By Sara Hailstone
Freshly published in 2022 by Guernica Editions, In the Writer’s Words: Conversations with Ten Canadian Poets, Volume II editor and creator Laurence Hutchman has presented a quietly relevant text that could potentially contribute to and shift the tone of the current conversations revolving around CanLit at this time. Writers in this second volume include Brian Bartlett, Roo Borson, George Elliott Clarke, M. Travis Lane, John B. Lee, Daniel Lockhart, Bruce Meyer, Al Moritz, Sue Sinclair, and Colleen Thibaudeau. Hutchman asks each writer to speak to their lives, issues within Canadian society that potentially inform their writing, historical events, influences, style, and lastly, the inspiration that fuels their poetry writing. As a writer, I was inspired by this volume, in delving into other writers’ styles, and I found that I took away many discussions on writing, convention, and issues within CanLit that I would teach and borrow from as a resource in an English classroom.
First, I loved the use of transforming haiku into a verb, “haikuing,” with Brian Bartlett in his interview on his essay about the style of poetry. I hadn’t encountered this verbiage before and would refer to these segments of the interview when teaching poetry. Bartlett states that “Haiku need a delicate balance between solidity and ellipsis, substance and suggestion, speech and silence. A haiku needs to give enough, but not too much; overwritten haiku stumble, but underwritten haiku are static.” I found, too, I was inspired throughout the interviews by how the writing process was shown differently according to each author’s personality. John B. Lee remarked that, “Writing is a discovery and a rediscovery of things that I already knew, but forgot, or that I never knew or that I didn’t really know that I knew. Poetry is more profound than conversation.” The compilation further contributes to current and necessary conversations in the field of CanLit.
D.A. Lockhart writes about the history of his nation and the deaths of Indigenous children in residential schools, adding a sense of urgency and humanity to the text. The recent discovery of the graves of Indigenous children at former Canadian residential schools and the need for reconciliation are two significant topics mentioned by the writer. With the need for our Canadian society to work to connect more fully with nature, Lockhart writes that “the hope with these lyric essays was to capture something truthful about the world we’ve come to inhabit and are gifted by creation. The poet is naturally the speaker across so many cultures. So, it was natural to assume the role, one must find their way into situations that one wants to discuss.”
Indeed, this tone works through the manifesting powers of prayer and language, but also functions to kick “at the edges of decolonization. There is a great deal to learn from the space between languages.” Lockhart ends on a powerful note that should push the industry of CanLit into a space of more fully including Indigenous literature—if that space is where Indigenous Lit wants to be— that, “if anything could be said of actual Indigenous folks it is that we are survivors. Surviving is something to be both happy and hopeful about.” Survival is a powerful term. The reality was that Indigenous authors were excluded from this national work which further reinforced caricature and stereotype in literature. This compilation gives space to a reclamation and reconciliation in CanLit for Indigenous readers and writers.