None of this Belongs to Me

Before we had to move, I had heard of Ellie Sawatzky’s debut poetry collection None of This Belongs to Me (Nightwood Editions, 2021) and was intrigued by the title. 

I interpreted it like a confession, and I sensed sadness and loss.

When I visited Toronto in May right after the landlord put “our” house in Vancouver up for sale, that house was almost the only thing on my mind. Language is slippery. It was our house but it was also not ours. It took visiting Toronto to write a poem about what we were losing in Vancouver. The idea of ownership (what actually belongs to me? what can I call mine?) haunted me. Sawatzky’s title returned. None of this belongs to me.

When I heard she was giving a poetry reading at Massy Arts this past September, I was determined to go and finally buy the book from the author herself (provided I liked what I heard, and I did).

In her collection, I found coming-of-age poems, ex-boyfriend poems, Kenora (Ontario) poems where the author grew up, Vancouver poems where the author lives, vacation poems, and work poems.

My favourite section of the book (where the book’s title comes from) are these “work” poems that offer vignettes of the speaker’s role as a nanny looking after a three-year-old girl called “B.”

Take these lines from the poem “Nounou” that also relate to language:

I sit with B in her kitchen, discuss
a Safeway bouquet
of lilies. I say lis. B says

Maman accidentally. 

None of this belongs
to me.

That twinge of sadness and loss is amplified in “Forgive Us Our Trespasses” where Sawatzky writes: “The first girl just wants something to belong to her…”

While the book covers multiple subjects, the connecting thread of “playing a part” was most evident for me. Playing the part of mother, of adult, of being responsible. The joy in reading the book was discovering what “this” in the title refers to. The lines quoted above make it explicit—“B” doesn’t belong to the speaker, but there are many other examples of what doesn’t belong to her throughout the collection. 

Adulthood, with all its revelations, loneliness, and losses, is another one. 

B doesn’t know

she won’t always be a child,
the way I didn’t know I’d be

thrust into this thistle-stitched
ditch of adulthood.

-“Ouroboros”

I love the assonance of those short ‘i’s, echoing the narrowness of a ditch, as well as the spitty awkwardness of those “th” and “ch” consonants that suit the thorny journey to adulthood.

On a road trip at 24 with her parents, Sawatzky writes in “Recalculating”:

In the silence now
we’re all adults and no one knows

what’s best.

And in “What Blue”:

With Grandfather dead,
we are three single women, sisters, girls, absorbing

the mysteries of the world comparing blues.

These are poignant lines, but there is also humour and sass in Sawatzky’s writing, like in “Blessings Upon U and Ur Bullshit” that she dedicates to her neighbour “who threatened / to have my car towed / bc it was parked in front of / ur house…u’ll understand when ur / a mom u said / u’ll understand / when ur a homeowner / but I won’t / I will never be like u”.

Her house doesn’t belong to her either, and how many other renters can relate to the feeling conveyed in the line “i pay her / so she owns me”?

Sleep doesn’t belong to the speaker anymore when she’s at her father’s bedside in a hospital room in the opening poem. Rob Taylor beautifully analyzes “Overnights at the Hospital” in his Tyee article, “Be Brief and Tell Us Everything.”

A self-conscious voice emerges in some of Sawatzky’s poems. A surprising number are self-referential (I began counting how many have “poem” in the poem) and felt they could have been stronger without this (but I am of the school that doesn’t usually like the fourth wall broken). Sawatzky mentions in this interview with Rob Taylor that she likes playing with expectations of poetry and drawing attention to its process, but I found those poems detracted from her otherwise strong theme.

Sawatzky is at her best when the poem isn’t obvious, when it fades into the background and the reader is left with images and sounds that haunt, punch, linger, explode; when she’s working out what does and doesn’t belong to her and subverts readers’ expectations of girlhood and female desire. The reader might assume someone who wants kids or who does want them but can’t have them would pursue work as a nanny. But not so. In “Crystals,” Sawatzky declares, “I tell my mother I never want kids.”

