That’s not how we read: a conversation with poet Catherine Owen
“Belonging isn’t static, or fixed, but always in flux and shaped by what stirs you, what you need, and also what you can give to others.”
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Welcome back to my recurring segment, “That’s not how we read,” in which I chat with writers I find interesting about books I love, regardless of when the books were published. Because we, the book lovers, don’t read in an orderly fashion, and great books don’t have an expiry date.
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This month I’m excited to talk with my friend Catherine Owen, a wonderful poet and very fun human. Catherine is the author of seventeen collections of poetry and prose, including her latest, Moving to Delilah (Freehand Books, 2024), which was nominated for the Al Purdy and the Robert Kroetsch prizes for poetry. She also teaches form poetry, is a freelance editor (I’ve recommended her to a number of writers, who have given her glowing reviews), and reviews books for various magazines including Alberta Views. This Fall, Wolsak & Wynn will release her hybrid-memoir, Sixteen Homes.
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LESLIE: Catherine, welcome to The Green(tree) Room interrogation! You’re my first poet in this series.
CATHERINE: WOOO!
LESLIE: I have an extra-special love for Moving to Delilah, having been inside your beautiful home, Delilah, many times, having given you flower seeds and the occasional divided plant from my yard, and having swapped garden pics and tales with you for years. But it’s such a universal collection in its exploration of new beginnings, of the search for roots, and for meaning, and for connectedness wherever we land – a reader doesn’t need my level of intimacy with your home to connect deeply with these gorgeous, sharp, thoughtful poems.
CATHERINE: Wowza! What a wonderful opportunity to chat with you Leslie. Yes, you have indeed been a most adored guest in my home, Delilah, over the past eight years, at events and parties, as visiting cat patter and bringer of garden delights.
LESLIE: Let’s start at the beginning of the collection, with the first poem, “Exodus: a directive.” It’s a dark, clear poem about the impossibility of being an artist – really, of young people living any kind of affordable, satisfying life – in Toronto or Vancouver.
The city has no heart now, it can do without colour, light,
sound,
The baked-in vibe of CanLit – for all artists in Canada, really – has seemed to me to imply that writers must go to Toronto or Vancouver to “make it.” Talk to me about this, about your decision to leave Vancouver and come to Edmonton, to build your creative life and work in an affordable and wildly creative province that still always feels like it’s sitting artistically at the edges of the cool kids’ conversations.
CATHERINE: It’s true that the notion once was where we might go, as artists, to “make it,” whatever that implied, and now I think that paradigm has shifted to where we “need” to go to survive instead.
I first left Vancouver in 2006 and stayed in Edmonton until 2009 as a renter. At that time, whether due to youth or the political and cultural climate in general, Edmonton actually felt like the “coolest kid” to me, open as its residents were to attending a multimedia series I hosted every month and to just being SO OPEN to almost anything artsy.
LESLIE: I love to hear this. Maybe because I’ve lived my entire adult life in Alberta I can’t see it from the outside, but I’ve always felt such an adventurous and artistic spirit permeating the province, despite our current challenges with separatist lunatics and the like. And Blaine and I also chose Edmonton because it feels like such an arts hub.
CATHERINE: It certainly has been a hub for me, back then especially! So when I determined to buy a house in 2018 and knew there was NO WAY I could afford even the tiniest outhouse in Vancouver, I instantly thought, well, I could return to Edmonton. There are older sweet affordable homes there and hey, I know people! Owning my gorgeous 1905 house still feels like a miracle to me, that I can have the walls painted any colour, host a range of events and grow a spectacular garden. The scene has shifted somewhat however, with me being older (what?!) and many having moved away, but it’s still a pretty happening place for the arts. Accepting being torn between places is part of it all.
LESLIE: I’m glad you mentioned your multimedia arts series, because I want to talk about that more – about your commitment to hosting artistic events at Delilah. You regularly invite local and travelling writers to read, and pair them with musicians and visual artists. These events are always such wonderful fun and I’ve met so many interesting and talented people there. It’s a lot of work, though. What makes you so committed to doing these events? And tell us about the title of the series, which I’ve read at a few times: Trobairitz.
