Le poète et médecin canadien Jean Désy (1954 - ) est un auteur prolifique qui oscille entre deux mondes: la médecine et la poésie, l’écriture et l’enseignement, l’autochtonie et le centre urbain. Loin d’en être déstabilisé, il en tire un équilibre qui ne se trouve que dans la présence du mouvement. Membre de l’Union des écrivaines et des écrivains québécois, il publie de la poésie, des récits de voyage, des contes, des nouvelles, des romans et des essais. Son écriture procure un appaisement porteur d’une condition : celle de mettre du sens dans notre vie, car il est question, toujours, d’humanisme dans son œuvre.
Je ne peux pas dire que j’aie lu beaucoup de poésie jusqu’à ce que j’étudie plus spécifiquement en littérature à l’université. Mais je dois répondre que le poème « Soir d’hiver », d’Émile Nelligan, est un texte qui a marqué mon adolescence. Si je me souviens bien, c’est grâce à la chanson qui a été créée à partir de ce texte que je m’y suis arrêté, que j’ai eu envie de l’apprendre par cœur. Mais de fait, le plus grand poème de mes vingt ans demeure « Vague est le pont », de Gilles Vigneault, un texte que j’aime encore réciter, à tout moment.
J’ai commencé à vraiment écrire de la poésie, ou à tout le moins une poésie qui en valait la peine, à partir de mon éblouissement nordique, lors de mon premier voyage au Nunavik en janvier 1990. De fait, je crois que c’est depuis la parution du recueil Ô Nord, mon Amour que j’ai commencé à me considérer comme poète à part entière. Sans le Nord, et c’est encore ce que je crois, je n’aurais pas plongé vraiment dans l’univers de la poésie, celui qui m’atteint le plus foncièrement.
Le travail du poète consiste à d’abord jouer avec la langue, avec les mots, de manière à les faire sonner autrement, différemment. Je crois que c’est d’abord par la poésie que la littérature permet aux lecteurs et lectrices d’accéder à ce si mystérieux monde de l’inconscient. Je crois aussi que c’est d’abord par le langage poétique qu’on accède au « sod », c’est-à-dire au « secret » des choses, des êtres et du monde (le « sod » étant le quatrième niveau d’interprétation, le plus profond, selon Marc-Alain Ouaknine).
J’ai écrit le poème « Dieu tout au bout » une nuit d’hiver, à Salluit, alors que j’étais monté sur un cap faisant face à un immense fjord. Le ciel était magique. J’étais cependant épuisé après plusieurs nuits blanches passées auprès des malades. Le texte m’est venu pratiquement tel qu’il a été publié. Il est rare dans ma vie qu’un poème m’a été donné de manière si entière. J’en ai pris note sur l’éternel petit carnet que je traîne toujours dans mon sac à dos dès que je suis en randonnée.
Je choisirais d’emblée le poème « Accompagnement », de Saint-Denys Garneau, un texte que je fais d’ailleurs lire chaque année aux étudiants de mon cours de littérature universelle. À mon sens, ce poème fait partie des plus grands textes de la poésie d’expression française.
Mimi Haddam est une autrice d’origine franco-algérienne qui vit à Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. Elle a publié Attendez de m’enterrer pour chanter (Noroît, Coll. Adelphe, 2023), Il existe un palais de teintes et d'hyperboles (Noroit, Coll. Omri, 2018) ainsi que Petite brindille de catastrophes (Éditions de la Tournure, 2017, réédition augmentée 2019). Ses œuvres ont notamment été présentées à la Galerie de l’UQAM, à la Galerie d’art Louise-et-Reuben-Cohen, à la Maison des artistes visuels francophones, à l’Espace Transmission, à la Galerie AVE ainsi qu’aux Ateliers Belleville.
S’inscrivant du côté des philosophies du vivant et des études féministes, Mimi Haddam s’intéresse aux pensées tactiles, touchées et touchantes, aux réflexions affectives dévalorisées au profit des normes tenues par les institutions dominantes du pouvoir, aux imaginaires somatiques ainsi qu’aux identités ambiguës. Ses projets, en quête de mouvements sensibles, investissent les espaces incertains et sans formes étanches.
Carol-Ann Belzil-Normand vit et travaille à Québec. Elle poursuit ses études au doctorat en littérature et arts de la scène et de l'écran à l'Université Laval. Dans sa recherche, elle s’intéresse au concept de frivolité comme approche méthodologique sensible et humoristique à travers le cinéma d’animation. Belzil-Normand a effectué des résidences de création et participé à des expositions collectives dans plusieurs centres d'artistes au Québec. Son travail a été mis à l'honneur lors d'expositions individuelles à Arprim, l'Atelier Presse-Papier, La Bande Vidéo, Caravansérail, la Galerie R3 et l’Oeil de Poisson. Elle a diffusé ses films d'animation lors de nombreux festivals locaux et internationaux. Après Sanités (Moult Éditions, 2020), PUSSY GHOST (Écrits des Forges, 2021) et Vamp (Éditions du passage, 2024), feu flou bouche est son quatrième recueil de poésie.
