Drew Lavigne Season 1 Episode 6

Poet Laureate Podcast – Episode Six
Drew Lavigne | The Aesthetic Pull

In this episode, Kyeren Regehr welcomes Drew Lavigne—poet laureate of Moncton, poetry editor at The Fiddlehead, curator of the Attic Owl Reading Series, and author of Evening Dress (Anstruther Press). With precision and vulnerability, Drew speaks about the compulsion to write, the quiet power of memory, and poetry as both record and ritual.

The conversation travels through long-form poetics, family mythologies, shame and transformation, queer literary lineage, and the textured intimacy of bilingual translation. Drew shares how poems insist themselves into his day, why aesthetic experience can redeem even the hardest moments, and how poetry, like music, changes us in the air.

Drew Lavigne is a member of the editorial board at The Fiddlehead and host of the Attic Owl reading series. Recent work has appeared in Vallum, Visual Arts News, Tourniquet Magazine, and with Éditions Rhizome. He translated the collection Poems Twofold with Georgette LeBlanc and is the author of Evening Dress with Anstruther Press. 

This episode is generously supported by The Fiddlehead, Atlantic Canada’s international literary journal. Published quarterly in Fredericton, The Fiddlehead features exceptional poetry, fiction, and reviews from Canada and beyond. Learn more at thefiddlehead.ca

The Poet Laureate Podcast is recorded in studio at Haus of Owl: Creation Labs—supporting artists to create the best work of their careers. Original music by Chris Regehr. To learn more or reach out, visit www.thepoetlaureatepodcast.com or find us on Instagram @poetlaureatepodcast & poetlaureatepdcast@bsky.social.

We acknowledge with gratitude that this work was created on the unceded homelands of the lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ peoples.

Transcript

Poet Laureate Podcast: Episode 6 - Drew Lavine

Introduction

(The episode begins with Drew Lavigne reading "All Our Lives, We Will Reach for Things No Longer There.")

For Bradford
The lilacs went from the lit street to the curved door of a dark garden. We decided the large Italian house had the most beautiful bushes together. Each night after work, we walked to them. That spring we had so little time. You pinched off a new sprig of bitter flowers while I investigated the inscrutable archway.
Enclosed in ivy, it was only a gate into a fine backyard. But at night the garden was endless, was puzzling questions collapsing into each other as if God had decided to start again and brushed everything into abstraction. Reaching my hand beyond the door was like trying to touch someone no longer there.
A gentle shadow abounding. At night each May the lilacs bloom for you, Bradford, a celebration. There will be time to explore. To go back to where we started. I linger for a moment, then turn from the darkness to face you.

Interview

Kyeren: Welcome to the Poet Laureate Podcast, an illumina sanctuary for poetry and reflection. Recorded at Haus of Owl Creation Labs in Victoria, BC, on Lekwungen Homelands. I'm Kyeren Rae, and Episode Six of the Poet Laureate Podcast is supported by The Fiddlehead, Atlantic Canada's international literary journal. Published quarterly in Fredericton, New Brunswick, The Fiddlehead features exceptional poetry, fiction, and reviews from Canada and around the world, placing emerging and established writers side by side and celebrating diverse and underrepresented perspectives. Discover more at thefiddlehead.ca.

We just heard "All Our Lives, We Will Reach for Things No Longer There" by Drew Lavine, who is a poet laureate of Moncton, New Brunswick. Welcome, Drew, and thank you for being here.

Drew: Thank you so much for having me.

Kyeren: That poem just now arrived in our ears. Where did it first begin for you?

Drew: So, that poem first started a few years ago where I was going through a period where I was working so much, I felt that everything in my life was slipping away from me. I almost felt like I was being torn apart. I had no time. I had made a promise during that summer with my partner that at least every night after work, we were gonna go for an evening walk. The first draft I wrote was about a sort of very long and messy and kind of incoherent, but it was about how my partner's birthday's in May and how we always joke that the lilacs are his birthday flower. Later, it came into its final form about two or so years later after I received some, uh, bad news about my health. And then that spring and that summer, I was sort of immersed in that feeling and also going for those walks at night, going to the lilac bushes, really thinking about them in a more intense way, the feeling of uncertainty. And the poem then kind of emerged as a turning towards love, turning towards light, which is where that last line comes from of, "I linger for a moment, then turn from the darkness to face you."

