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Tributaries: Kim Fahner + The Pollination Field
Kim Fahner chats with us about her new book The Pollination Field (Turnstone Press), a collection of poems that bloomed during
the quiet solitude of pandemic walks, emerging as a deeply personal and feminist exploration of nature, transformation, and self-discovery.
Read “A Bee in the House” from
The Pollination Field (Turnstone Press)
A Bee in the House
Deep July and it buzzes, like a simple housefly,
but then with a baritone that conjures a bagpipe’s drone
as it gets closer to panic—not able to find its way home.
A day of hours later, silenced, it falls to the hardwood floor,
curled into itself like a strange semi-colon—a pause—
punctuated by stillness, antennae shivering in a breeze.
Hold it in the palm of your hand,
let it roll from side to side. It might
tell your fortune if you’re lucky.
Stained glass, those wings, like tiny windows
you look through, trying to find answers to questions
that have only been imagined, never asked.
A bird in the house means death, but a bee is good luck.
So how do the two creatures meet? Around corners, unseen—in quiet,
premeditated affairs, hidden messages, or broadcast in bold bunting,
hashtags that are hung out to say, skankily,
‘X’ marks the spot
&
this is mine, not yours.
An interview with Kim Fahner
All Lit Up: Can you tell us a bit about your book and how it came to be? How did you come to write “A Bee in the House” and how is it representative of your collection?
Kim Fahner: I had been writing a few bee poems and imagined that they would just fill a section of an upcoming manuscript because, at that time, I couldn’t really envision a full book of poems about bees. A few were published in my last book, Emptying the Ocean (Frontenac, 2022), and one, “Beekeeping,” won first place in the League of Canadian Poets’ Broadsheet Contest in 2021. Through 2020 and 2021, there were more and more poems that kept coming, though, so I knew it would be a longer sequence.
Somehow, the pandemic weaves itself into this creation story because, when the world slowed down and Ontario went into lockdown in March 2020, I would take long walks with my dog. Everything got very quiet outside. Cars weren’t on the roads, so there was a sense of being better able to hear the sounds of the natural world—including bird song and bees buzzing. Those sounds became loudest, almost redirecting me towards a more magnified way of looking at—and being in—the world. In a time when everyone was isolated, the bees I kept encountering in my flower beds were symbols of both independence and community at the same time. The creatures of the natural world carried on despite the human calamity, and there was a comfort and certainty in that cyclical pattern.
I wrote “A Bee in the House” when I found a bee in my living room and was able to hold it in the palm of my hand. The poem began there, a place where I could actually touch a bee and hold its body up to the light to see the architecture of its wings and body up close. I remember thinking that it was so still, and that it was a contrast to how active the bees are outside in my flower beds. The poem is about taking the time to observe things—even tiny things—very closely, and that those observations can lead to larger ideas that are mirrored in the world. It hints at sexuality, at pollination, and at a woman’s exploration of herself and her desires, as well. I was reading Anais Nin’s work at the time, so I know that had an influence on the collection, too. “A Bee in the House,” then, serves as a starting point, leading the reader into the wider experience of the collection, and starts the forward movement of The Pollination Field.
ALU: Has your idea of poetry changed since you began writing?
KF: I’ve been writing poetry since my early 20s, so that’s just over thirty years now of purposeful study and practice. I’ve had five full books and two chapbooks of poetry, and one novel, published in that span of time.
I know that my style of poetry has changed since I began, as I’ve grown as a poet and person through my life experiences, and I know my understanding of poetry has deepened through each book I’ve written, and through each course I’ve taken over the years. While I studied poetic forms at the graduate level at Carleton University back in the early 1990s, I’ve only really been exploring and practicing specific forms since my mid-40s. The idea of poetry I have hasn’t changed that much over the decades. For me, poetry is central to who I am in the world. I see images and metaphors, and I read poetry every day, and write it every week. I see the world poetically, I guess you could say, and I don’t know any other way of being in the world. I know that poetry is powerful, something that I love and can’t imagine living without.
ALU: What drew you to poetry? What do you most value about it?
KF: I remember being drawn to reading poetry in high school because I had several English teachers who loved it, so they wove it into the curriculum. Then, when I got to the undergraduate level of study, I had a professor at Laurentian University—Dr. Laurence Steven—who taught a third-year course in Modern Poetry. I remember distinctly loving that class and feeling as if a door had opened inside my head. I value the fact that poetry is transformative for the reader and the writer, and that I have found a dear group of poet friends from around the world who are kindred spirits. We’re a tight poetic community here in Canada, in particular, and I’m so very grateful for the work and friendship of all of those poets I’ve met in the last ten years in particular since I was laureate here in Sudbury. Too, I believe that poetry can change the world for the better. There’s a great sense of hope that comes from creating art, I think, and we need that hope in dark times.
