Ideas - Fireside & Icicles — Poems for Winter

Episode Date: December 27, 2024

A childhood full of Christmasses in Wales has left IDEAS producer Tom Howell pining for a certain kind of nostalgic poem this winter. So he turns to poets to put into words a strange feeling of homesickness, nostalgia, and yearning. *This episode originally aired on December 17, 2020.

Hey there, I'm Kathleen Goltar and I have a confession to make. I am a true crime fanatic. I devour books and films and most of all true crime podcasts. But sometimes I just want to know more. I want to go deeper. And that's where my podcast Crime Story comes in. Every week I go behind the scenes with the creators of the best in true crime. I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley, the list goes on. For the insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app. This is a CBC Podcast. Whose woods these are, I think I know. His house is in the village though

He will not see me stopping here To watch his woods fill up with snow I'm Nala Ayed Welcome to Ideas And to a story set in the bleak beginning of winter in Canada Not long ago at all My little horse must think it queer To stop without a farmhouse near

between the woods and frozen lake. That winter people were missing the tried and true ways for cheering up a dark evening. No dinners, no parties, no reunions. The only other sounds the sweep of easy wind and downy flake. CBC Music was calling it the year of escapism for those lucky enough not to face the worst. Escaping meant a surge in subscriptions to video games and movie streaming, alcohol sales and online shopping. Not that these are necessarily bad things. He gives his harness bells a shake to ask if there is some mistake. As Canada's winter drew in and we were asked to steel

ourselves once more, we found ourselves reaching for new ways to get by. Ideas producer Tom Howell plunged himself into an icy bath of wintry poems. The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but I have promises to keep. Tom's documentary is called Fireside and Icicles, Poems for Winter. And miles to go before I sleep. And miles to go before I sleep, and miles to go before I sleep. It was snowing the other day, so I went for a walk in the snow. I saw a multitude of snowflakes coming down, and a few actually going up, but that's politics for you. Vast majority, 97% at least, seemed to agree down was the way to go.

And with Christmas coming, you know, it was all quite pretty. I had no complaints. I finished my walk before it got dark, came inside, lit a candle, sat down on my rocking chair, and then I noticed I was yearning. For once, it wasn't the yearning I do almost every day to have a thing delivered in a box, nor did it seem to be one of the other yearnings I'm used to, like for a drink or a movie or my childhood. But as clearly as I could tell what I was not yearning for, it was equally unclear what I was yearning for. And I thought, maybe this is poetry's job, to help a person out in moments like this. It also seemed picturesque to open up a book of poems, sit on my rocking chair, maybe light a few more candles, or even sit beside a roaring fire, which would be dangerous since we don't have a fireplace.

The snowstorm blowing against the window, etc., etc., like a Christmas postcard. I asked my wife, who's a poet, if she knew any good poems with a wintry flavor that might fill the as-yet-undefined hole in my Christmas spirit. For some reason I didn't really get, she found the question annoying. I think her word was barf. So I asked someone else. Hi, I'm Stephanie Burt. I am a professor of English at Harvard. Professor Burt's latest book of criticism is called

Don't Read Poetry. In my not terribly sophisticated way, I wanted some nice poems. I began to explain to her about the yearning. When I'm feeling a little bit down or whatever, I'm married to a poet. I did not know that. I am. And she said she was frustrated that poetry is always treated this way. People are always like, I want a nice, cozy, decorative poem to purr on my lap or whatever. Why is this the only way poetry ever gets dealt with? And I was like, I shouldn't feel bad. It can take me a while sometimes to get to my point. In the sense that one always feels bad for being comfortable because you're not, you know.

But still, why don't you get over that for a bit? I'm going to, that set of Desiderata makes me want to read you my single favorite cat poem. And it's possibly my favorite cozy winter poem. Do you have it there? I do, yeah, yeah. It is Thomas Hardy's poem, Snow in the Suburbs, and you'll have to wait for the cat. Every branch big with it, bent every twig with it, every fork like a white web foot, every street and pavement mute.

