Sharon Berg Interviews Kate Rogers

(AOS Publishing, 2024)

Kate Rogers

Sharon Berg:    Kate Rogers, you have spent just over two decades living outside of Canadian borders in Hong Kong, intermingling with another culture in a way that relatively few Canadians have done. I was first introduced to your work while you were away, and I celebrated your return to Canadian soil with your friends. Now, you’ve taken up a role in continuing the legacy of The Art Bar, a poetry reading series in Toronto—on a volunteer basis—because you are that sort of giving person. So, your life is busy, and I thank you for agreeing to this interview. I look forward to hearing more about your insights in your new book, The Meaning of Leaving.

For my first question, I’ve observed there is much about your poetry that echoes the voices of other women. In fact, the raw emotion of your poetry gives voice to those who haven’t spoken of their trials, and alerts us to suffocating situations that continue to exist around us, including the pockets of angry paternalism around the world or here in Canada. Can you comment on this?
 
Kate Rogers:    I’m glad that my poetry echoes the voices of other women. I’m grateful that my poetry collection can speak for other women, as well as myself, since not everyone can write about their experience with abuse. Statistics Canada data tells us that one in four Canadian women experiences intimate partner violence (IPV) in her lifetime. This year and in recent years, a number of notable cases of intimate partner violence in Ontario have ended with murder. From what I have read on CBC and in other articles about femicide, that outcome is not unusual: “Between November 2023 and May 2024, there were 25 femicides, according to the Ontario Association of Interval and Transition Houses (OAITH). Since 2018, the number of women killed in the province has jumped by 68 per cent according to OAITH.”

Saskatoon, Saskatchewan was recently recognized as having the highest intimate partner violence in the country. Nowhere in Canada is immune. A case of probable but unresolved femicide in Newfoundland has recently been investigated by the CBC program The Fifth Estate in their documentary Finding Jennifer: How can someone disappear without a trace? In 2020 a man’s shooting rampage in Portapique, Nova Scotia began with domestic violence and ended in the deaths of 22 people. In the early 2000’s British Columbia serial killer Robert Pickton murdered more than 30 women: “The remains or DNA of 33 women, many who were Indigenous and went missing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, were found on Pickton’s Port Coquitlam, B.C., pig farm” (https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.7221260).

It should not be a surprise that several poetry collections or chapbooks published in Ontario in 2024 deal with IPV: Vixen by Sandra Ridely; In Violet by Margo LaPierre and my collection The Meaning of Leaving. I don’t know how many people recall that Canadian poet Pat Lowther, whose name is connected to an annual award given by the League of Canadian Poets, was murdered by her male partner.

In describing my poems in the first section of The Meaning of Leaving in particular, and those poems which challenge the patriarchy throughout the collection, I would say that rather than expressing “raw emotion,” the experiences and observations I have described in my poems are carefully crafted emotion seen from a distance. I could not write about my experiences of intimate partner violence until 20 years after that relationship was over. After I left my ex-husband I had to survive in a different culture and make a living. Although I loved my job and became very focused on my students, much of my energy went into my psychological and economic survival after I left him. I was catapulted into memories of my five-year abusive marriage when the brother of my ex contacted me during the pandemic to say he had died. The poems about that time in my life poured out of me.
 
SB:    Yes, my oldest daughter discovered that she lost a close friend to Robert Pickton in BC. Perhaps we should say, though, that femicide is not always performed by serial killers. They are a different, even more highly dangerous lot. However, in terms of the audience for The Meaning of Leaving, there will be a group of people who are naturally drawn to reading it, and perhaps a collection of people you think should read it. What do you see as the difference between those two groups, if anything?
 
KR:    So far, the people who have been drawn to read The Meaning of Leaving are mostly women, some of whom I know have experienced intimate partner violence. Many women understand that we are all at risk as women. Many of us think about our safety when we’re out after dark alone, or walk unaccompanied through a forest, because we know we are far more vulnerable to sexual assault than men. There is a continuum of vulnerability among women which unites us.

On the other hand, I think it would be great for more men to read The Meaning of Leaving. They might not want to think about how pervasive intimate partner violence against women actually is, but if they did they might develop more empathy for women they know and others who have experienced violence. Maybe they would even call out other men for committing violent acts against women. When I was first publicising The Meaning of Leaving on social media, some established male poets (Baby Boomer generation) insisted that it is impossible to write well about the emotions provoked by abuse. One in particular insisted that such writing would be “drivel.” I think such older male poets (one of whom insisted that poets should never write from personal experience, or emotion) are stuck in the past and base their poetics on T.S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” written 100 years ago. I doubt they ever read the so-called confessional poets such as Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. I think it’s time for such male poets to join the real world and value women’s poetics rooted in authentic experience, as much as they value their own.
 
