A Gift of Mystery and Many Hands: An Interview with shauna paull

The following interview is part three of an eight-part series of conversations with BC poets about their new poetry collections. The series will run from January until the end of April, National Poetry Month. All interviews were conducted by Rob Taylor, editor of What the Poets Are Doing: Canadian Poets in Conversation (Nightwood Editions, 2018).

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as you come to dust

let its settling be rare
let it carry the great, low hum of mountain
tune of sap      notes of summer
leaves under high tide pull, under low
that hush before the opening of wings

let it caress, as hands have done, the bare feet of a fraught child
an adventuring child
let its sparks of want, want     burn softly away
let its final quiet be a listening, solace for difficult necessary voices
let its listening protect the ones who remain
let it rest, lift, soften the edges of wind, lift again
and be carried

Reprinted with permission from blue gait (Mother Tongue Publishing, 2021).

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Rob Taylor: So many of the poems in blue gait feel timeless: they deal with abstract, existential questions that we as a species have been asking of ourselves since time immemorial. But another stream of poems in the book is tightly bound to the political world of the here and now, centred around particular injustices (such as the confirmation of the 215 children buried at Kamloops Indian Residential School or the ongoing actions at the Unist’ot’en Camp). In these poems you speak very specifically and politically.

These two “modes” seem to mirror your larger life, in which you work as both writer and activist. Could you talk about these two “modes” in your writing: the abstract/eternal and the political/immediate? Do you think of them as distinct from one another, or as part of an indivisible whole?

shauna paull: Thank you for this question, Rob. I think I mostly resist separations between art and world. In the presence of my community work, which was political as well, my most fervent hope was to create access to abundance for the highest number of people. It’s natural then that the work emerges from ontological concerns and enlarges to encompass the concerns of those whose lives are marked by xenophobia of one sort or another. I am aware that some of the poems that address what is present in the “here and now” are doing so because the stories of alterity that open in them are longstanding.

I think song is the one thing that can cross just about every barrier — what moves a space of air cannot be contained by any regulatory or political body, or set of convictions. For me, these poems are a small attempt at creating song-space for witness — my own. This space is limited in various ways, but my hope is to honour what remains alive in the communities I am engaged with and hope to support.

The root values of well-being, autonomy, and dignity for all, will likely always be central to my thinking and making. It’s possible that a practice of paying attention with one’s heart is present in the work, too. Nobody is really safe until we are all safe. At this point in time, I carry an awareness that witness will always be needed, but also celebration and beauty and kindness, all of which are under-sung in the dominant myths of our country and in capitalism. Simplicity and relational attentiveness take time and care and it seems to me, from almost every direction, these benefit humanity.

For me, these poems are a small attempt at creating song-space for witness

RT: In blue gait you make space not only for the historical and ongoing injustices experienced by Indigenous peoples in Canada, but also draw upon the words of a number of Indigenous poets, from Joanne Arnott, to Gregory Scofield, to Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. Could you speak to the importance of Indigenous history and voices in your life, and in this book in particular?

sp: My undergrad was focused on post-colonial literatures so I am aware now that although I had to read Eurocentric canonical texts alongside, I was able as a young person to access world literatures, literatures of liberation and resistance, as well as Indigenous literatures from across the globe. I am grateful to have been opened in my early learning to stories that unsettled individualism as a value and, again and again, enlivened ideas of communities working together for larger substantive change.

I think current Indigenous writers share with us a world view that has been responsible for the stewardship of lands, and particular connections with the land (and each other) that are essential for all of us to understand. Those stories are also longstanding. Across time, and especially now, they have been great gifts toward my thinking and making.

My community work has for years located me near Indigenous leaders and Elders as well. I have had the great gift of being invited into ceremony, for which I am grateful, and there it’s impossible not to witness the wisdoms of the people of these lands. The necessary work of reconciliation and decolonization will be long, but I locate this as the most important conversation of our time. In writing this book, I was accompanied by all these gifts. My hope is that the respect I have for Indigenous communities that work and celebrate, create and re-create, in this ongoing genocide, is present in the text.

The necessary work of reconciliation and decolonization will be long, but I locate this as the most important conversation of our time.

RT: The arrival of your “starlit granddaughter,” Shai, seems of vital importance to blue gait. When you write about Shai the abstract questions of human existence and the grounded realities of political injustice seem to come more pointedly together. Could you talk a little about Shai’s arrival in your life? Did it cause you to think about your writing in a new way?

sp: It is difficult for me to speak about my daughters or my granddaughter without becoming immediately corny. Daughters are unaccountable beauty and mystery. To be near that for all these years still leaves me mostly speechless. Much of my community work was rooted in modelling for my daughters a woman’s responsibility toward well-being in our world. Shai’s arrival was no different — although she is a new iteration of my mother, another wildly extroverted creative. And that was an added gift.