white web foot, every street and pavement mute. Some flakes have lost their way and grope back upward when, meeting those meandering down, they turn and descend again. The palings are glued together like a wall, and there is no waft of wind with the fleecy fall. A sparrow enters the tree, whereon immediately a snow lump thrice his own slight size descends on him and showers his head and eye and overturns him and near inurns him and lights on a nether twig when its brush starts off a volley of other lodging lumps with a rush. The steps are a blanched slope up which, with feeble hope, a black cat comes, wide-eyed and thin, and we take him in. I was a little worried for the sparrow when the cat showed up. Yeah, I know, especially in Thomas Hardy, but it turned out okay for once. It's actually one of the only Thomas Hardy works of any kind I can think of

besides Far From the Madden Crowd where things turn out okay. But we take the cat in. We take the cat in. So what expectations and demands do you think I'm allowed to bring to a book of poems without getting in trouble for being the wrong kind of poetry reader or doing poetry reading wrong? You can't really be the wrong kind of poetry reader. What you can be is either delighted and surprised and, you know, expanded or empowered by finding the kind of poem that's right for you or frustrated by finding the wrong one. We come to poetry, which is really a name for a set of

techniques for making lots of different kinds of verbal objects that do lots of different things. We often come to poetry as this concept through schools, and we think that poetry is this thing like geometry where you learn it, and it's one body of knowledge. And it's actually a lot more like music. this is groovy. It just means that Thelonious Monk isn't for you and possibly 50s and 60s jazz is not for you. And if somebody plays you a whole lot of string quartets and you're not responding, that doesn't mean you don't like music. It means that that's the wrong kind of music for you. Poetry as an art form works the same way. You can look for as many things in poems as you can look for from life. But it turned out when I made a giant imaginary stack of the poems I liked and asked, why do I like these? And then I asked, why do I like these in ways that I'm more likely to go to poems for? But there were six things, and I had six names for them. Feelings,

character, technique, difficulty, wisdom, and community. And these can overlap. Note that Stephanie does not have a category called aimless yearning. The closest one to it is maybe her first one, feelings. Feelings, and sometimes that's called lyric, give you the sense that you're inhabiting the soul or the psyche of the poet, or the sense that this person really knows how you feel. It's as if the poem could speak for you or from some version of you, your joy, your anger, your selfhood is in there somehow,

some version of you. Part of what makes Don't Read Poetry an interesting book is Stephanie's persistence in pinning down and distinguishing what she means by a feelings poem as opposed to, say, a poem of technique. Technique are poems that make you say,

I didn't think anybody could do it with language. That's amazing. That's super complicated where there's just some kind of feat being performed. Stephanie's already mentioned that her categories tend to overlap and the process of getting what you want from a poem isn't as straightforward as ordering stuff online.

Poems can refuse. A poem that I remember really changing my sense of what poems could be and what poems could do, partly because it refused to be a poem of wisdom at a time when I was looking for wisdom and insisted on being a poem of technique and a poem of feeling. Instead, a poem that just displayed the universe, a universe, a tragic universe, and suggested that maybe we can't do the things about it that we think we can do, is Elizabeth Bishop's poem, The Armadillo. It's become quite famous.

It's become quite famous. It is a poem that takes place in Brazil, where she was living. And she's watching a festival in Brazil for which people light balloons on fire and then let the balloons float up, because they become hot air balloons when you light fires under them. And then eventually either the fire burns out or the balloon burns up or the wind blows them down and they come back down and do some damage.

And it's a poem that begins with just some lovely descriptive technique and then ends as a poem of deeply mixed feelings and a frustration that we can't do more to help the people as well as the animals around us. A poem about feeling helpless and a poem about seeing that if the people and the animals around you are in pain and are in trouble, some will make it and some will not. At the time that I first encountered this poem, which was I was 18 or 19, I was very much someone who wanted poems to generate wisdom.

I wanted poems to tell me how to live and what to do. And this poem almost faints towards telling you how to live and what to do. And this poem almost faints towards telling you how to live and what to do. And it has a kind of quatrain at the end where you keep thinking it's about to tell you what to make of this tragic spectacle. And then it throws up its hands and just shares your sadness. It throws up its hands and just shares your sadness. Are we ready for me to read The Armadillo? We are ready for The Armadillo.

Okay, this is Elizabeth Bishop's poem, The Armadillo. And she dedicated it to her friend Robert Lowell. This is the time of year when almost every night the frail, illegal fire balloons appear. Climbing the mountain height, rising toward a saint still honored in these parts. The paper chambers flush and fill with light that comes and goes like hearts. Once up against the sky, it's hard to tell them from the stars, planets that is, the tinted ones, Venus going down, or Mars, or the pale green one. But if it's still, they steer between the kite sticks of the Southern Cross, receding, dwindling, solemnly and steadily forsaking us, or in the downdraft from a peak, suddenly turning dangerous. Last night, another big one fell. It splattered like an egg of fire against the cliff behind the house. The flame ran down.

