THE POET LAUREATE PODCAST

Season 2 Episode 4

Host: Kyeren Regehr

Guest: Micheline Maylor

Recorded at Haus of Owl Creation Lab, Victoria, BC, on Lekwungen Homelands

Links

Canada Council for the Arts: https://canadacouncil.ca/

Micheline Maylor: https://michelinemaylor.com/

The Bad Wife — University of Alberta Press: https://www.uap.ualberta.ca/

Haus of Owl Creation Lab: https://www.hausofowl.com/

Transcript

[MICHELINE READS POEM #1: “How to Become a Bad Wife”]

Kyeren: Welcome to the Poet Laureate Podcast, a sonic sanctuary for poetry. The poem is listening. I'm Kyeren Regehr, and we're recording at Haus of Owl Creation Lab in Victoria, BC on Lekwungen homelands. We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for making season two of the Poet Laureate Podcast possible. We just heard “How to Become a Bad Wife” by Micheline Maylor, who served as Calgary's poet laureate from 2016 to 2018. Micheline, welcome. I'm so happy you're here.

Micheline: Thank you, Kyeren. I'm glad to be here, and thank you to Jordan and the Haus of Owl and to the Canada Council.

Kyeren: Hmm. Lovely. Micheline, that poem just arrived in our ears. Where did it first begin for you? And when you look at the finished piece now, can you still recognize the initial impulse that compelled it?

Micheline: Well, for me, that poem came as a sequence of poems that were erupting from a time of life that was fraught. And, um, I needed to write a eulogy to the marriage that was ending and...

Kyeren: Hmm.

Micheline: ...to force myself into dealing with the emotion through the poem. I think that a lot of times poets will say that they learn themselves through the act of writing.

Kyeren: Hmm.

Micheline: That's the way poets are. We, we learn ourselves through the act of writing and, and that came as that eulogy to that marriage. Poems come in different ways, in all kinds of ways. I, I think that they're almost always sensory first, and then they arrive in some sort of, "Hey, look at me. Now will you shape me into a poem?" So, uh, that's usually how a poem will come fr- to me, is through that sensory impulse.

Kyeren: Sensory impulse. Hmm. Can you elaborate?

Micheline: Sure. I think that there's a saying from someone that says, uh, "Poems go raid the environment." And for me, they come either as a glimpse of something that I've seen walk by, and it can be, uh, a little fragment of a vision, or it can be sometimes a sound or, uh, sometimes a feeling that needs to be named. So it's either through sight, sound, or the body that a poem will arrive in kind of a small sensory package, and it will ripple out from there as the seed that grows.

Kyeren: That's beautifully said. Can I ask you, when you're editing, do you have to go back into that sensory experience to climb back into that poem, or are you working purely at a craft level then?

Micheline: Uh, I think the craft level comes later. What happens first is the seed arrives...

Kyeren: Hmm.

Micheline: ...and it arrives on the paper or the computer, whatever is being written on at the time. And then what happens is there's a layering up. It's almost like the underpainting that a visual artist will do. The first initial thing that arrives is the thing that you layer above...

Kyeren: Yes, yes.

Micheline: ...and continue to add layers to, and that can be through language or image or craft or emotion or metaphor or volta. And then eventually I can look at it as just purely craft. But first it has to arrive on that emotional level. And then that becomes layered up, and then the craft work comes later.

Kyeren: Thank you. That's so exciting. I love that. Thank you. Wow. Would you share your poetry practice with us? You know, what, what does poetry ask of you, and what do you need in order to give yourself to the poem?

Micheline: Poetry practice asks everything. I said in the past to my friend Marty Gervais, he was the poet laureate of Windsor, Ontario. I said to him before that for me, poetry is my religion. It's, it's devotional and it requires everything. It requires all of the attention and all of the reverence and all of the resonance of living in order to become itself. And that kind of attention means reading every day...

Kyeren: Mm-hmm.

Micheline: ...thinking about poetry every day, thinking not just about poetry, but also just even the way that grammar works. I love the analysis of grammar work...

Kyeren: Mm.

Micheline: ...to look at a well-constructed sentence...

Kyeren: Oh, yeah.

Micheline: ...that can make me happy for hours. Just hours. You know, like, oh, this sentence arrives on your desk and you find it someplace out in the wilderness and it's like spotting a bird. It's like the same kind of reverence that bird watchers have if they spot some kind of rare finch. If I find some sort of wonderfully crafted sentence out in the wilderness, I've, I've gotta go show it to someone else...

Kyeren: Yeah.

Micheline: ...and go, "Look, look at the way this, this person has used the verb in this sentence...

Kyeren: ...or, or look at the way the commas are." Oh, yeah.

Micheline: Uh, yeah, it's...

Kyeren: I get it.

Micheline: ...it's a real kind of reverence in...

Kyeren: Mm-hmm.

Micheline: ...just that grammar. Even that, that construction of the thing will make me indescribably joyful. And you know, I can say that one of the poets that I look at the most for that is Susan Musgrave's last book, Exculpatory Lilies. There are a couple of...

Kyeren: Mm-hmm.

Micheline: ...poems in there that I will turn to for their use of grammar and for their use of punctuation because...

