Happy World Poetry Day! Enjoy this interview featured in our most recent issue!
Clarise Foster: Congratulations on the publication of Scientific Marvel, your debut collection of poetry! One’s first book is such a milestone—and yours was a few years in coming. How does it feel after holding it close for so long to finally have it out in the world all on its own?
Chimwemwe Undi: It feels just like I hoped it would feel, both like a milestone and like a brand-new start. I spent all of this time telling myself that I was working on a poetry collection but some part of me was not sure it was actually possible for me write one until I did. Now I want to do other impossible things.
CF: It is truly an exquisite debut. Not a discordant note to be found nor misfire or order dysfunction. Cohesive, confident, each poem a testament to the passion and care of a poet who is profoundly gracious and in equal measure defiant. In this exceptional collection, one finds newer work flows seamlessly into older work and back again. The erasure poems excerpted from Supreme Court of Canada cases strategically threaded throughout the collections are especially evocative. I am curious, how much of the manuscript was completed upon acceptance for publication with House of Anansi? How many poems/pages came after?
CU: Thank you, Clarise! That means so much from you especially, as I have always admired your eye and ear. I came to Anansi with a bundle of poems, and many of them made it to the final collection, though a lot of them transformed on the way. I think that only included one of the SCC erasures, or only the erasures from one decision. I had started others, but I was not sure if they were too contrived. Kevin Connolly, my editor, helped me identify what was singing and ringing true and what was not, with respect to the erasures and in the collection as a whole.
CF: You are most welcome. As someone who has been following your writing career for many years, I am so pleased to finally have a book in my hands! How difficult was it to write the work needed to complete the manuscript given the resonance of the existing work?
CU: Very difficult, honestly. A lot of the poems in the original bundle of poems I submitted I made or fleshed out over the course of a residency, and after two hard years of trying to become a lawyer and survive a pandemic.
Those poems sprung out of me—it felt like I hit the ground running, like the poems were waiting for me to have the time and space to pluck them out of my head and put them down properly. The work of adding to those was really challenging, but some of my favourite poems only arrived in that process of trying to turn that bunch of poems into one, cohesive collection.
CF: And how did you find editing your work into a book format as opposed to editing a group of individual poems you might send out for publication say in Prairie Fire or even a chapbook?
CU: The process of holding on to poems and threading them together was a big part of why I wanted to write a collection in the first place. I have been writing and submitting one or two poems here and there for over a decade, now. My chapbook, The Habitual Be, which was published in 2017, was a collection of the best poems I thought I had at that point, and the notes from my chapbook editors, Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani, were focused on strengthening the individual poems. Those experiences of working with editors at publications and for the chapbook were important for me, as a sort of substitute of studying writing formally.
I wanted to move from writing a poem to writing a body of work, and to see what that illuminated for me. And it was illuminating! I enjoyed the process of purposefully placing poems in conversation with each other without the aid of a narrative arc, and, even more so, it was fascinating to notice what patterns and conversations existed accidentally. There were all of these images, ideas, questions, and individual words I did not realize I was obsessed with but there, on the page, I kept turning to, again and again.
CF: Were there any surprises along the way?
CU: Less during the process of writing and more in the reception of the book. I have been surprised and so pleased with how many people have described the poems as funny. I definitely make myself laugh.
CF: As someone who has worked with you as an editor and observed your exceptional skills as workshop leader and mentor, I have to ask if, during the making of Scientific Marvel, you were as patient and generous with your own writing as you continue to be with that of the other writers you work with?
CU: Despite myself, I was. I had to learn to be patient and generous with myself, at least in the drafting process, reminding myself that a terrible poem in the world is better than the perfect poem in my head. It sounds so good and wise to say in a workshop or in an interview but it is harder to believe when I am staring at the blinker on an empty page.
CF: In Scientific Marvel, readers like myself, who are familiar with your spoken word background, will notice a definite formal shift in your writing. Your spoken word roots are still audible/palpable but the touch is lighter, the line tighter and the language more powerful in its spareness rather than in its urgency. Because it is the nature of poetry to push us to explore what often seems unsayable, I am always interested in what inspires a writer to move in a new direction. Can you tell me more about this shift in your writing and what precipitated it?
CU: I am grateful to have my foundations as a poet in spoken word, and that practice still animates what I do on the page. A lot of my community practice involves a fair amount of reading and performing, and I strongly believe that hearing a poem is one of the best ways to experience it—alongside, not instead of reading it on the page. I still read everything I write aloud to listen for music or clunkiness, and I read other people’s writing aloud to myself too. It can totally transform the experience.
