Portal- Katherena Vermette Feature

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The Ralph and Betty Gustafson Trust was established at Vancouver Island University in 1998 from the estate of the late Ralph Gustafson (1909–1995), one of Canada’s pre-eminent poets. For over six decades, Ralph Gustafson practiced his craft and shared his love of language with successive generations of poets.

He wrote almost 40 books, including more than 24 books of poetry, a collection of essays, and a book of short stories. He compiled the first anthology of Canadian poetry, published by Penguin in 1942, and was a music critic in New York for over a decade before returning to Canada in 1963. His book Fire on Stone, published in 1974, won the Governor General’s Award for Poetry, and Configurations at Midnight received the 1993 qspell a.m.. Klein Poetry Prize.

Gustafson was a member of the Order of Canada, co-founder and life member of the League of Canadian Poets, and a life member of Keble College, Oxford. He was the recipient of numerous medals, honorary degrees, and awards of merit, including the Queen’s Silver Jubilee Medal, and the Commemorative Medal for the 125th Anniversary of the Confederation of Canada.

While he worried about poetry’s place in the world, he continued to grow in his art, to write with clarity and efficiency, poems filled with wisdom. In spite of fad and fashion, Ralph Gustafson sang with the best of contemporary poets, in an exultant voice.

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Turtle Spirit: Katherena Vermette on the Distinct Joys of Writing Homeby Jennifer Cox

e are all turtles, says Métis poet Katherena Vermette. “We walk around with our homes and our spirits on our backs.”

As the 2014 Ralph Gustafson Chair of Poetry, Vermette visited viu October 22 to lead an engaging afternoon student

discussion, and the next day delivered an evening lecture for the public, discussing how her experience of writing “home”—Winnipeg’s North End—has influenced her poetic aesthetic. Before she began her lecture, she acknowledged the Snuneymuxw territory as well as her own Métis heritage. “It is important for me to respect the territory I enter as well as the territory I come from,” she says. “It is how I define myself, how I identify.”

Vermette’s first book of poetry, North End Love Songs, won the 2013 Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry. The book is also the 2014-15 featured book in the Winnipeg Public Library program, On the Same Page, a province-wide initiative that encourages all Manitobans to read and discuss the same book at the same time. Vermette was also named one of cbc’s 12 Canadian writers to watch for 2014.

“I had this quiet little career where I was going to write some poetry and probably go back to teaching and now I feel a lot more people are paying attention. It feels like I have to be really good and I am bound by this perfectionism. I read and submitted poetry and stories for about eight years before I signed my book deal. It’s about keeping at it, learning to edit, and being patient. You have to really love writing.”

Vermette graduated in April 2014 with an mfa in Creative Writing from ubc. “I wanted to learn how to write properly, commercially, because

Wwhenever I wrote a short story it was like a poem. I wanted to know that formula because I had no idea how to write fiction. I would recommend it for learning how to organize your writing and meet deadlines. I thought it was going to be very artsy, but it was quite structured.”

Vermette is also an active member of the Indigenous Writers Collective of Manitoba, a collective that has been invaluable to her growth as an artist. “Poetry found me another home among these people. They write about families that look like mine,” she says. “When you’re in a chorus and everyone is making ‘I’ statements, then you can share your story too. It feels very safe.”

Within this group, she met younger Métis and Aboriginal writers who inspired her and gave her hope for the future. “Art begets art. The generation coming behind me is intensely powerful. Part of my job is to help new writers through teaching, talks, workshops, mentorship.... You want people to like your work enough that they hear their own song and go after it.”

As for her advice for new writers: “Get a thick skin. People are going to say things, and have opinions, and you can’t get defensive. Some things are true and some things are nasty. Some compliments are also not true. The inspiration is just a tiny part of the work. Sometimes you have to write a lot of stories before you get to your story.”

When Vermette first studied poetry in high school, she read William Blake and E.E. Cummings. She

When you’re in a chorus and everyone is making ‘I’ statements, then you can share your story too. It feels very safe.

“”

Sun HallSpenser Smith

Turtle Spirit

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didn’t discover Indigenous poetry until years later when she read Marvin Francis. “He spoke to me because he wrote about the street and specifically my street,” she says. “Urban experience is important, significant, and specific. It’s different from a rural experience. The poetry decides what it wants to be, but a street poem is very different from a pastoral poem, the idea that you look on the natural world with awe, with yearning to return. That doesn’t come into play in the street, in urban settings. There is a lot more presence and survival that goes on. It’s definitely a different tone.”