Kyeren: Mm-hmm.

Micheline: ...she is an extreme craftsman, and if you look at it, it is a master class in how to use punctuation properly.

Kyeren: Wow, what an answer. Thank you.

Micheline: So yeah, the short answer is it's devotional to me.

Kyeren: Yeah, yeah. I get that. Yeah. Yeah. I totally get that. I love hearing you say that. Yeah. Thank you. At what point in your poem's emergence do you think about a reader, if at all?

Micheline: Oh, I'm such a selfish prick. I don't think about the reader as much as I think about who I'd like to please.

Kyeren: Huh.

Micheline: So I suppose that there's, there, there's a reader that you're trying to please, and there's a couple of people that I think about when I'm writing, but it comes later because first that emotional thing arrives, but then I think to myself, "Could I show this to Douglas Glover, and would he be upset with me?" So Douglas Glover is one person that I've learned a lot from in terms of, uh, grammar and style. Douglas Glover has a book called The Erotics of Restraint, and, uh, there's another one called Attack of the Copula Spiders, and those two books have formed my opinion about the way that style should work at a line level. And if I know that I can show something to Douglas Glover without being embarrassed, that's the thing. So he's one of my readers that I think about. I think about punctuation, and I say to myself, "If Susan Musgrave is going to correct my punctuation, then I need to work on it harder." If I say to myself, "Would I be embarrassed to show this poem to Carmine Starnino?" I will often use that as a reference point because, I mean, I think that some of his work is spectacular.

Kyeren: Yes.

Micheline: He's got a poem called “Our Butcher,” which I think is m- a magnificent example of craft work at its best in Canadian literature. If I think about metaphor and I think, "Would I show this metaphor to Jan Zwicky?" and I feel like it wouldn't pass the, the muster, then it's back to the drawing board it, it goes. So I have people who I admire as my intended audience. But I very rarely think of anyone beyond that council. And then so I have a selfishness about speaking to those that I admire, and then the rest of the readership just either gets to follow along or not. Yeah. And, and that's all right. It's totally all right. Yeah. But I do have this intended r- readership, this intended audience that exists as the pinnacle for me to be able to speak to, and if I know I'm speaking to that audience, then, then the rest becomes far more irrelevant.

Kyeren: Your poetry just lifts into those stratospheres.

Micheline: Uh, I don't know if that's true or not. But, um, at least I know who I'm talking to.

Kyeren: Your craftsmanship is superb. I'm wondering that at this point in your writing life, you know, how much of your craft has ceased to be like a conscious toolkit and has simply become instinct?

Micheline: I don't know if it's ever instinctual. I think that craft work is, in literature, the same as scales in music. So for a poet, I think that knowing forms is incredibly important. You know, earlier you were talking about sonnets, and a long time ago when I was studying sonnets, I think I could name 19 types of sonnet at the time. I don't know if there's more now because, you know, poets are always experimenting and pushing boundaries, which I think is phenomenal. Like look at Diane Seuss's enormous sonnets...

Kyeren: Yes.

Micheline: ...that, that cross two pages.

Kyeren: Yes. Yes.

Micheline: That, that's, that's an example. Or even the way that there's some form with, uh, Jericho Brown's duplex...

Kyeren: Mm-hmm.

Micheline: ...and then you can make a duplex sonnet and...

Kyeren: Right.

Micheline: ...like there's all kinds of new forms always emerging. So, you know, at the time, and that was really early, it was in the mid-'90s, I could count 19 sonnets. I don't know how many there are now. Right. And, and the- for me it was a kind of joy to be able to discover I can list 19 kinds of sonnets. And that kind of joy, I mean, it's kind of twisted and strange and niche, but it's also very passionate. And like I said, it's a little bit like birding. You go out into the wild and you're, "Ah, look at that warble-crested yellow finch." And and you know... like three people know what you're talking about, but you know what you're talking about. And it just, that to me was joyful. Other things, pantums, uh, villanelles, Japanese forms of all kinds. Knowing what's out there, and I think that every poet should probably own a copy of The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, and then also be able to have engaged with it, rip it up, and make a giant pastie shot of it. Like, I think that both of those things should be true. I think that you should know your materials. And to put this in terms of like a visual artist, if a visual artist had a studio, and they had oil paints, and they had watercolor, and they had pastels, and they knew how they all worked...

Kyeren: Yeah.

Micheline: ...if you know how they work and you know your materials, then you have the ability to experiment with those materials and to be able to create new forms, to create mixes and blends and push the boundaries and, you know, try new things. And then always your own hand is in it somehow moving and shaping and, you know, doing what it does. For me, the way that I look at it is I always think of form as the materials, as in... the same as a visual artist would have their, their paints or the same as a musician might know their scales, but then also become a jazz artist and riff completely off, off the fly. I think that it's really important to know the thing and then to be able to experiment with the thing.

Kyeren: Wow, beautifully said. Wow, y- I mean, you've spent decades teaching and editing and reading manuscripts as an acquisitions editor. I mean, your baseline must have changed. What can a manuscript still do on a page, uh, like on page one, that genuinely piques your interest or even startles you? I think our baseline of what excites us can shift over time.

