Carry On My Wayward Poem

​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.

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