Marie Metaphor Specht is a multidisciplinary artist living on the traditional territories of the Lək̓ʷəŋən and SENĆOTEN speaking peoples. A long-time member of the Canadian spoken word community, Marie is currently serving a two-year term as the sixth Poet Laureate of Victoria.
Her debut full-length book of poetry, Soft Shelters, explores the double-edged gift that is caregiving through the lens of intimacy, queer motherhood and our complex relationship with the natural world. Like offering a pulled thread from one end while weaving new fabric on the other, this compassionate mediation on the transformative power of relationships is both an unravelling and a becoming.
Interviewed by Kat Nicholls
Kat Nicholls (KN): What is the writing process like? How would you describe the rhythms and the metrics of the poems?
Marie Metaphor Specht (MMS): My writing process most often starts with a general concept held in a single line. That line is usually not the first line of the poem, it’s just a combination of words that hint at something bigger; a line that encapsulates a knot of ideas in need of unravelling. From there I start pulling threads to find the poem that exists around the line.
I have spent the last few years working primarily in spoken word, so for me rhythm and metrics is all about breath, pacing and emphasis. I want my reader to ‘hear’ the poem as close to how I would speak it as possible. My best poems usually feel like an intimate conversation.
KN: What projects do you have on the go?
MMS: My first full-length book, Soft Shelters, comes out on September 22nd and that was a big project, spanning a few years–a real labour of love. Now I’m busy ushering it into the wider world with some touring and performances. My role as Victoria’s Poet Laureate has come with many wonderful opportunities and I’m grateful to have more than enough workshops, shows and collaborations to keep busy.
Over the last few years I’ve been working with Victoria interactive light art company, Limbic Media, and it has been such a pleasure to build narratives and soundscapes for their walk-through lighting installations. The combination of sound reactive lighting technologies, sculptural art and storytelling results in truly magical, immersive art experiences. Our most recent collaborative project, Lighting the Path: Our Stories of Resilience, will be running this year at Syéx̱w Chó:leqw Adventure Park on Sq’ewá:lxw land. It is an honour to work with Sq’ewá:lxw artists, knowledge keepers and language keepers to co-create an interactive art experience that includes a memorial for residential school victims and survivors. I am deeply humbled to be a small part of this project, helping build the container for these important stories to be shared. I have learned so much about how grief and celebration can be woven together in ceremony; this project has changed me and I am deeply grateful. I highly recommend making the trip to check it out.
I’m really looking forward to sharing my Poetry in Light project in the next few months since it combines my work as a visual artist and a poet. It involves installing Love Begets Love–a sound reactive lighting installation I created in collaboration with another artist, Gabrielle Odowichuk–in a public space where I can offer generative writing workshops and curated performances around the themes inherent in the work. This installation features prism-faceted, heart-shaped lanterns that speak in the language of shifting light and colour to create curiosity and conversation around human relationships, love and diversity including themes of 2SLGBTQI+ love. There will be more details on this coming soon, so stay tuned.
I also find a lot of joy in mentoring poets and have had the pleasure of working with individuals one-on-one through the League of Canadian Poets’ consultancy program. It’s simply wonderful to have the support necessary to allow me to focus on one individual and their specific poetic needs for a predetermined amount of time. The results have been amazing.
KN: What is your editing process like? What do you cut out or change?
MMS: For me, editing can be where the magic happens. On occasion a poem will arrive clear and fully-formed, but most often the first few small changes I make in the editing process clarify what I am trying to express. As I get rolling, I discover where the poem needs a few more lines and where there is excess to trim away. I’ve started pasting those excess lines into a working document to look at later, which makes it so much easier to be ruthless. I’m always reminding myself to be succinct; to fight my tendency to over explain. This works in the microcosm of a single poem but also applies to the larger context of a whole book. Once I started the editing process for my collection, I learned where new poems needed to exist and discovered where I was saying too much. The nature of each poem subtly shifts depending on where it is placed in the book–the conversations it is having with its neighbours.
KN: Writing is not a career people typically enter to become rich and famous. The starving artist/writer is a cliché for a reason. Many feel that this is even more true of poetry. What advice do you have for those writers seeking to branch into this field? What drove you to do so?