Micheline: Well, that's interesting. I don't know if there's something that I've discarded. There's definitely things that have lasted.

Kyeren: So what's lasted?

Micheline: For me, Philip Larkin lasts.

Kyeren: Why?

Micheline: Yeah. Because he's a master craftsman. Again, it's all about the craft. What excites me in a manuscript is seeing something that I can't access myself. You mentioned Billy-Ray Belcourt earlier.

Kyeren: Yes.

Micheline: You said, you said, "Okay, what, what was it about that manuscript?" Now, the first line in This Wound Is a World is, "My love is a moontime teaching," or something to that effect. I'm going off the top of my head here. "My love is a moontime teaching." So what is that?

Kyeren: Yeah.

Micheline: My love is like a red, red rose. That's Bobby Burns. My love is a moontime teaching. Th- Right there you've got a metaphor. My love is. My love is this, my love is that. It's something, but it's this big idea of love...

Kyeren: Mm-hmm.

Micheline: ...and it turns into something else. So it's that metaphor that creates a new way of seeing. Now, at the time, Bobby Burns, when he said, "My love is a red, red rose," that would've been innovative. It would've been extraordinary, and over 400 years it becomes cliche. My love is a ro- Oh, please don't write that ever again. Like, ugh, la, la, la. So it's where eventually the truth of the metaphor becomes a cliche, but at the beginning it's innovative. And Billy-Ray Belcourt accessed something we had never seen before.

Kyeren: Oh, he sure did.

Micheline: "My love is a moontime teaching." Everyone's like, "Moontime teaching?" You know?

Kyeren: Yeah.

Micheline: And the, and the exploding of the brain happens... and everybody wants to know more and more.

Kyeren: Yeah.

Micheline: But he is a master of a metaphor. It appears simple, but it's also extremely complex, and it accesses a world...

Kyeren: Yes.

Micheline: ...that I cannot access myself. There were no moontime teachings in my culture when I was growing up.

Kyeren: Yeah.

Micheline: So he allows me access through his metaphor to a place that I cannot go. So for me, poetry is one of the last pure democratic spaces... where we can cross boundaries without politics, without anything at the heart of it but deeper understandings and more human connections. And when we talk about human connections, what we all want to do is we all want to feel loved and welcomed... and understood, and poetry at its best will do that thing. Yeah. It's one of the last unbuyable democratic spaces that exists.

Kyeren: Yeah.

Micheline: Poets learn themselves through their writing. They learn their environment through their writing. They learn knowing through their writing. They learn w- what is it that I know I know? That's a deeper kind of philosophical question that we, we grapple with when we sit down and write. And then there's the point, though, when it becomes a choice to, to offer it to the world. I think somehow that, that is an act of generosity, you know? Yeah. When we get to that point where we share it.

Micheline: I hope that it's an act of generosity. I have too often seen it as an act of ego as well.

Kyeren: Well, yeah.

Micheline: "Look at me. I have to do this thing... 'cause I am so great." Or the other, the other one that I resist is, "Oh, here, here's my book. I have to produce a book because I have to write my report for my tenure report." So that's another place where I feel...

Kyeren: Wow.

Micheline: ...like it gets corrupted.

Kyeren: Huh, I didn't know that existed. That's very interesting. We hear a lot about bravery in contemporary poetry, and I think it can be confused with raw disclosure or shock value, and I'm wondering your take on what distinguishes genuine artistic risk from mere exposure.

Micheline: To me, that's an easy one.

Kyeren: Yeah?

Micheline: So bravery is where you expose the paradox. There's always guilt in innocence. There's always innocence in guilt. There's always the sacred and the profane are at odds with one another. That's very different than shock value. Saying something in a poem for the sake of itself, that's when it becomes just shock value. It's like, "Here's this horrible thing that happened," but without that paradoxical element where, you know, where's the blood without the healing?

Kyeren: Yeah.

Micheline: Where's the healing without the blood? Like, there's always gotta be that paradoxical energy that exists on both sides of the equation because that tension is what makes life, life. Because life is never simple. It's never as simple as Dudley Do-Right is a good guy, and there's always a cartoon bad guy, but that's not the way life is. That's the way Looney Tunes is, but that's not the way life is. There's always a yin-yang of, of this paradox, and bravery is being able to name both sides of the paradox and somehow arrive at love or beauty or forward momentum or joy or healing or health.

Kyeren: Oh, gorgeously said. Kind of, uh, is a great segue into The Bad Wife, which won the Robert...

Micheline: Yeah.

Kyeren: ...Kroetsch Award, yeah. And was recently translated into Italian as well?

Micheline: Yes. Yes.

Kyeren: I would say you're very fearless and in, in this book and, you know, your speaker is allowed to be flawed and implicated and unheroic, and you've captured the beauty of that too, and you've, yeah, you've taken us into a new place. And I, I'm wondering what becomes possible on the page when a poet surrenders the need to appear ins- innocent.

Micheline: Well, innocent is an interesting word. Is it innocent or good?

Kyeren: Mm-hmm.

