Deanna Young

In Grade 11. in Mr. Underhill’s English class, we read Alden Nowlan's “Britain Street”. It was a warm spring day in London, Ontario, in a portable at the end of the football field. The portable door was propped open, the pungent smell of torn-up turf wafting in, and he held up a worn copy of 15 Canadian Poets Plus 5, like a circuit rider might hold up a bible, and intoned, “This is a street at war./ The smallest children/ battle with clubs/ till the blood comes,/ shout ‘fuck you!’ / like a rallying cry —”. I was startled, instantly hooked. By the end of the poem, the top of my head was tingling and I thought, Wow, I want to do that. Whatever Nowlan had achieved in that poem, I wanted to try to do it too.

I started writing poetry in Grade 11 and I felt an instant sense of belonging. Poetry was a world that felt truer, more essential and more natural than anything else I’d encountered. I thought, If this feels so right to me then I must be a poet! Now, at parties, I never say I'm a poet. I tend to say, “I write poetry sometimes.”

The poet’s job is to translate experience into words. It is inachieveable, of course. I mean, lived experience exists in the realm of experience, not in mere words. But words are the tools we have to capture and communicate experience, so we use them and we try. And we keep trying to capture experience with words, like butterflies in a net, because when we get even close, it is marvelous—that instant of recoginition. Life becomes more liveable, I think, when it is revealed to us in all its heartbreaking complexity This is very rewarding and necessary work, for us as individuals and for society.

My poem "Holy Ghost" is in the Poetry in Voice anthology. It is part of my book Reunion, which is a book of linked poems. I remember the moments of the poem's inception. I sat in my living room in the middle of the day and was overcome. The words ran through me. It's a poem about surviving childhood trauma with the help of art, or transcendent beauty--in this case, popular music. The poem references Elvis Presley and Aretha Franklin. I think my child self believed in deliverance because I saw how beauty existed in the world. Art was a pathway to a better place.

I would choose Emily Dickinson’s “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain” because it’s quite dramatic, and yet I imagine the poet’s voice as understated, so this would be a challenge of interpretation. I’m also interested in Dickinson's frequent use of long dashes. What is the proper pause for a long dash, anyway?