Marie Specht
Biography
Marie Metaphor Specht is a multidisciplinary artist, poet, and performer living on the unceded territories of the Lək̓ʷəŋən- and SENĆOTEN-speaking peoples. A long-time member of the Canadian spoken word scene, Marie is the 6th Poet Laureate Emerit of Victoria, British Columbia (2023-2025) and was the 2018 Slam Champion of Victoria. In addition to her independent practice, she has collaborated with filmmakers, lighting engineers, dancers, and musicians to create immersive and interactive works. Marie has been featured at literary festivals, arts events and poetry slams across the country and has been published in notable magazines and anthologies. Her full-length poetry collection, Soft Shelters is available with Write Bloody North Publishing.
Marie believes in the transformative power of this art form and has had the privilege of coaching and creating space for poets of all ages for two decades. In her work as a teacher and mentor, Marie leads with compassion as she composes moments of nourishing intimacy and connection. She believes in intrepid acts of beauty. She believes in the power of stories shared.
Micro-interview
As a teenager, a family friend gave me a copy of Pablo Neruda’s, "Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair", and it was a revelation. I started seeking out poetry wherever I could, driven by the discovery that language can create an experience that is somehow both deeply personal and universal, both surprising and familiar. These early poetic explorations gave me permission to play within language, to see if I could transcribe something essential of my unknowable self, of my experience interfacing with the unknowable world.
Writing poetry never felt like a choice, more of a compulsion really. I started writing around puberty and poetry has been an important part of my life ever since. I have always thought of myself as a poet and I can’t imagine a life where I do not process the world, and my experience of it, in this way. I suppose the choice came down to sharing it; whether or not I should build my life in a way that would allow for the spaciousness required to really pursue writing, publishing and performing. For me, this was a long process that required uprooting beliefs around the feasibility of a career in the arts.
Poetry allows us to inhabit the experience and thoughts of another human being, to find some small part of ourselves reflected. We are each an island of our unique encounters with the wider world, harbouring an uneasy urge to be understood in our individual humanity. The poetry that strikes my heart and stays, most often speaks to an unnameable feeling or contemplation that has been hovering in the background— pulling it into the light where it can be seen and named. In my own work I strive for something more than an account of my experience; I search for language that can transmit my experience viscerally and directly, inviting my audience to inhabit my otherwise unknowable world. A lot of what I do in my poetry is also meaning-making, ordering the chaos of my experience, striving to make sense of it while packaging it up in a way that will hopefully resonate with my reader. I write, perform, read and listen to nurture our individuality while closing the spaces between us; Ultimately, I’d like us all to feel a little less alone in our experience of being human.
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“The Raincoat” by Ada Limón is an excellent example of how a memory triggered by witnessing a small anonymous moment can lead us to a deeper understanding of ourselves. This poem speaks to a mother’s everyday sacrifices and reminds me of all the times I have been cared for in tangible, concrete ways, hinting at the cyclical nature of our human lifetimes and how our understandings shift as we grow. I love it when poems revisit the past with the accumulated wisdom of a life lived; the adult speaker understands the childhood singing as a carefully orchestrated distraction from the discomfort of her medical condition, but as a child she thought her mother just liked the way she sang. Isn’t it beautiful that both these understandings can be true? The mounting care in the narrative arc of this poem leads us to the revelation of the final lines as we witness a mother’s love from an adult perspective and recognize all the quiet ways we shelter those we care about most.