Micheline: Well, to me it goes back to the paradox of the sacred and the profane are always... in some sort of tension. They're always pushing and pulling at one another, and if you're only exposing your poetry as good, it's probably not very good poetry. Because it's not coming to the point where there's that wisdom or insight or philosophical thrust that allows for irony or elevation into insight, thought. If you're just saying, "Oh, look at this. This is beautiful..." you know, you're back to that cartoon situation of only having that monochromatic character. The thing is is that life is very diverse and very strange, and there's always things where you're, that are pushing and pulling. It's the process of life itself, this tension of action and reaction. It's not so simple as, "Here I have arrived, and here's the beauty of it all, and, and there's no ugliness." Like, it's, what is that the Buddhists say? No shit, no lotus, right? So you need to have that paradox. One of the best writers of that paradox was Patrick Lane. He was one of my best teachers as well, and he was constantly saying that, and he was constantly exposing, you know, the, the violence underneath, the danger underneath, the horror underneath, and then, you know, going beyond those things to write the most elegant prose and phrases that we've seen in Canadian literature as well. So...

Kyeren: Yeah.

Micheline: ...you know, so to me, bravery is about that paradoxical state that we grapple with consistently as living beings.

Kyeren: Micheline, wow. You know, your, your earlier work seems somehow more formally mischievous and experimental, while The Bad Wife feels more emotionally experimental, like fearless and exposed. Are there things that you're willing to risk on the page now that you might not have been earlier in your writing life? Do you wanna talk about that movement in your own work?

Micheline: I think that all writing is experimental. All, all of it. At least it should be at its best. And that mischievous quality, uh, I mean, I think that that's just part of my personality. I think that I'm just a little bit of a irreverent bastard at the heart of things.

Kyeren: A, an irreverent bastard with a mighty nasty red pen.

Micheline: But there you go. Uh, I, I love to be irreverent and also grammatically correct.

Kyeren: So...

Micheline: They can coexist.

Kyeren: Yeah.

Micheline: So, so there's that. In terms of The Bad Wife, I just think, like I said, it arrived at a time when I felt that it was necessary to write a eulogy, and it just poured out in that way. I don't think that poets should keep writing the same style, and I don't think that they should keep writing the same way their whole careers. I hope that that's not true for a poet, because I hope that we're experimental. I hope that we always have phases of trying different things. So for example, again, if you look at a visual artist, someone like Picasso, he had very different eras in his work. And that's because there was an experimentation, there was a response. There was, you know, he, he knew how to do classic work, but then pushed into something like Guernica, where, you know, there's this reaction to the politics of the time and to, and to all, you know, in a very different way than, than doing a classic form. But he knew how. Right. But, you know, so I appreciate when I see growth in others and myself, so I'm very excited by that kind of display, and I'm willing to try to do things, and sometimes they fail, and sometimes they fall down, and I don't care. I'll just, you know, get back up and do something different the next day. That's also a kind of a bravery. What I don't wanna see as an editor is a poet rewriting the same thing over and over their whole career. I want to see what else you got. And I found that a lot with being an acquisitions editor and looking at, sometimes people will send me their, their second books after they've sent me their first book, and I'll think that's the same as the first book. And then I will say to the poet, "I think you need more time. Take more time." Because if you aren't fearless in poetry, where can you be fearless? Like, there's no stakes here. You're not gonna lose your house if you don't perform. It's the place where there's the least amount of pressure. So take the maximum amount of chances with your work. Take the maximum amount of chances with revelation, with word choice, with grammar, with excitement.

Kyeren: Yeah. I was gonna ask you, uh, what advice you would give to poets beginning their careers, but you've just done it. You've just answered that question so brilliantly.

Micheline: Well, uh, there's two things that I'm gonna say to beginner poets. First off, read everything you can get your hands on. Go to the library and read poets. Read them all. Don't think that there's one kind of poetry, because there's not. As a, a thing that I used to say to my students, 'cause they used to think that a poem would be a certain kind of thing. L- like, you know, a lot of poets think, "Okay, well, I'll just write like Mary Oliver, and then I'll be a successful poet." No, you won't, because number one, you're not Mary Oliver, and you need to go take your own chances, not the chances that Mary Oliver took.

Kyeren: Exactly.

Micheline: So go take your own chances. And then secondly, a poem isn't necessarily what you think it is. Because the one thing that I've learned over time, and you did ask this question earlier about what would you say differently about poems at the beginning. At the beginning when I was first studying poetry, I thought that a poem was supposed to be a certain kind of thing. And now my idea of what that kind of thing is, is far more expansive and broad. You know, the word poetry comes from poiein. Which means a thing made. A thing made, a noun verbed. Yeah. Right? If you break that sentence down...

Kyeren: There's a lot of room there...

Micheline: ...there's a lot of room there. And then you think about what a poem is. Well, a poem can be a two-line ditty like, "Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker" by Ogden Nash. Like it can be as simple as that.

Kyeren: Yeah.

Micheline: Or it can be a formal sonnet with absolutely perfect iambic pentameter and end, end rhymes. It can be a Japanese haiku. It can be a song sung by any number of artists. Or an epic trilogy like Renée Sarojini's three-book trilogy. It can be a trilogy. Yeah. It can be a novel. It can be broadcast up onto the Calgary Tower like what Derek Beaulieu did with his visual poems. He, you know, he had them on the Calgary Tower and...

