Renee Sarojini Saklikar
[Author Name]
Biography
Renée Sarojini Saklikar is a poet and lawyer who lives in Vancouver on the unceded traditional territories of the Coast Salish peoples. Her work appears in many journals and anthologies and she is the author of four books, including the ground-breaking poetry book, children of air india, about the bombing of Air India Flight 182 which won the Canadian Authors Association Poetry Prize; and is the co-author, with Dr. Mark Winston, of the poetry and essay collection, Listening to the Bees, winner of the 2019 Gold Medal Independent Publishers Book Award, Environment/Ecology. Her work has been adapted for visual art, dance, and opera, including air india [redacted] with SFU Woodward’s, the Irish Arts Council, and Turning Point Ensemble. (https://tomcreed.org/portfolio/air-india-redacted/). Renée Sarojini served as the inaugural Poet Laureate for the City of Surrey (2015-2018) and she teaches creative writing as well as law and ethics for writer and editors. She curates Lunch Poems at SFU and the Vancouver Poetry Phone and is a member of Meet The Presses collective and serves on the advisory boards of Event magazine, The Ormsby Review as well as serving as a board director for the Surrey International Writers Festival and poetry in canada. Renée Sarojini works the epic, reclaiming it for climate justice and female heroes in her long poem project, THOT J BAP, The Heart of This Journey Bears All Patterns, an epic fantasy in verse. The first book in this series is Bramah and The Beggar Boy, (Nightwood Editions, 2021). For more information, please visit https://thotjbap.com/
Poetics Statement
“[
To imagine, sound—
To see gesture, the fragment, as series of—
To embed, to crave the sense of the shape of things, the way of—
To write letters, all those un/sent—
To trace a pattern, immersed in—
To seek erasure, having been—
].
When reading …, I enter a state of not-knowing which frees the imagination: poems come on through, then, through a kind of portal, door to a gate, unlocked—so the poems: themselves, the thing. Arising from, corresponding to, they inhabit their own margins, are constructs, imagined, not literal, they gesture toward—
Everything about writing and reading produces within me, a resonance: to touch text…, to revel in construct, methodology …, and the rhetorical …; to spend time over the names of things, [flora and fauna];—one language leads to another and sometimes, when either reading … or listening …, my response emerges in that form in which I practice: embedded fragments and the juxtaposition of opposites, to name of few things in which I delight, fed by curiosity, impressed by the care and attention of [makers in this world]… . Something about the way things appear on the page, that is the key that unlocks—a kind of finding—
My poetics lean to language as material, and the quest is to marry song, chants, spells, and incantations, with syntactical word-play, embroidering the poems I make with numeric patterns, such as my obsession with both hexagons and anything to do with the number six, and the ten-beat line, whose movement sometimes leads to formal poetic structures such as the sonnet, the villanelle, the madrigal, the sestina and an adaptation of the ghazal, where, depending on each form, the stanzas are sometimes revamped to allow lyricism to exist within and alongside the language of science: cribbed, found, merged, less description, more sound, and always, the dance most of all.
©Renée Sarojini Saklikar
(an earlier version of this essay appears in Listening to the Bees, 2018).
”
Sample of Poet's Work
Three Poems from Bramah and The Beggar Boy
Overheard
Small wiry brown-skinned yet British; sly, too
quick, skilled with lock and key, long black hair
braids touching her leather packsack: tools plus
lasers, all the latest gadgets for openings
no lock that ever met her hands, too tough or sticky.
A thousand scrapes, she’d dodged them all.
One soldier from the Before-Time even called her
K-Low. No one ever knew why. Just laughed.
She collected nicknames, light year to portal:
them hard ones, April, or June: the worst.
In the nick of time, a turner of bad odds
her body on the line of any fire, her cheek scarred
smooth skin though, and the softest lips.
Tattoo on her arm: Ishmael Joe and laughed—
Their Second Adventure
Once inside a Portal, they would divine
streetside or mountains, rivers, oceans, maps
a fist full of soil, their nose to the wind
iterations of this blue-green planet
decades, centuries, era to epoch
in the Before-Time and after their days
in a café on Rue Mallarmé, that
black book, unlined, cream pages, a few marks
left open with a felt pen inside, no
sign of them, on the wall a painting
rescued from that fire, singed edges framed, hung
over that threshold, carved greetings in wood
golden locket opened from round that neck
that time they met, diving into the wreck.
Resistance Song
At the year’s midnight, we sighed, heads bent to—
Perimeter where oracles foretold
colony collapse, our aunties saving
mason bees, small finds in handmade glass jars.
Wildfires in November, ash mixed with ice
our skin dry and cracked, scalps covered in lice,
grey skies unending, snow drought extending
salal leaves withering, their spines snapped in two.
At Tower Juniper, Rentalsman stood
ready to accept payment for shelter.
We bartered our daughters, we sold our boys
WiFi on ration, our androids, no toys:
Toxic Alert on high, we ached for green
who would have thought of us, standing, unseen.
>>>>>>
♛♛♛
mind those drones
they’ll break your bones
hide and sweep,
duck and swerve
watch us, learn
these raindrops, burn.
