Gabrielle Volke Archives

from Liam Volke in Victoria, British Columbia

University of Victoria

In Victoria, among the aged flower children and retired English folk, a river of young blood surges through its heart and pools around a green ring.

In your first year as a student, life was wrapped within and around the Ring Road of the university campus. You saw maple leaves for the first time. You tasted independence: in Rez, with other under-aged drinkers. You lost your first love. Here is where you thought you’d reinvent yourself.

The classes for your Acting major are all in the Fine Arts section of the campus, a modest trio of white, brown and grey brick buildings facing a paved circular courtyard with a single evergreen in the centre. This section seems quarantined from the rest, placed outside the Ring (inside is the stronghold of Sciences and Humanities). “Theatre? We have a theatre?!” they say. We’re a big deal abroad, you tell yourself.

Most of the trees here keep their leaves, so at first you suspected you were in paradise. The rain was a welcome change from the snow that browns and greys with the dust and gravel of hometown Calgary. You told yourself you would always love the rain. You told yourself a lot of things.

DG judged the FreeFall poetry contest this year. The winners were just announced in the current issue (which also contains the interview Gabrielle Volke did with dg plus a short Gabrielle wrote). Some of the poetry entries were very good indeed.

First place went to Catherine Owen for “Reincarnation Redux.” Second place went to Mark Sampson for “On Choosing a Mattress.” Third place went to Leslie Timmins for “Caravaggio to his Critics.” And honourable mentions went to Leslie Timmins again for “What is Served” and Catherine Owen (again) for “Solace/No Solace.” DG read the poems blind and did not know the names of the winners til the announcement was made. (You can listen to the first and second place poems read by their authors here.)

Here are dg’s comments as they appeared in the magazine. FreeFall is edited by Micheline Maylor—you may remember her poem “Bird at the University” published earlier on these pages.

Good writing, poetry or prose, dares to make large statements, to teach us about life, to parse existence and tell what is valuable and what is not. The top three poems I read for the contest all made this leap into the oracular. They were also all clearly aware of being inside a tradition of art; they spoke knowingly to and of other works.

First place goes to “Reincarnation Redux” which I adored because of its subversive (it uses the word) anti-sentimentality over the death of a loved one who, the poet imagines, has been reincarnated as a fly. The poem takes a sly, knowing jab at Jack Gilbert famous poems mourning his dead wife which are lauded in America but are also a bit self-pitying and, yes, sentimental. (In the one mentioned here, the poet imagines his wife coming back as the neighbour’s Dalmatian.) This poem sweeps away bushels of easy literary emotions and stock stances. It renders a lot of other poems impossible and thus is incredibly refreshing (also very funny).

My vision, I console myself, if it’s not as faithful or warm as Gilbert’s
has, nonetheless, a numerical advantage; even in wintertime one finds that flies
are quite populous, cleaning their delicate subversive limbs on windowsills.

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Gabrielle Volke is a first year student at Mount Royal University in Calgary. Her writing teacher, Micheline Maylor, poet and editor of FreeFall, set up this little interview by email for an essay Gabrielle is writing. I post it here in the usual Numéro Cinq spirit of shameless self-promotion and the vague hope that some other writing student might profit from my animadversions.

Gabrielle Volke: More often than not I will be performing some mundane task, or hear one random phrase, when an idea hits me. They usually just pop into my head out of the blue. Where does your inspiration come from? Do your ideas appear out of thin air, or do they arrive through careful planning and deliberation?