Some of these poems were composed when I was at home during COVID lockdown, and when my daughters were younger I worked mostly from home as well. So, there was a kind of circling around the wonder that a new life represents, whatever the circumstances of the world. A balancing and re-invigorating of the importance of nurturing responses to the devastations of both history and the present moment.

RT: blue gait is your first book in thirteen years, following 2008’s roughened in undercurrent (Leaf Press). Despite this long time in which you had to accumulate poems, given their immediate political nature many of these poems must have been written in the last year or so. You mentioned writing during lockdown: could you talk a little about the slow-fast nature of this book’s creation? 

sp: I consider this book a gift of both mystery and many hands. Several of the poems arrived in the spaces between a very demanding work and community life, across probably a decade. During lockdown, I was able to work from home and so was able to settle into a gentler pace. I didn’t have to navigate the space between public discourses and more intimate expressions. It occurs to me now that meaning is not only constructed in the mind, but also made by hand. In reengaging with the quiet and the simple, where my senses were most settled, I was able to complete the work.

I think, for all artists, it’s a balancing act to maintain ourselves and also create work that has some relevance to the communities we belong to. I hope the poems welcome those communities to share in what is produced. I worked from home for maybe fourteen weeks and then returned to work, but in that time, though I continued to teach, I was able to just pay attention to sounds and light and gather myself toward the poems that had kind of been humming and waiting.

Mona Fertig had contacted me a year before and I had said I would need a year to finish what I was working on. And then, a year later she asked again. So, with that encouragement — Mona is an amazingly creative and skilled champion for poetry — I was able to finish the work.

There is also this: over time, although I will likely always identify as a poet, I think I am moved as much by the stories I know from my community work as I am from the mysteries that I encounter from a place of trust in beauty and abundance. I am not so much interested in being seen as a poet as I am in living like one, and by that I mean in trust that the sharing of stories helps us continue. This isn’t new to me but I think I did experience a deepening acceptance of the ephemeral nature of everything as I moved through my particular iterations in these poems.

RT: You mentioned your publisher, Mona Fertig of Mother Tongue Publishing, who recently announced her retirement. As you say, she’s one of our province’s great champions of poetry, including yours! Mona’s published your poems in her anthologies Rocksalt: An Anthology of Contemporary BC Poetry and Forcefield: 77 Women Poets of British Columbia, and now, of course, in blue gait. Could you talk a little about Mona’s role in your writing and publishing life?

sp: For a poet to work with a publisher is an unaccountable gift. Mona walked me through this very graceful and respectful process, and every step of the way I was able to feel her insight breathing the text and helping it along. I remember when Mona’s The Unsettled, from Kalamalka Press, came out. That book got me through the whole winter. We first met at a residency at Green College, called Booming Ground. I was so struck by Mona’s joy and her ability to create community wherever she was. When the calls for Rocksalt and Forcefield came out, Mona made sure I got that information, which I really appreciated. And Mona’s presence for art and poetry is not limited to me. She has been like an artery for poetry and art books for decades. I really feel, and I thank her for this, that she has done an enormous amount to shape literatures on the West Coast. A treasure for us, and to us.

RT: Oh, I agree! I still can’t believe she can retire: how can you retire from being Mona Fertig? You’re right, community blossoms wherever she goes. You make community, too, through your work teaching creative writing at the Shadbolt Centre in Burnaby, and your coordination of the Deer Lake Artist Residencies. Has working with artists from a variety of disciplines influenced how you think about your own art, both the making of it and how it is received by the public?

sp: My teaching has been such a gift. The Shadbolt is a unique place to teach in that it is a community-based fine arts centre. For me, that has meant a kind of openness to anyone who might want to share a story. I have taught here for 23 years. I began with two classes and now I teach several. Building a program that is connected to the creative process of those at the table is very connected to my way of being a poet in general: to watch, to intuit, and then to make it happen.

The Deer Lake Residencies welcome artists from all creative forms, and so interacting with them across their residencies has been affirming—some aspects of the creative process cross genres and forms. I am beginning to see how our creative forms want to merge and morph. I think our longing to connect may be at the root of it, in these uncertain times when isolation and individualism seems to be unsettling its hold. Public reception of the work, for me, is not as important as the conversations and insights that emerge for others as they encounter the work. In many ways, that is how a poem lives: after the poet has given and shared it, the poem’s energy moves through the reader’s worldview, becoming itself in new ways.

I am not so much interested in being seen as a poet as I am in living like one, and by that I mean in trust that the sharing of stories helps us continue.

RT: The energy in your poems is certainly evident on the page. The words refuse to stay tethered: they roam the page, often eschewing the left margin and leaving significant gaps between words and phrases. In this way, your work brings to mind that of another Mother Tongue poet, Daniela Elza.

