Poetry Month in Canada

Happy National Poetry Month! Can you smell it? It’s poetry month, and a handful of exciting poets are about to discuss their new books.It’s April which means here in most of Canada it’s still the middle of winter, as Canadian poets saw their shadow two weeks ago. But it’s also world poetry month—that’s worldwide (from Ajax to Argentina) and a time to focus on the line breaks and metre and all that goes along with the great write and roll swindle known as poetry. Okay, so poetry is hardly a swindle of any sorts, but a mesmerizing, perennial force to be reckoned with; a creative outlet which we celebrate here on the Internet, here in seedy bars, here in the privacy of our own homes, or here in public spaces (even schools).By no means is it an easy feat for book reviewers, editors, and promoters to do justice to the breadth of quality work that gets published every April. But with the League of Canadian Poets, the Griffin Poetry Prize, and other hot spots for poetic greatness out there, we’re doing our darndest. I posit this, in my best Jerry Seinfeld voice: What’s the deal with poetry month? Don’t poets live all year long? Who are these people? Okay, enough. And so, in no particular order, other than that which I’ve typed out:Curtis LeBlanc grew up in Alberta, St. Albert to be exact, which is just north of Edmonton.“It’s kind of like the threshold between rural Northern Alberta and urban Edmonton,” he says. Now this Vancouver-based poet has released his debut collection Little Wild (Nightwood Editions, $18.95). This timely collection addresses masculinity and explores it in ultimately the most important time for its potency to be examined. In the age of Trump and misogyny, LeBlanc doesn’t mince words when it comes to his feelings about the current social climate.

I think it’s clear that right now—and I won’t say more than ever, because the need has always been there—we need to be teaching our young men a new definition of masculinity that isn’t so toxic and destructive, one that’s healthier and safer for women and non-binary folks, as well as men ourselves.

LeBlanc says he feels encouraged and inspired by the fearless work being done by marginalized groups. “But at the same time, I’m profoundly upset about the resistance to progress by those individuals and groups that seek to maintain their power.” LeBlanc hopes his book might assist in “dismantling that toxic idea of masculinity in whatever way it can.”

... we need to be teaching our young men a new definition of masculinity that isn’t so toxic and destructive, one that’s healthier and safer for women and non-binary folks, as well as men ourselves.

With the lion’s share of his writing focusing on the past for this book, Northern Alberta comes up a lot in his poetry. “Sometimes it’s the physical setting or backdrop for a poem. Other times I feel like it’s the essence of what I’m trying to capture.”LeBlanc also credits the growing Vancouver literary scene as a source of inspiration for his work.

We have such an amazing community here in the Lower Mainland and based on those folks I’ve had a chance to meet from other communities in Canada, the same thing applies. My partner, Mallory Tater, and I started Rahila’s Ghost Press to try and celebrate and promote voices from our community as well as other communities—the voices we really love and want to hear more of. We have a big team consisting of Adèle Barclay, Selina Boan, Dominique Bernier-Cormier, Shaun Robinson, and Shazia Hafiz Ramji, and maybe that’s the best testament to how great it is to be a part of this community: everybody wants to come together and support each other and help out.

Laisha Rosnau’s latest poetry book, Our Familiar Hunger, (Nightwood Editions, $18.95) is out now. She and her family are the resident caretakers of Bishop Wild Bird Sanctuary in Coldstream, BC. Her new collection explores the author's own Ukrainian heritage and also women’s plight throughout time. Rosnau explains her process,

I think the best way into universal themes, for both writers and readers, is through specific details of place, time, gender, ethnicity, family, etc. For me, exploring my Ukrainian heritage led quite naturally to examining the roles that political conflict, exile and immigration, resettlement, immigrant and settler culture, etc. play in the lives of women.

Rosnau says she expanded the collection into thinking about “how both resources and women as sexual objects have become things to exploit and export on a global, rather than just local, market.” This she says impacts women’s lives completely, everything from their sexuality, their agency, sense of equality, worth and security is not unique to one place, time, culture, or ethnicity. “For me the most natural way in was through my maternal family history.”One of many striking pieces in Rosnau’s new collection is about Tatiana Pawlichka and the Ukraine Famine Commision of 1986.

