D.A. Lockhart : Three poems

Pigeon Medicine Dance Through Tunnel Plaza

          after Eminem’s “Without Me”

When I arrive know that it shall come with cursing and chest pounding gestures of primate dominance. Crossing this medicine line, tucked as it is beneath the upward glass claws of the Renaissance Center, is a ritual that amounts to calling intents in small distances. Inch the car forward, towards the barrier arm and booth border. This process the very outcome our great-great-great-grandparents warned would arrive because another blowhard chief willfully traded everything for a glorified QVC pitch about freedom and unending sunshine on the land. Nine cars deep of antsy lane watching, radio scans, and checklist of half truths prepared for an officer in uniform protecting families from families.  Feel the tension soon as someone mentions me. Pale skin Indians with a mouth as free as departed ancestors the tension that would start with a slow roll up, window down, and invitation. Here's my ten cents, my two cents is free .A nuisance, who sent, you sent for me? Ford Escape before me moves ahead to booth under a chorus of pigeon coos. From overhang, mottled pigeon flutters to ground before my car. Three head bobs it proclaims, I said, this looks like a job for me. So everybody just follow me.

          Border barrier arm

          sways in wind, Pigeon lands

          struts past booth.

They Shall Know Us By Our Motion

          after Jr Jr.s “If You Didn’t See Me (Then You Weren’t on the Dance Floor)”

When the ancestors fled Lenapehoking they hauled our relations bones across the mountains and brought them to dance before in the Big House on the new territories. Taken out at least once per year, they would return in shared dance from the great white way. You are supposed to surrender to the bass. You are supposed to blend into this place. Think of these moves as she strikes the forms new eddies and currents atop the Cobo Hall rooftop garage. This her homeland, this the air, winter earth she and her ancestors pull their movements from. Her eyes on me now that says you aren’t there for the noise. But these moves and the welcome that comes on in the earnest moments between and you hear in her gestures that you are supposed to pull her like the sun pulls the earth. Dance with her in those rooftop parking lot. Understand that the river flows and traffic moves clear and lonely down Atwater past the shell of an old hockey arena. And up here, it’s all views, and the white hush of persistent wind. And her dancing into the rush and noise of it all. You should know by now that we are just gonna keep on moving on.

                     Orange monorail car

          floats past Joe Louis skeleton.

          iron spine frames passage.

Engine Block Love at All Night Coney Island

          after the Detroit Cobra’s “Hittin’ on Nothing”

Before us, a city that approaches creation with engine block love. Each of its movements the result of metal on metal collisions, each with growing entropic heat, brattles in, releases in Ford Avenue traffic. Late night parade of taillights between suburban tavern stops, late night pot dealer runs, and the hot clumsiness of dark bedrooms with the right type of strangers. This the back story to the Bell’s Two-Hearted fueled moves I make on the improbable brunette with the cardinal arm sleeve. She answers my moves with a look that speaks to third law  thermodynamics and the soft way strong women answer “you can keep your sweet talk.” National Coney Island dinner stools our post-bar early morning anchors to a world that shall move behind closed eyelids. Two plates of coney detritus and in the glimmer of food cooled blood, I can hear in a cockeyed smile and arched back tease, you ain’t hittin on nothing unless you got something for me.

                     Pies orbit around

                     fluorescent light tubes. Two

          sugar pie slices, removed.

D.A. Lockhart is the author Devil in the Woods (Brick Books, 2019), Wenchikaneit Visions (Black Moss Press, 2019), and Breaking Right (Porcupine's Quill, 2020). His work has appeared widely throughout Turtle Island including Best Canadian Poetry 2019, The Malahat Review, Grain, CV2, TriQuarterly, The Fiddlehead, and Belt. He is pùkuwànkoamimëns of the Moravian of the Thames First Nation. Lockhart currently resides at Waawiiyaatanong where he is the publisher at Urban Farmhouse Press.

Amanda Anastasi: Using Poetry to Communicate the Climate Crisis

Producing poems on the theme of climate change across a 3-year residency is an exciting, challenging and somewhat daunting task. For almost 12 months now, I have been Poet in Residence at the Monash Climate Change Communication Research Hub (MCCCRH) at Monash University in Melbourne. The focus of the MCCCRH is to communicate climate science in a way that is clear, easy to understand and advocacy-free, with the aim of increasing its accessibility and to cut through misinformation. At the Hub, it is understood that by forming innovative, multidisciplinary connections with writers, musicians, communication specialists, weather forecasters and other professionals and organisations, that climate science can be conveyed in new and creative ways that everyday people can relate to.