MMS: It never felt like a choice, more of a compulsion really. I started writing poetry around puberty and the practice has been an important part of my whole adult life. I can’t imagine a life where I do not process the world, and my experience of it, in this way. I suppose the choice came down to sharing it; whether or not I should build my life in a way that would allow for the spaciousness required to really pursue writing, publishing and performing. This was a long process that required me to uproot deeply entrenched beliefs around the actual feasibility of a career in the arts and I didn’t end up making real space in my life for it until my mid-thirties. It took some big life shake-ups to get me to this point. I actually have a lot more to say on the subject than I can reasonably fit here and spoke about it at length in my talk about Kismet with Creative Mornings and the Victoria Arts Council. The video of that chat is available on their YouTube channel.
My main piece of advice to those pursuing a life in the arts is to be as flexible as possible. Not everything you do for income will be purely writing the poetry you need to see in the world; you have to find the poetry and art in other modalities like teaching, editing and mentoring. Find it in commissions, collaborations, community organizing and creative consulting. This work can be endlessly inspiring if you let it. BUT don’t allow these pursuits to eat up all of your time and creativity, let them support you in a practical, financial way, so that you have some room to freely explore the poetry you really need to write.
KN: I particularly liked “How to write a poem about becoming a mother” and what I thought were some very well-pointed passages about the stereotypes that mothers face. Can you talk a little bit about the writing process for this one?
MMS: Our culture tends to pit parenthood against our very personhood, like it’s all one big trade off and you no longer get to be yourself or make work that matters because you’ve made this choice. Of course this is patently not true, and there are beautiful examples of exceptions to these unspoken rules and expectations. Additionally, there are many factors besides gender that influence how much becoming a parent will affect a person’s ability to maintain or create an art practice. Everyone has their own unique experiences of discrimination and oppression. Things like race, class, sexual orientation, physical ability, age, etc, can greatly impact a person’s parenting experience and influence their creative life.
In my case, motherhood stirred a deep feeling of responsibility to myself. My labour was long and intense. I felt incredibly close to death while simultaneously the most alive I’d ever been, straddling this liminal space between life and death. A space that was much narrower and closer than I had anticipated. So yes, there is the intense responsibility towards this other human’s growth and self-actualization, but also a deepening awareness of my responsibility towards my own.
I see the process of gestation, labour and parenting as simultaneously one of the most profound AND the most ordinary things a person can do. These processes offer infinite space for duality; for holding two opposing truths simultaneously. The joy and fear. The exhaustion and enthusiasm. The incredible, horrible, beautiful ache of it all. But once you go through it, once you’re in it, there seems to be this unspoken rule that you can’t make art about it, at least not the kind of art that will be valued; you should not explore the profound experience of acting as a portal to a whole new human existing on earth– this is off limits. Or, if you do make art about it, the work is somehow less: bland, pedestrian, boring.
I was pregnant in 2015 at the same time as musician/artist Amanda Palmer. When I was only a few tentative weeks into wearing my new mother-skin, I came across a poignant blog post she wrote in response to a “fan” who had expressed concern over how Amanda’s art would suffer as a result of her choice to become a parent (link). It was a tough read because she unflinchingly addressed many of the percolating background fears that I had not yet put into words, the shadows I had yet to look in the eye. Writing this poem was my way of sorting out my own baggage and stereotypes around the role of motherhood.
The funny thing is, here I am eight years later, making more of the art I want to see in the world and reaching a wider audience. Choosing to become a mother lit a fire in me to live the life I wanted–needed– to live, drove me to make less excuses for why I couldn’t do the work I wanted to do. I fight for every minute I get to work on my art and my writing. If I’m going to take that space from my family I need to make it worthwhile; I’ve come to understand just how precious my time is, and have started acting accordingly. This is not an entirely selfish act either–whether I like it or not, I am an example to my son and I want to encourage him to pursue and prioritize the work he knows he is meant to do. I’d like Wolfgang to have a childhood featuring a mother who is working towards self-actualization and living with integrity of the heart; he already knows his very existence inspired me to make more space for this work and that is a beautiful thing.
KN: In “Questions for the Slow Apocalypse” you speak directly to the shame and the helplessness that is a part of confronting the Climate Catastrophe we as a species are facing. I have to say the poems about the elephant and the monkey particularly caught me. Can you delve a little more into that and the process you went through to write them?
