It constantly astonishes me how many are bursting with talent and have decades of accomplishment. I don’t seem to get used to it. Ditch Walker (Yarrow, 2021) is an 87-page book of gentle haiku by Bernice Angeline Sorge of Dunham, Quebec. She has been an internationally known printmaker, (and occasional counterfeiter) for decades, and now is a published poet as well. She was part of the 2021 film, Emergence: Contemporary Women Poets of the Eastern Townships of Quebec. 

Book description:

Her agile haiku voice her ardent engagement with nature as she walks the road, and works in her garden.

The best poems here read on two levels, the physical and the reflection of plant as a person, such as in the first sample poem, the bolted parsnip also having a rare beauty coming to an unexpected late peak we can appreciate.

Adamant about noticing beauty as the book rolls through the seasons, Sorge lets poems unfold in the reader’s mind. For example, the second poem here where the day without a breeze and the swimming are left implied, and the act of removing yourself is giving a gift of vision and reflection.

Samples:

how beautiful
the one that didn’t get picked
chartreuse parsnip in seed

blazing hot sun
returning the pond
to the clouds

Ditch Walker (Yarrow, 2021)

PP: Among your botanical prints is a bra series and flower head series which are palpably feminist. The same sense of whimsy in those are in the haiku,

oncoming car
she saves the centipede
all its legs kicking

PP: Writing haiku can be like writing poems that don’t know we are trying to save them as they try to wiggle away. What kind of composer are you? Constant notebook or reflecting back on the day from wee hours of morning or night?

BAS: The bra series (Solo, Unveiling the Bra, 2008, Toronto) and Flower Heads (solo, 2015, Ottawa) See website: bernicesorge.ca) are feminist questioning of what is. I am trying to say, “Listen up!” as one friend summarized for me.

I am more the anxious composer, day and night, up in the wee hours talking to the moon coming in my skylight, getting sidetracked by the mystery before me when all I wanted to do was figure out a three-line haiku: measuring it, linking it to the song of insects and wondering how I fit into it all. 

But there are moments of spontaneous combustion, mostly always a piece of paper in my pocket just in case there is a jump start by nature’s odd orchestra of everything, like giving birth to a little Haiku with the help of a doula.

The whimsy you mention is part of the plan, even tricky!  I lure people in to read more, see a deeper meaning in my visual work. As they see the wall totally covered in flower heads they are overcome by the breathtaking beauty of the mural, They are drawn to read the text set up by a 3-D flower head sitting nearby. It is about a young girl who was buried up to her head in sand and stoned to death because she was raped. Will her head be transformed and bloom into flowers? Will is decompose and recompose into something based on the whimsy of nature, maybe flowers? Could these flowers now growing where the young girl died be the memory, the memorial of such a sacrifice done by a misogynistic malevolent dictator. 

Here we need the earth as the intermediary, as the restorer of memory, of truth, and of the inequality of women. Ergo hatred towards all vulnerable creatures including people. 

PP: In your introduction, you say “the activities of animals and plants as seasons unfold […] never ceases to make us one.” Is pointing out this common ground of unison part of the aim of publishing this collection?

BAS: Definitely! I am trying to say that life is everywhere, even the ugly ditches, ugly because they are conveniently there for the arrogant driver who thinks a ditch is a place for refuse, just a depression where he can toss his trash out the window as he passes by. In the countryside along the gravel roads, I can tell what season it is by the type of trash in the ditch. Life in the ditches is played out as part of the interdependence between humans and other creatures as well as plants. All the actions and interactions are to survive, the ditch is the world in replica.

PP: In prints or poems, you seem driven by the dictum to record, what is, what is, what is yet your paintings are more abstracted. It is a different way of expressing what is. I realize you have just finished this book, but is there another book underway that are a counterpart to your impressionist painting for haiku, perhaps women’s perspective senryu?

