Susan Robertson grew up outside Washington, D.C. but has made her home in Canada for years. Her poems have appeared, or will soon, in journals such as Prairie Fire, Parentheses, Grain, The /tƐmz/ Review, Psaltery & Lyre, and The Fiddlehead. Her chapbook, So I Go, is out with Baseline Press..
You can read We All Discover the Unity of Time in the July 2025 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?
Shortly after her 93rd birthday my mother suffered a series of small strokes that left her bedridden and jumbled. She never failed to know her children and remained her same gentle self, seemingly content and blessedly unaware of her condition. But time collapsed and became permeable. Her parents were still alive. I was her daughter but at times her same age. She was 16 and 40 and 92 all within an hour.
Time collapsed for me too. I sat by her bed reading the diary she kept at 16, the girl in the diary as new to me as the woman in the bed. Time still collapses. I tried to write a poem conveying this permeability, this loss and this gift.
Is there a collection of poetry that never leaves your (perhaps metaphorical) nightstand?
The virtual stack varies depending on what I’ve recently read, but Lucille Clifton’s Blessing the Boats never leaves the pile. I read the title poem to my brother over Zoom the day before he died.
How do you revise your work?
It depends on what you mean by “revise.” I’ve often wondered where writing leaves off and revising begins. If I’m honing a draft I’m fairly well satisfied with, I interrogate each word and phrase, trying to be mindful that a so-called “stronger” word may actually weaken the poem, that the poem, not the quotable line or surprising word, is what matters. (Thank you, Sandra Ridley, for this reminder during our work together.) Once I’m reasonably happy that the poem sounds as it should (thank you, reading aloud), I begin what feels like two-dimensional sculpting—playing with the word placement and enjambments on the page. More reading aloud ensues.
If I’m working with a half-formed mass desperately trying to be born (I can struggle particularly with endings), I take it outside—to the wooded lot at the end of the street or to visit the polydactyl cat two blocks down—or set it in a drawer to incubate. In either case, I cease with the fiddling, allowing time for some more major change to occur.
As a poet, what does creative success or achievement look like for you?
Feeling I’ve expressed as well as I possibly can what I was trying to express, that for a brief moment a reader and I might vibrate on the same frequency.
Have you ever received advice (or has there been something you’ve learned on your own) about writing or revising poems that has made you a better poet? What was it?
“What matters is the making of music and the sincerity of the making.” This reminder from Kaveh Akbar isn’t necessary for everyone, but I can sometimes veer into, not just reading, but writing in “poet voice.” Nothing kills even a well-crafted poem faster than a false note.
In terms of poetic style or craft, is there a big question you are trying to find an answer for?
How to persevere with compassion, with joy. How to cherish the asking knowing there is no answer.