Italian novelist Italo Calvino theorized that we write to learn what we don’t know.
For Mary MacDonald, the job of the poet is just that: to reach into the abyss and pull back something recognizable.
“When we’ve got these big open-ended questions, they can be too big and we back off and get scared and don’t know what to do,” she says. “We turn to poetry partly to make sense of it all, but I think it’s also to put limits and boundaries on it so it doesn’t seem like it’s going to be endless.”
MacDonald, an accomplished poet and author herself whose debut short story collection, Every Crooked Thing, debuted in 2020, is the curator and moderator of a signature poetry event every year at the Whistler Writers Festival. On Oct. 19, she will lead the discussion with three Canadian poets she handpicked to read: Conor Kerr (Old Gods), Rhea Tregebov (Talking to Strangers), and Ali Blythe (Stedfast).
Titled “The One Thing,” MacDonald explains the event speaks to the truths that only that poet can put to paper.
“It may be the poet can only write the one thing that demands to be written,” she says.
MacDonald’s roster of writers is proof of that. Kerr, a Métis-Ukrainian writer living in Edmonton, often tackles his dual identity in his writing, as well as his respective cultures’ shared history of displacement.
“[Kerr] is constantly looking for his own background, he’s constantly talking about being displaced from the land, which we hear about in Canada from the Métis part of his identity, but we might not have understood about the Ukrainian part. He says, ‘I’m writing myself back to the place I’m always longing for,’” MacDonald says. “The book is a beautiful balance between anger, which you kind of expect, and the longing for nature and what we carry with us.”
Tregebov, an associate professor emerita at UBC and former chair of the Canadian Union of Writers, also happens to be a neighbour of MacDonald’s. Although the two would “walk our dogs and yap away,” it was only recently they realized they were both writers. Tregebov’s eighth book, Talking to Strangers, is a celebration of the tiny intimacies of life, “small ideas that reach everywhere,” MacDonald says. “We get out there and talk to strangers, and for goodness sake, we talk about luck, about sidewalks, about tourists, about detox, and then we talk about grief, love and sorrow. It’s a little book that creeps up on you.”
MacDonald describes Blythe as “a really sharp poet,” whose Stedfast is a milestone of creativity and craft. Practically every element of the book references the 19th-century Romantic poet John Keats in some way, from the title, taken from his monumental work, Bright Star, to the poems themselves, each coming in at 14 lines, just as Keats’ sonnets did.
“Ali Blythe is really reinterpreting John Keats,” MacDonald says. “It’s a beautiful book, a real searching for self, for what’s eternal. He’s taken this last sonnet [Keats] wrote, Bright Star, reinterpreted it, and it’s just bursting into the constellations.”
MacDonald acknowledges poetry can be daunting to some, but she also knows full well it is frequently the first thing people turn to in pivotal moments.
“I think it’s really common, when it’s a funeral or a wedding or something very deep and heartfelt, for people to turn to poetry. Why do we do that when we don’t read poetry the rest of the year? I think it’s because it’s the job of a poet to bear witness, to stand up and to speak deep truths as earnestly as possible,” she says. “That’s the power of the poem: to confront the personal and say it in a public way. It’s very profound because most people think they can’t do it. But they wanna hear it, that’s for sure.”
The One Thing: Poetry Reading and Discussion takes place Saturday, Oct. 19 from 4:30 to 5:45 p.m. at the Fairmont Chateau Whistler. Tickets are $27, available at whistlerwritersfest.com.
