While I’m happy to write, I’m just as pleased to read. This is what Poetry Weekend means to me. My poems, my friends’ poems, the moving words of professionals and colleagues and artists are all the better heard echoing from the walls of Memorial Hall. I’ve only attended in-person twice; I started reading my own work during the Zoom years. I’ve been writing my whole life but poetry only for three years, and I know I have so much to learn and catch up on. This makes two days of poets and their work so valuable and so fulfilling.
Last year I started a personal Poetry Weekend tradition: buying the books of everyone I was scheduled to read with. I’m glad to be welcomed among these people, to shake the building with verse. This is, if nothing else, a contemporary poetry crash course.
I write this not to review each of these books, but simply to notice things – things I don’t do in my own work, things I can borrow and some day make my own, things that absolutely floor me. To feel impressed seems almost counter-productive to the purpose. I don’t want to be impressed. I would rather forget that I’m also a poet and just find something to fall in love with as a reader.
I didn’t get to read with kevin andrew heslop, but he was first on my panel, so I picked up his book anyway. Reading the correct fury of your why is a mountain felt cursed, like I was reading something that was changing reality around me as I dived in. I felt like I was reading something of an undercurrent, not subtext necessarily but the closest you could get to the feeling of a word instead of its meaning. I believe strongly in reverence for the people in your life who move and shape and influence you, and his last poem in this book, “my celia,” has footnotes on each line with extended thank-yous and acknowledgements in lieu of a Thank You section. It feels so warm to couch appreciation in poetry this way.
Benjamin C. Dugdale, I am in awe of your smut. Reading The Repoetic: After Saint-Pol-Roux made me feel for the first time something like “This is so good I wish I’d written it.” I always wonder if it’s to my detriment that I foreground my queerness in my poetry, or if maybe I should tone it down. Nah. The Repoetic shows me that, in fact, I could stand to go way, way harder. The contents of page 36 made me scream, and then again when I read its explanation in the Acknowledgements. Dugdale did something here I have literally joked about doing with my peers.
Noah Page had a zine from a few years ago on the table at the back of Memorial Hall, so I made sure to grab one of those. Page’s “Poolside Fugue” was the first zine Benjamin Dugdale released as part of the bnnybybook series. I don’t know if Page ever revisited this poem, but it made me want so much more. There are 12 stanzas in this poem and each one feels like an episode in a limited series. What if Origami Angels’ Somewhere City was shoegaze instead of emo and scored to an indie movie set in the absolute dregs of suburban summer? That’s this poem. Of everyone’s works that I grabbed, this is the one I kept going back to the most to keep looking for things I glazed over.
It’s so funny that I’m talking about a Tadgh Saxa work right now. Back in 2018, during the last year of my BA program at St. Thomas University, I was working for Kathy Mac’s Atlantic Canadian Poets’ Archive as the managing editor. That year I read Tadgh Saxa’s debut collection Of Feathers and Fire and had an analysis of one of its poems published on the ACPA website. Now, in the last year of my MA program, I’m once again reading and writing about Tadgh Saxa’s poetry with their new chapbook, Seax. Since that first time we crossed paths, both of us have shed our old names and embraced new futures, and this transformation takes stage in Seax. These poems remind me of Senua’s Sacrifice, a game about a Pict warrior in the throws of tremendous mental health struggles, reliving trauma as a form of rebirth. Tadgh Saxa’s poems are also grounded in battle language and trauma survival. It’s this casting off and survival I’m taking away from their work. I have been able to capture so many things about gender transition in my poetry but not the process of finding and fitting into a new name, and I’ll be studying this closely while I figure out how to do that.
Jordan Trethewey’s These are the People in Your Neighborhood is the culmination of his project as the Poet Laureate of Fredericton, gathering stories from the population and rendering them in verse. This collection came out a couple months after Poetry Weekend, but I thought I’d speak to Trethewey’s most recent work. His poetry in this collection is journalistic, like reading a brief profile story. While Trethewey’s voice tells these stories, his subjects are so varied, from completely different walks of life. This voice lends consistency to the telling of many intimate scenes. It reminds me of when I interviewed the former owner of Cedar Tree Café, Lisa Wilby, and we spoke about Fredericton’s tendency to attract a little of everyone from the world. There’s a poem I owe her about cinnamon chicken, but I wonder if Trethewey might be better equipped to write it.
And this is why I love reading poetry as much as writing it, because I’m always thinking about who the poem is for. Poetry Weekend and other live poetry events add a touch of intimacy to the poem and presentation, bringing you closer to the work. But reading the work of your co-presenters is interesting because you get to reconstruct their cadence in your mind with what you read after the conference. It kind of carries it forward, making the weekend last much longer.
