Author spotlight: Anna Quon

This conversation was conducted by video chat in K’jipuktuk, on June 6, 2024, at 10:45 AM, on the day of a new moon.

Dea Toivonen, Program Officer (Arts Education): First of all, big congratulations on your appointment in your role as Poet Laureate of Halifax Regional Municipality! I would love for you to talk about what that role means to you—and for readers who aren’t familiar with what a “Poet Laureate” is, would you perhaps shed some light on the position?

Anna Quon: Well, I am still working that out myself, but on the municipality’s website, it says that the poet laureateship and youth poet laureateship programs “aim to celebrate and elevate the literary arts through the written and spoken word. Poet Laureates are nominated and selected to advocate for poetry, language and the arts by attending events across the municipality, and beyond to promote and attract people to the literary world, and as an ambassador for Halifax and its residents.” So, that is what the city says, and I hope to do that—but I also like the idea of bringing poetry to parts of the city that we normally might not associate with poetry and also to bring poetry back from those parts so we can hear what people have to say. That sounds pretty simple but to figure out how to do that might be a little more complicated. I haven’t gotten to it yet: I have, so far, been responding to invitations from community groups and from the municipality itself for events that I will write poems for or perform poems at. So far, I have been reacting to what is brought to me more than going out and making something new that I envision for this role—but that will come.

I think you have already started to imply the beliefs that will guide your time in this role, but could you speak more to the foundational beliefs and philosophies that guide you in your poetics and your activism?

First, I will say that I don’t see myself as an activist. I was part of a panel called “The Accidental Activist” for Halifax’s Access Awareness Week, but I really struggle with the idea of being one. I see activists as doing a lot of hard work, as being the people who go out and organize, sometimes sit out in the rain for days on end protesting something—that kind of thing. And I don’t do those things or even go to demonstrations much anymore. But I am a member of the Bahá’í faith, which is an optimistic and hopefully, eventually, unifying world religion. I am also very fond of the social determinants of health, things like having enough income, housing, and food, not being socially isolated, having good health care and education—things that make a good life for people. I am also interested in social justice and in equitable access to what people need to lead a good life. When I say ‘a good life,’ I mean one where they can feel good, contribute to the world, and do it without too much anxiety about bombs dropping on them or losing their paycheck and their housing. Security of some measure.

I find the Bahá’í faith’s world-embracing scale and its optimism compelling because I think we need hope-fueled communities that have some idea of what they moving towards. So my next question, perhaps related, is about the role in society of the poet. I think that the fact that there are poet laureateships, that institutions and municipalities have these positions, says something about the poet’s importance in the social framework, and I am wondering if you have some thoughts about what that role is.

I think there are a lot of different kinds of poets, and I am not sure that I would want to be prescriptive about what poets should do. I write poetry about a lot of different things: sometimes it’s about the drudgery of housework, sometimes about basic income guarantee or the revolution [chuckles], or it could be about spring, or flowers. I write about a lot of different things, and the Poet Laureateship—as I have been told a number of times by my contact at the city—should be a role that I make align with my passions. I think the kind of poet that I am is an observer and a thinker and a feeler, so I am more interested in seeing the world clearly than I am in bringing some agenda to my poetry. I want to be more of a seer who is committed to bringing that into language than I do someone with an agenda, though I don’t always succeed. We all sometimes have ideas in our heads that we want to run with instead of responding to the world in a thoughtful way.

I think that is a beautiful ambition, that commitment to seeing with clear eyes and to being an archivist of the present.

It is archiving the present, it is true, but it is also seeing some essential things about being human and about the world we live in and, hopefully, transcending the present. That’s my hope. I am a hopeful poet, but I don’t always succeed in doing what I hope to do.

My next question is about the particular social issues or initiatives that you are involved with. What will you use your laureateship to bring more energy and awareness to?

As I said before, I am not an activist, but I really value what those people that I would call activists do. I am not really sure how the world works, actually, in terms of what makes the biggest differences in it. Mostly I attend to things related to inequity. The housing crisis that we are in and the crisis of homelessness that is ongoing are very compelling problems for me. We see these all around us, and I really feel that the government has failed in this area.

I am going to speak at the Basic Income Guarantee Nova Scotia symposium in September, and sometimes I am very hopeful that that is one of the answers—that everyone having a basic income to rise above the poverty level would do a lot of good. But I can’t say for sure that I am sold on any practical solution as the answer. I have also been influenced a lot by the Canadian Mental Health Association and ideas around making the world better for people with mental health challenges, things like the social determinants of health and changing attitudes towards people who are different.

I consider myself Mad: I see the world differently from a lot of other people and have had experiences that shape that way of seeing. The world out there regards me differently because I have had those experiences, but it often gets me wrong—what I am about and what people with similar experiences are about—which makes me believe that stigma and prejudice and discrimination of all kinds are something to be eradicated, which takes constant education. I am hoping that my poetry can do a little of that. That it can help people see that how they see me is not who I am, how I see myself, or what I can bring to the world. Helping to reduce prejudice and discrimination, including ones that I hold myself—we all hold prejudices that we don’t even know that we have—goes a long way to making the world a better place and is something I hope to do as Poet Laureate.