CATHERINE: I have co or solo hosted events since the mid-90s at coffee shops, bars, living rooms and even in my bed 😉 Home events are the most satisfying to organize and host for me as one has more command over the space, few limitations and it just all happens in a more relaxed, convivial place. Yes, it is work, but mostly joyous. So really my only issue with hosting events is when participants flake out too close to the date, cancelling without good reason, or occasionally when people have disrespected my home by making messes or refusing to leave until late (why I now have afternoon-only events??).
The melange of all the arts and the mysterious way they echo each other and the catalytic connections that are made at the series are pure magic. My most recent multimedia series is called 94th Street Trobairitz after the female troubadours from medieval Occitan, a paired event to the one I used to host for three years in Edmonton, 44th Avenue Troubadour.
LESLIE: See, one of the things I love about hanging out with you is learning arcane words. My phone now knows how to spell – and will autofill – “Trobairitz” in my calendar.
CATHERINE: SO important. THE PHONE MUST LEARN! But recently, I decided to take a break from running this series as I felt the pool of willing performers was drying up, so I began a touring poets only event that happens at random with poetry, a Q & A and writing time, called the Impromptu series. Nothing works forever. Flexibility is essential to maintaining energy!
LESLIE: I’ve heard you read “Dedication to a Home” aloud a number of times and it never fails to move me. These lines in particular feel like a primal call that I feel in my bones every time:
When I bought this house I wanted to own it like I’ve learned to own my body,
so I could say no to any non-agreed shifting of boundaries, so I could define
where the art would hang, the books slot, each knick-knack assume its magical place,
so no one, no man could say to me again we’re done because I’m a wrong
kind of woman and with his hands or feet and voice kick me out
And I hold this section in companionship with your line from “Two Homes: a corona” (a poem we’ll talk about more later on):
When you look around you feel at home, allowed, contained –
These are beautiful examples of how you explore dual notions throughout this book – home and displacement, independence and companionship, the twinning of past and present, ocean and prairie. And you bring it all together at the end, with the gorgeous pairings of “Coda: The Fine Print” and its lines:
– you will
have to hold both now, carry two buckets: BC & Alberta,
and you the teetering fulcrum
and “Coda: Home, 2018 – 2023,” in which you describe yearning for each place when you’re in the other.
Talk to me about belonging, and what we claim and what claims us.
CATHERINE: I love to separate the word belonging into two words “be longing” because I believe belonging isn’t static, or fixed, but always in flux and shaped by what stirs you, what you need, and also what you can give to others by knowing place in that moment of time. I belonged in Vancouver because I was born there and the mountains, ocean, forests and my family all bonded me. But I longed to have an actual house to call my own as I knew I couldn’t root down deeply enough within a rental property. The ache for that adult belonging, a kind of gentle claiming of a realm, meant I had to move to a land that would not utterly gouge me for the basics of a roof and walls. So I belong here too now, in Edmonton, in Delilah, and like one of those matryoshka dolls, there are entities of belonging within me, of varying sizes, but none cancel each other out or replace the other. They are all essential forms of being fully alive in the world.
LESLIE: That’s beautifully put. I spent my childhood in various mountainous parts of the interior of BC, and while I have grown to deeply love the prairies and the huge skies here, I need a lot of trees to be happy, and I don’t think I could ever live in a city that didn’t have a river running through it, for the lushness and ecosystems they bring.
I do love a good piece of gardening art, and Moving to Delilah has a whole section on gardening, among other irresistible explorations – gardening is such a creative process, and can be as exhausting and sometimes heartbreaking as creating art. You and I both find tremendous joy and satisfaction in our gardens, and the wildlife they host. (And we both came to it a bit later in life, as many people do). Let’s talk about our love affairs with bees and trees and flowers – especially the sunflowers! – and with eating food we’ve grown. Are these connections more important than ever as the world speeds up and gets ever more irrevocably online and people feel (and sometimes choose to be) more and more disconnected?
