One Question Interview: Anita Lahey
Anita Lahey is the author of The Mystery Shopping Cart: Essays on Poetry and Culture and two poetry collections: Spinning Side Kick and Out to Dry in Cape Breton. An award-winning magazine journalist, her most recent book, The Last Goldfish: A True Tale of Friendship, was a finalist for the Ottawa Book Award. Lahey serves as series editor of the annual anthology, Best Canadian Poetry. Her most recent book of poems is While Supplies Last.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I get a sense of movement throughout this book, both geographically and through time. Tides, wildfires and the ice-age all get mentions in your deeply thoughtful work. Even a section on the pandemic, often talked about as paralyzing, takes the approach of pandemic traffic reports. Could you elaborate on this?
I have been sitting on this excellent question for a few months, as you know. I love it when a thoughtful, astute reader picks up on something in my work that I didn’t see myself. And I didn’t catch this one at all, either when I was writing or when I was piecing the poems together into a manuscript.
You mention several kinds of movement: geography, time (it’s true that we go all the way back to the ice age in this book), tides, wildfires, and the more mundane daily movement of traffic—and there’s the flipside of that, traffic not moving at all. There are also rivers here, currents, water flowing and pooling, and the history and stories associated with those waterways moving alongside them.
Between the mammoth poem, the Don River saga—and even the question at the end of the first poem, that, when the great reckoning comes, when the ocean finally spits back at us all the wrack and ruin we’ve poured into over the ages, “will any of us be here, waiting?”—I am clearly finding myself digging into these longer timelines, the big picture: what came before our own presence here, our own little narratives, and what may follow.
Behind this (or between the lines) is maybe, in part, the sense of a human being moving through time: that is, me, ageing. I turned 50 the year before this book was published. And as I age, I become more and more attuned to the tiny dot each of our lives takes up on the vast timeline of the history of humanity, the earth, the universe. My sense of my own importance diminishes with every passing year—at least, I have more glimmers of awareness of my own insignificance. A good kind of awareness, I think.
Does this manifest itself in the poems? I think maybe it does. In that mammoth poem, for example, by the end, I am musing way down into the future beyond the existence of humanity, beyond our own extinction, when the land is reclaiming itself. It’s a scary thing to imagine—our disappearance as a species—but when I wrote that part of the poem, it also felt restful, somehow right and just. Never mind that we kind of deserve it. It also seems simply part of the ongoing order of the universe: nothing is static or permanent, things change, species come and go. And despite our always evolving ideas about our own significance in this fantastic and profoundly mysterious story of life, that change likely, eventually, includes us.
Don’t get me wrong: I also rail against my own personal end, the fact of my own pending disappearance, which various recent events—from the state of the planet and global politics to some personal losses—have lately brought into pretty sharp focus. That’s of course the impetus behind writing at all, right? It’s the weapon we poets wield against our own mortality. Totally ineffectual, mind you, but briefly satisfying!
Going back to geography, years ago, I met someone at an event who would later become a friend, the writer Abou Farman (who now lives in the U.S.). During our first conversation, as we talked about the different places we’d lived in and visited, he exclaimed with a look of knowing and delight on his face, “Everything is about geography to you!” And I realized that yes, as I spoke about the places I knew and loved, I was describing neighbourhoods and characteristics, shorelines and streetscapes, views, how it felt to move through those communities, on the ground, by pedal or by foot.
The poems in this book were written over a period of about 12 years, during which time I—and then my little family, which happily for me came to exist along the way—moved, for various reasons, from Montreal to Fredericton to Toronto to Victoria, and finally, in 2019, to Ottawa, where I had lived for about a decade earlier in my adult life. I grew up in Burlington, Ontario—ironically, not moving at all from the age of 1 to 18—studied in Toronto and held my first grownup job there, and have had a longstanding and deepening tie with Cape Breton Island since childhood (it’s where my father is from, and where many close relations remain). In each of these places, I’ve bonded with my home & community on an intimate and visceral level: I’m a person who works mostly at home, I go for lots of walks and bike rides, I shop in the neighbourhood when possible. I’ve also gotten involved in some volunteer-ish way in the community, and been fortunate to make lasting friendships. On the one hand, each move was a gift, the chance to get to a know a whole new place and find my footing there. On the other hand, it meant leaving behind people and places I’d come to feel attached to, to love. All that moving around dislodged something in me for awhile, and I think that sense that pieces of my self, my heart and my history are scattered about the country might also live somehow between the lines in this book. It’s blatant in the poem “Neither Here Nor There,” but I know it also drove the writing on some level, that restless unease, a sense for a time of not really belonging anywhere, of having given too much up—too many homes, and too many people. When you feel lost, sometimes you can find yourself in a poem, in the act of writing, even if temporarily.
I’m keenly aware as I write this how lucky I am to have found comfortable homes in all these places, and been able to afford them. I’m also keenly aware of how my relationship to the lands and places I’ve come to feel attached to have been shaped in part by our colonial history—that my being here at all, as a person with Polish immigrant grandparents and long-ago Scottish/Irish (and possibly French) ancestors who settled on the East Coast, is, in part, a kind of intrusion. Though it’s not necessarily explicit, my growing understanding of this and of our troubled history also affected the ways these poems moved as they were being written.
There are so many other places I could go with this idea of movement. How wildfires move erratically and with such terrifying force—the one whose story I tell in this book, and those coming at us now, in the present, increasingly so. How the forces of climate change are rolling toward us very much like a wall of flames, and we seem paralyzed in the face of it. When you take all that roiling, all that turmoil, and all the anxiety that’s attached to it, and fasten it with words to the page, still it there—though not entirely, for the words move, the rhythm of the poem, hopefully, embodies the rhythm of the forces it’s trying to convey—what does that mean? What does it accomplish? I don’t know, but it’s the one thing I’m capable of doing in the face of all this.
And traffic. Well, the traffic poems were pure joy to create. Obviously, road congestion and underfunded public transit are issues in many cities that relate directly to climate change and our future on this planet. It’s an issue fairly heightened here in Ottawa due to our light-rail fiasco. But that’s not why I made these poems. I use “made” because that’s what I did, as opposed to “write” them: I pieced them together out of words from Doug Hempstead’s local traffic reports on CBC Radio. I made them because my son and I were having so much fun writing down quotes from Doug’s traffic reports, which are colourful, chatty, and often sprinkled with commentary that has nothing at all to do with the traffic, but in a way that’s delightful rather than annoying. During the pandemic, we got in the habit of turning the radio up when the traffic report came on. We had no practical use for it except that it often made us smile, or outright laugh. Eventually, I had so many quotes from Doug scattered on notepads around the house, I thought I should try to do something with them. It was an instinct, and really just a fun thing to do.
But it did something—and I think you’re right that what it did in part has to do with movement, with the stop-and-go of traffic and with the juxtaposition of the effort to get somewhere, the mental image of all those cars on all those roads, in the midst of a pandemic that, in other senses, called a halt to so much movement, as well as to just about everything we knew as normal. Movement is what we do best. When we are forced to pause, and when a poem gives us the opportunity to pause while contemplating movement—including thwarted movement—what happens? How do we proceed? Where do we go from there?
Or do we manage to convince ourselves it’s OK to go nowhere at all, which might be the response that’s called for?
