I invited Karen Solie to read at our Celebration of On Occasion: Poems for the People last Friday. I wanted to have her alongside emerging writers (Misha Solomon, Chanel Sutherland, Sabyah Seyam, Ethel Meilleur, Lena Palacios, TLiem, myself, and my colleague Stephanie Bolster), but she was unable to make that event. Instead we are hosting her this Tuesday, March 31st in the Floating Box in the John Molson Building at Concordia University’s downtown campus.
This isn’t the first time we have hosted Solie. In November of 2021 we hosted her in conversation with the poet AE Stallings (also in On Occasion!), who zoomed in from Athens. You can listen to that conversation here.
But even before that Karen Solie was part of a launch for one iteration of Lemon Hound 3.0 edited by students at Concordia and read at our launch on March 15, 2018 along with Canisia Lubrin, Paige Cooper, Oana Avasilichioaei, and Laura Broadbent. You can read a poem from that issue here on the newly renovated Lemon Hound site attached to this one. In fact, you can read the whole issue.
I am very happy to say I was able to include two poems from Solie in On Occasion. Both “Berkeley Hills, 2022” (83) and “Foxes” (124) are from Wellwater, her latest, and perhaps most celebrated book of poetry–winner of the TS Eliot Prize, the Governor General’s Award, The Forward Prize and a Best Book of 2025 on many international lists. The occasion for both of these poems is weather related, in many ways not a new relationship–seasonal poems are everywhere. What is unusual is the degree to which poems about the weather, the seasons, the natural world, are so concerned with climate related occasions of disaster.
I’ve been thinking about Solie’s work for a while now. Here she comes up in a post on the lyric from Lemon Hound, 2008:
lemon hound
‘One of the things lyric poetry does to my mind, aside from a providing a kind of speaking subject or subjectivity (an entity can work, no), is to provide an anchor in the poem–an emotional and intellectual anchor. That ‘thing,’ you find yourself face to face with after the dust settles. Someone, depending on your temperament, like Anne Carson or Lisa Robertson, Karen Solie or Ken Babstock, David O’Meara, Margaret Christakos, Juliana Spahr, or for that matter Mohammad. A good poet will leave you, not alone, but alone with your thoughts.
Your thoughts are your solace. Not the poem’s easy placations…’
It’s interesting to see Solie in that group of poets from 2008. Aside from Lisa Robertson, whose second novel is forthcoming in a few weeks, they are all still focused on poetry. Spahr’s excellent Ars Poetica appeared last year and is still by my bedside. I haven’t read anything from K. Silem Mohammad in about a decade, but I recall all of this thinking. All of my trying to fit these very disparate voices together. I never finished my essay on the lyric. There are fragments here and there. Avant Lyric. Lyric Conceptualism. Lyric Accumulation. I feel them tugging.
There are quite a number of reviews and engagements with Solie’s work over the years in the Lemon Hound archive housed on this site. Here’s Sheryda Warrener on a poem from Pigeon posted impossibly it seems, way back in 2009:
“Pathology of the Senses” opens into the concentrated heat of a lake-side southern Ontario town. This heat, “an inanimate slur, wool gathering, hanging like a bad suit,” sustains itself through the entire poem.
Sheryda Warrener
That heat, already building on the planet, already having had so many of the hottest years…building in our poems. It’s been enlightening looking back through these posts and tracing the emergence of climate change through our collective observations–among other things. More to say on this in the coming weeks. Many more posts to come.
Meanwhile, come and hear Karen Solie read. It is the second to last Writers Read Event that I will be hosting. We’ll have a conversation afterward, maybe talk about aesthetic trajectories, lyric time, whether or not a novel is in her future, how deeply embodied the poems in Wellwater are, and if that felt different to her writing those poems–we’ll also take questions from the audience. Registration is essential.
A reminder too that there will be launches of On Occasion in Montreal and Toronto in May! We’ll invite local contributors to read at these events whenever possible. I’m hoping to convince Karen Solie and Lisa Robertson to read in Toronto in May. Everyone who read at our March 20 event I hope will make our May 12 launch as well. That event was stunning. Stay tuned.
Sina
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