INTERIOR WITH LANDSCAPE: SANDRA RIDLEY IN CONVERSATION
Several years after hearing first murmurs, then exclamations, about Sandra Ridley's evocative poems, I discovered them for myself. We met one summer afternoon in Tamworth, in the garden of Robert and Lorie Wright's bookshop. Sandra had stopped to take in a poetry reading on her way to a month-long retreat in the woods.
SUSAN GILLIS: What brought you to poetry – or, if you prefer,
what brought poetry to you -- in the first place?
SANDRA RIDLEY: Poetry didn’t find me until I was in my twenties. Until
then, I didn’t know what poetry could be, and even now, I can’t define it.
Aside from “In Flanders Fields” and King
Lear, I can’t remember reading any other poems in high school. Does that
mean the curricula contained material that didn’t resonate with me or does that
mean a faulty memory? I don’t know. The first poems I’m conscious of I came
across while doing graduate work in Environmental Studies at York University.
My thesis was on the sacredness of place. Part of my questioning at the time
was how can we begin to save our spaces without first encountering the “sacred”
within them—and, how can we express that in a meaningful way, outside the
language of resource-based economics? That common kind of clear-cut language
strips nature of its intrinsic value.
It was thrilling to read the work of nature poets like Annie
Dillard, Diane Ackerman, Don McKay, Gary Snyder, Mary Oliver, Ralph Waldo
Emerson, and Walt Whitman. Thoreau, too, seemed a poet to me. I partnered their
work with the philosophies of walking. The walking part was important for me to
consider as well. How else can we understand and speak of place, urban or more
‘natural’, without walking within it? Solvitur
ambulando.
I realize almost all of the poets I mentioned are American, which
in hindsight, is strange and unfortunate. I began to look at Canadian
contemporary poetry after completing the MES program, and the world opened up
for me.
SG: Your poems and poem-chains, if I can call them
that, unfold the way a walk unfolds, over terrain that’s varied yet consistent,
of a place. We’re somewhere recognizable, yet also surprising and new. Where
does a poem start for you, and how does it develop? Are you conscious of language calling to you the way a
certain place might, or does it begin more often with a subject, an idea?
SR: Language is informed by landscape. I’d even say that
language is a landscape—or the poem
is. For me, a poem needs to contain a particular place and time. It needs to
somehow embody it on the page. This becomes its atmosphere, its emotive space,
which then creates the trajectory for the narrative of the work. This is a
roundabout way of answering you question. I suppose I’m saying that, being
tethered to each other, both language and place frame my work. I don’t feel them to be separate at all.
Tangible subjects and ideas do become embedded in the
landscape of a poem, but they’re secondary for me. Those are the surprising for
me. In thinking about a 1950s farm on the prairie, or a remote tuberculosis
sanatorium, or a room in a Victorian house, my starting point was to imagine
the mood of those spaces before considering who might be there and what might
be happening. Narrative can build with small, fragmentary moments, which gather
and open large, but it’s the landscape’s language that is the frame.
SG: What is inspiring you these days?
SR: The quiet of snow? To be honest, it’s been a rough
couple of years with death and illness. And our planet is quickly turning into
a dystopia. Inspired? I’m not feeling it these days but I’m looking for it,
wanting to acknowledge it in its rare moments and to allow it in. I’ve been in
a deep fallow period. No doubt some inspiration is here, but it’s impossible to
recognize. I’ve been reading and thinking—walking and daydreaming. I may not be
actively writing, but a thematic frame for a new serial work is slowly coming
together. The collecting phase can be a long one.
Consider the interior landscape, the atmosphere, of a
waxworks museum. Inside is a locked cabinet of curios. If you could open it,
you’d find seemingly disparate ideas and objects: a handbook of ciphers; vintage
images of Nikola Tesla’s Magnifying Transmitter for electrical power, fata
morganas and St. Elmo’s fire; the Cottingley Fairies; diagrams of automaton
clocks and windup toys; photos of Victorian séances and diaries of the scientist
sceptics within the Society of Psychical Research; the spiritualist essays of
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; and the head of Edward Mordrake, a 19th
century nobleman born with two faces, his own and that of a woman who would
whisper hauntings to him at night, bringing on his madness. The
trick for me is to figure out how or why they were all placed in the cabinet
together. That’s the key to the lock. If I can find the key, and with the
atmosphere of the waxworks museum already set, the poems will start to write
themselves.
Sandra
Ridley is the author of
three books of poetry: Fallout (Hagios Press), Post-Apothecary
(Pedlar Press), and most recently, The Counting House (BookThug). She has taught poetry at Carleton University and has
mentored poets through Ottawa Salus and Artswells’ “Footprints to Recovery”
program for people living with mental illness. Sandra has also facilitated
poetry workshops for the City of Ottawa, Ottawa Public Library, and the Tree
Reading series. Read an excerpt of her long poem Vigil/Vestige here.