Canadian poet Lorna Crozier shares her gifts at Wintergreen Studios

May 28, 2015

Nature has forever been one of the key muses for poets through the ages. It's no wonder that a mixed group of close to 30 accomplished and aspiring poets and poetry lovers gathered at Wintergreen Studios, the off-grid educational retreat centre that opened in 2008 near Burridge, for a special reading by award winning Canadian poet Lorna Crozier. Crozier. Crozier, who is soon to be a recipient of an honorary doctorate degree from McGill University, has published 17 books to date and is no stranger to Wintergreen Studios. She has returned there almost every year since 2010.

Most recently she led a five-day workshop from May 17 to 23 for 11 poets who came from across Canada and the United States, all at various stages in their careers, to gain some insight from her. Rena Upitus, owner and operator of Wintergreen Studios, said Crozier is“an incredibly inspiring and gifted poet and a very generous person whose workshops fill up as soon as they are posted”.

Midway through Crozier's workshop, Wintergreen opened its doors to local poetry lovers, who for the $40 ticket price enjoyed a scrumptious home cooked meal, courtesy of Louise Cooper (Wintergreen's in-house chef) followed by Crozier who read poems from her brand new book, The Wrong Cat (2015, McClelland and Stewart).

She is indeed a unique talent with a wide ranging sensibility for the comic, the perplexing, and the purely imagined. She writes poems that cover the entire range of unbridled human emotions, and is also a gifted reader with an expressive, vibrant and precise voice able to pierce her listeners' hearts and minds.

She began her reading with a number of short poems from her new book. She read a poem highlighting different imagined points of view of animals towards humans. Crozier said animlas likely “don't think much of human beings since we have done them a lot of wrong and go on doing so.” From “Crows Take On Man” she read, “They don't know their shadows have blood in them...their souls build nests of sticks to hold the shiny things they can't get by without.”

She read a series of short poems that under the overall heading - Notes for a Small Pocket. One of them, “Spider” includes the following: “So what if there is no money in our wallets. How joyous the spider is though her eight feet have no shoes.”

In “Game” she tells of three raccoons playing “paper, scissors, rock” by a pond and in another, about moths, “Call and Response” she observes how “A moth's single thought is light" and in the next line, she wonders “is that enough philosophy to get by on?”

She read a poem from the new book that is the favourite of her poet husband, Patrick Lane, “A Common Life”, a longer poem that tells of the relationship between a woman and a man as reealed by the woman in hindsight, who describes the man as one who “didn't want her when he was younger and now he does”, who “claims his first affair which made everything go wrong, his flame with a flamenco dancer was a big mistake”. The dancer was “the daughter of a hotel keeper in Barcelona, the man who counted them among his foreign friends” and how she “saw them through the smeared glass of the green house, the girl in her red skirt,” and later on in the poem, how “what she remembers, twenty years later, is the skirt, its flame and flair, how it looked as if their pale torsos rose from the skins of large splayed animals she'd weep for in her dreams.”

One of her funniest was “Moose Poem” which she introduced with the words, “To be a true Canadian poet, you have to write a poem about a moose.” It showcased her delight in language. “A moose knows it's the most orbicular, the biggest nose of our country's ungulates mimicking as much as anything a crook necked squash, the one that won the ribbon at the country fair.”

She describes the animal as “so powerful, its singular is plural” and with a nose so funny that when you come across it, “its nose relaxes you and makes you laugh as if the craftsman assigned to the task had never made a nose before.”

Crozier no doubt inspired the workshop participants and she described her method of teaching the students as “a call and response technique where I give them nudges or a call and they come back the next day with a response.” She added, “We're just all thriving on each other's energy and love of language and poetry and it's been a fantastic time here at Wintergreen.”

Upcoming events at Wintergreen inlcude a community drumming circle on Saturday, July 25 with Lorrie Jorgensen; a Bio Blitz on Friday, June 12 and Saturday June 13; in October, a Buddhist psychology workshop; and in November a workshop on death and preparing for the end of life with Julie Vachon and Dr. Brian Goldman, the host of CBC Radio's White Coat, Black Art.

Rena Upitis said that along with their intensive arts and eco educational workshops, much of their upcoming programming includes eco/spiritual workshops which “seem to be drawing a lot of interest and showing us that people are definitely needing to process some of their own personal stuff.”

For more information about upcoming events at Wintergreen, visit www.wintergreenstudios.com.