Ronna Bloom
Biography
Ronna Bloom is the author of six books of poetry. She is a registered psychotherapist (CRPO inactive). Ronna developed the first Poet in Residence programme at Mount Sinai Hospital/Sinai Health which ran from 2012-2019. Her Spontaneous Poetry Booths and RX for Poetry have appeared in hospital waiting rooms, bookstores, fundraisers and arts events in Canada, The UK and Italy.
Ronna's work has been broadcast on the CBC, recorded by the Canadian National Institute for the Blind, translated into Bangla and Chinese, and shortlisted for several Canadian literary awards. She has performed with Juno award-winning musician Jayme Stone. In a collaboration with PLANT Architects, her poem “The City” was painted 30 meters long on King Street in Toronto for the summer of 2018. In 2022, her chapbook, Who is your mercy contact? was published by Espresso-Chapbooks.
A Possible Trust: The Poetry of Ronna Bloom, selected with an introduction by Phil Hall will be published by Wilfred Laurier University Press in 2023.
Poetics Statement
Ronna Bloom, smiling, posed outside before green vines climbing down from up top the other side of the wooden gate, and a wooden door slightly ajar revealing greenery. Bloom is wearing a woven straw hat and red button-up shirt.
“I rarely have a specific Other in mind, an audience, a person, when writing poems. But writing from the feel, the phrase, the image, the word—and letting it go where it wants—that’s what I’m after. Going for the ride, crying, I want to dig deep. And I find a lot of things funny. Humour is real. Even in darkness. A friend used to say, “Your poems show us what insides look like.”
She was right for a long time. I wanted to take a felt-sense photo of my experience and say. “Here, have this.” I hoped readers might recognize their insides in my poems too. Some readers cringe at too much feeling—for me, for a long time, it was a release not to explain but point, to make a thing that expressed some version of me, and to connect. If there was recognition maybe there could be trust. To connect is a circular thing. When I write a poem that works, you and I are in relation.
I’ve been a meditator for 12 years now and my writing’s changing. I write less about what my insides look like realizing they’re mixed in with everything, and no separation. More and more, I want to include more and more—be wider, the ache plus the streetcar, birds in the trees, and the smell of French Fries. The poems I want are the ones that bust me out of the cage of self. They pop.
There is often a therapeutic component for me, later comes the communication — the being in the world with other people component. The work changes on its way from one to the other. The former is private. The latter is the public conversation. The poem needs to stand between us like a glass on a table anyone can pick up.”
Sample of Poet's Work
Grief Without Fantasy
What I lost
was not going to happen.
I had
what happened.
There was no more.
from Cloudy with a Fire in the Basement, (Pedlar Press 2012) and forthcoming in A Possible Trust: The Poetry of Ronna Bloom, Selected with an Introduction by Phil Hall, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2023
Appointment in Samarra
30 people in chemo today multiplied by
x hospitals in y countries and z universes.
Back here, H smiles through 4 syringes of chemicals, 2 bags of saline,
and a flush of life-giving killer liquid.
White-haired sisters in their 70's share clippings of their modeling days
with shirtless men in big cars, take selfies holding up their matching drips.
A woman in the corner looks exactly like what is happening to her.
Pale and bald like coal after a fire.
Slap me good and hard with mortality while I'm strong.
My body wants to run as though it's seen a ghost.
from The More (Pedlar Press, 2017) and forthcoming in A Possible Trust: The Poetry of Ronna Bloom, Selected with an Introduction by Phil Hall, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2023
Bukowski
One night my guy says I'm not mean enough
or funny enough to be a good poet. He's just read
Bukowski out loud. Bukowski can fight and confide
so why bother? I agree, but say nothing
which makes me no poet at all now, but a chronicler
who wants to sleep and is awoken by the wish
to be mean and funnier. To be somebody. Like Bukowski.
But when I look, there's a lot of flotsam jetsam
pains and wishes. My own shenanigans. But nobody here.
Nobody to be. The relief of that is like being let out of a jail
made of my own emojis and desperation.
Or taking my bra off at night.
"The difference between a bad poet and a good one is luck,"
Bukowski wrote. And having your finger in a light socket.
Bukowski knew he was nobody. That's what makes him so great.
Come to think of it, Emily Dickinson knew first and said so.
Everybody knows they're nobody.
Why is this such a problem for us?
Published in Literary Review of Canada, April 2022, and forthcoming in A Possible Trust: The Poetry of Ronna Bloom, Selected with an Introduction by Phil Hall, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2023
For excerpts and book order details:
https://ronnabloom.com/books-index