When I asked Daniela about the spacing in her poems, she said that writing poems the way they traditionally “should” look made her feel claustrophobic, and that spacing her words out felt “akin to the mind dreaming and connecting. How it darts off. There was a kind of control and at the same time a letting go. A kind of freeing myself and the reader to experience the fluidity of the words…” Does your thinking on shape in your poems mirror, in some way, Daniela’s? What do you think the shape of your poems allows them to do that a left-justified poem would not?

sp: My practice is rooted in a kind of deep listening, which I fail at a lot! John Berger says that art is a conversation between the maker and the materials. When I work with language then, there is a waiting and listening. And a reverence for where the text is heard in the body and where I think it wants to arrive on the page. This is partly to respond to the music of the text which I am hearing, which can be done syntactically, yes. But for me, allowing the text to find its place on a page is a part of letting go of authorship, which is important to me in the context of the noise and individualism of our world.

I have a fairly strenuous engagement with hope in the power of language and art to sustain us. So, it would be unlikely for me to impose a form on a text. Certainly, I’m just not that interested in traditional Eurocentric forms, although I appreciate them. I think there is a space in which a poet can listen across time and incorporate the gifts and guidance of the past and the future in a way that defy logic. It’s possible that this text may have wanted even more than I was able to provide for it. So, I suppose my intentions in terms of form have more to do with how the work might be heard and carried than any kind of intellectual or theoretical intention. 

I think there is a space in which a poet can listen across time and incorporate the gifts and guidance of the past and the future in a way that defy logic.

RT: Your “fairly strenuous engagement with hope” often leads you to writing about birds (““Hope” is the thing with feathers,” according to Emily Dickinson, after all!). The book opens with a goldfinch, and many other birds appear in the poems that follow. On top of that, the beginning of each poem in blue gait is marked by the little image of a bird, a different one for each section of the book (hummingbirds, eagles, etc.).

sp: The birds were Mona’s idea, which I loved, and the drawings are the work of designer, John Malcolm. It’s just one example of Mona’s insight as a poet/publisher that she could choose the birds that went with the sections of the poems.

RT:  In “on the first morning,” you speak of learning about the world by watching birds, and write that “hawk vision transforms the sky.” What draws you to watch birds so closely?

sp: I think I am not really watching the birds as I am listening to them. When my first book was almost finished, a small brown bird came into our house and stayed for just a few minutes and once we opened all the doors and windows, if flew out. The same thing happened with this set of poems. I received an email from Mona about acceptance of the manuscript and that same evening, another bird came in and stayed for a bit and then returned outside. It’s such a thing to have happen.

The art centre where I work is located in a park with a large central lake and the residencies that I support in my work are located in a couple of houses on the other side of the lake. So, I am back and forth quite a bit as new artists arrive and work and then finish up their residencies. There are routinely eagles and herons—and so many geese! In our neighbourhood, we have a resident raven and a resident hummingbird that don’t seem to migrate. Also, a pair of cooper’s hawks that nest in the alley behind our house.

RT: How has listening to birds helped you think about the world differently? Do you think your considerations of birds have influenced how you write poems?

sp: I grew up in a rural setting and we had a big piece of land so there were pheasants and cranes in the garden and robins in the cherry tree – all through my growing up. And at that time, migrating geese too. In this set of poems I was aware of these beings as members of the communities that have made me and accompany me. I was also aware of the space between the material and the immaterial as well as the tender vitality of ecosystems. For sure, there is something about the ease and grace of flight and song that gets me as a poet. Motion that I resonate with. Also, in the presence of so much heaviness in the world—including the pandemic, but also the histories that have led to it and the work ahead for the planet—I feel a kinship with the sounds bird make just for the sake of song. Attending to small joys is sustaining. Mostly, though, as a new generation arrived into our family and as my parents passed, I was aware of my own personal location on the planet as very much less central to anything that matters. I think unsettling the myth of human dominance on the planet will become more widespread as we greet the future. Many communities across the globe move through lives without that dominance. And although humility isn’t very often seen as a sign or source of strength, I think what we’ll find is that in whatever ways we are able to be in community with other living things, the planet will be affirmed and possibly healed. The intersection between our lived experiences and the art we make is interesting to me. So, as I was contemplating the ephemeral nature of individual lives—the folding and unfolding of time—all living things became more precious and more companioning to me. Birds especially, because of their movement and sound, which seem generously given.

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shauna paull, poet, educator and community advocate, completed her MFA in Creative Writing at UBC. blue gait is her second book of poetry. Shauna has led creative writing workshops at the Shadbolt Centre for the Arts on the ancestral and unceded territories of the Tsleil-Waututh Nation since 2000. She currently coordinates the Deer Lake Artist Residencies. In community, shauna has worked extensively with migrant and refugee women in areas of labour and mobility rights, poverty alleviation and legislative reform. Shauna represented Canada at the UN Commission on the Status of Women in 2006.

Rob Taylor’s  fourth poetry collection, Strangers, was published by Biblioasis in 2021. He lives with his family in Port Moody, BC. You can read more of his interviews at: http://roblucastaylor.com/interviews/