Shannon Web-Campbell talks to Sharon Berg about her latest poetry collection.
1. It is interesting that your orientation to writing in Lunar Tides highlights a play on the approaches of academia (i.e., as in ‘Definition’ and ‘Idioms’ of the word grief) and Indigenous voices (i.e., ‘Sleeping With The Northern Lights’, where you divide the book contents into the phases of Grandmother Moon). You explore speaking about yourself, commitment, community, and language. You’re of mixed heritage and deal with teachings from both your Mi’kmaq and ‘settler’ background in voicing your experience of the world. Was this mix intentional from the beginning? Did you map out that part of your work before you began to collect the poems and build this book? Or was it happenstance?
I wouldn’t call it happenstance. I believe it’s a deeper order. All circumstance brings us to our path, as I was born mixed, and carry teachings from my Mi’kmaq and settler backgrounds in everything I do. My mixed heritage makes up my positionality, my worldview and my poetic voice. My work embodies Two-Eyed seeing, a guiding principle by Mi’mkaq Elder Albert Marshall, which brings two or more perspectives into a collaboration. I worked with Jonina Kirton on Lunar Tides, who is Métis/Icelandic poet and author, and her wisdom, and care helped me crystalize the collection.’
Lunar Tides stems from losing my mother, which has been a life-changing experience and ongoing grief. These poems are a means of connecting with the essence of what she taught me, and they map my own lunation of learning to cope, exist, and move through the world without her. We all come from mothers, and in a broader scope, we are alive and sustained by Mother Earth.
2. Your poetry is not constructed of measured lines and rhymes but it is built around expressed emotion and deep observations. Yet in one of your longest poems, ‘Dear Elizabeth Bishop’, you talk about “a correlation between architecture and poetry”. You say to her, “Let’s go sip [blood orange bourbons] with the map-makers and sing out to a seashore town” and “Tell me, what is a map?” This suggests you see the craft of poetry in similar ways, not only to architecture but to map-making, both of which are highly structured approaches to making sense of the world. Can you expand upon this?
Architecture and map-making are highly conceptional means of making sense of the world. For me, poetry is a different approach. It brings in emotionality, and orients readers in a different way than say an architect guides us through a building, or a cartographer maps the land, which are both colonial constructs. Though, I do believe poets and architects share a commonality as they both deal in space, lines, constrictions, and light aesthetics.
Just as person walks into a room, a mind wanders into a poem. Recently, on a trip to the Guggenheim in New York City, I was reflecting on architecture being the mother of all arts walking up the ramp of Frank Lloyd Wright’s rotunda. While architecture is an orchestral arrangement of light, textures, moldings, planes, sound and views, poetry has its own form. Each poem is a unique shape, a structural arc. Just as line breaks guide the reader, poetry has its own structure, rhythm and logic. A poem can be a means of making sense of the world, a reckoning, or an offering. For me, poetry has become mother.
3. Lunar Tides seems to be both a book of grieving and one of celebration. You look for your home now that your mother has left, and often celebrate the way Newfoundland grounds you. It is this contradictory message of being unanchored and yet knowing where your mother found home that I find appealing as someone who came to Newfoundland from away. Can you comment on how when you craft poems you muse over your sense of rootlessness, and it is ironically grounding?
Grief is an undertow, but also a bizarre celebration of sorts. It’s an honouring of love shared, and the expression of deep familial and ancestral ties. Ktaqmkuk/Newfoundland and I are interwoven. The island holds generations of my family, both my maternal and paternal sides, who lived on opposite sides of the island, and later met on the mainland. It’s a place I have run to and away from all my life. Ktaqmkuk is my ancestral home, and where I go to feel the wind, which reconnects me to the land, and helps me remember all who came before, and who will come after. I am not rootless. Colonialism ravaged my root system. Yet, I am finding my way home. Ktaqmkuk is the origin of poetry. That island made me a poet.
4. What was your intention in writing this book?
I was intending to honouring the moonlight, my mother, and the tidal rhythms between life and death, and all that washes ashore.
5. What themes and inquiries are you pursuing in this collection?
Grief. Love. Loss. Mother. Ecology.
6. What central inquiry or question unifies the collection?
The central inquiry is from a line in a poem: who am I in relation to the moon? This could be the physical moon, spiritual moon, or grandmother moon.
7. What do you intend for the readers to be left with after the final page?
I hope readers look up the night sky, and connect to their inner light. Or perhaps they will find themselves at the lip of the ocean and feel the pull of the tides. May the collection offer some companionship to anyone who is grieving, or have lost their mother. May the poems create space for grief, and honour the love shared.
8. Was there a specific incident or experience or series of events that inspired this work? What was the development process for the inspiration to become this newest collection?
I began writing these poems at the Banff Centre for the Arts in Spring 2019, which was around the time my mother was very sick with cancer. I wrote several poems during the residency led by poet Liz Howard and writer Cherie Dimaline.
From there, I started my doctoral program at the University of New Brunswick in Creative Writing in the Department of English. Many of these poems came in the wake of my mother’s passing into spirit world in November 2019. During the winter, I took a poetry workshop with Sue Sinclair, who graciously, gently and poetically led me through some of the most difficult months.
While working on Lunar Tides, I spent a lot of time at the water’s edge, looking out but also inward, charting the lunar phases in relationship to my mother. I rested on the land and felt Mother Earth embrace me. These days, I’m finding my footing, but still wander to the water’s edge, and time to time cry out to the moonlight, missing her.
9. If this book was to be translated in another language, what would your advice to the translator be, what aspect of the original work would you most care to consciously preserve?
I would love to have my work translated into Mi’kmaq, and also French. I would trust the translator of the poetry to represent the poetics, and artfully convey the work through the language. I recently had a poem published with the Atlantic Vernacular which was translated in to Mi’kmaw by Joan Milliea, and I’m humbled by the tremendous and deeply meaningful offering. Here’s the poem: https://atlanticvernacular.ca/portfolio-item/darren-emenau-shannon-webb-campbell/
Shannon Webb-Campbell is a member of Qalipu Mi’kmaq First Nation. Her books include: Still No Word (Breakwater 2015), I Am A Body of Land (Bookhug 2019), and Lunar Tides (Bookhug 2022). She is a doctoral candidate at the University of New Brunswick in the Department of English, and the editor of Visual Arts News Magazine.