Shortly before my residency, I began working on a series of poems set in the year 2042, an envisioned future landscape based on current trajectories. It was the first time, aside from writing ekphrasis poetry, that I had challenged myself to write poems that were purposefully (albeit loosely) thematic. In both this work and my climate change writing, the approach has been to focus on the domestic, everyday and human-centred, presenting a kind of flip side to anthropogenic life. I knew that the primary challenge in writing about climate change would be to explore a very bleak subject in a way that wouldn’t be utterly devoid of hope. So far, my focus has been to confront the reader with the reality of the situation through strong, vivid imagery regarding human and surrounding animal and landscape impacts. I felt that the poems needed to – whatever the specific subjects chosen – look the uncomfortable truth in the eye.

There has always been something greatly poetic and emotionally engaging to me about the clash between humans and nature. So too, the displacement of humans from their customary comfort and routine. As far back as 2011, I depicted the aftermath of cyclone Yasi in Queensland. I had felt moved to write about the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the US in 2010, and a community on northern Victoria’s border coming together to save a one-thousand-year old tree. Of course, I have written poems unrelated to environmental issues, spanning love, grief, family, suburbia and the city loop train. I soon realised that I would be writing about all of these things still, as the impacts of climate change increasingly enter the domain of our day-to-day lives. We will still be navigating our families and friends, going to work and school and falling in love.

But where to start? In the latter part of 2019, I was invited to attend lectures in climate science communication at Monash. I quietly sat at the back of a lecture theatre with a class of undergraduates, as we were shown scientific and historical graphs, data and images, delivered by scientists, communications experts and knowledge brokers. To say it was confronting would be an understatement. I realised that the climate crisis was, in fact, a worse situation than I had originally thought or imagined. It was a truly heavy realisation. I began looking for the human stories within the scientific data, and finding the relatable images and events that would touch people and create emotional connection and response to the issue.

In one of the lectures, an image of a tired and emaciated polar bear balancing himself on a thin piece of ice was presented. I found myself extremely moved by this direct, inarguable image and knew I would be writing about the plight of this creature. I began researching reports about polar bears being sighted in Russian villages, having travelled from the Arctic to the panic of local people. One such event in Belushya Guba on Novaya Zemlya in Russia was depicted in my poem ‘The Invasion’. ‘Bat Piles’, is a poem told from the point of view of a wildlife officer walking through the piles of dead bats wiped out by heat waves, based on several events in South East Queensland and New South Wales. One likely future scenario that compelled me was that of extreme weather keeping children and families indoors and unable to venture out or play outside. I wrote the poem ‘Into the Heat’ about children craving outside play, including incidences of people ignoring warnings and risking their lives by going out.

Now, in the time of COVID-19, this poem feels more current than futuristic. In Australia, almost immediately before COVID-19 occurred, we had endured the worst bushfire crisis our country had seen. It spanned 12.6 million hectares. For the first time in my life, the air quality was declared hazardous in my Melbourne suburb due to bushfire smoke from country Victoria, and we were encouraged to stay inside and wear masks when leaving the house. Melbourne, a place that had been declared the world’s most liveable city for 7 consecutive years prior, was now suddenly feeling the frightening impacts of extreme weather. Sadly, we knew that we were the lucky Australians whose houses remained intact and with better air quality than Sydney and Canberra to the north of us. During this crisis, which occurred across December 2019 and January 2020, we felt that the future was indeed here.

A large part of my writing on climate has been working on numerous one-line or monostich poems. As the Hub has a strategic preference for short, accessible messaging, and knowing that Instagram poetry has been gaining popularity, I explored the idea of pairing one-line poems with pictorial images in a shareable meme format. So far, I have written 22 one-line poems about climate change and there are more in the works. These have been of great interest beyond those who usually read poetry, including being featured in the Bulletin of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society (BAMOS). I am also currently working with a fellow member of the Hub on a school lesson plan to communicate climate change in Australian classrooms, where my one-line poems will be studied in Year 7 English classes.

In October 2019, I had the opportunity to be a part of the panel ‘Feeling the Heat: Exploring Compassion in Climate Change’, joining the MCCRH contingent at the History of Emotions Conference at the University of New England in New South Wales. In my first conference paper, I wrote and presented ‘The Emotional Impact of Climate Storytelling Through Poetry’ in the dry and drought-affected New South Wales Highlands, a region very close to where fires were then burning. I vividly recall travelling from Sydney to Armidale in a small plane and looking down at a landscape covered by a vast shadow of smoke.

