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 Richard Harrison
ALL LIT UP: How would you describe My Mother Joins the Resistance to someone picking it up for the first time?
RICHARD HARRISON: This is a book about how my mother struggled with the consequences of the abuse she endured as a child during World War II, and how that struggle affected those closest to her. It is also a response to my being with her when she, sick with cancer, chose a medically assisted death. In the end, I see this as a book about my discovery of my mother through an understanding of her life story and through not letting her story, or the effect of that discovery on my view of myself and the world, disappear into silence.
ALU: How do you see poetry as an act of resistance?
RICHARD: What may make poetry distinct in this is how simple the machinery of its resistance and subversion can be. All you need is the voice you were born with to make it, send it out into the world when it comes from you, and pass it along when it arrives. It’s one of the few art forms that, once remembered, is possessed in its entirety and has all the power of its original appearance.
ALU: What does poetry allow you to say or refuse that other forms don’t?
RICHARD: For me, poetry is the art that forces me to write things I wouldn’t say (at least not until after I’d written them). It’s the art form that I can’t bend to my intentions. What has to be written has to be written. I can write about family shame or violence there because I am putting those things into words that need to be shaped to fit into the larger experience that is the poem, which is something for me and for someone else at the same time. Likewise, perhaps paradoxically, speaking only in the language of images, poetry won’t let me indulge myself in my own emotions. There’s nothing in those that describing elevates or enlightens, but if and when the poem I write puts the language of my feelings aside, then it brings you as close to what I experience as I am. If I’ve done my work right, the poem offers you a chance at the full range of responses that real life offers us every moment. If I’ve done my work right, the poem itself refuses me.
ALU: Is there a line (in your own or someone else’s work) that you return to?
RICHARD: My father recited a lot of poetry. It was the way he was taught as a child and then the way he loved it. He had a lot of favourite lines. The one that gathered his whole life, and I hope mine, is Dylan Thomas’s close to “Fern Hill”: “Time held me green and dying/Though I sang in my chains like the sea.”
ALU: What role does community—readers, poets, teachers—play in your writing?
RICHARD: A huge one. Though there is a necessary solitude in the relationship between poet and poem in the writing, in the shaping of what’s written, there is, to my mind, an equally necessary community. A line I could have used in question four is another of my father’s favourites, from Tennyson’s “Ulysses”: “I am part of all that I have met.” I can look at my books of poems the way people look at family albums. There I can see the images of readers who told me what they experienced in my work, poets whose work I’ve learned from, and poets and teachers who taught me what they knew I needed to know.
ALU: How do you sustain a practice of writing poetry in politically or personally challenging times?
RICHARD: I think poetry is a response to those times, personally, politically, or both. Maybe it’s a question of how we keep up hope, which is the element that art and resistance share. Out of hope I write, and in having written, I find reason to hope.
Read a poem from My Mother Joins the Resistance
My Mother Joins the Resistance
Hurricane season, and while my brother and I waited the days
with my mother for the doctor to come and deliver her death,
Tropical Storm Cindy headed north out of the Gulf of Mexico
and the cancer continued to grow in my mother’s drained lungs
from where it had started in the organs below them.
Echoing Genesis, the faith of ecological thought is the Earth loves itself:
we are the ones surging with destruction,
and if God had confined Adam and Eve to the Garden
for their transgression, nothing would have gone wrong
with the rest of Creation, rain would never kill
and we would have been condemned
to all our days in Paradise with everything but freedom.
It was bright in British Columbia the whole time Cindy turned the skies
battleship dark over the Carolinas.
Remembering the smoke of car bombs in London, and English to the last,
my mother turned down my offer of a parting drink the morning
the doctor was due because she wouldn’t touch Irish whiskey –
I took her refusal personally until now while I stand on guard
against the US by never touching bourbon.
The world is what we pretend the Earth to be.
By the time the doctor arrived, we had run out of
things to say that didn’t assume a tomorrow,
and held back the words that carried farewell. So we turned to the weather.
A storm is a cell in the body of the air. Cindy was on the move,
and that afternoon she would drench Washington, DC.
When my mother heard the warning, she sat up in her bed
with small lightning in her eyes and said,
When it pours down on the White House, that’s me pissing on Trump!
My mother’s name was Doreen,
perfect for the order in the christening of storms,
an old woman, cancerous with clouded cells given
someone to rage at, at last,
from a sky that drowned the light.
Reprinted with permission from Wolsak & Wynn.
Watch Richard read “My Mother Joins the Resistance“
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Author of seven books of poetry, Richard Harrison is the winner of the 2017 Governor General’s Award for Poetry for On Not Losing My Father’s Ashes in the Flood. This year he was honoured with the Writers Guild of Alberta’s Golden Pen for Lifetime Achievement. Professor Emeritus of English and Creative Writing at Mount Royal University, currently Richard is a full-time poet, essayist, editor, and writing mentor.
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Thanks to Richard for answering our questions, and to Wolsak & Wynn for the text from My Mother Joins the Resistance, which is available to order 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.
