Wild Poetry
“Eleonore Schönmaier’s [third] poetry collection, Dust Blown Side of the Journey, is the work of a poet who has mastered her craft…featuring a beautifully elaborate intertwining of images…connections continue from poem to poem…akin to recurring melodies or riffs across distinct movements of a composition…poems both captivating and moving.” –Emma Skagan (read the full article in The Malahat Review)
Photo by Eleonore Schönmaier
“Conversation” (from Treading Fast Rivers), “Migrations” (from Wavelengths of Your Song) and “When I Reach” (from Dust Blown Side of the Journey) have all been chosen for Poetry Pause by the League of Canadian Poets.
“With Poetry Pause, the League will circulate one poem a day, Monday-Friday, each month, all year – starting late 2018. For your daily dose of poetics, you can subscribe to our Poetry Pause newsletter or find the poems on our website where they will be archived.” If you wish to receive the Poetry Pause poems please sign up here.
Photo by Eleonore Schönmaier
On September 5, 6, & 7 the St Andrews New Music Ensemble performed three concerts featuring Emily Doolittle’s Conversation (based on a poem by Eleonore Schönmaier from Treading Fast Rivers).
“Conversation is a 12-minute work for soprano and chamber ensemble, based on the sounds of grey seals (Halichoerus grypus) in haul-out. Schönmaier’s poem explores what Doolittle describes as a ‘slightly uncanny sympathy between humans and grey seals’.”
Conversation
Are my thoughts so noisy they murmur
outside my body?—keening like distant
voices, like wind through buoys.
Each moment carries its own frame.
On the shoals I count fifty seals,
their grey pod-bodies entwined.
Is it their thoughts or mine
that I hear?—a longing
so ardent and spacious. The past
and its regret talks
back to me: panting, insistent, it holds
my hand. I eavesdrop in the lapse
between one wake-up call and the next.
What language emanates from the seals
as they pleasure in the sun? A vibration
shuddered in the air that lures
me back to or away from myself,
a conversation fetched home.
From Treading Fast Rivers (McGill-Queen’s University Press)
What We Don’t Think of Packing
but take along anyway: the shoes on our feet,
the fifty-four bones in our hands, the memory of
the colour of the sheets on our beds. We prepare
for flight as if we and the customs officers are the only
ones who will ever open our baggage. Nightshirts close
to the suitcase’s zipper so when we arrive we can quickly
begin to restore what we thought we’d lost. Certain kinds
of loss we bargain for in transit: eight hours of sleep,
the memory of where we parked the car—
In Canada a man stands at the end
of his driveway talking to a neighbour: I received
the call—search and rescue. There was no screaming, no
arms hanging loose. The helicopter shone light on the water
and we picked up what there was—
When I walk the beach with the kids
I know what I’m looking for.
I found a piece of plane and slipped it into my pocket.
Didn’t tell the kids—a scrap
the size of a two dollar coin.
Loss jangling, except it’s in a currency
no one else understands even if they were on the boat
when he cupped the child’s sneaker in his palm, insisted
the police promise to return it to the family—We never
anticipate losing the memories of what we have already lost—
From Treading Fast Rivers (McGill-Queen’s University Press)
Heartwood has now been published. The anthology includes my poem “Knot” and is over 300 pages which includes beautiful original photographs of trees. You can order your own copy online.
“Heartwood is a Canadian anthology of poems that celebrates trees. Published by the League of Canadian Poets, this anthology features poets from every province and territory celebrating the immeasurable value trees have for the environment and for the soul. Poets wrote about a tree they loved as a child, a park they sat in, or a forest they go to for invigoration and inspiration. The planet needs trees to survive. Poets from across Canada have written poems to ensure that the message is heard. Compiled and edited by Lesley Strutt. Foreword by Diana Beresford-Kroger. Original photographs by Chuck Willemsen.”
“Time in music is one way to organise chaos, and musical polyphony uses multilayering as a form of time travel. This is similar to the layering found in life-retrieved memory. Time for me isn’t linear but the coexistence of multiple layers and I write poetry because I want this polyphony.” Paul Hamann quotes Eleonore Schönmaier in his feature about her writing in the newly released issue of The New Quarterly .
Editor Pamela Mulloy in her introductory essay for the issue writes: In “Live-Retrieved Memory: The Poetry of Eleonore Schönmaier” Paul Hamann examines his former student’s work and delves into her theory on a “live-retrieved” memory, a conjoining that might be found with merging the past from our letters and journals together with the live memories we carry with us through the years.
Photograph by Eleonore Schönmaier
The landscape of my childhood is now a UNESCO Mixed World Heritage Site. The nearly 30,000 square kilometers in the heart of Canada’s boreal forest is designated as having “outstanding universal value to all of humanity.”
“There are few great forests left in the world. And even fewer where indigenous people have been taking care of the land for thousands of years. But such a rare place exists…In Ojibwe we call it Pimachiowin Aki (Pim–MATCH–cho–win Ahh–KEY) or “the land that gives life.” Ojibwe (Anishinaabe) Elders teach us that the land provides fresh water, healthy food and clean air for many people near and far.”
Weightless
At the water’s edge
is an empty canoe
open to the pouring
in of starlight:
it’s inconceivable to bail
the light out
once it has been
(however briefly)
carried—
From Wavelengths of Your Song (McGill-Queen’s University Press)
“To defend poetry means to defend a fundamental gift of human nature, that is, our capacity to experience the world’s wonder, to uncover divinity in the cosmos and in another human being, in a lizard, in chestnut leaves, to experience astonishment and to stop still in that astonishment for an extended moment or two. The human race won’t perish if this capacity withers—but it will be weaker, worse off, different from what it was throughout those millennia when every civilization placed poetry, in whatever form, at the heart of all human endeavor.”
—Adam Zagajewski
Photograph by Eleonore Schönmaier
Lost
They ski through the northern boreal
forest, over frozen
lake after frozen lake
until finally where the ice cracks
like gun shots beneath
their skis, and their eye lashes
are thick with white frost, the man
slows and says to his ten
year old daughter, “If my heart
stops beating right now
what will you do?”
She says, “I’ll continue
forward.” “No,” he says, “you’ll
follow our tracks safely
back.” And years later
after his pulse
has stilled she again finds
the way
to the deep safe cold
of this heart warmed place.
from Wavelengths of Your Song (McGill-Queen’s University Press)
Photograph by Eleonore Schönmaier
Postcard Image Designed by Megan Fildes
“Poem in Your Pocket Day is an annual initiative organized by the Academy of American Poets to celebrate National Poetry Month. The League of Canadian Poets is very excited to be have joined this initiative…adding some of our favourite Canadian poems and poets to the mix!”
Eleonore Schönmaier’s “Migrations” is part of this years Poem in Your Pocket brochure plus the League of Canadian Poets has created a postcard version.
It’s easy to carry a poem, share a poem, or start your own Poem in Your Pocket Day event. Visit the Academy’s website for a full history of the program and other materials. Here are some ideas of how you might get involved:
