The Meaning of Leaving

Toronto poet Kate Rogers talks to Emily Cann about her debut collection The Meaning of Leaving (AOS Publishing, 2024)

Emily Cann (EC): The poems in this collection do a great deal of storytelling. “The Passing of Sean Connery,” for example, crafts the story of an abusive five-year relationship. The collection as a whole tells stories of relationships, migrations, and life. What secrets and/or strategies can you share about integrating and balancing narrative in poetry?

Kate Rogers (KR): In “The Passing of Sean Connery” the narrative takes the reader through how the speaker comes to terms with the five years she spent with an abusive ex-partner. The catalyst for her reflection is mentioned—the death of the ex-husband 16 years after the end of their marriage. In Part II the speaker asks herself and the deceased ex-husband, “Was it your story I fell for?” That question confirms for the reader that “The Passing of Sean Connery” is a narrative poem and shows that the speaker has the distance on her experience to explore her reasons for leaving the marriage.

In a narrative poem, the flow of time is central to the poem itself. We need time to track the poem’s story: its order of events, the actions and reactions of the characters. But, although narrative poems often show cause and effect, they should follow a non-linear story structure. They might jump forward or backward in time, start in the middle, or at the end. The end of Part I in “The Passing of Sean Connery” tells us how things ended for the speaker: “When you punched me in the eye / the pain cleared my vision.” The choice to reveal the ending early signals to the reader that the rest of the poem will be the speaker reviewing her own interactions with ex-Derrick so she can discover the cause and effect of her involvement with him and reasons for leaving him.

Characters and their statements and exchanges, plus their body language, can show a lot about relationships. They help to integrate and balance narrative in poetry. It’s important to choose the most vivid details to develop the characters in a narrative poem. For example, in Part I, “Derrick, you forbade me to have / meals with co-workers, /… You wanted me to know / just you. I wore long sleeves / to work, even in summer, the bruises/blue as my shadow.”

The description of the bruises shows a lot about the relationship between the speaker and her ex-husband and helps avoid too much explanation as in “blue as my shadow,” which shows the speaker’s constant state of depression while the ex-husband controls her behaviour with violence.

The use of reported conversations in the poem shows the ex-husband’s character: In Part III at the “matrimonial dinner by the sea” the speaker’s new husband Derrick shares a cautionary tale about Jackie, “his almost wife” in which he insists that she liked being hit and “had it coming.” The repetition of the phrase “had it coming” in the poem shows the spell cast on the speaker by Derrick’s insistence that she and any woman deserve to be hit.

Point of view is a useful strategy in narrative poems too. Most of “The Passing of Sean Connery” is in the second person, addressing Derrick, the deceased abusive ex-husband. It is finally safe for the speaker to address the ex now and her choice of second person telegraphs that.

EC: Many of these poems are deeply attentive to place. The collection travels around the world yet is grounded in specific markers: for example, reference to Tim Hortons in “The Nose-Ring Girl,” or mention of surfing “off Kintyre” in “Love Song, Edinburgh.” What do you consider the role of setting to be in this book?

KR: A blend of significant settings and scenes with telling details expands the narrative: as mentioned in question 2, the setting outside a Tim Horton’s is important in “The Nose-ring Girl.” It anchors the reader in place and helps them imagine the environment, which is a familiar one to many Canadians. In my experience, unhoused people often wait outside Tim Horton’s to ask for money or food.

The poem “Love Song, Edinburgh” needs setting to convey the character of the lover who surfed “off Kintyre.” Description of the salt water tide, Ben Nevis mountain and the cobbles of Edinburgh’s “Auld Toun” also help to evoke the lover’s physique and the speaker’s longing for him.

Returning to “The Passing of Sean Connery,” the Hong Kong flat with a parquet floor is important because of the splinters it lodged in the speaker’s thighs as ex-husband Derrick dragged her around by the hair. Another important setting in that poem is Kruger Park in South Africa where the bull elephant is in musth, “a dark grey thunderhead” backing the couple’s jeep down the road. The elephant symbolizes the threat of the ex-husband’s anger.

EC: Leaving appears in many contexts (from people, relationships, places, homes). After exploring leaving in its many forms, what do you think the meaning of leaving is?