BAS:

Yes, the paintings are different in that they come from a need to express like a memoir of my physical body in motion. There is nothing on my mind, just one colour calling for the next, just one movement of my body making way for the next with the paint loaded tools. Just as I see something recognizable, I tear it apart with paint and other tools to rupture the beauty or the ugly.  Why?

BAS: Artist statement:

The intimate relationship with the processes of the natural world influences my technique, color, materials, and content and is a testimony to the fact that I am nature. The textures, thick layers of color, the scratching, erasing, and smoothing over is in a way an experience of continual renewal and an expression of the never-ending process of re-creation. It is symbolic of the way I live my life in tune and in love with the unconditional force of nature, the ever-changing living process. Nature is the filter through which my experiences become art. Images arrive unannounced, spontaneous births in my paint: animals, birds, raindrops, wind. Nature is the tympanum through which we will be able to hear each other and potentially accept that all of us belong in some way to the same tree. Bernice Sorge©

NYC, 2012 re: paintings.

PP: What was or will be your favourite moment(s) in making this book?

BAS: I must admit I wrote the haiku a day as a challenge which spurred me on to take time to be still and alone with space for just being there as I walked along the side of the road, the same road every day. But making the drawings was just plain fun! That was the best! And of course, ‘haikuing’ my partner into oblivious laughter. Some of those are not in the book!

PP: I realize you have just finished this book, but is there another book underway that is a counterpart to your impressionist painting for haiku, perhaps women’s perspective senryu?

BAS: Thank you for the idea!

I am researching Senryu and Tanka for another project.

I am not sure what the theme will be: Maybe insects, humour, feminist haiku, climate change. 

But I am finishing a memoir about me and my mother who was a shepherd until she became a child bride.

PP: That sounds fascinating. Once again, people, check out her author/artist site.

Laurie Koensgen has published fifty-odd poems nationally and internationally since that first phafours credit with Where There’s Fire (2013)

Laurie Koensgen (KŌNS-gən) is an Ottawa writer and educator. She was shortlisted for The Malahat Review’s Far Horizons Award for Poetry 2018, received honourable mentions in Arc’s Diana Brebner Prize 2018 and The New Quarterly’s Occasional Verse Contest 2019. Her poem “Gravities” was featured in the League of Canadian Poets’ 2021 Poetry Month celebrations. Laurie is a founding member of the Ruby Tuesday Writing Group. Her 2021 chapbook, Blue Moon / Orange Begonias, is already out of print from Rose Garden Press (who were lovely to work with). Also out, Three Movements, (Coven Editions, 2018) and headlonging (Floodlight Editions, 2012 is also out of print).

PP: What have you read lately that lit you up? Why or how?

LK: Coming out of a long, muzzyheaded ennui, I wanted an unusual novel. Girl, Woman, Other by Evaristo was that fascinating read—a hybrid of prose and poetry, with a disarming lack of narrative. Bernardine Evaristo has created a feast of women characters whose worlds intersect in slow reveals. I loved its almost poem-like fluidity. And was startled by its honesty.   

PP: What’s life’s focus these days, literary or otherwise?

LK: I recently worked on a project with visual artist, Lynda Cronin. She’s the creator/curator of hum, Ottawa’s first micro gallery. Micro galleries are miniature spaces for small-scale artworks. They’re cropping up on posts in urban communities, stirring connections with art outside of the usual cultural venues. [See the link, they are like Little Free Libraries but art display cases instead.]

Linda exhibited two of my poems in succession, creating an ambience for each. I was honoured to be hum’s opening artist, and pleased that poetry was the first art featured. I love collaborations between artistic disciplines and want to work across genres with other artists soon. I’m exploring some ideas.  

PP: Cool. What else is underway or forthcoming?

LK: I’m working on a chapbook tentatively called A Cold Glass of Water Against this Heat. It traces the arc of a love relationship. Generally feminist, it’s alternately fiery and tender. I want these twenty-or-so short poems to be read together, in close connection. 

I’m thinking about my first full poetry collection but the process feels be·he·moth. I need to break it down into be·she·moths.

PP: Ha! Good plan. What work do you have out? 

LK: I have a poem in Pinhole Poetry’s current issue and another forthcoming in Flo. Literary Magazine. The Madrigal published a 20 year-old romantic poem in their Verity issue this spring, and Blood Moon Poetry published a feminist piece in Und(h)erstory. Recently anthologized poems are in Worth More Standing by Caitlin Press and Ice Floe Press’ Pandemic Love Anthology. 

PP: Any author site?

LK: I may disappoint impassioned social media observers. I’m only an occasional poster. Twitter: @EkeLore or Instagram: @lauriekoensgen

PP: Thank you for all this! Any links you’d like to promo?

LK: Yes, links to three artists in the National Capital Region whose bodies of work astonish me:  

Paula Murray, ceramic artist. Her porcelain work is spiritual, vulnerable and serene. (her Instagram)

Ruth Dick, photographer.  She elevates common moments and subjects with her inquiring mind and fabulous eye. 

Michèle Provost, conceptual artist. She is endlessly creative! Check out her installation at SAW Gallery (SAW Prize for New Works) until July 16. 

Rhonda Melanson appeared in the 2011 Air Out/In Air, a chapbook anthology for the Guatamala Stove Project . Since then she and the organization have done a lot on their own trajectories.

A graduate of Queen’s University Artist In The Community Education Program, Rhonda Melanson has been published in several print and online magazines, including Hedgeapple, Pocket Lint, The Wild Word, Juniper, The Boxcar Poetry Review, Quill’s, Philadelphia Poets, Ascent Aspirations, Lummox, and the Windsor Review.  In 2011, she published a chapbook called Gracenotes with Beret Days Press, and she is also featured in the Encompass IV anthology, a publication from Beret Days Press and The Ontario Poetry Society.  She was featured in Nasty Women and Bad Hombres, A Poetry Anthology, edited by Deena November and Nina Padolf (Lascaux Editions), in Tamaracks, An Anthology of Canadian Poetry, edited by RD Armstrong and She Summons: Why Goddess Feminism, Activism and Spirituality, edited by Kaalii Cargill and Helen Hye-Sook Hwang.  She is also a co-editor of the literary blog Uproar, and is an associate member of The League of Canadian Poets.

PP: What’s life’s focus these days, literary or otherwise?

RM: I just finished up a PK Page mentorship opportunity with the League of Canadian Poets where I was able to learn from the prolific Chad Norman. He helped me with some very focused work on my chapbook “My Name is Mary.”

PP: Wow!

RM: I am also in my second year of co-editing a literary blog “Uproar” with The Lawrence House Centre of the Arts in my hometown of Sarnia, Ontario. (Uproar on Instagram). Most recently, we launched the Carmen Ziolkowski Poetry Prize and gave cash awards and publication to three poets for a single poem.

Looking forward to a summer of writing without the distracton of full time teaching!

PP: What is underway or forthcoming?

RM: I am looking for a home for my chapbook “My Name is Mary.” I have had some poetry accepted by Hedgeapple, Pocket Lint,Poets Against Fascism (Jay Miller), The Wild Word and Portraits 101 (Sandcrab Books).

PP: What work can people read?

RM: How Do Rainbows Fall, exactly?

https://hcc-hedgeapple.hagerstowncc.edu/index.php/2022/04/02/the-visitation-among-women-by-rhonda-melanson/

Rhonda Melanson

Some teaching poems,

PP: Any other links to find you and your projects?

RM: Social Media and Other Sites: Rhonda’s Twitter, Uproar on Twitter, Uproar’s Website:

Shelley A. Leedahl  has written thirteen books, the most recent of which is the poetry collection, Go (Radiant Press, 2022) which caught my attention with its lively down-to-earth and grounded yet lifting past mundane poems. (See the Go book launch.) 

