Hear this story as reported on Tantramar Report:
To kick off poetry month, CHMA called Sackville poet laureate Shoshanna Wingate.
She has two published works of poetry, Homing Instinct and Radio Weather, and is working on a memoir.
Wingate has a long history with poetry, starting back in her childhood in the United States.
“We had to do a public speaking presentation in my grade five English class,” Wingate remembers. “I just fell in love with the power of the words and the power of the recitation and how it made me feel like I was wielding something so much bigger than myself.”
“In reciting [the] poem… the repetition, and the beauty of the language, sort of transported me. It just really changed me… I fell pretty hard and wrote poems obsessively in middle and high school. In university, I began taking poetry courses, and eventually went on to graduate school to earn a Masters of Fine Arts in poetry.”
Wingate says that writing poetry has been an important step in accepting herself and her complicated childhood.
“When I was first starting out as a poet, I tried really hard to stay away from writing about my life. I had a very unusual life, and I had a very challenging life in a lot of ways,” explains Wingate. “I didn’t want to be known for what I perceived as the things that happened to me. I wanted to be known for the person that I was.”
“I wanted to create poems that were more like ideas about the world, and those poems really failed in a lot of ways because I was not including my whole experience and who I was. I was trying so hard to craft an image of how I wanted to be represented, or how I wanted to be seen, without doing a lot of the emotional work.”
It wasn’t until Wingate started writing about herself that she wrote poems that were “successful.”
“I felt like I was really developing my voice… I was confident enough and had learned how to sit with myself long enough that I was able to write those poems,” she says. “Those are the poems that became my first collection, and a lot of them are really distilling a lot of my experience into a one-page poem.”
Since Wingate is writing her memoir, writing poetry has been put on hold momentarily. That being said, she is still reading it regularly.
“Poetry is my touchdown, it’s my solace, it’s the thing that I always return to in my life when I’m feeling lost or confused. It’s sort of a lifeline for me. They require a stillness, attentiveness, and care. I feel like when I need those things in my life, I can turn to poetry. I can engage with someone that I have never met and will never meet, and be able to see the world through their eyes for a period of time…It’s a way of cracking open the world and how different people view their lives.”
To finish off this conversation, Wingate read one of her poems “Living With the Dead” from her book Radio Weather:
