Fade in: it’s just me, sitting here, staring at a computer monitor. The glow from the screen is lighting up my face. I wipe my hair off my forehead and chew on my bottom lip. Outside the window, a billion stars are moving past me at the speed of light.

Cut to me, ten weeks ago, getting kissed and coddled by high school crush Kaley, while high school boyfriend Zack sits on the floor and watches. Kaley brings me a glass of water, watches me drink it—I’m holding it with two hands. The hottest mother figure I’ve ever laid eyes on. Tipsy and distracted, I slosh the water onto my sock. Cut to me, walking home with one of my own socks on, and one of hers. She wears my wet sock home. I still have hers, in my dresser drawer, right next to all my panties. It almost matches my other black socks, but not quite.

Real life and the biopic of a real life are planets in different solar systems; neighbours in the bigger scheme of things, but miles and planets and stars apart when you’re stuck in one, and trying to get into the other.

Cut to me, two days ago, accomplishing things, directing physics-student actor David. Cut to me, in the same moment, thinking about his stubble on my cheek. Cut to me, in the same moment, contemplating jeopardizing my professional career before I even have a professional career. Cut to me, wishing he would whisper his Spanish accent down my throat.

What I mean is, there’s a gap that seems minute, but is actually mammoth, that separates real life from what life is like in the movies. Real life will never be as good as it could be if there were writers and directors and better lighting and great sound and everything was cut together just right. Here on the polluted, corrupted, boring planet of real life, the important moments just waste away, while the all-too-fucking-shitty parts drag on and on, and it feels like everything is just a little bit under reaching its potential. 

And it’s not that I want a perfect life—I just want a more thought-out plotline. I want to cut the part where potential best friend Levi’s mom has cancer, and decide that the scene where I hit rock bottom in a bloody high school bathroom doesn’t need to be there. I want everything in my fridge to be a part of who I am as a character, and I want to be consistent in my attitudes, thoughts, actions. I want someone who loves me writing the script of my life instead of just me—writing myself, playing myself, directing myself. I need someone else to take the reins and use every scene to move my story forward.

Cut to me, four months ago, lying on high school boyfriend Zack’s bed with a ball of unbreathed air in my throat. Cut to me, tears running down my face so fast I can’t believe he doesn’t notice. And then he does, and he scoops me up into his arms, and I squirm like a pathetic invalid. Cut to me, being too big to be carried that way. Cut to Zack, putting me back down. Cut to me, being put back down.

If I had a team of writers, assembling scenes of my life on little index cards, rearranging them until my story had a perfect arc, I know what they would change. My team of writers would send me on a series of escapades — I would stop thinking about loving people, stop thinking about fucking people, stop thinking about touching everyone who has problems, and instead, I would actually do it.

In real life, I’m afraid, and not only afraid, and not really afraid, but also stuck. I’m stuck doing the same things over and over, and I’m not moving my story forward quickly enough. In real life, I’m my only audience member, and I’m getting bored. In the movie of my life, I’m never bored. In the movie of my life, I have a bit more courage: I move away, try drugs, fuck girls, dress in drag, and act on all of my feelings. In the movie of my life, I am the opposite of trapped.
        
Cut to me, on New Year’s at best friend Mica’s party, music thumping. I’m half lying, half sitting on the bed, and best friend of best friend Han is lying beside me. Zack is off drunk somewhere. I speak my first line.

“Han,” I say.
“Yeah?”
“What if I’m a lesbian?”

Han pauses.

“I dunno. That’s fine, isn’t it?”
“I dunno. Maybe.”

Eventually, the fast life would come to a screeching stop when I decide to write my masterpiece movie. I would lay off drugs, sex, and coffee, and put away all my boy clothes. I would dye my hair back to brown, wear crocheted blouses, and water all of my plants. Once the script was done I would send it away, and I would become something new. And I would keep becoming someone new after I accomplished something new.

Cut to me, a week ago, not speaking, standing at the sink at work. Twenty-six-year-old co-worker Max enters. My internal monologue pushes ideas of his hand brushing my hair off my face, thoughts of his not caring if I’m misted with dishwater, it not mattering that he’s gay. My external monologue is virtually non-existent.