ALU: If your collection had a theme song, what would it be?
KF: This is a very difficult question! I listen to music all the time in my house. When I write, it’s usually instrumental music because otherwise I’ll just sing along and not be able to think to write!
While The Pollination Field is partially about bees and many other pollinators (including humans), and the threats to the environment (by humans), it is also feminist and mythopoetic in its stylings. There’s the multi-faceted image of a queen bee that keeps changing throughout the collection: she isn’t one entity, but many, and I love how that shapeshifting, fiery feminist essence reflects the idea that women transform at mid-life, how they come into themselves in a new, more vibrant, powerful, and confident way. It’s that phoenix from a flame notion. Given that transformative perspective, when I consider The Pollination Field, I think of songs like Ani DeFranco’s “32 Flavors,” or Sinead O’Connor’s “Take Me To Church,” or Natalie Merchant’s “Wonder,” or Jane Siberry’s “Bound by the Beauty,” or Sarah Harmer’s “Just Get Here.” There are so many strong women singer-songwriters I love to listen to, including people like Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon, Kate Bush, The McGarrigles, and Tori Amos. I admire their ability to speak to the complexity of women’s lives in song, and in poetry.
ALU: What’s a non-written piece of art (e.g. a song / album, painting, sculpture, or film) that you feel is a “sister city” or companion to your collection?
KF: I’m really drawn to Andrea Kowch’s artwork. She’s an American artist from Detroit, and she always places these fascinating female characters in a series of domestic and rural situations that seem strange and otherworldly. I love her magic realism and I’m working on a series of poems based on more of her paintings. Some art critics in the States have called her work “magical realism of the countryside,” which makes sense to me. I first came to her work when I lived down near Windsor, in Kingsville, back in 2018.
There’s an ekphrastic poem in The Pollination Field that’s inspired by Kowch’s painting “Queen Anne’s Lace.” Every single one of her paintings makes me imagine what’s happening outside of the frame, or what’s about to happen, or how the women will act or respond. In every piece, there are insects, plants, animals, or birds. What she does in her artwork, placing women within the space of a natural, rural world, is parallel to what I’m trying to do in The Pollination Field. It feels ancient, wise, mythic, and earthy to me.
Kim recommends…
“Corridor” from Yvonne Blomer’s
Death of Persephone: A Murder (Caitlin Press)
ALU: Why did you choose Yvonne Blomer’s “Corridor” from her collection Death of Persephone? What do you love most about this particular poem?
KF: I recently finished reading and reviewing Yvonne Blomer’s Death of Persephone: A Murder (Caitlin Press, 2024) and I’m in awe of what she’s done poetically and narratively with this new book of hers. Blomer subverts the myth of Persephone and re-roots it in a cityscape that is inspired by Montreal, with Persephone being renamed in the present time and urban world as “Stephanie.”
Recently, on social media, I’ve noticed people (men, mostly) speaking of the myth of Persephone as if it’s about seduction, rather than abduction. I find it upsetting. What Blomer does, especially in a poem like “Corridor,” is remind us that the myth of Persephone is rooted in patriarchal and colonial misogyny. There’s nothing romantic about it. There’s no “dark feminine energy” here, but instead there’s an abduction of an underage girl.
Blomer takes the myth and draws parallels to the abduction of women along Canada’s Highway of Tears, “a corridor of vanished beings. Violence/an erasure of earth and what is fertile.//An erasure of women and deep knowledge.” So, Death of Persephone: A Murder is not just a re-telling of a myth that was likely initially written down by a man, but rather a reclamation of feminism and a warning to mind the ways in which a too patriarchal and colonial world view still poses a very real threat to women, and to the natural world as well.
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Kim Fahner lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario. The Pollination Field (Turnstone Press, 2025) is her sixth book of poetry. Her first novel, The Donoghue Girl, was published by Latitude Press in Fall 2024. Recently, Kim won first place in The Ampersand Review’s 2024 Essay Contest, second place in Prairie Fire’s 2023 McNally Robinson Bookseller Award for Creative Nonfiction, and was a finalist for The Fiddlehead’s 2023 Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize. Kim is the First Vice-Chair of The Writers’ Union of Canada and may be reached via her website at www.kimfahner.com
Photo of Kim by Gerry Kingsley.
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Thanks to Kim for answering our questions, and to Turnstone Press for the text of “A Bee in the House” from The Pollination Field, which is available to order now (and get 15% off with the code TRIBUTARIES until April 30!). And for the text of “Corridor” from Yvone Blomer’s Death of Persephone: A Murder.
Follow our NPM series all month long to discover new poetry or connect with old favourites, and visit our poetry shop here.