For example, your poem, “Mistakes already made in the garden by May 5th” is such a great title, and the poem feels like it came straight out of your gardening journal – it makes me laugh, but also wince in sympathy, especially at the worry of this line:
Did I cut off a beetle’s wings by digging too vigorously?
CATHERINE: Ahhh the garden. I have always been a nature child but never wholly dug in (tee hee) to planting and harvesting gardens until seven years ago. The land that Delilah sat upon was, quite frankly, underused. Mostly grass, a few trees, random beds mainly filled with plastic-raddled soil and a few perennials amid weeds. I started by getting a few fruit trees and popping in some spinach and zucchini seeds. And by now my little orchard has grown from cherries to apples to plums and pears; there are haskap and sask and raspberry bushes; goldfinger, portulaca, burning bushes return each year too. I cannot say I am a superb vegetable gardener, perhaps because I value the shade of the trees too much. But some forgive me anyway: peas, cucumbers. And this year, amaranth! What I adore about gardening is the hope that underlies the practice. Even after this summer of storms, hope remained and eventually, though there were losses, flowers still bloomed and I managed small harvests. There are always surprises, mysteries. And every year I plant more sunflowers and yank out more grass.
LESLIE: Say no to the grass! When we bought our house (a new infill, at the time) I told the builder to cancel his plans to sod the back yard, and spent the next few years planning and planting it. It’s now a chaotic mass of leaf and bloom and vegetable planters. I keep meaning to start a gardening journal but I don’t do it, and then each spring I’m constantly asking myself, “Is this normal? Was last year sunnier or rainier, or am I making things up?”
CATHERINE: I DO keep a garden journal and it is definitely necessary to remind oneself that the weather can get nasty every year and that one has grown to greater consciousness of other life forms and how to nurture them as best one can in this era where so many seem to want to detach from the planet, to give up in the face of climate change. Garden as many days as you can! Truly, an antidote.
LESLIE: Truly. My version of the “touch grass” mantra is to walk among the flowers and talk to the bees.
One of the things that strikes me over and over when reading your work, but also in our conversations as friends, is your commitment to finding meaning in everything. Maybe commitment isn’t the right word: you just do it, it’s the way that you move through the world. So often in our conversations, I think or say, “yes, I do that too,” but you take the time to write these moments out and to speak them aloud, and to dig deep – even, as in some of the poems about the provenance of Delilah, where you researched your home’s history in various archives. What’s my question? I dunno – I just want you to talk to me about the immersive way you move through the world and how your poetry informs that, and how that informs your poetry, because I see the two as an unbroken circle.
CATHERINE: Having written poetry since I was about four years old, me and poems have never felt divisible. And I truly don’t think you can be a poet, maybe any kind of connective artist, if you don’t pay attention (from the film Ladybird: “attention is a form of love”), or feel awe to invest yourself in everything. Even when the meaning I find appears silly, say in my naming of trees (Fred is my apple, Scarlett my cherry), I do this to locate another level of focusing upon whatever the entity may be. Sometimes I feel cynical about people, but never about nature or art. The poetry and other genres of writing and creating offer me a way in, how to say it, transform it, make a thing that perhaps causes others to want to look in and go Oh!
LESLIE: I want to talk about one of your poems, “Kelley’s Bathtub, Jarvis Lake, Hinton, AB.” In it, you’re looking around a lakeside scene, noting the scruffiness, the unsatisfactory nature of the humans, the scene, your own part in it. You have a moment of near happiness then it fades against the reality again, and you close with these lines:
Poets are awful people.
There is no possible sufficiency for us.
Talk to me about these lines, which made me laugh.