By the end of the collection, I notice a movement from naming and/or lamenting what doesn’t belong to her towards claiming what does belong to her…even the unpleasant parts one doesn’t like to admit.

In “Self-Portrait as Ostrich,” the second-last poem, she sounds the most vulnerable and mature:

I do dream regularly
that I’m gathering eggs

And I thought it was because I used
to look after children

Or because I’ve rewatched
Fly Away Home

so many times and maybe that’s true
but maybe also

I’m finally taking responsibility for me
Anger has a shape too

Ditto shame ditto pride when it unfurls
when I rise

Up off my knees to become
the biggest bird alive

Here is a speaker who accepts she doesn’t have it figured out (“maybe that’s true”) and holds numerous possibilities out in her hand like seed for a bird, not sure which one will take. But the uncertainty doesn’t shrivel, paralyze, or keep her on her knees. Rather, it emboldens her to the extent that she stands up to become “the biggest bird alive.”

Coming out of (and soon approaching another) season of uncertainty, as is the way life ebbs and flows, None of this Belongs to Me felt like a gift at the right time. I am prone to anger too, prone to complaining about life not being fair (and yes, the old adage who said life was fair? always plays in my mind in response), and there is a sisterhood, so to speak, in Sawatzky’s words and in the kind message she wrote in my copy of her book:

Sending care as you settle into your new space. Hope you enjoy the familiar and strange in these poems.

I have been so focussed on our old house, our old city, what we lost and left behind (and there is a season for mourning) but I think it is now time for me to look ahead, not only for myself but for the sake of my child, who very much belongs to me even as she simultaneously does not belong to me. Oh language, oh the paradox of both/and.

The future is as it always was, a quivering
night lit occasionally by lightning. World
without end.

-“Matrilineal”

The Writing on the Wall

After nine years in Vancouver, I am saying goodbye. This is the city where I moved to in my mid 20s, single and living in an apartment all to myself for the first time, freelance writing by the corner window and loving it. 

The golden hour at Fremlin St & 70th Ave

It’s where I looked for poems and found them on skyscrapers, rocks, streets, chairs, gravestones, and strangers who stopped.

Vancouver Novel by João Loureiro at Point Grey Road and Collingwood St

Echoes by Michel Goulet at Kits Beach

Children’s rock artwork along the Arbutus Greenway

Where I had an amazing job for one and a half years at Regent College and felt the strong welcome and support of that community. Where I met a man who asked good questions, including the unforgettable, life-altering one, “Will you marry me?” 

Reader, I said yes.

Where I made new friends who feel old now, like they’ve always been around.

Where my almost 3-year-old daughter took her first breaths, cries, laughs, steps, and lessons in being alive. She’s learning there is beauty and joy and delight in the world but also pain and sadness and uncertainty. Why is the landlord selling our house? Once the landlord sells it, can we come back and live in it? Why is someone else moving into our home? But where will we live?

She, like my husband, asks good questions. Questions I don’t usually have good answers for. Adam and I have been asking a lot of our own this season: Why is Vancouver (actually most of the Lower Mainland) so unaffordable? Why does it seem to do nothing about its housing crisis? Does it not care that so many people, particularly families, are forced to leave?

Granville Island

I think of Maggie Smith and her ever resonant poem “Good Bones.” “I am trying / to sell them the world,” she says about her children, like any new parent. What memories will Madeleine tell of Vancouver, of our house near the park with the wild garden out front?

Shortly after moving into that Marpole apartment, I walked the neighbourhood and saw my name on a building. My name’s not terribly common, so this stood out to me. So much so I wrote a whole blog post about it. It was my welcome message to Vancouver, saying I belong.

After months of searching for a new place to live, applying for 20+ co-ops, viewing 11+ places around Metro Vancouver, lining up with 40+ people stretching the length of a city block to view an apartment that charged for a parking spot each month and didn’t even have bike storage, encountering more than one Craigslist scam and landlords who don’t take good care of what they own, I am relieved to say Adam and I have found a new home we like in a city we didn’t expect, but one I hope to love in different ways than I have loved Vancouver.

somewhere along Main St

The day we drove to look at the place, Adam pointed out an inscription on a concrete barrier at the corner of Lougheed Highway and Pitt River Road: WE LOVE YOU CHARLENE. I suspected it was to mark the site of a tragic car accident, and that sadly is the case. But it stayed with me, just like the Marpole sign did. Because how often is your name written into the landscape? Not only that, but written in stone? 

I, like my daughter, am sad (mixed with other emotions) at all that we are leaving in Vancouver, but this unexpected message—so personal, so intimate—felt like a direct welcome to Coquitlam. You belong here now. 

Time to step through a different door. Goodbye shiny Vancouver.

A Brick Lover’s Toronto

I recently travelled for the first time since Covid—a solo trip to Toronto to celebrate my first year of motherhood (in a pandemic no less). It’s been two of both now but Covid got in the way of going earlier.

As someone who attended university in Ottawa, I had been to Toronto a few times on weekend trips and it was fun but not particularly inspiring. The destination of this trip actually wasn’t that important to me. What was more important was having a much-needed getaway (I am inclined to urban spaces) and seeing and staying with an old friend I hadn’t seen in several years.

Brick houses in Cabbagetown.

But the destination surprised me. It was so much older and beautiful than I remembered. I found myself enchanted with all the brick houses, taking picture after picture because they were all so beautiful and different and teeming with character. Coming from the West Coast where our building materials are wood and glass (Douglas Coupland nicknamed Vancouver the “City of Glass,” and it was only incorporated in 1886), there was something comforting about the solidity and permanency of brick. I wish I could call one of these houses mine.

Such love in the details here. And that red door! Cabbagetown neighbourhood.

The symmetrical, two-pronged staircase leading to the blue door is perfection. Also in Cabbagetown.

Yet another lovely duplex in Cabbagetown.

View from my friend’s condo in the Annex. It was not uncommon to see turrets. Turrets, folks!

Of course there were also turrets on Casa Loma.

Housing was on my mind as my husband and I had just learned that our landlord was about to sell the beloved house that we rent the top floor of in Vancouver. We’ve been there for three years and were hoping to have been there a lot more. Now we’ll have two months from date of sale to find a new home.

Looking back through my photos of the Art Gallery of Ontario, I noticed how many were paintings of houses and rooftops. Definitely a theme here.

A wall of Lawren S. Harris paintings in the Thomas Collection. Left: Houses, Richmond Street, 1911, oil on canvas. Top middle: Street Scene with Figures, Hamilton, 1919, oil on wood-pulp board. Bottom middle: In the Ward, Toronto, 1917, oil on wood-pulp board.

Maximilien Luce, Gisons, The Cathedral, 1897, oil on paper mounted to canvas.

These two women beside each other in the AGO also caught my eye: Saint Anne with the Christ Child (c.1645-1650) by Georges de la Tour on the left and Melancholy (c.1627) by Hendrick ter Brugghen on the right, which purportedly depicts Mary Magdalene. They look like they could have been painted by the same artist. The works share so many similarities: dramatic late-night scenes illuminated by a single candle, two women with downcast eyes thinking and feeling deeply. They face each other, as if they are made to converse about life and death. I wrote a poem about the two women the next day at First & Last Coffee. The weather was delightfully warm enough in early May that I could enjoy their wonderful patio space.

One of my hopes for the trip was to have some quiet time wandering, reflecting, and writing. I headed to Toronto’s Necropolis, because just like Vancouver’s cemetery has inspired many a poem, I thought this picturesque Toronto cemetery could too.

Entrance to the Necropolis, featuring a Victorian Gothic chapel.

The most recognizable monument in the Necropolis. Jack Layton’s wife Olivia Chow created this bronze bust.

The Necropolis is one of the city’s oldest cemeteries, established in 1850. It sits to the west of the Don Valley Parkway, which is shown in this painting below by William Kurelek that my friend and I saw the day before at the AGO. We spent at least half an hour trying to find the hidden crucifix near the edge of the trees. We gave up and googled it instead.

