Di Brandt poetry reading

Following up a captivating poet like Christian Bok is no piece of cake, but Di Brandt certainly made a commendable effort during her visit to Redeemer on February 4th. She may have a small voice and gentle personality, but Di Brandt also has courage that would give Oz’s lion a run for his money. Di Brandt began her poetic career as a rebel, if you can imagine writing poetry to be rebellious, but in more recent years she has made some major changes to the way she views the Mennonite background she originally ran away from.

When she was 17, Di Brandt became the first member of her community to leave in over 400 years. And on top of that, she was acting as a woman in a strongly patriarchal society. Her earlier poems seem to reflect a sort of breaking away from the bonds and regulations of her Mennonite heritage by using little to no punctuation. You heard me right – some of her poems use no punctuation whatsoever. You might not have known it from hearing her read the poem, but “when i was five” has no punctuation at all. This technique also challenges the reader (and the listener) to consider more carefully the specific parts of the poem and why she would structure them the way she did.

Although she was officially “shunned” by her community after breaking away from them, Di Brandt freely discussed her initial rebellion, but also her newfound appreciation for her heritage – especially because of the focus that the Mennonites put on the importance of taking care of the earth.

Di Brandt also responded very well to questions and was open to sharing more about her work and what lies behind it. She even shared a story about a “found” poem "Zone: Le Détroit," a poem that rearranges words that someone else wrote or said into a new form, that she heard from one of her daughter’s children while driving on the 401 towards Windsor. Having lived in southwestern Ontario for all of my life, I found the paranoid tone of this poem to be quite humorous.

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