I will leave you all with these lines from (non-Aboriginal) poet Mary Oliver, while I try to find some space and time to really get into the poems in "The Pemmican Eaters" by Marilyn Dumont.
"Wherever I am, the world comes after me./It offers me its busyness. It does not believe/that I do not want it." (from the poem The Old Poets of China.)
Mary Oliver's poem is short. Those lines are most of the poem, actually. But those lines have been in the back of my mind during this past year, a year during which I have been trying to find my way through a new approach to poetry.
I've had some success--I was long listed this fall for the 2016 CBC Poetry Prize and Malahat is publishing one of those long listed poems. So I have reason enough to keep moving ahead. But trying to disentangle myself from the busyness of modern life and family life and working life takes tremendous effort. Oliver's poem encourages me to continue with that effort.
