What Would Thales Say?

Is there a specific moment that inspired you to pursue poetry?

As a young child I loved to be read to by my father, who would run his finger under the lines of text, an act which helped me recognize words as well as the images in children’s books and led me to be able to read before entering school. Additionally, my aunt, a retired schoolteacher, stored her collection of children’s anthologies including, My Book House and Journeys Through Bookland, in a wardrobe cabinet in our basement. Often, I would go downstairs to retrieve a volume, then read it with a flashlight under the covers at night. The anthologies contained poetry, starting with Mother Goose, as well as global myths and stories. Reading led me to wish to emulate the writers, so even in elementary school I wrote a few poems, some of which were based on assignments, but others I wrote for myself. Yet it was in grade 7 that a keen desire to be a poet crystalized due to an English teacher, Mr. Lemieux, who after reading one of my early rhymed and metered poems, suggested I had a gift and invited me to assume the role of literary editor of the student newspaper. At that time the paper was run off on a mimeograph machine, stapled together and distributed in the hallways. Being an introvert, I worked on my poetry column alone rather than with a team, choosing submissions from my fellow students and including a few poems of my own. Then in high school, undergraduate school, and graduate school other mentors fortuitously appeared who not only marked my essays, but sometimes gave me feedback on my poetry. These mentors included Robin Blaser at SFU and Professor Lee Johnson at UBC who was my doctoral dissertation advisor, both of whom were poets as well as scholars. Now whenever I compose a bio I refer to myself as “poet and scholar,” as I have always put poetry first in my life.

How/where do you find inspiration today?

Though I still do a great deal of reading, even at the age of almost 76, I have turned more and more in recent decades to the natural world, especially during my daily long walks with our family dog Rosie. I also do mindfulness meditations and yoga, during which intervals I attempt to give my full attention to my body and my connection to the earth. My husband Mark, an environmentalist, was and remains the person who, when we first met in 1978, admired my passion for reading and writing, but realized I needed to enter silences and become more aware of the specificity of flowers, trees, the awesome beauty of the physical reality of the world here and now. I remain an avid reader and see myself as a poet of the mythopoetic imagination who has continued to read and study mystical and visionary literary works while finding more balance in my daily life. In 2012, Mark and I conjoined our respective skills to help save a local forest that the Township of Langley was planning to sell to private interests. My contribution was organizing poetry events in the forest as well as what I called the Han Shan Poetry Project, through which I solicited tree poems from poets all over Canada and beyond. Then a group of activists strung the poems gently from the trees with ribbons without doing any damage to the trees. Afterwards, I invited local poets to come read in the forest. Now I realize that by including activism into the holism of poetry, my poetry has become enriched. Now it attempts to unite Gaia, Planet Earth, our Mother, with the land and its place in the entire cosmos without being didactic. To confess, I have become a tree hugger who seeks out the wisdom of the Mother Trees, our sentient elders. Given global warming, the impact of human wastes in the oceans, and the threat of world-wide warfare, poetry is more relevant than ever in terms of providing inspiration for living in the now and hope for positive change.