Daniela Elza
Biography
Daniela Elza lived on three continents before immigrating to Canada in 1999. To date, her poetry collections are the broken boat (2020), milk tooth bane bone (2013), the weight of dew (2012), and the book of it (2011). In 2021 Daniela launched slow erosions—a chapbook written in collaboration with poet Arlene Ang.
Daniela earned her doctorate in Philosophy of Education from Simon Fraser University. Her thesis was nominated for the 2011 CAGS UMI Distinguished Dissertation Award Competition, and received the Dean of Graduate Studies Convocation Medal, recognizing her dissertation for not only addressing the long standing epistemological split between the philosophic and poetic, but attempting to heal that very split.
Daniela has recently been growing her passion for the essay too. Some of her essays can be found in Riddle Fence, Grain Magazine, Motherwell, Queen’s Quarterly, About Place Journal and subTerrain. Daniela is a founding member of the Place Mattering Matters Collective (2022) and is actively engaged with her community on protecting affordable housing in Vancouver. She works as an instructor, teacher, mentor to writers of any age; she loves to inspire, and help birth poems and poetry manuscripts. Website: http://strangeplaces.livingcode.org/
Poetics Statement
“Each time I get discouraged with how small the world can become, I remember Heidegger thinking of poetry as that which brings us into the open clearing of truth, and Robert Bringhurst saying that poetry knows more than any of us who write it. I live this tension. Poetry as institution and poetry as freedom—
Poems were taught to me in a hurry. Somewhere along the clinical hallways of school they lost their souls. We do this to other things, like food. Instead of a carrot we need carotenoids in our diet. But, we still cannot understand what goes on deep down in the soul of a carrot. says Michael Pollan in In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto. When food devolves to nutrients, we need experts to tell us how to eat. Poetry is at the mercy of such forces. But “you do not need to fathom a carrot’s complexity in order to reap its benefits,” concludes Pollan. So eat the carrot. Write the poem. Eat the poem, says the carrot—
Poetry knows language isn’t adequate for its needs, so it does something with language that language shouldn’t be able to do. To create intimacy with words we work with them, just like we would work on any good relationship. Language benefits from this attention—
Without poetic thinking, the world becomes too clear—and that’s dangerous, says Tim Lilburn. The poetic imagination is a species of knowing. It vaccinates us against narrow and petty mindedness, allows for paradoxes and diverse thoughts to co-exist. Poetic thinking, I believe, is crucial to our survival. After all as Mary Ruefle says: “The rose is not beauty. What beauty is is your ability to apprehend it.”
Try to define poetry and it will defy you—”
Sample of Poet's Work
:diagnosis:
a field of snow. a picture of a tree.
the body hangs. a eulogy.
suspended groundless words fall
around a simple question
(at first sight
black on white) so clearly
outlined— a tree a body
and a breath between them.
*
and the crows they utter their deadly caws
all at once (as if trying
to explain.
they saw it all
with their sharp little eyes but none
swooped down to blind the executioner.
*
their cawing grows
especially loud
at dusk when I hang by that thin
noose
of dying
light.
alone.
published in milk tooth bane bone (Leaf Press, 2013)
the weight of dew
can I fill these words with what is not
intended. with what the river keeps
hidden
under her tongue.
with the maps birds carve in my marrow
fill my bones with air
my eye with their dying.
to wait on the river bank
long enough
to know what knowing looks like
before it is disturbed.
stepped on. sanitized.
poked with a stick.
put in a vial.
to know the shape of me
nameless—
my given names left out
like shoes I was meant to fill.
they gather dew now
it slides down their tongues. I watch them
through this open door where
even the clock wipes its face clean.
published in the weight of dew (Mother Tongue Publishing, 2012)
autobiographies of grief: three fragments
The city legislates our movements
paves the paths we are supposed to walk.
there’s barely song here in the footfall
the negotiation of space— the way we avoid
bumping into each other
as we bump into each other.
each day our together wakes up
remembers itself into not-being
raises itself from the ground up
like a city— stunned and unbelieving.
in the choreography of this struggling light
I never imagined not loving you.
<>
Your dreams have begun to resemble reality.
your favourite lawn chair face down
in the backyard pond
is drowning itself.
the lily pads have turned into Pac-Men
eating up the koi everyone wanted
but no one cared for.
though you were suspicious
of those happy endings
you liked them—
read all the way to the end of the book
finished watching the bad movie
just to see that final kiss.
your dreams have begun to resemble reality.
in the mornings you feel
robbed cheated.
<>
One way and for lease we paint our façades
in recognizable acceptable colours.
boarded and shuttered inside ourselves.
I never knew not loving you was an option.
we are busy fighting the small crimes
the big ones are beyond us now.
the widows with the views are elsewhere.
the mountains you imagined curious and peeking
have looked away. stay at a safe distance.
the sunbeams that so readily stretched themselves
like rugs on our afternoon floors
have been issued restraining orders.
the doors of your shock open wide.
published in the broken boat (Mother Tongue Publishing, 2020)