The movie of my life would be gritty, I think, and hazy and sexy and depraved, and it would have this kind of floaty feeling—the audience would have to feel connected to me, but I would keep them at arm’s length, which would only make them more interested.

My real life is not gritty, more like slippery, and it’s not hazy or sexy, it’s out of focus and clammy, and it’s not depraved in an art-school, sex-fuelled, drug-fog kind of way. I’m living an ordinary, realistic life.

Cut to me, yesterday after class, walking down the hall with prospective best friend Levi. Tilt down to my hands chewing each other raw, tilt back up to my eyes on his face. Internal monologue flatlines, we make plans for the future--fun plans, cool plans, new plans.

In the movie version of my life, I fuck every person I think about—I don’t know the difference between wanting to be with someone and wanting to be friends with someone. In real life, I still can’t see the difference, but I don’t do anything about it. I admire someone, I like someone, I feel close to someone—I think I want to be theirs. But then I’m not theirs, because I don’t ask if they want me. 

I’m trapped by my own ideas, and trapped by relationships. I am trapping myself, though, because nobody’s writing my life but me. This is my problem: I want less control, but more control. I want off, off the ride, off the planet, off the path I’m on, but I won’t make myself stop.

Cut to me, three years ago, poised at the top of a cliff, my friends around, all urging me to just jump, just try it, it won’t be scary once I do it. It was scary, would have been scary, and will always be scary. My internal monologue won’t shut up.

My hand is poised above the button, ready to push it—I could launch myself into my movie-life if I just had the courage to do it. Why wouldn’t I press the button, if I want it so bad? I want to be on the planet where I’m having fun, the one where I’m doing what I want, the one where I’m free. So why won’t I just push the button?

Cut to me, tonight in bed, alone. No external monologue, internal one dull. Making lists, making plans, grasping at straws. Trying to find where my loyalties are, who’s my ally and who’s my enemy. Who do I owe and who do I want? This is where real life and biopic overlap.

I won’t push it because I don’t want those things. I don’t want sex or drugs or escapades, I guess—I don’t want to send myself into space, across stars, and into new places. Real life isn’t a movie—that’s why we have movies. I am not the same me as the me who is the star of my movie life, and I don’t know if I like that, but I know it’s true. So I guess that’s a start.

Cut to me, me, me, me. It’s my movie, after all. Cut to me five years from now, writing the same fucking essay for a different reason. Cut to me six years from now, seven, eight, nine, writing my story into screenplay after screenplay, trapped writing about girls who are trapped. I never launched myself into space, never hit the button. Never.

Fade out: it’s just me, sitting here, staring at a computer monitor. The glow from the screen is lighting up my face. I wipe my hair off my forehead and chew on my bottom lip. Outside the window, a billion stars are moving past me at the speed of light.

Like all good things, eventually National Poetry Month must come to an end for another year. But we couldn't end our Poetry Primer series without a big finish, so here it is: George Bowering, winner of the Governor General's Award for both poetry and fiction, Canada's first Poet Laureate, and an Officer of the Orders of both British Columbia and Canada, is our final senior poet to choose an emerging voice he feels will make an impact on the Canadian poetry community. The co-founder of the poetry journal, Tish, and the author of over 100 books, Bowering's latest collection, The World, I Guess, has just been released from New Star Books.

As the author of over 100 books, selecting an emerging voice was a relative process for Bowering and he selected Montreal poet Oana Avasilichioaei. With many translation projects under her belt, including Universal Bureau of Copyrights and The Thought House of Philippa (both from BookThug), Avasilichioaei has published a few poetry titles of her own: Abandon, feria: a poempark, and We, Beasts, all published by Wolsak & Wynn. She continues to strengthen her poetic voice with the release of her latest collection, Limbinal, from Talonbooks.

Read on for a poem from her We, Beasts collection and an original poem on why she writes poetry!

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George Bowering on why he selected Oana Avasilichioaei, or Poly Oana craquer:

Each morning the first thing I do is to read some poetry before going downstairs to the daily paper’s prose. A lot of the books I have tried lately do not dis-resemble the latter enough. But the work (and play) of Oana Avasilichioaei has raised my hope for the future of our art. We do not really need poems that tell us what the poet saw and how he can make figurative language to give us his view of those things. We do not really need language that is passed over the counter by its baker. Ms Avasilichioaei is environed by language as she is by any world she enters, and when you read you don’t read her version—you are too busy negotiating the pleasant difficulty of her pages. If you run into one another from time? Well, what a nice thing to experience first thing in the morning. This poet offers no Frostian conclusions, but possibilities leading in all directions. Judith FitzGerald was right when she wrote that you can’t really read the poems, but you can sure experience them--and if you do not want poetry to lull you, you will want that experience.