Kyeren: Thank you. Wow. Drew, can we talk about your Anstruther Press chapbook Evening Dress? Many poets release chapbooks before their first full-length work, but Evening Dress feels deeply self-contained and quiet and potent and emotionally distilled. I'd love to hear how it came into being and how the writing process looked.

Drew: Thank you for saying that it felt very distilled. That was one of my intentions with it. So really the poems from Evening Dress are a selection from The Golden Snare. Those poems developed over a long trajectory. The first poem in Evening Dress, which is called "The Boy," was written when I was around 24 years old. And the form from that was taken from "The Fish," by Marianne Moore. Mm-hmm. And the final poem was completed just about a year ago at around the age of 37. So the process of creating these poems was really the process of learning how to write them and very slowly realizing a vision I had of creating a type of self-contained poem, sort of like "Ozymandias" by Percy Shelley is a model that I always go back to of a kind of very self-contained, standalone unit. I like units of poetry rather than poetic sequences, at least for the time being anyway. I found that a lot of poetry books these days are, they're terribly long. I think sometimes I read one and I think, who's written 150 pages of good poetry? Um, so I was having the ambition of making something as distilled and self-contained as I could get it.

Kyeren: I can see how you are succeeding at that, Drew. And so The Golden Snare is a full-length collection that we're expecting when and who with?

Drew: Well, so far, um, that's been, you know, a process of sending that out, receiving more and more positive rejections. There are some good news on the corner with that though, just coming. I have a strong feeling based on the last editorial comments I've received.

Kyeren: It's not easy even as a poet laureate to get your book published, is it?

Drew: No, it's all about persistence. Um, anything in the arts, you continue to do it and persist at it.

Kyeren: Would you mind telling us a little about the scope of this new book and what sort of questions the work is circling? And I know that you've been writing it over a long period of time, but how have you found the cohesion within the writing process?

Drew: It kind of emerged naturally over time, uh, with my own personal interests and drawing influence from different types of poets who inspire me, like, uh, Jay Macpherson or Gwendolyn MacEwen. It's really a collection of myth poems, a lot of self-mythologizing, mm, and coming to terms with family, with parents. Several of the poems in the book are reconceptualizing of my parents, turning them into heroic people. Um, for example, my father was a very difficult person, but also as an adult, I recognized that he was a very resourceful person. I tried to make him into a heroic figure as a way of reimagining what I find difficult. I also deal with the province, with New Brunswick, with poverty and really trying to escape feelings of shame through the book. It's, um, partially also about self-actualizing, I think. I think that's a big thing about making any art.

Kyeren: Absolutely. And it's a tall order, what you've listed.

Drew: Yeah.

Kyeren: Looking forward to it.

Drew: Thank you.

Kyeren: With the poet laureateship added to the Attic Owl Reading series that you are already curating and your editorial work for The Fiddlehead, you've been carrying a lot of weight. And speaking from experience, this sort of work uses up a lot of creative energy. So where does poetry live in your daily life? Is it something you have to carve out, or does it insist upon showing up and forcing you to sit?

Drew: Yeah, for me the poem insists on itself. So from a very early age, I felt I had an aesthetic sensibility, which kind of made me feel, um, alone or outside. And, uh, I think that's not uncommon for, um, people who practice an art to sometimes feel that way. And the some sort of aesthetic sensibility preceded everything. Then when I got into writing poetry, you kind of developed this attunement or perception to these types of images or voices or emotions. And then suddenly, a line or an image or just the sense of something really kind of strikingly emerges. And that'll be often, you know, in the shower or when you're getting ready for bed or in the middle of a hectic day, and I'll just kind of jot that down and not ignore it. It's something I try to stay dedicated to. I'll go through periods where I ignore that and you don't jot it down and, um, it kind of feels like it leaves you and gets more quiet. The more you jot those voices down, the more you're kind of respecting it and practicing your attunement to them. Then after that, outside of the rare exception where a poem comes fully emerged, that's just the beginning of the work. Then months of work can go into what ends up being the final text.

Kyeren: Yes. Mm-hmm. And so I'm really glad to hear that you're still writing in the midst of all that is calling you from the world.

Drew: Yeah, it's, uh, something I draw inspiration from is the "eye of the storm" thing from John Keats, mm-hmm, who died at 24 or 25 years old. Mm-hmm. Um, he didn't come from an upper-class family. He was trained as a chemist or something, and really wrote these poems that have still persisted, just like approaching eternity and illness in the end of your life and doing it in the eye of the storm. There's no ideal time where you're going to do it. I think that's something I'm still working on because I used to kind of treat myself more as like someone who, I'll write and I'll make art when I have the right time and the right circumstances, and eventually I kind of realized that's not gonna happen.