This month, my new poems have been posted on the MCCCRH site including a poem about the wonder of a child being exposed to grass for the first time (‘Charlotte in her Natural Habitat’), a poem about loggers returning to bushfire-affected areas in Victoria and New South Wales (‘Loggers, Post Fire’) and a poem about the common sight of a displaced koala ‘(Koala Holds Up Traffic’). Next on my agenda is to write a creative response to Assembly for the Future’s project ‘The Things We Did Next’ – a collaborative practice generating a series of artworks and provocations via Zoom that collectively imagine multiple futures.

By poetically responding to current events and imagining and reimagining futures, I hope to hone my writing craft while finding and telling the climate change stories that need to be heard and shared. Hopefully, it will cause one or two or more people to think more deeply about climate change and how a single species’ extinction or a burning tree affects us all.

The climate change poems I have written to date can be read here, with more poems to be added in May and November every year until July 2022.

Amanda Anastasi is an Australian poet whose work has appeared on the walls of Prahran’s Artists Lane in Melbourne to The Massachusetts Review. Her debut poetry collection was 2012 and other poems. Amanda has been the recipient of a Wheeler Centre Hot Desk Fellowship and is currently Poet in Residence at the Monash Climate Change Communication Research Hub.

Shazia Hafiz Ramji : Fears, Anxieties, Schisms, Trends: An Interview with Conor McDonnell

Conor McDonnell is a physician & poet. He has published two chapbooks, The Book of Retaliations (Anstruther Press), and Safe Spaces (Frog Hollow Press). He received Honourable Mention for The Fiddlehead’s 2018 Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize, was shortlisted for the RawArtReview 2019 Charles Bukowski Prize, and was runner-up in the Vallum 2019 Contemporary Poetry Prize. His debut collection will be published later this year. Conor chats fears, anxieties, schisms, trends, and Nick Cave, with Shazia Hafiz Ramji.

Shazia Hafiz Ramji: Your chapbook, Safe Spaces, was published in 2017 by Frog Hollow Press. How did you land this sweet deal?

Conor McDonell: Hey, Shazia, I suppose I was very lucky, really. I’m not a networker (in any facet of my life) so I have always tended to develop close connections with small numbers of people, and it’s on me to choose those people wisely. Paul Vermeersch was an early teacher who grew to become a close friend and ongoing mentor. He introduced me to Jim Johnstone who published my first chapbook with Anstruther Press and who also grew to be a fierce friend, supporter and mentor. Shane Neilson is a close colleague of Jim’s and Jim encouraged me to submit my next project to Frog Hollow Press. Shane was most generous with his time and energy, we worked closely on the book together, he had me read aloud many times and made me think about the work from within the work. We also laughed a lot, over two lines in particular! I enjoyed working with Shane on Safe Spaces and learned a lot from the experience as was previously the case with Jim and Paul.

SHR: On your blog, you’ve said that Safe Spaces “is a collection of lyric poems which explore personal fears and anxieties as they connect and exist within larger societal trends and schisms.” What are the fears, anxieties, schisms, trends, at the heart of this beautiful chappie?

CM: Thank you for the chappie comment, very generous. I suppose I started writing and publishing at a weird time and place in my life: everything else felt sorted in many ways - relationships, career, health, etc and yet something always feels not quite right to me. I have certainly had some bad stuff happen (like most people), I have reached middle-age and everything from the outside looks rosy but my job terrifies me on a daily basis because I could legitimately kill someone if I have an “off-day.” I have gradually come to realize that the wounds of childhood such as anxiety, grief, night-terrors, PTSD, may sometimes go to sleep for a few years but eventually come back to assail us. At some point in developing Safe Spaces it felt that my function (in writing, in my career) was to publicly declare “yes, I know, this does feel awful,” or, as I say to many of the children I work with, “it’s okay to be scared, tell me what scares you most and let’s talk about that first.” Some parents / patients / families are very uncomfortable with that level of honest engagement so I tend to take the debris from such moments and place it within a universal set of images/circumstances that reflect the “fears, anxieties, schisms, trends, at the heart of this beautiful chappie,” lol. I always hope that someone will read one of my poems and think, “oh, I’m not alone” but I also know a reader won’t trust work that doesn’t feel authentic. I believe authenticity either comes from having lived a thing, or, from having genuine informed empathy for somebody who has. It’s incredibly important to not feel alone, to not feel isolated. I suffer from some pretty aggressive anxiety but one thing that helps me is that I don’t feel alone with my struggles. In my writing I adopt characters, personae, voices etc where I sense that same struggle and fear and I try to externalize it, make it more recognizable. I want people to know I’m open to being part of their conversation so in that regard I try to be more universal than personal with my poems.

Also, no small thing, the book eventually became very much about grief and surviving said state. The book is dedicated to two families, one of which is Nick Cave’s after the sudden loss of their teenage son in a tragic accident. Cave’s first album after his son’s death, Skeleton Tree, was released during the writing of Safe Spaces. I saw him live in Toronto at this time and had a bit of an out of body co-experience with Cave himself. I wrote a poem on the way home that night (Better Living Through Carpentry) and from that point on the book became a treatment of shared grief, the pain of moving forward and the necessity of experiencing all that comes with that. I accept now that most of my anxiety emanates from a combination of grief and anger. I also accepted my physical pain does not always need to be treated or managed, sometimes it simply needs to be acknowledged, first and foremost by me. So, I resolved to talk about that, describe that, vivisect myself with open arms and ears in as honest and creative a way as my meagre talents would allow; hope that my bones might become a map of sorts, follow any rib to get to the heart.

I just now revisited my website where you grabbed that sound-bite and I notice the next line reads, “These poems address what increasingly goes unsaid by creating a unique space and voice for each piece to be absorbed.” It occurs to me that this book snagged between two opposing sentiments: the dedication page contains a quote from the Cave song, “Skeleton Tree,”  which reads “I called out right across the sea, but the echo comes back empty and nothing is for free.” I think I married that to something Robin Richardson said the first time we spoke, she said “please, as an emerging poet, say something.” So, I guess I called out, and in the face of the deafening silence that greets most poetry releases, I created some of the responses I needed to hear as well…

SHR: Thank you for being so candid, Conor. The sense of responsibility you have as a pediatric anesthesiologist translates to tenderness and authenticity in your poems, and I can’t thank you enough for it.

I saw Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds on the same tour as you! Did you see his fan letter to the 10-year-old earlier this year? I was so moved by it. You said that you hope your poems will make someone feel less alone and I think this is what Nick Cave has done for this kid, Ptolemy. I cried seeing that letter, because I did feel like that kid, and I wished that someone had said that to me – to have the strength to be who you are, to like what you like, to do what you want to do, from such a young age. It would’ve made me feel less alone for sure. Would you say writing poems helps you acknowledge your pain and learn how to live?

CM: Yes, yes, yes, you’re talking about The Red Hand Files website! That letter was so moving, and it was incredible that he had already formed a memory of the child from noticing them in the audience at the previous night’s performance. I find Cave’s journey, from one which used to make fun of fan-letters on film to the patient open considerate human being he is now, to be quite inspirational and it makes me optimistic that people can change. Here is someone we considered to basically be a murder-balladeer 25 years ago, now he’s the canary for our humanity as we step into the coal-mine. And, I don’t think this is solely because of his son’s death, he can barely have started to truly process that. I think this change is down to two important relationships, that with his wife who he obviously respects as much as he loves, and Warren Ellis, who has liberated Cave’s soul through greater exploration of sound than was previously possible with other iterations of the Bad Seeds. We need people we deeply love and admire to make us want to be better. I need to tap into that more and start writing love poems for my wife!

With regards to writing my poems, I think I’ve nailed the first part in that I definitely acknowledge my pain; in truth I probably eviscerate myself. I’m not sure that I have yet acquired the skill of learning how to live from lessons within my own writing. That’s why Cave’s responses to the Red Hand files are so astonishing, he has learned to live but also to soothe. I worry that solutions stare me in the face and I am blind to their possibilities, but I’ve got time, will and patience and I’m committed to this journey.

SHR: How was Safe Spaces received by the community at large?

CM: Can I say I don’t know? I think this is one failing of the community whereby we don’t talk about each other’s work in much depth. I send people texts, messages, emails etc and I quote specific poems and lines that have bowled me over (I know I have done so with Annick MacAskill, Dom Parisien, Dani Couture, I think it’s how I first engaged with you!) and it’s always a nice opportunity to engage and chat, but I have to say the response to Safe Spaces was mostly silence. And that is death for me, the only thing worse than not publishing is delivering new life into a void. Don’t get me wrong, people have mentioned it in passing, and Jim Johnstone was a sweetheart and put in a very good mention for Safe Spaces when making end of year recommendations to the Poetry website in 2017. There are times I think if it wasn’t for “extra-mile” support and friendship from Jim and Paul and you and Julie Crawford, I might have actually ‘given up’ at the start of 2019. I look back on Safe Spaces as a body of work I’m proud of and a great collaboration with Shane, but as album titles go I don’t know if it’s my First Born is Dead or my Kicking Against the Pricks. As I said above, I called out and in the face of the deafening silence that greets most poetry releases, I created some of the responses I needed to hear as well…

SHR: I agree that “extra-mile” support is where the magic happens... I still have your postcard on my fridge from when Safe Spaces first came out! Aside from the extra mile and the postcard, though, I had definitely heard about Safe Spaces and read it when I got it, and I think it’s a very good chappie. What do you mean when you say you “created some of the responses you needed to hear”? You said that before too.