The spoken word poets who I learned from taught me that spoken word poems are poems written with the purpose of being performed aloud, like how lyrics can be poems written to be sung. You can read them, but that’s not the point. Thinking of a “page” poem in a similar way, as a thing designed to be experienced on the page, was an interesting angle for me. I liked the project of making poems that reward being revisited, that can be sat with the way I have sat with poems, to be dissected and held up to the light.
I had a lot of fun trying to figure out how to write poems that, I hope, resonate without the tools of presence, voice, and gesture, and without the urgency of being in front of the listener who knows they cannot rewind time. I read quite a lot of poems, in collections, in publications and, until recently, as an editor with CV2, so I am learning all the time about what is possible inside of a poem. I somehow ended up with some poems in the collection that I have not figured out how to perform aloud, which I think is a cool place to have landed.
CF: Yes, that is definitely a very cool place to land. I think that is the beauty of writing into the page rather than the voice, because sometimes a poem becomes one to be “held to the light” rather than to be heard. At least until you discover its register. What would be an example of one of these pieces?
CU: The Supreme Court of Canada decision erasures are a good example of a poem in this category. I have not figured out a way to perform them, and there may not be a way, since the silences imposed on the text in the process of making the poem and the blackness of the page are so central to the poem’s work.
CF: Also exceptionally cool is that you were able to move your work so effectively from one mode of writing to another and have fun in the process. I understand that part of the fun/process of writing parts of the collection was to set formal constraints for yourself. You don’t stick to one. In Scientific Marvel, a number of “forms” are literally at play. Spoken freeform of earlier work exists in concert with list poems, centos, the erasure pieces. Form is both a challenge and a freedom—the challenge of accomplishment and the freedom of messing with it—making it yours. What was your goal with this challenge, with the range?
CU: I could go on and on about form. First, you’re right that the forms are fun. I love reading a collection or a journal and coming across a form I have not tried, or have not tried successfully, and working through it. Sometimes the poem stays in that form, and sometimes it feels too forced or clunky, and I forage whatever worked in that draft and move on. Second, I like what the constraint and challenge of trying to make a formal poem do to my use of language; the exercise of navigating a structure forces me to reach for new words, or cadences, or images. It is harder to fall back on the things I am used to. And last, there can be a sort of magic to formal poems for me. It’s close-up magic, where I am so focused on the math-puzzle of fitting the words together and suddenly I have conjured an image or idea that I am interested in writing more about.
CF: Speaking more specifically to form, I am intrigued by the series of erasure poems running through Scientific Marvel. I understand from your notes the source material is excerpted from Supreme Court of Canada cases. How did you come to choose this source material and what was the goal? Was it to reiterate what the material said, but from a different voice perspective, or was it to flip it on its head and explode it into something new? And why redaction rather than a more traditional erasure approach? Finally, what do you want your readers to take away from what you’ve done, both the selections and your treatment of the text?
CU: Those erasures are of Supreme Court of Canada decisions where the person being affected is a Black person, but where the person’s Blackness is not explicitly or, in my view, adequately addressed. The work of the erasures is to make the subtext text—they are an attempt to amplify what is silenced and to silence the noise around the Blackness that is not spoken about. It feels really, tragically Canadian to me for Blackness to be side stepped and minimized in this particular way.
These are decisions that are taught in every Canadian common law program, and that are relied on for foundational legal principles. Baker, specifically, comes up every day in my administrative law practice. In the notes, I mention academic work by Dr. Amar Khoday, one of my law school professors, and particularly his article which presents what he calls a “counternarrative” of R v Smithers, one of the decisions in the case. I wanted to turn these decisions in which Blackness was downplayed and make them about Blackness, including by making the actual page more black.
CF: I want to ask you about the deep sense of commitment to, aesthetic, and community that seems to run throughout Scientific Marvel. The poems in this collection are firmly grounded in the locale of Winnipeg, as you have been. Your community involvement/activism in the city’s arts community and other organizations over the years has been extensive, including a long commitment to Poetry in Voice. You were also a co-founder and director of Voices, Ink., the Winnipeg Youth Slam, providing much needed opportunities and resources to other spoken word artists, queer and Black performers like yourself and other writers of colour. You were the longtime coordinator of Winnipeg’s Speaking Crow open mic series. You were a member of the CV2 board of directors for several years and later served as one of its poetry editors. You’ve been a mentor and workshop facilitator. And this list primarily covers the arts community. Why and how is community so important to you? How has your community experience/involvement impacted your creative practice? What has it given, does it continue to give you as a poet that more traditional writing experiences do not?
