E.G.N. Lafleur is a poet, essayist, and street Anglo Catholic living in London, Canada. Her debut chapbook, The Magi Come to Toronto, is forthcoming with Kith Books in 2024. She has poetry in Feed Lit Mag, Pinhole Poetry, Wrongdoing, Deathcap, Sage Cigarettes, Psaltery and Lyre, and forthcoming in The Wasteland; and essays in Earth & Altar and forthcoming in The Hour and Monk Arts. Her work interweaves faith and the body, liturgy and theology, housing justice, food security, and medieval English history and literature. You can find her on X @egnlafleur and her essays at egnlafleur.substack.com or egnlafleur.com.
You can read Huron in the April 2024 issue.
Would you like to tell us a little bit more about your poem? For instance, how or why you wrote it, or perhaps provide some extra context?
I wrote Huron almost in one go in an intense week at the very end of December/ beginning of January. My grandfather was dying, slowly and then quickly, and I was rushing out to Alberta to help with palliative care. The first draft was on my phone on the bus from London to the Toronto airport; the second was in the airport pub waiting for my delayed flight; the third was in my grandparents’ apartment.
I was due to fly out New Year’s Day, when no one else wanted to travel. The night before, we drove out of London to spend New Year’s Eve with a friend. The poem was made by those lovely, luxurious midwinter experiences – lying on your back in a hot bath staring at the mildew on the ceiling, laughing in the car with friends – when there’s nothing you can do about the family emergency until tomorrow. It’s a weird tension – not so much because it keeps your sanity, but because everything is heightened when you come close to the edges of life and death.
How do you revise your work?
Badly; by reading it over to hear how the words sound together.
As a poet, what does creative success or achievement look like for you?
Being read. I’m not interested in ‘quitting my day job’ – I’d find the pressure to write a certain volume so destructive – but half the joy of the work is sharing it.
What are you working on now?
My debut poetry, chapbook, The Magi Come to Toronto, is coming out with Kith Books some time this year! Putting that together has been my main artistic focus since October – editing, cover, production, press. I’m learning a lot working with a micropress – I don’t think I’d have gotten to be nearly so hands on if I’d slid into the professional publishing world. I’m also trying to rebuild a body of work – everything good I had went into the book. I like to have a few poems I’m querying to journals at any one time, and I’m trying to write so I can get back into that swing.
How or where or with what does a poem begin?
With a phrase or the way words sound together. I’m coming back to Rowan Williams’ poetry. Advent Calendar is best known, but my favourite is Low Sunday, Abu Ghosh: “Calm, fluent the Mass moves/like robes on a walking body, upright/and in no hurry, the chanted French/swings loose between the stresses.” So with the sound of the words, and secondarily with an image. I admire people who can use a poem to make a point or narrate a story, but it’s always clunky when I try.
Are there other art forms that inspire or inform your poetry?
Medieval and Renaissance choral music! Polyphony has this spaciousness and this density inside it – you can imagine a hollow space spiraling upward. William Byrd in particular quite literally makes texts sing. The way he sets the everyday words of the Mass makes you hear them in new ways, and his settings get stuck in your head. You hear them under the words when you read them. If I could write poetry that sounds like that! I guess it comes back to style – how do you approximate complex sung structure in text?
What are you reading or watching or listening to lately that intrigues or inspires you?
I’m devouring the ebook of Allen Bratton’s Henry Henry (Unnamed Press) and waiting with baited breath for Sydney Hegele’s Bird Suit (Invisible, May 7). What I enjoy most in fiction is prose style, and both Sydney and Allan write beautifully – tight, sharp, elegant. Henry Henry is a reworking of the events of Shakespeare’s Henry IV. It’s sad and funny if you’ve read the original, and stands on its own if you haven’t.