How does a poem begin?
A poem begins as something incredibly small or incredibly big. Usually, in my mind it is born of a juxtaposition or an irony. A dripping leaf after a storm, the impacts of colonialism on the environment, a funny joke, some righteous absurdity that lives in the palm of our hands. To me, growing a poem is always a process of expansion or distillation to find the pure form of an idea, a feeling, a rhythm, a thought, a joke.
Why is poetry important?
Poetry is important because it relies on observation and constantly brings us back to our senses. It allows us the heart space of the universe and forces us to reckon with the cramped legs of a bomb shelter. Poetry is life. Poetry is not for sale. Poetry is not a commodity. Poetry is radical mindfulness. It is part of the true essence of all things that are real.
What other poetry books have you been reading lately?
I have been reading poetry books by Charlie Petch, jaye simpson, Jillian Christmas and RC Weslowski. I also recently found some nice vintage copies of Brautigan and Ferlinghetti. They all sit bedside together in a jumbled heap of beatnik joy (and some surreal misery as well).
How did you first engage with poetry?
I had to write terrible rhyming poems in school. My parents both love to read and we grew up memorizing Shel Silverstein and Dennis Lee. There were always poems around and we had a very large library in a closet in our house. When I was 13 my dad gifted me a Rumi book and then the Leonard Cohen anthology Stranger Music. After that I spent hours upon hours alone in the library poetry section sitting on the floor reading. Between my parents and the library I found my biggest first influences, Yeats, Lillian Allen, Keats, Rumi, Brautigan, Rilke, Lorca, Gibran and on and on it went. When I was in grade 11 I put together an entire show, for a project in Drama class, of poems from the holocaust. I failed English 5 times in High School. I moved to an Alternative High school in grade 12 and my teacher there encouraged me to make a book of poems to be read out loud. I started performing them at school fundraisers and at 17 I fell into a really great group of weirdo poets at a reading series at a local coffee shop. Somewhere in there, I fell hard into a spoken tradition in my own work.
A bit of a witch, a nature freak and an activist at heart, Magpie is known for her visceral, often surrealist writings that extend from the everyday human experience into the depths of natural and inanimate worlds. Magpie has spent much of the past decade heavily involved in the arts while living in and around rural BC and Southern Ontario. Having spent the past few years raising a new human and past many years caring for her grandmother through Alzheimer’s disease, she has become increasingly interested in questions surrounding genetic memory, place, body, grief, aging and how we choose to tell our own stories. She currently lives on the west coast of Canada on the traditional lands of the Snuneymuxw.
What are you working on?
Creating in this pandemic time has been very difficult for me. I have been homeschooling a neurodivergent child and caregiving for my grandmother while my husband finished a professional degree in our basement in a city we didn’t want to be in. It’s hard to have a thought of one’s own in conditions like that. I grew a lot of food and saved a lot of seeds and focused on reigning in my power and energy for the future.
I have been working on a large project about caregiving for my grandmother who lives with Alzheimer’s disease. It has been years of research around memory, genetic memory, her own family history, settler histories, how I interact with the past, how we tell our own stories and understanding the kinetics of homesickness. Hours upon hours of sitting with things my grandma said or did. I have 100 pages of poems I don’t know what to do with now. And then I sat down the other day and just started writing poems with an outpouring of deep grief. The opioid crisis, the last ancient forests being cut down on the west coast in BC, my grandma’s house, endangered species, lost healing herbs, my childhood, my housing instability, other people’s lost children, free things that are no longer free, our inability to connect in meaningful ways, our obsession with categorizing humanity, it’s all in there. Sometimes you have to go back to where you began to be able to continue.
