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 poet Meghan Kemp-Gee
ALL LIT UP: How would you describe Nebulas to someone picking it up for the first time?
MEGHAN KEMP-GEE: I would describe Nebulas as a constellation of poems inspired by the glorious glowing images from the James Webb Satellite. Nebulae are luminous clouds of gas and dust. They are often stellar nurseries, where new stars are formed, but they can also be the remains of dead stars. I wanted to write about these nebulae when I saw all these brand new pictures of them in 2022, as well as their gorgeous names: Witch Head, Spider, Dumbbell, Eye of God, Fox Fur, Christmas Tree, Fish Head. During the various waves of the coronavirus pandemic, I found myself looking up, like a lot of people. I wanted to know how to make meaning out of all that death and sacrifice. Where do all those lost ones go, or where can we go looking for them? Can we still talk to them?
ALU: How do you see poetry as an act of resistance?
MEGHAN: I define poetry as any art that is working at the borders of language to create an effect of any kind. So it follows that poetry is often an act of resistance, because the basic materials, tools, and effects of this art form often challenge the working relationship between language and reality. And of course, poetry can also “resist” through its explicit subject matter, framing an object or idea you want people to see or think about differently. But I think on a more fundamental level, poetry works with our human source code, because of how intertwined our language is with our reality. I think that language is synonymous with perception, cognition, and emotion. Poetry makes that synonymity apparent and effective, and doing so tends to challenge everyday experience in a way that often challenges, reframes, and resists.
ALU: What does poetry allow you to say or refuse that other forms don’t?
MEGHAN: I like how people who read poetry read — I like that they like strangeness and abstraction and that they’ll read carefully into detail and craft.
Compared to other forms, when I write poetry I feel less like a creator and more like a curator or guide. Like I’m looking out at the night sky and seeing what is there that I can point out to other people. This feels like infinite freedom to break any rule and suggest any new shape I want — infinite because the raw material is limitless, and because there’s possibility in the language itself to do new things.
ALU: Is there a line (in your own or someone else’s work) that you return to?
MEGHAN: I think every time I undertake a new project, it tends to form around these refrains that I can’t get out of my head. I obviously use repetition a lot in my work, and I think one of the formal aspects that matters most to me is return — the verse that folds and unfolds and turns and returns and reverses.
There are many, many lines I return to in other people’s poetry, so maybe I’ll answer by looking a little to the side of poetry. I really like the line in the Tragically Hip song “Music at Work” where they sing “when the sunlight hits the olive oil, don’t hesitate.” That line always feels lovely and golden to me. I try to make it my writing motto. You don’t have to put the sunlight into the olive oil, but you should absolutely get going and make it your work when it hits.
ALU: What role does community—readers, poets, teachers—play in your writing?
MEGHAN: I am always writing for other people — often explicitly, as a lot of my poems are “for” or “after” someone. And even when it’s not explicit, I am always writing because I want to make something for you. You, “you,” or whoever is reading or I can imagine reading. I am trying to build a field for you, where you can do something, or make something happen.
Something I really like about poetry is that its audience and its community are so inherently embodied and disembodied at the same time. A poem can very much be something on a page that one person reads quietly to themselves, or it can be this very vital live performance that is really about shared physical space, shared breath and sound passing between real human bodies. Usually we’re somewhere between those two extremes, and they’re in harmony or even tension with each other.
So as I’m writing to try to respond to a specific person, or to pay tribute to something I’ve learned from a teacher or a mentor, or if I have a particular kind of reader in mind, it’s because I want to bring everyone else along for that physical ride with us.
ALU: How do you sustain a practice of writing poetry in politically or personally challenging times?
MEGHAN: It’s worth acknowledging that sometimes political or personal challenge makes writing poetry less challenging, because it sometimes makes you want to write more.
But of course it’s also true that we’re often talking about very material challenges to a writing practice. Sometimes that challenge defeats me. Poetry is not really different from any other meaningful human activity in this way. It’s not extraneous to our health or our politics or personal life.
So these challenges, I think they’ll always be part of my work, which can be a good thing or a bad thing. You can write about the challenge, or through the challenge. Sometimes it will be a barrier and sometimes it will be an engine.
Read “Lions Gate Hospital“ from Nebulas
Lions Gate Hospital is across the street, November 2022
Things go sideways. Forgive me,
but it seems precarious
to do just about anything — carrying the coffee
cup to my lips, the table,
the sink, disaster jogging
down the alleyway, dragging its pink handless leash around
the corners, ruthlessly. There,
there. There’s no emergency.
I’m just trying to say what questions I’m not asking. The cold
snap, the new carpet, dentist
appointments and the groaning
dishwasher overcome with sad, soap-drunk desire, public
transit and the four-hour time
change. The temperature swings back
and forth across the freezing point. We all catch another
cough. Up here on the eighth floor,
we are in for the long haul,
the countless zeroes, lightyears, turning everything unasked
and unwanted out into
the unseasonable cold.
We punctuate the summer, evict the temperature
like a bad dinner guest too
loudly drunk on everything,
on mercury-laced salmon, on the carbon-dioxide-
loaded gulfstream. Forgive me,
but up here on the eighth floor,
everything arrives on time. Everything glows and rotates
in its place, or not out of
place. There, there. On cold mornings,
I come home, make coffee. Up here, there’s no emergency.
Reprinted with permission from Coach House Books.
Watch Meghan read “Lions Gate Hospital” from Nebulas
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Meghan Kemp-Gee is an award-winning poet, teacher, and scriptwriter. She is the author of The Animal in the Room (Coach House Books, 2023), as well as four poetry chapbooks. She co-created the graphic novel One More Year, and co-edited the sports-comics anthology Come Out and Play . She holds degrees from Amherst College and Chapman University, and is now a PhD candidate at the University of New Brunswick, where her dissertation focuses on sports literature. She currently lives in North Vancouver on the unceded traditional territories of the Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Nations.
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Thanks to Meghan for answering our questions and to Coach House Books for the text excerpt from Nebulas, which is available to purchase on All Lit Up (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.
