Writes of Spring 2022

When the League of Canadian Poets announced that the theme for this year’s National Poetry Month was “intimacy”, a poet-friend wondered if all we’d be reading would be kissing poems.

Luckily, the poets who submitted to — and were selected for — this year’s Writes of Spring defined intimacy differently.

We call having sex with someone “being intimate” but intimacy isn’t only found in romantic relationships. It’s about connection, moments of vulnerability, and those can happen between any two organisms or even in a moment of clarity alone.

But the coronavirus pandemic has meant that we’ve either been too intimate or not intimate enough with our families, our neighbours, and our wider communities for more than two years.

Co-editor Duncan Mercredi and I wanted the poets to tell us what it means to be intimate in this strange place we’ve found ourselves.

Writes of Spring was launched at McNally Robinson Booksellers on April 23 and included poets Lynnel Sinclair, Denise Duguay, Megan Ronald, Brigette DePape, Jeannette Timmerman, Shannon Joy Wazny, Roewan Crowe, Laurie Fischer, Bryanne Lamoureux, Anne Claros, Cam Scott and Katherine Bitney.

TreeTalk: Birds Hill Park—2022 & 2019 Winnipeg Folk FEstival

As part of the Winnipeg Folk Festival’s Prairie Outdoor Exhibition, I TreeTalk-ed twice in Birds Hill Park, which is to say: I wrote poems and hung them from a cottonwood on the festival site between the handmade village and the family area. Collaborating with festival-goers, I sat in the shade and created a second set of leaves for the tree with paper and yarn.

TreeTalk: Birds Hill Park is site-specific and so included poems about the bird’s foot trefoil at the foot of the tree to buzz of the pine sawyer beetles in the neighbouring trees. It absorbed the severe thunderstorm warning and the daze of four hot days as well as the drawings of children and the confessions of adults, pre- and late-pandemic.