Tofino is full of creative people - poets, writers, sculptors, artists, carvers, performance folk of every type. Tuesday night we gathered at the Common Loaf Bake Shop for a book launch of Joanna Streetly's new book of poems titled, All Of Us Hidden. Joanna asked me to talk about poetry, so I offered the following. Live music followed our presentations, and Tofino's special magic happened, as it does every time we gather together to share our love of the arts, the written word, and music.
Poetry has companioned me through my life. I remember when my first poem wrote itself. I was sitting in school in grade nine when the lines of a poem began writing itself in my head. I started writing down the words, like taking dictation. I have been writing ever since.
Poems chart our journey. They leave signposts along the way so when we are gone those who come after can read them and remember who we were in this life. Poems have channeled my joy, my gratitude, my love of the natural world and its incredible beauty, my love affair with Clayoquot Sound, and with an amazing big black wolf-dog who shared my wild wilderness heart. I have written my activism, my angst, my grief at the climate crisis and its impact on all beings – especially the beyond-human souls with whom we share this struggling planet.
Mostly, I strive for gratitude – for life, for its beauty, for the love that has resulted in the grief I carry. I bear witness, I grieve. But I also try to leave something in my poems for readers to take away with them – some hope, some compassion, some awareness….something of beauty to shine through the darkness.
Poems don’t always have to be serious. For fifteen years I have written poems online among poets from all over the world. They love my Wild Woman poems, and all the predicaments Wild Woman got into in her more agile years. Every now and then, a funny poem arrives. I will leave you with this one, written when I was writing among some wonderful poets at a site called Imaginary Garden With Real Toads. I worked hard to keep up, as they were very good and much younger. One day this poem arrived and made them laugh. I share it with you to show you poems can cross the whole spectrum of human emotion: from dark to light, from grief to gratitude, from despair to hope, and from tears to laughter. One of the best of those poet friends hated haiku, so I wrote this for her:
OLD FROG MAKES HASH OF HAIKU
Old frog falls in pond
reviving briefly.
Old frog sits in stupor,
finally thinks of Word.
Old frog – ancient enough
for dimness to be forgiven.
Old frog, swimming with the young fry –
Glub glub.
(Everyone loved the "glub, glub!!)
