creative forces

Blog # 118…June 2021

Poets Laureate aren’t anything new – Geoffrey Chaucer was paid 10 shillings a year in the 1300’s to write for King Henry 1 and there’s been an unbroken line (of males with Carol Ann Duffy, 2009-19, the one exception) in Britain ever since.  Canada climbed onboard with Dennis Lee (2001-04) taking on the role in Toronto and George Bowering appointed (2002-04 ) at the federal level - called Parliamentary Poet Laureate. We’ve done a bit better in the gender balance with 3 women Parliamentary PL’s since.   

                                        

Louise Halfe, the current poet in parliament, checks many boxes - she’s a Cree elder (at 68) from northern Alberta, a professional social worker with a special certificate in drug and alcohol counselling. Taken from her parents at the age of 7 to the Blue Quill residential school where she spent 10 years, she brings the experience as a survivor of that system as well as an indigenous feminist perspective to her poetry. Louise tells the stories of women who came before her, the kinship relations between women and their importance in Cree culture.   She incorporates white space into her poems to emphasize the isolation and loss felt by her people. She also uses code switching - I know, I had to look it up - telling a complete tale by weaving the Cree language and teaching into her poems as a reminder of the devastation of losing language and the fragmentation of history, culture and land that can’t be conveyed in English.                                                                                                 

In Toronto since Dennis, the past 2 decades have seen a range of poets, including Dionne Brand (2009-12), Anne Michaels (2016-19) and today, Al Moritz.  George Elliot Clarke (2012-15) with his typical exuberance, followed the Toronto gig with a hop scotch into the Parliamentary position (2016-18).

All the provinces and 2 territories honour poets laureate and in fact two areas led the field, with Yukon appointing their first in 1994, New Westminster in 1997 and Cobourg in 1998. Some have appointed them for life, in Cape Breton, Rita Joe is the lifetime poet laureate of the Mi’k maq people. Ottawa has both French and English. I don’t know about you but I had no idea there was such a substantial poetry subculture lurking just below the surface, toiling in the fields, working from the bottom up, so to speak,... Poets link us to our environment and to traditional knowledge, serving as ambassadors of language and culture. It’s good to see them being recognized.

Now, Ontario boasts Randall Adjei, a spoken word artist as its first poet laureate.   Although not yet thirty, he  brings years of personal experience and community organizing and is the founder of RISE - Reaching Intelligent Souls Everywhere. A self confessed bad boy (he was arrested at 12) Randall has turned his life around and is committed to helping other young people do the same - providing a safe and inclusive space for expression, connecting and developing a more positive sense of themselves.  This newest position was created in memory of Gord  Downey of the Tragically Hip and it's particularly moving that the first recipient shares Gord's love of the lyric word and a passion for drawing attention to stories of injustice.   

Randall and Louise couldn’t be more different at first glance, but their commitment to bringing their backgrounds and experiences into the light through their work is the same. Code switching, rapping, using not only words but language forms, music and visuals serve to attract and inform us. Listening to the voices of poets  helps connect us to the world we share, and to appeciate and make some sense of it and of each other. There's a poet somewhere out there who will speak directly to you and steal your heart, break it, make it sing, maybe both...keep your eyes and ears open to welcome them in.                                               .

                                                            

Finally, huge congratulations to Michelle Good, Louise's fellow Cree from western Canada, a lawyer, also in her 60's, who just won the Amazon Canada first novel award for Five little Indians. It's on the short list for the Governor General's award for fiction. And poet and Rhodes scholar Billy-Ray Belcourt's memoir A History of My Brief Body, about growing up indigenous and queer is up for non fiction. Results  announced on Tuesday, June 1...fingers crossed!

See you next on Canada Day.