Karen Solie grew up in southwest Saskatchewan. Her five previous collections of poetry have won numerous awards, including the Griffin Prize. A 2023 Guggenheim fellow, she teaches half-time for the University of St Andrews in Scotland and lives the rest of the year in Canada.
The poems in Wellwater, Karen Solie’s sixth collection, explore the intersection of cultural, economic, and personal ideas of “value,” addressing housing, economic and environmental crisis, and aging and its incumbent losses. Hope, Solie argues, is as necessary to addressing the crises of our time as bearing witness, in poems that celebrate wonder and persistence in the non-human world.
Interviewed by Tara Colborne
Tara Colborne (TC): When I reached out to you to arrange this interview, you shared with me that you were on the family farm in Saskatchewan busy with harvest and then would be traveling back to Scotland where you teach at the University of St. Andrews. How does that life split between places and across geography, time zones, and emotional landscapes inform Wellwater’s pages?
Karen Solie (KS): I researched and wrote much of my previous book, The Caiplie Caves, in Fife, a place not my own. In the poems that followed, I returned to what I still think of as home ground, though I hoped to think about origins, and value, in a different way, one that incorporates story, imagination, relations, that maybe at times is a bit more straightforward, even syntactically less avoidant. Writers are the least capable of describing their work, as we tend to describe what we intended to do, not necessarily what we did. I do worry about how to return to my fascinations without falling into a rut, how to move forward in my thinking. Our emotional landscapes change, as do our physical ones. Poems are written in contexts that change, and are read in them, and reflect those changes. My dad died as I was finishing the book, and some of the poems read differently to me now, and I wrote others in the shadow of that loss, in which the familiar looks different.
I sometimes think that if Frost can’t see birches without them bending, I can’t see a field back home without an empty chemical box blowing through it; but that’s what happens. I can’t photoshop it out to make the picture prettier. I also recognize the gorgeous explosion in the population of cloudy sulphur butterflies this year, the proliferation of sweet clover and alfalfa as a result of unusual July rains, the smoke in the air from wildfires up north, the worldwide fear of authoritarianism, violence, and misinformation, and some of the writers and artists I return to mean differently in changing contexts. I expect that the places I stay in and work inform the book as much as change informs anyone’s life. On a practical level, moving between places by necessity means less time to settle, write, and revise.
TC: Karen, it does not take long on the internet with your name in the search bar to get to some of the most exceptional praise of your work. Nicholas Bradley in The Walrus recently put your name besides Yeats while borrowing from Joseph Brodsky to say of you, “she is the one by whom the language lives.” In the Guardian, Wellwater is listed as one of the best new poetry books (in the world). You are internationally interviewed and published. I wonder how much you pay attention to the press? How does the prairie girl who “drove the watertruck underage to the well / in a swimsuit” (Wellwater) and watched the “Ice Capades with our mothers / in the Medicine Hat arena” (On Faith) manage the realm of the critics and the fangirls?
KS: Nicholas noted that Michael Hofmann had adapted the Brodsky quote in his review of my selected in the LRB in 2014. I had pneumonia when the review was published and nevertheless walked all over Toronto in the winter to find a copy and when I read it in my fevered state I thought I was hallucinating. So yeah, sometimes I do pay attention. But generally I don’t go out of my way to search up press. I’m very grateful for the positive reviews. Depending on how shitty I’m feeling about my work at the time, negative reviews can be hard, even though I believe that if someone is charged with giving their honest opinion, they should give their honest opinion. But there isn’t anything I can do about the book by the time it’s reviewed, and I’m on to the next thing, so am mostly thinking about that. I can’t imagine feeling blasé about people liking my writing. It will always astound me.
TC: You were recently interviewed on Q with Tom Power where he confessed struggling with asking poets what their work was “about”? So I wondered what is your relationship with the about-ness of each piece you are working on. I suppose this is a process question – when do you know what a poem is about? Once you know, does that shift the editing process?
KS: Sometimes I only think about what a poem is “about” when I’m asked about it later. Speaking for myself, a poem needs to have an honest question, or questions, at the core of it, and I guess what it’s about are those questions. Many writers have said this, but if I already have an outcome, an answer, a “message,” going in that I stick to, the poem probably won’t end up being much other than that. Poems can change radically in revision when a complication and/or tonal use of language arises, when things are added or, much more often, edited out. I might discover the real questions quite far along in the process. The poem becomes more about itself, rather than about me, which is a relief. Tomas Tranströmer is among my favourite poets, and his poem “Morning Birds” ends this way:
No emptiness anywhere here.