We saw the pair of owls who nest there, flying up and up, their whirling black and white stained bright pink underneath until they shrieked up out of sight. The ancient owl's nest must have burned. should owl's nest must have burned. Hastily, all alone, a glistening armadillo left the scene, rose-flecked, head down, tail down, and then a baby rabbit jumped out, short-eared, to our surprise. So soft, a handful of intangible ash with fixed, ignited eyes. Too pretty, dreamlike mimicry. Oh, fallen fire and piercing cry and panic. And a weak, mailed fist clenched ignorant against the sky.

The mailed fist because the armadillo, I guess uh has that armor all over him or her yeah can you talk about anything that's happening in that sort of closing uh fireworks yeah literally fire works or fire that doesn't work it is a poem that places so many feelings and that admits that it can't resolve them or solve them or take away your frustration. It can just represent those things. You can raise your fist at the sky and say, I would like to defeat this outcome. And you might get away. The armadillo gets away. Or you might not. You might be the bunny on fire. It's quite an ensemble cast. Thank you very much. This is really helping me in my pursuit of the perfect poem on the particular evening. I'm happy to, you know, come back and help you find whatever you're looking for. There are poems for every fireside, every electric heater, and everybody who just needs to huddle together with whatever other human being is in the house for warmth in these strange times.

Wonderful. Thanks so much, Stephanie. Thank you. Stephanie Burt is Professor of English Literature at Harvard University. Stephanie Burt is Professor of English Literature at Harvard University. She's the author of Don't Read Poetry, as well as a new collection of poems called After Callimachus. Stephanie gave me the names of some poets who've been hitting the spot for her lately, like Ross Gay and Canada's Sonnet Labé. Or Sonnet Labé, who's really good. I've gotten really into her brand new book. So I ordered their books online, and the next day,

they didn't arrive because I hadn't ordered them from you-know-who. Instead, I found myself in much the same rocking chair as before with no visible signs of progress. But now I knew I was in the market for some poems of feeling. However, I was still hampered by not knowing which feeling I needed a poem to be of. It crossed my mind I might just be homesick because it's Christmas time and I can't go spend it in Wales with my family in the house where I spent all my Christmases as a child. But that didn't seem quite right.

Then I found a much more interesting word to consider. The great Welsh essayist and travel writer Jan Morris died in late November 2020. She was 94. And I was reading through various tributes to her, many of which mention her affection for a Welsh term, hiraeth. Jan Morris once defined the word as, quote, a bittersweetness and yearning for we know not what. She comes back to it in a few books, and even mulls it over once more on the final page of her final book,

which will be published in Canada in January. She makes hiraeth seem a very useful and attractive word. Hello, Tom. My name is Tum. Tum Morris. Tum is Jan Morris's son, and also he's a celebrated poet in Wales. He specializes in one of the world's oldest living poetic traditions. My poetry is mostly what we call strict metre poetry, a technique not exactly unique to Welsh, but it's bound up in the Welsh language

and is a very old way of making poetry and seems to be impossible. Why? Well, because it involves so many rules, you know. It's a sound system, really. It's a sound system, and it involves alliteration, internal rhyme, semi-rhymes, bouncing rhymes, chiming rhymes. It takes, it is reckoned, about seven years apprenticeship to learn it properly. Fascinating. Did it take you seven years? I was lucky because my teacher in school was a very good practitioner and he told me one-to-one. And so I had a Bardic teacher and I learned alongside my schoolwork, I learned how to do it.

Yeah. Can we bring up this word? Now, I don't even know the proper pronunciation. Is it hiraith? Yeah. Can we bring up this word? Now, I don't even know the proper pronunciation. Is it hiraith or hiraith? Hiraith. Hiraith, yes. Can you tell me how you use this word just when you're speaking Welsh without a sort of literary thing necessarily?

Yeah, well, it's a common word, and it means the closest English translation of it is hiraith. It is hiraith. That says it all, doesn't it? The closest English. Well, that is true probably because it's claimed that it can't be translated as English. It means longing for something either nostalgic, something you've lost, or something you might have had, or something you can't even have had, as it were, but you want.

Longing in that sense in all sorts of ways. And it can mean love sickness, of course, longing for love, longing for somebody who has died, longing for a place often. And how you say it in Welsh is, there is hiraeth upon me for something. Do you mind giving me the whole sentence? Mae hiraeth arneu.

