Reimer’s fourth book of poetry, No Town Called We, was longlisted for both the Raymond Souster and the Pat Lowther Memorial Awards.
GRIEFWAVE.com, a multimedia, web-based, extended elegy, has been performed to creative writing classes and community death care series. GRIEFWAVE was partially supported by the Canada Council for the Arts.
Other poetry books are My Heart is a Rose Manhattan, DOWNVERSE and [sic], which was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award.
Creative work, non-fiction essays and critical writing on death, grief, feminism, poetics, and embodied anti-capitalist practice have appeared in journals like Arc, Order of the Good Death, Maisonneuve, The Rusty Toque, Capilano Review, and trade anthologies like Locations of Grief; Watch Your Head; Against Death; GUSH; and Modern Loss: Candid conversations about grief.
Reimer's creative practice extends to multi-media, performance and collaborative projects in visual, performance and music contexts, though she views the breath line as her basic compositional unit.
I read poetry in high school, and used to inscribe my favourite song lyrics in my exercise books, and onto one particularly punk pair of jeans. My very favourite poem from late adolescence is Frank O’Hara’s “Song (Is it Dirty),” which made it’s way into my first book of poetry as an epigraph. O'Hara's tone is both exulting and blunt, poetic, but anti-whimsical. "That's not a thought, that's soot." The city is dirty, and we love it.
I’ve been writing poetry since I was a child, and started thinking of myself as a poet when I was in high school.
A poet’s job is to challenge mainstream culture’s definitions of the world, to explore and annotate the world as they see it, and to define new ways of being that open space for inclusion and safety.
“Trust Fund Witches” by Emma Healey. I love the assonance, alliteration, sensual glittery imagery. The scene Healey weaves is as gritty as O'Hara's odes to New York, but Healey reminds us about the capital that underpins bohemian luxury. These witches have "glittering auras," they're fashionably lo-fi, but with wealth that allows them to move through walls. Who belongs? Who owns? Who stays?
Laurie Anne Fuhr is a multimodal poet of page, screen, and stage, and a singer-songwriter based in Calgary. Her work merges Modernist-influenced free verse lyric narrative and postmodern experiment; her influences include Stuart Ross, rob mclennan, and Karen Solie. Laurie has lived in Ottawa, Winnipeg, Cold Lake, and Germany as a military brat. In Summer 2021 she co-released Uncommon Grounds: poems by the Espresso Poetry Collective. Her first book, night flying, released in Fall 2018 from Frontenac House (Calgary), is available here: https://www.frontenachouse.com/night-flying/; her EP, love in the digital age, is available at https://birdheat.com/music, and she plays upright bass in a nostalgic duo called Bluebird Telegraph, and electric bass with swamp rockers Shona Rae & the Bona Fides. Laurie's poetry has been published in magazines such as THIS Magazine, Freefall, and Go! (San Francisco); in anthologies like Leonard Cohen: You’re Our Man (Foundation for Public Poetry); and her manuscript for night flying was shortlisted for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry in 2016. A member of the League of Canadian Poets, Writers Guild of Alberta, and the Stroll of Poets, she instructs poetry at www.alexandrawriters.org, publishes micropress ephemera as blue moon, and is volunteer Festival Director at The People's Poetry Festival in Calgary. Connect with her via @Multimodal_poet on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.
When I was a teenager, the only hippie in my high school went to my homeroom. To my chagrin, he tried to befriend me, and the cool girls disdained us.
Soon I figured out that he was real, and they were fake. Armour was a poet. Once he introduced me to poetry, we became best friends, and wrote together regularly to old records in a PMQ basement.
There's a magic to writing something that you know a fellow poet will read soon. This informs my work as a writing instructor at Alexandra Writers Centre in Calgary; I want to share the magic with others who need some in their life as much as I did back then — and still do.
After I began writing, we started taking bus rides to downtown Ottawa so we could have experiences worth writing about. We stumbled into a poetry open mic in progress at Cafe Wim, run by Steve Zytveld. All the poets in the room that night became friends and mentors as years went by. rob mclennan, a prolific published poet and micropress publisher who has inspired many, handed me poem pamphlets and information about more readings. It was a welcoming community for all ages and all styles of poetry, with open mics that included featured readers to inspire everyone. That's exactly the community feel I want to encourage with the work I do as an organizer, host, and promoter of poetry events.
Leonard Cohen said poetry is a verdict. If that's true, I guess we are lawyers... or judges? of the truth.
In that case, we have the most underpaid role of the legal profession!
More seriously, there are many jobs that poets do — and I'm not talking about the day and evening jobs that many of us who might not be career students, or married to a supportive partner, have to do. (I myself am also an administrative assistant and security guard, and have worn more hats than a preschool tickle trunk could hold).
Speaking for myself, the job of a poet is to inspire readers to use their imagination, slow down, and enjoy the page. The job of a poet who has been writing for some time, who has a book, who likes to teach, is to be a good mentor, and a good person as well. There are many unworthy mentors out there breaking hearts. I intend to be one of the good ones, whenever I have the good fortune to teach, help edit a manuscript, give a reading, give a pep talk to a discouraged writer, or wherever poetry takes me. And of course, I especially love sharing poetry with young people; learning to use your imagination by exercising it in the writing of a poem can help you creatively problem-solve, creatively love, and creatively bring happiness to yourself and others for the rest of your life.