Oana Avasilichoaei on why she writes poetry & who her influences are (in an original poem!):

Why I Write or Why I Write the Long Poem or A Longpoem Minifesto

The long poem is traversed because to speak across the gutter is urgent, necessary.

The long poem because one page is too small a movement.

The long poem insists that I build its narrative, then break its narrative.

The long poem forms an architecture inviting one to listen to its corners, edges, valleys, boundaries, cornices, stairwells.

The long poem thrusts typography into topography.

The long poem is graphically alert.

The long poem has its own notion of time and motion through differently each time.

The long poem presents the past into the future of now.

The long poem is my conviction that I will remain unconvinced.

The long poem sings, blurts, screams, demands, pleads, cries, bites its lip, sticks out its tongue, swallows, grits its teeth.

The long poem leaps to another long poem lapping on the shore of another long poem longing to lick the pointy interruptions of another long poem.

The long poem can’t help asking itself “when am I long enough to be a long poem?”.

The long poem because the serial, the series, the sequence, the sequential join and, in joining, unlock, accumulate, spill over.

The long poem becomes a book of long poems since the long poem is untamed, brutish, feral.

The long poem is in charge and knows it.

The long poem is its own charge.

The long poem agitates the sentence, possibly misspells it, leads it astray.

The long poem disobeys the rule of the unilingual and tries to speak in tongues.

The long poem disobeys the rule of the univocal attempting to exceed the page to new tonalities.  
 
The long poem is its own ecosystem yet open to myriad articulations of influence, voices intersecting to resonate its alertness, its eccentricity, its flow.

The long poem is a creature and, like all creatures, somewhat vain, meaning the long poem is a survivalist.

The long poem won’t back down until it grows into the long poem, though it brakes down, dawdles, dithers, almost drowns.

The long poem aspires to be a revolutionary, yet knows this is unlikely.

The long poem is promiscuous.

The long poem is faithful only to the long poem, which is not to say that the long poem is narcissistic.

The long poem might delve into a nature though the long poem is not natural.  

The long poem is shifty, unsettled, inherently nomadic.

In the end, the long poem lengthens longing, end to end, to no end, unending.

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That's it! We hope you enjoyed our Poetry Primer in celebration of National Poetry Month, whether you were already a poetry lover or a new poetry reader. You can always take the whole collection home, including poems from our established poets, with our anthology, ibid. What won't be around forever is the opportunity to get our ALU merch, so pick up any buttons, magnetic poetry, shirts, or bags before the end of the day.

Established poet and women's activist Sonja Greckol highlights the corporeality of Kate Hargreaves' debut poetry collection,  Leak, as her poetry primer pick. Greckol's work is inspired by activism: she began writing upon the re-election of Ontario Premier Mike Harris. She's coordinated poetry for Women and Environments International Magazine and has served as the Associate Rep representative on the National Council of the League of Canadian Poets, and currently works with the Toronto Women's City Alliance. Her poem "Emilie explains Newton to Voltaire" was nominated for the 2008 CBC Poetry Prize. Her most recent collection, 2014's  Skein of Days (Pedlar Press), streams together newspaper headlines, excerpts of Governor General Award-winning poetry collections, and song titles (among other elements) to create an experience that is "cacophonous, soothing, disturbing, comic, comforting, melodic" (The Rusty Toque).

Greckol's pick, Kate Hargreaves, chooses source material in Leak that is a little closer to home: the poet's own body is juxtaposed against her language. The multi-talented Hargreaves has previously published Talking Derby: Stories from a Life on Eight Wheels (Black Moss, 2012), appeared in numerous literary magazines and anthologies, and serves as a publishing assistant and book designer in Windsor, Ontario. Leak has been called an "exciting poetic debut" by Susan Holbrook – see why for yourself with "Stems", below.