Mae hiraeth arneu am fy ngwlad. Mae hir aith arnei mae hir aith arnei am fy ngwlad mae hir aith arnei am fy nhad that kind of thing. There is hir aith upon me for something.

Do you find that it is untranslatable yourself? Is there some connotation that is uniquely Welsh? I think there is. I think the power given the word the value of the word

is different to longing in English. And that's true about many words in different languages. The colour of them, as it were, the basic meaning is the same or has things in common, but the colour of it and the power of it are different. And I don't know, I think probably the Welsh people are more full of hiraeth in general than the English people. And so that's why an Englishman cannot really maybe understand the whole meaning of the word. First country to be colonized by the English. Quite true, quite true. They're trying again now. But that's a topic for another day. I asked Tum for a Welsh poem evoking hiraeth

in some manner. Well, there's a very well-known folk song about hiraeth, which in a way is a very good example because it personifies hiraeth in the way that some cultures personify death, for instance. The Bretons, we call death a rangai. And there are some poems in Welsh which personify a rangai. And in Breton, it's called an oncu. And if you go to old churches in Brittany, you'll find an oncu. You'll find him, a statue, you know,

in an image in the churches as a person, death. And of course that's true in old English paintings and things, but not as much as in Brittany and formerly in Wales, where he actually moved among people, as it were, rather like in Mexico, or that kind of culture. And there is a poem which says, Dwey dwch fawrion o'w i bot daith, o ba beth a gwnaith pwyd hi raith, Ond yw'r poem sy'n dweud... Derfydd melfe, derfydd sydan. Derfydd pob dilledyn helaeth. Eto er hyn, ni dderfydd hiraeth.

Hiraeth, hiraeth. Cilia, cilia. Paid â phwysio mor drwm arna. Pan fydd drwm ar nos. Naki, nesa di pin at yr erchwyn. Gadi mi gael cysgu gronin. It's a bit longer than that. It's a song, you know, but it means really, people of great knowledge, you wise men, as it were, tell me what hiraeth is made of.

And what material was put in it that doesn't wear, if you put it on, as it were, like clothes. if you put it on like clothes gold perishes, silver perishes velvet perishes and silk perishes and all ample clothing perishes

but hiraith never perishes hiraith, hiraith move away move away, move away do not press so heavily upon me please move closer to the edge of the bed and let me sleep a little so you're even sharing your bed with Hiraith

and that's a very good description of Hiraith, as something that's with you something that accompanies you, almost like a person in various situations of your life. When Jan Morris wrote about this word, she sometimes referred to its indulgent quality, even addictiveness. She did use the word quite a lot, and she was fond of saying as well that it wasn't translatable into English. Roedd hi'n defnyddio'r gwaith eithaf, ac roedd hi'n ffodd o ddweud hefyd nad oedd yn gallu cael ei gyflawni i'r Saesneg. Roedd hi'n un o'r rhain sy'n hynod o'r profond, nid yn ymarfer o Ureith, ond rhywun sy'n llawn Ureith. Roedd hi'n llawn Ureith am rywbeth nad oedd hi'n gwybod beth oedd. Roedd hi'n gofyn am rywbeth, ond nid yn gwybod yn union beth oedd.

she longed for something not knowing exactly what it was whether she'd lost it sometime or whether she'd never had it or whether she it had not yet been invented whether it might be a place or a person she often expressed that here I throw all sorts of things just beyond the imagination or just beyond your reach yes heart-wrenching longing which can be quite fun as a matter of fact as well well I want to ask about this you might want Hiraith to move aside on the bed on occasion but you don't want to expel Hiraith altogether oh no no by no means

a bit of melancholy you see is quite good isn't it and one tinge of meaning of Hiraith is melancholy and some people are too melancholic they get a bit of a bore aren't they but a touch of melancholy is a good thing so if you have a touch of melancholy and a touch of who will merriment uh you they can go hand in hand and it's a good combination yeah especially at christmas time. Especially at Christmas time. Yeah. across North America on Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. You can also hear ideas on the CBC Listen app

or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayed. My name is Graham Isidore. I have a progressive eye disease called keratoconus. And being I'm losing my vision has been hard, but explaining it to other people has been harder. Lately, I've been trying to talk about it. Short Sighted is an attempt to explain what vision loss feels like