Je me souviens qu’au secondaire, on lisait Jacques Prévert. Baudelaire, je l’ai découvert un peu plus tard. Je me rappelle qu'un professeur nous avait lu « Cage d’oiseau » de Saint-Denys Garneau. Ce poème m’avait marquée.
J’ai commencé à écrire à 16 ans. J’écoutais beaucoup NIN et je traduisais les paroles en français pour tenter de les reformuler autrement dans ma tête. J’aimais aussi énormément les philosophes, comme Friedrich Nietzsche ou Jean-Paul Sartre. Adolescente, je percevais la philosophie comme une forme de poésie. Je pense que j’ai eu le droit au titre officiel de poète lorsque j’ai publié mon premier recueil et fait mes premières lectures publiques vers la fin de la trentaine.
Être poète, c’est maintenir un lien constant avec le langage et avec soi-même. Un travail de discipline, de doute, d’inconfort. Chaque jour, j’accueille des idées, même quand elles ne veulent pas dire grand-chose. J’aime jouer avec l’humour et la gravité. C’est un geste à la fois simple et exigeant. Je suis toujours à la recherche d’une forme prête à éclater ou à persister.
« Mon sexe est une blessure liquide » de Lorrie Jean-Louis.
Kaie Kellough is a novelist, poet, and sound performer living in Montréal. Born in Western Canada and with roots in Guyana, Kellough's work emerges at the intersection of engaged sociality and formal inquiry, and has been recognized by the Manitoba Book Awards, the Quebec Writers Federation, and the League of Canadian Poets. He is the author of Accordéon, a finalist for the Amazon.ca First Novel Award; Dominoes at the Crossroads, a collection of linked short stories; and two poetry collections. Exploring migration and the suspension of arrival, Kellough's sound work has toured international and includes two albums, Vox:Versus and Creole Continuum. His second book of poetry, Magnetic Equator, won the 2020 Griffin Poetry Prize.
Sue Goyette lives in K'jipuktuk (Halifax) and has published several books of poems and a novel. Her latest collection is Future Howl (Gaspereau Press, 2025). She is the editor of Resistance: Righteous Rage in the Age of #MeToo (University of Regina Press, 2021), The 2017 Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology (Anansi, 2017), and Best Canadian Poetry in English 2013 (Tightrope Books, 2013). Her work has been translated into French, Spanish, and German, and has been featured in films, subways, buses, spray painted on a sidewalk and tattooed. Her work has been nominated for the 2014 Griffin Poetry Prize and the Governor General’s Award, and has won several awards including the J.M. Abraham Poetry Award, the ReLit Award, the Atlantic Independent Booksellers Choice Award, a National Magazine Award, the Pat Lowther Award for Poetry, the Bliss Carman Poetry Award, the Earle Birney Award, the CBC Literary Award for Poetry, as well as the 2015 Lieutenant Governor of Nova Scotia Masterworks Arts Award for her collection Ocean. Sue teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Dalhousie University.
Yes, poetry saved me in high school. Seriously. I’d always read like a fiend but when I encountered poetry, its potency, its verve, I felt like I had found my people. What a relief, what a homecoming. Poetry somehow soothed my burn. I remember first reading the Quebec poet Saint-Denys Garneau and being so caught off guard, so bamboozled, not just by his poetry but by how his poems thought, how they moved, how their thinking and moving were inexplicably joined the way a fish is joined to its swim. His poetry changed how I thoughts or maybe redeemed my way of thinking. His poem Bird Cage was the first I read and I still think about it, how it works, the contraption and velocity of it.
I started writing poetry when it felt like I had too much in me and I desperately needed a chimney or a window: something to open, a way to express myself. My house wasn’t a great place to live, there was a lot of yelling, a lot of fighting. Reading and writing, for me, was a secret fort, an escape, things I could do to keep busy while I had to be in my house. I kept a diary but the way I wrote in my notebook changed in grade eight. I remember considering the words I was choosing and how those words collided with other words, the weirdness they made, the oddness that wasn’t like a story but more like a first-time spell or a flock of words that moved like a bird. I wrote a lot of pretty bad poems filled with big feelings, and morose. I wrote a lot of dramatic heartbreak.
I didn’t call myself a poet for a long time. It felt like a dare when I finally did. Saying poet out loud felt important, formal, and then, as I do, I felt ridicules and scared. Who was I to call myself a poet?
It really is a vocation more than a job, I think. One task is to stay open to poetry. Poetry is the most crucial part of a poem for me. I think it resides in a poem’s silence, where its reader meets the words with their own experience and imaginings. The poem is like the wharf to that connection, the path to it. So staying curious is important and staying open to where the poem needs to go to get as close to poetry as it can is essential.
We’re living in pretty challenging times. When I think of climate change and our environment, the wars that are happening, racism, poverty, equality issues, our murdered and missing Indigenous women, it would be easy to say not challenging but dark times. I think poetry, all art, can revive our best selves when we encounter it. Often, when we read a poem, we give up the firm ground of knowing where we stand and have to trust it knows what it’s doing. We’re mostly generous, alert, and using all of our senses to make sense of it. Giving up the firm ground of knowing is an easy thing to do with something as non-threatening as a poem so it gives us a good opportunity to practice that and all the other good skills I mentioned.
Staying open and curious, vulnerable, authentic is hard. Making something that has nothing to do with money is hard. I think poets need to take good care of themselves, surround themselves with good company, good music, good food. Keep their spirits nourished. We need artists now more than ever and maybe our only “job” is to be keep being ourselves.
I wrote “eight” because I was thinking about how wild the ocean is and how close Halifax is to it. I was thinking about how we build around the water, how we expect it to behave itself and then how shocked we are when it shows itself, when it washes out a road or starts encroaching our houses. In a way, the ocean is a great metaphor for a lot of the things we don’t like to deal with, how we don’t think about those things until we’re forced to. I also wrote “eight” as a way of exploring how we live with anything unknown, how we make bargains with it to keep it happy so it will leave us alone or be gentle with us.
What a great collection of poems. They’re all so good for their own reasons, it’s really hard to choose just one. Today, I’d pick C.D. Wright’s “Re: Happiness, in pursuit thereof” because I’m still so sad that she died and I want to say her words out loud knowing that a part of her is still in them, and in saying them, memorizing them, taking them in, that part of her would still breeze of this world. Also because it’s a really fine poem.
Jónína Kirton, an Icelandic and Red River Métis poet, was born in Portage la Prairie, Manitoba, Treaty 1, the traditional lands of the Anishinaabe, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota, Dene peoples, and the homeland of the Métis. She graduated from the Simon Fraser University’s Writer’s Studio in 2007. She released her first book, page as bone ~ ink as blood, in 2015 and was sixty-one when she received the 2016 Vancouver’s Mayor’s Arts Award for an Emerging Artist in the Literary Arts category. Her second collection of poetry, An Honest Woman, was a finalist in the 2018 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Her third book, Standing in a River of Time, released in 2022, merges poetry and lyrical memoir to take us on a journey exposing the intergenerational effects of colonization on her Métis family.
Jónína currently lives in seniors housing in New Westminster, BC, the unceded territory of the Hul’qumi’num speaking peoples. A chronic pain sufferer, she has walked with her husband as he has faced life-threatening health issues. Living in subsidized senior housing she has also witnessed, firsthand, the challenges of others as they age and live with health issues while on a low income. This journey is documented in her fourth book. Save Your Prayers – Send Money, which will be released in April 2026 with Talonbooks.
I do not recall reading any poetry in high school. As a trauma survivor I have very few memories of that time in my life.
My writing life began at the age of fifty. I was first introduced to writing poetry while enrolled at the Simon Fraser University's Writer's Studio (TWS) in 2006. I enrolled hoping to get into the non-fiction cohort but was told that my writing sample indicated I should be in poetry. I resisted at first but am now so grateful to TWS and Miranda Pearson, my mentor while at TWS. I quickly learned that poetry could be used to tell my story.
It took some time for me to fully claim the title of poet. The more I leaned into poetry, the more I began to see that I had the heart of a poet all along.
I think there is more than one answer to this question and that each poet needs to decide for themselves what it is they want their poetry to do out in the world. I write poetry to share my story and the stories of others who have experienced childhood trauma, grief, loss, sexual violence, racism, sexism, chronic pain, and caregiving. I also share about my healing journey, my time in recovery, and the New Age world.
In recovery we use our story as a way to teach and encourage anyone seeking recovery. Given this, I like to think of my story as good medicine, and the poems I write can become a companion as others explore healing. I feel we can say things in poetry that 'educate' or inform about all manner of social justice issues, and when done well, poems can bypass the mind's need for control and allow teachings to go straight to your heart.