I was researching The Holodomor, which was the state-sanctioned, human-made famine imposed on Ukraine in 1932-33. The number of ethnic Ukrainians who died of starvation under the Soviet regime during this time is estimated between six to ten million. It wasn't spoken about for years (much like Canada’s internment of Ukrainians in prisoner-of-war camps in WWI wasn't spoken about) and is now recognized as a genocide by Canada, Ukraine, and several other countries. I came across Tatiana Pawlichka's testimony through going down several Internet rabbit holes, and something about it resonated with me, so I took some of her very simple, but brutal, phrases and wrote a poem around them. Sometimes, when faced with the reality of such atrocities not only happening in the past, but happening right now in the world, the only response I have, as small and seemingly powerless as it is, is poetry.

The closest thing to poetry we’ve come up with materially or durationally—is Twitter. Like poetry, Twitter is a time machine, an empathy machine.

Toronto poet David Alexander’s debut collection After the Hatching Oven (Nightwood Editions, $18.95) deals entirely with the plight, stereotype, and laughing stock status of the chicken. While the author says his experience in direct contact with chickens is very limited, his community of like-minded friends helped influence his opinion on the species.

I did spend a lot of time around vegans and vegetarians thinking about how our unexamined beliefs about animals influence food choices (and what kinds of choices are available to be made). I wanted to incorporate these concerns into my poetry so I wrote the first poem in the book, "Why Chickens Don’t Fly." I wasn't happy with it, so I started riffing on it through self-translation exercises (hat tip to Stuart Ross), bringing different ideas into the framework set out by the first poem.

Alexander found this process lead to “bigger deviations,” and allowed him to get deeper into “chickenhood” and “deconstruct what chickens mean in a society that happily writes them into kids stories at the same time that billions are systematically exploited through industrialized agriculture.”For about ten years Alexander led a small Toronto nonprofit whose mandate was to support and inspire those interested in taking steps toward vegetarian or vegan eating. A lot of his work there was coordinating practical nuts and bolts events stuff or else developing marketing strategies to spur change. It was through this type of work that Alexander met different types of artists who were adamant in using their work as a tool to bring awareness to important issues for social change. “I hope these poems operate in that same space.”Now touring their sophomore collection, I left nothing inside on purpose, (M&S, $19.95) Toronto poet Stevie Howell has an impressive schedule ahead of them in the next six weeks. “Canada is massive and hard to navigate and I am truly grateful to the curators I reached out to, who welcomed me. I hope to see friends & strangers, whether poets or readers.”Howell’s first book of poetry Sharps (Goose Lane, 2014), was a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. It wasn’t until two years later that Howell really began writing poetry again, and at the same time put out a chapbook with Desert Pets Press called Summer. “A few things from that project became ur-poems for my next fixation ("Talking w/humans is my only way to learn")." Howell’s new collection seems to be trying to dismantle the dead-end algorithm of our modern syntax. That might sound like a grand goal, and likely isn’t the poet’s intent, but I asked Howell if they find the Internet frustrating, if they believe it’s making us all illiterate babies.

I'm in love with how the Internet is improving language. The dead end is probably High English ... and I think we're all likely, or at least potentially, more literate than ever before ... Some things I'm doing in this book are a direct tribute to the brevity of social media. Poetry is about bending time and doing so in order to connect to other people's lives. The closest thing to poetry we've come up with materially or durationally—is Twitter. Like poetry, Twitter is a time machine, an empathy machine.

And to conclude, as we say farewell again to poetry month, I asked Stevie Howell about the month in question. My question goes like this: Do you feel like poetry month ever truly ends? I always have this feeling like Bill Murray is at the bar with all of us and says, "Poetry month huh ... It's still just the one month of the year, right?" I mean, I could see him saying that. “You know that quote from Zhuangzi—did a dude dream he was a butterfly, or did a butterfly dream he was the dude?!” Howell muses. “Either/or, both/neither. It's so enduring because it tells us don't trust anyone who claims to know anything.”

Nathaniel G. Moore used to live and write in Toronto. But now it's somewhere in New Brunswick and works as a freelance book publicist and journalist. His first poetry book in nearly a decade is Goodbye Horses, out now with Mansfield Press.