by exploring how it sounds. By sharing my story, we get into all the things you don't see about hidden disabilities. Short Sighted, from CBC's Personally, available now. Today's episode is about a feeling that's hard to define. A yearning apparently brought on by winter weather and Christmas time during the lockdown of 2020. A yearning that couldn't be satisfied by Zoom calls

or video games or movies or home deliveries. Ideas producer Tom Howell has gone searching for better expressions of this feeling, and it's led him to the Welsh concept of hiraeth. Hiraeth. Hiraeth, yes. It means a longing for something nostalgic or lost. Something you might have had, or something you couldn't ever have had. The writer Jan Morris once said that in Wales, the bittersweetness of hiraith

has become something like a national addiction. And it's in that country's poetry that hiraith truly comes alive. It's important for Welsh poets to know how to strike notes of Hiraeth when they need to. But even more important, when dealing in traditional strict meter verse forms dating back to the 7th century, poets have to master the technique of cynghanedd. Cynghanedd. Cynghanedd. Cynghanedd. Cynghanedd. Th. Th at the end. Oh, cynghanedd. Yeah, that's perfect. Cynghanedd. That is a word that cannot be translated into English. And I use the word chiming, which is as close as I can get. And I was in Canada years ago with a friend of mine,

Ewan Lloyd, who is also dead. Like, well, most poets that I've known, good ones, mind you, are dead. And we were touring Canada, and we visited colleges where we were asked to explain the tradition, the Welsh tradition, and poetry, Strigmy to poetry. And we found that that was almost impossible because there were no examples, really, in English. And we were staying in Saskatoon.

It was the coldest I've ever been in my life. If you went outside, you might as well just... Well, you had to stay there because you'd be frozen solid. Yep, we know about those. You know about these. But I fortunately was sleeping right down in the basement where there was a boiler, and I was warm, you know, it was quite a pleasant place.

The boiler made a good deal of noise, but a rhythmic noise. Ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum. Ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum. Ba-bum, ba-bum, ba-dum, ba-dum. Like this. And anyway, one evening we decided the only way to explain Strictly to Poetry to the Canadians would be to compose some in Canadian. That is not Cree or anything like that,

but English, Canadian English. And so one night when I couldn't really sleep because of the boiler, I used the boiler to help me write a Strigmeeter poem in the meter we called Cowith. And I just let my mind wander, you know. And that is sometimes the best way to write poetry without even aiming for a meaning sometimes it just comes out and the meaning could be settled later and so I emptied

my mind really and the first line was this my first love was a plover now I won't go into all the but you can probably hear that my first love was a plover the sound of in the in the middle of the line is picked up again under the accent at the end of the line

now that's the easiest of all the the other ones are more complicated but I will relate it to you you close your eyes now, listen Now that's the easiest of all the Kanganidion. The other ones are more complicated. But I will relate it to you. You close your eyes now. Listen. My first love was a plever. Beautiful things her wings were.

Tiny eyes shining at night. Though mainly in the moonlight we ate leeks by a lakeside I caressed her crest and cried all night then the kite called unshaven

and dishevelled he saw from the bristling sedge my playmate's handsome plumage. She made a tryst, kissed the kite so dearly in the starlight. I thought of only one thing, my plever lover leaving it meant absolutely nothing at the time but as a matter of fact

it's the most successful poem I've ever written in my life because it had a strained effect not only on the audiences in the colleges who often came up and said, can we have a copy of the Plover poem? And so I had to write it out and give it to them. But later on, you know,

people contacted me, and they somehow found this poem on the internet. And there was one American who was a teacher in a New York school, a very rough school, which was getting worse. And he was in a New York school, a very rough school, which was getting worse, and he was in a bad way, you know. He could hardly face going into work in the morning.

And on the subway, he used to recite this plever thing as a mantra, which gave him strength. And this, I kind of laugh at it, but I don't really in my heart, because there is some kind of magic in this type of poetry. Even though I knew at the time it had no particular meaning, it obviously does have a meaning, all words have meanings. And often the way they're expressed are part of their meaning. And that poem sings, it sounds wonderful because of the structure of it,

because of the rules one has to abide by. And so that is, that has in itself an effect on people. And furthermore, the audience maybe sees meanings in it, which I would never have seen. And that is poetry. Hmm.

