We’re continuing our poetry month series with another Sackville poet, Laura Watson.
A visual artist and a writer, Watson is known for her hand drawn and bound zines, among other art and craft projects.
Watson says that for her, poetry and art are inseparable. She graduated from Mount Allison with a degree in fine arts, but it wasn’t until after she received her diploma that she combined her writing and drawing practice.
“I think of them as completely interrelated,” says Watson. “I usually hand-letter my poetry with accompanying drawings, and sometimes to the point where I think it doesn’t even really make sense without the drawings.”
Watson self-publishes much of her work in the form of a “zine,” which is an independently published DIY form of a magazine that is generally homemade.
Part of why she publishes her poems this way is for accessibility reasons.
“Publishing through traditional publishers, or through magazines… it takes a long time and they’re very exclusive,” explains Watson. “Even if you are lucky enough to get a publisher behind you, it takes many years to get books out. So there’s something really wonderful about the fact that in a zine anybody can make a little book off of their home printer, or off of a Xerox machine at a library. Anybody can do it, and you can do it really quickly. There’s something nice about not necessarily having to wait several years to get your work out there, especially something that’s really timely. The internet is also another way to do that.”
The hand-lettered and hand-drawn nature of her work is also meant to be approachable.
“It doesn’t have that authority of printed type,” says Watson. “I think it makes it feel a little less intimidating. For a lot of people, I think they think poetry is not for them or only for a certain type of people of a certain education. When it’s hand-lettered in pencil crayon, it can’t be that serious. I think it makes it a little more approachable. It’s not like literature with a capital L.”
Much of Watson’s work features folklore, and many of her poems are labelled as “spells.”
“Growing up, a lot of the literature I was raised on in the place of religious texts [were] fairy tales,” says Watson. Many of those texts were “based in the remnants of pre-Christian paganism.”
“Those things serve as a set of metaphors that you use to understand the world,” says Watson. “I’ve embraced that in my work. I use this format, referring to poems as spells, because I think of art-making and writing as a kind of magic.”
Watson is currently working on an art and poetry project exploring climate catastrophe anxiety, which is a compliment to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
“Before COVID-19, I started writing about the feeling that we were moving through the end of the world and discussing whether or not it’s rational to be thinking that way,” says Watson. “Given the climate apocalypse, maybe to a certain degree it is.”
“Then COVID hit, and it was like everything was magnified a million. All that end of the world anxiety was just so much more intense. It has definitely re-emphasized a lot of my interests. More practically, I’ve been like, a very lucky person who mostly works at home, and lives off of things like grants. I haven’t had quite the same like income impact and stuff like that, that a lot of other artists have.”
Poetry and art are Watson’s contributions to combatting the climate crisis, among other global catastrophes.
“I don’t have a science background or a lot of education in politics,” says Watson. “I don’t really think what I should be speaking publicly about is practical solutions on these things. I do think that I can offer a help towards building resilience and talking about the anxiety that can be a real obstacle to dealing with these problems. That’s how I’ve tried to approach it, is like dealing with the kind of emotional labor involved in confronting these processes. Maybe, art and poetry can be a way to help us get through that.”
Watson says that social media is both a strength and a detriment to art and poetry.
“Social media is this incredible way that we can communicate and publish ourselves, but at the same time it’s a corporate space,” says Watson. “It is designed to like engender outrage and to be divisive because they make more money on us when it functions that way. It has these severe limitations that we have to be aware of too…I have seen the tendency to want to make things really oversimplified and digestible, because you want people to get it in the second that they scroll through it.”
“To me, that’s one of the main obstacles for poetry right now. It’s also an obstacle for culture in general, is that through the corporatization of culture over the past century. We’ve developed this model [where] we just passively consume things rather than culture being something that we actively participate in…I think it’s an obstacle to convince people that poetry isn’t just [for] a certain class of people called poets. It’s something that everybody can participate in. I think that there’s been a nice thing happening with the internet in that there’s all these poets who have come off the internet who are now the best-selling poets in the world. They may not be my favorite poetry, but I think it’s a really good thing that maybe now there’s a whole group of people who don’t think of poetry as something that’s not for them, because they see it on Instagram all the time.”
“Ideally, I would like to see these platforms become publicly owned and not have algorithms designed to manipulate us,” says Watson. “I think that for now, we have to try to be conscious of what they’re doing, and maybe a little bit more forgiving of each other’s mistakes…I can’t do everything I want to do online, so I can use the internet to get people to the zines.”
Sackville provides Watson with a community of supportive artists and writers.
“I came from suburban southern Ontario. Growing up, I didn’t have any notion of what it looks like to make art for a living or a key thing in your life… I didn’t have any kind of like contemporary idea of what being a not famous, continually practicing artists was. [Sackville] is a very creative community and a supportive community. It’s a great place with people just making things for the sake of making them and not because they have any fame and money agenda.”