CM: It’s there in the quote from Skeleton Tree that I mention above, however, I’m not resilient enough for my own echo to come back empty; not yet. In order to guard against that I knew I didn’t want this book to be merely illustrative, it also needed to be transformative, even if that’s ultimately only for me. I may over-reach here but I’m thinking this is something you achieved in Conspiracy of Love. Many young Toronto writers have talked to me about how important that poem is for them, and this is me echoing that back to you if you haven’t already heard that yourself. 

Last night, at the Red Hand Files show, Nick Cave (am I ever going to shut up about him?) said, “the worst thing people said to me after my son died was, ‘he’s still with you, he’s in your heart’, but I couldn’t feel him. It wasn’t until someone said, ‘take him out of your heart and let him walk beside you’ that I felt he might still be with me”. So, even though I wrote those poems two-three years ago, and Cave only said those words last night, I think I was ready to let those poems leave me but I wasn’t ready to let them disappear. I needed the poems to feel like a child that’s been well prepared for life by its parent, “go on ride your bike, you might fall off and I might not be there to catch you in the moment, but you’ve got enough with you now to cushion the shock until I get there”.

I think what I struggle with most at the moment as an ‘emerging poet’ is that it’s hard to see what’s actually me unless you stand really far back. Then when you come in close again, if you can get your arms around it that’s me, if you can’t it’s not truth and I’m still failing at this thing; but I’m trying. Shane Neilson said, “there’s a lot of falling [falling not failing!] in this book”, and he’s right, I was in freefall and it shows. But from where I stand, so new still to this world of words, I think I kinda stuck the landing. I climbed a few ladders to get this work out there and now I want to get to a higher point and jump off all over again. Thank you for this, you’re an amazing person. I truly enjoyed Port of Being and I can’t wait to see what comes next for both of us. Cx

SHR: Wait wait wait - YOUR FIRST BOOK IS COMING OUT LATER THIS YEAR. Please tell me about it.

CM: Yes, it’s called Recovery Community, and it “explores the intimate connections between deftly-layered moments of trauma, illness and loss.” It’s not as depressing as it sounds, it’s a bit of a trip through 20th and early 21st century pop culture that recruits movies, actors, addicts and artists to provide a Greek-chorus rally-call that re-imagines the way the world has been (re)presented to us. The Vallum Prize poem from last year, Twin Peaks in under two minutes, is a good example of my work in this book (http://www.vallummag.com/poem_conor_mcdonnell.html). I have tried to take what’s familiar through media and art, and give it a new voice that hopefully encourages readers to revisit / re-imagine older values and attitudes in a fashion more in line with their own highly evolved lenses and intuitions. I cut this quote out of an earlier part of our conversation, “In my writing I adopt characters, personae, voices etc where I sense that same struggle and fear and I try to externalize it, make it more recognizable. I want people to know I’m open to being part of their conversation so in that regard I try to be more universal than personal with my poems.” It was in reference to Safe Spaces but it absolutely still applies to Recovery Community. I ended up being surprised at some of the poems I ended up leaving out of this book, whether it was due to relentlessness of tone or losing some long poems in order to allow readers a moment to breathe, relax, maybe even recover, lol. Hmm, actually now that I think about it, we dropped the Twin Peaks poem at the last minute too! Still can’t believe I was okay with that…

SHR: Sounds genius, Conor! Eagerly awaiting to recover from the apocalypse with your debut book of poems.

CM: PS Anesthesiologists ‘recover’ people by waking them up, or, as they in France, réanimation ...

Shazia Hafiz Ramji’s writing has appeared in Best Canadian Poetry 2019, THIS magazine, Best Canadian Poetry 2018, and is forthcoming in EVENT, and Maisonneuve, and Gutter: the magazine of new Scottish and international writing. Her poetry and prose have been nominated for the 2020 Pushcart Prizes by Poetry Northwest and carte blanche, respectively. Shazia was named as a “writer to watch” by the CBC. She is the author of Port of Being, a finalist for the 2019 Vancouver Book Award, BC Book Prizes (Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize), Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, and winner of the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry. She is a columnist for Open Book and is at work on a novel.