Mine is a very marked up copy of ooh, like that. Such as “What I Left in that City” which starts as a list poem but whomp,

“Stained-glass wine goblets. Favourites/ gifted from my daughter’s old boyfriend./ Sacrificed because the man I was escaping—//who insisted I not raise my eyebrows/ as the effort left lines in my forehead—//asked for the glasses to remember me by.”

The poems don’t tend to float oceanic but touch the far shore and touch the shallow end of the pool to gratifying results. Later in “Smuggler’s Cove Provincial Park” she shows her humour “I can’t read the minute directions on the $50 can of bear spray […] wouldn’t it be just our luck to be doomed in the wilds by nearsightedness.”

Shelley A. Leedahl is the author of thirteen books in various genres, an adult and a juvenile novel; short story collections; creative nonfiction; and the illustrated children’s books The Bone Talker and The Moon Watched It All, and four previous poetry collections. Her most recent title is Go, a poetry collection published by Radiant Press in Regina. 

Shelley presents across the country and also works as a freelance writer, book reviewer and editor. She’s been awarded International Fellowships for prestigious artist residencies in the US, Mexico, Spain, and Scotland. She created a 3-season literary podcast called “Something Like Love”, and she’s produced two audiobooks for Radiant Press.   

Shelley was born and raised in Saskatchewan, where she was very active in the literary community for decades. She raised her own family in Saskatoon. Her active involvement in the arts continued with her move to Edmonton, where she worked as a radio advertising copywriter. 

She now lives in Ladysmith, BC and is often on hiking trails, on her road bike, in her kayak, or literally running around town. 

Sample poem: (p. 69)

Late December

You migrate toward coffee shops
for the velvet of human voices, the warmth
of an oversized mug and indie music.

You are certain no one sees you
falling in love
with the scrape of a chair,
the drooping cedar wreath
in the Beantime’s window.

The white-grey sky is a pelt. Raindrops on glass
a bead you’re tempted to trace
with your tongue.

Across the street:

Fox and Hounds.
A gym.
Women in designer rubber boots.

Everything is exquisite
but once again, no plans for New Year’s Eve.

Getting to be a long time;
you’d like to hold anyone’s hand.

from Go

PP: What was your aim with the book?
SAL: Firstly, Go evolved slowly over fifteen years as I had time to work on it. I was also working on and publishing books in other genres during this period, including the poetry collection Wretched Beast; the short fiction collection Listen, Honey; the essay collection I Wasn’t Always Like This, and the illustrated book The Moon Watched It All. 

Writing is my fulltime occupation … and to that end, an accountant once said I should be dead. I publish individual poems in journals and anthologies, but as a long-time professional writer, I suppose I do always hope that whatever I’m working on will one day find its way into a book. I’ve known since the time I was old enough to manage a pencil that I wanted to be a writer.     

When I write poetry, I write from a very personal place, with the understanding that the small things are the big things, and, as American psychologist Carl R. Rogers said, “The most personal is the most universal.” I may be writing from my own experience and disparate emotions–joy, pain, wonder, surprise, loneliness–but if I can communicate my own experience as authentically as possible, the hope is that others will make connections with my work via their own emotions and experiences. Sort of an, “Ah, yes, I’ve felt that too.” 

It might be said that poetry makes the world both a larger place (via language, ideas, geography, etc.)  and a smaller place. I’m interested in the inner map, the map of the heart.  

In documenting my own life, I also try to make sense of this often nonsensical world, and share that journey with others. The aim, then, is to make connections. To share our humanity here on planet Earth. And to continue to challenge myself in terms of language, poetic form, and subject. Writing poetry also requires that I slow down. Pay attention. I’m high energy, and slowing’s difficult for me. It’s good for me. 

PP: Favourite moment in making this book?

SAL: That’s a tough one. I really enjoyed writing the walking poems, or what I’ve titled the gratitude poems. I was living in Ladysmith and felt like I’d finally dropped anchor in the right place. I’d go for long solo walks – still do! – and come home and write.

I’ll add that the poems written while I was in Portugal in 2013 are also quite close to me, possible because they earned recognition via shortlisting for CBC Poetry Awards and the Arc Magazine’s “Poem of the Year” Contest. Again, walking was involved. Walking and writing go hand in hand for me. 

Finally, the last section of the book, “Manitoulin Suite”, is also special to me, for many reasons. It’s the most recent work; I wrote it in July 2021. And it demonstrates, I hope, that one can find happiness (and romantic love) later in life. It’s also about the passing of time. 

I wrote the first draft of this long poem in one day, the only day I dedicated completely to writing while on Manitoulin Island (Ontario) at my partner’s cottage, where most days there were many chores to be done, i.e.: I washed the entire exterior of the home, Pete built a shed, and we hauled loads of deadfall into the woods behind the cottage. I include details like this in the poem, as I believe poetry should include the stuff of life … this goes back to that connection thing again.

PP: Where to find out more?

SAL: For more on, please see the member’s page at the Writers Union of Canada site.   

Allison Armstrong appeared in Air Out/Air In (phafours, 2011). She ran the Voices of Venus series. More recently her poems appeared in Long Con magazine, L’Éphémère Review and Yes Poetry.

PP: What have you read lately that lit you up? Why or how? 

AA: TBH, what’s been lighting me up lately is novels. The Locked Tomb series (Tamsyn Muir) and The Scapegracers (H. August Clarke – Part 2 due out this Summer, iirc). One is gothic science fantasy and one is New England misfit teen drama, but the world building in both is wonderful and the writing itself is so alive. Looking forward to the next instalments in both cases.

PP: What’s life’s focus these days, literary or otherwise?

AA: These days, my focus is on my people. Two partners, plus a close friend with some sudden health problems.

PP: What is underway or forthcoming? 

AA: I have five glosas forthcoming in Bonemilk Volume 2 (Gutslut Press). This is one of the rare times when all of the pieces in a multi-piece submission have been accepted, so I’m pretty excited about that. I’m slowly chipping away at my Femme Glosa Project, polishing and sorting out layout. I’ve got a chapbook on sub, and the beginnings of a microchap in the works.

PP: That all sounds exciting. What’s the Femme Glosa Project?

AA: So, a Glosa is a type of formal poetry that takes 4 sequential lines from a pre-existing poem by a different poet and builds a 40-line, 4-stanza poem around them, using each line in sequence (backwards or forwards) as a line in one of the stanzas. Traditionally, that line is the 10th of each stanza, but other placements are fine too, as long as the lines appear at the same point in each stanza.The idea is to have your glosa be a response to, or exist in conversation with, the original poem that you pulled those four lines from.

I find glosas to be particularly reflective of the ways queer femmes riff on, respond to, promote, and encourage each other so, in the case of my Femme Glosa Project, each of the poems I’ve glossed (60-ish) has been written by another queer femme. Some are poets I know personally, many are poets whose work has shaped my own, some are new-to-me poets whose work I chose just because I happen to like that particular poem when I found it in a magazine or an anthology.

In a number of cases I’ve actively chosen to gloss a glosa that a particular femme poet has written on the work of yet another femme poet, specifically to draw attention to the idea of “femme lineage” and how its reflected in our poetry.

Here’s an example of a glosa: https://longconmag.com/issue-1/allison-armstrong/

PP: Cool. What other work do you have out where we can read it?

AA: My most-recent publications are in erotica anthologies (The Big Book of Orgasms: Volume 2 and Scandalous).

PP: Any author site or social media urls you’d like to drop? 

AA: Follow me on twitter @amazon_syren

PP: Thanks for your time. Look forward to what’s next.