Ronna Bloom’s poems are each whole and complete on the page. And they seldom stand alone. While the poems do not need the stories of the people and places where they were created, the people have often needed the poems.
In 2009, Ronna Bloom sat in her first Spontaneous Poetry Booth, “scared and excited”. Her sign said “The Poet is In.” Anyone could drop by, say a few words, ask for a poem: “then I shut up and wrote.”
I can attest to the sense of risk, the requirement to set aside all ego and urges to edit. I’ve given spontaneous poetry writing a try more than once, based on nothing more than a faith in the possibilities of the person before me and in my own (quaking) capacity to respond. I have never met Ronna Bloom, but I do know at least one thing about her: I don’t think I could have imagined myself into such bravery without her example in front of me: A Possible Trust, indeed.
From 2012-2019 as poet-in-residence at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, Ronna continued to offer poems of the moment, poems by prescription. “Walking the Hospital” is one of the cross-genre prose/poems in the collection: “Poetry in the hospital has no templates, no colleagues, no management. I’m always temporary and I go alone.” Reflecting on how being a hospital poet has affected her, she says, “I see how I don’t own anything, not my role, not my health, not my body.” The piece ends with a deceptively simple invocation: “Awareness, carry me.”
It was not a surprise to learn that the process of selecting poems for this collection was collaborative, inclusive, an open request for assistance:
“To the colleagues, students, doctors, nurses, therapists, poets, friends and teachers who helped me put together this collection by sharing their favourites: thank you.”
A poem painted on a Toronto street; a poem in a Grade 11 textbook set between poems by Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson; poems used in movies; poems translated into several other languages; numerous books and publications in English. Tanis MacDonald, General Editor for the Laurier Poetry Series talks about Ronna Bloom as a poet who has been “carrying a full cultural backpack for decades.” The poems collected here are honest and trustworthy in their maturity, skills, and insight. Phil Hall, from his introduction, “To Lead by Crying,” says: “This woman is not walking away. Down the hallways we are parked in, she comes, dragging common language to us — by its jubilant snout.“
Service
The doctors are writing poetry.
The poets are listening to the stories of soldiers.
The soldiers are changing the sheets of the aged.
The aged are dying as trumpetlessly as ever.
And if you could rub their feet,
that may be all you can do, but it is a lot.
Their feet get very cold where they are going
and then get very still.
A second stanza in which every word but one is a single syllable. A first stanza where one word leads easily to the next, up to trumpetlessly. That one word stopped me entirely, reverberating across time and space. Transporting me there — to a nursing home during the pandemic, Helplessly rubbing the feet of one of the thousands of dying. There in the midst of that chaos and fear is the poet’s voice, holding us all: “but it is a lot.“
This is lyric poetry, scraped to the bone. Shamanic, essential, useful. As poetry can be. As it is, in Ronna Bloom’s hands.
Ronna Bloom is the author of six books of poetry. She lives in Toronto. She is a registered psychotherapist (CRPO inactive). Her work has been broadcast on the CBC, recorded by the Canadian National Institute for the Blind, translated into Bangla and Chinese, and shortlisted for several Canadian literary awards. She has performed with Juno award-winning musician Jayme Stone. In a collaboration with PLANT Architects, her poem “The City” was painted 30 meters long on King Street in Toronto for the summer of 2018.
Phil Hall has published many books and chapbooks of poetry. In 2011/12 he won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry in English, and Ontario’s Trillium Book Award. He has been twice nominated for the Griffin Poetry Prize. Guthrie Clothing: The Poetry of Phil Hall appeared in 2015 from Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Most recently, Beautiful Outlaw Press has published Toward A Blacker Ardour (2021) andThe Ash Bell. He lives in Perth, Ontario.
Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier University Press (September 12, 2023)
Paperback 9″ x 6″ | 84 pages
ISBN: 9781771125956
Susan Wismer (she/her) is grateful to live on Treaty 18 territory at the southern shore of Georgian Bay in Ontario, Canada with two human partners and a very large dog.She is a poet whose recent workhas been published in These Small Hours(ed. Lorna Crozier) a Wintergreen Press chapbook,Pinhole Poetry,Orbis International Literary Journal,Poetry Plans(Bell Press),Qwerty,Prairie Fir,,and inPoets in Response to Peril (eds. Penn Kemp,RichardSitoski). www.susanwismer.com.