CATHERINE: Poets are hungry lil beasties! Artists in general are I think. Possibly I’ve existed in a state of yearning for the ineffable, the inextinguishable, all my life. That burning has made me super restless: to have ALL the experiences and make ALL the art. It’s kind of a funny, sardonic comment too. What makes us awful because we cannot be filled? We can be hard on those around us I suppose. Many partners have sighed at me: “Why can’t you just be and not think all the time?”
LESLIE: Agh. Me too, in the past. It’s not going to happen, sir.
CATHERINE: Impossible! And if lines come into my head no matter what I am doing they shall be written down so get outta my way. Ha.
LESLIE: This is the beauty of being partnered with fellow artists – they see that faraway look in our eyes and know to get out of the way – or, in Blaine’s case, to start talking nonsense to create some white noise so I can think. He’s very proud of knowing by the glazed look on my face when he should switch to white noise.
CATHERINE: Just another one of his brilliant qualities!
LESLIE: You write about contemporary topics we can all connect with – a woman recovering from grief, first-time home ownership, gardening, building an artistic life and connecting with your neighbourhood, the pull of past and present – and you use a variety of classic poetry forms to do so: corona, haibun, linked haikus, pantoum, sonnet, abecedarium, sestina. I’m curious about these uses – what comes first, the form or the content, or do they feed each other? And why are you drawn to these forms?
For example, the form in “Two Homes: a corona” links each stanza (or, more properly, each sonnet) by using the final line of the previous sonnet as the first line in the next sonnet, while moving its meaning in a new direction. The result is gorgeous – the repetition, the rhythm and the build create such a satisfying, immersive feeling for your reader. Similarly, your use of the pantoum form, with its different pattern of repetitive lines, creates such rhythm and flow.
Talk to me about these choices you make to marry contemporary topics with classic forms – it’s a level of craft I very much admire as a writer, but also find extremely effective as a reader.
CATHERINE: Forms. One of my life’s passions. When I first started writing seriously, I literally knew nothing about them and wrote in a lyrical, free verse style. The first form I became obsessed by was the North American ghazal as popularized by John Thompson in Canada and I published a book of them, Shall, in 2006. Then Joe Rosenblatt got me writing collaborative sonnets with him in 2008. After my partner, Chris, died of a drug overdose in 2010, I really delved into forms and they assisted me in my confused, relentless grieving. I wrote a whole, long-discarded, manuscript, called The Crackhead’s Book of Forms in which I wrote about the drug in all the forms I could find, using Robin Skelton’s The Shapes of our Singing as a guide.
I’ve never stopped writing in forms since, though not exclusively.
LESLIE: Wow – what an incredible and deeply focused way to use poetry to work through grief – to pull the grief apart and put it back together in different ways.
CATHERINE: Yeah, it really helped me on a personal level, but I essentially had to destroy the manuscript afterwards as I knew it could never be for any reader other than myself. But it taught me so much about what form can do and so by the time I got to writing Moving to Delilah, the poems fell into their forms quite organically. Comparing and contrasting two homes made more sense within the recursiveness of the corona of sonnets, and forms like the pantoum or the villanelle allow, with their repetitions, the chance for return, sonically and psychologically, to images or instances that feel key to a, however elusive, comprehension of the content.
LESLIE: This is a gorgeous way to describe it. I highly encourage every newsletter reader to find examples of these forms – preferably yours! – and read them aloud, and then come back and reread this description.
CATHERINE: Thanks! Yes, Denise Levertov said that form is a “transformation” of content and I like that because it implies a dynamism, an energy exchange, not just a filling of a container but of a pouring into other, never entirely knowable, shapes.
LESLIE: And now we have to talk about your floor-to-ceiling bookshelf with its sliding ladder, something your wonderful partner Michael – who finishes wood by day and is a bass guitar playing rocker by night – had a hand in creating a few years ago in what used to be your dining room but now serves as a party room for your arts gatherings. Sure, fine, you can talk about how happy it makes you. But more specifically, how do you deal with the burning envy every single writer who’s set foot inside Delilah – including, deeply, me – feels about it?