Kyeren: That's so cool.

Micheline: ...and that's, that's a different kind of poem. It can be music. It can be visual. It can be abstract. It can be formal. It can be so many things. And so my idea of what a poem is has far, far expanded to realms I didn't think and ways that genre overlaps other genre. So again, like take as many chances as possible and remember that your poems, they shouldn't sound like someone else's poems. They should be your own relationship to the world, to the word, and to the craft.

Kyeren: Yeah, your own relationship to the world, to the word, and the craft. Yeah, that's a quote right there. Micheline, I know you have brought a brand-new unpublished poem for us, and before we hear it, I wanna mark the audio-first publication we're launching this season on the Poet Laureate Podcast. With the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts, we're inviting each featured poet to bring one new poem into the world first through sound. So alongside two signature poems, each poet is offering this audio-first poem, which is published here before they appear in print. So the poem's first public life is the poet's own voice, breath, cadence, silence, and of course, listening. Micheline, would you please read us your new poem?

Micheline: Sure. This poem is called “Junco,” which is a type of little black finch. Junco.

[MICHELINE READS POEM #2: “Junco”]

Kyeren: Thank you so much for reading that poem to us and bringing it into the world for the first time, and that you offered this to the podcast. Thank you. Would you talk about how that poem emerged? Is it part of a larger work?

Micheline: It is part of a larger work. So the second line there is, uh, "The bird did not love me." So I'm currently, uh, working on a sequence that's called Unrequited, which is things...

Kyeren: Mm.

Micheline: ...that did not love me, and the dead bird did lo- did not love me. I live in a place where I, uh, deal with a lot of dead birds. What happened was I, I did, I heard another poet say on a podcast that th- there was a, a tradition, some sort of belief system that every feather from a dead bird would fly off and become another bird. And the image of that struck me as, like, every dead bird is a seedling for another flock of birds. And for me, that was so wonderful. It was the only way that I could reconcile the tragedy of these, like, tiny little birds hitting windows and just dying. It was a kind of a poem of hope, that I hope that this one bird becomes many other birds. I, I hope...

Kyeren: Yeah.

Micheline: ...that that's true.

Kyeren: That's so beautiful. I'd love to turn our attention to your laureateship. You were Calgary's poet laureate from 2016 until 2018, and the first woman appointed to the role in Calgary. Did being a woman figure into your experience of the role in any way?

Micheline: I think so. And firstly and foremost, I want to say that really they should have given the first poet laureateship to a, a woman in Calgary, to Sheri-D Wilson.

Kyeren: Oh.

Micheline: She had done, she had done more work in the space than I had. However, I think the committee thought I was a safer choice. So...

Kyeren: Mm.

Micheline: ...I think that that's what happened there. I don't know that for a fact. But I think that it should have gone to her first, and I'm ... And we're very good friends now, and I, I really still think that. Did it play in? Yes, it definitely played in. In 2016 to 2018, there was a lot of really bizarre things going on in politics, for example, and one of the strangest experiences that I had as the Calgary poet laureate was going to a women's march that was happening at City Hall in Calgary. And I went to the mic, and I thought maybe we- there would be 500 people there. And the, the thing ballooned into, like, 5,000.

Kyeren: Holy cow.

Micheline: And there were so many people that I couldn't believe it. That was the beginning of some of the political strife that we see now. There were, you know, redefinitions of what a woman is.

Kyeren: Ah.

Micheline: There were a lot of anti-political slogans. There was a lot of political things- was going on with Trump and Obama, and there was a lot. And it was this atmosphere where the, the world seemed to be turning...

Kyeren: Mm-hmm.

Micheline: ...and there was choices to be made about the way that things were going to go, and it felt enormous to the point where I thought I knew what it meant to be a woman poet and, and then I realized that I had no idea what was coming down the pipe.

Kyeren: Wow.

Micheline: No idea.

Kyeren: And so you read in front of 5,000 people.

Micheline: I did. I think only 400 could hear me, but that's okay. It doesn't matter.

Kyeren: That does not matter. No, it doesn't.

Micheline: And I, I read a poem about women's empowerment, and I don't know who heard it, and it didn't matter because the energy and the space was so much larger than any poem could be.

Kyeren: Wow.

Micheline: It was definitely a, a time of deep turning.

Kyeren: Yeah. Yeah. Incredible. You appeared in an extraordinary number of public events as laureate.

Micheline: Yeah.

Kyeren: Often in spaces where people hadn't necessarily come expecting poetry. When you stood in front of a crowd, how did you think or feel about the physical and artistic act of asking for their attention?

Micheline: Well, first off, I don't think that you ask for the attention because I think that when you're the laureate, they invite you. So first off, you're not asking. You're invited, and that, that creates a different kind of atmosphere altogether. But then there's other things that happen where I never knew quite what to expect from my audience either. You know, there were times when I went to the Women's Historical Society, and then we ended up talking about history and not much about poetry at all, all afternoon, like, for four hours, and it was the most fun ever. It was, it was...

Kyeren: Wow.

Micheline: ...absolutely spectacular. But then there was another time when there was a, a literacy event, and I had kindergarten kids, and most of the kindergarten kids were new to Canada, and many of them didn't speak English, and that was...