Kyeren: Absolutely. You see people who have to have their writing desk just so before they'll sit to write, but I mean, yeah, you can write anywhere, right? On the bus.

Drew: Yeah, so you can try. You can try to, and that's better than not trying.

Kyeren: Yes. Yeah. It's the attempt.

Drew: Mm-hmm.

Kyeren: Yeah. For many of us, there's that inner pool, regardless of how swamped we are, that compulsion to make art even when there's no window. Can you talk about that impulse to create and why art-making is so essential?

Drew: I think for me it's deeply personal and it shifts with the period that I'm going through, and I'm sure ideally it'll keep to shift throughout the rest of my life. It's to document for me. Um, it's becoming, I find more so than ever to document, to bear witness. Mm-hmm. Um, to say I was alive and I'm here and the people around me are here. We all had our life. I've been writing new poems, really feeling this, um, wanting to honor as many things and people as I can, because so many of the poets who I go back to bring this to me. Like when I read the ancient Chinese poet Li Qingzhao, from the Song Dynasty, I think about her poems, uh, you know, written like a thousand years ago. And when I read them, I'm right there in her emotions, behind her eyes. I'm there seeing the things she saw, feeling the things she felt. Uh, there's something about that that is wonderful. It's just really powerful to me. And another big driving force is just the aesthetic transformation of life. Life is so difficult. It's so chaotic. We are just pushed along through it. You know, we work, we fight to survive. That pull to take experience and make it into an aesthetic object, again, it's just, there's something so powerful and radiant about that. It just draws you back in. Once you get a taste of it, it keeps drawing you in.

Kyeren: Absolutely. I would love to hear you speak about what accessibility means to you in poetry, the gateway poet versus the gatekeeper, and yeah, how you land in that arena.

Drew: Um, I read a lot of different types of poetry and enjoy a lot of different types of art from the purely accessible to the very abstract and intellectual. I think all artists are almost obligated to realize whatever their vision is. It doesn't matter if I don't like John Ashbery. Um, he had to realize his vision, and his vision is good. Mm-hmm. I think even if I don't personally connect with the aesthetic or find it enclosed and impenetrable, just from my own taste, I love clarity in poetry. Um, but there's a certain type of clarity that I love the most, and it's the clear poem that opens you to mystery, that opens you to questions, and that doesn't have to provide answers. There's a quote by, I'm not sure exactly what it is, it's by the psychoanalyst, uh, Jacques Lacan. And he says, "The reason we go to poetry is not for wisdom, but for the dismantling of wisdom."

Kyeren: Hmm.

Drew: I felt I only started really writing, you know, decent poetry once I stopped trying to be wise and started posing questions that didn't have an answer. In my own opinion, ultimately an artist doesn't have any obligation except to themselves, but I do, I do like stuff that's written to be read, to be experienced by an audience rather than experienced by no one, maybe.

Kyeren: Uh, you recently, speaking of audiences, had a rare opportunity to read an entire long poem publicly, which is a gift that not many contemporary poets get. I'd love to talk to you about the long poem as a form and the journey of writing at length and the gifts that come with staying inside a poem for so long and the challenges too.

Drew: Mm-hmm. I think you might mean the poem "Province," which I read at the Frye Jam, which is one of the great venues in the entire country for poets to perform their work. Every poet who gets to perform there comes away saying, "I hadn't had that opportunity to do it with the video production and images and music concept and lighting concept." And that event sells out every year to an absolute packed audience. It's wonderful to see so many people coming to that event at the Frye Festival and it's selling out.

Kyeren: It sounds like poet is rockstar.

Drew: Yes. It's an opportunity to be a rockstar poet. Exactly. And they're so open to taking risks at that event. So for me, the poem "Province," which is one of the poems from The Golden Snare, was really a long poem in the sense too, of just how I thought about that poem. It goes all the way back to my earliest feelings of kind of shame about poverty. My father was illiterate, and you know, this was not in the distant past, this was in the eighties and nineties, and there's a deep shame that comes from coming from a poor area, coming from a poor family. And in that poem, I wanted to lay it all on the line. I wanted to put it all on display in front of everyone, and I wanted to just burn up any feeling of shame that I had. I felt, when I did that long poem, I was getting something out of myself that had been on my back for so many years, and by having the chance to really pull it off and make it work, and I feel I did, it was like transforming my life, transforming the audience, transforming what I could do after that, is how I felt about it. And for me, it really came while I was reading a lot of work by Dorothea Lasky, who's like a really wild, contemporary poet. And I recommend everyone read her. When I was reading her poems, it was, it's a voice that is totally uninhibited, a voice that is just saying what you are not supposed to say, and the line does what you are not supposed to do in poetry. She just line after line, poem after poem makes it work. So reading her made me feel kind of free to create this.

