Catherine Graham is the author of four acclaimed poetry collections: The Watch, Pupa, The Red Element and Winterkill. Vice President of Project Bookmark Canada and Marketing Coordinator for the Rowers Pub Reading Series, she holds an MA in Creative Writing from Lancaster University (UK) and teaches creative writing at the University of Toronto School of Continuing Studies. Her work has appeared in such literary journals as The New Quarterly, Descant, The Fiddlehead and Poetry Ireland Review, anthologized in The White Page / An Bhileog Bhan: Twentieth Century Irish Women Poets and showcased in Poetry is Public is Poetry and Nuit Blanche Words Travel Fast. The following three poems are from her latest collection, Winterkill:
Turtles
I wanted something alive,
not stuffed.
Soft heads hinged to shells.
They glisten in the plastic pond
with the plastic tree.
Two. In the water.
Out of the water. They don’t
notice me. What am I?
I am the storm.
I am the eye.
I let them stew in their piss.
I wanted something alive.
Boy and Lawn
When I close my eyes I see
the weeds through his head.
Clover. Dandelion. Wild carrot.
Daisy. I wanted every day
to be Saturday, for the grass
to grow high like the waiting
inside me. Dad paid the boy
to mow. I watched him
turn aisles through my
bedroom window. His glasses
thick and black. I saw
those eyes close up. Green
hovered between us
like the spears on his grave.
Fiona
Oh, I blame
my very sadness
on Fiona.
My lost smile
and my returning sadness
on Fiona’s sadness
and her lost smile
that prompted the teacher
I loved to put down
her chalk and purr:
Oh, what’s the matter
my dear, Fiona?
And all heads turned
away from me,
away from me,
and darkness roped
my folded arms
and tied a double knot
in my sadness.
So, I'd like to start with a comment made near the end of your Late Nights with Wild Cowboys, in the poem "Jawbone." You express real fear and anxiety over the prospect of having your life and love be objectified, turned into summary, a bowdlerized rendering that "[leaves] nearly everything out." More than that, though, you are worried about how we ourselves are complicit in this sort of exclusionary act. I guess what I'd like to ask first, then, is: do you imagine poetry as a means of letting things in rather than keeping everything out? And what are you aiming to let in, exactly?
I really do think of poetry in that way, in terms of providing a space -- an opening -- in which it might be possible to say the things that are hard, and perhaps impossible, to say otherwise; in which to express that inarticulate feeling that you get sometimes...continue reading
Steve McOrmond's new collection of poems begins with a caution. In the style of TV content warnings, "Advisory" lists potential disturbing content to come: "themes which could threaten the viewer's sense of security," "Evidence of fatalism and irreligion," and the typical forewarnings about sexuality, violence and "language." Here McOrmond displays the dual cautionary and playful perspectives that interact throughout the book, switching from warnings about a drowning and an animal attack to the line, "The following program may contain scenes not suitable for language."
The poem raises the expected questions about what we censor and screen in popular media. What is considered objectionable, and why? Placed at the start of a collection whose title references Armageddon, "Advisory" leads the reader to expect a certain discomfort.
With that warning, the book moves to the title...continue reading