​​The most frequent answer I get to the question, “Who’s your favourite poet?” is Mary Oliver or Billy Collins. Following up with the query
“What draws you to their work?” the response is almost predicable —“It’s easy to understand”. Personally I happen to like many of Mary Oliver’s poems, but I find them layered, nuanced and often, speculative as to exactly what her poem is saying — not necessarily easy to understand. So I wonder why would a poet and their poems be deemed favourites due to being “easy to understand”? 

As part of an online study group, I’ve been exploring an English translation of the Shinkokinshū, a Japanese literary anthology of waka or tanka poetry spanning poems written cira 905 to 1439. Many of the poems appear, at first, to be straightforwardly commenting on seasons, love, or laments. However, the more one learns about the layers of references that many of the words have in Japanese, it becomes clear that these short poems are subtle creations akin to matryoshka nesting dolls. The closer you examine these poems, the more there is to comprehend.

The idea of poems being easily understood, in my opinion, places the poet in an almost authoritative role. These so-called accessible poems are written using common parlance rooted in conventional usage. The words may be satisfying in that they reflect and validate a mainstream interpretation, but the poems inhabit an essentially safe perimeter. There is no challenge to the status quo. Stretching the boundaries of language isn’t part of the game plan, it’s more like verbal comfort food.

The role of the reader/listener in bringing their own perspective and knowledge to the poetic interaction seems largely neglected in an approach that basically says the poem always has a definitive meaning. Even in the so-called, hard sciences, individual bias is still a factor that needs to be acknowledged when interpreting data. That’s a good thing as it leads to questioning meaning, and questioning meaning leads to new interpretations, and often to new discoveries. 

Poets who have questioned how language makes meaning — Gertrude Stein, Joan Retallak, bp nicol, bill bissett — to name a few, have created new poetic forms, played with the ‘meaning’ spelled out by common words. In essence they have discovered new ways to utilize the multitude of meanings nested in language. Their work may not be easily understood, but poetry has grown and thrived because of their contributions. Reading the work of these poets has helped me grow in my own poetic practice and invited me to challenge my assumptions about how to make poems. 
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When sports are the topic of discussion, levels of difficultly comes up as part of the conversation. That might be an interesting way to think about poetry, too. I still enjoy poems by Mary Oliver and Billy Collins, I just don’t agree that easy to understand is always the best way to decide on which poets you choose to engage with.

Is painting poetry or is poetry painting? Seems like a an odd question, except when you consider the similarities. Poems use language to offer the reader/listener sensory images that lead to emotional responses. Paintings, whether abstract or representational, usually forego the use of text and still create sensory resonance through their portrayed images. 

There seems to be a natural confluence between poetry and visual art sometimes as fertile ground to express more than words or visuals alone. This dance between mediums has been taken up by poets and visual artists for centuries. Japanese culture produced the haiga, a combination of a haiku poem with a painting. Haiga paintings and poems were intended to be complementary, not explanatory. In western culture a similar practice referred to as ekphrasis developed. Ekphrasis, a Greek word, that translates to ‘description’, also has a storied history with poets from the romantic era, like John Keats, to present day poets such as, Blas Flanconer, creating in this form. 

I’ve been writing haiku poems off and on for many years, but only discovered haiga a few years ago while researching for a poetry workshop I was giving that focused on Alan Ginsberg’s American Sentences, a form he developed that was based on haiku. Around the same time I was invited to be a jury member for a local ekphrastic poetry contest where artists entered paintings that were then selected by writers who created a poem about the painting of their choice. Four years later I took off my jurist robes to focus more intensely on a new poetry collection which is almost reaching completion. But the lure of haiga and ekphrasis still speak loudly to me as my own creative practice moves within both poetics and visual art. 

If you would like to try your pen at writing an ekphrastic poem, you might be interested in checking out the Ekphrastic Poetry contest at the Nanaimo Arts Council. It’s a fun way to experiment with a new poetic form and you might just find yourself adding ekphrasis to your own poetic techniques. 

This haiku came to me the other day as I was reviewing postings on my website’s art galleries. Now paired with one of my cityscape paintings, I think  it can also stand as a haiga!  