Kyeren: So you sort of got permission from her.

Drew: Yes, exactly. Yeah. There was just this permission, that's exactly the right word, to not even worry about any form and just go from line to line and follow it, continue following that trajectory of the poem. Um, someone who I really respect that night, they said hearing you read that, it was like fractals where one led to the other, to the other, to the other. And that's how I feel about it too. With that long poem, I could have kept going forever. You just eventually had to stop it.

Kyeren: So writing in that form, uh, were you thinking about carrying the reader forward? Did that awareness come in at all or were you just letting the poem carry you?

Drew: Um, I think a bit of both. Part of it was drawn from hearing a minister read at church when I was a kid and that kind of religious voice, that hellfire religious voice. And I was, I don't wanna say parodying 'cause that's not the right word, but it was, um, it was definitely playing on that voice of the like the hellfire minister, except I was condemning the province, liberating myself and condemning the province at the same time.

Kyeren: Amazing. Drew, would you like to read another poem? After you read this poem, we'll have a little guitar interlude for the listeners to rest and reflect.

Drew: Yes. Thank you so much. This poem is called "The Golden Snare." It's one of the poems about my father.

The only thing delicate he showed me was how to make circles of mineral light. The wires in his hands, the only time he was silent, sharing the most elusive knowledge he had. Cut the wire for your snare, create a small circle at the end. I was always silent with him, but here in this memory, he was silent with me. He never did anything silently, except for when he said, now we’ll wait for snow.My father taught me how to capture prey, and when the time came after the first dusting of new snow, we went to the forest to follow the prints and find the burrow. My father never did anything carefully except for when he crouched down low to tie the snares on branches, glinting against the white, a golden glow.Later we collected the soft rabbits in a bag and hung them by their legs from trees. He showed me how to drain the bodies and how to remove the delicate skin without damaging the beautiful fur, without destroying the tender meat, without wasting the useful blood. My father taught me how to be silent when you walk back home.

Kyeren: Drew, that was absolutely gorgeous. Thank you. I was actually enthralled by an interview you gave for Discourse where you spoke of poetry as shamanic ritual, and I would love to invite you to revisit that idea. Might you speak to the relationship between poet and audience as a kind of ritual or a shared performative act, even the intimacy, like I felt right there with you when you read that poem?

Drew: I think that, um, a public reading ideally is like music. It's a sort of sacred space, and the moment is energetically charged. I think in its best moments, uh, you would get as close as possible to transmitting the emotion and the meaning, uh, without a barrier or without even interpretation. It ideally just acts on the audience and changes them. Mm-hmm. Um, music, of course, is the art form which does that most perfectly in that the sound acts right onto the emotions. That's really only, you know, one way to experience it. There is the beauty of the alone, private with your book experience too, of having it not even read aloud, but just as a voice in your mind on the page. But I definitely think that it's an ancient art form which originates in magic and ritual and in the power of words. Uh, you know, growing up in a religious family, I always heard my mother say, "Life and death is in the power of the tongue." Mm-hmm. And, you know, I kind of would as a teenager, kind of, you know, loathe and mock that sort of like that kind of religious fervor, but then as an adult distanced from that, I can kind of respect "life and death is in the power of the tongue" and in the power of the word. And so I think growing up in that kind of setting too gave me a sense of that, of the, um, even in the Bible, for example, how God speaks the world into existence. There's definitely something there.

Kyeren: I've always been, in a way too, a little bit resistant when people say that words don't have power or words don't have the power to change. Yeah. But they clearly do, right? I don't know what those people are thinking. I mean, yeah. Poetry, it can cause a paradigm shift.

Drew: Yeah. Even if only on a personal level, it can cause it, I think.

Kyeren: Yeah. And something happening on a personal level is enough for something to happen.

Drew: Yeah, it is.

Kyeren: I've just been thinking about the way listeners will receive your poems. The big audience versus this really private moment.

