Marie Metaphor
Headshot by Chris Dingo
Alt Text: Marie Metaphor has her head slightly tilted towards camera left. She is wearing a white shirt, posing against a black backdrop.
Biography
Marie Metaphor Specht is a multidisciplinary artist, poet, and educator living with her partner and child on the unceded territories of the Lək̓ʷəŋən- and SENĆOTEN-speaking peoples. In addition to her independent practice, she has collaborated with filmmakers, lighting engineers, dancers, and musicians to create immersive and interactive works. A long-time member of the Canadian spoken word scene, Marie is currently serving a two-year term as the 6th Poet Laureate of Victoria, British Columbia. Her work has been featured at festivals, arts events and poetry slams across the country. She believes in the transformative power of this art form and has had the privilege of coaching and creating space for youth poets for two decades.
Marie’s poetry has been published in Oratorealis, Untethered Magazine, Chestnut Review, The Hellebore, and Room Magazine, among others. Her debut poetry collection, Soft Shelters is published with Write Bloody North (2023).
www.mariemetaphor.com
Instagram: @mariemetaphor
Poetics Statement
“As a teenager, a family friend gave me a copy of Neruda’s love poems and it was a revelation. I started seeking out poetry wherever I could, driven by the discovery that language can create an experience that is somehow both deeply personal and universal, both surprising and familiar. These early poetic explorations gave me permission to play within language, to see if I could transcribe something essential of my unknowable self, of my experience interfacing with the unknowable world.
Poetry allows us to inhabit the experience and thoughts of another human being, to find some small part of ourselves reflected. We are each an island of our unique encounters with the wider world, harbouring an uneasy urge to be understood in our individual humanity. The poetry that strikes my heart and stays, most often speaks to an unnameable feeling or contemplation that has been hovering in the background— pulling it into the light where it can be seen and named.
Through the immediacy of spoken word, I have blurred the distinction between audience and performer, each role informing and enriching the other. I strive for something more than an account of my experience; I search for language that can transmit my experience viscerally and directly, inviting my audience to inhabit my otherwise unknowable world. I write, perform, read and listen to nurture our individuality while closing the spaces between us; Ultimately, I’d like us all to feel a little less alone in our experience of being human.
The world can be a bitter and difficult place, but it can also be joyful and unexpectedly tender. The beauty lies in our struggle to simultaneously hold the love and the mess, the soft and the hard—to inhabit and celebrate the interwoven complexities of our world, together. ”
Sample of Poet's Work
Rather, I worry
Frowning tight-knuckled at the steering wheel
after preschool drop-off
I think of his ear backlit in breakfast light
all shell-pink and orange juice glow
a soft moment of refuge before
his parking lot tantrum.
It started with an empty water bottle.
He wouldn’t leave the car
wouldn’t enter the building
wouldn’t tell me why.
Until gravel-kneed in the parking lot
I held him eye to eye
and through salt and snot he told me:
it was the granola bar
he ate on the drive over
rather, the peanuts in the granola bar
rather, the lack of water to wash them from his mouth
rather, the potential deadly reaction of a classmate
rather, the safekeeping
rather, the worry
I have dreams where my heart expands
and contracts with such force
my T-shirt billows, flapping over my chest.
It is not an illustration of exaggerated love
but the pounding panic
of each buzzing fear
swarming my chest in unison.
I blame the weight of the world
rather, I blame the slow apocalypse
rather, the news cycle
rather, the future
rather, the worry
Together in the aftermath,
we crouch in the parking lot
watching the wasps retreat.
They leave only
aching softness in their wake.
I tell him some worries are for bigger hands
I explain this is not for him to carry.
We count ten breaths on my fingers
then lock our knuckles into a makeshift shelter.
I promise to keep his worries safe.
I will hold them.
On my way home
I pass the encampment in the park downtown.
I notice a tent, the backlit orange of a dusty sunrise
edged with shell pink and surrounded by crows,
their wings pulsing like syncopated lungs.
Yesterday, driving past the same park
he had asked me, Why?
So I spoke about people doing their best
with what they are given
(and without what was taken)
Rather, I spoke about choices
rather, about circumstance
rather, systems
rather, trauma
rather, privilege
rather, love
These are big ideas for a five-year-old
and I don’t know if I’m doing it right
rather, I worry I’m doing it wrong
rather, I need to learn how to manage
with all I have been given
(and without what was taken)
I realize I’m gazing at my knuckles instead of the road
and when I look up, I see that I’m speeding
through the school zone right next to the park.
I take a breath and resurface through the buzzing.
Love. I choose to remember
we talked about love.
Soft Shelters
To build a shelter in the eye of the storm,
use only the softest materials:
let household sheets and pillows
be walls and roof,
let the baby blanket pulled from storage
be foundation,
let the cushion from your fever bed
be threshold.
The quilt that carried your grief
all that long spring
is here, waiting to hold you
while wind howls
and rain thunders.
Come in, love,
come in.
Let father’s hunting jacket
be the door,
while Grandfather’s work boots
buttress the walls
and Grandmother’s umbrella
supports the roof.
Let mother’s best dress
be a window,
its stale perfume your lullaby.
Come in, love,
you can sleep for ninety days.
Come in, love,
I will bake bread and sing songs.
Let this tender nest
be a defiance,
let this comfort
be a deep-rooted uprising,
let this fortress
be a revolution of softness.
Come in, love,
and let the storm be.
I promise our soft shelter will hold.
How beautifully we are (un)made
There is a canopy
stretched on a boundless loom.
It is forever being assembled,
forever being unmade.
There has always been
this tireless weaving.
The star trails of my ancestors
form the sturdy warp of this shelter.
In this life
many have offered
bright strands of their love,
pulled from the bottom
of their own shelters.
Many have unravelled just a little
for me. I shuttle the weft of their offerings
across the warp of those who came before.
They twine to an indigo fabric
always in flux.
Often, I forget I am sheltered,
until I wrap my body with this cloth:
my beginning so tangled
with its end.
Sometimes my skin is woven indigo
and my scars become star trails.
Sometimes my fingers are loom.
In this life, I have offered
each tiny love
and each vast love
a thread unravelled
from my own raw edge.
My bright filaments
a dismantled shelter in their hands.
Look, I tell them.
Look how you can build yourself.
Look how beautifully you can be unmade.