​Poets across many generations have found inspiration traversing unfamiliar ground, sometimes, in their countries of origin and other times farther afield visiting cultures presenting not only new sights but, new languages, cuisines, and perspectives for a life well-lived. Walt Whitman famously traveled by boat, train and stagecoach. Lord Byron was inspired to write about his travels through Greece. Elizabeth Bishop in her third poetry collection, Questions of Travel, wrote about tourism in the opening poem: 

“Oh, tourist,
is this how this country is going to answer you

and your immodest demands for a different world,
​and a better life, and complete comprehension
of both at last, and immediately,”                              -excerpted from Arrival at Santos

British Columbia poet, P.K. Page, mused about her impulse to travel: 

“Restless in all this emptiness, I seek
a fellow traveler, a search for a sign —“
                                                                            -excerpted from My Chosen Landscape

I’ve travelled throughout my life traversing locales between city and rural summer homes, road trips across the States and Canada, sojourns in multiple provinces for work, and explorations on other islands and continents. I never thought of these journeys as specifically meant to inspire poems, and yet, being a visual artist as well as a poet, I have often habitually recorded details of the landscape, the weather, people encountered, and many times those details marry themselves into poems. 

The overall concept of my 2024 poetry collection, Zero Hour, was about how our sense of life’s experiences are not routed along a linear timeline and that poems that arise out of travels aren’t necessarily only about describing the journey, but can also comment and encapsulate emotion, opinion and so much more. Poems have a stubborn way of letting a poet know what they want to say, even if the poet didn’t realize the message at first.

A number of the poems included in Zero Hour drew on some details of those journeys. Here’s a snippet from To Lake Michigan:

“Your winter white caps etch my dreams. I am in love with your hieroglyphs.
intaglio inscribed on frozen sand. effaced again at waking. “

In Sun Dogs and Open Toe Shoes,  the poem opens with an extreme Vancouver Island winter day contrasting with memories of the prairies:

“Minus thirteen Celsius 
and this morning’s Island forecast 
brings back thoughts of you, Saskatchewan — 
of a me naïve to block heaters and remote starters 
wind chill factors that count down 
seconds to freeze bare skin…”

A road trip through the western United States provided the details for the basis of You Escaped from Memory: 

“I wonder about you. Wonder at the years 
since we shared a Dodge van 
cramped with six explorers of inner space, 
vapours of mystical incense passed from hands, 
to lips, to lungs, then passed again…” 

The observed details that have made their way into my poems have also come from a simple loop through my neighbourhood, such as in, An Errant Daffodil, composed while walking my dog:

“pushing thin green arms toward 
a drained December sky 
she defies fog, freezing rain; 
shouts a promise in citrine petals, 
mirrors a hidden sun.”

Writing about these previous journeys and the poems they birthed has set me toward wondering what new roads my feet might be traveling along in the future and what poems those footprints might inspire.

As a teenager predictability and stability had pretty negative connotations that mostly translated into boring with a capital 'B'.  My friends and I assumed that change would always mean improvement. Life lessons learned have supplied plenty of evidence that although nothing really stays the same, change, in and of itself, doesn't necessarily forbode change for the better. 
There is a quiet predicability in the rhythms of seasons, forests, and gardens that in the current social and political atmosphere of rampant unpredictability, feels far from boring and I find myself wanting to seek it out more and more frequently.  My poem published in issue #4 of Counterflow Magazine speaks to that push and pull of change and stability.

Owing great sensitivity to small changes              by Carla Stein 
​
“…where nothing
will grow lie
cinders
in which shine
the broken
pieces of a green
bottle”                            from Between Walls, William Carlos Williams 

the Omnishambles breaks loose
uproar and commotion ensue

a disordered three-ring circus
chaos, turmoil, a state of mayhem

complete with free-for-all
snake pit madness in the region

hell, it’s bedlam --
pandemonium

so much disarray
everything out of order 

a frenzied snowstorm
a hurly-burly maelstrom 

its hue and cry upheaval
a muddled riot

a babel-filled car crash
so unpredictable as to appear random

within that nest of lawlessness
that hullabaloo of tumult

a red cedar sprouts
sends ruby tendrils
​into fire-blackened earth

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