‘Lucky are those who are poets’

By Dalhousie Gazette Staff

Anne Sexton writes, “with used furniture poets make trees.” This is true of three women who read at the DUASC reading series in the University archives on Wednesday Nov. 18. Carolyn Smart, Carol Langille and Sue Goyette are all published by Brick Books, the Canadian all-poetry publisher.
As well as a poet, Carolyn Smart is a professor of Creative Writing and Canadian Literature at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. After years of confessional writing, Smart is now writing narrative poetry. Her fifth collection, Hooked, narrates from the point of view of seven infamous women, “each of them was hooked on, and her life contorted by, an addiction or obsession.”
In the poem Written on The Flesh, Smart writes from the point of view of the British murderer of children, Myra Hindley. During her childhood in England, Smart’s father would read headlines from the London Times about the murderer. Smart also drew on her own feelings of anger to create the murderer’s voice. Written On The Flesh addresses the classism that took place in England during the time of the murders. Biting and poignant social criticism comes through Hindley’s voice re-created in Smart’s poem.
Carol Langille and Sue Goyette are two poets and professors of Dalhousie’s Creative Writing Department. All women spoke on the importance of their own lives coursing through the veins of their work, or becoming it. For Goyette, “there is a difference between autobiography, and the truth. I tell small lies in my work to tell a bigger truth. What’s not written is equally important.” Smart now combines her own emotions with her artistic temperament in order to produce biting narrative poetry. On the cathartic opportunity to document life, Langille says, “lucky are those who are poets.”

You can find Carolyn Smart’s Hooked at local booksellers. More information on how to acquire the books of Langille, Smart, and Goyette is available through Brick Books. www.brickbooks.ca.