Rachel Rose
Biography
Rachel Rose is the author of seven books, including her forthcoming debut novel, The Scarlet Daughter (March 2027) and her story collection, The Octopus Has Three Hearts, which was longlisted for the Giller Prize. The Dog Lover Unit: Lessons in Courage from the World’s K9 Cops was shortlisted for the 2018 Arthur Ellis award for best non-fiction crime book. Her most recent poetry collection, Marry and Burn, was longlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award.A former fellow at The University of Iowa’s International Writing Program, she was Poet Laureate of Vancouver from 2014-2017.
Micro-interview
Yes, I definitely read poetry in high school. In fact, we started the Creative Writing Club at our Seattle high school (Roosevelt) and took writing and reading very seriously. I was partial to T.S. Eliot's The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock, Sylvia Plath (of course), Robert Frost and whatever my friends were writing and reading at the time. It wasn't until I was at university in Montreal that I got to know Canadian poets like Atwood, Ondaatje and Cohen.
As a child, I was surrounded by poets. It wasn't always comfortable. But I was fortunate in that my parents read to me and let me read anything. I first got serious about poetry when I was living in Japan, though I'd been writing for years by that point. That's where I wrote many of the poems that became my first book, Giving My Body to Science.
Poets and writers are those who resist forgetting; they carry our collective memories, our joys and hurts, and part of their job is to make the rest of the world pay attention, in the tradition of Blake, of Carolyn Forché and Paul Celan. Another part of our job is to celebrate our interconnectedness, to comfort and delight and give succor, which is also a way of saying “Pay attention.” I’m thinking of Rumi, of Lorna Crozier, of William Carlos Williams, of the poems of the Bhagavad Gita, of Akiko Yosano.
My poem, "Drone," was written years ago, but is sadly relevant to our current era, as we enter new wars and fight with new technologies that are capable of ever-more destruction. It doesn't matter which war; I was inspired to write this to poem to remind readers that they must resist with all their humanity what this kind of warfare does; as my poem says "it just stupefies us....we can't mourn or condemn because we can't see." I want readers to see, to be awake and to see. I don't tell them what to think, but I do ask that they pay attention.
William Butler Yeats' The Second Coming. Choosing a poem that is written in form and meter lends itself to memorization. The poems I memorized in high school are with me still (Frost's Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening; Paul Verlaine's Il Pleure Dans Mon Coeur).