SB:    In this volume, you deal with grisly stories at times, heartbreaking tales, and yet you also offer glimpses of sunshine and loving hearts as if to buoy the reader’s belief that we can all be rescued from a threatening apocalypse. The last section of the book, especially, suggests we can survive the worst that humans do. How close have I come to your worldview?
 
KR:    I think you have come pretty close to my world view. I would add that I believe that poetry, which Margaret Atwood has described as ‘condensed emotion’, has an important role to play in giving voice to authentic feelings about abuse, silencing, discrimination and destruction of the natural world. In that sense, to return to your second question, I do believe that poetry can educate.
 
SB:    Titles are often difficult to come up with, though some authors seem to begin there. What was your experience in developing a title for The Meaning of Leaving?
 
KR:    I wrote a poem titled “The Meaning of Leaving”—a loose glosa of a stanza from Bei Dao’s poem “Requiem.” It reflects on leaving Hong Kong and queries assumptions the speaker arrived there with. Many of the poems in my collection are about leaving and arriving and what those experiences have meant, including leaving my abusive ex-husband, so it seemed a very suitable title for the book.
 
SB:    Your poetry speaks to your experiences as a teacher working overseas, immersed in an alternate culture, sharing an understanding of the fears and constraints your students lived with. You share your own experiences as well. I can’t help but think you want this book to awaken readers to the experiences of people in abusive relationships, those raised in other cultures, and the constraint of alternate political systems. Do you see your creative art as a teaching tool?
 
KR:    I see my creative art as very much connected with the act of witness, as described by American poet Carolyn Forché, who coined the term, ‘poetry of witness’. In March 2020, The New Yorker magazine had this to say about Forché:

“For a large part of her career, Forché, who is now sixty-nine, has been characterized as a political poet. Which she is, though she prefers the term ‘poetry of witness.’ Her poems ask again and again, What can we do with what we see and live through? They help us to consider our memories of Auschwitz or an image of immigrants drowned in the Rio Grande. In our deeply bifurcated world, Forché’s best writing engages in a kind of dialectic, one in which the truth of experience burns as brightly as the author’s intuition and imagination.”

Writing poetry of witness does not mean I presume to speak for others such as fellow Hong Kongers like Vancouver-based poet Sam Cheuk, who wrote brilliantly about the 2019 pro-democracy protests on Hong Kong university campuses in his collection, Postscripts from a City Burning. Rather, I see my role and the role of any poet who chooses to write from direct experience and observation, as speaking truth to power. (Sam Cheuk was my sensitivity reader for the Hong Kong poems in The Meaning of Leaving.)

In 2021, I was lucky to co-organize and take part in an online political poetry reading with Toronto poets and reading series organizers Bänoo Zan and Gavin Barrett. We were inspired by poetry about loss of freedom in Hong Kong, Iran, Canada and the U.S., among other parts of the world. Political poetry can be powerful and well-crafted, contrary to some more traditional assumptions about it. My poetry was very influenced by Chinese dissident poet Bei Dao, who resided for a time in Hong Kong. Bei Dao’s bio on the PEN America site states that in 1989 he was accused of helping to incite the pro-democracy protest in Tiananmen Square and forced into exile from China. He has lived in seven countries, but keeps writing.

I would also say that as a Canadian who lived abroad for over two decades I see things here very differently from before I left. I write poetry of witness set in Canada too.
 
SB:    Every book takes a stance in the midst of its contemporary social and political concerns. How would you describe the position of The Meaning of Leaving and its areas of concern in today’s world?
 
KR:    The Meaning of Leaving is a response to the pervasive nature of violence in our world—whether intimate partner violence, political violence, victim blaming, or violence against the natural environment. I believe we live in the age of denial. Poetry rooted in authentic experience and emotional honesty can help counter that denial.
 
SB:    Can you offer an idea of the literary surrounds for this work? As in, what books were you most impressed with reading while you were working on it? What live performances did you attend, if any, that you feel influenced the book?
 