CU: That question makes me sound so much more selfless than I am! I came to a poetic practice in a community setting—my high school poetry club—so I learned early that there was value for me in writing and reading along other people, in receiving their reactions and feedback and in honing my own ear and eye by thinking about other people’s writing. I am so glad that the work I have done in the poetry community has benefited it, but the truth is I don’t know that I would have kept writing without the input and inspiration of going to a reading or an open mic, or sitting in workshop, or at drinks with other poets and writers and being reminded of how great a poem can be.
I was also really lucky in my encounters with more established poets and writers, particularly in Winnipeg but all across Turtle Island, who told me I was a real poet before I believed it. The experiences I had as an emerging poet are so much of why I love working with emerging poets. I know how important and impactful it can be to be seen and validated when you’re still half-hiding.
CF: No, not selfless—that to me implies a giving away of self—what I wanted to emphasize was your generosity—your contribution of your unique and amazing self. The arts community will only change and grow with artists like you giving of their unique talents and energy. Something you’ve done for many years. One of the many whose efforts make our arts community one of the few things that other Canadian envy us for, perhaps only.
But I am wondering about the impact of your other community involvement on your writing. Many of the Winnipeg locales featured in the poems in Scientific Marvel are in downtown Winnipeg. The title of the collection for instance, Portage Place Mall, Club 200, The Hydro Offices as are the people. Downtown is quite a ways from the neighbourhood where you grew up and the part of Winnipeg which many outsiders and its own citizens see as the source of its most pressing problems. It is also, I should point out, the heart of the arts community. How has/does your engagement/work with these Winnipeg communities shaped/shape your writing?
CU: I grew up in a far-flung suburb and I love living and working in central Winnipeg. My husband and I moved here intentionally, trying to have the best of both worlds: to be in the city where we had family, and community, and to be walking, biking and bussing distance to the art, music, food and coffee that is concentrated in or around the downtown core. So much of my adult life has happened in this part of the city, and that shows up in my poems.
I am also interested in the downtown as a scapegoat for this city’s frustration with itself. I do not think it is a coincidence that this neighbourhood is one of the most visibly diverse in the city and that it is both starved of resources and much maligned. I am a romantic but a smart one. I know that there are problems in Winnipeg—of apathy, and rage, of an uneven and untenable distribution of what we choose to call resources, of the ongoing effects of colonialism on the people who carry that trauma in their bones. That is as true in South Pointe and Transcona as it is in the downtown core, but it is more obvious and easier to villainize in some neighbourhoods than it is in others. These are issues and questions that I grapple with in my poems because I grapple with them in the rest of my life, too.
CF: During the time you were working on Scientific Marvel, you were selected to be Winnipeg’s Poet Laureate for 2023–24, not only a great honour, but also, I imagine, one your most high profile and most consuming community commitments to date. I understand this position affords the opportunity for working on one’s own writing, but also involves a number of cultural and civic responsibilities including the creation of programming and legacy events that raise awareness of the arts across many sectors of the city and its communities. What has the acknowledgement of being selected for this prestigious position, the opportunity to advocate for the art you love, and the occasion to engage/create with and for such a broad range of our city’s communities, meant for your own creative work?
CU: I have loved being Winnipeg Poet Laureate. The selection process involved the Winnipeg Arts Council asking members of the Winnipeg poetry community to put some names forward, and it is really moving that my community thought I would be a good representative for them. I hope that I have been. My favourite part of the position has been meeting people from our city’s communities, many of which I do not think I would have come across before, and getting to talk to them about their relationships with poetry. I have visited community picnics and business luncheons, libraries and university classrooms, and everywhere, there are so many more former and current poets than I think any of us realize.
The impact on my creative work is something I have been thinking about a lot lately. To be frank, for most of my life, I have been reading poems on the steps of City Hall and the Legislative Building at protests and vigils for Black people, queer people, immigrants and victims of police brutality, so it has been a bit odd to be invited in as a special guest. It can be hard to navigate saying what I want to say with treating this position with the tact and respect that I think the position deserves, but I have tried my very best. I’m fortunate to have people around me who I can turn to for guidance, and who I trust to hold me accountable.