Sonja Greckol on why she chose Kate Hargreaves:

Kate Hargreaves -- LEAK ...and she piles, plies, pulls, pliés and pleas...and she's off and playing and turning ..

The humanoid tangloid on the cover of Kate Hargreaves's first poetry collection, Leak, alerted me to the intricacies of a body, lush and darkly striated and entangled in growth. Then the surge of verbs: heap, chew, skim, pore, chip, peel open into a body, always into a body that struggles with itself. I am primed with my own surfeit of breaks, sprains and scars — those storied bumps, falls, incisions, anxieties, fears and joys — that etch each daily life. Hargreaves is playing for keeps here, nothing is frivolous on the inside like nothing is frivolous on the cover; everything appears fantastic, it is all precisely ordered and disordered and present.

Each opening riff, musically both casual and precise, lifts and spins me along these verbs that nail quotidian self-care or immolation: She heaps her plate with Brussels sprouts. She chews more than she can bite off. She picks a scab and tucks it into her purse. She pores over her blackheads in the bathroom mirror.. She chips her tooth on a stale raisin. She peels away the skin on the side of her thumb.  Little word puffs to my eye enervate and illuminate a complex embodiment and I am chasing, heelweighted while Hargreaves lifts and spins and undulates:ties her laces, scrapes her shins, composts in her bed, rubs cream onto purple knees shaving around stubble swell.

It's Hargreaves handling of the stuffness of that daily life in a body, in a house, in a city, on roller skates that is arresting. Each poem opens out into complex word play, riven through with paratactic shifts that accumulate a factenergy that threatens to but never comes apart. I am amused and challenged by the bones of her poems, while I rush headlong in awe of her corporeality and my own.  There are no abstractions, no summations to be found in Leak, just delight in the skill and disquiet at the quiet end: my body of work | pressing warm sheets into your hands.

Kate Hargreaves on why she writes poetry, and who her influences are:

I hated poetry until I was 18 or 19. I had loved reading my entire life, but somehow hadn't encountered any poetry that excited me; I went into my undergrad in English and creative writing with the firm belief that poetry was a bunch of abstract, pretentious nonsense and that I would stick to short fiction and never, ever write a poem. Cue some wonderful professors, namely Susan Holbrook and Nicole Markotic, who heaped upon their classes visceral, surprising, playful, energetic poetry from people like Sina Queyras, Fred Wah, Jenny Sampirisi, Nikki Reimer, and Haryette Mullen, who really showed me how vibrant and tangible the form could be. I found out that poetry was a space where I could play with language and question its cliches and idioms without falling into abstraction, and that my favourite poems were the ones that made me feel like they had me by the guts. Those were the poems I wanted to write. Seven years later, I'm absorbed by the play and possibility in poetry, and I don't think I've ever finished writing a short story. 

***

Follow along with our  Poetry Primer series all April long or get the full collection of featured poetry plus a poem from each of our established poets in our new chapbook,  ibid. Get a free ebook copy if you buy a collection of poetry from All Lit Up during National Poetry Month.

The Rusty Toque is pleased to cross-post selections from the All Lit Up blog's Poetry Month series Poetry Primer in which poets from across the country select their favourite up-and-coming poets. 

Visit the All Lit Up blog for this and other Poetry Month treats!

Award-winning poet and novelist Arleen Paré does us the honours of selecting our next emerging poet. Hailing from Montreal, then a long stopover in Vancouver as a social worker and administrator, and now, residing in Victoria, Paré's works have garnered the acclaim of the Dorothy Livesay BC Book Award for Poetry and the Victoria Butler Book Prize. Her latest book of poetry, Lake of Two Mountains (Brick Books, 2014), won the 2014 Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry. The jury noted that it was a poem of "sustained beauty, an almost monastic meditation on the overlapping centres of human and natural reality."

Arleen Paré has chosen fellow Brick Books poet Karen Enns as an emerging poet to watch, and with good reason. Also residing in Victoria, but having grown up in a Mennonite community in southern Ontario, Enns works as a private piano instructor and writes poetry of notice: her first collection, That Other Beauty (Brick Books, 2010), was shortlisted for a Gerald Lampert Award. Her most recent collection, Ordinary Hours, explores her Mennonite childhood and the community's original diaspora from Russia.

