Sculpting moments with words
For Cassidy McFadzean, evoking feelings in poems is part of the thrill
In Cassidy McFadzean’s new collection “Crying Dress,” the Saskatchewan Book Award-winning poet sought to catalogue the disparate threads converging in her life over the past five years. It’s been a period of profound change and tumult: McFadzean had to contend with the unexpected death of her mother, the decision to become sober and a move to Brooklyn at the height of the pandemic to enrol in a master of fine arts program.
The poems deal with the feelings of grief, waning resolve and romantic solace accompanying these life changes, and build on the confessional mode of writing she established in previous books “Drolleries” and “Hacker Packer.”
“I love a good ‘project book,’ ” said McFadzean, who is back living in Toronto, alluding to the pressure that poetry collections must be conceptually yoked to grandiose subjects to lend them import. “There’s so many brilliant poets that explore one idea or theme from many diverse angles, but that’s never been something that I’ve been able to do successfully.
“Maybe it just speaks to my own comfort zone as a poet,” she continued, “but I tend to write poems discreetly, without necessarily thinking of previous poems that I’ve written.”
This predilection for “writing in the moment” allowed McFadzean to look back at the book with a new-found sense of discovery in the month preceding its release; it reflected a period of maturation that only distance could render with clarity.
It’s now evident to McFadzean that she was engaging “esthetically with fragmentation” and embracing the polyphony of influences in her life. Whether in the form of overheard conversations at New York museums or quoted musings from her architect boyfriend Kourosh, the use of clashing perspectives makes “Crying Dress” a testament to the volley of sensory data constantly competing for our attention.
“Because I’m sort of skeptical of my own observations, it helps to have a counter like that,” McFadzean said. “I started ‘collaging’ in that way. I think it takes the pressure off of having to knead a poem into making sense. I’m really excited by not needing to trace the meaning of the poem all the time.”
McFadzean believes the thrill and joy of her discipline lies in sculpting a perfect poetic moment, even if it only conveys “a feeling or a texture.” Such moments take the form of similes involving flowers, references to architectural truisms and the subtleties of learning a new language like Farsi to bond with her partner.
These finer qualities of the form have always fascinated McFadzean, who elaborated about what first drew her into the complex world of meter, rhyme and cadence.
“I was interested in old Anglo-Saxon charms and riddles, these playful miniature metaphors where there’s tenor and a vehicle, and you try to puzzle out what the poet is attempting to conceal or reveal.
“I grew up with a stutter,” she added, “which still sometimes enters into my voice. I’m always subverting or undercutting the speaker or myself in these poems, as if I’m never too confident in what I’m saying. That’s where the irony comes from, too.”
Some poems examine the brittle peace to which mourners must surrender when they forsake seclusion and return to the world awaiting them. In “Birthday Sonnet,” McFadzean memorializes the realization that a loved one will never return.
Other poems, like “Seeding Sunsets,” allude to the way that ennui can metamorphose into a clinical form of nihilism. Darker emotions of alienation are probed further in a poem called “Field of Mars,” whose narrator “crawled out of the bramble/berserker waking from a nightmare/following my bumbling shadow/rabid bozo plucking burrs from my hair.”
“In these expressions of hopelessness, I like these voices or subversions entering into the poem,” McFadzean said. “I am challenging the coherence of it, and I even started wondering how I could replicate my stammer or disfluency. I wrote poems so that puns will repeat to such a degree where I couldn’t even actually read them aloud.”
Poetry for McFadzean even possesses a political, reclamatory quality that can explore subject matter defying articulation. She said she’s been struck by the conflict in Gaza, in particular.
“It’s really been poetry that has been able to communicate that horror and atrocity while speaking broadly to people. Palestinian poets like Fady Joudah or Mosab Abu Toha have reached such a wide audience now.”
Contemplating what consolation, if any, can be found in the wake of unspeakable acts of war, McFadzean looks to the agitational potential of the written word.
“Maybe it is from the fringes of literature that we are able to speak truth to power.”