CF: Among the many powerful revelations in “Property 101,” the brilliant opening poem of Scientific Marvel, you write “serving the language I serve, and work against, / to dupe.” To both serve and to dupe is a fascinating juxtaposition. Serving language at the same time as deceiving it, as you do quite successfully in this poem and throughout the collection, requires a deep understanding of how language works. Earlier in our conversation you talked about how working with editors at publications and on your chapbook was “sort of substitute of studying writing formally.” But you have studied language formally, earning both a Bachelor of Arts and a Master’s in Linguistics. How does this background in the science of language assist you in your creative writing practice? And how, in Scientific Marvel, does it serve you in the effort to dupe the language you so obviously love?
CU: Studying linguistics deepened and complicated my love of language. That humans developed these mechanisms of sound, gesture and mark-making to communicate with each other is fantastic, and more fantastic is that we use those communication tools to make art. When I was in my linguistics programs, I would write these boring, unreadable poems basically repeating concepts and theories that I had learned, because I find the structure of language so moving and so fascinating. Language is science and it is magic.
Language can reveal, and free, and express, but it can also, of course, obfuscate, justify and dehumanize. We can speak truth to power, or we can rearrange the sentence to obscure the truth. A tool becomes a weapon with the wrong intention. I am interested in using language but also in how language is used, and why, and in what those mechanisms and those reasons reveal about the world. I think my linguistics training gave me lots of tools that I use to contend with those questions.
CF: “Property 101,” as well as the erasure poems, also directly allude to your legal background. Most immediately, how did your experience as a lawyer more generally impact the writing of material for the book? The sense of yourself as poet? Has it changed who you write for and why? Also, the study of law is also a study of language—and I wonder what the influence of that experience has had overall on your creative work?
CU: Some kinds of lawyers spend as much time as linguists and poets thinking about language, but the project of thinking about language in that legal context is to very particular ends. I find that really fascinating. In terms of the impact on my writing, in the book and more generally, I am excited every time I become conversant in a new register of language. I feel like a painter with a new brush, or more pigments to mix. Lawyers have such a specific way of speaking and writing, and I was excited to play with those phrases and that vocabulary, and to better understand its uses through my poems.
CF: There are so many brilliant things to be said about Scientific Marvel—and they are being and will be said. But one of the most powerful and moving threads running through this collection is love—love of language, love of poetry, love for a scrappy little city called Winnipeg, with its scrappy weather and its scrappy communities, love for the husband you’ve made your life with—I could go on. We are talking here about a deep and compassionate love—one that is direct—determined and confident—not a stylish rose-coloured lens in sight. It is, I would say, your superpower, your “magic”—can you talk about that? Why is it so important to you as a poet? So important in your new book?
CU: That is so nice! Love is one of my life-long fascinations. There are ways that love, particularly familial love, has been challenging for me, has felt tied to conditions or silences that did not feel tenable. The love of friends has been so crucial to my formation and survival. I also figured out early that I am queer, which for me manifests mostly in the realms of love and attraction, and so it was obvious for most of my life that any kind of love I experienced, romantic or otherwise, would be shaped by that. And then I have been so shaped by the writers and thinkers I admire, who have instilled in me a sense that love is what underlies a hope for the world, a determination to make it a better place, the insistence on speaking out about ways that it needs to change.
I love writing and reading about love, trying to capture this thing that is somehow both completely miraculous and utterly ordinary. Love is the closest thing to an animating principle in my life and I will spend my life, like I spent the book, coming at it from every angle.
CF: Earlier you said you were surprised and pleased that people found some of the poems in the collection funny. It sounds like you were concerned that readers might miss the humour you intended, like in the first “Winnipeg Poem,” which quite playfully riffs on our city’s much referred to “iconic” artists and imagery, including the weather. Were you? How come?
CU: I was! I love humour in poems, but I worry that people assume that I am very serious when I am only pretty serious. The Winnipeg Poem has done well on certain stages though. I read it in New York last year and it fell absolutely flat, which I liked. I like that it is interrupted by knowing laughter when I read it in Winnipeg and then in other contexts, it’s an anthropological text the reader has to decipher through a series of Google searches.
CF: At the beginning of our conversation, I made reference to the time it has taken for Scientific Marvel to arrive. In my experience as a magazine and book editor, there is, for so many emerging poets, an urgency to get that first full book under their belts. I am curious as to why you chose to wait until now. Especially after the critical acclaim of your chapbook, The Habitual Be, was included in New-Generation African Poets: A Chapbook Box Set, Akashic Books, Brooklyn, New York, 2017?
