Maureen Hynes
Biography
Photography by: Marion Voysey
Maureen Hynes lives in Dish with One Spoon territory/Toronto, and has published a memoir, Letters from China, and five books of poetry. Her most recent is Sotto Voce (Brick Books), a finalist for both the League of Canadian Poets’ 2020 Pat Lowther award and the Golden Crown Literary Award for lesbian writers (U.S). Her first collection¸ Harm’s Way, won the League’s Gerald Lampert Award, and following collections have been shortlisted for the Raymond Souster and twice for the Pat Lowther Awards. Her poetry has been included in over 30 anthologies, including three times in Best Canadian Poems in English (2010, 2016 and 2020), and in The Best of the Best Canadian Poetry (2017). Maureen has given numerous poetry workshops and has taught at the University of Toronto’s Creative Writing certificate program. (www.maureenhynes.com).
Poetics Statement
“Etel Adnan says, “Writing forces one to go the bitter end of what thinks.*” Her statement strikes a chord with me—the demanding mental and emotional striving towards a meaningful and artistic poem, finding its core and form in a morass of cloudy ideas and feelings. An arduous search for a kind of truth, a search that depends on serendipity, leaps of faith, improbable connections. Poetry, of course, isn’t just thinking, it’s making, as much as carpentry or gardening or fashioning cloisonné. What helps me most in getting to the “bitter” end is the richness of other poets’ work—often a line or a poem opens an idea, a topic or a form, and directs me to respond, to take off in a different direction. It feels as a bird might, landing on a feeder or birdbath, then flying off, cleansed or rejuvenated. Maybe both. I try to encourage myself towards exploration and experimentation, but somehow I have to keep re-learning how to trust myself, how to go semi-conscious, allowing whatever wells up to contend for consideration. Not to will anything into being— although sometimes a subject seizes me, and I have to write about it. I do not exclude the political from my poetry—it is a rich and important vein in every culture’s poetry. And of course poetry requires shaping and clarifying and cutting, going through a dozen drafts. But sometimes there are those “gifts,” the poems that arrive in my head ready to be transcribed onto paper or screen. Who can account for those?
https://www.bidoun.org/articles/etel-adnan ”
Sample of Poet's Work
Take the compass,
take the harp, take
the FitBit and the bandaid box. Fold the whole
grey sheet of sky, lumpy and unalluring
into your rucksack. The song of woe, the itch,
and the predatory U.S. dollar will follow
you without invitation. No keys or papers
needed for this journey. Pack needle and nail,
thread and wire, fragrant cathedral beeswax,
the air recently flapped under a gull’s wing.
A shoe pebble to make you stop and rest and puzzle
where your other pains come from. Carry
curiosity and confusion in your hand, stroke
them with feathers and prick them with thorns
to keep them alive. Wash your face in fog,
your hands in hopefulness. No journey
is completed without yearning and a sustained
mercy for the walkers, the harpists, the injured,
the hatless and the lost.
[From: Juniper, Volume 5, Issue 2, 2021]
A Taxonomy of Troubles
Still trying to understand
the hunger that makes wasps sting and fathers strike,
how the awl shudders into the soft
cured skin of a goat. What makes the eye
look away and how the injured heart
can muscle into someplace new, somewhere
shining but askew. How silliness and sorrow
can drop from the same cloud
and how exactly the breeze cools. The size
of the world’s container for mercy.
Why the word welcome
is so difficult to utter and whether big-
heartedness can be contagious
in a time of forced labour, barrel bombs,
razor wire, drowning, what a late
pregnancy feels like and what exactly
a baby sees and hears in utero.
Across Budapest, Gabor Maté said,
all the Jewish newborns (and he was one)
were wailing the week the Nazis
invaded. Mothers were feeding
distress into their babies’ mouths and everyone’s
capacity for grace forever jeopardized.
Is bearing witness all
I can do when my life has been nearly
untouched? Is witness enough? Tonight
the horizon is a dividing line between
two shades of cobalt. How can I watch
slavery’s pyramid be reconstructed.
[from Sotto Voce, Brick Books, 2019]
Kindly Stops
Osorno, Chile
The car of love crawled into the rundown part of town,
past the Ropa Americana thrift shop and the earthquake-
damaged stores, their wooden balconies awry.
Te amo, Te amo, Te amo –o –o –o –o –o – o
in a magic marker scrawl along its sides.
It coughed to a stop beside the old stone fort
and stretched out its wings, its doors I mean,
to let the newlyweds out. The way they signalled
each turret, north south east west, with a kiss
got me missing you.
When I arrive home to our continent, you say
my long absence awoke a fear –
the sleek black car with chariot wheels and obsidian
wings, a panther’s face in chrome on its grille.
When might it pounce into our driveway,
who would be the first snatched
into the passenger seat, who would be
left behind to watch.
[from The Poison Colour, Pedlar Press, 2015]