Get lost in the "sublime pleasure" (review, Michael Dennis) of Enns' poetry with an excerpt fromOrdinary Hours, below.

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Arleen Paré on why she selected Karen Enns:

I have chosen the wonderful Victoria poet, Karen Enns, to showcase in the LPG project for National Poetry Month because she is simply one of the most evocative, tender, lyrical poets to be recently published. She uses words economically, wisely, precisely. She writes from long contemplation, out of silence about music, sorrow, hauntings. Her poems are intelligent and open, but quiet with understated emotion. They are political too. Enns grew up in a Mennonite family/community in southern Ontario. Her community has a history of harsh exile from Russia for their Mennonite beliefs. She writes poignantly about the results of this sort of exile. The loss, the pain. This is the reason her poems are important in the general Canadian contest: they speak of an immigrant population that receives little attention. She draws our attention to it. Beautifully.

Karen Enns on why she writes poetry, and who her influences are:

I've often wondered how a musical phrase, which is really just the particular order in which a series of pitches of various lengths are arranged, can be capable of such emotional power. One note placed differently or held for a shorter or longer period of time can change the entire effect. A line of poetry, or a group of lines, works the same way. That something so briefly heard can stay with us so long, that we remember lines of verse or music our entire lives, or that we remember the exact place and time of our first hearing them, is hopeful. This is reason enough to write poetry. 

To me, the craft of making the poem after the initial draft or fragment is completely absorbing: putting it together, taking it apart, cobbling and splicing. And beyond that — the compression and restraint that go into taking what seem like enormous complexities and distilling them into the one metaphor or image that clicks. Who wouldn't want to write poetry? 

It's been said by others before me that writing a poem is an act of faith. I would add that it can also be a very private act of faith. Not long ago I was walking along a beach in Vancouver and noticed a carver who had displayed his work on a low rock wall. Further along that wall he had set three stones of various shapes. They seemed so carefully chosen, so exquisitely placed, to catch the light in such a way that their shadows became as much a part of the form as the stones themselves. I don't know if anyone else noticed — people were walking and jogging by — but my belief that no one else was aware of the particular slant of those particular shadows in that moment was, I think, somehow important. The artist had created something in solitude and offered it to the private space of my attention. It was exclusive and generous at the same time. I like to think of writing poetry in this way.

It's difficult to say what influences are at work in one's own writing. The sounds we're surrounded by during our childhoods stay in our ears: the music, our first language, the stories and verses we hear, and the distinctive noise of our geographical and cultural landscapes. In recent years I've found myself drawn to the work of Polish poets: Zagajewski, Milosz, Szymborska, Herbert, and Rozycki. It may be that their poetry, so haunted by the historical traumas of the 20th century, carries echoes for me; it resonates with the culture of the displaced and traumatized Russian Mennonites I grew up among. I feel the responsibility of the art form through knowing their poems.

***

Follow along with our  Poetry Primer series all April long or get the full collection of featured poetry plus a poem from each of our established poets in our new chapbook,  ibid. Get a free ebook copy if you buy a collection of poetry from All Lit Up during National Poetry Month.

The Rusty Toque is pleased to cross-post selections from the All Lit Up blog's Poetry Month series Poetry Primer in which poets from across the country select their favourite up-and-coming poets. 

Visit the All Lit Up blog for this and other Poetry Month treats!

Marilyn Dumont is one of Canada's preeminent Métis poets—needless to say we jumped at the chance to have her select a new, up-and-coming voice for our Poetry Primer series. Dumont, from northeastern Alberta, is an award-winning poet, has been a writer-in-residence at several Canadian universities, libraries, and at the Banff Centre. She is also an educator, teaching creative writing and Native Studies. Her most recent collection of poetry from ECW Press, The Pemmican Eaters, looks at the Riel Resistance. Coming up in August, Brick Books will re-issue Dumont's 1996 collection, A Really Good Brown Girl, on the occasion of their 40th anniversary with a new introduction by Lee Maracle.

As a poet with an established voice in the Canadian poetry landscape, Marilyn Dumont selected slam poet, visual artist, and environmental activist Natasha Kanapé Fontaine as an up-and-comer she feels will make an impact. Her first collection of poetry, Do Not Enter My Soul in Your Shoes, was originally published in French and won the Society of Francophone Writers of America poetry prize in 2013. Now translated by Howard Scott, it is available in English for the first time from Mawenzi House (formerly TSAR Publications).

