Fiona Tinwei Lam
Biography
Fiona Tinwei Lam is the author of three poetry collections, Intimate Distances, Enter the Chrysanthemum, and Odes & Laments. Her poems, nonfiction and fiction appear in over 40 anthologies, including The Best Canadian Poetry (2010, 2020 and the 2017 Best of the Best Anniversary Collection). Her work has won TNQ’s Nick Blatchford prize and been shortlisted for the City of Vancouver Book Award and has been thrice selected for BC’s Poetry in Transit. Besides editing The Bright Well: Contemporary Canadian Poems About Facing Cancer, she has co-edited two anthologies of nonfiction. She has also authored a children's book, The Rainbow Rocket. Her award-winning poetry videos have screened at festivals locally and internationally. fionalam.net
Poetics Statements
[Fiona Tinwei Lam, credit Rebecca Bissett-col
Author photo of Fiona Tinwei Lam, smiling at the camera. Lam is wearing a blue cardigan with black leaves printed across, and a pearl necklace. In the background, there is a garden, slightly blurred, of dirt, grass, and a tall shoot of pink flower blooms.
“A poem might start from a single image or a line and grow from there, or be a response to a photograph in the news, or a work of art or literature or a written prompt. Revising and editing are an essential next step in the journey. Revision focuses a poem to bring out its inherent truth: where does the true poem actually begin and end; what structure would best bring out its underlying spirit; what is unnecessary; what needs reordering; how are the transitions; does the rhythm flow; is the imagery vivid and fresh; how can I energize the poem (variation, repetition, fragmentation, point of view)? Editing is about fine-tuning: are there too many adjectives and adverbs versus strong nouns and verbs; are there any clichés, inconsistencies, unnecessarily repeated or extraneous words, formatting, spelling or grammar glitches? I’ve revised poems long after they’ve been published.
It’s rare that the initial draft of a poem matches my vision of what its potential. It takes time to either carve away at it to get to its essence, or to slowly unpack and add layers of sensory imagery and meaning—or both simultaneously. Every word counts in a poem. Syntax matters. White space matters. My initial drafts that might fill a page might end up being less than a quarter of a page long due to the compression necessary to make it flow with the intensity and clarity necessary to give it resonance and power. Or a short draft might end up being expanded to add depth and complexity. Ultimately, I strive to make my poems seem organic: to sound and read as if they could only sound or read as they do with those words and images. As Coleridge famously said, poetry is “the best words in the best order.””
From: "Enter the Chrysanthemum", by Fiona Tinwei Lam. Video by Alan Goldman and Rob Postma
“‘A poetry of loam where water can sing. A poetry of bread where everyone may eat.”
- Pablo Neruda
Pablo Neruda links poetry with soil, water, and bread—the necessaries of life. Across cultures, borders, and time, good poems have provided humankind with sustenance for the spirit and the heart. He advocates for poetry that is accessible, democratic and unpretentious, and that acknowledges readers’ thirst and hunger for meaning, wonder, delight, and solace.
Neruda’s odes to ordinary things have inspired me ever since I was introduced to his wonderful “Ode to My Socks” many years ago. In Ancient Greece, odes were written in an elevated style, and performed publicly for state occasions. In contrast, Neruda’s odes are simple, clear, informal—and magical. They retain the song-like nature of the ode, but celebrate humble objects, honouring the place, role, and significance of things we so often take for granted, making the ordinary extraordinary through the alchemy of poetry. His odes inspired me to rediscover wonder in the quotidian through writing my own poems about ordinary things—poems of celebration to counterbalance my other poems of despair about habitat loss, global warming, plastic pollution, and cancer.
As political, social, and environmental crises have become more acute over recent years, the celebration of beauty in the world around us has become even more essential. What we take for granted may one day vanish. Writing poetry is not merely fiddling while Rome burns: rather, it’s a way to acknowledge what is at risk and what has been lost, to stand up against the enormous tide of greed, violence and inhumanity threatening to inundate the planet. We poets have the power to recognize life and beauty, even if at times we feel powerless to prevent them from being destroyed.”
Sample of Poet's Work
Colostrum
For four days, the baby’s parched lips
worked my stinging skin. Pressed up beside me,
he suckled away sleep with his thirst. Those hospital nights
filled with the shrugs of nurses,
and ragged dreams of barren riverbeds, receding tides
and always the child in my arms,
shrinking slowly, a small sack of wailing.
The end of the fourth day,
my breasts suddenly transformed
into throbbing stones, yet still no milk.
In the shower, heat pelted away at the ache
while I willed hardness to melt.
Then they came, those rich yellow drops
my body had made and could finally offer,
the first sprinkle of rain on hungry soil,
and I watched my child with the eyes of all mothers
through fierce histories of loving and fear--
war-time queues, futile miles to a muddy well,
dirt sifted and sifted again
to find the stray kernels of corn
to pound into flour for the family’s
single precious meal of the day.
Published in Intimate Distances (Nightwood Editions, 2002) and reprinted in Force Field: 77 Women Poets of BC (Mother Tongue Publishing, 2013) in the anthology White Ink: Anthology of Poems on Motherhood, ed. Rishma Dunlop (Demeter Press, 2007) and in the US anthology, Honoring Motherhood (Skylight Paths, USA, 2008).
Chrysanthemum
Rolls of rice paper in the corner,
jars of soft-haired brushes,
elegant cakes of watercolour,
black inkstone at the centre.
My mother held the brush vertically,
never slant, arm and fingers poised,
distilling bird or breeze into
diligent rows of single characters.
Hours rippled. Years of practice urged
the true strokes forth-- stiff bamboo
now waving in white air, cautious lines
now ribboning silk folds of a woman’s gown.
My favourite of her paintings
was of chrysanthemums. They began
as five arcs of ink, long breaths in the emptiness
alluding to stem and blossom. Then,
from the finest brush, the outline of each petal.
Flesh flowed from the fuller one, tipped
with yellow or lavender, until every crown
bloomed amid the throng of leaves.
If only I had been paper,
a delicate, upturned face stroked
with such precise tenderness.
Published in Cha Literary Magazine, and in book form in Enter the Chrysanthemum (Caitlin Press, 2009) and reprinted in Forcefield: 77 BC Women Poets (Mother Tongue Publishing, 2013), in East Asian Mothering: Politics & Practices (Demeter Press, 2014) and in in Cha:An Asian Literary Journal online magazine (May, 2010)
Lost Stream
Forgotten one, you remember what you were:
mossy banks, fringes of fern, rivulets, riffles,
cool passage for salmon. On a map
of old streams spilling out to the strait
you were one of hundreds
of capillaries threading through earth
muscled with rock, lavished with forest.
Then the city donned concrete
masks, civilized grids. Smothered
into park, you were culverted, diverted, yoked,
locked into pipes while we romped above.
But you refuse to be choked
under clearcut, brushcut tracts. Playing fields
soak back into marsh. Bog permeates playground.
One by one, oaks topple in sodden soil,
upended roots like tangled claws.
Submerged roads around you
ripple in wind. Water above seeks
water below. Deep underground,
you gurgle, chortle, ready to rise.
Published in Odes & Laments (Caitlin Press, 2019) and Sweet Water: Poems for the Watersheds, ed. Yvonne Blomer (Caitlin Press, 2020).
