AMJ: Your 2024 poetry collection Come One Thing Another sings many of its stories in the speech of deceased relations and neighbours, feeling at once like an elegy and a reckoning as it recounts, relitigates, and revels in your family’s histories in the cadences of the dead. How do you navigate what I would imagine is both the emotionally and interpersonally unsteady ground of borrowing those voices to speak your contemporary versions of their truths as well as your own?
CL: Thanks for the great question, Ariel. As I navigate emotions and other tensions around the familial stories my poems explore, I am always trying to see people for who they are or were are/were while also recognizing how my focus on these stories reveals aspects of my own personality. Dwelling on the life and death of my Uncle Rickey, for example, when I was writing “Man Shot in Brooklyn,” I reckoned with what he meant to me both then and as a kid, how his death impacted the family, portraying him in a mythological manner, as a king of the underworld to explore the mythological place he took on in my imagination, in familial lore. I try to avoid portraying anybody in a one-dimensional way, and so even if there is some negativity involved or revealing things that might be unpleasant, I hope everything serves to give a fuller idea of these complex individuals for whom there was and remains a lot of love.
AMJ: One of the neatest tricks in much of your work is the way you slip in and out of the dialects and accents of local rural folk without stumbling into a sense of tedious folksiness. What do you look for when you’re writing those poems—how do you use a folksy voice to express something true about its speaker’s reality without allowing that mimicry to slip into something more like parody?
CL: I think I manage to keep my most folksy-sounding poems pretty natural-feeling at the same time, mainly, by not overdoing it, and by sticking to a register. I was writing some decent poems by the time my Grandpa (Lawson) Roy died, and not long after he passed I had a few-day period where I wrote over a hundred lines “in his voice,” the first time I’d ever written poems that came out of me in someone else’s voice. I guess it happened because I knew his voice, I’d listened, and then felt compelled to create a record. Loosely, my Lawson Roy poems do sound like him. They incorporate things he’d say, and I sometimes borrow other words/phrasings, from Helen Creighton’s work or Poteet’s South Shore Phrasebook. In the poems, I don’t have my grandpa saying things I can’t actually hear him saying. The mimicry needs to feel like a tribute and true. If a poem does start to go a bit overboard–I could see “Lawson Roy’s Tick Talk” feeling that way–then it has to be because I can imagine hearing him getting overly excited rambling on about something or other.
AMJ: Your poetic voice is immensely striking in its musicality; your poems often feel as much like audible songs as words on a page. I’d love to know how you consider and engage with sound when you’re composing or editing new written work.
CL: Thank you for the nicest of compliments! I agree with George Elliott Clarke that, in effect, ideally, poetry is song. In my earlier poems, I would sometimes find a certain sound (often a vowel sound) or cadence as I was editing my work, and I would hone in on that when editing, as a unifying sound, or a way to make the lines pop, with some success. In more recent years, I’ve become more intentional. Sometimes a poem is preceded by simply a collection of potential nouns and verbs that share a sound and are linked in terms of their meanings. I listen to a lot of music, hip-hop especially, and sometimes there will be a song that has a certain tone I want to imbue a poem with. Then, I guess it’s just a matter of finding the right words and getting them in the right order, to not only make the sense I want to make, but also create the desired soundscape that feels in tune with the meaning.
AMJ: Your poem “Sitting with Grammy Lavender’s Bible on the 134th Day of Genocide in Gaza” widens the scope of the emotional depth given to many of your other poems by their hyper-local and intensely personal focus on your family’s histories, turning the mirror of empathy outwards and back again—
“Free Falasteen and Free the Congo and Free Sudan and Free Grammy
Lavender, who didn’t (want (us) to) know we’re African”
—in a way that collapses distances both geographical and otherwise. I’m curious about how memory and grief and those local and personal histories inform your poet’s-eye view of the rest of the world.
CL: Hmmm… I would say that my history, my sense of my family, what they mean to me, my grieving for what’s passing by, extending its endurance, doesn’t just inform how I see the world but is, generally, the lens through which I see the world. I feel my family’s connection to Nova Scotia, but then I’m also aware that our history is a colonial one and one of being transported here. In the poem you refer to, I wasn’t originally intending to reference Gaza and the struggle of the Palestinian people. However, as I reached out for my Grammy Lavender and what her truth might have been, underlying the lies that were told, my sense of her struggle resonated with the empathy I was feeling (and continue to embrace) for the Palestinian people as they face an ongoing genocide. Free Palestine!
AMJ: The ocean is a frequent presence in your poems. Is the imagery of salt and spray mainly a relic of lobster fishing relatives, or is this element one of the places where your own physical presence in life and landscape—you lived right next to Cherry Hill beach when writing some of this body of work—takes up as much space as those remnants and revenants whose voices haunt your writing?
CL: My love of the ocean, as well as lakes and rivers, certainly comes in part from my mom’s family fishing for lobsters. When I was growing up, there was always a basic attention paid to whether or not there was “a sea on,” how well or poorly the fishers’ catches were, what lobsters were selling for, etc. When I lived in Cherry Hill and used to hike around Pollock Point on a regular basis, I was more attentive to the sea birds and other wildlife along the coast, the amount of plastic pollution that washed up, as well as the pronounced coastal erosion I witnessed from year to year. Ultimately, while the coastal environment is a big part of my culture, I can’t help but feel that the connection is more elemental than that. Being beside the ocean, breathing it in, feels good and grounds me, and it’s for similar reasons I want the ocean in my poems.
AMJ: I’m curious about what comes after a body of work as cohesive as the poems in Come One Thing Another. What can you say about your next project, or about your approach to moving on from one book to another?
CL: This was my first full-length collection of poems! Forty in total. Towards the final years of working on it, I did start to work on poems to fill in gaps I perceived in the book, to make it more balanced in certain ways. However, when it comes to poems, I make it a point that I’m not really writing a book even if there’s a notion that they’ll hopefully end up in one. Just writing poems. Right now, I’m back to writing poems. A long one’s coming that’s been building inside of me and on a flurry of scraps since I finished C.O.T.A. Thank you, Ariel, for this opportunity to reflect before I dive into that new work.
