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.
An interview with Di Brandt
ALL LIT UP: How would you describe Little Dragons to someone picking it up for the first time?
DI BRANDT: Little Dragons is my “covid” book, a collection of backyard poetic meditations on the presence of trees, and birds, and squirrels, and cats, living among us in urban spaces now. My constrained backyard poetic “vision quest” during the lockdown led to a range of visionary encounters, with tree spirits, ancestral memories, and dreams of evolutionary and liberatory uplift, mingling together among the singing trees.
ALU: How do you see poetry as an act of resistance?
DI: Poetic language is multidimensional and has the capacity to engage us at the deepest possible level, as a language practice that is embodied, rhythmic, sexy, and filled with appreciation, humour, and love. Poetry allows for affirmation and humility and healing. The poet PK Page famously said that each species has its species song, that adds its melodies to the cosmic harmonies of earth and heaven, and poetry is our human species song. In these many ways, poetry resists the forces of chaos and despair that sometimes threaten to engulf us and throw us and the world around us off balance.
ALU: What does poetry allow you to say or refuse that other forms don’t?
DI: Poetry is the language of love, praise, eros, silliness, profound reverence, and embodied presence in the world, all at once! Poetry can hold deep contradictions together in its wide embrace and can also cut through contradictions where they keep us bound and conflicted, or restricted. Poetry is accessible to people of all ages, including babies and young children, who tune into the rhythmic and emotional and intentional elements of language long before they understand its “meaning.” Poetry is the ultimate language of love and can help us resist the forces of hatred around and in us, by encouraging beautiful, eloquent, fun creative expression. Poetry has the capacity to reach into the deepest part of ourselves and others and the world around us, in (re)visionary and healing ways.
ALU: Is there a line (in your own or someone else’s work) that you return to?
DI: “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will.”
Is it true? I marvelled at this statement in Shakespeare’s Hamlet when I first encountered it as a young teen, and I marvel at it still. Hamlet has just escaped a murderous plot against his life made by his malicious stepfather King Claudius. The king had sent him on a journey to England, and on the ship halfway there Hamlet suddenly realized this wasn’t a friendly international visit he was embarking on, that he was likely to be killed upon arrival by the king’s instruction.
Hamlet’s realization is intuitive, and not based on any hard evidence. But he trusts it, and acts quickly to escape, and return home, to confide in his friend Horatio and confront the king. Hamlet attributes the source of that intuition to “divinity,” and Horatio agrees.
I think the “inspiration” or “knowledge” that poetry offers us is often accessed in this way, briefly, intuitively, not based on any hard evidence, but by a tremor, a twinge, a miniscule lightning flash “out of the blue,” that strikes us in the heart. We can learn to recognize such flashes in our poetic writing practice for what they are, infusions of inspiration, trusting they might lead us to marvellous new creative and expressive possibilities.
This is why people sometimes regard poets as “mad.” Because our sources are so fragile, so temporary, so invisible to the naked eye, so impractical. And yet they often lead to realizations that everyone agrees later are “divinely inspired.” (Not always! Sometimes they are in fact “mad”!) Who or what is the “divinity” that “shapes our ends” toward something more beautiful than what we could have come up with ourselves? The ancient Greeks called it the Muse, or Muses, the spirit overseers of creative expression in humans. Religious people sometimes call it the Holy Spirit or Creator God.
I like Shakespeare’s term for it, a benign and uplifting “divinity” that looks out for us and lifts us up into higher purposes and understandings and expressions. We’re part of a much larger project as living beings in a living cosmos than we can know by ourselves. We can only ever glimpse that larger divinity in small flashes—but enough to save our lives and recalibrate our plans toward more life enhancing ways. I have often lived by Hamlet’s insight, in specific times of crisis, holding on to that hope, that inspiration, to see me through. And certainly my poetry writing has been lit up by streaks of “divinity,” something I think all poets know about.
ALU: What role does community—readers, poets, teachers—play in your writing?
DI: I was very lucky to grow up in a profoundly poetic family and community. In the traditionalist Mennonite Darpa (peasant farming villages) of my childhood in southern Manitoba, poetry was held in high regard, and saturated our lives, at home, in family gatherings, in church services, in community events and at school. Knowing a thousand poems “by heart,” and being able to recite them flawlessly at any time were high “old World” cultural values. It was an oral culture, still, then, at mid-century, and the mnemonic, memory-enhancing, heart-warming qualities of poetry were well understood and cherished by everyone—as they once were everywhere, globally.
Poetry in modern English-language culture was also highly regarded until quite recently. It was long understood as the “queen of discourses” and requisite learning, “core curriculum,” for all people hoping to enter the professions. Poetry would “gentle” you, and uplift you to your highest, best possible attentions and achievements in life, while connecting you to deep ancestral memories and powers, and the creative shaping of “divinity” that Shakespeare knew about.
I’ve been composing and writing poetry since early childhood, and for publication for nearly a half century. It’s been a great ride! What a privilege to be in the front lines of the primary creation of a new national literature for Canada, and for the world! Especially in its multicultural aspects, having permission and opportunity to weave together traditionalist and contemporary cosmopolitan engagements and realizations in healing ways. Readers, poets, teachers, colleagues, publishers, reviewers, friends, and all the people who support book publishing and performance in our communities are all vital to the process. Thank you, thank you, everyone!!
It’s sometimes a very lonely profession, you have to spend a lot of time doing nothing, in a quiet corner somewhere, to hear those fragile twinges of inspiration that underlie the hard work of shaping the details with craft and style, and insight. But it’s also a very social profession, very public and communitarian and sharing in its myriad dynamics and effects.
ALU: How do you sustain a practice of writing poetry in politically or personally challenging times?
DI: Novelist and short story writer Alistair Macleod liked to say, “The best writing comes from the worst places.” Charles Dickens famously started one of his novels about a troubled time with these words: “It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.” The Toltec elders of Mexico teach us to “Redream the dream.” Challenging times can take us to deeper truths and realizations than we’d be willing to embrace on our own and can call forth formidable new powers of faith and imagination and creativity, in us, and in the world around us. It’s not always easy to believe that the poorly understood, fragile medium of poetry can accomplish such vital re-dreaming, and new imaginative creation. But when it happens, even for a moment, there’s nothing like it! You suddenly have that palpable, visceral sense of belonging to a shimmering, shining, cosmic life project much bigger and wiser and more caring than you are. Everyone should give it a try!
Read a poem from Little Dragons
Reprinted with permission from Turnstone Press.
Watch Di Brandt read the poem “Long Enough, Strong Enough”
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Di Brandt is a celebrated poet, essayist and literary critic. Her poetry titles include questions i asked my mother; Agnes in the sky; Now You Care; Walking to Mojácar; Glitter & fall: Laozi’s Dao De Jing, Transinhalations; The Sweetest Dance on Earth: New and Selected Poems; and this year’s Little Dragons. Her work has been credited with helping to bring many new interests to Canadian literary practice over the past half century, including multicultural, maternal, ecopoetic, prairie and intergenerational questions and engagements. Di Brandt recently received the Manitoba Arts Council Distinction in the Arts Award and an Honorary Doctorate from MacEwan University. She served as Winnipeg’s Inaugural Poet Laureate.
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Thanks to Di for answering our questions, and to Turnstone Press for the text from Little Dragons, which is available to preorder now (and get 15% off + FREE shipping Canada-wide with the code POETSRESIST until April 30!).
Follow our NPM series all month long to discover new poetry or connect with old favourites, and visit our poetry shop here.
