Cecily Nicholson is the author of five books, including From the Poplars, recipient of the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, and Wayside Sang, winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award for poetry. Her collaborative practice spans artist-run centres, museum and community arts organizing and education. She is an assistant professor at the School of Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia and the 2025 Holloway Lecturer in the Practice of Poetry at the University of California, Berkeley.
Crowd Source considers the daily migration of crows who, aside from fledgling season, journey across metro Vancouver every day at dawn and dusk. Continuing Nicholson’s attention to contemporary climate crisis, social movements, and Black diasporic relations, this is a text for all concerned with practising ecological futurities befitting corvid sensibilities.
Interviewed by Anna Cavouras
Anna Cavouras (AC): Crowd Source feels reverential of crows, as if they hold a place of importance. This stands in contrast to how they are often viewed, as pests or as forbidding omens. What is it about crows and their daily migrations that inspired this collection? How would you describe corvids?
Cecily Nicholson (CN): People are rarely ambivalent about crows. They hold a place of importance within worldviews, mythology, spirituality, literature, and popular culture pretty much everywhere. Even when cast as pests or portends of doom they carry a kind of power and presence that warrants attention. I am inspired by the ubiquity, resilience, communication, intelligence, and wayfinding of the “deceptively lowly crow” as Philip notes. Corvids know a lot about humans. I was particularly focused on how crows in my area gather and disperse, and how that relates to what is urban and what is ancient.
AC: This is a book worthy of a second or third read. I was struck by how it is not so much a collection of poems around a theme, but these sections feel like an entwined dialogue between poet, reader, corvid. What was your process of writing a book like this? Does this process differ from your other collections?
CN: Thank you for taking time with it. There are several threads entwined in Crowd Source. My process of writing was scaffolded on the Wallace Stevens poem, “13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”. I began each of the thirteen sections in Crowd Source with a page of contemplation in response to each stanza of Stevens’ poem. I enjoyed the experiment, seeing what themes emerged, and allowing those to flow into the research, observation, and notes that I had amassed for the book. Thinking on the “looking” was another overarching concern. Corvids possess theory of mind, fair to say they are also looking (sometimes piercingly, sometimes with indifference…). Additional ways of looking at blackbirds may regard their selfhood and collective awareness. Overall, I treated the research and writing as a study and contemplation. In that regard perhaps it is most like my book, From the Poplars.
AC: There are no titles in the book and very few capitals are used. Would you say a bit about the forms used in this collection and what guided those choices?
CN: I use capitalization and punctuation sparingly. Capitals hold prescribed authority that are not necessarily required within poetry. I often decline their use to allow for smooth lines (visually). I did give “The Still” poem a title. Titles often allude me. When I am writing for journals or art collaborations, poems with titles do surface, but I feel uncomfortable conceiving of poetry in increments when working on book projects. The page is a discrete unit that I find helpful and fun, and I adore the possibility of book form. For Crowd Source, the meandering but intentional threads parallel the study and relations therein. I use sections for pause while following the course of a long poem. The Roman numerals emulating Stevens, combine with the crows themselves in playful design thanks to Talonbooks.
AC: This book is firmly rooted in place with many references to Vancouver and Burnaby life. At the same time, there is a familiarity in the way you explore cities, our relationship to nature, and the climate. What role has place played in your work?
CN: Place is important to me and being somewhere in a relatively safe and grounded way I cannot take for granted. The influence of the city is inescapable, and I feel responsible to where I live and consume. Even as someone raised in (and ever longing for) the rural, I have deep affinities to community within the urban. I have spent most of my adult, working life in the heart of Vancouver. After twenty-five years on this coast, I take up familiar and salient concerns regarding nature and climate in my writing as a matter of care, alertness, and relationship building. Despite a pervasive sense of non-belonging, knowing the impossibility of just settlement, and as an active witness to violence and displacement, entanglement with land and to non-human relations here feels completely necessary. This too is an expression of love for the city. Corvids and humans have coevolved. Crows, crow migrations, the communal roosts of crows exist all over the world. Drawing on this local crow moment bridges to other cities. So far it has been the source of some great conversations as incidentally, conversations about crows so easily slip into topics of displacement, migration, homing, and collectivity, internationally—not to mention mischief, irreverence, and gothic delight.
AC: On page 38, there is a line “it’s later than you think,” and of all the compelling lines in this collection, this one haunts me. Is there a line like that for you?
CN: I appreciate you noticing that line. It draws on the vocabulary of sundial mottos. For this book I listened to crows carefully. In the evenings, especially in the winter, sentinel crows (parents!) seem to do a round up in the neighbourhood—activating, warning, rallying perhaps (these are all my projections). The flurry of vocal activity precedes the arrival of the crows rivering in from the south and coincides with the departure to the roost. It reminds me of Saturdays in early fall, as a kid, a gaggle of us lucky to be out wandering across fields and ditches, stretching our time in the light to the last minute before you best hustle to get home in time for supper and before the sun went down completely. And of course the Anthropocene, and our arrogant floundering. We know the scale has tipped and climate bends increasingly toward calamity, yet we linger still as if upon a precipice and not already falling. I can’t say that there are any particular lines that haunt me, except to say I do write what haunts me.
AC: Do you have any new projects at this time? Would you tell us about your upcoming event at the Victoria Festival of Author?
CN: At this time I’m working on some commissions for journals, a sound/musical collaboration based on a selection from Crowd Source, and a prose work that will see the light next year. I’m otherwise focused on teaching, editing, board and care work, and growing what I can.
For the VFA please join us for Poetry at the Threshold: Witness, Resistance, and Renewal on October 17 with the wonderful Christina Shah, Karen Solie, and moderator Kyeren Regehr of Planet Earth Poetry as we consider, “what can poetry do?”