CU: That’s a hard question. Some of the wait was just life—grad school, law school, getting called to the bar, getting married, COVID-19.
But yes, some of it was intentional. I wanted to have a surer sense of myself before I put a full-length collection into the world. I hope and expect that my writing voice will continue to grow and change as I do, but I think I had a sense that I was, in my early work, doing a lot of sort of mimicry, particularly because I take in so much poetry and started performing and publishing relatively young. Anytime I came across some great poem, I would think, oh, I should be writing that kind of thing—that is smarter or more important than the nonsense I have been doing. I am proud and fond of a lot of my old poems, but I read them and I can tell who I had read right before writing them. I might feel the same way in a few years, but right now, I think Scientific Marvel sounds as much like me as I know how to be right now.
That said, in 2019, I was at the Banff Centre’s Emerging Writers Intensive, learning from Canisia Lubrin. I went to her office hours with these grand thematic ideas and like three poems, and she basically called me out and said, you just have to actually write the thing. So, some of the wait was good old-fashioned fear-based procrastination.
CF: Your work as a spoken word artist continues to inspire younger performance poets. I understand that “A History of Houses Built Out of Spite,” one of your poems included in Scientific Marvel, is a favourite selection for students participating in Poetry in Voice competitions. What guidance would you give a young spoken word artist who wants to make the leap to publishing a book of their work?
CU: Yes, “A History…” has such a cool life as part of Poetry in Voice’s catalogue, being memorized and embodied by many young people who perform it in a much more compelling way than I do.
It is such boringly common advice but that is because it is good advice. You have to read. If you’re going to write poems, you have to read poems. If you are going to perform, you have to watch performances. There is so much to learn about what a poem can be, about what you can do, about what has been done over and over again. Your poems exist in the context of other poems, and I strongly believe an awareness of and interest in that context will only make your poems better.
And it’s not homework. Read stuff that you like, or don’t, and try to figure out why you feel the way you feel. I really love reading and talking about poems, and there is little that brings me as much joy and pleasure as reading a good poem for the first time or revisiting a poem I love after a while and noticing new things in it.
CF: I agree reading is essential. Are there are some poets you would recommend, or some books one could get started with? Who are you reading right now? I also wonder if there are some online resources you would suggest that would be helpful to new and emerging poets, or anyone looking for new poetry to read? There is so much available online these days—it can be kind of intimidating.
CU: I read katherena vermette’s new novel, real ones, in about a day and a half. It is fiction but Kate is so obviously a poet and there is poetry in there, obvious and otherwise. I came across a Diane Seuss collection in a used bookstore when I was travelling a couple of weeks ago, and I had seen a poem of hers I liked a few days before. That felt like serendipity, so I’m cracking that open, too.
In terms of resources for people looking for poems, I could go on and on. We are so fortunate to live at a time where it is easier than ever to access poems that speak to us. Poetry In Voice has a great online archive of poems, largely by Canadian poets, and there are other archives online. I love any subscription service that will regularly put a poem in your inbox or podcast feed: League of Canadian Poets has Poetry Pause, there’s the Slowdown podcast, the New Yorker’s podcast. I am famously obsessed with public libraries—they are criminally underfunded and do not always have the strongest poetry collections, but they often have a way to request books for them to order and, in my experience, they usually order them. I try to always have at least one active subscription to a poetry magazine like Prairie Fire, like CV2, Room, The Capilano Review, EVENT, so many more. They publish really great poems, and I was on CV2’s board and a poetry editor there so I know how scrappy these magazines are. When I read someone I like, I try to figure out who they are reading—in the notes section of their book or by looking up interviews online. Instagram gets a bad rap (some of it earned) but following poets and other readers whose taste I trust on social media has pointed me to so many collections I don’t think I would have come across otherwise.
I obviously relish the process of finding poems and collections I like, much like my husband loves crate digging for records. Like anyone, though, I am busy and don’t always feel like I have time to figure out what to read, so I always recommend finding ways to put poetry in your way, so you stumble over it, and take those moments to take them in.
CF: What “impossible thing” is Chimwemwe Undi planning to undertake next?
CU: I don’t know! I am playing with writing other kinds of things, and I don’t know yet if those things are projects or cross-training for whatever poems I want to write next.
CF: And finally, thank you for this conversation and for your astonishing new book! Scientific Marvel is a brilliant, gracious, defiant and astonishing debut filled with courage, grit, wit, irony and love, all the things that make the best poetry!
CU: Thanks! I liked thinking about your questions.