an interview with Shawna Lemay (excerpt)

Nina Berkhout: Your our fourth book of poetry, Blue Feast, is an intensely personal collection in which you explore the excruciating moments of everyday life, writing, motherhood, and marriage. Your earlier collections, All the God-Sized Fruit and Against Paradise, are meditations on the history of art and the history of Venice, recounted in the first person through a multitude of characters, including painters and writers. How did you make the transfer from writing through other characters to writing as yourself, the poet entirely exposed? Was this a difficult transition to make? How did you get there?

Shawna Lemay: I think this largely came about through a pattern of obsessive reading. The first two collections arose from an obsession with reading about women artists—there is a mystery at the core of how women in particular navigate and sustain an artistic life. Through all my research and delving, the questioning I had embarked on only deepened, became more mysterious. The leap had to be made—into that naked state. At the same time, I became a mother, and that changes nearly everything. My reading habits had to change. Still, the obsessiveness, the sort of time one has to lavish on poetry, on dream-thought, is diminished. One’s life becomes so much smaller. I read, at this time, The Stream of Life over and over. I returned to certain poems by poets such as Denise Levertov, Dahlia Ravikovitch, Phyllis Web, Roo Borson, Rumi, Yehuda Amichai, Marina Tsvetaeva, and others, over and over. It wasn’t a conscious experiment, but more of a thinned and greedy need. On the surface, many of these poems were quite simple, but the more I read them, I realized how huge they were—unbelievably thick and complex. This was a real lesson for me, both in reading and toward writing.

NB: In the preface to Blue Feast, you write: “These poems were written toward the core of sadness as a way of navigating the multiple registers that we dwell in at all times. The reader who wants these poems is the reader who understands the complicated joy that is entwined with sadness.” This brings to mind something that Franco-Manitoban writer Gabrielle Roy inserted on looseleaf at the end of her unfinished autobiography, just before she died: “Je n’ai donc pas souvent rencontré de douleur qui n’ait pas laissé au moins une toute petite part à quelque joie, de même que je n’ai pas r rencontré souvent de joie si grande qu’elle n’ait laissé entrer dans la place quelque sentiment de douleur.” As a poet, do you believe that with all joy there inevitably exists sadness, and with all sadness, some bit of joy? For you, does writing poetry alleviate this truth? Would it be possible to write poetry without experiencing tragedy, personal or otherwise, and the aspect of sorrow in joy?

SL: For me, the poetry I’m drawn to does embrace the multiple registers, that does lose its balance. Sunetra Gupta has said in her novel Moonlight into Marzipan (and I used this as an epigraph to Blue Feast), “Yet somehow in this dragonless age, we have learnt to balance, for the most part on that narrow ridge that separates extreme joy from extreme sorrow, to suspend ourselves endlessly at this counterpoint . . .” As my other books had been in some part experiments in voice or in the intricacies of ekphrasis [poetry about art], this book became an experiment in losing balance, in discovering what it would mean to shun that narrow ridge, which is merely an illusion, anyway. Through the act of writing, I was able to embrace the richness that resides in accepting this loss of balance. I was surprised, too, by how much courage one needs to summon. By how much fear one must overcome to write the simplest things. Hélène Cixous writes about the “least-dazzling fear,” which is the fear of “reaching joy, acute joy, the fear of allowing oneself to be carried away by exaltation,” and which has to do, sometimes, with writing.

NB: The title of your collection, Blue Feast, implies a celebration of sadness. A red rather than blue poppy on the cover of your book, or calling your book Red Feast, would have brought a completely different meaning to the poems. Does the symbolism of the colour you chose contain an element of tragedy? Can you discuss the juxtaposition of a “blue feast,” in terms of your experiences in writing
and in life?

SL: Yes, it does have to be a blue feast. Red comes later. (My next book of poems is titled “Red Velvet Forest”). But yes, blue. It has to do in some ways with seeing what is there. To come back to Cixous, which I often do, she talks about knowing how to see flowers, “knowing how to live them.” There is a way, too, of living the colour blue. It’s what is there, anyway, above and beyond; it’s just a matter of choosing to see it, to live it. There is something daring in living what is, and in choosing to see a small bit of life that others might turn from, blind to it.

NB: Your husband, Robert Lemay, is a visual artist. He painted the stunning blue poppy on the cover of your book. How has his work influenced your own, and vice versa? How did the blue poppy first emerge—was it through writing or a painting, or did it actually grow in your garden?

SL: Oh yes! We both influence each other in innumerable and unquantifiable ways. I have no way of knowing what my poetry would be without his art. The book, in this case, came first. The poppy we grew in our garden, which was quite a miracle in itself. To see the blue poppy under the blue sky! Such joy in that alone. We had taken many photos of this fleeting prize, and when my book was taken by NeWest, he painted the image for me as a congratulatory present. Ruth Linka, who designed the book, also loved the image when we got to that stage, and of course, it makes sense in terms of what the book is about . . . The book means that much more to me with such a cover.

Again, Cixous: “For we have always known that flowers are women, we have all lived one or two flowers.” She goes on: “But the problem of flowers is the problem of maternal and indispensable women: they are there. They are so much there.” So, the flower that I undertook to live before my daughter began school was the blue poppy.