Susan McCaslin is the author of seventeen volumes of poetry and ten chapbooks. She completed her Ph.D. at the University of British Columbia in 1984 and taught at Douglas College in B.C. in the English and Creative Writing Departments from 1984-2007. Her most recent volumes of poetry are Consider (Aeolus House, 2023) and Sentient Stones (Raven Chapbooks, 2023). She resides in Fort Langley, British Columbia, where she initiated the Han Shan Poetry Project as part of a successful campaign to protect a rainforest near the Fraser River.
Jessica Walters: When did you start writing poetry and what drew you to it?
Susan McCaslin: I was fortunate as a child to have had a father who loved to read me nursery rhymes, stories by Beatrix Potter, and other children’s books. Though he was an aeronautical engineer and not an avid reader himself, he would run his finger under the words as he read. This practice enabled me to connect the words with the images on the page. During that time my great aunt Lois, a retired elementary school teacher, moved to a smaller house after her husband died and asked my parents if she could store her book collection in our basement. The books included two children’s anthologies that began with nursery rhymes, Mother Goose, folk tales, fairy tales, and myths, then progressed in subsequent volumes to excerpts from famous poets like William Blake and Robert Louis Stevenson. In the more advanced volumes of the series were excerpts from the Homeric epics. One set of these multi-volume anthologies was titled Journeys Through Bookland and the other My Book House.
My parents stored these treasures in an old-fashioned wardrobe with an oval mirror on the door panels quite similar to the one in C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. I would often sneak downstairs at night, carry a book to my bedroom and read it by flashlight under the covers. Soon I started scribbling my own poems, some of which were responses to school assignments.
My mother saved one about ghosts on Halloween that I wrote in grade three. However, it was in grade seven that my English teacher, Mr. Lemieux, asked everyone to write a poem, so I wrote about my cat Mittens. It was rhymed and metered but witty and well-written. At first Mr. Lemieux challenged me by asking if I had copied it from a book, but when I assured him it was my own work, he believed me and invited me to be literary editor of the student newspaper. I accepted and oversaw a column in which I would include my own poems as well as those of my fellow students. This event was a turning point for me because from then on, I felt I was on the poetry path.
JW: What themes or ideas do you explore in your poems?
SM: It’s difficult to generalize about my lifelong themes, though many of my volumes focus on spirituality. In university as an undergraduate, I majored in English Literature but also took courses in Philosophy and Comparative Literature. Serendipitously, my favorite professors turned out to also be poets with whom I shared my poems and received generous feedback.
Robin Blaser, my MA thesis advisor at Simon Fraser University, opened me to William Blake’s lyric poems, engravings, and long poems as well as Emmanuel Swedenborg’s works on the afterlife. He also exposed me to Dante’s Divine Comedy and the European mystics, including the Spanish mystic Teresa of Avila. Later my volume of poetry The Altering Eye (Borealis Press, 2002) included subsections titled “Letters to William Blake” and “The Teresa Poems.” My book that won the Alberta Book Publishing Award in 2012, Demeter Goes Skydiving, was based on the Demeter-Persephone myth and the Eleusinian mysteries of ancient Greece. Now at the age of seventy-six, I feel very blessed to have interacted with poetry mentors who helped me develop many of the themes that lay deep inside me as a child.
JW: Have these themes or ideas changed over the course of your writing career?
SM: My central themes remain, but they have evolved over the decades because new experiences have transformed them within a more expansive mode of being. I see them in the light of experiences that led to changes in both my outer self and inner psyche. Recently I have expanded and deepened earlier themes by writing on embracing my aging body. I have also noticed that themes tied to social activism and environmental activism are evident in my poems. At this time in my life, I’m engrossed by a holistic, global spirituality that honors the Buddha, Rumi, and other wisdom teachers. These mystical teachers and poets have broadened and transformed my themes. Due to Thomas Merton, I realize that contemplation and action belong together in a union of apparent opposites. This is to say that without being didactic, poetry can and must address the pressing problems of the world at this time. I have written about global warming as manifested in the forest fires of 2017 in BC, the war in Ukraine, deforestation in BC, damage to other species, and our collective need to develop love and compassion rather than self-centeredness.
