Cecily Nicholson
Biography
Cecily Nicholson is the author of four books, and past recipient of the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, and the Governor General’s Literary Award for poetry. She has held the Ellen and Warren Tallman Writer in Residence at Simon Fraser University, and Writer in Residence at the University of Windsor. She teaches at Emily Carr University of Art + Design and collaborates with community impacted by carcerality and food insecurity. Her most recent book, HARROWINGS, considers rural and black experience.
Poetics Statement
“Poetry for me is a process of situating everyday matter into scale and contexts that are returning and systemic as well as cosmic and entropic. I am lifted by this effort; it is difficult, necessary, and often joyful and comforting. In conversation with the material of the page and the value of making material, I’ve long been inclined to approach letters, language, and forms to surface and sharpen my legibility, and to manage my aching hypervigilance. Dissonance can flow. This is part of my voice.
I love collaborating and my practice is entwined with artists, writers, readers and beyond. While I feel passionate, often the work involves slow observation and research. It tends to manifest in performance and community long before it is printed on a page.
I honour experiential and ancestral histories of racialized and gendered labour. Each new project is an opportunity to regenerate memory, relations, care, connection, and even soil and structure, as the poems advance collectively. My poetic future continues to learn especially from land and beings industry has sought to dominate. Against extractive conceit—in poetry, I hone my refusal of apathy, provincialism, inferiority, and fragility. May I always tow lines attuned to old and new music.”
Sample of Poet's Work
select poems, from Wayside Sang (2017)
road shoulders
verges interrupt progress
wander into the ditches
form a breach
the picture plane interval in transit-space
heaping dirt
onto the edges of a wildfire
smoulder on the verge, taking up trees
~
where things were found ourselves those days stretched
across a bond
semi-trailer black with burgundy flame detail all out
everyday felt to two cans of coke and a mickey of rye
strings of substance pull through black holes
for home
so long mould the damp sprung
there was no controlling the heat or the bedbug
flashbacks
shared laundry and all the domestic tasks made public
hit the road
hove time
discipline to muscle
won’t have to drive too far
just ’cross the border and into the city
wherever
the final destination takes this it’ll be higher ground
~
land lifts the road
rises to meet
where you are at
passenger
how did you come to be
so out of reach
in just a few years
well I remember well
those lips
a seal of callous
on a mouth thin-seeming
till the bottom one
plumps out
how did you get to be so free
and far
from hand-coursed thigh
in Hopper summer light
~
power lines held by birds
of prey the hostile expanse above
ditches teeming floral invasive
wayside fleurs
late summer the shoulder sang
holds breeze by
the course of the drive
ravelling winds furl sparse treetops
semi-trailers startle traffic to attention
righted to the middle steady
a point of calm
a sense of pedal to headrest
never lost hope of going somewhere
~
a waiting trench the front across the dash
deep open road through the window
on the glass
bokeh crystals of settlement
streaming past mirror side appears larger
after all the lakes hold ashes and fur
long route tapers to a blue-strip august
the walk along here I was a daughter then
along a highway
on the route she shines on
leaning into the path as nettle heavy with rain
