You Were Always Leaving – Guest Poetry Blog #29 – Introducing the Latest Contributor, Canadian Poet, Susan Alexander – Part One of Two

Canadian westcoast poet Susan Alexander

VANISHING GODS

Each year I wait for two maples at the shore
to gild themselves, scullery maids off to the ball.

We were in foreign parts, touring the qubbas,
the crumbled Alcázar. I was afraid I’d missed

the best mosaic, gold stars
scattered after last night’s wind.

We touch each other more often now, an extra
kiss before going for groceries. I can’t complain.

You were leaving this world when I found you.
You were always leaving.

Susan Alexander from The Southern Review, Fall 2023

RICHARD INTRODUCES GUEST POETRY BLOGGER # 29, SUSAN ALEXANDER, AND PART ONE OF HER TWO-PART SERIES

Life has its twists and turns. Joys and sorrows. The joy when Susan Alexander and I married in 1986. And our two children Tella and Libby. The sorrow when our marriage ended in 2008. The roads back to joy when we both remarried. The sorrow when Susan’s husband Ross, a true friend of mine before and after Susan and I ended, died earlier this year.

Now, a joy to celebrate Susan and her poetry career which began after we separated. To see her win poetry awards and publish two full length collections and a recently published chapbook which received an honorable mention in the 2024 Raven Chapbook Contest.

A joy to celebrate Susan but also the acknowledgement of the loss and sorrow of Ross’s recent death carried so forcefully in the epigraph poem that begins this post. It’s heart-ripping ending: You were always leaving. I wrote a tribute to Ross after he died. Please click here to read it.

Susan says in her introduction that she doesn’t know why she writes poetry, says that her introduction, her reflection, in these pages, might tell her. Her trust that like in writing poems this prose piece would tell her what she didn’t think she knew. And it did. It tells her poetry is where she finds out who she is beyond outward appearances. Also a way, she says: to work with suffering, to change it through artistic practice.

Susan is a poet who is not afraid the embrace the mysteries of transcendence, the reality of God. You can see it in her exquisite poem that concludes this post. This faith also informs her commitment to ecopoetics. To poetry that celebrates our beleaguered earth. The proof of this in her line: The earth is the place where I meet the source. Where else can we touch the holy except through weather, rock, water, our physical bodies?

Now, in Susan’s own words, Part One of her Two Part series. Part Two will feature the great Welsh poet R.S. Thomas. In that piece you will also see Susan’s scholarly influence in her writing. Her MA in Christian Studies from Regent College, Vancouver.

SUSAN’S INTRODUCTION

The truth is that I don’t know why I write poetry. Perhaps writing this reflection will tell me why. Because one thing for sure that poetry gives me is the ability to tune in more deeply to what I am thinking and feeling. The Susan that shows up and chats over a cup of tea with you is not the same Susan who writes. Poetry is where I find out my own secrets. And to tell you the truth, it is where I find out who I am. “Vanishing Gods” told me what I wasn’t ready to know. It is from my latest collection and my very first chapbook thanks to Diana Hayes of Raven Chapbooks on Salt Spring Island. My late husband, Ross McDonald, had a long lingering blood cancer that was killing him slowly over many years and then came a more aggressive colon cancer which finished him. The poems in this collection are about love and anticipatory loss.

Often people will say it must be therapeutic to write poems about the loss of your husband. It is. But it is also necessary – a way to work with suffering, to change it through artistic practice. I think of language as my paintbrush, word, image and sound as my paint. Sometimes when I write, it is as if words come out of the shadows. I understand the concept of the muse because often the process feels like it arrives from outside of me.

I am the furthest thing from a perfectionist in real life except when it comes to poetry. Not that I am saying my poems are perfect – far from it! But a poem is one of the few things I will keep working on past the “good enough” stage. I will go back to and revise and tinker with and let go of and then pick up and change a word or cut a stanza over months, sometimes years.

It wasn’t so much beauty and love that got me going with poetry, but childhood memories and anger. I needed to write about things that caused me pain. I needed to write about my dad and me. To get into that distant past meant describing scenes, rooms and people who were long gone. But there they were, tucked away and waiting. Here is a poem from my first collection, The Dance Floor Tilts.

THE AVALON

It was a fast food joint on Highway 3
where it turned into Main Street.
Picnic tables in the breezeway, Creedence
screaming up around the bend on the jukebox.
No drive-thru windows like today.
People had to park, get out of their cars.

My father was boss, shape-shifted
from grease monkey in his own garage
to short order cook. Short temper cook
more like it. Hotter than burgers sizzling
on the grill. Hotter than chips in the deep fat fryer.
Him and his shout and his bottomless rum
and coke just inside the cooler door.

Scariest thing for me was making
chicken dinners when he was crazy
busy and the grill was packed. I’d crank
up the flames under the pressure cooker
in the back, drop thighs, legs, breasts,
wings, into popping oil then twist
the metal top on tight as I could.

Timing was critical and I was racing
up front with customers at windows,
making change with fingers burnt
from bagging burgers. Milkshakes
whizzed on metal sticks while I erected
dazzling ziggurats of soft ice cream cones.

All the time at the back the pressure
built. Always I expected the explosion.
My father’s holler. Flying metal, boiling oil.
Fast food shrapnel. Casualties.

When the cooker’s valves got flipped up,
they screamed like murder, smeared the air
with steam and grease. I served up impossible
crispy gold in a cardboard container.

For years I wore burn scars
on the soft insides of forearms.
They are faded, gone.
So is my father.
Nowadays summer never gets that hot.

Susan Alexander from The Dance Floor Tilts, Thistledown Books, 2017

The funny thing about writing a poem like this one, narrative and confessional, is it brings me closer to my father and more at peace with my past. Strangely and unexpectedly, it heals something in me. I think I came to some level of acceptance of who this man was. Buried under my anger, I found love. I discovered how much I am like my father.

Much of poetry is training not just to write, but to listen. What a delight to listen for rhythm and rhyme, assonance and alliteration, the play of syntax – all these delicious language-y things. I am naturally more of a talker than a listener. Too often my mind jumps to what I want to say in response to what you are saying. Poetry is teaching me to slow down, to quiet my chatterbox mind, which is also, of course, the necessary posture for meditation and prayer.

What comes from the deeper mind, or heart, or whatever it is in us humans that is the creative source, is often unexpected. I start over here and I end up in an entirely different place. Poet Lorna Crozier (who, full disclosure, is my hero) once said at a writing retreat, paraphrasing Robert Frost: No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader. And I think that is one of the gifts of poetry. Surprise! I find out what I didn’t know while creating an object and a soundscape with ink on white paper and later a keyboard and a screen.

In a world in which worth in often measured by effectiveness and utility, poetry is a counter cultural voice. Beauty is beyond utility. I don’t know if poetry is useful, but I do know in these months of grieving, reading poetry has helped me feel less alone.

The two poems I have shared above are about people, but much of my poetry is a response to nature – its beauty, its power and the tragic impact of humans on the living world. The earth for me is something like the body of God. Not synonymous because I believe the divine is present both within and beyond the material world. The earth is the place where I meet the source. Where else can we touch the holy except through weather, rock, water, our physical bodies?

Theophany

If God were a tree, this page
could be a sacred thing,
oblation in cellulose.
Words would rustle,
stir heartwood,
cause water to rise
root to crown.

We’d toss seeds at weddings.
Every tap and stream
where we drink
would be holy.

If God were a tree,
we’d study Botany
to grow closer to
Divinity.
Our third eye
would be a leaf.

Susan Alexander from Nothing You Can Carry, Thistledown Books, 2020