Cara-Lyn Morgan

I have always read poetry.  I read poetry long before I ever thought to write it, in fact.  As a young person, Shel Silverstein and Dennis Lee were standards in our home, as well as AA Milne.  I remember my dad sending me a copy of When We Were Very Young, which is still one of my favourite collections.  As I grew older, I began to see how poetry was more than just something cute and fun to recite, but rather a catalyst for change.  It was a tool for protest, a pathway to resistance.  There is an Atlantic Canadian poet, David Woods, who wrote a collection which expressed the history of Black Canadians in Nova Scotia, and I can still recite his work from memory--his was the first collection I had ever read which expressed the rage and grief of a people, spoke of displacement, historical erasure, and told a story that no one had ever told me before.  This was the pivotal collection for me, this was what changed how I would write and indeed, why.  

I suppose I have been writing cute poems since I was a little girl, and writing poems and song lyrics have long been a coping mechanism which was instilled in me by a child therapist named Gary, who I was forced to speak with as a child in the 1980s.  He did little else for me, to be clear, but he did teach me that writing was a better way to manage stress and anxiety than torturing my parents and teachers with defiance.  I didn't think to write poetry in any real way though, until I was in university--it was my second attempt at a degree, having shifted from Criminology with my sights on law school to Fine Arts with my sights on defying my father.  I was in Tim Lilburn's intro poetry course which I only took because I had to as a requirement for the degree.  Tim has this deep passion for poetry, unapologetic and he told me during this class when I shoved a collection of about six poems into his hand, that he felt my work was important and that no one had been writing this way before--the perspective of both an Indigenous person and the first generation child of an immigrant.  That moment was what drew me to this type of writing--the idea that is was important and that there was a story that deserved to be told.

I think we narrow the focus.  Poetry is about the minute.  We agonize over singular words and specific sounds, we languish over semi-colons versus colons or simple line breaks.  We hid puns and metaphors into single beats camoflaged in lines.  We appear to be things of striking beauty while secretly calling for governments to be overthrown and the patriarchy to be obliterated.  Poets hold the key to revolution in our words, so our job is to set change in motion.  We are the ones who whisper, and we are the ones who can change the world.