appealing to me as a reader, thinker, settler, feminist, and writer. The various themes ribbon themselves through the book, stepping back and then reintroducing themselves later, so that you are never really allowed to sit back and not take note of your own preconceived notions of what it is to be a woman who walks in a world that is so very rarely kind, fair, or just.

MacDonald’s thesis is clearly set out in the introduction. Straggle is, she says, “a book about imperfect walking in imperfect situations: sometimes dangerous, sometimes defiant, sometimes just trying to get down the street.” She asks her reader: “What if walking is as much a problem as it is a pleasure?” As I read the pieces, I nodded to myself and muttered, “Yes, a problem if you walk alone…” Because—let’s face it—if you’re a woman, you know that you are constantly aware of where you are walking, what surrounds you, who could be a potential threat, and how best you will deal with any confrontation. Men will not understand how much this sense of hypervigilance—and exhaustion, even—can colour a woman’s solitary walk. If we were to take a poll of walkers, I’d guess that most women, at some point in their lives, have felt terribly unsafe, or have been sexually harassed or assaulted, on a walk in a public space. “Safe spaces,” it often seems, just don’t exist, and maybe they never really have, even though it seems to make men feel better if they believe in something as nebulous as Snuffleupagus when they think women can ever walk safely.

In “We, Megafauna,” MacDonald considers how writing about the natural world is akin to writing about human violence, in how the body of a deer is “like the body of a woman found in the woods. The body becomes reduced so quickly to the question of who sees her and who does not.” Later, the writer finds comfort in the woods because they will not “sweet-talk or gaslight me…” and will “never pretend to be anything more than they are.” Yes. This.

Later, in the powerful essay, “Veil, Valley, Viaduct,” MacDonald recalls a walk along the Bloor Street Viaduct in the 1990s while she was in her 20s, including the clever way in which she used pieces of Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion as a way to distract a potential attacker until she was safely away from him. While she uses the retelling of the story to keep him busy, she herself rattles off a litany of points to keep calm. “I tried to count my blessings: (1) still alive, (2) still talking, (3) still moving towards the lights of safety, (4) still alive.” Years later, on a walk with other women at the base of the viaduct, she notes the female sculpture, “a woman bent over in a crouch, her veiled head obscuring her face unless you knelt down and peered at her.” The essay leaves you thinking about female agency and voice in the face of male violence, in the shadow of patriarchy, in the way in which a woman needs to constantly be hypervigilant in living her life—even in the simplest of ways.

The spectre of sexual assault is present throughout Straggle. The vulnerability of a woman walking is parallel to the vulnerability of a woman who has been harassed or violated sexually. In the poem, “A Feminist Guide to Reservoirs,” the speaker says: “You have long/suspected capitalism hates//women and geese crave/stormwater/and gender parity.” The speaker continues, clinically voiced, a bit later in the poem: “One in three/women will/be sexually assaulted.” A voice replies, saying that they did not know of that statistic, and the response is chilling: “No one is, until/you are.” Again, MacDonald’s lines—whether in poetry or prose—cut through the complacency of cultivated and curated illusion. There are references to women who have survived sexual assault and violence, and to those who have not.

The poetry in Straggle is full of MacDonald’s customary wit and wordplay, as if she is in the middle of a verbal and intellectual fencing match. It’s always refreshing. In “Daphne in Lockdown,” “Daphne at Laurel Creek,” and “Daphne in Solidarity,” she plays with the Greek myth of Daphne, who was relentlessly pursued by Apollo, and only saved because the goddess Gaia turned her into a laurel tree.  In her namesake poem, Daphne “knows her long division; she’s the remainder.” The poet writes: “But Gaia save us from these pouty boys, when the god of reason becomes the grubby-handed patron saint of baby, you’re so fine. Hey, sonny Apollo: Don’t strip her leaves. Don’t wear her out or on your head….She sees you, circlet jerk, and she’s adding you up on her branches.”

Then, in the final poem, MacDonald uses a feminist lens to draw a parallel to the colonization of this country: “There’s always someone who thinks they own you,/thinks they decide for you, can trace where you are and/name you, dam you, reserve you, bury you, feed you/garbage and blame you. I’ll call you water, if you call me land.” She reminds her readers to consider how misogyny, racism, and patriarchal societal structures are the same ones that brought Europeans to ‘settle’ a land that was never theirs in the first place. A settler woman walking must also be mindful of the provenance of the land, and of the treaties and territories within which she walks.

So much of what Tanis MacDonald’s Straggle: Adventures in Walking While Female does—in all its hybrid wonder—is make a reader think about how identity, personal agency, self-reflection, oppression, gender, violence, equity, diversity, and colonization can all be tied to the physical act of women walking, speaking, and taking up their rightful space. As MacDonald writes, “This is the female forest. Walk as you would be seen.” For me, as a woman who loves to walk, Straggle has made me think differently about the way I have been positioned (and often positioned myself) in the world—as I live, walk, think, write, and teach. Others, I think, will benefit from a close reading of this new collection. I’ve learned to walk more mindfully, considering contexts larger than the one within which I live. For that, I am most grateful.

 

 

 

 

Kim Fahner lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario. Her most recent book is These Wings (Pedlar Press, 2019) and her new book, Emptying the Ocean, will be published by Frontenac House in Fall 2022. She's a member of the League of Canadian Poets, the Ontario Representative for The Writers' Union of Canada (2020-24), and a supporting member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada. Kim may be reached via her author website at www.kimfahner.com