Kate Braid
Biography
Kate Braid has written, co-written, edited and co-edited sixteen books and chapbooks of non-fiction and poetry, including co-editing with Sandy Shreve two editions of the ground-breaking work, In Fine Form: A Contemporary Look at Canadian Form Poetry (Raincoast 2005, Caitlin 2016). In Fine Form has been used as a text and introduction to new ways of approaching poetry, in classrooms and by poets across Canada. Her most recent book of poetry is Elemental (Caitlin Press, 2018).
Kate’s work has won or been nominated for the Pat Lowther Award, Vancity Book Prize, BC Book Prize, Pandora Collective BC Writers’ Mentor Award, Vancouver Mayor’s Award for the Literary Arts, and others. In 2016 she was Writer in Residence at Mabel Dodge Luhan House in Taos, New Mexico.
Her poetry subjects have included painters Emily Carr and Georgia O’Keeffe, pianist Glenn Gould, and her experiences as one of the first red-seal women carpenters in Canada. After 15 years of construction, then teaching creative writing, she now lives with her partner in Victoria and on Pender Island, BC. See www.katebraid.com
Poetics Statement
“I stumbled into poetry by accident, when I noticed that the notes I took nightly, trying to help me understand the strange male construction culture I’d fallen into, were getting shorter and shorter. They looked almost like – could it be – poetry?
I then fell, again accidentally, into a poetry class taught by Tom Wayman that focussed on writing about work. I will be forever grateful for Tom’s teaching and his confidence: first, that construction is a subject worth writing about; and second, that I could do this poetry “thing.”
My first book of poems, Covering Rough Ground, was about construction, but my second was about my other “mentor,” Emily Carr, who gave me the courage to keep going as a woman in a field dominated by men. Since then I’ve written in the voices of other artists, Georgia O’Keeffe and Glenn Gould, in addition to memoir and essays, but always, poetry.
My primary goal in writing is to communicate. I think this is the carpenter in me asking, “Is it solid?” I’m thrilled when people approach me with some version of, “I don’t get most poetry, but I get yours!” Poetry is often badly taught in schools, which is one reason Sandy and I edited In Fine Form, as a tool for teachers with which to build students’ curiosity (and abilities) in what’s still considered too-esoteric, too-unreachable, an art.
Though I write, and have taught, both creative non-fiction (prose) and poetry, my first instinct is to write poetry in moments of insight or curiosity. I tend to respond with non- fiction when I’m thinking about something over time. But I’m deeply grateful I’ve found poetry as a means of expressing wonder, else how better to express my awe at the beauty and yes, also horrors, of the world around me?”
Sample of Poet's Work
Wood Interior
Emily Car, 1909
Oil on canvas
Here it is, earlier still.
Such a naive picture,
with all the parts we recognize –
bark leaves branches –
green in its place.
But even this early
your spirit stares
and sees what is between the trees
joining them.
A space
any carpenter would understand.
It is the reason we build things.
Looks like air to some,
fresh breeze, a touch of chill
or fog.
It is the spirit of the tree.
Now I know who you are.
Another woman who knows wood.
(from To This Cedar Fountain, Polestar, 1995. Reprinted by Caitlin Press, 2012.)
Redwing, I Say
Sparrow, we say, redwing, magpie, crow.
The field goes on.
~ Maureen Scott Harris
Redwing, blackbird, able feeder,
what do you have to teach me?
Forgive my demand. It is based on urgency.
I do not say desperate but you will understand.
Redwing, bearing your own epaulettes,
unspeakable courage to always fly
forward. Are you not tempted sometimes to return
to the egg?
Redwing, why did the one who named you
omit the gold, the sun that shines from you to light the way?
Or is it your song that leads, gives me courage,
tricks me, some days, into looking up. Just this.
(from Elemental, Caitlin, 2018)
These Hips
Some hips are made for bearing
children, built like stools
square and easy, right
for the passage of birth.
Others are built like mine.
A child’s head might never pass
but load me up with two-by-fours
and watch me
bear.
When the men carry sacks of concrete
they hold them high, like boys.
I bear mine low, like a girl
on small, strong hips
built for the birth
of buildings.
(from Covering Rough Ground, Polestar 1991, and Rough Ground Revisited, Caitlin, 2015)
Loneliness
Isolation is the indispensable component of human happiness.
~ Glenn Gould
The critics, the world, even some of my friends think it mysterious
I am so much alone. They think I must be lonely. Don’t they know?
Isolation is the indispensable component of human happiness.
Some days I bundle up, get in the car, turn the heat and radio on high (this is the best)
and drive around Toronto, sweating. It’s a story rarely told, for
the critics, the world, even some of my friends would think it mysterious.
When I was young my friends were Nick the dog, Mozart the budgie and four fish:
Bach, Beethoven, Hayden and Chopin.
Isolation is the indispensable component of human happiness,
not a wife, not a close friend, no. Instead I take the splendour of music, peerless
companion that accompanies me to that place where order lies, home,
though the critics, the world, even some of my friends, think it mysterious.
Each hammer stroke on string, each fading note, precious,
can be called at my desire again. How much better even than the telephone.
Isolation is the indispensable component of human happiness.
Music is my wife, its shimmer of constancy, wondrous.
What lover could keep such harmony and still forever come when called?
The critics, the world, even some of my friends, think it mysterious
but isolation is the indispensable component of human happiness.
(from A Well-Mannered Storm: The Glenn Gould Poems, Caitlin, 2008)