Fantastic to feel how my poem grows
while I myself shrink.
It is growing, it takes my place.
It pushes me out of its way.
It throws me out of the nest.
The poem is ready.
TC: On October 17th, here at the Victoria Festival of Authors, you will be a part of a panel discussion entitled “Poetry at the Threshold: Witness, Resistance and Renewal” to consider poetry’s place in times of crisis (this feels like all the times now, doesn’t it). In Wellwater you bring to the page landscapes of corporate herbicides, fracking scars, and suburban decay, yet readers will also find hope and the voice of a witness who will persist. How do you hold together these harsh and fragile observations?
KS: In the same way most people do, I expect. We can’t ignore what corporate greed and corruption creates – though maybe if you’re insulated by wealth, you can. For most of us, it’s impossible to ignore because it affects us, and others. Neither can we ignore the beautiful, the miraculous. A poem is part of the world, and I don’t think it should ignore either. It’s not that I insist on each poem including equal parts horror and beauty, sorrow and humour, or anything; but just overall when I’m making notes toward one I can’t separate these things.
TC: In the poem “The Bluebird,” and indeed throughout Wellwater “one had the sense of something slowly, / unrelentingly, being taken apart within.” Philosophical allusions to Zen, Virgil, Rilke, Ancient Greek stories and also religious references are threaded throughout this book. In “Just Say The Word” I momentarily held my breath after these lines: “I have only ever wanted to see things as they are. Until I did / and experience narrowed to a fact impossible to turn around in.” This is, I believe, your seventh collection of poetry – do you feel the more you observe and write about, the more you take apart within, the closer you are getting to seeing things as they are?
KS: It’s my sixth collection. I published a selected poems with Bloodaxe Books in the UK in 2013, which includes poems up to my fourth collection, The Road In Is Not the Same Road Out. But in any case, probably I’m farther away than ever from seeing things as they are, as my scepticism as to whether there is a singular truth to many things, a stable or unchanging way things “are,” has grown. There are, of course, human values we agree on. But those lines from “Just Say the Word” – and this is maybe in retrospect – want to suggest also that we might presume a singular idea of how things are that leaves us no room to move. Certainly sometimes the veil of self-delusion or naivete or presumption or whatever falls away and we can see the real corners we’ve backed ourselves into, or been put in, can see the facts of the situation. But also we might take a narrow view of experience that we translate as “fact,” that is itself the corner, that forecloses possibilities, nuance, and change.
TC: For my last question, I am hoping you have seen the animated film “The Fantastic Mr. Fox.” There is a scene towards the end of the movie, at the peak of the action, where a calm and regal wolf appears, and for a moment, everything slows and we see a sort of truth about beauty, nature and wildness emerge. And that’s it. Then life goes back to chaos. In Wellwater the natural world does this again and again: the weevils, “the clod of earth”, the rat, the caribou, the foxes and vines and yarrow and more – offer a counterpoint to the human urgency and ruin that flows elsewhere. Can you speak to what those moments offer us – a balm, a challenge, a truth?
KS: I haven’t seen it! But I do think real attention to other beings – as opposed to ‘what can I get from this’ – is an ongoing act of respect that offers us these things. That we think about ourselves as other to the natural world has done a lot of harm, and allows us to think of it as a commodity we have rights to, as a priority secondary to the human. This allows feed lots, strip mining, etc., but also that we can pay for a forest bathing session and then drive home and not think about it anymore. I’m not saying forest bathing and strip mining are equivalent. Because none of us can fully exempt ourselves from the activities that drive resource extraction, because we can’t allow rats to proliferate in our apartments despite believing in their right to live, charges of hypocrisy start flying and then everybody shuts down. The non-human may be counterpoint to the human, but is not a separate realm, not a theme park for our self-improvement. I don’t think you’re saying it is, nor that people who enjoy and benefit from time in nature necessarily treat it that way. Those moments of solace, challenge, truth – of attention to others – can occur in a city park, or seeing a young tree growing between the bricks of an old building. Whether experienced in the city, the rural, the wilderness, a mistake we can make is expecting these moments of awareness to always be – even when there is beauty – uncomplicated, wholly comforting, and nice.