Kyeren: Wow.

Micheline: ...really interesting be- because we ended up coloring on the sidewalk... and just focusing on one word, which was flower. Hmm. Flower, flower, and then writing flower and, and drawing flowers in order to make the connection and trying to get one word, and that was super interesting too because I hadn't thought about the simplicity of literacy for quite some time because, you know, teaching in a university, literacy means something else...

Kyeren: Mm-hmm.

Micheline: ...than it means at that primary level. So the word literacy itself was challenged in my own existence about...

Kyeren: Yeah.

Micheline: ...you know, what, what does that mean? And, and how, how does it transmit, and how, how can I, as a poet laureate, even access the most, the most simple parts of literacy to the most complex parts of literacy and be, be literate in being literate? And, and, and that was a challenge, and it still is. I mean, there's some days when I think, "Oh, you were the poet laureate of Calgary," and then I think, "Yeah, well I can't spell and I don't know anything." So, you know, like, it's, it's a, a really humbling experience to be able to think about literacy as an act of translation and...

Kyeren: Mm-hmm.

Micheline: ...and about what it means to feel first and connect through feeling first. And the words come kind of as a secondary kind of situation later.

Kyeren: That's incredible. You know, civic roles like the laureateship ask poetry to do heavy social lifting sometimes, you know, to heal or commemorate or unify. Uh, can you speak about how you navigated the tension between serving the public's need and honoring the poem's need?

Micheline: I think that arrived at what kind of feeling do you want to give? You know, Wordsworth says that poetry is emotion reflected in tranquility.

Kyeren: Hmm.

Micheline: So, you know, when Wordsworth said that, what did he mean? Well, he meant that the emotion is first. So as a poet laureate, you're a connector. That's what you do. You connect community.

Kyeren: Mm-hmm.

Micheline: And that community is w- enormous. And if you think about that enormity, it's too big. You can't think about that kind of enormity. But what you can think about is connection on a human level, and what do we need as human beings? And we need love. We need acceptance. We need hope. We need, we need those things.

Kyeren: Yeah, yeah.

Micheline: So that's the primary goal, is to set in motion that connection in feeling. And then how that arrives as a poem is secondary. Right. I don't know, what did you think? Yeah. You were the poet laureate. How would you answer that question?

Kyeren: Yeah, I mean, it depends on the event, doesn't it? And it depends who's gonna be there.

Micheline: Yeah. Yeah.

Kyeren: Like, if you're writing for Remembrance Day and you've got veterans and First Nations people and children and people who have lost their family members, it's completely different than writing from a women's march or, or Canada Day. That was a tough one in this climate.

Micheline: Yeah. That was really tough. What does Canada even mean? What does it even mean? What does a woman even mean? Like... there's so many questions, right? There's so many questions. It's like I don't even know. I don't know.

Kyeren: Yeah. But those are the kinds of things where we say...

Micheline: Yeah.

Kyeren: ..."Okay, I don't know how to answer that. I'm just a poet, and I don't get it paid very much."

Micheline: "And I'm here with all of my fallibilities."

Kyeren: Yeah. "And all I can say is I want y- you to feel like you're part of my community. I want to feel..."

Micheline: Yeah.

Kyeren: "...like that hope and those doors are open," and that's...

Micheline: Mm.

Kyeren: ...where it arrived.

Micheline: But some of the questions are enormous.

Kyeren: So big. They're so big. Yeah.

Micheline: And I'm glad I'm not a politician be- ... that's their problem.

Kyeren: You know, while you were making public appearances and editing and championing other writers, you were also writing your own books. How did that intense season of public visibility affect what happened when you finally sat down alone at your desk?

Micheline: That intense season of public visibility was exhausting. I didn't recognize it at the time, but it was exhausting, and I know that my work suffered for it because it felt like I couldn't write anything that was complicated. I was too in it to be able to process it. So going back to the Wordsworth quote, "Poetry is emotion reflected in tranquility." There was no reflection and there was no tranquility. At the time, it felt difficult and I felt like I had my stupid hat on, like I couldn't do anything that was worthy of my own, like worthy of my own approval almost. Like, it would be like a gesture drawing if, like going back to the visual artist, it was like a gesture drawing, but it never ended up being like a fully completed piece, and it just felt like time had to go by and allow some of that stuff to get digested through in order to get back to it. And I think that that's a real risk for anybody that goes into that public space that's a true introvert, because I think that you're gonna have a little bit of a, a time, and I don't, I don't know what kind of a time, but you'll have a time.

Kyeren: Oh, totally.

Micheline: It won't be the same as anything, and you, and you definitely emerge differently than when you began. And is it worth it? Absolutely. Will you suffer? Probably. But, you know, like it's, it's both of those things that, going back to paradox as well, it's both of those things. It's, it's a thing. I don't know how you felt about it. Did you feel like you emerged differently from, from it?

Kyeren: I'm still kind of in it. I still have like a few months left and, and yeah, I, I can't tell you how grateful I am to hear you say these words. A lot of it is exactly how the laureateship has been too, and the poetry is so different. Public-facing poems are so different when you have to write them for an occasion.