CATHERINE: OOOOO Burning Envy! Everyone needs SOMETHING in their lives that others envy. For instance, I envy your relationship with Blaine, one that involves so much walking and imbibing and plain-to-see artistic compatibility. My partner Michael is a kick ass bassist and yes, he finishes wood, plus has a lot of connections in the wood working world. So he assisted immensely in getting that floor to ceiling bookcase made, plus he refinished its 1924 library ladder that sort of rolls along a track. I mean I NEEDED a massive place to store a whack load of my books as slender Ikea bookshelves were not cutting it. And yes, I have dreamed about a built-in bookcase serving as the core of my home forever (it replaced a set of USELESS coat cupboards). I enjoy the envy, let’s face it. Well let’s call it yearning shall we. And I DO hope for such jealous houseguests for everyone.
LESLIE: Ha! Now we need to do a tour of my house to find what you might be jealous of. I wonder if it’s too late to install a secret staircase?
CATHERINE: I am utterly sure there would be a host of things that would make me dark green with wanting them.
LESLIE: Who are your poetic influences? And what do you like to read other than poetry?
CATHERINE: My poetic mentors were, early on, Emily Dickinson and PK Page, then Robinson Jeffers. For a long time, John Ashbery. I truly feel like a whacky combo of everyone I have read and am reading. I do tend to veer towards poets who prioritize the ear, the sound of words, a certain structural propensity. Right now I’m reading Richard Hugo and Dominique Bechard, Bei Dao and Jorie Graham. Every day I read all the genres I can, beginning with poetry and poetics in the morning and shifting to non-fiction and fiction in the later afternoon. Sometimes a children’s book before bed.
LESLIE: Yes! You loaned me a fun children’s book a few years ago and I went back through my reading list to remind myself of the title but couldn’t find it. What was it again?
CATHERINE: O that was John Bellairs and The Treasure of Alpheus Winterborn. Another obsession, Bellairs’ spooky literate cross-generational tales!
LESLIE: It was an utterly delightful change of pace.
CATHERINE: Currently I’m adoring anything by Olivia Laing who has led me to Derek Jarman’s garden diaries during the time of the AIDS crisis and back into Maggie Nelson. I love when one writer leads me to another in an endless conversation with mystery.
LESLIE: What are you working on now?
CATHERINE: I have two memoirs in various stages that deal with life through certain lenses: poetic forms and gardens. And I am shlepping a book of poems called Northern Noir around (which you and Blaine so amazingly edited). There is a 100 ft Jesus statue, the first female cop in the force, a film worker poet and a historical killer in it, that’s all I will say. Research as the basis for any book is kinda my bag.
LESLIE: I love Northern Noir! It needs to find a home!
CATHERINE: I have hope.
LESLIE: Finally, you’ve got another collection coming out in a few months: Sixteen Homes. I’ll be talking about your Edmonton launch in an upcoming newsletter because you’ve done me and Blaine the honour of asking us to open for you. I’m excited! But tell us a bit about the new book – based on the title I assume you’re continuing to expand your explorations of home as a concept and as a concrete resting place.
CATHERINE: Sixteen Homes is my first memoir via a particular subject matter, in this case, all the homes I have lived in since I was a child to the present. This is the structural arc within which I can elaborate on the housing crisis in cities like Vancouver, teen motherhood, and partner violence while also being able to interview my parents and recount times spent at famous artists’ abodes, like Beatrix Potter’s or Ernest Hemingway’s. And it’s literally littered with photos and other visual tidbits. As for genre, I am calling it a Zuihitsu, the Japanese form where a core subject is elaborated by way of a multiplicity of sub-genres. Hey, why not?
LESLIE: Ah, thank you for teaching us all about one more literary form – I can’t wait to explore it.
CATHERINE: And omygorsh ta for this bubbly repartee that made me truly and deeply delve.
LESLIE: It’s always so much fun talking with you. Next time we’ll have wine!
Buy Moving to Delilah, pre-order Sixteen Homes and learn more about some of Catherine Owen’s various projects on her YouTube page.