Spotlight series #111 : Helen Robertson
Curated by Canadian writer, editor and publisher rob mclennan, the “spotlight” series appears the first Monday of every month.
STATEMENT
I enjoy cleverness and craft but in my opinion they should always be in service to emotion. I have written through rage; through religious ecstasy and unknowing. For me poetry is a pressure valve — a mechanism to ease emotions more vast than our capacity to hold. Just as I say that if I’m not on a watch list my poetry isn’t political enough if a reader isn’t burned by my release — if an emotion is not effected in them — then I need to rework the piece. Need to cut with cleverness, set with craft, so all glittering facets of humanity may be seen.
While my work typically has had a darker, sometimes bitter, bent that has recently shifted. My last project was instead about writing through my love. While purging my (admittedly warranted (especially now)) unpleasant feelings via poetry helps, it was still giving primacy to negativity. Letting care, wonder, affection, and belonging flow through my body has been a nice change. Allowing emotions to be felt is absolutely necessary to letting them pass but it also assists in feeling their full breadth. Trying my damnedest to express the whole of my love lets me feel the entire shape of it.
I may not be able to conjure love in a reader (as in my opinion that is a *much* harder task than rage, horror, or sorrow) but I do hope to call forth, if nothing else, that sickly sweet feeling of seeing someone mooning over someone else — that reaction of “look at them, so disgustingly in love”.
TWO POEMS
Te Spirem
I didn’t know there was a way to love
That felt like breathing. Twin billows
In my soul expanding my reach to caress
The outer limits of myself. Where I feel
Your gentle hand guiding me
To my fullest being.
Orpheus and Eurydice
Once you asked me how it felt. Where we go. I knew what you meant — those of us so quick to fly; so eager to be had. It was always a simple thing to step away from myself, a well practiced motion, as for so long I was simply a slip of command in a sorry construct.
“A boat” I told you.
“I am a boat in the ocean.”
I explained how I used to dissociate — cast my mind as anchor; the rope tight with worry knowing it would one day break. No bottom to the depth I was dragged along. Both a weight on, and noose around, myself.
I explained how you were different — how this was not sinking but buoyancy; how I was held by a gossamer thread to the vessel of my body.
Once you asked me how it felt and I answered.
“Thank you, for being my ocean.”
Witch, bitch, and full-time disaster Helen Robertson is a transsexual, bisexual, genderqueer dyke moving through the lifelong process of accepting how lucky they’ve been; using poetry to excise her ire and sorrow — hopefully turning it into something worthwhile. They have been published or have work forthcoming in Poet Lore, This Magazine, Sinister Wisdom, The Fiddlehead, new words {press}, Ex-Puritan, and others. She was long listed for the 2019 Vallum award for poetry and her debut chapbook was published by The Blasted Tree. They are a member of the poetry collective VII.
