The first thing that welcomed me as I stepped into Drew’s home was the sweet earthy scent of rose and patchouli. I learned Drew is a perfumer as well as a writer. While ushering me into the kitchen he asked if I was in a hurry as he was expecting a call he could not miss. He made me coffee and I unpacked my things as he took the call. Alone in his living room my eyes wandered, surrounded by books, art, and instruments I gave thought to how our belongings come to define us. A sunroom filled with plants, sculptures, and a weight set. A vintage stereo that played modern music. In that moment I became aware of the intimacy in inviting someone into your home and was grateful to be welcomed there.
JJ: Do you come from a literary background?
DL: I’ve always been an artist. When I was a little kid, I would make unusual things as gifts for my mom. I knew I wanted to be a writer when I was in grade two. I took a typewriter from school that was stored in the back of a teacher’s classroom. This would’ve been in the early nineties. And I took it home and I was like, I’m going to be a writer. I told my brother: I’m going to write a novel and you’re going to be my editor. I think I might have written around ten pages or so, and then failed. There were a lot of attempts like that throughout the years, me trying write a novel getting ten pages and then stopping. Maybe I’m still kind of there in a way; so that was an early thing, and it was very sombre. People would say, don’t ruin your life and I can see as an adult the kind of truth in people’s fear about that. Don’t become an artist, don’t ruin your life. But I think some people can’t live any other way unfortunately.
JJ: What clues appeared to allude that you were an artist at such a young age?
DL: I was very interested in beauty and interested in experiencing it. Like in Anne of Green Gables, which I recently finished reading again, how Anne is always saying things like: don’t you see the way that cherry tree is so beautiful? Wouldn’t you love to climb up that cherry tree and spend the night there? Then the adults in her life are like oh, I never thought about that. And suddenly they really see the tree Anne pointed out to them. From an early age, I kind of felt a little bit like that. I felt I was seeing things that other people didn’t see, and I would try to show it to them. Sometimes they would like that, they would think it was curious. But mostly they hated me for it. I had teachers who had a vicious hate for me. I think that’s also a normal part of being an artist too. You can’t please everyone. Your very existence disrupts things.
JJ: Did you read a lot as a child?
DL: I think I did, but not as much as I would have liked to. I still feel even now in my thirties, that I’m making up for things I should have read when I was a kid. I try to systematically go through things that I want to read and check them off a list. There’s no end to that though. A big event for me happened as a child when we lived in Northern New Brunswick and the area was just a long beach road and a highway, not much there. A travelling salesman came to our house, which was bizarre. Did traveling salesmen still exist then? Apparently so. My mom bought two encyclopedia sets from him, a world encyclopedia and a child craft encyclopedia set. The Child craft encyclopedia was wonderful. It had a volume on science, a volume on fairy tales, a volume on literature, and world places. When I think of all the best memories of my childhood, they involve looking at those books, and reading the poems in the poetry volume. I read Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson and all these nursery rhymes. I remember reading Emily Dickinson and being really disappointed by the slant rhymes that I only understood much later. That had a big impact on my imagination. The fairy tales in those books were dark stuff, like the Brothers Grim and The Little Mermaid. In the original version of The Little Mermaid that I read as a kid she gives up her voice to get legs and every time she walks it’s like being stabbed by a thousand knives. And it just so happened that Prince Eric loved to have women dance for him. So, Ariel ends up having to dance for the prince to win his heart because she doesn’t have a voice anymore. She is being stabbed and stabbed, using her body to win a man who fell in love with her spirit, and then ultimately at the end of the story, she gets turned into sea foam and dies. Moral of the story don’t ever give up your voice. Crazy stuff! I think reading these stories as a child had a profound impact on my imagination.
JJ: Tell me about your first year as a Poet Laureate.
DL: It’s been a great opportunity for me. I’ve had more publications and I’ve been able to do public readings. I was able to read my Fire poem at the Frye Festival, which is for me still one of the highlights of my life. Even though other people may say, oh just reading one long poem in public is the highlight of your life. That’s kind of tragic. But it was a poem that I had been thinking about for years. How am I going write this? I want to write this. And with the motivation of performing that night, I was able to complete it. I knew I wanted to do something big, and daring, and take a risk. I felt like that really paid off. It was a big risk, you know. I say in that poem, level this province in flames! On some level, it was a little act of terrorism. I think that the audience that night, this is going to sound arrogant, but so be it. I think the audience that night had never heard a poem like that before. They never went to a literary event anywhere and heard someone reading work like that. And that’s what I wanted. Having that opportunity was great. Also being able to put my city anthology together, knowing that there’s emerging writers in it, knowing that there’s Governor General’s award winners in it, knowing that I have the backing of the city to get it completed has been an opportunity that I’m so grateful for. On the other hand, a lot of the time also has just been me going to my job every day and working and being like, I’m the poet laureate. I should be doing things, but I’m just working every day with so little time to create. Such is life as an artist though, it’s a vocation that makes your life considerably more difficult. But overall, it’s been a tremendous opportunity.
