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Joining the Poets Caravan
Some years ago, when I lived in central London, an Afghan restaurant on Baker Street called Caravan Serai was one of my favourite places. In one of those life coincidences, I’ve found myself on another caravan here in Canada.
For much of this year, the Planet Earth Poetry series in Victoria BC has been filming local poets reading their poetry in their chosen location. Poets Caravan is a project that maps the various locations using Google Earth; the texts of many of the poems are shown alongside the readings. The poems are also available on Youtube (without the texts).
Here’s mine from Youtube (click here for the Google Earth version – patience: it takes time to load). I chose to read at Haliburton Community Organic Farm where I’ve been volunteering since 2008. I selected poems suited to the environment I was reading from, which prompted the videographer to ask me if I was an entomologist! (Nope, I’ve just been spending time looking closely at what bugs me and my garden, heh heh.)
Most of the poems are from my new manuscript, Larder, which will be published by Caitlin Press in 2022. One (Vegetable Kingdom) is from my 2006 collection Cartography.
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Life on Planet Poetry
Way back in 1988 I visited England for the first time as an adult. I had just published my second poetry collection, with a third on the way, and was keen to learn more about what was going on poetically in the UK. Before I left I got in touch with Mike Shields, then editor of the long running litmag Orbis, where I had had a few poems published. I asked if he knew any London poets I could meet, and he sent me the names Judi Benson and Peter Kenny, both of whom I met that visit and who both became longtime friends.
Towards the end of last year, Peter started up a podcast, Planet Poetry, with fellow poet Robin Houghton. Still fairly new, it charmed me from the outset with its straightforward approach; it feels like joining these two in the pub for a pleasant chat about poets they like, and what they’ve been reading and what they think about it.
So I was charmed to be invited into the virtual pub recently for a chat with Peter about long ago poems and themes of Arrivals/Departures. Hope you enjoy the trip!
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Poetry & the Wild
I attended a livestreamed reading and talk called Poetry & the Wild: A Reading and Conversation with Jane Hirshfield last Thursday. Hosted by Tom Fleischner, of the Natural History Institute, the conversation touched on poetry, Zen, natural history… whale trails, Poets for Science, climate change, and much more.
Hirshfield is a poet who’s embraced, or perhaps entered, the natural world more than many. Her Zen practice informed many of her observations. “When the self disappears, the self is happiest” she said, discussing the need to be open to observation in order to engage fully with the world. And citing Robinson Jeffers – “falling in love outward”.
She was asked, how does poetry help us? It’s thinking and understanding with the whole body, she replied. Poetry is a journey of discovery for her, as a reader and a writer. With all that is before us just now, she said, poetry can provide assistance towards a sense of resilience. It can help us engage with what feels beyond understanding — or simply respond to a curiosity. You want to be left changed when you read a poem, and “to find wholeness among the broken”.
When she asked in return why natural history? the answer was also zen-like: the practice of focused attentiveness to the more than human world; “the practice of falling in love with the natural world”, and an observation that natural history should be seen as a verb rather than a noun. And nurtures the deeper feelings about engagement with the world that poetry does.
Fleischner quoted Hirshfield’s own words: “Everything changes, everything is connected, pay attention.”
Thetis Lake Park, Victoria BC
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In her latest collection, Rhona McAdam navigates the dark places of human movement through the earth and the exquisite intricacies lingering in backyard gardens and farmlands populated by insects and pollinators, all the while returning to the body, to the tune of staccato beats and the newly discovered symmetries within the human heart.
“…A beautiful, filling collection, Larder is a set of poems to read at the change of the seasons, to appreciate alongside a good meal, and to remind yourself of the beauty in everything, even the things you may not appreciate before opening McAdam’s collection….”
Rhona McAdam is a writer, poet, editor, and Registered Holistic Nutritionist with a Master’s in Food Culture from Italy and a deep-rooted passion for ecology and urban agriculture. Her work spans corporate and technical writing to poetry and creative nonfiction, often exploring the vital links between what we eat and how we live. Based in Victoria, BC, and available via Zoom, Rhona is always open to new writing commissions, readings, or workshops on nutrition and the culinary arts.
