Maleea Acker lives on W̱SÁNEĆ territories. She is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Victoria and faculty at Thompson Rivers University. Her books include Hesitating Once to Feel Glory (poetry, Nightwood, 2022) and Gardens Aflame: Garry Oak Meadows of BC’s South Coast (non-fiction, New Star, 2013).
Maleea will be reading previously-unpublished work at the festival, as part of Field Works: Four writers share their works in progress.
Interviewed by Barbara Pelman
Barbara Pelman (BP): I’m always fascinated to see ‘work in progress’, to be able to glimpse the mysterious process of creative engagement. How does the poem grow? What is its seed? What nourishes it? When and how does it get cut back, or not at all? So, question one: what is the ‘seed’ of this new book?
Maleea Acker (MA): The original seed of this book might better be thought of as seeds. One is simply the publication of my previous book of poems, which meant that new things I am writing no longer belong with that group of poems and need to start to coalesce around other ideas. Another is a desire to think about interspecies relations (and even communication) in this time of orchestrated disconnection from Earth’s biome. Loss is also a seed. My beloved dog died in 2023; my father died suddenly last month. This last loss will obviously take the book in a new direction, and will also likely delay its completion.
As for how a poem grows, poems for me begin with sound and image. I hear a rhythm, even if I don’t know the words yet, or a phrase repeats in my mind, or an image arrives that seems to have resonance. I write from there. I relate to Rob Taylor’s experience of poems as “born out of an event or observation.” Attendance to these events is my entry to the silences and sounds of poetry.
BP: How do you decide its shape? Couplets, free verse, stanzas? Do you change your mind through the process and try another form for a particular poem? And if so, what is your criterion to make a change?
MA: I’m comfortable in couplets and tercets because I like the simultaneous formality of the lines and their ability to work in improvisational ways across line and stanza breaks, enriching meaning and creating unexpected connections. So I use these forms a lot. Some pieces, however, needed a tighter, faster rhythm, and the form of those poems has responded to that need.
I think one of the reasons we still have writers festivals and poetry readings is because listening to words spoken aloud is a beautiful experience, and brings poetry in particular back to the original orality of the art. The readers I like hearing from most often don’t follow the breakages and lineation that they’ve created on the page, reading past the end of a line into another, inserting pauses or quickness where it doesn’t appear visually. There are many shapes that poems can take; the published version often strikes me as a choice (often a good one) that is just one of many possibilities.
BP: Robert Frost talks of the ‘surprises’ a poet encounters when writing a poem. What surprised you in this series?
MA: I think all writing, when it’s going well, is surprising. If we come to a poem with a preconceived idea of what we want to say, usually the poem doesn’t work well, and the writing stalls, or feels pushed. When I’m writing well, I’m often surprised by the people, places or images that arrive. These pieces often work better from the start. In these cases, I often feel I am following the dictation or voice of something I cannot quite name. In this new work sample (which is not a series exactly, because the poems were written at different times, with a focus on different subjects) I think I’m surprised that I was able to find my way back to a place where things could surprise me. I completed a doctorate in Geography in 2021. In the years before and after the defense, I was thoroughly enmeshed in an academic world, where theory, science, and practicality, and the obligation to jump through many hoops trumped creativity. I remember looking back at my writing life through that lens, and thinking it almost quaint—to have time to put to art seemed ludicrously extravagant. Of course, that lens was clouded. It’s taken me three years to get back to putting my creative life near the top of my priorities, and the surprise was also the great joy I felt in arriving back there, as if I was rediscovering a hidden world, a nest in the grass in the shape of my body.
BP: Going back to that image of the seed, what interweaving themes arose during the process? Did one poem spark another theme, or was each poem a thing in itself?
MA: As a long-time settler activist, environmental journalist, and educator, with the Jewish concept of Tikkun Olam (heal the world) drilled into me from childhood, a lot of what I write seeks, perhaps obliquely, to address and combat the disconnection, commodification, and destruction of the world’s species and ecosystems. Lyn Baldwin’s idea of an “extinction of experience,” which is happening as we move closer and closer to an enmeshed relationship with technology and simulacrum, and further from a relationship with the actual ferns and otters and drought-stressed Douglas-fir trees around us—well, this makes me petrified, and grief-stricken, and moves me again and again to try to bring art into relationship with science. But in the end, a poem is still a poem and not pedantic doggerel (hopefully!). It must have its own determinations and preoccupations that are separate from me and what I might be worried about. I resonate with the idea that a poem is, as A.F. Moritz says, part of a larger constellation, made of poems that came before and will come after (poems which attempt something, then regroup, then attempt again), and that stretch into constellations as larger themes and ideas take shape over the decades. Each poem/star in this constellation simultaneously focuses on an unknowable thing, a preoccupation of the poem, but also on a concrete thing in front of the poet. It’s this combination of thing in the world—leaf, mud, canoe, lake, cruise ship, dog, father—with unknowable preoccupation (which the poem itself brings) that seems to me the most exciting place where a work might take shape.
BP: Where is this book heading? Are you almost done, still in the middle, just starting? What ideas do you have for its completion?
MA: This book is probably less far along than I thought it was a month ago. I have entered a new country, with the death of my father, a country populated by so many, a country only known about once one is thrust into it. I’m so grateful to those who were already its citizens, who have written and talked so beautifully about loss and grief, and who are instructing me on how to live here. Now that my life’s two lodestars have passed into another realm, I will need to wait to hear and see what my body and my heart needs to do in this new country, and what words need saying.
BP: How does it feel to have your work in progress ‘out there’ for all to see? Does it feel naked, or ready to be viewed even so? Do you look forward to the process of exploring something in its ‘making’ rather than only in its’ ‘made’?
MA: I’m going to put on my invisibility suit before I climb onto the stage of VFA!
For me, talking about work that’s underway means talking about what is helping me along on the journey. Currently, I am taking inspiration and courage from two sources. Firstly from Matthew Zapruder, who has a book out this year called “Story of a Poem” which, along with being a gorgeous memoir, goes into beautiful, intricate detail about the versions of a poem he writes, and how one takes a poem through drafts that don’t work toward a draft that does. It was very affirming to me that other writers hover in that strange spot that isn’t just about only being as good as one’s next poem (or story or novel) but is also a confirmation that we are practitioners—we practice, and that practice sometimes leads somewhere and sometimes is just that—doing the scales or the barre. We need not judge ourselves on the basis of one poem.
Secondly, I am inspired by visual artists, with whom I collaborate whenever possible. This summer I worked with Palestinian sculptor and embroiderer Maysun Cheikh Ali Mediavilla, from Madrid, on a series of works. Every day she showed up to create, to play, and her generosity and inclusion informed my own practice while we worked together at a residency at JOYA (Spain). She helped me remember that art, along with being a political act, is also a form of play. And that playfulness is inherent in any art, including writing. Making is creating—it’s play. As writers we make, and can even enjoy the process, the practice, of creation, even as writing also tears our guts out or puts us in touch with the electricity of the real.