an interview with Lorna Crozier

CV2: In the introduction to your new collection, Apocrypha of Light, "The Origin of Pen's Black Arts", you begin with a retelling of the story of creation as it is told in the Bible. In doing this you manage to articulate a complex concept for poets and non-poets, and that concept is the origin of the mind, our ability to think, create, to create even God. How did this come to you?

In that poem one of the things I was trying to get across, if that's the right word—I don't think you try to "get things across" in poetry, but for lack of a better way of putting it—was that everything is of value. Everything is sentient though the Bible places humans above other things as if the latter are worthless. I wanted to write a poem that said in a non-didactic way that intelligence isn't limited to the human mind, that it exists and makes decisions outside of us. Until we become fully aware of a nonhuman way of thinking and connect with it, we'll continue to mistreat the world as we do. Genesis's assertion that God created everything to serve mankind invites us to believe that we are on the top of a hierarchy of creatures whose value depends on their usefulness to us. As someone who wants to be at home in the world, a small part of many other significant and beautiful things, I find that kind of thinking repulsive.

Language and attention can uncover the extraordinary in what we often overlook. It can honour what exists outside us. Poetry searches for a thing's essence. What did Gerard Manly Hopkins call it? Inscape, I think. What I am trying to establish when I write is a movement back and forth between the profound and the ordinary. I can remember sitting at home in my kitchen early one morning, watching the light pouring in the window—it looked as if it were bending around the curve of our old stove, giving it a grace and luminosity I'd never noticed before. The stove had a glow about it, as if it were transforming into a new kind of being that needed to be recorded, needed to be thought about. The beautiful is often in what we usually don't notice. I like poems that have objects in them—that have things in them—animals and weather and someone's shoes.

CV2: Your work seems to have a bit of a Buddhist or more Asian sense of humanity, and as you were talking I was reminded of the philosophy behind Chinese landscape painting where you have huge mountains and a vast expansive sky which dwarfs the human being with respect to the actual power nature has over humanity.

That partly comes from me being a prairie person. We are so small in this landscape; there is such a blue vastness around us. I understand that some people who weren't born here find the space frightening; they freak out, become agoraphobic. But I love standing in the middle of a country road and seeing those wheat fields all around me and the sky and a storm moving in—you can see the lightening and the dark clouds coming from miles off. You're this insignificant blip on the ground, and no one would notice you from an airplane above. They'd hardly notice you from down the road a mile away. You're just a small vertical thing in a seemingly endless horizontal world. And I actually like that sense of insignificance; I think we humans need to be reminded of our smallness and humility more often.