Stuart Ross has been a big inspiration to me, ever since he launched The Inspiration Cha-Cha, his first trade press book, in Ottawa when I was a teen.
So the first thing I did when I came to Poetry In Voice was look for his poem.
“I Have Something to Tell You” is classic Stu. His point of view is that of someone absurdly simple, who speaks calmly and plainly, without contractions, about surreal experiences like — in this case — their shoulders turning into cameras. To be able to deliver a surrealist poem from such a calm, neutral observer character adds to the surprise and humour when body parts start becoming incredible objects. I just got a copy of his latest book at the time of writing this, Motel of the Opposable Thumbs, and it's my favourite birthday present (thanks Mom!).
Bertrand Bickersteth was born in Sierra Leone and raised in Alberta. In 2021, CBC named him a Black writer to watch. His collection of poetry, The Response of Weeds, was a finalist for multiple awards and won both the League of Canadian Poets’ Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and the Writers’ Guild of Alberta’s Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry. His poetry is generally lyrical in style with a focus on Black identity, prairie blackness, landscape, geography and history. His influences include African American poets Gwendolyn Brooks, Langston Hughes, and Rita Dove, as well as Claire Harris, Dionne Brand, and Wayde Compton here in Canada. He currently teaches at Olds College.
Yes, but I didn't understand it. I had a sense that something was happening with the words that was skillful, magical even, but I couldn't pin it down. I just sensed it was happening. (That could have all been in my head.) There is no specific poem I remember from that age. I just remember the emotion of feeling awed and out of my depth.
I started writing poetry at around 13 or 14 years old. It was all very bad, very angsty teenage stuff. At the same time, it was very emotionally liberating to be able to express my feelings in words and in ways that felt creative and artistic to me. It was also very helpful in the beginning to develop my own voice. I realize now that you have to go through a certain amount of unoriginal, derivative writing before you can start to feel your way toward something that is more authentically your own. Those early, "bad" poems were instrumental in getting me there. Even though I don't remember any of those very early poems, I do remember certain milestone poems that felt like I had reached a new level each time. In fact I still remember whole chunks of what I consider my first "break-away" poem. It's called "Chasing the Spirit" and I wrote it when I was about 17. I guess it took years for me to get to the first step! After that poem, I started to think that writing poetry might be possible for me, but I didn't officially start thinking of myself as a poet for another two decades! Like a lot of people, I suppose I am my own worst critic. The thing that turned me into a poet was moving out of the country and then rethinking what it meant to be Canadian, what it meant to be Black, and what it meant to be a Black Canadian. There was something about being an actual foreigner in an actual foreign land that gave me a poetic certainty about myself.
I think a poet's job is to wrestle with language in new ways so that society can see itself in ways it never has before. If a poet can twist language to the point that it is inside out, they will undoubtedly be twisting themselves inside out too. And when a poet is twisted inside out, certain elements of the world the poet lives in will also be twisted inside out, and that will reveal new truths about old things. That's what I think a poet's job is.
The poem in your anthology, "The Bow," forms a part of a series of poems on rivers that flow through the prairies. There are two things that inspired me to write this poem. The first one, funny enough, is the idea that the prairies are defined by a lack of water. We think of the prairies as flat and boring and empty. We have no shores, we have no coast, we have nothing exciting. This of course turns out not to be true: we have lakes (some of them, like Slave Lake in Alberta and Lake Winnipeg in Manitoba are truly impressive and even "sea-like") and, of course, we have rivers. I became inspired by the idea of rivers coursing through the prairies like blood vessels nurturing a greater body. This perspective gave me the sense that water is actually everywhere throughout the boring, flat prairies. The second thing that inspired me was explorer history. Rivers were used as the primary way that Europeans used to chart the land when they first arrived here. Exploration, for me, is a kind of journeying that is both external (landscapes) and internal (identity). When we think of explorer history, though, we are tricked into thinking that Europeans "discovered" places and, in a way, are responsible for "creating" our present-day landscapes. This ignores the fact that Indigenous people were already here and knew the land intimately. It also ignores the fact that Europeans were not the only ones involved in exploration. I tried to turn this understanding inside out in "The Bow" by looking at Stephen Bonga, an explorer whose father was Black and whose mother was Indigenous. For me, the river was the perfect inspiration for exploring what prairie identity is and how it is really a confluence of multiple contradictory elements that manage to flow together.
Ada Limón's "How to Triumph Like a Girl." I love poems that celebrate a quality in people that is usually not noticed or, worse, not valued. I love the energy of this poem. I love its confidence and swagger. I love how it makes me feel like a powerful girl even though I'm not a girl! I absolutely love how every other line turns some common perception on its head. I can only imagine how it makes some girls feel and I really hope it helps to lift some girl, somewhere who, until she met this poem, didn't realize that, inside, she was "giant with power"!