JJ: How do current events affect you and your work?
DL: They don’t! I think every good artist does things their own way, and I believe in the aesthetic statement over the social and moral one. I’ve always struggled with mental health and the aftermath of a difficult childhood, so that makes me focus on myself a lot. I don’t mean that in a narcissistic way, but just the task of going to work and maintaining stability in my life, while creating, is so difficult that I end up focusing on the details of my everyday life more than the world at large. But the world is always reflected in the daily life of the individual. More than the news I prefer to read some glamorous gossip, or a wild theorist like Marshal McLuhan who can put what seems to be chaos into perspective.
JJ: What emotional state inspires you most to write?
DL: I’m motivated by anger more than I should be, and revenge more than I should be. There’s an essay by Lorrie Moore, where she writes about how revenge motivated her whole writing career. That was nice to read. She’s a great writer. It was reassuring to see that I’m not the only one. Other than that, I’m obsessed with transformations, that’s not really an emotion though but the desire to transform one thing into something else has a big influence on virtually everything I do.
JJ: Do you have a routine for how you write?
DL: Usually, I’ll get an initial idea, word, or image that comes to me. I don’t ask for the word or image or seek it. It just comes. I have noticed, and I think many artists feel this way, if I ignore the image, word, or phrase that comes to me, it becomes quieter until eventually it goes away and I’m not a poet anymore. So, I try my best to honour that voice and write it down, no matter where I am, no matter what I’m doing. I keep a notebook, write those images down because they’ll be gone later from my mind, and I won’t get them back. Then from there, I let the image roll through my mind throughout my day. That can sometimes go on for weeks or months, or in the case of something like my fire poem, maybe a few years. Then eventually I’ll reach a point where I have so much frustration and anger about not writing the poem and about having no time to write it, that I can’t take it anymore and I write the whole thing in one moment and then it’s on the page. Then after it’s on the page, I’ll start the process of editing and rewriting it. Usually, I’ll do that about ten times and then end up with something that is okay. Even though poems are words on a page, it is an oral art form, it has to do with the voice coming out of the speaker. It originates in a shamanistic ritual that is extremely ancient. In the moment of hearing the poem emerge from the speaker, there is an act of transformation that happens in the listener where an experience is presented, that then becomes connected to a symbol that activate some kind of pre-conscious part of the human mind. And then it creates an emotional transformation in the poem and ideally in the listener too, where the subject emerges at the other side in a new way. In the very act of hearing the poem, you have been transformed. You are changed by it. To me the best type of literature happens when the text becomes a living word. It’s like what happens in music, there is no barrier between the musician and the audience receiving the emotional state. Some of the poets I love the most achieve that. Henri Cole, who’s one of my favourite poets achieves it, Jay McPherson achieves it, Allan Cooper, who’s one of Canada’s great poets, achieves it. The Blue Clerk by Dionne Brand would be another great example. The opposite of that is the type of smoke and mirrors poet who uses a lot of complicated difficult words on the page to intellectually intimidate you. Sometimes that style can be great, Hart Crane is very cryptic and difficult, using these long complex sentences joined by unusual words. But it has a purpose, when you read his poems, they create this ecstatic feeling in your mouth. It’s liturgical, you are praising God or something holy as you read these complex combinations of words. That’s genius though. It’s not just putting lots of difficult words together and creating a clunky, heavy poem that’s weighed down. I try not to do that. Many gatekeepers don’t like my work because of its simplicity, its clear use of symbols and emotions. They think what I’ve written must be a mistake, and don’t seem to realize my work is a reaction against them.
This interview first appeared in issue 4 of Tourniquet in March 2024.
To cite this article:
Drew Lavigne
Drew Lavigne is the anglophone Poet Laureate of Moncton, New Brunswick. A member of the editorial board at The Fiddlehead and host of the Attic Owl reading series. Recent work has appeared in Valium, Visual Arts News, Tourniquet Magazine, and with Éditions Rhizome. He translated the collection Poems Twofold with Georgette LeBlanc and is the author of Evening Dress with Anstruther Press.
John Jerome
John Jerome is a multidisciplinary artist based in Moncton, New Brunswick. Passionate about the pursuit of the creative process and self expression through the arts he has worked in music, film, theater and publishing. He has returned to his roots as a songwriter and is currently working on an album that will be released in 2025 under the name Porcelain.