(excerpted poem from Bramah and The Beggar Boy, an epic fantasy in verse, ©Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Nightwood Editions, 2021).
from Listening to the Bees
hibernacula
and hid there
for a long time
curled―
thinned
under bark―
rotten stumps
hollow curved
and nested
hollow wax
that nest architecture, brood, cells, the years
vertical, conical, newly emerged
colony where workers reared, hollow wax
colony where workers reared, hollow wax
from May to July, nectar in the field
that nest architecture, brood, cells, the years
that nest architecture, brood, cells, the years
if fewer than, no comb at all, those swarms
colony where workers reared, hollow wax
colony where workers reared, hollow wax
small cages, double-layered nylon bags
that nest architecture, brood, cells, the years
that nest architecture, brood, cells, the years
between the year [ ] and [ ], data pooled
colony, where workers reared, hollow wax
in the lower corners, October days
old queen in her nest that one season, gone—
that nest architecture, brood, cells, the years
colony, where workers reared, hollow wax
(© from Listening to the Bees, Renée Sarojini Saklikar, 2018, Nightwood Editions).
Everyday Heresies
I seen you at the Tim Hortons,
at the Canadian Auto Workers Hall,
and even heard you on the CBC:
you telephoned Rex Murphy.
I seen you in David Zieroth’s poetry class.
You marked up Saturday morning.
Douglas College, off Royal Avenue.
An airless room, one window sealed—forever?
And I seen you years ago. Yes, it was 1980.
College Place pub, New Westminster.
You wore a Band-Aid over your temple.
You’d popped a zit right up against the bathroom mirror.
At the pub you said, “I was hit with a field hockey stick.”
I seen you standing in the Vancity bank line-up.
You pull at your nylons. You pull on anything
you can get a hold of, time
and time again—
in Safeway, you dump three TV dinners into your cart.
First, you check the sodium levels.
And time levels off and I seen you—
Trout Lake Farmers Market.
You handle organic heirloom vegetables:
carrots, apples. Name all the names of the apples.
I seen you at Costco’s.
You heave 20 water bottles into your cart
you cart away the night so late. Later,
I seen you in an office at a desk—
your right hand rests on a palm-sized mound of plastic
index finger points, lifts, click, click,
the sound releases out of your 2008 XPC small-form computer
click, click on the Inner Net you write anonymous complaints
about other people. Misspelled words roll into time like a joint about to be smoked—
I seen you clear through to the summer of ’79, your hair in a high ponytail.
You drive out on Highway 99, South Surrey—
You drive a Ford pickup truck. You overtake a brown Chevrolet.
Gas tank leaks all over the place. You open your mouth. Your head hangs.
Out the window of your truck, you scream: where did you get your fucking licence,
you fucking Punjab? Your words, grit
thrown into the years and—
I seen you standing on a platform.
It is the first five years of the first decade.
This new century.
You are the star of your own political confession.
Your silver hair swept back, wife at your side.
You do not smile. You choke back tears.
Forgive me, you ask.
I seen you, female iteration, in a strata council meeting.
Downstairs in an apartment building.
You yell at your neighbours.
You refuse to pay for a new roof and say the word, roooff, like it should be said.
In the elevator, your key cuts
powder coated brushed steel brushes time and I seen you—
You walk your dogs on a lonely stretch of beach on the edge of an island,
somewhere in the Gulf you see a piece of flotsam—
No. It is not someone’s foot. It is plastic and you home in on it.
Your tongue behind your teeth. Tsk, tsk. Pick it up. Pick it up.
You lecture the people who bought the land.
They did not turn the land into a park.
You park time and its dimensions,
and I seen you again: you do not move for hours in the damp parts of a church hall.
You do not want to give up your seat, where you sit every month:
choir, board of stewards, Anglican, Lutheran, Roman Catholic, United Church:
so few now—grey, spent and stooped—
you refuse to acknowledge that really, there is no preordained seating arrangement
just because in September you sat down on the chair that now holds your person
does not mean that someone cannot sit there in that space close to the Very Reverend—
time shifts, again and again I seen you on Howe Street.
You wear a suit. You carry no umbrella.
In your ears, ear buds implanted. You work your electronic device. Busy, busy, thumbs. Your eyes look down to your hand. Your hands erase time and its dimensions.
You do not see me but I seen you:
You walk uptown, night of snow, hail, rain. Spring on the West Coast.
You search for a café where a man speaks about politics.
You like this man, even though some call him a socialist. You, too, have been called
and you want to find the place where the man speaks.
You walk eight blocks in a night of snow, hail, rain.
You are eighty-eight years old.
You anticipate finding the man. You peer into steam-stained windows.
You recognize no one. You walk back home.
You are eighty-eight years old.
You sit in your kitchen, walls painted buttercup yellow.
You celebrate your 65th wedding anniversary. Alone. Alone.
Your husband died decades ago. I seen you. I seen you.
(Geist 85, Summer 2012, used with permission. ©Renée Sarojini Saklikar).
From thecanada? project, a life-long poem chronicle that includes fiction and essays.
https://thecanadaproject.wordpress.com/