We’re Meant To Work With Our Hands:
Robert Colman and Christina Shah in Conversation
Robert Colman: First of all, congratulations on your new Anstruther Press chapbook, Rig Veda. It was an exciting project to handle as an editor. The primary reason I reached out to you to do the book is because I see similarities in our subject matter and approach. We both write work-related poems – I focus on metal working, while you deal with sawmills and slaughterhouses. What drew you to decide, first of all, that you wanted to write about working in industry?
Christina Shah: I actually started with poetry about a bartending job I worked in the north end of Saskatoon. A lot of the patrons were tradespeople, and they were, on the whole, really good people. Real personalities. Before working in bars, I’d never been exposed to the trades. My uncle was a carpenter before becoming a developer in Ontario, but I never spent much time with him. In the bar I thought, wow, this is an interesting world, and that stuck with me.
Later on, when I wanted to quit working nights, I had to figure out what I wanted to do. That’s when I took a job in industrial sales. Not a normal trajectory for someone in this field – people tend to come out of high school, start in shipping/receiving and work their way up, or they study the trades or engineering before working their way into sales.
RC: So you were engaged with tradespeople when you were working in bars, and obviously that left a lasting impression?
CS: Yes. I started writing portraits of some of the patrons. When I was in my mid-20s, I was writing fiction, but two instructors at Douglas College also encouraged my poetry. I hadn’t written a poem since I was kid. But I was inspired to write poetic portraits.
RC: I had a similar trajectory in writing about industry. It was a tradesperson who drew me in. I was visiting a shop, and the manager I was talking to was extremely frustrated. He felt like he wasn’t being seen. I think the business was struggling to find new employees and it confused him that people weren’t interested in doing what he did.
You touch on this sort of invisibility in Rig Veda. For instance, in the poem “Sunset Crew,” you have a line that says, “the world needs you.” That’s interesting. I would say that mood is a driving force in your poetry about manufacturing–more specifically, industrial repair work; there’s a conflict with the world at large that you lean into.
CS: Absolutely. That was probably the first major industrial poem that I wrote after the bar poems. I went out on an after hours job with my boss at the time, and he showed me what his job entailed. We were along the river at an aggregate site, and they had a big CAT excavator, and he shimmied underneath and took off the belly pan. It was caked with dirt and he wasn’t afraid to get a face full of it. I would hand him tools and just observe what he did. It was hard for him to see – he was wearing bifocals and it was dark. It’s increasingly difficult to find people to do that kind of field work these days. It’s dirty, it’s dangerous. It’s tough.
Most people want to work in a clean shop, and I don’t blame them. A lot of the guys I worked with when I started out were old logging mechanics and many of them are retired or close to retiring. I met one who was close to 80, and that’s where the last part of that stanza came from – this guy leaning on a cane in his shop coat. He ran a fleet of 300 machines. I was trying to capture the kind of individual whose kids wouldn’t follow him into the business.
RC: Yeah, there’s a historical progression in Canada – people start working on family farms repairing their own equipment, and when someone else takes over the property, or the family sells it, metal fab or machining work is a natural place to take their skills. Then, for a lot of them, they encourage their kids to go to university and find white collar work. As the farms disappear, so goes that pipeline of people with the ingrained knowledge of repair work. It’s like a progression of absences building on one another.
CS: People coming from rural environments, especially with forestry in BC, grow up learning to fix things because nobody’s going to do it for you. I’ve witnessed a lot of creative problem solving from heavy duty mechanics. I think, in many ways, that’s absent in the younger generation, because they’re urbanized.
One old machinist told me, “young people are afraid to make mistakes.” And maybe for good reason. There’s liability, right? You can’t work the same way these guys used to. There’s positives and negatives in that, of course, when you think in terms of health and safety. And of course so much is computerized now.
RC: The thing I love about work poetry is that we’re talking about people who are working with their hands more than computers. That’s changing. In the poem “Rig Veda,” you’re writing about a machine that’s doing a lot of the work, but it’s still very tactile. Do you find that tactility drives your poetry? Because there’s this hands-on quality that seems to power your words.
CS: I’m a very tactile person. I like to work with my hands, and I knit and crochet and do some metalworking making jewellery. I think that’s allowed me to connect with my customers. So much of my work is auditory. There is a texture to it. I like to capture that. I think it’s an antidote to the visual world. When I buy clothes, I like to touch them. Now, with everything being sold online, that sense is missing. I feel like it’s a narrowing of our vision. It reminds me of internet dating – people have immersed themselves online, and often have trouble connecting IRL. That’s why I love to take a break from the computer to make something, or do a bit of baking.
