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The Body as It's Lived: Michael Lee
de Vries interviews Kath Healing

Thank you, Michael Lee, for the chance to think out loud about these poems and my practice—it's a kind of conversation I always enjoy.

In “oriented x3” the use of third person creates a sense of self-distance that mimics the “shape of hesitation” imbued in the subject’s answers to their doctor’s questions. How did you come to decide to use third person in this poem? What role does perspective play in the way you approach writing about disability?

The third person arrived very early and I didn’t argue with it. I knew almost immediately that “I” wasn’t available to this poem.

Partly that’s because the poem is interested in dissociation, but it’s also interested in what happens when a person becomes a subject of documentation, when the language describing you starts to do something different than the language of you. The “she” in the poem isn’t quite mine. She’s the pronoun the form would use, the clipboard’s pronoun, the intake nurse’s pronoun. She’s also the version of the speaker who knows how to answer those questions. The poem watches her do that and doesn’t correct it, because correcting it would be one more thing the clipboard could mark down.

So the third person isn’t distance in the contemplative sense. It’s the speaker getting filed.

Disability makes me think a great deal about perspective because so much of disability involves interpretation. There’s the body as it’s lived and the body as it’s recorded, and those aren’t always the same thing. A great deal can happen in the gap between them. The poem is trying to stay inside that gap without resolving it. The moment a poem like this fully explains the dissociation, the dissociation stops being part of the form and becomes the subject instead.

In “what the fire gave me” the speaker’s body is natural, but remains separate from them: “in the ash, / i found my own mouth. / it was / closed. / it was / not mine. / the tongue / was already a river.” Body as nature recurs in your poetry as a prominent image. How does nature shape your writing about the body?

I’d push back gently on “body as nature” as a frame for “what the fire gave me.” That’s not quite how I was thinking about it when I wrote the poem. The body isn’t being compared to nature. It’s being overtaken by it.

The mouth is found in the ash and it isn’t the speaker’s mouth. The tongue is already a river. The ribs are flutes someone else is singing through. This isn’t metaphor, exactly. Metaphor would let the body stay.

I think I’m interested in the moment a body stops being available to be described and becomes the material of whatever’s happening to it. Smoke, river, ash, weather. The body doesn’t experience trauma, dissociation, and chronic illness as separate categories. Institutions do.

Nature has always been more than scenery or comfort for me. I spend a lot of time paying attention to ecosystems, migration, adaptation, survival strategies, the ways living things respond to pressure. Those patterns often end up shaping how I think about people as well. I’m drawn to transformation rather than certainty: fire, weather, erosion, growth, decay. Processes that change one thing into another.

I should also say that the poem refuses the renewal reading. Forest fires are often narrated as tragic-but-generative, the ground prepared for new growth. The speaker in this poem isn’t preparing for new growth. She’s still burning at the end. The clipboards arrive and say the place is empty, and they’re wrong.

How does your spoken-word practice influence your writing process and your perspective as a poet? How does performance influence the creation stage?

Performance teaches me to pay attention to attention. An audience will tell you, very quickly and without diplomacy, where energy rises, where tension drops, where a poem becomes predictable. They tell you with breath, with stillness, with the moment someone shifts in their chair.

I don’t write only for performance, and I’d resist the idea that page and stage are the same practice. They ask different things. But reading aloud is part of how I revise. I listen for the line that has gone slack, the section that’s congratulating itself, the place where the poem has decided in advance how the audience should feel. Those are usually the places where the poem isn’t trusting its reader.

I also move poems between page and stage in both directions. Reading aloud reveals different weaknesses than reading silently. Sometimes a stage poem asks for more complexity on the page; sometimes a page poem discovers its real rhythm when spoken. You can’t learn that from books. It’s one reason I keep both practices. They keep teaching me different things about the same poem.

Performance has also made me more interested in who is speaking. “oriented x3” is a page poem, but the question of voice—who gets to use the official one, who gets translated against their will, what the clipboard hears versus what the body says—comes partly from years of watching people perform speech, and watching audiences sort speakers into categories before a word has settled.

What writing projects are you currently working on?

I’m working toward a full-length poetry manuscript that moves between the body, ecology, mythology, family performance and the languages institutions use to describe people.

Some poems borrow the architecture of intake forms, assessments, and official documents. Others move through mythology, landscape, or social relationships. Looking at the manuscript as a whole, what links the poems is an interest in how people are read, categorized, translated, and sometimes misread by the systems around them, and in what remains when those systems fail to account for lived experience.

Alongside the poetry, I’ve also been working in creative nonfiction and short fiction. Those projects let me approach some of the same questions from a different distance, and the three practices keep cross-pollinating in ways I didn’t expect. Right now, though, poetry remains my centre of gravity.

What has been influencing and inspiring you lately? Are there any books, music, film, art, or other influences that you have felt particularly moved by?

Honestly, more prose than poetry right now, though music has been influencing the work just as much.

When I’m drafting or revising, I often listen to composers like Ólafur Arnalds, Max Richter, and Alexis Ffrench. I love the way they work with repetition and variation. A phrase returns, but it’s been altered by everything that’s happened around it. Poems often seem to work that way too. The same image comes back carrying new information.

On the reading side, I’ve been drawn to books like Jacqueline Harpman’s I Who Have Never Known Men, Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police, Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and Klara and the Sun, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, and Han Kang’s The Vegetarian. I didn’t realize until recently that I was reading a coherent shelf. Looking at them together, I think I’m drawn to stories where the usual coordinates have shifted—memory becomes unreliable, identity becomes unstable, the world has rewritten the categories a body is permitted to be in, and people have to find new ways of understanding themselves inside it.

In poetry, I keep returning to Bhanu Kapil, Don Mee Choi, and Billy-Ray Belcourt. Bhanu Kapil’s work continues to make me think about the body as a formal problem rather than simply a subject. Don Mee Choi’s poetry keeps teaching me about documentary language and what official records leave out. Billy-Ray Belcourt’s work reminds me that a poem can be intellectually rigorous, emotionally vulnerable, funny, and devastating all at once.

I’m also continually influenced by the natural world. I spend a lot of time walking, watching birds, insects and animals, learning about ecosystems, and paying attention to how species adapt and survive. Nature shows up in my poems, but it also shapes how I think. It reminds me that transformation isn’t unusual; it’s the condition of being alive.

And the live poetry scene here in Victoria has been hugely important. I’ve featured at Planet Earth Poetry and at Tongues of Fire Spoken Word and Slam, and I’ve been reading at the library and at Pride and disability events around town. Victoria is unusually generous as a poetry city, and I’ve been warmly welcomed into it. A great deal of what I’m learning about pacing, attention, and risk is being learned in rooms with other people in them, in real time. That’s not a side practice for me. It’s central.

Thank you again, Michael Lee and to The Malahat Review. It’s been a pleasure reflecting on these poems.

 

 

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