A Poet’s Nanaimo

If you’ve ever written on a theme or following a prompt for ten minutes or so you may have realized that your internal editor doesn’t have a chance to jump in. You just go for it as you don’t have much time to ponder and critique as you tap into your own wisdom. And perhaps there are guides who come to assist in those “tapping-into” moments as well.

We write short poems at poetry retreats I’ve gone to for years while we sit in the morning circle together. In November 2016, at a retreat with poet Lorna Crozier at Honeymoon Bay Lodge, her prompt to us was “Advice for a Poet.” I wanted to share a few of the pieces that emerged one morning. (The poets’ bios are at the end of the blog.)

My friend and fellow poet Liz McNally starts us off with her “Advice for a Poet.” Liz organizes the Patrick Lane and Lorna Crozier retreats, gathering the poets, arranging for our accommodation and meals and so many other details so that our time at Honeymoon Bay Lodge goes smoothly and the time is dedicated for poet muses to conspire.

You must be willing to look as Annie did
at Pilgrim Creek; that close, that attentive,
near enough to suspend the belief you knew anything,
the moment before you knelt down.
Leave your own eyes aside,
look through the kaleidoscope of a five-eyed house fly,
land that lightly on the familiar, the unseen, the holy.
Dip one – no, all your fingers,
into the wound you thought was healed, yours and the whole world’s.

-Liz McNally

Here’s “Advice for a Poet” from another poet friend, Tina Biello, who lives in Nanoose Bay and hosts poetry retreats at her home called […]

“We are searching for the core of our lives; our culture intuits that writing, that ancient activity, might be a pathway.” And indeed, Natalie Goldberg’s many students have found it be so – as we have in the Writing Life women’s writing circles.

The theme of one of the two six-week writing circles I offered in the fall was Gifts from the Journey. My intent was that in the stillness of the circle, we would honour our influences along the way: the people (teachers, friends, ancestors); the places we’ve lived and visited; the many experiences we’ve lived and thereby honour ourselves. And I wanted to make sure our writing about the past was done from being grounded in the present.

There were various gifts along the way as we supported the telling of one another’s stories. And there were epiphanies and insights about the writing process itself. Those insights, I pointed out to the women, are good to make note of.

After ringing the Tibetan ting sha and asking members of the writing circle to take three deep breaths, I read a poem. This is the same practice every week. In week one I read a poem called “Remember” by Joy Harjo.

“Remember the sky that you were born under, / know each of the star’s stories,” the poem begins. Some of the writing we did in that circle was inspired by the poem. We began to write “I remember. . . “

I remember the winter of 2016 as being a sort of blur of being mostly bedridden, of the effort it took to get up and down the two front steps.

I remember being in a wheelchair while on the ferry and feeling protected as Sarah pushed […]

My word for this year has been “WANDER” and while I haven’t been physically wandering as I did last year at this time, I have let my mind wander. I let it wander through books by Olivia Laing including To the River: A Journey Beneath the Surface and her latest, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone.

And my mind wandered as I prepared for the summer writing circles I called “An Invitation to Writing Life.” I appreciated exploring ideas, picking up books I hadn’t visited in awhile and sitting in the circle of women to explore and uncover together.

Sometimes though, the wandering became a more compulsive attachment to doing, accomplishing, adding just one more thing. That’s possibly why I was attracted to Roger Housden’s new book: Dropping the Struggle: Seven Ways to Love the Life You have (New World Library, 2016).

I’ve been a fan of Roger’s “Ten Poem” series. His essays about particular poems offer new insight and he tells his own life stories in relation to them. I appreciated a taste of many poets in his book, Dancing with Joy.

In Ten Poems to Change Your Life (Harmony Books, 2001), Roger wrote an essay about “Love After Love,” a poem by Derek Walcott. Roger said: “We spend much of our lives trying to make ourselves – to create the life we want, to forge some reality from our dreams. We live in a culture wedded to the fantasy of self-determination and self-made men. Yet there is another school of thought that looks at a human life from the other direction. Instead of making ourselves, this more ancient tradition would say we ourselves are there in embryo from the start, and we unfurl […]