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Marilyn Dumont on why she chose Natasha Kanapé Fontaine:

Unlike prose, poetry includes prayer as a common form within its accepted perimeters. By prayer, I mean reflection on self within a holistic cosmos rather than any faith affiliation. I think that this is the first reason many people are drawn to reading and writing this genre. But it’s a mode of being that Indigenous people have been practicing for centuries as oral text recounting cultural history, kinship and socio-economic bonds, ceremonial rituals, etc.

All women, but particularly Indigenous women in Canada, need to be heard and seen. I met Natasha Kanapé Fontaine in Trois Rivières, Québec during the International Poetry Festival. I was struck by Natasha’s writing and the performance of her work, which lifted me out of my seat, each note of her rebellious presence pushing back against conformity. Through her work, Natasha takes up space not only on the page, but also on the stage and within her homeland through her gender and race.

Jeannette Armstrong, in a powerful paper delivered to the Saskatchewan Writers Guild Conference of 1990, stated, “Our task as Native writers is twofold. To examine the past and culturally affirm toward a new vision for all of our people in the future, arising out of the powerful and positive support structures that are inherent in the principles of co-operation.” Indigenous writers such as Natasha (whom I am in contact with) carry the untold narratives of Canada, and frequently these “tellings” shed light on dark areas which can change with new energy of co-operation.

 

Natasha Kanapé Fontaine on why she writes poetry & who her influences are:

Poetry chose me. It came to me one spring day, four years ago, through Joséphine Bacon’s, Bâtons à messages. I discovered in that book a vision I'd seen before while painting. Visions are about traditions, ancestral territory, our motherland and my relation with it. And I discovered that I was not the only one who was seeing it. That's how I came to poetry, and poetry came to me, bringing me back to our traditions. Poetry is my identity.
 
In our language, Innu means “human being.” I am influenced by movements in our country, in our world, in our humanity. I am influenced by events that concern my people. I hear drums, I hear songs and voices. And I write in the name of my people, and future generations, and the future of our planet. I put my truth in my poetry. Poetry is hope, it is truth. It makes me complete as a human being and as an Innu woman. I am here to change history, like everyone here living on this land under our feet.

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Missed the first three posts in our Poetry Primer series? Follow all the action, all month long, here!

The Rusty Toque is pleased to cross-post the All Lit Up blog's Poetry Month series Poetry Primer in which poets from across the country select their favourite up-and-coming poets. 

Visit the All Lit Up blog for this and other Poetry Month treats!

Our first established poet in our Poetry Primer series is Elizabeth Bachinsky. Hailing from British Columbia, Bachinsky has published five collections of poetry, including her latest The Hottest Summer in Recorded History (Nightwood Editions). She has been nominated for such awards as the Governor General's Award for Poetry and the Pat Lowther Award, and her poetry has been adapted for both stage and screen. Applauded by Jeanette Lynes for her "sheer moxie" we knew she was a great poet to kick off our National Poetry Month festivities!

When we asked her to select an up-and-coming poet Elizabeth chose a fellow West Coaster, Kayla Czaga. Kayla published her first collection of poetry with Nightwood Editions, For Your Safety Please Hold On last fall and it was recently the only debut collection nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Poet Paul Vermeersch said this about her collection: "... Reading it is like being brought into someone’s home and told all the family secrets—never an imposition, it feels rather like an initiation into the clan."

Enough of an introduction, over to Elizabeth!

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Elizabeth Bachinsky on why she selected Kayla Czaga:

I first met Kayla Czaga in 2013. She was one of my students in a graduate publishing class at UBC—the kind of class where you learn to tell your kerning from your leading—and one day after class, despite my protesting, she shoved a fistful of poems in front of me and we sat down to talk about them. I was not only taken by the talent evident in the poems on the table in front of me but also with the young woman who had produced them. Blushing, stammering, she gave me a history of the Stakhanovite movement in socialist Russia and her appraisal of the effectiveness of Russian propaganda which struck her, if I’m remembering correctly, as “effective.” Czaga was, I think, twenty-one at the time and was nearly through with her graduate degree. She came from Kitimat. She lived above a grocery store. She wrote these very grown-up insightful poems. It was as if a valkyrie had let down beside me.

Later on, I’d turn out to select one of her poems, the poem featured here for National Poetry Month, as a winner for a poetry competition at the Fiddlehead magazine. The judging was blind. They’d sent me quite a stack, and still that poem, hers, rose to the top of the pile. Blind. There’s just something about her voice. Funny, confident, unique. I can only describe it as the kind of voice into which one can relax. Because you can trust Kayla Czaga. She’s got this. She knows where she’s headed. It’s OK. You can just relax and enjoy the poems.

I don’t know what impact any of us poor poets can hope to have on Canadian poetry in the long run. But I hope Czaga will be one of those who keep adding to it. Her first book is every bit as interesting as first books by Erin Moure or Karen Solie and, like them, I want to read Czaga in ten, twenty, thirty years and see what fascination she’s following now. Selfishly, I just want her to keep going. Keep going, will you, Czaga?

Kayla Czaga on why she writes poetry & who her influences are:

I write because I like writing more than I like doing anything else. Why do I like writing? I don’t really know. I could’ve easily liked doing other things—playing tennis or saxophone or sculpting. I think it has something to do with my upbringing. I grew up in a small northern BC town where people didn't usually talk about a lot of deep issues. I don’t have siblings and my parents are quiet people, so I read a lot. Books spoke to me about a great many things. Is it cheesy to say they were my best friends? They were my best friends. I started writing instinctually in response to the reading I did. My entire childhood and adolescence I wrote—everything from screenplays to novels about my cat—and I haven’t stopped, though I mostly write poems now. I can’t really imagining doing much else with my time.

I am always accumulating new favourite writers, so it’s difficult to list writers who have influenced me without feeling I’ve skipped many people. I own most* of Anne Carson’s books, so I think she’s been significant. Matthew Zapruder. Mark Strand. Anne Michaels. Mary Ruefle. Dean and Kevin Young (not related). I am also inspired by language in the world. The title (and title poem) of my book For Your Safety Please Hold On comes from stickers on Vancouver buses. Another poem I wrote is called “May Contain Traces.” A few years ago, I was at a hostel in the Okanagan that was plastered with signs that said, “You are in video.” I loved that.
 
*I can’t say “all” because I lent one to a friend and it never came back, and I haven’t replaced it yet.

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We'll be back tomorrow with more poetry! Want to know which other poets we'll be featuring in our Poetry Primer series? Check out the details here.

In her second collection, innovative  Canadian poet Sonja Ruth Greckol set herself the task of reconstructing “the time of her life,” 1945 until the turn of the century. Rather than untangle formative issues for us, Skein offers the tangle itself: a diary of entries compiled and composed around Greckol’s February birth date as published in print media, popular songs and poems excerpted from the Governor General’s Poetry Award collections as well as witty prose poems, some incorporating symbols and blanks as well as catch phrases and illustrations.

Found poems consisting of garbled headlines introduce the reader to the vocabulary that typified the era. Occasionally I felt as though I were there absorbing the news as though  skimming a journal over a train passenger’s shoulder or half-listening to the radio. An amazing range of issues is considered: the new feminism, guns & butter, mining, farming,  first nations peoples, the Cold War, poverty, as well as lives of ordinary Canadians.

Highlights are the lyric poems that book-end the volume and appear intermittently throughout. The initial untitled poem introduces us to Greckol’s view of what constitutes history and the “intricate textual rhythms” of her language:

In Coda: More Things Thing Up, (a terrific title) Greckol pulls the skein tight: the times are varied, chaotic; she (and we) house it all, and struggle:

Headlines and subheads appropriated, often reconstructed into dense, highly active lines plus brief personal narratives tie the collection together. These collage-like word-flows—cacophonous, soothing, disturbing, comic, comforting, melodic—replicate the era’s ambient sounds:    

From this unique, well-researched volume, two lines I’ll never forget: “You’re always running into people’s unconscious,” says  Marilyn Monroe in July 1961 and the beautiful mysterious line from 1947, A bomb snow made ladies out of trees…

You can read an excerpt for Skein of Days in Issue 6 of The Rusty Toque