Hear this story as reported on Tantramar Report:
Marilyn Lerch is a long-time poet who made her home in the Tantramar in 1996.
She has multiple published books of poetry, including That We Have Lived At All published in late 2018.
Originally from Chicago, Marilyn Lerch spent many years teaching high school English in Washington D.C. before packing up and moving to Sackville.
Lerch says that while she has been writing poems since she was 20 years old, she really hit her stride in her late 50s.
“In Washington, DC, I was teaching high school English,” Lerch remembers. “We’re talking about the 60s and 70s. There was so much going on, that poetry just… I did nothing. I wrote about my students, I kept journals. It was really only I was in my late 50s when I started writing poetry again. The big emphasis was leaving teaching, retiring, moving to Canada. It was a new country, new love, a new experience from a large city to a small town. That’s when I started writing poetry seriously, even though I thought I was a poet in when I was 20.”
Lerch also taught poetry and memoir workshops at local prisons, including Westmoreland, Springhill, and Dorchester.
She also fondly remembers helping members of the Seniors College write their memoirs.
She describes this human connection as a vital part of her own practice.
“I’ve been active for a long time, besides the teaching,” she says. “There were things going on, Vietnam, Central America, and AIDS, one thing after another. I really needed some kind of spiritual way to connect to the world that was not just meetings, and being against something or for something.”
Before COVID-19, Lerch was usually found frequenting a local coffee shop, chatting with friends and colleagues as she writes.
During COVID-19, she is missing the literary and social community. So much so in fact, that she struggled to write at all.
It wasn’t until she and her friend Geordie Miller, another Sackville poet, started a poetic dialogue of sorts that she was able to write again.
“Some [writers] found this [lockdown] a gift. It was just incredible to be able to write, and others found it difficult. That was me,” says Lerch. “I had launched That We Have Lived At All in early 2019, so there has been a year of the launch and readings. I had just relaxed a little bit. It takes me four or five years to bring a book out, but then COVID hit and so there I was with all this time, and no inspiration. You know what I was doing? I was taking COVID, and looking at the big picture. Real early on, people said ‘Well, this changes everything,’ and I began to see in what ways it was. It [COVID] was showing all the fault lines in our political geography and social geography, as it were. It was a time when I was thinking, but not doing any poetry.”
“A friend of mine, Geordie Miller…he was busy teaching online at Mount Allison, but we were both feeling the need to do something. So we said, ‘Okay, we’ll just start this thing. You write something, a line or two, and answer and vice versa.’ So we started this for several months. He would write something, I’d let it filter through me, and then I’d answer it. There’s no censorship, we just went wherever we could go… We ended up doing about 12 of those segments, and it was joyful. We were writing about joyful things. The process itself was fantastic.”
Lerch and Miller are reading these poems online on April 22nd, and CHMA has an interview with Geordie Miller coming up next week.
Before COVID-19, Lerch wrote extensively about climate change and the sense of impending doom that came along with it.
She says that much like with climate change, COVID-19 has challenged her to remain hopeful in the face of adversity.
“I feel so deeply that our Earth, and all living forms on Earth, are in such deep trouble and tragic trouble,” says Lerch. “As a poet, I have to look there, I have to look at that and sink into that reality and somehow not fall into despair. This has been said many times, that we have to try to live the future as we think it should be.”
“My feeling [is] we have this COVID-19 bubble, but where did that come from? It came out of the climate change bubble. And that came out, as I keep repeating, of a global economic economic system that is not it is not good for living things.”
To finish off the conversation, Lerch read one of her poems from her collection Witness and Resist (2008).