Micheline: Right. Well, just remember what words were said and remember right now you have no reflection and no tranquility. So it's okay. It'll come back.

Kyeren: It will?

Micheline: It will? It will. I promise? It'll come back. Yeah. Yeah. Derek Beaulieu, he, he once told me about at the end of a laureateship, he says, all of a sudden the phone just stops ringing, and then what do you do with that? 'Cause like, you know...

Kyeren: Mm.

Micheline: ...your phone has been ringing and it's like, "Can you do this, and can you do that, and can you go here, and can you go there?" And then all of a sudden the phone stops ringing, and it's both a relief and a surprise to get to that point...

Kyeren: Hmm.

Micheline: ...where it's like, wait a second, when's the phone gonna ring? And then you realize...

Kyeren: Mm-hmm.

Micheline: ...no, I'm in the, I'm back in the reflection and tranquility part. Yay. And then, and it, well, it's either yay or, or boo. Like, I don't know. Right. I think that different poets have different reactions to that as well, but I was glad for the phone to stop ringing.

Kyeren: Yeah. And yeah, a little bit. Yeah. I was like, oh, it's so much. And then yeah, when it stopped ringing I was like, I think I'm gonna go have a nap for a year. Fiona Tinwei Lam said it took her a year to recover.

Micheline: Oh, did she? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I, I wouldn't be surprised. Yeah. I mean, especially if you're an introvert and you've been talking that much...

Kyeren: Yeah.

Micheline: ...and your social battery is, like, out of gas.

Kyeren: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, I just did a mixed metaphor, battery gas. Mm.

Micheline: But you know what? Sometimes they work when it's in person.

Kyeren: Yeah. Yeah. Hmm. Um, you had some amazing projects, uh, projects like Drifting Like a Metaphor, uh, where you used the power of the laureateship to build a platform for 12 unpublished writers. I'd love to hear about that, and I'd love to know at what point in an artist's life does personal ambition begin to turn into responsibility for the literary ecosystem?

Micheline: My ambition was about, it was more in the teaching space...

Kyeren: Mm-hmm.

Micheline: ...than it was in the poetry space. Because I always felt like poetry was just, that's my joyful place, and I don't have any room for ambition over there. I felt like I wanted to be a good teacher. I always felt like that, and that was from a very young age. I, I remember wanting to be a teacher when I was about 12 or 13 and thinking, "Okay, no matter what happens, I'm gonna be a good teacher e- even if I'm...

Kyeren: Mm.

Micheline: ...become an accountant. Like, I'll just be a good teacher. And for me, what I always wanted to do was, you know, that lofty audience that I point at and say, "I want to, I wanna impress those people." A lot of times what I wanna do is I wanna say, "I learned this from Jan Zwicky. Let me show you what I learned." And it's so exciting to me to be able to say, "This is what I learned from her. Isn't this cool? This is what I learned from Douglas Glover. Isn't this cool?" Like, to me, it's about the excitement of the thing, is to be able to transmit and pass on that thing. And so for me, it's always about, "Let me show you this. I'm so excited." It's totally geeking out, and it's not necessarily about ambition, but I wanted to give that to somebody else. And then those 12 poets, I, I mean, on any, any given time, I mean, it could be a different selection of course, but I'm ... Because you always meet different people doing different things...

Kyeren: Mm-hmm.

Micheline: ...and there's always so many people. There's way more people doing exciting things than there is space for them.

Kyeren: Yeah. So that's another thing too...

Micheline: It's true.

Kyeren: ...right?

Micheline: Where it's like, "I gotta show you this," and then it goes the other direction where it's like, "Hey, if I was talking to Jan Zwicky, boy would I ever want to, her to see this, this kind of poetry over here."

Kyeren: Yeah, yeah.

Micheline: This young kid who's doing this thing or this new poet who's doing this thing. So it's, it's a matter of excitement for me rather than ambition. It's just about geeking out about the most fun, wonderful things. Like, oh, this poet makes me feel amazing. Like, there's one poet in, in Drifting Like a Metaphor, Tyler Engström for example. His poems, like he just does this amazing thing with Surrealism and language, and also with image where he shifts it from one thing to another and it's like...

Kyeren: Mm-hmm.

Micheline: ...a shape-shifter that's moving on the page. Think, "Wow, he's, he's like Eve Joseph. He's so good at shape-shifting images." Like, and he really excites me, so I would love to say, "Eve Joseph, you know I love your shape-shifting prose poems. You should see this Tyler Engström guy."

Kyeren: I'd love to see it, yeah.

Micheline: Like, and so it's, it's this matter of excitement rather than ambition. And just this hope that I can teach in either direction where it's like this is someone that I feel mentored by. Let me show you. And then this is someone that I've taught, but who's always teaching me. Because that's another thing too is when you're teaching, you're an authority in the room, but you're also...

Kyeren: Mm-hmm.

Micheline: ...always a student. Because always something new comes from some place that you never expect and you think to yourself, "Damn, that is very cool, and that person is doing something I've never seen before." So it's always this...

Kyeren: Mm-hmm.

Micheline: ...two-way relationship, and I think that the openness of being permeable in either direction is really important.

