Elee Kraljii Gardiner

G-L

Aug 30

Elee Kraljii Gardiner is smiling into the camera. She is wearing a green silk shirt with purple and pink flowers, before a patterned blue background.

Biography

Elee Kraljii Gardiner is an author, editor, and creative mentor whose award-winning books of poetry include Trauma Head and serpentine loop, and the anthologies Against Death: 35 Essays on Living and V6A: Writing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. She is also the author of three chapbooks: Residence, WATCHER with Gary Barwin, and Trauma Head: the medical file.

A frequent collaborator, Elee also creates visual and installation poetry. Central to her practice is community work: Elee founded Thursdays Writing Collective, sits on the advisory Board of the Andover Bread Loaf Program, and currently runs The Whole Cloth reading series, in addition to the previous Thunderbird Pop-Up, Postal Code, and Cross Border Pollination reading series. She is a recipient of the Lina Chartrand Award for Social Justice and the Pandora’s Collective BC Writer Mentor Award. She holds an MA in Hispanic Studies from the University of British Columbia and an MFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts. Originally from Boston, Elee lives in Canada where she directs Vancouver Manuscript Intensive. eleekg.com

Poetics Statement

Poetry is not a genre so much as a methodology for my interaction with the world. I am not a “solo” writer: I’m in it for the transmission and reception. Because I didn’t write my first poem until I was 38 years-old, I sometimes envy the people whose focus took hold in their teens (there is so much writing to do, so many books to read!). I am keen to pull in elements from other parts of my artistic life and tend to veer into genres that speak to these other interests. Collaborating with singers, musicians, film makers, sound artists, skaters, architects, and others, reveals my proclivities, tendencies, concerns and also my facilities, which is a great check-in for where I am or where I want to go next.

My first collection, serpentine loop, is a “first book” in the way it asserts the field of interests that brought me to the page. My second collection, Trauma Head, dropped into my lap fully formed as a project—it’s a year-long poem-memoir. As I waited for it to go to print I knew I had to keep my hands busy so I made a chapbook of related content that experiments with visual poetry, something that shows up in both previous collections in graphic elements. This opened a field of ideas, including thinking more about sound, such as playing with possible readings of the unreadable marks on the page of Trauma Head. Lately, I’ve been examining the law of thermodynamics as proof of the passage of time by observing rot, decay, and change in papers and poems that are submerged in water, honey, or dirt.

At the core of all my poetry is the fact that I’m fascinated by materiality, the kinesthetic and the haptic, and the non-inked processes of creation such as interaction. How does one thing affect another? How can I document a process of change? How am I changed by the reading and the writing and the poem itself? These questions are telescopes and microscopes into the poem that allow a galaxy of emotion to explode in tiny, quotidian detail. Perhaps my poetic process is one of equivalences: observing a condition and asking “how can I make a poem do that?”

Sample of Poet's Work

A Mirror of Hieronymus Bosch

Some miles from Salem I ran shoeless through the snow, spilling.
Red wine pinked our trail along the Charles River
where my uncle died.
The city was stopped, muffled and snow-blind,
adults long evaporated—the city never darkens in a snowstorm
but becomes absent. We filled all the spaces
with our suggestions, we were hilarious and unregulated.
Somewhere in snow I lost my red flats. I loved them.
We were a bright gang, and everything was hysterical.
I reached for a girl—she was late teens, I was early.
Six o’clock ringing from Old North Church. Cardinals
and crows trapped in white. My feet never felt the cold.
She piggy-backed me over the Fiedler bridge,
I must have been singing. Our cheeks appled up
in the elevator. My toes left feral marks on the carpet.
Oh how they burned when they came to life and how I danced,
hopping foot to foot! I would do anything to make it stop.
She threw me on the bed and began to chafe them
and I rolled my eyes back so far I could see pinned above my bed
the tshirt Billy Idol signed for me at Strawberries Records and Tapes.
I giggled through yelps and she warmed my feet
with her tongue.At midnight we made rye toast,
tomato soup, gulping mugs of water so we wouldn’t
have headaches in the morning. Our lips burned
dark from kissing. When we woke up
the plows were doing their work, scraping.
Phones ringing, everything ordinary again.

(published in Long Con and Best Canadian Poetry)

Work of Rain

The beach whispers,
the truth of this city is in the grey.

We live within
a skirt pleated
by the work of rain. Wet hems

us, becomes familiar
as mother’s footsteps.

To survive here

is to navigate a water-pruned cartography.
We arrive at destinations flattened
by run-off, tell ourselves, it’s not so bad.
Redirect seasonal affective disorder,
gloat. Think we are not so far
from nature, point to forest paths
carved by paws and hooves, parks
exhaling whorls of runners, multimillion-
dollar structures cantilevered
on cliffs mined with otter slides.

In the empty house a microwave pings, the only
company in a cold afternoon. Sleep
precludes dreams. We return to bed, joyless,
to sheets crushed with damp
sadness, a routine velour.

Downtown, corridors rush in plumb lines
to foreign markets and conglomerates.

A few blocks east, alleys collect footprints.

The map forms as we use it, etched
by the flow—not of water,
but what we do to each other.

Long lines circle the church;
tributaries winnow to
nothing.
Chainlink.
Behind the dumpster,
the surprise of human life
and what it can weather.

What do I know of loneliness?

Gulls gather in the rain. Together
they alight, flock and wait on the diamond
for a man and his bread. Come,
watch his hand glimmer while
he casts a fortune of crumbs.

Ask me what I can trust so much
as his defiant act of communion.

(p.81, serpentine loop, also on Poetry in Transit)