Well, this is wonderful. Thank you so much for the introduction and the explanation and the evocation and all of the above. Do you crave hereith still? What brings it up for you? I mean in the good way. Certain people, sometimes I have a stab of here-aith. There's a famous couplet from a poem, a medieval poem,

about a little boy who died, and his father, Lewis Glyncothie, wrote a poem for him in the Strigmita. One of the couplets is... the string meter and one of the couplets is Sean Sean O'Glynn was the name of the little boy and the couplet says Sean is sending his father a blade an edge of here I and love you see those two things together he loved his son of course

and love comes back like a two things together. He loved his son, of course. And love comes back like a barb shot by hiraith. And that type of hiraith often occurs to me as it does to us all when we reach a certain age, Tom, which you seem to be not having reached yet.

Well, I may just lack an inner life. I'll be there any second. It does happen, I'm afraid. Yes. Awch o hiraith a chariad. I may just lack an inner life. I'll be there any second. It does happen, I'm afraid. Yes. A u cho hiraith a chariat. Yeah. Thank you so much for the time,

and huldah, I guess. Huld aur. Tioch. Tum Morris is a poet and musician, and he's the editor of Bardas, the Welsh-language poetry magazine. Earlier on, Stephanie Burt drew a contrast between poems where the speaker really seems to know how you feel and express your feelings for you versus poems of technique, which are satisfying for a different

reason. Poems that make you say, that's amazing, I didn't know anyone could do that. She makes another contrast with poems of character. A poem that gives you a sense that you're meeting a person. And there are also poems of wisdom. Poems that tell you how you might feel and what to do about your feelings rather than just embodying them for you. Stephanie also has a category for poems which are deliberately difficult or obscure, maybe to shake up the reader in some way. And finally, Stephanie marks out poems of community. Poems that not only help you live and expand your world, but give you a sense of commonality with others. And those can be poems that are poems of political activism or poems of other kinds of fellow

feeling. As Stephanie Burt sees it, poetry is a name for a lot of different techniques for arranging words to make many different types of art objects and for any number of effects. It's strange and maybe beautiful that an art form so multiplicitous in itself, so hard to pin down, is also the thing that many of us turn to for precision, for just the right words to hit the spot when regular expression isn't up for the job. And like Tim Morris's plover poem, the way words can seem just right may have very little to do with what they mean. There are strange things done in the midnight sun by the men who moil for gold. The arctic trails have their secret tales that would make your blood run cold.

The northern lights have seen queer sights, but the queerest they ever did see was that night on the marge of Lake LaBarge I cremated Sam McGee. Was that night on the marge of Lake LaBarge I cremated Sam McGee When ideas put out a call for people's favorite Canadian winter-themed poems recently, this was the runaway winner. On a Christmas day we were mushing our way over the Dawson Trail Talk of your cold

Through the parka's fold It stabbed like a driven nail The cremation of Sam McGee by Robert Service is a very silly story. Like the Plover poem, it's not actually nonsense. There's a clear literal meaning. But without the game of rhythm and rhyme, it wouldn't count for much. This might disqualify it from being a poem of feeling or expressing someone's inner self. Or maybe it doesn't, because what makes this poem so popular is arguably the feeling people get

when they encounter its technique in action. Some people even memorize it and recite it to feel that feeling more purely. Stephanie Burt's idea of separating out and naming the six ways a poem might hit the spot bumps inevitably into her caveat. You might even say they have to overlap in order to work at all. I was thinking about this when one of the books Stephanie Burt recommended to me landed on my front porch. And it was a good recommendation because it contains my new favourite Christmas poem. I don't know if it's a poetic sensibility or just me,

but I often want that kind of peak of maybe emotional acuity. This is Sonnet Labé, the Canadian poet Professor Burt had mentioned to me earlier. I guess it's a similar kind of longing to like if a loved one is about to die and you have this desire for some kind of dramatic, epiphanic last set of words or something or like revelation of like this is what my life was about. That kind of longing, I have that on a slightly smaller scale with Christmases. Sonnet's latest book is called Sonnet's Shakespeare. Here's her Christmas poem,

and I'll lay down a challenge to the most dedicated fans of William Shakespeare to spot the connection in this poem to his work. Okay, as Tim Morris might say... You close your eyes now and listen. 39. Oh, holy night, what should my words do at this wishful time? Humans want their charismatic day.

I sing when night thoughts star the dark, familiar holiday theater. A better poet's art softens me when that cynical enmity threatens to make me disown praise. A poet whose mind frees its owned self brings a kindness I wish for that isn't about making sincerity shows for occasion. When Emily praised, the space between her verbs opened onto formless ethereal consciousness and let us drift above its depths. Would that Vislava's wise verse animated our dinner conversations, or that her love's eloquence seeped into family get-togethers? If only June's jingles were intoned in the malls, people might buy back their lost selves by paying visionary attention.

