04/15 2010

Lots Left To Say and Do For Dionne Brand

Contributed by Christopher Jones

Poet, novelist, professor Dionne Brand has poured herself into her duties as Toronto’s third Poet Laureate the way she pours herself into her own writing, which is to say, thoroughly.

On April 21, Brand will be front and centre at the Art Gallery of Ontario where she has challenged herself and four other poets (George Elliott Clarke, Lynn Crosbie, Daniel David Moses and Souvankham Thammavongsa) to write about an artwork in the Gallery’s collection. Poets Spell Art promises to be a lively evening as attendees make their way from work to work to hear the poems recited. The event is a fine example of Brand’s determination to use her time as city Poet Laureate to encourage a cross pollenization of poetry with art, music, theatre, you name it.

Just six months into her gig as Poet Laureate and Brand is already hard at work on her legacy project, an endeavour called Poetry is Public is Poetry, in which verses of poems will be permanently embedded in public spaces, initially at least, in approaches to Toronto Public Libraries.

Dionne Brand with Mayor David Miller “I want to work in a multi-disciplinary way,” says the writer. “The legacy project merges poetry with public art; I also want to work with musicians and painters, I want to work in different ways, to do cross-disciplinary work.”

Brand is thoughtful and warm, exuding the quiet confidence of someone with nothing left to prove. She has won a Governor General’s Award for Poetry for Land to Light On and the Trillium Award for Literature in 1997. Her book-length poem thirsty won the Pat Lowther Award for Poetry and was nominated for the Trillium Prize for Literature, the Toronto Book Awards and the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2003. In 2006, her novel, What We All Long For, won the Toronto Book Award.

The public recognition and her role as a tenured professor of English at the University of Guelph may have given Brand artistic and financial security, but she has plenty left to say; her latest work, a book-length poem called Ossuaries has just been published by McClelland & Stewart and she’ll be reading from and promoting the tome throughout the summer and fall.

Ossuaries book jacket “At this point I can’t even tell you what the book is about,” laughs Brand. “It’s a poem so it’s about a lot of things. The part of it that I can articulate without actually reading it to you is about the human zoos of the 19th century where the world got to know so much about certain people through this particular window onto humanity. It’s about how various groups in a society get appraised and it also talks about the role of photography in that appraisal. The poem wanders into avenues of contemplating those notions.”