Poets Resist: David Waltner-Toews + New & Selected Poems

In a month-long act of resistance, poets remind us that poetry can push back against forces that marginalize voices, erase stories, and impose control over how we live and imagine. 

ALU: Is there a line (in your own or someone else’s work) that you return to?

From Mary Oliver (I memorized these lines to keep the bears away on the Bruce Trail): “When death comes / like the hungry bear in autumn… / I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering: / what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness”

At my birthday while working in Uganda, I recited Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese” (after being plied with White Russians by my co-workers): “Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, / the world offers itself to your imagination / harsh and exciting / over and over announcing your place / in the family of things”

ALU: What role does community—readers, poets, teachers—play in your writing?

DAVID: Communities of people, geography, history, ideas, sense of the spiritual are all central.

Here is the dedication from New and Selected Poems:

“This collection is dedicated to my Grade 5 teacher at Polson Elementary School in East Kildonan, whose name I cannot recall. They made me write a poem as punishment for talking in class and then praised the result. Since then, I have never been able to stop writing, searching to find again that exhilarating line between punishment and reward.”

As a teenager, I started finding my poetic voice by writing poetry for birthdays, funerals, weddings, as payment (barter) for friends with other skills.

My most influential poetry instructor was Nick Lindsay, son of Vachel Lindsay, the founder of what he called “modern singing poetry,” which is one version of performance poetry. Nick, who carried on the tradition of poetry as singing and chanting, was a carpenter from Edisto Island, South Carolina, as well as a poet. I found Lindsay’s chanting, hypnotic incantations puzzling in their points of reference, embarrassing in their raw emotion, and inspiring for their unabashed chutzpah. In some ways, this chanting poetry was perfect for what I wanted: poetry that was directly engaged with what people did every day in their working lives, and which performed better on the stage than on the page.

I have performed my “Tante Tina” poems—the most apparently specific-to-my-Mennonite background voice—in a synagogue, in church basements, in bars, in scientific and literature conferences. I used Tante Tina not just to tell stories about my Ukrainian-Mennonite history, but to connect that history to current events. In 1993, at the twentieth anniversary of the Writers’ Union of Canada, I was asked to read “Tante Tina’s Request to put Salman Rushdie on the Missionary Prayer List.” Graeme Gibson suggested I do it in costume. At the time, I had never done this. So I went room to room in the dormitory at the university asking if someone had a dress I could borrow. Then, between the main course and the dessert, I went to the men’s bathroom to change. Apart from the sagging breasts made of hand towels, I was told it was very convincing. I was simply introduced as a woman from southern Manitoba. Later, I couldn’t recall whose dress I had borrowed, and the next morning I had to stand up at the AGM and announce that I had a woman’s dress from the previous night, but I couldn’t remember her name. The response was predictable.

Another teacher, Mary Eleanor Bender, from Goshen Indiana informed me, at the age of 95, that she finally understood T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. She was also actively protesting American right wing politics back in the ’60s and ’70s. I am still learning from her how to resist, and the role of poetry.

ALU: How do you sustain a practice of writing poetry in politically or personally challenging times?

DAVID: Discipline. I made a decision that this was important, even when, sometimes, it didn’t feel like that. I needed to keep up my skills.

Both when I was at the university, and later, when I founded Veterinarians without Borders, I travelled a lot for my work around the world. I wrote when I was discombobulated by time change and cultural changes, trying to make sense of what it meant for a white guy from Canada to engage in these different cultures. What was my role, as an outsider? I tried to put myself, imagine myself, more deeply into those places. 

Now, I write every day. Writing poetry for me requires total focus, both on form and on language. I always need a project, and if I don’t, I still write. Sometimes I write to exercise certain “muscles,” a series of villanelles or terzanelles or sonnets or poetry based on photographs. It’s a mental discipline, physical therapy for the mind. I was recently asked to write a poem for the 99th birthday of the professor who, at 94, had enlightened me about T.S. Eliot and political resistance. It annoyed me that people expected that writing such a poem might be like turning on a tap. But it was also a gift. I was pushed to focus on that poem.

At dusk a merchant,
stumbling down the bloody way
from temple to the site
of fallen walls and slaughter,
was ambushed, beaten, left
for dead. Then came the scavengers:
first passed the one who, praising
heaven, tore from the body grace
to not have been this poor unfortunate;
then circled by a second who wrought beautiful,
holy laments from other’s anguish.
A third, seeing a fellow traveller,
stopped, dressed their wounds,
and carried them to shelter.

The flustered innkeeper frowned
at the shivering heap
curled like a street dog
on the merchant’s mat,
rubbed the silver coins
placed on the counter.
And where will you be?
I must head back across the river
before dawn, or I’ll be killed.

The keeper, considering
the merchant’s accent,
wondered if he should seek
a lawyer for advice on liability,
but, considering the time of day,
the cost of paying overtime,
the cost of living,
the cash in hand,
the price of mercy,
he relented. 

That night
wrapped in time-torn shawls
and huddled on the stone-cold step
outside the door,
the keeper watched as clouds
were swept away, unveiling
bright-starred heavens,
clearing his anxious mind,
and, for the first time felt,
after a long and troubled life,
peace.

2023