Poems, on occasion

, On Occasion: Poems for the People, ed. Sina Queyras (Coach House Books),

I recently received my contributor copies of On Occasion: Poems for the People (Coach House Books, 2026), edited by Montreal poet and critic Sina Queyras, an impressive volume of more than one hundred poems by contemporaries, friends, mentors and fresh voices. I have three pieces in the collection—a poem composed in response to Kingston poet Steven Heighton’s death, another composed upon the death of Ottawa poet Stephen Brockwell’s beloved dog, Niko, and a third, responding to my own Covid-era birthdays, holding off on my fifties (“Forty-twelfth birthday”) until the whole crisis passed. Honestly, this is exactly the kind of anthology I’ve always wanted to be a part of, offering a rich overview of some of the best contemporary writing across Canada and beyond. Queyras has done a remarkable job assembling this work and I thank Queyras, as well as everyone at Coach House, for allowing me space within these pages.

The volume offers itself as “A twenty-first-century reconsideration of the occasional poem by contemporary writers.” Poems for “occasions,” as Queyras offers, whether births or deaths or any other kind of event worth noting. “I start this introduction with bookstores and books because these are essential components in the life of a poem. Poetry happens like this all over the world. Poems are written at café tables and library desks,” they write, early in the introduction, “on buses and subways, in fields and forests. They come out of bodies, comprised of synaptic flares, offering glimpses of the divine, tapping into deep-rooted feelings that are cross-hatched all through the poem, threads of worry and observation. Poems are best shared on paper too, and in person: hand to hand, mouth to ear. I have spent the last fourteen years of my life making such occasions happen at my university in Montreal.” I like this notion of the “occasion,” and was reminded a couple of years back, while judging a poetry contest, how elements of the public view the purposes of poetry: poems elegizing the loss of a spouse, a parent, a pet. A poem for a birthday. Although Queyras also offers the idea of the “occasion” one of the public reading itself.

There is value in witness, the occasion. Value in acknowledging a birthday, an anniversary; or as atrocities occur, armies move and the bombs drop, whether close by or in another country. Ordinary moments are worth noting, as are the extraordinary. There is value as well in acknowledging resistance, survival and trauma, and how portraits remain incomplete if only the positive moments are offered their due. The world is filled with such moments, out of which the stories of our very lives are built. There are moments that require themselves to be seen, otherwise we become lessened through the absence, the dismissal. And thus, the space for writing, whether poems or stories or memoir or essay.

Somewhere around the turn of the millennium, jwcurry prodded at me that not every occasion deserves a poem, and that might be true, I suppose, although I slipped his complaint into a poem as well, noting that particular occasion. Throughout that particular period, I was more consciously following American poet Robert Creeley’s lead, as many of his poems did appear to be prompted by occasions, whatever that might mean. A drive in the car, or the dishes put away. Poems that were set in what also be called the “domestic,” another term used as complaint, usually against writing by women, on those subjects dismissed as merely theirs (children, household, family, etcetera). What, then, the occasion? This particular element of “occasion” is where my three more recent poems, composed across those first few months of 2022, in On Occasion firmly sit, I’d think. All three of these poems are from the as-yet-unpublished manuscript “Autobiography,” a collection that sits as the third in a trilogy begun with the book of smaller (University of Alberta Press, 2022) [see my write-up on such here] and continues with the book of sentences (University of Alberta Press, 2025) [see my write-up on such here]. The current work-in-progress, “Museum of Practical Things” [see my note on such here] emerged a bit later, after a break of a couple of years, during which I purposely worked on other projects, including non-fiction.

The notion of the “occasional poem,” as I have long understood it, is different than poems on the “occasion.” These are poems that don’t fit with anything else a poet might be working on. One might say this is all about approach: those of us working large projects might have poems that sit outside that project, thus are unable to be incorporated. The poems, as Michael Ondaatje once paraphrased Jack Spicer, can live on their own no better than can we. Not everyone writes this way, but for those that do, these outliers, at least for me, are few and far between. My outliers continue, cluster, and eventually form books. Vancouver poet and troublemaker George Bowering, of course, corralled his outliers into a collection of occasional poems, many of which were specifically composed for particular magazines or journals, as In the Flesh (McClelland and Stewart, 1974). Apparently there were disagreements with the editor, who attempted consistency between the poems within the bounds of the manuscript, which Bowering wouldn’t hear of. Montreal poet Stephanie Bolster’s chapbook Three Bloody Words (above/ground press, 1996; 2016) falls into such a category as well, not being part of what became her Alice Liddell-prompted award-winning debut, White Stone: The Alice Poems (Vehicule Press, 1998). By the time she was working on what would become her second full-length collection, that earlier chapbook was most likely too far behind her. The rare time I manage an outlier, I seem to build books around them, as support. Any good idea or structure is worth building upon.

I don’t know who first offered that the best response to a poem is the composition of a new one, but there are different perspectives on the purpose of poems, the purpose of literature. There isn’t any single answer, given the variety of reasons readers attempt to enter writing. Not everyone comes with the same goals, whether readers or writers. There are literary works that play uniquely with language and high concept, utilizing space on the page or sound as a medium; others that highlight, or document. Even witness.

I find it interesting that Queyras subtitled this collection “Poems for the people,” attempting to bridge the perceived distance between literature and a general audience, a distance I usually blame on a combination of cultural distances and education. If schoolchildren are only introduced to poems by dead white Englishmen, then it becomes difficult to reconcile the differences between that kind of work and what contemporary writers are doing. If even the idea of living writers manages to occur. George Bowering famously composed his Seventy-One Poems for People (Red Deer College Press, 1985) as a response to, or continuation of, Dorothy Livesay’s Governor General’s Award-winning Poems for People (Ryerson Press, 1947), a collection that worked a particular kind of politics. Bowering followed not necessarily the working class politics of Livesay’s volume, as he wrote to introduce his collection:

In 1947 Dorothy Livesay published a collection of her verse about public struggle in a volume called Poems for People. In 1972 Milton Acorn, in response to Livesay’s book, published More Poems for People. For some years I have been writing and filing poems with the intent to offer my predecessors and others a book called Still More Poems for People, but now I don’t like the tone of that, and I hope that the poems will not be still.

Either way, these are poems that refuse to remain still. If you know someone who wishes to begin with poetry, or has begun and not gone far, this might be the perfect volume. Poems for the people, indeed.