KR: Leaving in The Meaning of Leaving is an expression of agency. It takes courage for the speaker to leave her homeland and her family with its abusive dynamics behind. Leaving Canada, leaving an abusive partner and ultimately, leaving Hong Kong, come from both a place of vulnerability as well as a place of strength; those departures choose growth even though they also inevitably mean loss.

EC: 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?

KR: Earlier in this interview I mentioned that enduring and leaving a violent relationship were important catalysts for writing The Meaning of Leaving. In addition, witnessing violence against pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong and the violent repression of freedom of expression and assembly there, and upon returning to Canada, the huge number of unhoused people living on the streets of Toronto and smaller cities and towns—showed me how much violence there is in our world. In this era, violence can be found in many spheres of human existence, yet it seems to me that violence has become normalized in many lives and locations, so people no longer see it. Connecting these forms of violence was an organic and intuitive process for me at first. An editor helped me confirm the connections between them.

EC: Did you have an intended audience for the book?

KR: My intended audience is broad: people with a social conscience and those who have experienced violence themselves, “ordinary” readers along with poets and other writers.

EC: Are any aspects of the book autobiographical? How did you consciously deal with your intimate material (i.e., experiences – emotional and physical) in a way that avoids the dangers of straight autobiography?

KR: This is not a simple question to answer. While some of the poems in The Meaning of Leaving are autobiographical and/or poetry of witness, literary devices and the associative nature of poetry took me from literal experiences to metaphorical truth. I used literary devices such as metaphor, simile and form to evoke emotion. At times, free association helped me expand on my experience in unexpected ways. Repetition and other rhetorical devices were helpful for emphasis. At all times, I was striving to evoke the impact of physical, psychological and political violence, seeking emotional truth and hoping to inspire empathy for all victims of violence.

EC: How do you intend for the value of the work to be assessed – as a piece of work that shares a compelling message or makes a social, political, or practical point or is it to be seen as a cultural event/phenomenon – an object of taste or a statement of your aesthetic?

KR: I think it’s possible for a book to be viewed as both a text sharing “a compelling message,” one making “a social, political” point, and “as a cultural event/phenomenon – an object of taste.” Some of my poems about encounters with unhoused people in The Meaning of Leaving recently appeared in the Vancouver, B.C. literary journal subTerrain. That journal’s slogan is “Strong Words for a Polite Nation.” Some of the Hong Kong poems from my poetry collection were featured in the Political Poetry reading curated by Toronto’s Tartan Turban Reading Series in 2020. Many “literary” poets have written poetry of witness. The St. Lucian / American poet Derek Walcott and the American poet Carolyn Forche come to mind, along with the dissident Chinese poet Bei Dao whose poem “Requiem” inspired the title poem of my collection. I have heard some critics dismiss political poetry as poetry with no aesthetic merit. That opinion actually shows limited scope on the part of such critics.

EC: What was the most satisfying aspect of your recently completed work?

KR: The most satisfying aspects of my recently completed work have been writing the poems and making them the strongest they could possibly be with revision and the interest in my work from literary and craft journals like yours. I am thrilled by that. (The Miramichi Reader just published my essay, “Why I Wrote This Book” and three poems from The Meaning of Leaving in Issue #23.) When I put the book together and saw the organic connection among my poems I did not assume my book would grab attention. In fact, I was half expecting the opposite reaction since many in our society tend to operate from a place of denial these days. The subject matter of The Meaning of Leaving is challenging, and yet, I am being approached to do interviews and readings from it. I feel like what I am trying to communicate through my book is attracting interest and enthusiasm. I am grateful for the interest my book is generating during these difficult times.

EC: What does the craft of writing mean to you?

KR: The craft of writing means patient and persistent revision to me. I rarely have “fully realized” first drafts. Most of my poems go through three or four drafts. Some go through nine or ten drafts! The revision process often shows me what the poem wants to be and what I really want to say. I experience revision as a kind of carving—perhaps a bird carving since many of my poems have birds in them. I find the shape of the poem in the wood and whittle the poem down until I can see what it wants to be and hopefully, the reader can see that too.

EC: What was your intention in writing this book?KR: My intention was to express my experience and observations, communicate them and promote awareness of the pervasive violence in our world among readers.

About the Author

Her poetry also recently appeared in Where Else? An International Hong Kong Poetry Anthology. She has been published in such notable journals as World Literature Today; Cha: An Asian Literary Journal and The Windsor Review. She is a Co-Director of Art Bar, Toronto’s oldest poetry reading series.