Wazhashk Poetry

I’ve been doing a lot of cleaning and organizing as of late. This goes with the whole publishing thing. As I clear off old work, like having two poetry collections due out in 2025, then there is a need to evaluate one’s space and one’s resources. As such, I’ve been returning to influential works that fill my bookcases. Roll in some Charles Baxter essays on craft and this gets the mind a moving. Or at least moving enough to give you a small essay on those thoughts careening about this old head of mine.

I find myself more and more straddling the line between poet and writer of prose/essays/fiction. And as those lines blur and focus at a rather constant rate, I find myself at constant thoughts about what the place the writer has in our society. I ask this often because the literary “society” of my specific region has relegated me and my work to the outsider status here. An outsider whose books, due to their popularity and listings for awards, have forced at least two of the areas equally connected bookstores to carry them but them to either completely block and blacklist me as a person from. Let’s not focus on my blacklisting. I am not the first. I am not the only. And I will likely not be the last.

You may ask why the blacklisting? Which is reasonable quite on track with the direction of this essay. And my answer is simple; it comes in the form of the Charles Baxter essay and most specifically the quote below from his collection Wonderlands: Essay on the Life of Literature:

“When we write, we are not just writing about individuals, or members of a family, or those whom we love; we are writing about the culture we live in. We can’t help but record the zeitgeist of our times, particularly when we are writing about those who are chewed up and consumed by the machinery of the culture and the state apparatus. You never know when the next plague will descend and what’s about to be lost.”

– Charles Baxter, “Things About to Disappear: The Writer as Curator”

I have long cherished this notion of the writer as a sort of witness poet. I published an essay by Tara Ballard in the Ford City Anthology a good while back about this. Her piece “What It Is to Witness: Understanding and Applying Poetry’s Bardic Traditions” uses conflict in occupied Palestine as a backdrop to explore the role of poet in society and how that looks in practice. Ballard’s essay has long held a central place in my notions of craft, conscious approach to action, and societal positioning. All poets owe a debt to those that came before us, those that shall follow us, and for all those lives and minutiae that they choose to depict. We play witness with beauty, with honesty, and with integrity for our subjects and the world in which they actually inhabit. No deletions, no speaking for, simple honest witness. Witness that must cross borders, must bring up the often uncomfortable, and do so in a beautiful manner that honours both the tradition and the lives being depicted and affected by ones words.

Which brings us to the poet laureateship as it is practiced here along the south shore of the Detroit River. These four all-white and highly privileged and politically connected friends have put a hammer to the notions of how poetry functions in the world (at least in the ideal and long tradition of the craft) and what a poet actually is supposed to do with their work and the time in community. I would point out that their collective work as exceedingly rarely produced laudable lyricism nor important reflections upon the difficulties many legitimately experience within the cultural mosaic of our city. What emerges, if you examine the work of the anointed quattro of these poets, is a sense of clearly defined privilege (they are owed this space for some reason), they speak little of the well-documented on-going struggles of Windsor’s working class, often they write in that patriotic/jingoist nonsense of a ruling political party, and clearly lack any lyric or metaphor skill in their craft that would place them above the writing. On the whole, they write nostalgic-laden trash that at best ignores the BIPOC and non-privileged lives of the majority of Windsorites but most often subverts reality and history for the fanciful depictions of lawyers, retired newspaper columnists, and Catholic English high school teachers. We can avoid the talk of lyricism in regards to their work. Suffice it say it’s terrible, resplendent with cliche, and often metaphors (when used at all) that combat each other into utter nonsense. The pieces lack courage and fall into the familiar ring of the region of making those in power happy at all costs. Even if the cost is the craft of writing and dignity of the person.

The second of these approved laureates took it upon themselves as a former Catholic nun to write and publish a collection of poems in which she takes on the voices of Indigenous children in residential schools. The first laureate took upon themselves to publish and profit off this title with no actual engagement with Indian Country. There was never a plan to give any monies or proceeds back to residential school survivors. There was only ever a plan to make the book publisher (the first poet laureate) and his privately owned settler press money of this person’s work and widely publicized trauma of Indigenous children and their families. None of them met with the Indigenous community over this book and I personally spent considerable time “keeping the peace” between our regional Indigenous community and this small group of political connected and economically advantaged settlers. The peace for the most part has held and after almost a year of fighting, the copies of this individual’s book have thankfully gone away, to the best of our knowledge.

All poets owe a debt to those that came before us, those that shall follow us, and for all those lives and minutiae that choose to depict.

I argue that the ails of the literary community are strongly driven by these politically connected hacks. Their hunger for literary attention is pitay on our community, they are the white foam on water that suffocates all life below it. For the better part of two decades, this small group not only quieted BIPOC and emerging voices in the region, they also codified and entrenched this hunger in the halls of power. And history, fact, and the experience of actual community members has been silenced for giant flags, photo-ops, and candy-coating of a city that is much richer and varied than office holders and their clutch’s visions of what they want it to be. I want to think that in their collective pasts there is some connection to at least our collective writing past. Writing is most fundamentally a community. As a community that’s traditions have long embraced the craft as one that provides for accurate witness, that witness provides that you hold only so large of a space, and a witness that demands we place listening and learning above the act of speaking and performing. We still read Beowulf even if we don’t know the poet. The poet must never be greater than the work. And the work must understand its role in society and the longer traditional of writing craft.

There is a strong record of lasting violence and oppression that poorly written, politically-connected if not contrived, writing has left us. The measure of dilettantes in power, of how they continued to ignore the sufferings and scope of others around them, others of different classes, cultures, and connections for their own personal gain, that is the record left by this particular city’s poet laureate program. One that should likely be ended or the very least completely reformed to better match not only the larger literary community beyond these river narrows, but to bring us back in line with the traditions of poets and writers rather than another overt manifestation of petty political cronyism. Ineptness and self-serving title making projects such as these positions, hurts the craft of poetry over all in our community. The system is closed to “outsiders” – an oft repeated sentiment by local poets that find themselves outside the PL circle – and runs counter to the concept of growing the craft that allegedly lies at the heart of these programs.

And for those that have moved beyond the message of this piece about the roles of poets laureate and how one specific city has failed spectacularly, I want you to consider Charles Baxter on a personal level. You are our witnesses. And in a decolonized world that so many of us are moving towards, we need to learn about the role of witness over ego, and that space and words are meant to be shared.