We’ve spent the last month talking with eight BC poets about their new poetry collections. Now they get a chance to share some love with their fellow poets! We asked each featured poet to write about another BC poet who influenced or inspired them. This post was arranged and compiled by Rob Taylor.
Junie Desil on Hari Alluri:
Hari Alluri is a favourite poet of mine. Author of The Flayed City (Kaya, 2017), Carving Ashes (CiCAC, 2013) and the chapbook The Promise of Rust (Mouthfeel, 2016), Alluri is a beautiful soul and talented writer. You read his words and feel the musicality, the rhythm, the breadth, and weight of difficult love, and loss. A song. Alluri is warmth personified.
I love: his ability to make others welcome, his thoughtfulness, his engagement with other writers, the labour of love in his founding Locked Horn Press, and the way he’ll read your work and find the beauty you might miss. His love of collaboration with others, and his humbleness (even as a Leo!) are admirable.
One of my favourite memories/moments is when he organized having poet Sham-e-Ali Nayeem (City of Pearls, 2019) come up and read at Massy Books. Alluri asked me to host. The evening flowed, and was filled with luminous words. We all three ended up reading, and riffing off each other, and then “breaking bread” with a larger group of folks from the audience at Phnom Penh Restaurant. Probably one of the best poetry nights. One of the last beautiful summer nights of the “before times.”
This is the thing about Alluri: his ability to bring people together, share space, and let magic happen. If you haven’t read his work yet, you’re sorely missing out.
From the poem “A Declaration, Love,” from The Flayed City:
It is nothing.
To be surrounded by fallen prayers-this is city.
I ash on shimmers. They no more implicate my day than dogs
Who sniff for the piss of other dogs.
Perhaps that’s what prayers do.
Dallas Hunt on Brandi Bird:
A BC poet that has had an impact on my writing has been Brandi Bird, especially their chapbook I Am Still Too Much. Bird’s writing is so evocative and piercing, and has some personal resonances with me in that we’ve both spent time (and, in some ways, have a complicated relationship with) the Manitoba area. I implore those of you who haven’t had a chance to read their writing to do so now. I mean, sadly, I’ll never be able to write like this, but for that reason I’m so happy Brandi and their writing exists in the world: “A scour of petals / on the riverbank, clay pinking / in waves. The life bridge opens / in the chip of thorns and unfolds / a trellis to drift through, cradling / rosehips on the rust spokes” (“Selkirk, Manitoba”). I find it hard to write about geographies, to render them in a way that’s both brutal and tender, realistic yet florid, and Bird seems to do this so effortlessly. It’s work I aspire to and, if I’m lucky, might be able to write like someday.
Barbara Nickel on Suzanne Buffam:
I was reading Suzanne Buffam’s The Irrationalist in the car by the soccer field, occasionally setting the book down to watch my son practising “one-touch,” receiving and sending the ball back into play with one motion. Suzanne’s poetry has this kind of energy. I’d been reading “On Moving Day” from “Little Commentaries,” the section at the heart of her three-book oeuvre:
On Moving Day
Two houses stand aloof
In their emptiness.
The same dusty sunlight
Licks the floorboards
Of your future and your past.
It is good
To be homeless
For an hour.
“Licks the floorboards” is one touch—the pass received and in a stanza break sent on—skip the dribbling, the fussy footwork that bogs down so much poetry—into your future and past, all that holds. What happened? Will happen? Who waits for you and who was there? Open mouthed, I ask how she does that.
I met Suzanne in the Writing Program at the Banff Centre years before either of us had published a first book. I’d glimpse Suzanne at a party or on the sidewalk by a herd of elk. We’d chat, but never long enough to have the conversation I wish we could have now about the poems she hadn’t yet written. I’d like to tell her how I laughed out loud, not only in A Pillow Book, with its hilarious lists, but in the other books, a subtler effect that could be simply the surprise of a teabag after war after cirrocumulus clouds, or Tom Cruise sharing a poem with Aristotle. Suzanne wears her erudition lightly, casually; paradox is always at hand—metered and free, cosmopolitan and next-door, pragmatic and full of wonder, restrained and generous, curious, wise and less is always more.
Suzanne grew up in Vancouver, Canada’s soccer capital, so maybe she’s familiar with that one-touch technique. I was looking at her poems in Breathing Fire: Canada’s New Poets—it came out when she was in her twenties—and noticed that none of them were included in her debut collection, Past Imperfect, published ten years later. She practised for years and then, like the possible future trumpeter in her poem “Dear Future,” released her book—“He must learn each note so well he can forget it.”
Cicely Belle Blain on Jillian Christmas:
Jillian Christmas has been hugely influential to me. As a friend, colleague and fellow poet, her work is truly inspiring. She has a presence in the Vancouver community and especially the Black community here that is simultaneously fierce and fearless, yet gentle, kind and warm. I was so excited to find that our books were coming our around the same time—after following her work for years, watching her perform slam poetry and always looking forward to her radiant smile at events, this felt like a beautiful moment.
Her book, The Gospel of Breaking, is a deep, evocative, painful and beautiful ode to so many thinks I can relate to as a fellow Black queer femme. I felt as though her words were speaking to me, and knowing Jillian’s fierce commitment to her community, I am sure many pieces were love notes to the Black diaspora. My favourite thing about this book is how cleverly and seamlessly she put slam poetry to paper and having seen her perform, is able to do the reverse.
