The following interview is part five of an eight part series of conversations with BC poets. All interviews were conducted by Rob Taylor.
Perennial
All day, birdsong tills the air.
By evening, stars push through
the loam, perennial, their roots
tapping back to the bulb of their first
blossoming. It’s not the flight so much
as how the sparrow gathers up her body
for the landing, how the ladybug folds
each wing like a napkin inside its lacquered
case. How we are designed to open as much
as we are to close. Listen to the frog’s singing.
How it starts as suddenly as it stops.
Reprinted with permission from Asterisms (Harbour Publishing, 2023)
Rob Taylor: The poems in your third collection of poems, 2020’s Governor General’s Award finalist Orrery, largely focused on outer space (an orrery being a mechanical model of the solar system), as do many of the poems in your new book, Asterisms. That’s not the standard preoccupation of most poets! Could you speak a little about what drew you to writing about space, and writing about it via poetry specifically?
Donna Kane: I grew up surrounded by a landscape where other-than-human life vastly exceeded human, so the natural world has always been an intrinsic part of who I am. Northeast BC is quite prairie-like (as Lorna Crozier, one of my favourite people and writers, once said, “It’s the closest BC gets to Saskatchewan.”). As a result, the sky takes up a lot of room. On dark, clear nights, the stars are the main feature. I also grew up during the Space Race. I was ten when Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon. The night sky, space, and the natural world were formative parts of my early years, and they have remained not only of interest, but places of solace.
I also write about these subjects in my non-fiction work. I’m currently working on a prose manuscript that chronicles my experiences sleeping outside (I’m heading into my fifth summer of sleeping on an old cast iron bed on our uncovered deck in Rolla) while exploring subjects related to the nocturnal world, astronomy, and light pollution.
It’s good to be reminded that not only do we depend on the natural world for our survival, we are nature.
RT: In both Orrery and Asterisms, you write poems directly about outer space and the science that underpins its study, but in Asterisms we see that scientific language working its way into poems about animals and objects here on earth: a butterfly flies as if “nicked by a gravity well,” a can of Bartlett pears is no less than “the pivotal moment when the first star / formed… deep within their cosmic dawn,” and even the speaker of your poems is transformed, becoming, in one, an “interstellar object / on a mission to a glass of wine”!
I think the instinct of most poets would be to go in the opposite direction, to use more earth-bound, familiar objects (butterflies, pears, wine) to describe the complexity of the wider universe. (He says, knowing full well that metaphors always end up flowing in both directions.) In reading Asterisms, it felt as if the firmer, more grounded of the two worlds for you was not the earthly, but the cosmic. Would you say that’s true? Do you see deep space around you in the forest, just as others might look up at the stars and see, in their patterns, animals?
DK: Great question. It reminds me of the first four lines of William Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence”:
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour
I do feel that. And it’s important, I think, especially now, in the face of climate change and an often-divisive world riddled with fake news, to remind ourselves of the discoveries made by science, and how we understand much better the connections between ourselves and the larger universe because of these discoveries. I also think it’s good to be reminded that not only do we depend on the natural world for our survival, we are nature. Our bodies are comprised of one of the universe’s first elements—hydrogen. There is no element in us that does not also exist in the cosmos.
My interest in and knowledge of the night sky and astronomy has deepened since I began to sleep outside. With the stars and the movements of other planets more viscerally a part of my nighttime experience, I have been reminded of the night sky’s natural and cultural significance, and it has inspired me to learn more. When so many of us live in urban centres where light pollution blocks out the sky and where access to natural spaces is limited, we may not always be aware of the deleterious effects of being disconnected from nature and darkness. A study in 2023 claimed that only one in five North Americans can still see the Milky Way. It’s unsettling how our connections to the night sky are being lost, not to mention that with more animals active at night than in the daytime, the greatest impacts of light pollution have been on other-than-human life.
RT: You split time between Rolla, BC and Halifax, Nova Scotia, where, as you say, light pollution blocks out the sky. I’m curious if you write different poems when you’re in the city. When you’re in Halifax, do you look up at the stars with the same frequency? Do you see the same things when you do?
DK: I definitely write different poems when in Halifax. There’s not a lot of natural space in the city, and while I can see the moon, and sometimes a planet, there really isn’t a night sky. If I do see a smattering of stars, I have no idea which ones they are because there isn’t enough context. In Rolla, the constellations and asterisms are clearly defined, though there is still some light pollution. This past fall, I visited a dark sky preserve in southwest Saskatchewan where there were so many stars that the asterisms and constellations I knew were almost overwhelmed by stars I normally never see. It was an incredible experience.