We hold a similar belief that a lot of the world maintains a narrow framework for what is normal, or what is neurotypical, and experiences outside of that central accepted ‘normal’ have a lot to teach us about what is real, what is true about the world, and what our hearts really long for. I think it is beautiful to hear you talk about your desire to approach and write with these ‘outside’ voices and to use poetry, which I think of as the language of the heart—I don’t know if you would agree—to transmit shared experience.

I do see poetry as the language of the heart, even though people might hear that and think, ‘Woah, what does that mean?’ It means that my feelings and my deeply held values and beliefs are what speaks through my poetry. We have all written and read things that don’t come from the heart, including things that might be called poetry, but poetry, at least for me, is made of the feeling stuff and not so much the thinking stuff.

When we talk about poetry coming from the heart, it is important to me because it touches on another question you asked—about what poetry does. Words by themselves, I don’t think that they have the power to change people, but I think that they have the power to change how people see things. And when people see things differently, they may change the feelings that they hold in their hearts. That is to say, poetry doesn’t make people act differently unless it makes people see and feel things differently. But, also, it is not really up to me to decide what poetry is. I spend a lot of time thinking about how to write a good poem, which I think needs to change what people see and feel and think, or some combination of those three things that might change how people act or gives people hope to keep acting in a certain way.

In almost a conclusion, I wanted to bring some of the things that we have been talking about to your poem “To Council, 2024,” the first poem that you have written in your laureateship. In this poem, you begin by making note of how you arrived here, in Halifax, recalling your father’s foresight in moving to the heart of the city—then you proceed to situate yourself in the local landscape, traveling through and observing the city, its changing streets, its architecture and the way that architecture speaks to histories that are often violent, and noting the people who live here, especially those who are often neglected or abused by the policy-makers and cops.

I spent some time this year thinking about what I call “a poetics of arrival,” which is essentially the conviction that it matters how we narrate our own journeys and tell our own stories. I think story is very powerful and can inform how we find ourselves in the present and what we chose to do with our situation, and we can all tell our own stories of arrival in many different ways. I read your poem with this notion in mind, and the care you take in situating yourself as both a local and a witness of local political life feels important, especially in your first poem written as Poet Laureate. Is there anything that you want to add in accounting for your arrival, both as a person living here and as Poet Laureate? How has your journey brought you to the worldview that you currently hold? How does that experience inform your work?

I was giving some thought to how I have come to this place in my life, part of which is becoming the Poet Laureate. I have lived a quite comfortable life, economically, having the privilege of parents who are comfortably middle class. And I have never known, through recessions and difficult times, any feeling of insecurity. I never realized how much that had influenced me until later in life, that type of security. I have also suffered psychologically in a number of ways that I connect with perfectionism and with internalizing a colonial and capitalist and sexist and racist way of seeing the world. Because I am a mixed-race woman, I am Mad, and I am fat, I have been a lot of things that don’t match up to the ideal that these systems promote, and that was a cause for a lot of psychological distress. I also have a probably biological predisposition for depression and psychosis. I have a university degree, which I don’t believe I earned very well, but it has given me access to work that I wouldn’t have had access to otherwise, which is, in my mind, a privilege.

That is some of the background on how I arrived here, but I also think, because I grew up in a home with supportive parents where books and art mattered, I had a lot of exposure to things that have led me to write, and I think reading novels has helped me develop a lot of empathy. I have had a comfortable life despite my mental health challenges, which have been really grievous at times, and realizing this makes me think about what makes up a good life. Like having a certain amount of economic and emotional security. These are not new thoughts, but in my life, I see how much they influence where I am and how I got here, and I think that everyone should have those things. These are things I value, the things that peacetime brings. ‘Peacetime’ meaning more than just the absence of war; ‘peacetime’ meaning the ability to live freely or “freeishly” in a place where a lot of our needs can be met. And we have in Canada a place that, compared to many parts of the world, offers a lot to some who are lucky enough to have enough resources and support.

Speaking as Poet Laureate, or just as yourself, do you have any advice to young poets or words of wisdom or hope to offer the local community?

I guess I would say, especially to young poets, read a lot. That is advice that people give young writers a lot, but keep that curiosity and openness and go with gusto after filling some of the gaps in your knowledge and experience through reading. That would be a wonderful thing for young poets to do. While I am not a big chaser of experience, I am a chaser of knowledge about the world, which includes subjective and objective knowledge, so I try to be open to reading all forms. And as for wisdom and hope for the community, one of the quotes from Bahá’u’lláh, the founder of Bahá’í faith, that I have been thinking about a lot goes,

“O SON OF SPIRIT! The best beloved of all things in My sight is Justice; turn not away therefrom if thou desirest Me, and neglect it not that I may confide in thee. By its aid thou shalt see with thine own eyes and not through the eyes of others, and shalt know of thine own knowledge and not through the knowledge of thy neighbor. Ponder this in thy heart; how it behooveth thee to be. Verily justice is My gift to thee and the sign of My loving-kindness. Set it then before thine eyes.” (Bahá’u’lláh)

What it basically says is that keeping justice in your sight will help you see the world in your own authentic way and see truth your own way. I believe in this idea, especially that justice is important in the world and that it will help us to see as we are meant to see to express that—which, I really think, is my job as a poet.