Words from the editor

Home is an interesting phenomenon in our lives. It is both the past and the present at the same time. It is where we live and at the same time it is often where our parents live­—our families live. It is old friends and it is new friends. It is where we grew up and where we live now. We leave home. We come home. We create homes. We wreck homes. Home is a town. Home is a house. Home is where we choose to make it, a physical and emotional space of well-being, a person we feel most comfortable with in our little corner of the world. As well, we often talk about being at home in our bodies and if we are not at “home” with ourselves how does that discomfort influence our creative inclination to write poetry?

In response to a question about the location of her creative impulse, Tanis MacDonald sheds a bit of light on the relationship of the body and poetry:

I write a lot about the body, because it seems to be simultaneously the most present and most ignored object in the language. I work with a “felt theory” about the body’s position in the flow of language, and think of poetry as a way of hooking into that flow.

In this issue CV2 explores the inspiration of home in poetry, how it shapes language, creativity, how it appears in verse. Most of us run around with an expectation of home in our heads that conforms to a Father Knows Best ideal of warmth, nurture and unconditional support of family members when the reality is that the majority of us come from homes that fall short of this wonderland expectation. But whatever relationship you call home it is for many poets and other writers, often the place we begin to explore our craft. And it makes a lot of sense that home would be the first thing we write about. Perhaps not about the physical home we grew up in, but about the beginning of our story, our childhood, our family. It is an essential exploration of what we feel and think of, the home at the core of who we believe we are. Begin at the beginning. Home is often how we start to learn to perceive the world. If we had a good home, maybe the world looks a little rosier. If it was a difficult home, then what might strike us most poignantly is how difficult the world is. It follows, then, that the poetry we write will reflect those experiences. In any case, the old cliché “home is where the heart is” is never more true than when we begin to write poetry. Home is a universal, a concept that means pretty much the same to each of us no matter where we come from, no matter what language we speak—the physical dwellings might be as different as the colour of our skins, what clothes we wear or what we believe or our cultural expectations, but show me a poet and I will show you a poem about home.

And just maybe home is where the poetry is—at least in the beginning as the place where we gain our first taste of how the world works and how to deal with it—first in microcosm, and then as we take our experience of home with us into the rest of our lives. It becomes our first key to understanding others and is the basis of how others structure the world we live in. Our relationships with family are the first relationships we begin to delve into, they are so immediate, so pervasive.

Home is also the focus of research. Clinicians and social scientists have taken home to heart, so to speak, taking it apart as a child might take apart his favourite toy to see how it works so that everything, no matter how small, has become a clue to how our world works. The world we live in today is a complex and beautiful machine spinning and sputtering out of control, creating a food chain of professionals to attempt to fix it. From government officials, politicians, multibillion-dollar financiers at the top opposing armies of religious leaders, weary battalions of doctors, medical researchers, teachers, activists, soldiers, peacekeepers, academics, to overworked legions of social workers, down to the guy selling newspapers on the corner by the Bay, it is the daily work of millions to fix the world. How we decide which little cog in the machine is our job to fix has a lot to do with where we come from, in other words, home. One of our lasting contributions is how we as adults make homes for a new generation—which leads me back to poetry. Yes, in CV2 all roads lead back to poetry.

The other evening I was listening to The Arts Tonight with Eleanor Wachtel on CBC. She was interviewing the celebrated English novelist, Doris Lessing. Ms Lessing was talking about her difficult relationship with her parents and her growing up, and made the comment she had to write her way out of the past in order to develop as a novelist. It is a common lament among writers that there is a period in our development in which it is important­—even necessary—to return home in order to understand who we are as writers, especially poets. For many it is a kind of weeding-out-the-cobwebs thing, the distractions, to get to the “real” stuff. A process of writing into the present, you might say. For many writers the past is home, family, and the trials and tribulations, the challenge being to write about these things in the present. A common mistake many a new poet makes is to believe that the impact of a particular event makes a powerful poem, and while it is true that it is important to explore many experiences, it is not the event, but the way language opens it up to the reader that makes a poem. So, for a poet, it is a process both of selection and of learning how to communicate poetically.

In CV2’s interview with featured poet Rajinderpal S. Pal, he remarks how a poem he wrote entitled “earliest memory (2),” about a kite festival he attended as a child, brought responses from people from a variety of cultural backgrounds about kite festivals they experienced in their own communities. He was surprised that something that seemed a specific memory could have an impact on so many people. Also Rajinderpal, who was born in India, raised in England and has spent a great deal of his adult life in Canada, talks about the impact these three homes have had on his writing, inspired by the intersections of these places in his life, despite the fact they exist thousands of physical and cultural miles from each other.

For Tanis MacDonald, who has spent a great deal of her adult life moving around, change as well as poetry have become homes. In speaking about the influence of the experience of home in poetry, Tanis also talks about another topic important to those who struggle with the inspiration of home, which she refers to as “confessionality.” She writes:

In the hothouse of a workshop atmosphere, where the instructor may push her students to demand more from their craft, an assignment to write about painful or moving family dynamics may be a worthwhile exercise in risk, but it doesn’t necessarily result in good poetry. Discovering one’s voice is a long process, in my experience, and it comes from dogged work and the willingness to work without reward, rather than in a romantic flash of catharsis. Young poets are sometimes slow to realize that the reader’s experience of the poem is more important than the writer’s.

Probably the most famous examples of the legendary confessional movement in poetry are Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, whose tragic deaths have at times eclipsed the importance of their literary achievements. And while these women broke the traditional standard of maintaining a professional distance from the subjects they chose to write about, the quality of their poetry cannot be questioned. Both were talented poets whose troubled lives became their muses, but did not compromise the literary merit of what they wrote.

In this issue you will find many ways that home informs verse. The poets you will read talk about the place of home, as in the case of Sue Chenette, whose poem “Draperies Relaxed in Their Folds” wonderfully describes the secret life of house and home. And, speaking of the many rooms of the body, Brecken Rose Hancock’s “Consider the Body” reveals the experience of a child just come to his new home of Canada. In “Commuting” poet Susan Stetson gives us a poem about family and loss. Arleen Pare gives us a violent home and a friend who dies trying to protect a battered wife from a brutal husband. Michael Trussler’s poem “Collecting” reminds us that home is also a secret box to be filled with the stuff of memory.

Finally, CV2 would like to dedicate this issue to Carol Shields. Home forever came first to this warm and always gracious woman—first in her novels, her poetry and her life. It seems only fitting to honour this great Canadian writer whose own efforts could easily be exchanged for those of the knitter in her poem “a friend of ours who knits.”

Knit, purl,
she goes faster and faster
Increase, decrease,
now she prevents
storms, earthquakes, world wars.

And limb by limb row by positive row
she is reviving God..

We offer our condolences to Carol’s husband Don, and to her children. Carol, you will be so missed.

until next time, all the best in words,

—Managing Editor, Clarise Foster