from A river runs through it: a writing diary

, collaborating with Julie Carr

September 2021: I’ve been increasingly uncomfortable with the title of “poet of place.” It was a description attached to my work due to the kinds of writing I was exploring throughout the 1990s and beyond, but now feels enormously outdated. The notion of being the descendant of white settlers aching for a “poetry of place” becomes both disingenuous and reeks of colonial privilege: we are only able to speak of belonging to a geography that wasn’t ours to claim, and was claimed by displacing others who had held as a central core of identity the relationship to those particular lands for thousands, if not tens of thousands of years. In the 1960s, one might speak of how Canadian poetry sought ground through conversations around geographic identity, such as the Vancouver poets utilizing American influences while writing their west coast strictures. They were writing against a Canadian literature that claimed scope only through Toronto and Montreal, what a generation or so earlier had been centred around Ottawa and Fredericton. The conversations of writing and around writing were different, seeking out different foundations, and set with the pre-conceptions and blind spots of the day.

Now to see a contemporary poet, descendant of white settlers, write a poem around their particular growing-up suburb of youth, especially while not speaking to the privilege of such a space, feels a bit cringey. It feels outdated, ignoring conversations that have become increasingly present. So many of us, as settler-descendants, self-conscious about attempting to find our bearings, despite one developed at the ongoing expense of the Indigenous peoples that were here when we landed; working a descripting to counter our Britishness, or even to counter our more boisterous neighbours to the immediate south.

Are self-descriptors, or descriptors of any sort, important? Maybe. Maybe not. A poet of specific geographies to a poet of “thingness,” perhaps. The concrete shape and structure of language, description and salvage. It is not of the described environment or subject but the how of the description.

There is a quickness to my approach to composition, something comparable, possibly, to Fred Wah’s “drunken tai chi”—I work to carve, to craft, as quickly as possible. Otherwise, a poem might take days or a week or even longer to carve and craft, through multiple printed drafts my pen rides roughshod over, poking and tweaking the smallest details until the poem feels bulletproof. To paraphrase Don McKay: crafting a line, or a poem, any bird might trust to light upon.

And yet, there are times I’m concerned that my writing isn’t a site of inquiry, but a space through which all of my decisions have already been made.