Kyeren: Yeah, yeah. You put a lot of years into teaching. You were teaching for a couple of decades, right? And...

Micheline: Y- yeah... yeah. I thought it was gonna, I thought it was gonna be the way I earned my crust.

Kyeren: Yeah. I mean, you won awards for teaching as well. Uh, yeah. Yeah. And, and now you're not teaching. How does that feel? Like how, how does that change the way you are in the world and the way you work?

Micheline: I don't think that I'm not teaching. I mean, I mean, you think... Maybe not academically. Well, if I'm not teaching academically, it means that I have less reports and less people to be accountable to. Which is fine with me, because I'm just fine being accountable to myself, and I do teach people. I do teach them. I have a little group that I run out of...

Kyeren: Oh, you do?

Micheline: Yeah, I have a little group that I run out of my house, and I'm definitely generous with people who phone me and say, "Hey, can you help me with this, that, or the other thing?"

Kyeren: Oh.

Micheline: So that's...

Kyeren: And you're also editing, right, which is a form of teaching.

Micheline: Yes. Yeah. Absolutely. I think that editing is teaching, yes, with- without the benefits.

Kyeren: Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. But I mean, all of that stuff translates back and forth.

Micheline: Yeah, yeah. For sure.

Kyeren: I guess it's a more shifting landscape rather than the routine of teaching.

Micheline: Well, you don't go Monday to Friday. Yeah. I mean, now I just work wherever my laptop is, which is fine with me because, uh, you know, I've married someone who has ants in his pants. We're always traveling somewhere, so it's really fun. So as long as I've got my laptop, got my office. So yeah, it's fun. Have laptop, will travel. Have laptop, will edit.

Kyeren: Will edit. Perfect. Before we finish, would you let us in on what's occupying your attention these days? Like what you're interested in, what you're working on now. You talked a little bit about Unrequited.

Micheline: Yeah. I'm- yeah... I'm working a little bit on this Unrequited project. I've got another project going that has to do with the Great Bear Rainforest in northern BC. And then I have another weird experimental project going on, and then I just had an essay come out in the Living Histories book that's, uh, on A.F. Moritz's work.

Kyeren: Oh.

Micheline: And I particularly am enamored with him because he taught me a lot about what it means to be a good citizen in a poem...

Kyeren: Mm-hmm.

Micheline: ...and what good citizenship is. He, he's a very fascinating and impressive character in Canadian literature.

Kyeren: Can you talk more about that for a moment? Sure. What is it about being a good citizen that you learned?

Micheline: Well, Al Moritz, one of his mentors was Octavio Paz, the Spanish poet. And Al Moritz brought, like, the- there's this idea about what it means to be a good citizen, and he brought that idea into s- a couple of his books, one especially, The Sparrow, where he, he talks a lot about how a sparrow is one of the best citizens that we have in a city...

Kyeren: Mm-hmm.

Micheline: ...because a sparrow lives in the cracks and has this eternal optimism and is, you know, this joyful symbol of, of what it means to survive in strange places...

Kyeren: Yeah.

Micheline: ...and, and also be, you know, part of the ecosystem. And so all of those entanglements made me think more about what it means to be a good citizen and what it means to be a good citizen through poetry. Because, you know, part of our job, too, as poet laureate, is to act as a, as an ambassador, and I, I hope that we are acting as good citizens in those roles...

Kyeren: Mm-hmm.

Micheline: ...and that we are thinking about the greater good. Yeah. And the greater good is not necessarily about specific kinds of politics, because specific kinds of politics can be more divisive than...

Kyeren: Mm-hmm.

Micheline: ...they can be uniting. Yeah. So I think about what it means to be a good citizen in those capacities, in those, in those ways, that we bring that message to the environment and say, "Okay, what does it mean to be polite? What does it mean to be kind? What does it mean to be inclusive?" You know, all of those things end up becoming considerations. What does it mean to be the sparrow who lives in the cracks? Like, what does, what, what do all those things mean? So in that way, he made me think a lot more about what being a good citizen means, and especially in terms of poetry, and he was the poet laureate of Ontario. So, so that's, that's one project that's going on.

Kyeren: That sounds fascinating. Yeah. And, and important.

Micheline: It is important. Yeah. Yeah. And, and Al Moritz is a good citizen of poetry...

Kyeren: Yeah. Wonderful.

Micheline: ...and a good citizen, period. So he's- he's a good character. He's als- also in my audience of mentors.

Kyeren: I love this little gallery of mentors that you've got up there.

Micheline: Yeah, yeah. It's wonderful.

Kyeren: Micheline, thank you so much for your presence and your words today. It has been such a pleasure to spend this time with you and, and really exciting to hear your ideas and to, and to hear your poetry. I, again, I would love to acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for making this season possible. And, uh, Micheline Maylor's full biography and links to her work can be found on the Poet Laureate Podcast website and in the show notes. And her books can be found or ordered through your local independent bookstore. If this episode meant something to you, please share it with someone who you think might need poetry today. Micheline, would you please leave us with your final poem?

Micheline: I'll leave you with a second new one. “Alien Afterburner.”

[MICHELINE READS POEM #3: “Alien Afterburner”]