Tonight, may I give that sweet duende to those sad-hearted whose gifts reach out hopefully toward undeserving takers. Christmas loneliness mourns the absence of fellowship that wants story and meaning, of kin that would strengthen our practice of love. We gather together to imitate a normal family that hardly exists, but our likenesses find pleasure in comforting avoidance, in taking sweet leave together from commitments. There are those happy families, resembling each other, whose intimacies we either inhabit or have to struggle to achieve. The rest of us love, awkwardly, shoving purchases at family members, adding and subtracting from the account of our generosity. These poems delight a sensibility so sweet and acutely seldom cultivated that despite their craft and expensive inspiration, they do not charm most of the fellow humans I treasure.

Couldn't the sonnet be how to make an occasion felt? What if, instead of buying, we praised, in mad flighting, the epic mystery of our togetherness? Brother, for whom I stupidly forgot to purchase a thing, let this evidence of your gift prove you're mattering to me. Do you mind talking us through maybe the first couple of lines just to show technically what you're doing? Oh, sure. Okay. It would be easiest if I just, if I grabbed a copy of Shakespeare's sonnets so that I could just, um, okay, hold on. I'm going to, I'm going to grab it off my shelf. Okay.

Oh, how thy worth with manners may I sing when thou art all the better part of me. What can mine own praise to mine own self bring? And what is but mine own when I praise thee? Ay, ay. So, in these poems, what I'm doing is a kind of erasure technique that I invented. Usually erasure poets take a source text and then they erase parts, like they delete parts of the original to make their own poem. And in this book, I take the source text, which is the Shakespearean sonnet, and I insert my letters all around the original text

so that you often can't hear the words, even though the entire Shakespearean sonnet is there on the page. So, for example, with this one that I just read, my poem 39 has Shakespeare's Sonnet 39 embedded in it. And the first line of Shakespeare's Sonnet 39 is, Oh, how thy worth with manners may I sing? My text starts, Oh, holy night, what should my words do at this wishful time? So, let's see. My O is the same O as Shakespeare's O. O how thy worth with manners may I sing. And then his first word is how. And so the HO from how shows up in holy night. O holy night, what should my words do at this wishful time? And then the W of his how shows up as the W of my what. Oh, how thy worth with matters may I... Then his next word is thy.

So thy... It's maybe not the easiest technique to explain or to follow. So if you're feeling a bit confused or lost, that's okay. It's supposed to be hard. Words do at this wishful time is mine, is my phrase. I actually thought this style might be very easy to do, just writing new words into old ones by adding as many letters as you like and getting a new poem out of it that makes sense and contains interesting phrases. If you aren't busy, have a go yourself.

It's extremely difficult. And then I start a new sentence with the H from with to say humans want their charismatic day. So I don't know if that gives you a sense of how meticulous and painstaking it was, but I use up all of Shakespeare's letters that way. I use up all of Shakespeare's letters that way. Sonnets Shakespeare, the book, contains every letter of Shakespeare's 154 sonnets treated in this way, which could make it a work of technique in Stephanie Burt's terms, or else her next category, poems of difficulty. Those are poems that make you say not, wow, I didn't believe anybody could do that,

and more poems that make you say, why on earth would anyone want to do that? I am baffled. That is a puzzle. It often felt like hooking or knitting because I would have the tapestry or the plane of my thinking, but I had to pull these letters almost like beads into the text. Sometimes the words that I needed and the letters that Shakespeare's text offered me just fell into place. And sometimes I thought, man, I'm like the only one who's ever going to see how like nicely this fits. Wordplay isn't a meaningless game for Sonnet Labé. Her earlier book, Killarno,

is a mixture of playful punning with serious reflection on language and power. In Killarno, I was very interested in the cultural resonances of individual phonemes. Phonemes are the units of sound that we rely on to tell words apart, like the bit in bitter versus the ba in batter. bitter versus the ba in batter i was thinking a lot uh it was you know post 9-11 i was thinking a lot about how i don't have a muslim sounding name though many many members of my family do and what that meant for me growing up or on resumes or on the telephone and the way that just having a Z, a Z-A in your name was an indicator, even if I didn't speak with a quote unquote accent, that having a name like Zelina could signal to an ear that I was foreign, quote unquote foreign or ethnic. So I was really exploring, were there meanings behind individual syllables like ma or za or uh? I think that that was my kind of formal fascination with that book.