KR:    I have already mentioned the influence of Bei Dao’s poetry on my work. In the Hong Kong poems I was also influenced by protest poetry by Tammy Lai-Ming Ho; Sam Cheuk (also already mentioned) and Leung Ping-Kwan (another Canadian, like Sam), also known as P.K. Leung. The poems of Don Coles and Libby Scheier, both of whom I studied with at York University in the late 1980’s, and other Canadian poets Don McKay, Al Purdy, Jennifer Hosein, John Wall Barger, Lynn Tait, Lillian Allen, Marsha Barber, Jean Eng, Tanis MacDonald, Kim Fahner, Donna Langevin and Kate Marshall-Flaherty have all influenced my poetics. Specific books which I returned to again and again during the writing of The Meaning of Leaving are Elizabeth Bishop’s The Complete Poems, The City by C.P. Cavafy and Not A Muse: the Inner Lives of Women (NAM). In 2008-2009 I was very lucky to compile and co-edit NAM—an international women’s poetry anthology. Our contributors launched it simultaneously in several countries in Asia and the West, including at the AWP in Colorado in 2010. The more than 100 women poets from 24 countries collected in our anthology have influenced my own poetry for years. Several women mentioned above were contributors.

I already mentioned the 2021 Toronto-based political poetry reading I co-curated with Bänoo Zan and Gavin Barrett. Their poetry has also had a profound influence on what and how I write. I read and re-visited poetry by all the above poets while working on my collection The Meaning of Leaving. While writing and crafting the poems in my collection I also read and re-read American feminist poets Ellen Bass, Sylvia Plath (I first read Plath as a teenager), Anne Sexton and Sharon Olds.
 
SB:    You’ve already made references to your experiences, but something that often interests readers is knowing how much of a particular work is invented by the author and how much is autobiographical. Would you care to share your approach/thoughts on this aspect of your readers’ curiosity?
 
KR:    I think a lot of poetry is autobiographical. In my collection The Meaning of Leaving the most directly autobiographical poems are in the first section of the book. Persona poems in my collection such as “Albino Sword Swallower at a Carnival, 1970” and “The Don Jail Ghost” imagine other realities, but are informed by direct experience.
 
SB:    Would you say this book is written as a particular genre? Does it touch on the literary ideas from a particular place in literary history? Or is it so intent on ‘speaking truth’ and developing an individual voice that you were not overly conscious of its genre?
 
KR:    I was not conscious of genre at all when writing the poems later compiled in The Meaning of Leaving. I have already mentioned my drive to document the violence in this world which I have experienced and witnessed. I think if this collection was to be considered as part of a genre, ‘poetry of witness’ would be a suitable one. The collection came together organically. In other words, the poems revealed their shared theme after they were written.
 
SB:    Please describe the central idea that links all of the parts in this collection and why you felt it was important to address this in contemporary times.
 
KR:    This answer is linked to my previous one; my collection The Meaning of Leaving is a response to the violence I experienced in my last marriage, the recent violence against democracy and freedom of expression in Hong Kong, and violence against unhoused people. (A number of poems in The Meaning of Leaving respond to the homeless crisis in Canada.) My poems in the book also highlight moments which show our violence against the natural environment. All the violence I describe has been normalized. I think writing about it is a way to help readers of my poems see those forms of violence from a fresh perspective.
 
SB:    Thank you, Kate, for expanding on the messages imbedded in your poetry. I hope, along with you, that The Meaning of Leaving achieves your goal of speaking to people of all genders to inspire a greater understanding of what is lost through violence of all kinds around the world.

Kate Rogers won first place in subTerrain’s 2023 Lush Triumphant Contest for her suite of poems, “My Mother’s House.” 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. Homeless City, a chapbook co-authored with Donna Langevin, launched in the first week of January 2024. Kate Rogers is a Co-Director of Art Bar, Toronto’s oldest poetry reading series. More at:  katerogers.ca/

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​Sharon Berg attended the Banff School of Fine Arts Writing Studio in 1982 and was accepted to Banff’s Leighton Artist Colony in 1987. She is also an alumni of Humber College’s Writing Program. She did her B.A. in Indigenous Studies at Laurentian U, followed by her B.Ed for Primary Education at U of T. Her M.Ed focused on First Nations Education at York U, and her D.Ed focused on Indigenous Education at UBC. She also received a Certificate in Magazine Journalism from Ryerson U. Sharon founded and operated the international literary E-Zine Big Pond Rumours (2006-2019) and its associated press, which released chapbooks of Canadian poets as prizes for the magazine’s contests. She's published five full books and three chapbooks, working in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. Her work appears in periodicals across Canada, the USA, Mexico, the UK, the Netherlands, India, Germany, Singapore, and Australia. Her 3rd poetry collection Stars in the Junkyard (Cyberwit 2020) was a Finalist in the 2022 International Book Awards, and her narrative history The Name Unspoken: Wandering Spirit Survival School (Big Pond Rumours Press 2019) won a 2020 IPPY Award for Regional Nonfiction. When she retired from teaching, she opened Oceanview Writers Retreat in Charlottetown (Terra Nova National Park) Newfoundland.