Terrence Young on Patrick Friesen:
Poet and playwright Patrick Friesen continues to model for me what I consider a truly artistic sensibility when it comes to looking at the world. He possesses an abiding curiosity about a huge number of things—language, art, music, film, history, science, religion – and allows these interests to percolate and invest themselves in his thought and his writing without making a huge fanfare about research or the current popularity of what he is exploring. He is guided only by what interests him and is truly indifferent, if not antipathetic, toward the trappings of a writer’s life, the fuss over awards and fame, the invitations to prestigious festivals, the adoration of the reading public—although he has certainly had his share of accolades and is much admired among his peers. If anything, he avoids the limelight because it poses a distraction to what is important. His poetry, more than the writing of almost any other poet, reflects who he is and is unlike that of any other poetry I have read. To experience it at its best, one really has to hear Patrick read it, and anyone who has heard him will readily admit that a kind of spell settles over the room where he is reading, as though the listener has entered a very quiet and thoughtful space, where each inflection and pause contains a meaning that is highly personal, while at the same time inclusive, almost universal in nature. I know of no other poet who can achieve this degree of intimacy with an audience. It is not something I would ever try to imitate, nor would I ever try to write in Patrick’s style. It is peculiar to him and arises out of his intensely honest approach to the task of conveying what he knows to be true. I feel I am lucky to count him among my friends, and he remains for me a kind of yardstick for good writing, for the joyous gravity of the craft itself, and for what it can elicit in the hearts of others when it is done well.
Lillian Boraks-Nemetz on Joy Kogawa:
I have always admired Joy Kogawa’s work, especially her novel Obasan and her poetry. Obasan inspired me to write about my childhood: the little girl in Obasan is incarcerated in a camp for Japanese Canadians during WWII, and I was similarly interned in the Warsaw Ghetto in WWII. In both cases the world was silent as our people were treated unjustly.
Joy’s poetry has that wonderful quality of gentleness mixed with depth of feeling, resilience, affirmation of life and, above all, survival. In the beginning of Obasan there is a beautiful poem that has stayed with me to this day:
There is a silence that cannot speak.
There is a silence that will not speak.
Beneath the grass the speaking dreams and beneath the dreams is a sensate sea. The speech that frees comes forth from that amniotic deep. To attend its voice, I can hear it say, is to embrace its absence. But I fail the task. The word is stone.
Indeed silence prevailed as millions were being murdered and as the Japanese Canadians struggled for justice. Kogawa’s poem carries a message, at least for me, that despite human tyranny there is hope for humanity if we would only awaken from our deep sleep to awareness and freedom. Only then the silence would be broken, and the word would no longer be stone.
Selina Boan on Samantha Marie Nock, jaye simpson and Shaun Robinson:
Samantha Marie Nock, jaye simpson and Shaun Robinson are three poets whose work I deeply admire. I remember first hearing Sam read her poems and immediately being blown away—she writes the kind of poetry I wish I could write. It is tender, honest, and grounded in love for the prairies. I cannot recommend her work enough.
jaye simpson’s collection, it was never going to be ok, takes the kind of formal risks that I love and admire. The collection is deeply moving, necessary, and textured with so many stunning images and exciting page play. Their work inspired me to experiment more with space on the page as I was going through the editing process of my own book. I admire jaye’s attention to sound so much. The collection is a must.
Shaun Robinson’s collection, If You Discover a Fire (which I mentioned in my interview), is witty and darkly comedic, filled with the kind of unexpected and delightful images of your dreams. Another book I cannot recommend enough.
Patrick Friesen on Allan Safarik:
Allan Safarik has had a multi-faceted impact on me. I’ve known him for about 40 years, from when he lived in Vancouver and White Rock, to the present day in Saskatchewan. If I remember correctly, what I first heard about Allan was the work he did for other poets. I knew he co-founded Blackfish Press, knew that he travelled hard miles across Canada getting both magazine and books into homes and bookstores. I knew he was involved in getting readers to Vancouver, and he edited manuscripts and compiled the Vancouver Poetry anthology. I was impressed. There was something so alive about him, so much energy, and he always had an angle of perception and expression I didn’t encounter anywhere else.
Then I found his poetry, probably at a public reading first. I remember how he didn’t telegraph the humour in his work, in fact he underplayed it, and it was left to work directly on the listener. The lines kind of slid by, and I found myself laughing a second or two later. I realized, after a while, that not only was his humour one of a kind, but it carried the core of his philosophical, spiritual approach. As if his thinking was in disguise, slipping by any defenses I might have so that I could gather it together more fully later. The lines stayed with me. Succinct observations, often turned on their sides or upside down, with that sardonic, sometimes absurdist humour. Allan has an absolutely unique poetic sensibility. He doesn’t waffle. The poetry is as resolute as he is with his life. There are not a lot of poets who have an authentic poetic vision; Allan does. He’s been consistent in his honesty of observation and language from his West Coast days to his current life on the prairies. Just check out The Day is a Cold Grey Stone, selected and new poems which cover the West Coast as well as anyone has. Then read Yellowgrass, which does the same for the prairies. The man knows where he lives; he enters the terrain and culture of a place, asks questions, mulls them, and offers what he’s found in poems that range from tight little narratives to aha moments.
2 replies on “Eight BC Poets on the Writers They Love”
Thank you for these wonderful hints on poets to read!
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