Drew: I think, um, poetry is an art form that even though I do think it originates in ritual and magic and in the sort of intensified word or symbol, it is a very private art form. And I think, far and away, it's experienced privately, uh, through poetry lovers across the world, you know, sharing books hand to hand. Um, it's not experienced through bestsellers, it's not experienced through anything big and flashy. The opportunities for those readings with audiences are a wonderful experience that kind of put poetry into that sacred space, that kind of shamanistic, ancient oral art form where I think poetry is, you know, at its heart an oral art form of the voice in the air, the voice moving through the air.

Kyeren: Beautifully said. Thank you, Drew. As Poet Laureate of Moncton, you published the anthology Poems, Two-Fold, translating poetry with Georgette LeBlanc. What has working across linguistic boundaries taught you about voice and nuance or maybe the possibilities of saying the same thing differently?

Drew: Yeah, that was a really great experience. I felt, uh, putting that book together, I had something to prove. And it was great that the city and the Frye Festival kind of just backed it when I proposed that with my project and we would translate it. And then getting Georgette LeBlanc on board was wonderful. You know, she was the Poet Laureate of Canada. It just really gave a stamp of approval to get it done. And she translated in that collection 'cause New Brunswick is the only fully bilingual province and Moncton is the official bilingual city, and it felt really right to do the collection with half English writers and half French writers and translate each poem from French into English and English into French. I had never translated before, so I had several people close to me advise me, "Oh, don't take that risk. Um, you don't wanna embarrass yourself." And then I just jumped into it. Uh, for me the process was more intimately getting into the French language, into the French community. Uh, while I was doing the translations, I was a bit uninhibited in just asking people, being like, "What does this word mean to you?" Uh, if I was at a coffee shop and I would see someone I know, I'd say, "What do you think that word means?" And uh, so there was a little bit of a community effort in helping me with the translations. There is a definitely an untranslatability to so many things where what you're actually doing is you are rewriting the poem into a new voice. For example, um, one of the poems I translated by Rose Després, a section which I pondered over for quite a while, and forgive my pronunciation, it said, Ton seul regard me captive et ranime la baignade et sa floraison certaine. And that line translates sort of literally to, "Your gaze alone captivates me and revives swimming and its certain blossoming." I was like, pondering that... "Your gaze alone captivates me, revives swimming and its certain blossoming." And I translated in the end to, "Only your gaze captivates me, revives this soaking and certain blooming." So it wasn't about coming up with a direct translation, but coming up with how will I make this precise in an English poem?

Kyeren: Right. And also there's some artistic license there within the literal translation.

Drew: Exactly. Yes. Yeah. Uh, that's something that was kind of a discovery. It's not literally translating the poem, but discovering how it's gonna be recreated in a new language.

Kyeren: Mm. Recreation... translation is recreation.

Drew: Yeah. Yes, yes. Yeah, I think so.

Kyeren: It reminds me of a book by Andrew Harvey called Recreations of Rumi, where he translates Rumi.

Drew: Oh, that's fascinating.

Kyeren: Mm-hmm. I think you'd really like it actually.

Drew: Yes. I'm gonna look it up. I bet I will.

Kyeren: I'd love to invite reflection on queer literary work. Whether as a writer, a reader, or community member, have queer poetics shaped or accompanied you in a meaningful way, and are there moments whether through events or publications, your or your own work where you felt part of that broader ongoing conversation?

Drew: Yeah, I think that for me it's something that I didn't necessarily feel the most comfortable with for a long time and have kind of grown into. A big transformation for me was reading Gilgamesh, which is, you know, one of the earliest known texts. Uh, I think there's some other texts that are earlier, but Gilgamesh is one of the oldest. And I read it in the beautiful Stephen Mitchell translation, and right there in one of the earliest known texts that humans ever wrote is Gilgamesh and his love for Enkidu. And the passages in this hymn describing beautiful Enkidu, this heroic, beautiful person in the light, this God in the light, which is all humans, really, all humans in their beauty and their dignity. And then Enkidu's death, and the whole poem, all of Gilgamesh, is mourning. How can beautiful Enkidu be gone? The descriptions of him in the underworld, you know, they didn't believe in this afterlife the same way we do... in the underworld, crouching down, kind of like a weird, dirty bird forever in a dark cave. How can this beautiful person be there in this dark cave forever? So anyway, reading Gilgamesh was kind of like, "Oh, the voice of queer literature is there in the human experience." Right from the beginning, even though it's went through periods where it's been silenced or ignored or pushed away. It's always there and it always persists and emerges. And I'm not sure exactly what I'm saying about that, but it's just, it was a wonderful feeling to discover that.