I feel we’re atrophying. That’s why the trades are important to me – they stimulate problem solving. I read a lot about neuroscience, and all the nerve endings we have in our hands – we’re meant to work with our hands.
RC: There’s tactility, but there’s also an aural sensibility in work poetry – the rhythm of machines and their movement. I picked up on this when I was writing a poem about the sounds around machine shops for my third book, Democratically Applied Machine. Specific sounds mean specific things to people who work with equipment, because operators can hear when something’s wrong.
I’d like to come back to what you said about people being afraid to make mistakes. I think that’s part of the beauty of trying to express work in poetry – people who still do manual labour seem like they’re living close to the edge where something could go wrong. I get a sense in your poems, in particular, that there’s a daredevil side to work. As an example, you have a poem in Rig Veda where the central character is on the highway and may get pulled over because they’re speeding. That sounds tame, but there’s a feel to it on the page; the protagonist is so focused on the job that there’s this idea they’ll fail.
CS: Yes, there’s adrenaline in that poem. There’s also the idea of being needed. I went out on the job for two years travelling from construction site to construction site looking for repair work. When people start to call you, you’re one of them because they can rely on you. As a woman in industry, it takes persistence to get that acceptance.
I’ve had plenty of people who kind of smiled and didn’t take me seriously when I first got into heavy industry. But then when their preferred repair service didn’t come through, they’d give me a chance. If they call me, I know they respect me.
RC: Right. The narrative of being a woman in industry runs through your book. I love the moment in “Gel Nails” where you talk about getting down to “real girl grain.” That’s such a great line. I mean, what does “real girl” even mean? I think a reader automatically asks that question of themselves. It’s absurd that we should be asking that when people who identify as women form roughly half of our population. Can you tell me about how gender identity has shaped your poetry?
CS: You can see it in the poem “Parts Run” – how does one present as a woman in that world? I feel like I break gender barriers by just existing in industry. To be clear, most of my experience has been very positive, but a woman’s presence in the field still rankles some people. And it’s unwinnable for those individuals: not feminine enough, or too feminine–or worse, too “aggressive” when a woman is simply being assertive. Those people won’t take me seriously. And it’s not just men. Other women sometimes hold these outdated attitudes.
RC: I’ve noticed that some of our poems intersect. We both have poems about parts. You have a poem about a trade show, which I also have, written in 2008. What made you write your trade show poem? What was going on?
CS: I used to attend mining industry shows. So much of my poetry is about writing what nobody writes about. In this case, it was almost utilitarian. That’s why I give my poems the very straightforward titles that I do. It’s a challenge to the reader to see this somewhat utilitarian thing given a poetic treatment – what could I possibly pull out of this? It’s a nice frame, because there’s an aspect of the industrial world that’s very stuffy and conservative and seemingly one dimensional with everyone in their corporate golf shirts, and people being very conventional.
There aren’t a lot of people who think about why we’re here doing what we’re doing, or at least it strikes me that they don’t want to think about that. For some reason, I insist on paying attention to the man behind the curtain.
RC: Many poets write to escape their daily lives – they don’t come back from the office and write about what they did at work. Is your writing always connected to what you’re doing?
CS: My work poetry has had the best reception, but I do write about other things – urban scenes, food, objects. I’ve become more focused on the work poems of late, but I’m at an interesting juncture. I still want to write more work poetry, but part of me is looking at turning back to fiction soon.
I think mostly I’m trying to explore performative ritual. Trade shows are a performative ritual in a way. And I like to make fun of the things others take too seriously.
RC: I like the concept of performative ritual, because that’s what I’m thinking about when I write about assembly lines, looking at how they’ve changed. The whole idea of the assembly line given to us by “god,” or Henry Ford, plays a big role in our culture. It’s almost a religious construct in capitalist society. This concept gave so many people work for so long, and while it still gives people work, automation has changed the industry enormously.
My poem “Ghosting the Assembly Line” is about that change, but it still focuses on the ritual aspect of the line’s flow and our belief in it, or certainly our dependence on it. The poem “Rig Veda” is an example of a poem in which you conjure a similar ritualistic, elegiac feel. I think it’s the most condensed and perfectly framed piece in your book, convincingly capturing your concept of performative ritual in both mood and form.
CS: Thank you. I’m trying to describe a world that’s being lost as folks are pushed out by automation. I see the longshore workers recently went on strike because they’re concerned about that. I’ve sold parts down at the port, and I don’t want to see people put out of work. But at the same time, we can’t really pretend change isn’t happening, can we? Am I part of the problem or part of the solution? I’m wrestling with that. I’m also trying to be forward thinking. And yet I’m sad that we’re losing people whose skillset is that they can walk in and smell that something’s off or hear that something has malfunctioned with a piece of machinery.
