Melanie Siebert Melanie Siebert is the author of two poetry collections, Signal Infinities and Deepwater Vee—a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry. Her non-fiction book, Heads Up: Changing Minds on Mental Health, won the Lane Anderson Award for best science writing for young readers in Canada.
In Signal Infinities a therapist takes up an apprenticeship to a lake, to bare attention, to pain itself. Expansive and moving, this long poem courses with the intelligences of the body, its music and limits. As glaciers and ancient forests disappear, Signal Infinities maps a search for more enlivening, ethical relationships with each flickering presence.
Interview by Amy Reiswig
Amy Reiswig (AR): This book holds so many issues – environmental, psychological, personal, colonial – in “a stunning tension” (to borrow one of your lines). What was the push/impetus for this work, and how did the writing unfold?
Melanie Siebert (MS): I started writing this book when I began working as a mental health clinician. I was sitting with young people who were trying to figure out if they could go on living because the pain they were in was so great. I really felt that all the knowledge in the world, all the assessments and safety plans and resources weren’t going to cut it. Not that those things aren’t useful. There’s a place for them. But something more was needed. Something else had to open. Some quality of presence.
It’s a bit hard to put into words without sounding hokey. But it reminds me of a lake. A living thing. With great patience and permeability. That moves on an eerie timescale. With complex processes involving chemistry and sediment and microbeings and prevailing winds. With reflective genius, for sure, but also pressures and depths that evade any easy knowing.
Part of what I was after was learning a way of being where you’re not trying to find a solution or a fix…. where you’re able to be with whatever is happening in the moment. Sometimes we call this empathy or attunement. And that makes sense in that there are points of connection and understanding and embodied knowing. But it’s more than that. It’s also a basin of unknowing. It can give me that woozy sense of peering into deep space. I was trying to learn how to open into this sort of unknowing, how to open to infinities.
And, strangely, I find poetry helps me with this.
I could also say I started when my own body was breaking down and I was trying to figure out why my relationship to it was so uneasy and distrusting, why there were so many dead zones. So, there’s this element too—trying to get in touch with my own embodiment, my own lakehood.
AR: While the book reads in a series of titled poems, it is subtitled “a poem.” Tell me about your vision of this multiplicity as a unity.
MS: For a long time I didn’t have any titles, except Signal Infinities, and I was just letting things flow and pulse. I liked the dreamlike meandering. That felt natural to me, but it was probably too recessed and mystifying to get published. My editor at McClelland and Stewart, Canisa Lubrin, suggested that titles might help the reader orient. So I gave that a try and then that led to putting in more waypoints and cues. And then also creating the character of the therapist, so that the viewpoint was more situated, more anchored. But I hope there’s still a flow that you’re invited to enter.
AR: One theme that repeats here is language’s limitations to convey the unknowable interior experience of the human and non-human world. It’s what we so often rely on to connect, yet it can be a barrier to real connection. How does poetry allow you to enter in and also point us to a different, more embodied connection? Does it have a particular ability to be the bridge between, as you say, “what you know and what you feel”?
MS: Oh yeah, language gets us in so much trouble. It can trick us into thinking we’ve put a pin in something, when actually some misty, winged thing has just fluttered away. Or our heads are so full of language, or in my case podcasts streaming into my ears, that we miss all the intricate languages going on around us. Plus, there’s the arrogance of my western, colonial cultural inheritance that thinks humans are all that, so we get to be the boss of everything.
I’m attracted to poetry partly because it has so much capacity for cadence, tonality, texturing, rests. I think the music of it can zip past logic and light up more dreamy things like emotion, memory and movement. Poetry also uses things like metaphor and paradox and white space and morphing images and all of these elements suggest the way language can’t quite get at the thing we’re trying to talk about. Poetry puts the failure of language on display. While still being flush with resonance and meaning.
Okay, I have to compare it to a river. I just can’t help myself. Poetry is like a rapid and with its waves and currents and eddies it carries the imprint of the unseen riverbed. The things that can’t be said shape the flow.
AR: You write of people and nature suffering trauma, negotiating pain and loss and survival and maybe, sometimes, finding the possibility – but difficulty – of healing. What do you see as some of the key things we need to do in order to heal ourselves and, possibly, the land?
MS: There seems to me to be a deep kind of listening that could be possible. A being with that might be a place to start. In working with trauma and addiction and pain, my own and others’, one thing I’m always learning is that deep acceptance of and intimacy with what is, always precedes change. And that’s not easy. But I don’t think there’s a shortcut.
When I think of healing the living world, then I think we need to look to the wisdom and leadership of teachers and cultures who know how to live in deep reciprocity with all things. I think of what Robin Wall Kimmerer, a Potawatomi botanist, writer and teacher, has said: “Know the ways of the ones who take care of you, so that you may take care of them.” This of course includes the mosses and the murrelets and the little brown bats, all the interwoven beings and life-giving processes.
I’m looking forward to walking with Sarah Cox and Dr. Jennifer Grenz as we read at W̱MÍYEŦEN. Sarah Cox’s newest book Signs of Life is such an immersion into the sagas of spotted owls, caribou, rare lichen and other endangered species and the intricate, troubled relationships of the humans trying to save them. And Jennifer Grenz’s Medicine Wheel for the Planet sweeps the reader along on her journey to shed the narrowness of her scientific training in ecology and integrate her Indigenous worldview into all of her relationships. There’s so much to absorb from both of these writers and the deep listening that they have done.
AR: There is heaviness here but also so many radiant moments of beauty and so much love and compassion suffusing these pages. How do you care for your own heart while writing a book like this?
MS: I think the writing cares for me in a way. When I make space to write, I have to give myself to quiet, to wandering, to close attention. That slowing and quieting and noticing somehow feels as necessary to me as water. There’s a deep companionship there with other beings that is so sustaining. And it always seems to open in some way into wonder. I think that’s just the living world doing its thing.
AR: As part of this year’s Re-Story Forest Walk at W̱MÍYEŦEN nature sanctuary, you’ll be reading under the trees and by the water. How might gathering on the land to listen to one another help cultivate the kind of “bare attention” so central to your book?
MS: I’ve been to this reading before as an audience member and I just loved it. The wind swishes through, bugs land, shuffling feet rustle up a peaty, grassy smell, the colours and patterns of all the shimmying things seems to cast a spell. You’re not just sitting and listening. The living land seems to invite all our senses to zig and zag.
So you can take in a surge of words, and then your body gets to move and the crowd starts to murmur. It just feels like the words get to breathe, and they become part of a larger chorus, and somehow that feels enlivening and good.