Julia Williams is a poet and prose writer whose work has appeared in The Literary Review of Canada, This magazine, filling Station and CV2, as well as The Mercury Press anthology, Shift & Switch: New Canadian Poetry. Her first book, The Sink House, was published by Coach House in 2004. She lives in Calgary with her husband and a couple of cats.
Carolus Linnaeus. Seduced not by tooth and claw but by names: slick, sussurant. He went north to view a maelstrom. He walked one thousand miles wearing animal skins. Aped Adam.
In the trees, plague soldier beetles, glistening harlequin shells. A jewel family. Karl names shield bugs, rummages burrows, seeking the ghost moth, cuckoo wasp, the wee velvet ant.
Karl is afflicted by tropical dreams, continental friction, colonized islands dense with displaced life. Pets and stowaways: ants, rats, mongooses, the strangler fig, feral pig, norfolk pine and avocado.
Karl would eat bananas and wear frangipani in his hair. Plumeria is fragrant, but on his fake islands the public squares are swine-scented.
Karl measured the bells of each flower, the blubber of each landed seal. He walked north to view a maelstrom. He wore a white wig, kept his footing in snow. If only he had loved finches, not flowers, swapped an alphabet for sweet, lush Galapagos. A green island - now there's a kingdom.
Karl was no Barnum, had no feegee mermaid. A naturalist does not sew a monkey to a fish. He looks for stitches. No Mendel either, that filthy old monk, gamete swapper, slavering over his peapods. Just Karl, blood thick with venom.
peel beeswax to rob golden honey
stolen nectar ripens on my gums
Wait. His ambition took him north and south, to rich harvests. He was a man of science.
soft apocrita, gorged on husks
of bell flowers, sterile pollen
sweet ancient ignorance
What more poetic than a million corpses?
The Swede Karl von Linne adopts a Latin name. In a word: form is how we separate the beast from its herd. He snatches a dead language, conjures a hierarchy and grants animals class, kingdoms.
Gentle Adam, only human, understood at least this basic flaw.
Canadians have an odd relationship to the U.S. We define ourselves against them, first of all. Many of us in urban centres find guns appalling, our history is closer to compromise than conflict, possibly born out of the need to accommodate both French and English, and the same need has introduced a greater love -- at least in theory -- of diversity, and a recognition diversity is a strength, not a weakness. There is a distinct Canadian identity that Canadians...continue reading
Your second collection of poems, The Cold Panes of Surfaces, is out now. Your first book, Bonfires, won the Canadian Authors Association Poetry Award in 2004. Did winning a national award for your first book bolster your artistic confidence while working on your second, or did you find it daunting, as though you had more to live up to than other poets working on a second collection?
I think it certainly gave me a boost of confidence and the permission I needed to do what I wanted to do artistically with the second book. I didn't feel any outside pressure because of winning the CAA award, or feel that I had any expectations to live up to. Winning the award was terrific, and it was good publicity, but it was also an education on how fleeting such praise can be, and how it leaves your writing life virtually...continue reading