Our capacity to recognize patterns may very well be because everything in nature, including humans, is comprised of patterns—from the Fibonacci series, to petals on a flower, to the tracks of animals.
RT: Let’s dwell on that word “asterism,” which will be new to many people (including me before I Googled it). An asterism is a pattern of stars that has not been formally named a constellation. As Orrery formed a tighter circle around the theme of outer space, Asterism feels more eclectic, with many of its poems looking elsewhere: outward at the natural environment where you live; inward at the philosophical underpinnings of your life.
The covers of the two books, too, suggest a shift (from a space probe to a butterfly’s wing). My sense is that the poems in the new book, like the stars in an asterism, are related, but the connections are more open to interpretation by the reader. Would you say that’s true?
DK: I think my writing has most often started with a concrete image or experience and from there I have tried to apply that image or experience to abstract ideas. In many ways the concerns of both books are the same, but you are right that they seem to take off from different vantage points. With Orrery it was from the vantage point of a probe in interstellar space, an object we could no longer sense, so ultimately an abstract, and then within that abstract I tried to explore concrete images and experiences. In Asterisms I often started with the particular and then tried to view it through a larger cosmological lens. I love learning about similarities between large structures and small structures, such as the fractal patterns of the universe and that of a brain cell, so I do find myself starting more and more from striking relationships such as these and then applying them to the everyday.
As you suggest, the poems in Asterisms definitely have a greater range of subjects. With Orrery, I focused on Pioneer 10 or else tried to reflect the ideas inspired by the probe—materiality, consciousness, transformation, in the subjects I wrote about. With Asterisms, I was more concerned with patterns and their disruptions, with things we can and cannot know, so I tried to allow for more diverse subjects and more room for interpretation.
RT: If it has one, what do you think of as Asterism’s gravitational centre?
DK: I would say it’s the interconnectedness of patterns. An asterism is, as you say, a pattern of stars. Our capacity to recognize patterns may very well be because everything in nature, including humans, is comprised of patterns—from the Fibonacci series, to petals on a flower, to the tracks of animals. In many of the poems in my book, I explore how humans have interrupted or disturbed these patterns to the detriment of other life.
RT: Your poems are musical and playful, and also grounded and wise: Kay Ryan meets Mary Oliver meets Elise Partridge meets the Lunar Lander Module. You seem to have a firm sense of your place in the universe (if that’s an illusion, then it’s a convincing one!). I’m curious how you feel you learned to be at home where you are. How much of it involved looking at the skies and landscape around Rolla? How much at the pages of books of poetry?
DK: I love all the poets you mention (I have mixed feelings about lunar landers), so I am flattered. I’m also somewhat calmed by your comment that I seem to have a firm sense of my place in the universe. While I do feel at home when I’m in the natural world, in the human sphere, I am often quite diffident.
I think it hasn’t been so much that I learned to be at home where I am, but that for nearly all of my life, I’ve never lived anywhere else. My place in the universe is so familiar to me I have never felt separate from it. Poetry too, can make me feel at home, particularly poems that embody what Don McKay calls, “poetic attention,” where poets are “readied” to recognize the wholeness that may arise from paying attention to the material world. When I read poems by poets such as Don McKay, Sue Sinclair, or Jan Zwicky, I am calmed.
I think any poem we read is in conversation with all the other poems we’ve read or written.
RT: Asterisms seems focused on the present, paying attention to the immediate moment before the speaker. In doing so, though, these poems become obsessed with the past and the future. In “On Silence” you write,
music can be disclosed only
by the silence between each note.
And the silence before. And after.
And three pages later, in “On Memory,” you write about,
This memory, which is no longer
that afternoon, but nectar in an uncapped cell,
a sweetness between before and after.
The one poem suggests the material demarcations between all things, and the other the felt connection between them, flowing over everything like nectar. How true both are: the cell capped and uncapped at once!
I’m curious about how this duality relates to your writing process. You seem able to compartmentalize—to write discrete poems about discrete things—and yet those discrete things (rainbows, comets, singing frogs) are always spilling out to wider concerns or personal revelations. How discrete do you think a poem can be, sitting alone on the page, demarcated by the silence of the blank page around it?
DK: Oh, that is so insightful. I am indeed obsessed with the liminal space between one moment and the next. I feel like that hinge, that transition point, is where the real mysteries lie. I hadn’t actually thought about the silence of the blank space or pages between poems as reflecting this same sort of liminal space, but it’s a great observation. Because my poems have always focused more or less on the same subjects—the material world, phenomenology, consciousness—I feel they have always been in conversation with each other. I think any poem we read is in conversation with all the other poems we’ve read or written.
