The act of writing poetry is an emancipatory act that allows me to write my truths and observations about the world we live in. I also am a researcher at heart, which allows me to explore the art of poetry from a place of documentation, and engaging both the archives and engaging popular media references.

Whenever I’m pressed for a definition of the word lyric, I think first of this—the ‘song’ contained in the Greek word ode, the Latin carmen, the Hebrew psalm, the Sanskrit gita, and the French cantique. Or the ‘little sound’ of the Italian sonetto; the rhythmic ‘jumping’ or ‘dancing’ behind the French ballade.

Julie Joosten’s first book, Light Light, was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry, the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, and the Goldie Award. Her second book, Nought, was published in 2020.

My paternal grandmother was a writer, poet, and elementary school teacher in my family’s ancestral hometown, Anju, Jining. She taught her students how to read words by the jujube trees she helped to plant at the entrance of their elementary school yard.

Poetry has allowed me to explore loss, the world of the unseen and the Ancestors. It offers me the ability to gesture towards memories that are incomplete, opening doorways to the thoughts and feelings that live on as dreamscapes in our psyche, inhabiting our bodies and souls.

My poetry since the 1990s has primarily addressed black and mixed-race identity and, in particular, black history in British Columbia, variously at the formal meeting points …

I was born “into the world” speaking the Cree-Michif of my home community of Île-à-la-Crosse. I heard sounds and mimicking them I learned words had power to connect me with a world outside of myself, human and otherwise

It’s inevitable that landscape seeps into writing, whether we are writing from an urban, a rural, or a wild place. And there are many kinds of landscape—the physical, the aural, the psychological and the social, just to name a few.

Through the honesty of her words, she embraces the spirit world, the resilience of her foremothers, the integral healing powers of disassociation as a survival mechanism, and the richness of her PoWaMeWin - dreams, which reconnects her to herself.

If the heart could speak, it would speak poetry. If the soul could speak, it would speak poetry.

Poets have the chance to build a conversation in writing, a means of exploring what writing can be through ongoing discourse and the creation of opportunity.

Read, love, listen, write, dance and sing – cry out – make waves – stand your ground firmly – experience big – be brave – be vulnerable – know who you are – give back before you take – and remember

As a Kwantlen man, father, fisherman, poet and playwright I believe the gift of words was given to me so I can retell all of our stories either upon stage or in in a book of poetry or in our longhouses on a cold winter’s night.

I feel like the poems—even when they remember, forget, and imagine elsewhere or elsetime—encounter place as layers of memory: arrivals, departures, resistances, transformations.

The measure of these geolinguistic spaces is found in the particularity that writing reveals: correspondences of a world. And then, of course, the surprising and unexpected holes in that world.

As a daddy writer to be, I urge every parent to be able to write about their experiences and share it with the world.

“Poetry, because it enacts the mutability of both language and perception, can reflect the constant mutability of our world. In the underground verbal webwork made by the roots of words…

I think of my poetry as a form of rescue work. I’ve spent much of my creative life giving voice to figures from the recent or distant past, silenced by turmoil and time, who clamour to have their stories told. It’s a process that been called the ventriloquism of history…

Molly blends epistolary, confessional, lyric, and prose forms, especially favouring the poetic statement and contemporary plainspeak. Her use of humour and sharp thematic and formal turns act as vehicles to empathy and comprehension.

Jan Zwicky is the author of over twenty books of poetry and prose including Forge, Songs for Relinquishing the Earth, and Wisdom & Metaphor. As both poet and philosopher, she frequently focuses on music, the natural world, and questions of ecology.