Poetry is a natural fit, since it evolved from, and complements, the oral tradition of Indigenous communities. “I have never completed a poem without having to read it out loud, so what ends up being on the page is an echo of what is read. Poetry is supposed to be oral. Still, I was devastated to learn that as a young wannabe writer because the whole attraction was to sit in a room alone with the door closed and tell stories, but you have to get up in front of people. I thought I could figure out how to have a successful writing career without having to do that.”

At 17, Vermette decided to leave Winnipeg’s inner city neighbourhood because she didn’t see many success stories there. She spent years as a traveler, searching for her identity in unfamiliar landscapes. It was not until she returned to her roots that she found what she was looking for.

When she came back to Winnipeg at 27, she didn’t want her daughters to grow up amidst the hardships that she experienced. “I wanted to keep them safe, to wrap them up in my shell. I was running away from what my pain was. I didn’t want to deal with it.”

During this time, Vermette found connection in poetry. “I always had a backpack and I always had poetry,” she says. When she was a young girl, her mother had given her a pink Hilroy notebook that provided a safe place to try to make sense of her

world—“when I had the opportunity to speak what was in my head, I spoke in poetry.”

When Vermette began writing, she wanted to write about street injustice, resistance, and resilience without the context of her own history. She quickly realized this was not possible. “All those girls and women on the street were my story and I had inadvertently written myself home,” she says. “I was writing about myself at the ages my daughters are now, which added an extra layer. You walk through the world as a young girl and try to figure out who you are. I constantly am exploring why women do not feel empowered. I don’t know where it’s going to go yet. Things evolve. Young women

have this crazy strength and vulnerability.”

She wrote North End Love Songs as a tribute to her

environment, both her physical landscape and her spiritual identity. She wrote of trees, birds, parks, and city streets, of friendship, family, loyalty and belonging. She wrote of a girl looking down Bannerman

Avenue where, “branches overhead / interlace like

fingers / cup around her / hold her in,” and Selkirk

Avenue, where a girl walks, “head down/ body huddled / into

herself… as if she could / hide and not feel / the cold.” In her poems, the girl listens to

“the stifled sobs behind / her mother’s closed door / smells her stepfather’s / cigarette” walking in the rain under “winter naked elms / such a cold November / a season warmer/ than her house.”

To shape the collection, she invoked the medicine wheel and its four seasons, the four stages of life (childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and elderhood) and the four aspects of self (physical, mental, spiritual, and emotional). As she cycled through these phases, she attempted to show the beauty in the brokenness of her community. “I tend to write about things you don’t necessarily want to write about, things that are not obviously beautiful.”

One such act central to the collection is a poem that gave Vermette a way to come to terms with the loss of her older brother whose journey home on a winter evening ended tragically: “they think / he tried / to walk across the river / in a cold November when / it was almost frozen.” Her family was torn apart when he went missing and this loss was compounded by the fact that local authorities did not take his disappearance seriously: “no sense lookin’ / they said/ he’ll turn up when / he gets bored / or broke.”

His story was in her blood and therefore in her poetry. “Spiritually we are connected to home because we are connected by blood memory,” she says. “Blood holds memory. We may not remember things that happened to our grandparents, or things that happened before us, but we carry these experiences in our blood.” Likewise, trauma can be passed on through generations. “I was told in my early years to write what I know,” says Vermette. “I wrote a lot about pain and anger and sadness and craziness...and I practiced by seeing.”

She was writing her own experience, but also a universal experience of a girl on the cusp of adolescence coming to terms with her family’s brokenness. “You change it from something that happened to you to a poem. You play with cadence, you play with words, and it becomes something else. When you write something and put it out in the world, there are so many variations with respect to what it means....”

Poetry has given Vermette the language of catharsis. “In my childhood everything was a bit chaotic,” she says, equating her home life to a storm. “Poetry allowed me to come into the eye and let all the chaos happen beside and around me, because when poetry happens there is joy, a very distinct joy.”

Katherena Vermette Bibliography:

Anthologies:

Apocalypse Now Rob Wilson

Mothership: Tales from Afrofuturism and Beyond (2013)

Manitowapow—Aboriginal Writings from the Land of Water (2012)

Debwe Series (2011)

The Exile Book of Native Fiction and Drama (2010)

Other Tongues: Mixed Race Women Speak Out (2010)

Tales from Moccassin Avenue (2006)

The Seven Teachings Stories (2014 & 2015)

North End Love Songs (2012)

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