RT: Yes! Very much so. In Hiddenness, Uncertainty, Surprise, Jane Hirschfield wrote that “good poems undercut their own yearning to say one thing well, because to say one thing is simply not to say enough.” Does that resonate with you?
DK: Yes, that completely resonates. In her poem “February” from Sixty-Seven Ontological Studies, Jan Zwicky writes, “Hello world, you who also know / nothing you can say.” As I get older, this has become ever more evident for me. My work is far from the experimental work of language poets where the process of writing a poem is sometimes seen as pre-cognitive, the poem posing the problem, and the writer working through it until the poem resolves itself. That’s not my approach, but I am cognizant of the impossibility of pat answers, and I hope my poems don’t close in that way. Maybe that’s why so many of my poems do resolve with a kind of “this or that” ending.
RT: Though your poems contain multitudes, they usually do so in small spaces: forty of the fifty poems in Asterisms are a sonnet’s length or less. This goes against the general trend in Canadian poetry publishing, where short poems are fairly rare. Could you talk a little about your attraction to writing these more densely compressed poems?
DK: It may just come down to a short attention span and an aversion to hoarding. I like things to be spare, and I seem more suited to reading (and writing) contained poems that capture a moment or thought in a way that, hopefully, gives rise to something more, akin to Jan Zwicky’s idea that metaphor works as a gestalt. In this way, I think a short poem can do the work of a long poem.
I learned that good prompts can work like a seam ripper on a poet’s own ideas, opening up the stitches so you can move around in your thinking a bit more.
RT: Beyond Zwicky, have any particular poets inspired you in pursuing this approach?
DK: The aforementioned Jane Hirschfield, and Louise Glück, too. One of my other favourite poets is Tony Hoagland whose poems are much longer than mine, but I think in his case it’s his candid tone and humour that draws me in, and what holds me is that same resonance of meaning that’s greater than the words on the page.
RT: You note in Asterism‘s acknowledgments that during the depths of the Covid outbreak you enrolled in an online poetry workshop with acclaimed Newfoundland poet George Murray, which proved to be “exactly what [you] needed.” How did Covid impact your writing, and what role did Murray’s class play in seeing you through that time?
DK: You’d think because I’ve lived nearly all my life in a rural, isolated community that Covid wouldn’t have affected me as much as it did. But I wasn’t writing. I had always organized or attended a few writing events each year, and perhaps they fueled me more than I had realized. And also, for reasons I can’t explain, I wasn’t corresponding as much with my writing friends. It got very quiet. I’d always admired George Murray’s writing and his blogs, and when I saw an advertisement for his virtual “Introduction to Poetry” class, I signed up. I think on one hand, I wasn’t sure I did know how to write a poem anymore, but I was also missing camaraderie; I wanted to know what other writers were thinking, who they were reading. The classes not only gave me that, but I began to write poetry again.
RT: Were you reminded that you did know how to write poems, after all? Or did you find some new ways to do it?
DK: Prior to George’s classes, I had resisted form (all those arguments as to whether form drives content, or content form), and I was very averse to prompts. I was abysmal at workshopping poems while doing my undergrad and then my MFA. But many of the poems in Asterisms began from challenges to write in a certain form or to apply particular words. This didn’t change at all the subjects I was thinking about, but it gave me a structure to work in, and suddenly I was writing sonnets and villanelles, something I’d never really been attracted to before. I learned that good prompts (which George seems gifted at) can work like a seam ripper on a poet’s own ideas, opening up the stitches so you can move around in your thinking a bit more. Paradoxically to what I had previously thought, having structure helped me move in directions I might not otherwise have gone. Structure gave me a place and a way to start writing again. And using a bit more form or structure fit with the book’s overall theme of patterns.
A recipient of the BC Medal of Good Citizenship, Donna Kane’s poems, short fiction, reviews, and essays have been published widely. She is the author of the non-fiction book Summer of the Horse and four books of poetry including Orrery, a finalist for the 2020 Governor General’s Literary Award. Her most recent book is Asterisms (Spring 2024, Harbour Publishing). She divides her time between Rolla, BC in Treaty 8 Territory and Halifax, NS in Mi’kma’ki, the ancestral and traditional lands of the Mi’kmaq people.
Rob Taylor’s fifth poetry collection, Weather¸ will be published by Gaspereau Press in Spring 2024. He lives with his family in Port Moody, BC. You can read more of his interviews here.