MMS: The process for the poems Wonder, Don’t know wild and Drawing circles was quite different from the other poems in the book as these are experiential, specifically narrative pieces that took quite a long time to gestate. Most often life is where the poetry happens and the writer’s job is to notice and record it. That sounds easy, but in my experience these moments of connection and ache arrive so beautifully orchestrated that the desire to effectively transmit the experience–to do it justice–can be quite intimidating. Intellectually, I knew I wanted to write about these two experiences with elephants that occurred 20 years apart, but I couldn’t bring myself to actually sit down and write about it for months. It felt important, big and rich, and I didn’t know where to start picking it apart.
Wonder and Don’t know wild started as one long poem, but I found explaining the shifting timelines and locations challenging. My wonderful editor, Alessandra Naccarato, pointed out that it was actually two sister poems that could be separated in the book, the same way these events were separated by years of my life. Steeped in contemplation about our human relationship with animals, the memory of my encounter with the spider monkey came rushing back and Drawing circles found its way to the page with greater ease; the processing I had already done when writing the elephant poems had laid the groundwork.
KN: In “The Alchemy of Becoming More” you move into shape poetry, starting with “Abracadabra” and then with “Caregiving” which I found to be especially powerful. Can you tell us how these shapes influenced your writing and your storytelling.
MMS: Wolf path, is the last poem I wrote for the collection. When doing my final edits, I was struck by the realization that by the time my book would be published, my son would be old enough to read it. This felt profound considering that many of the poems explore what it is to mother–to be deeply invested in someone so young–during this age of impending climate collapse and uncertainty. What would it be like for Wolfgang to read these poems, having grown from a toddler to a seven-year-old while watching me write them? This realization brought into sharp focus the everyday magic and time travel of the written word, of transmitting knowledge and experience through reading. Abracadabra is an incantation dating back to the ancient Middle East that has been adopted by popular culture and used by screenwriters and stage magicians to indicate the moment something is transformed by magic. The word is generally understood to mean, “I create as I speak” but can also mean, “I disappear like this word”. When abracadabra is written in its triangular form, dropping a letter with each new line, it becomes a banishment spell; as the word diminishes, so does malevolent energy or illness. Each layer stripped away gets you closer to the purest, unadulterated self and when you arrive at the final line you are yourself, alone. The poem combines the everyday magic of learning how to read and write and by the time we get to the last line–the final “a” of abracadabra–Wolfgang has discovered the meaning of his own name, a lens he can use to examine himself.
Caregiving, and its shape on the page, is a great example of my striving to translate a spoken word poem to the page. This poem exists in my body as a memorized performance piece that I have shared many times to different audiences. The pacing, the breath, the tone and even my body’s movements are a part of each line, shifting in small ways for each audience and environment. As I worked to place this poem in the collection, I came to understand that its collected moments–centering around existential emptiness, grief and connection–required so much more space on the page. Each snapshot needed room to breathe. I discovered that, while it is impossible to transcribe the experience of my performance, I could change my audience’s experience of the piece by adjusting how the words align. The use of space, enjambment and alignment offer different readings of the same poem, allowing the way it lands on the page to offer the variety and subtle differences that my body brings to a performance.
KN: How does poetry as a means of storytelling have greater or lesser challenges than prose fiction?
I am by no means an authority on this subject because although I am an avid reader of prose fiction, I have written very little of it myself. I have always written poetry. I suppose the two are different beasts with an intersecting venn-diagram of rules, strengths and difficulties that often overlap. I’m tempted to say poetry leaves more space for experimentation and play, but that’s not necessarily true; there are amazing, boundary-pushing works of experimental fiction out there. The thing I’ve always found intimidating about writing prose fiction is the very thing I love about reading it; an author can weave a story with all its disparate threads framing and tangling a whole world, then bring it back together in a satisfying way. The real world doesn’t always offer that kind of satisfaction and meaning. For me, it’s the contained world of a well-wrought story that keeps me engaging with fiction. On the flip-side, a lot of what I do in my poetry is also meaning-making–ordering the chaos of my experience interfacing with the greater world, striving to make sense of it while packaging it up in a way that will hopefully connect or resonate with my reader.