Biography
Tamar Rubin is a poet and physician who writes and practices on Treaty 1 Territory. Her first book, Tablet Fragments, was published by Signature Editions in 2020, and was nominated for 6 awards, including the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award, Eileen McTavish Sykes Award for Best First Book, Betty Averbach Foundation Prize for Poetry, Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, Fred Cogswell Award for Excellence in Poetry, and Lansdowne Prize for Poetry. She spends a lot of time listening to patients tell their stories, and teaches medical students and residents at the University of Manitoba. She is currently searching for a home for her next book, which examines the genetics of experience.
Micro-interview
As a young teenager, my favourite poetry was set to music - Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Radiohead, The National, Regina Spektor, The Wallflowers, Dan Bern (the list goes on)...Back when music came on CDs (that you had to go to the store to buy!), I used to read the inserts with the lyrics on them over and over - and I considered that my first introduction to contemporary poetry.
Growing up, taking public transportation to high school, there was a program called "poetry on the way" where short poems were published on streetcars and city buses. One that I always loved, and I first saw on the bus, was "For Annie" by Leonard Cohen :
----
With Annie gone,
whose eyes to compare
with the morning sun?
Not that I did compare,
But I do compare
Now that she's gone.
-----
Such a concise and poignant expression of a well-known feeling!
I started writing (bad) poetry in elementary school. In fact, one of my first efforts was a rhyming, limerick style poem that can still be heard on my family's voicemail (if you happen to know my parents' home phone number). I continued to write throughout high school and undergraduate university, but I think it was during medical school at the University of Toronto, when I really started to take my writing seriously. I joined a poetry workshop group (Algonquin Square Table) at Hart House, and the rest is history.
I think a poet's job is to translate, to trans-mutate and to illuminate - to take all the common and unifying aspects of humanity - the beautiful, the painful, the strange, the hidden, the confusing - and present it back to people. After reading (or saying, or singing) a poem - the reader emerges - feeling, or knowing or being - different.
In my parents' house, there were dozens of plants, and it seemed as though they lived forever. My mother always pointed out this one plant, given to her by her own mother, who once came for a visit from Israel. I wrote "Perennial" about this plant, but the poem is also about growing up in places where roots are only pot-deep, that do not always feel like "home."
Alice Oswald's A short Story of Falling.