JW: Some of your poems attend to what is small, almost invisible. Your poems “Consider the Bleeding Hearts” and “Consider the Millipede” are just a few examples (though I know there are many, many more I could list). What does paying close attention do for the poet and non-poet alike? Why does it matter?
SM: This is an excellent question that reminds me of the philosopher Simone Weil’s comments: “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity” and “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer.”
My husband Mark is an environmentalist who from childhood immersed himself in the wildness and beauty of the natural world. He would often go camping in the forest alone and was transported by the beauty of trees, plants, birds, bears and deer. Eventually, he found his life’s vocation was to be an environmental lawyer and work to protect the natural world. What Mark taught me was to be still, receptive, and attentive so I could learn from the book of nature. Now when walking our dog Rosie, we often stop to marvel at the world of a millipede, a Pacific Red Cedar, a hummingbird, a hydrangea, giving the non-human plants and creatures our full attention.
The title section of Consider is based on Jesus’s sayings, “Consider the ravens” and “Consider the lilies of the field.” When walking, I often stop and give my full attention to the local flora and fauna along the Fraser River near Fort Langley. Often, just by remaining still and quietly gazing up at a tree, I lose myself in the beauty and uniqueness of the tree as depicted in my poem “Consider the Western Red Cedar.” I should also admit that I’m a tree hugger.
Without trying for a poem, sometimes a musical phrase, line, or image will flow into the silence, becoming the seedbed of a new poem. Afterwards, I craft it, working through revisions, hopefully without losing the essence of the original experience.
JW: Your poems speak to an ability to hold ideas in tension. To some, you hold what might seem like contrasting ideas but you’re able to articulate these ideas with nuance, generosity, and complexity without falling into either-or thinking. Does the language of poetry enable you to hold these tensions? If so, how?
SM: Thomas Merton experienced what he called “le point vierge”— the deep center within all humans, creatures, and things that participate directly in Spirit, an omnipresent, loving, merciful, universal Presence. For Jesus, or Yeshua as I call him in Consider, this divine center is a non-dual state of consciousness beyond the split between time and eternity that Jesus called “the kingdom of heaven.” For Jesus and other global wisdom teachers, what we call the transcendent is not a severance of heaven and earth but the holistic, universal consciousness in which they are one. Consider includes poems on the non-canonical gospel of Thomas, discovered in a cave in upper Egypt in 1945, that puts forth the experience of the kingdom as being both beyond and within the earth. In the canonical gospels Jesus’s parables are also full of mind-boggling paradoxes, poetic symbols, and metaphors. One of the poems in the third section, “Cracking the Jesus Koans,” examines Jesus’s parable of the landowner who pays the workers who arrive early in the day the same as those who arrive at day’s end. Working on a mind-boggling paradox can lead to a breakthrough. Like the koans used by Zen masters, such conundrums help us to “wake up.”
JW: Many of your poems are ekphrastic, drawing on or inspired by the artwork of others (here I’m thinking of Betty Spackman’s “A Creature Chronicle” and Robert Blaser’s libretto for The Last Supper). Why is this important to you?
SM: Children are often encouraged to draw, scribble images and symbols using crayons, chalk, watercolors etc., which was certainly the case for me. I also used to climb into an apple tree in our backyard and sing my heart out, fantasizing that I might become an opera singer. In high school I enjoyed art classes and wanted to be a visual artist as well as a poet, but eventually settled on poetry as my central focus. To this day I love all kinds of visual art from realism to abstraction and have written a volume of poetry on Paul Cézanne titled Painter, Poet, Mountain: After Cézanne (Quattro Books, 2016) which contains many ekphrastic poems.