William Kurelek, Don Valley on a Grey Day, 1972, mixed media on hardboard.

I also took a pilgrimage to Knife Fork Book, a poetry dispensary located in Capital Espresso on Queen Street and picked up some reading material for later.

Street art of…houses, what else?

As someone drawn to architecture and its endless forms, I found Toronto inspiring after all.

O Toronto!

Nathan Phillips Square with the Romanesque-style Old City Hall in the background.

Spadina Museum (a Victorian mansion) near Casa Loma.

One of many old stone buildings on U of T’s campus.

St. Michael’s Cathedral.

Old meets new in the Daniels Building for U of T’s architecture, landscape, and design program.

When I posted some of my pictures on Facebook, a friend commented, “Who knew Toronto could be so beautiful?” Indeed, who knew?

Historic home of Daniel Lamb, business man, City Father, a founder of Toronto’s first zoo, 1842-1920.

And for those curious, I do have a poem in the works that combines my love of Victorian houses with my interest in cemeteries and my surprise appearance in Jack Layton’s Ottawa rental before he was Leader of the Opposition. Strange what memories and alignments a trip might spark and a poem might allow.

Running to Not Forget

When I run, I go to Mountain View Cemetery. I love seeing how it changes, how it stays the same when the world around me is so precarious.

When I returned home last Saturday, my toddler announced, “Mommy, when I get bigger and older, I want to run through a cemetery.” I laughed.

Little does she know she’s been here many times as a baby. I wrote a poem about the experience of walking through here with her two years ago as the world was on edge, COVID “sweeping the world / like my father in a game of Risk.”

That military image feels devastatingly apt right now as I run past gravestones and think of Ukraine. All the suffering they have endured and are still enduring. All the lives and homes lost. All the loss. The horrific war crimes the Russian army has committed in Ukraine, particularly against women and children, has shaken me. One of the questions I keep circling back to: “Where does all that hurt go? What does a country like Ukraine do with all that grief/rage/trauma?” I don’t have answers.

I recently read an interview with Ukraine’s First Lady, Olena Zelenska in Vogue. When asked what can ordinary citizens do to help Ukrainians, she says:

The main thing is not to get used to the war—not to turn it into statistics. Continue going to protests, continue to demand that your governments take action. 

I suppose running and praying through a cemetery is one way I don’t get used to the war. There is death all around me here, including death from war. I notice how young the men are in the numerous memorials throughout the cemetery, many of them younger than me.

But I also run through the cemetery because there are signs of life all around me too: from cherry blossom trees to blooming heather, from freshly cut flowers to surprising gravestone offerings like big, juicy oranges. I need these reminders lately.

Fighting Goblins with Verse

One of my reading goals this year is to read something by George MacDonald. Many authors reference his fairy tales, which inspired Lewis Carroll, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkein, and Madeleine L’Engle, to name a few. So I picked up The Princess and the Goblin (1872) last month and thoroughly enjoyed it.

One of the first modern fairy tales and a precursor to modern fantasy, this book pits humans against goblins and is unconventional in its female heroine, the eight-year-old Princess Irene who rescues her miner friend Curdie from the goblins. Curdie, in turn, rescues Irene and everyone else who lives in the castle from a goblin invasion. The goblins have concocted a plan for revenge against the humans who live in the mountains above them and who, according to legend, drove them into the subterranean dwelling ages ago where their bodies began to twist and dwarf in accordance with their physical space. The goblins’ Plan A is to abduct the princess and wed her to one of theirs. Their backup plan is to flood the mines where many humans in the kingdom work, thus destroying their livelihood.

I love that a fairly tale from 1872 featured a girl rescuing a boy and where a princess does dirty work, removing rocks one by one from the mine to access the spot where the goblins imprisoned Curdie. And I love that Irene’s great-great-grandmother spins her a magical thread that leads her and Curdie safely out of the mines and back home, whereas Curdie’s rope that he used to eavesdrop on the goblins and return from the mine was found by the goblins’ pets. In a wonderful inversion, the pets reel Curdie in in one scene like he is the dog and they are the owners. 