It’s just like poetry; you need all your senses. I’m cautiously coming out as a writer in my day job and some people really appreciate it. They say, “yes, you’re writing about us!” Like my friend Gerry, who’s a machinist, who’s thrilled that I’m writing about the industrial world.
RC: When you talk about people hearing, seeing and smelling what’s wrong, that amazes me. There’s a new technology in Canada where they can add a microphone to an automated welder, and that microphone will pick up, given the right baseline recording, whether your weld parameters are accurate. The people who could naturally hear these things themselves are retiring. I’m amazed by what we can do with technology these days, and I’m glad a Canadian company’s developing such a welder. But at the same time, we’re losing something else. It’s strange to know we’re losing our senses in some way.
CS: It scares me that we’re becoming a nation of button pushers who have everything done for us. It’s reminiscent of like Brave New World. I think Aldous Huxley had a more prophetic vision than Orwell, in terms of what we are going to become. I think we’re taking so much of the human element out of work. Yet we’re working more than ever.
RC: Just briefly, I want to talk about structure in your poetry. Do you consciously go into a poem thinking, “this is going to be this shape?” You have a couple of prose poems in Rig Veda – is that something that you think about ahead of time? Or do your poems give themselves form as you proceed?
CS: My use of form has really evolved. I used to be very strict stanzaically, and that was what I felt comfortable with. Now I’ve loosened up a bit, and I’m trying to write more a narrative prose-styled poetry. A colleague recently told me that he feels like there’s a pressure element to my work, as if it were hydraulic. In a poem like “they canned a good man today,” I think the hydraulic intensity comes from its prosaic structure. It was originally written in stanzas, but switching it set off a light bulb for me and opened me up to develop more poems in that way.
RC: Your prose poems are quite conversational, but then you have a poem like “Dig In,” which is very structured, very much two or three syllables per line. I can feel the solidity and groundedness, the percussive action of the lines. I don’t know if that was intentional right from the beginning…
CS: That’s a great question. When I look at it now, I think that form is acting as a protective mechanism because I’m exploring my own fears. I don’t know how well you know some of the industrial areas of Vancouver, but if you go under the Patullo Bridge, it’s got a scary vibe to it. I used to spend a lot of time in the scrap yards and in some of the smaller barge operations along the waterfront. You go into places like that and men look at you with surprise, like, “what are you doing here?” I have to make a living, though, even if I feel vulnerable. That’s where that poem came from.
RC: We had a moment when editing your chapbook where I wanted you to use the first person in the poem “fear and probability” and it was a real struggle for you. I found that interesting because I remember having moments like that when working on my first collection. How do you feel about the poem now?
CS: The use of first person in that poem is something I’ve grappled with. I’m glad you gently nudged me to make a brave emotional choice. And I’m okay with it. It’ll be interesting to see the poem out in the world like that. It’s tricky – poetry can come across as self-indulgent, like it’s all about the person writing it. And yes, “fear and probability” is about me because I wrote it, but I’ve always struggled with the question of how much of myself do I put in my poems? When am I simply an observer? When do I step into a piece and when do I step back?
RC: I think it’s important to point out that just because you’re using the first person in that poem doesn’t mean it’s necessarily about you. I feel like most people who read poetry do understand and respect the difference, although in an initial reading of a book I still confuse the author with the poetic first person at times. Even when I’m reading something where I know the two are distinct, it can happen.
I once saw a self-published book titled My Deep Thoughts, which was very funny, but also captures the idea of the self-indulgence you’re fighting against.
CS: For a long time I didn’t put my work out there. Especially being in business, I thought, “how do I feel about people googling me and seeing this stuff?” There’s no such thing as privacy anymore. But you have to make the brave choice. Especially now, when you see so many threats to democracy, I think it’s our responsibility to speak honestly.
Christina Shah’s first full-length collection, if: prey, then:huntress will be published with Nightwood Editions in 2026
Publisher: Anstruther Press (2024)
ISBN: 78-1-998774-11-1
Robert Colman is a Newmarket, Ont.-based poet, critic, and essayist. His most recent collection of poems is Ghost Work (Palimpsest Press 2024).
- Robert Colmanhttps://miramichireader.ca/author/robert-colman/
I feel this should be required reading, especially for young people. I appreciate how you talk about the what and the who of the poetry, not just style. This helps my appreciation of the work. Excellent interview!