Poets use language to create visual images by working with similes, metaphors, and symbols. They also convey musicality through assonance, consonance, alliteration, onomatopoeia, end rhyme and distanced rhyme to create a “palate” of sounds.
What fascinates me are the similarities and differences among art forms that lead to dialogue and variety. Poems work with the relation of sounds and silences by using caesuras, line breaks, and spaces between stanzas, while visual artists work with colors, brush strokes, shapes in relation to each other. Some like Cézanne, deliberately left blank spaces on the canvas. Betty Spackman’s rich collages juxtapose diverse figures and forms. The one that graces the cover of my volume Heart Work (Ekstasis Editions, 2020) features an image of St. Francis blessing Brother Wolf who has a wounded dog at his side. In the sky is a series of orbs, one of which is a mandala by the 12th-century mystic Hildegard of Bingen. Higher up a lurking satellite hovers, and below is a sign saying, “Caution Hazardous Waste.” By combining past and present, Spackman critiques our current culture for its destructive impact on planet earth though our harmful technologies. As for the fourth section of Consider, “A Suite on Robin Blaser’s Libretto for The Last Supper,” Blaser’s words bring resonant poetic language to the opera, dramatic enactments of conversations, arguments, and various characters’ points of view. The opera is set at the crest of the year 2000 where eleven disciples of Jesus arrive to reassemble the table in order to reenact the Last Supper while surveying the relation between past, present, and future. When Judas arrives late, all the disciples revile and shame him. Yet when Jesus arrives, he welcomes Judas, offering love and forgiveness. The words of the poet and the music of the composer Harrison Birtwistle combine to create a powerful union of music, drama, and poetry.
JW: I love the section “Cosmic Egg” in Consider (which is in one of your recent books of poetry). In this section you take well-known images of Christ and play with them, teasing out new images or ideas (titles include “The Camel in the Room,” “Birds of Clay,” and “If Yeshua Had a Bumble Profile”). In this section, I was met with images of Christ that were as playful and they were surprising. It was a delight! Why is this approach important to you?
SM: I’m so glad you enjoyed “Cosmic Egg,” and especially the jokes about Jesus, as I worried that some readers might take them as sacrilegious or disrespectful. However, I’m sure the human Jesus had a great sense of humor. “Cosmic Egg” opens with the honoring of my Presbyterian background as a child because I had positive experiences of Jesus as kind and loving. Yet even when I was a child, the notion that everyone needs to convert to Christianity to be saved never took root. As an adult I turned away from rigid beliefs, doctrines, creeds, and dogmas and began to experience God as universal Spirit, the ultimate mystery evolving endlessly, present deep within the world and within each of us. For me, what we call God is both named and nameless. In “The Camel in the Room,” I speculated about whether Jesus and Mary Magdalene were lovers, married, or had a child, notions that have arisen in 20th-century novels, movies, and in the writings of some Jesus historians where “God” is androgynous. “Birds of Clay,” was based on a visionary dream that was inspired by a passage in the Quran honoring Jesus’s childhood. Many people aren’t aware that Jesus is honored as a prophet within Islam. When I wrote “If Jesus Had a Bumble Profile,” my daughter was exploring dating websites. I clearly enjoyed writing these playful poems because I realized that the more serious poems based on the works of the Jesus historians needed to be balanced by humor. That way the volume could speak to head, belly, and heart. After all, like children we all need to laugh and play.
JW: What are you currently working on?
SM: I’m currently working on an unpublished manuscript of poems titled FieldPlay. It consists of four interconnected sections: “Kith & Kin Fields,” about family of origin and friends; “Gaia Fields,” about Planet Earth and our need to interconnect with nature; “War Fields,” about the war in Ukraine; and “Cosmic Fields,” about the playfields of the cosmos as related to Planet Earth.
JW: Where can readers find your books of poetry?
SM: My books of poetry can be found on my website: www.susanmccaslin.ca. They can be ordered through me directly by emailing Golden Eagle Books: GoldenEagleBooks@shaw.ca