Kyeren: That's perfect. And I have not read that. Stephen Mitchell's such a fabulous translator.

Drew: Yeah. Well that translation particularly, um, it reads like a film.

Kyeren: Oh, wow.

Drew: So it's definitely, um, it's wonderful to read. Um, there's like a sequence where Gilgamesh runs through the center of the earth to get to the other side pursuing Enkidu in the afterlife. And the sun is setting through this hole in the earth 'cause they, you know, they believe the sun would set down into the earth and he's outracing the sun as it comes through the earth. And it reads like a film.

Kyeren: Oh. Drew, I found your name in an online review for a perfume, which you poetically described as "a nineties aquatic, like harsh, cold, ocean air." And it made me think about the sense of smell. And I know that you are a perfume man, so I'm wondering what you have to say about poetry and the world of fragrance and our sense of smell and all of that.

Drew: I think that, uh, there's something about the sense of smell that's so, uh, grounding. It doesn't feel like an abstract thing, but it is the physical vibrations of the world. You know, over the past two years, I've been writing a series of what I call "night poems," and they have to do with going in the night and experiencing different flowers, the lilacs, the roses, and hoping something is gonna be revealed to you through the aesthetic experience of these things. You know, like the lilacs have their blooming smell, their dying smell, and there's something about it that acts directly on the emotions, I think.

Kyeren: Yes, absolutely. Drew, I'm also now recalling a sensual poetry film you made with a fragrance ad as film footage. I hope I'm recalling that correctly. Could we talk about the synergy of film and poetry?

Drew: Yeah, absolutely. That short film was actually made from the ad for the perfume Eden by Cacharel. And, uh, that was the inspiration for the poem "Eden," which is in Evening Dress. And in that poem I was imagining Eve as, uh, a knower, a seer who opens your eyes rather than the downfall of man.

Kyeren: I love that.

Drew: And I think that poetry is an oral art form, and I much prefer poems for the ear rather than for the eye. Poems in the air rather than on the page. It's the expression of the human voice. And I think poetry, like film, both work so well at capturing the surreal or the emotive or dreamy states. Pairing those mediums, film and music with poetry, can really make them into an event. I think that, um, no offense to anyone, but some academic poets may feel that that means the poem isn't self-sustained on the page, but I fear that many of the poems they write might be only for the page and not for the ear or the eye or for an audience. But that combination of sound and image is really wonderful.

Kyeren: Hmm. Yeah, I'm recalling Stephen Ross Smith recently saying to me that poetry is what we decide as poets.

Drew: Absolutely. There's no limits to what you can write about and what you can do. And poetry can be as simple as a single, energetically charged word, I believe that. Or a phrase.

Kyeren: I love that. Drew, is there anything that you wish someone would ask you about poetry, something that you would be burning to share?

Drew: I think something I'd be burning to share is, um, now more than ever, uh, read. Read anything, everyone read anything. Read a romance novel, read a bestseller, read poetry too, of course. But now more than ever where the world is demanding we be distracted, mm-hmm, uh, demanding we pull away from empathy, reading brings you back to your senses like no other art form can.

Kyeren: Oh, so true. Yeah. When I go through a period of not reading, I feel like I'm spinning away from myself and away from what's human.

Drew: You're well said.

Closing

Kyeren: Thank you, Drew. Thank you so much for your presence and for your words today. And thank you again to The Fiddlehead for supporting this episode of the Poet Laureate Podcast. Please do visit thefiddlehead.ca, subscribe, purchase a copy. Uh, Drew Lavigne's impressive biography can be found on the podcast website and in the notes, and books by Drew can be ordered online or in person at any good independent bookstore. If this episode meant something to you, please share it with someone who you think might need poetry today. Drew, would you be willing to leave us with a final poem?

Drew: Yes. Thank you. This poem is called "Summer Archive," and it's from a series of night poems that I've been writing.

Midway through the forest of my tangled, hateful life, there was a sudden clearing and a season of beauty returned to me. Each night, I clung to the testimony of radiant blooms until their indolic alphabet wrote dying words on my hands. Each day I read the poets, the real ones, brave enough to swim through a river of fire. I knew my life would change— the perennial wild flowers around me after the lilac, then the rose.