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 Sadie McCarney
ALL LIT UP: How would you describe The Bright Afters to someone picking it up for the first time?
SADIE MCCARNEY: It’s a novel, but it’s told entirely in poems narrated by different characters; it’s about anti-queer violence, but also queer resilience. It’s very fundamentally about Nova Scotia, but it’s also about every small place that has tried to make its people feel small in order to fit in.
ALU: How do you see poetry as an act of resistance?
SADIE: There’s a Theodore Roethke quote I really like: “Art is the means we have of undoing the damage of haste.” With anything humans make, we’re shoring up the breakwater with fortifications toward really seeing each other’s humanity. I think poetry enacts this kind of resistance especially well. We’re not only looking directly at the core of each other’s truth; we’re looking at it through a singular lens that didn’t exist a poem or a sentence or a phrase ago.
ALU: How do you sustain a practice of writing poetry in politically or personally challenging times?
SADIE: To me, poetry fits as naturally in trying times as a splint does for a broken bone. Reading poems—a lot of them, from a panoply of voices—reminds us that our struggles, however difficult, have some heft of universality behind them. There have been countless people who have faced similar threats, and the way they move around these difficulties, the way they describe them, can give us the most essential keys to unlock the door to our own path of liberation. Writing the poetry is forging the keys, as many and as specific as we can.
ALU: Is there a line (in your own or someone else’s work) that you return to?
SADIE: Dylan Thomas’s “To surrender now is to pay the expensive ogre twice,” from “On No Work of Words.” It’s kind of become a personal mantra for me. The poem is about (at least, I think!) how all the work writers put into creating anything is actually the primary way they’re serving humanity, taking what we’re “given” by others and working it like clay until we shape the pain of living into something that can help others better process their experiences. The expensive ogre is death, and if we give up on our duty to life too soon then we’re giving death more than we need to. Writing, according to Thomas, is a service to humanity as a whole.
Read “Merrily We Roll Along” from The Bright Afters
Merrily We Roll Along
Ms. H., an English teacher
A trickle out the main doors,
a handful at the sides. Talking,
tittering. Like the “mad dog” drills
they had back in elementary,
around Columbine-time. Half-smiles.
What if the dog’s in the gym now,
Teacher? Listen, you stupid shits:
there was never going to be a dog.
Now they’re quick-footed—urgency
in their Air Jordans, their chilly-toed
but optimistic Birkenstocks. Bomb,
someone texted a minute ago. A dread
wave of information sweeps over
the crowd like mist. The kids start
to push. Hell, so do the teachers.
I stride out as briskly and confidently
as I can, but now everyone’s running
and with running comes trampling.
A shooter! they yell, with echoes
all the way into the courtyard where
a piecemeal and hardly Fire Dept.-
approved fire drill lineup begins.
I shepherd them into lines as best
I can. Someone says, it really was
a fire. We assemble in bedraggled
columns of pain, concern.
One text.
One text relays to us all the stabbing
in the bathroom, the blood. It seems
as soon as we know, the ambulance
pulls in and around the dark rump
of the school. All I see are two burly
paramedics, hauling their unhappy
stretcher inside.
All I can think to do is
corral the kids
and pretend it really was a mad dog.
Reprinted with permission from ECW Press.
Watch Sadie read “Merrily We Roll Along“
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Sadie McCarney’s other books are Live Ones and Your Therapist Says It’s Magical Thinking. Her work has also appeared in Best Canadian Poetry, The Walrus, Grain, Foglifter, The Malahat Review, and The Fiddlehead, among other publications. She lives in Cornwall, PEI.
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Thanks to Sadie for answering our questions, and to ECW Press for the text from The Bright Afters, 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.
