b. 1984
Photo credit
Anna Keenan

Biography

Canisia Lubrin is a writer, editor, teacher and critic, with work published widely in North America, as well as in the U.K.. Translations of her work include into Spanish and Italian. She is the author of the awards-nominated poetry collection Voodoo Hypothesis (Wolsak & Wynn) and augur (Gap Riot Press) finalist for the 2018 bpNichol Chapbook Award. Lubrin's fiction is anthologized in The Unpublished City: Volume I, finalist for the 2018 Toronto Book Award. She teaches English at Humber College and Creative Writing at Sheridan College and in the University of Toronto's School of Continuing Studies.

Micro-interview

Did you read poetry when you were in high school? Is there a particular poem that you loved when you were a teenager?

I don’t remember reading any particular poems when I was a teenager. We studied very little poetry in high school and the fact that I don’t remember any of them is very telling. I think this may be due to some strange amnesia or to splitting my time, impossibly, among every high school club or to the poems themselves having zero resonance. But I knew that I regarded poetry with intense reverence.

When did you first start writing poetry? And then when did you start thinking of yourself as a poet?

I wrote songs as a teenager, which I considered poetry — music is the anatomy of poetry. I wrote my first serious poem in 2008 in my undergraduate Intro to Creative Writing class. I struggled for many years to view myself as a poet even though I always suspected there to be a poet in me somewhere.I thought poetry something close to the Gods, a thing that I could read and enjoy but never write. Am I ever glad I scaled that wall.

What do you think a poet’s “job” is?

I wonder if this question has always been a hard one to answer: we have real trouble naming things we cannot measure. I think that today a poet writes into and out of the chaos of life the things that trouble notions of humanity as a species with only utilitarian interests or provocations or purposes. Just yesterday I heard a college teacher saying that he doesn’t support people choosing an art as a career, that he would easily donate to an organization raising funds for, say, a carpenter’s association but would never give his money to the ballet. It is a wonder, then, why it is easy to conceive of architecture with no consideration for what architecture owes to the artist. Perhaps, ultimately, the poet’s job is as the poet decides, but the work of poetry is elemental and expands the possibility for our lives beyond mere utility, beyond the basic needs that reduce us to some oversimplified version of “what is real and who we are.” I would hate to live in a world devoid of art.

If you have a poem in our anthology what inspired you to write it?

I wrote this poem [“Sons of Orion”] after the murder of Philando Castille. It came out of grief, anger, and an inability to turn away. It came from having to face anew the world that exists and might await my own black-bodied children.

If you had to choose one poem to memorize from our anthology, which one would it be?

from thirsty by Dionne Brand

Publications

Poem title(s)
Final Prayer in the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception II
Title
Best Canadian Poetry in English, 2018
Publisher
Tightrope Books
Editors
Hoa Nguyen, Anita Lahey, Amanda Jernnigan
Date
2018
Publication type
Anthology
Title
Voodoo Hypothesis
Publisher
Wolsak & Wynn
Editors
Paul Vermeersch
Date
2017
Publication type
Book
Poem title(s)
Voodoo Hypothesis; The Mongrel; Keepers of Paradise
Title
The Next Wave: An Anthology of 21st Century Canadian Poetry
Publisher
Palimpsest Press
Editors
Jim Johnstone
Date
2018
Publication type
Periodical/Magazine
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