But what I love the most is the role of poetry in the book. Early on, MacDonald establishes poetry or verse as the best weapon to fight the goblins:

As I have indicated already, the chief defence against them was verse, for they hated verse of every kind, and some kinds they could not endure at all. I suspect they could not make any themselves, and that was why they disliked it so much. At all events, those who were most afraid of them were those who could neither make verses themselves, nor remember the verses that other people made for them; while those who were never afraid were those who could make verses for themselves; for although there were certain old rhymes which were very effectual, yet it was well known that a new rhyme, if of the right sort, was even more distasteful to them, and therefore more effectual in putting them to flight.

This is yet another inversion in the book—that creative, generative, imaginative language like poetry can fight against evil. It reminds me of the aphorism The pen is mightier than the sword.

Thomas Whyte interviewed me last year about poetry and one of the questions was, “Why is poetry important?”

I wrote:

Like all art, poetry is a response to the world, and as a wise person once told me, “Response matters.” It seems that there are just as many ways to respond to the world as there are ways of being human, and that’s a mind-boggling thing. Art responds creatively, generatively, which is an important distinction from the ways we can respond destructively. Poetry connects us to place, to people (including ourselves), to worlds past, present, and future. Poetry is not fast reading or listening. It requires slowing down, sitting with, reflecting, returning. In our high-speed, consumer-driven culture, poetry is nothing short of subversive. 

Curdie is the poet in The Princess and the Goblin. His rhymes are funny, disarming, and truer than they seem at first listen. Except for when he is grossly outnumbered, Curdie’s rhymes work. They repel the goblins. They keep him company when he is held captive:

There was nothing for him to do but forge new rhymes, now his only weapons. He had no intention of using them at present, of course; but it was well to have a stock, for he might live to want them, and the manufacture of them would help to while away the time. 

There’s a lot of destructive activity and speech in our country right now. I’ve long been a fan of Canadian spoken word poet Shane Koyczan who wrote the poem “A Tomorrow” when the pandemic arrived early 2020 (incidentally, I first heard him perform in downtown Ottawa when I was a university student). I was recently made aware of this poem and have been thinking more and more about this generative response in light of the vitriol we’re hearing from both sides of the vaccine mandate debate. As he asks in the poem, Where do we go from here?

While I’m not naive enough to think that poetry can solve all our problems, I think it can do something like slow us down, quiet the noise, maybe help us see and live in the tension of the here and not yet, of who we are and who we could be.

On this note, I’ll leave you with one of my favourite scenes in the book between the Princess and her great-great-great grandmother that could have been written for today and which pierced me sharper than any sword.

 “But in the meantime, you must be content, I say, to be misunderstood for a while. We are all very anxious to be understood, and it is very hard not to be. But there is one thing much more necessary.”

“What is that, grandmother?”

“To understand other people.”

“Yes, grandmother. I must be fair—for if I’m not fair to other people, I’m not worth being understood myself I see.”

Highway Guardian

Last December, I closed out the year on here with an Advent poem by K.D. Miller. This year, I thought I’d share one of mine. It’s published in CRUX (Winter 2020; 56.4), a journal of Regent College.

I think this is the only Advent poem I’ve written, and one I had the opportunity to read at church. It’s also probably the most theological poem I’ve written, attempting to bridge (pun intended) the story of Christmas and Easter in the short form of a Petrarchan sonnet.

As I state in the poem, my reflections are borne from “this common world”: my commute from Vancouver to Surrey where I notice a bird’s nest on the S curve leading to the Alex Fraser Bridge. The associations spin off from there, much like the cars on this dangerous stretch of road.

It is this common world that strikes me anew in the Christmas story; that strikes me in another year of getting through. We are weary. In need of rest.

I also invite you to read “The Pulley” by George Herbert, which you may hear echoes of in my poem.

Merry Christmas all.