Sonnet Shakespeare, I found a new fascination, a new game to play and constraint to up the challenge, make it feel as though I was playing the game on a harder level in one way, but also just conceptually doing something that I didn't have. I didn't have words for what it meant in terms of voice or like in interviews, people can ask me, what's your relationship to the text or why did you sit down and do this thing to the text? But I always felt as though the doing it, the doing of it was the closest expression of my relationship to it, as opposed to any kind of prosaic articulation of what I was doing. There's plenty that could be said about Sonnet's gesture of erasing and appropriating Shakespeare's words, the symbolism of asserting her narratives on top of a tradition associated so closely with the British Empire

and the spread of English culture. And on a different day, on a different rocking chair, I might ponder all that. But for now, what chimes with me in Sonnet's Christmas poem is following the very intricate technique of pulling words apart and putting the bits back together. It seems to ring a bell from childhood when the whole notion of words was new and strange. I have memories of my own language acquisition. I have a memory of my mother teaching me that this symbol, she held up the visual symbol of an A, and she's like, this is A or A.

And I remember, I would have been less than two, having the thoughts without the words. I was like, seriously, these humans have a notation system for the sounds. That's brilliant. I'm like, that is, that is so dope. So I thought I need to learn this notation system because it holds everything down. Like, cause otherwise the sounds just fly away. Um, but before that, I also have a visceral memory of melody and pattern and being like, seriously, you're going to make that sound again? Like you are going to repeat that phrase. And that lets me know that you are another soul that exists on the same plane as I do. Like I'm not the only consciousness in this world. You are another consciousness. I can repeat that phrase. I think for a while, I was experiencing my own poetic practice as a very precise semantics, using my language in as honest a way as I could. But now I do think of it as much more musical and time-based.

musical and time-based. So, like I read that poem a few times just for the recording, and sometimes you hit the inflection just right that the way that that phrase sits makes you go, yeah. And if you read it just a little bit off, maybe that spark doesn't happen that particular time. And that's a very musical thing, I feel like, you know. Like I say in the poem, not everybody wants, not everybody's charmed by poetry. Not everybody wants to talk about words this much or syllables this much. And some people do.

Vyslava Zimborska, who I do actually talk about in this poem, writes a poem about how her sister does not read poems and doesn't carry poems in her purse. And my sister neither. She doesn't. So the people that I super care about, I have to get over that the way that they might want to commune might not be the way that I want to commune with the larger universe.

Thanks so much, Sonnet, for talking to me. Thanks. Thanks so much, Sonnet, for talking to me. Thanks. Sonnet Labbe is a professor at Vancouver Island University where she teaches English and creative writing. Her new poetry collection is called Sonnet's Shakespeare. Stephanie Burt called her guide to reading poetry Don't Read Poetry because she doesn't think we should treat the art form Stephanie Burt called her guide to reading poetry, don't read poetry,

because she doesn't think we should treat the art form as one big lump, like a weird monolith someone plonked in a desert. You are probably locking yourself out of a lot of experiences, of a lot of different kinds of poems. So I won't leap up from my rocking chair-based adventures to nominate poetry as the best

answer to nameless or ineffable yearnings that anyone may be experiencing this winter. I'll just wish those of you who do go looking, however aimlessly, for the right words, or the right arrangements of words, for the right epiphanies, or for the right mixture of melancholy and joy, hereith and hul, that you succeed in finding them. Or are they in finding you? There are poems for every fireside, every electric heater, and everybody who just needs to huddle together

with whatever other human being is in the house for warmth in these strange times. Tonight, may I give that sweet duende to those sad-hearted whose gifts reach out hopefully toward undeserving takers. A bit of melancholy, you see, is quite good, isn't it? It's one of the many ways, roots into defining poetry generally, I suppose, if you must do that, making the familiar strange in some way. Or making the familiar astounding.

Yeah. I gave out one heart, I am not only me, but by love can joy all. You were listening to Fireside and Icicles, Poems for Winter, by Ideas producer Tom Howell. You can find information about the poems heard today

and the guests on the program by going to our website, cbc.ca slash ideas. Technical production, Danielle Duval. Web producer, Lisa Ayuso. Senior producer, Nikola Lukšić. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of Ideas, and I'm Nala Ayyad. CHOIR SINGS For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.