Chickadees
New Year’s Day, Fredericton
They crowdsurf through the air and greet
the new year like they greet everything:
perched on the lilacs and cedar hedges,
heads tilted inquisitively, emojis
of cheerfulness. They flock like words
on a new page of snow, searching
for spruce seeds. Resilient fluff balls,
they adapt to the winter’s coldest nights
by dropping their temperature to conserve
energy. The world is not black-capped
and white, but the piano keys of their flight
collect the scattered notes of our folk songs,
melodies I hung on to when I lived out west,
when their western cousins gently hooked
their claws around my index finger
and pecked at offerings of sunflower seeds.
The self-referential music I once thought
was just the sound woods made.
An override for the world’s autocorrect.
Hope gone viral.
from Metadata from a Changing Climate by Ian LeTourneau (Gaspereau Press, 2025)
Dakota Casey: Metadata from a Changing Climate considers themes of nature, change, and connection. Nearly every piece connects to nature in some form. What inspired you to explore these themes? Was it challenging to incorporate some form of nature into nearly every poem?
Ian LeTourneau: I believe that what the poet experiences through their senses influences their ideas and images and what they write about. I care deeply about the natural world—some of the first poets that struck a chord with me were Wordsworth and Keats (that’s going way back). So when I was starting out, I actively went out in search of my own Tintern Abbey. And it was Keats who taught me that connecting images and ideas was how poetry could be made. So that’s a long way of answering your question, but it was not challenging at all to incorporate nature because that was what I am observing and what I am engaged with.
DC: I see similarities between Keats’ work and yours, particularly with how you both address nature. I took away from your book the idea of movement and creation, how life persists. If there is one thing you hope readers take away from Metadata from a Changing Climate, what would that be?
IL: There is not one specific thing I’d like readers to take away from reading the book. I believe that since it is out in the world now, any takeaway is valid (and supremely interesting to me!). The fact that there is a takeaway at all is indicative that they’ve engaged with the work and that’s all I can ask for. I do hope something readers encounter in my work sparks an interest in the natural world or highlights the precariousness of it so that some minute change in perspective is possible.
I do hope something readers encounter in my work sparks an interest in the natural world or highlights the precariousness of it so that some minute change in perspective is possible.
DC: I think it’s extremely important to have interest in the natural world, especially amidst our current climate crisis. I grew up in BC; nature was my backyard. So I, too, often find myself writing about it. You currently reside in Fredericton. How much did the Maritimes, in particular, shape how you wrote about nature?
IL: I was born and grew up in a small northern New Brunswick town (Dalhousie, NB), and with the exception of six years working in Alberta after graduating, I have always lived in this province, so the simple answer is my knowledge of the local has built up over time and influenced what I write about. But the less simple answer is I grew up next to the ocean so my sense of a vast powerful force emerged from that. I grew up in a bilingual community and I think that taught me to pay close attention to language. The town I grew up in was close knit, as was my family, so that taught me about community, and that town was also very industrial so I believe in some way that influenced my diction and my efforts to reconcile those two forces—nature and industry—and once I found poetry and metaphor, I was off.
DC: In the second section of your book, which shares its name with the book title, we continue with the idea of change, but now with a focus on endings and death as well. Your third section, “Late Flowers Bloom in the Ditches,” encapsulates this idea of perseverance. All three sections flow together seamlessly. How did you arrive at these sections? Were they always in this order, following these themes?
IL: I don’t think in themes necessarily, but your observations seem accurate now that you’ve pointed them out. When I felt that I had written enough poems for a book, I spread the completed drafts of each poem on the floor to get a wide-angled look and then shuffled them around until they had a satisfactory order. I relied mostly on intuition, asking how they flowed from one to another but keeping an eye to juxtapositions–I wanted things to fit together but not like a puzzle…I liked the idea of the poems as tectonic plates, how they fit together but I also wanted to preserve some friction, some energy. So, no, they were never always in this order; the sections broke naturally because the title, the sequence of ghazals, I decided should go right in the middle, like the centerpiece of a spiral galaxy. And then I just tried to pluck out a line for the title of each section that was evocative and loosely captured the feeling of the sections.
I wanted things to fit together but not like a puzzle…I liked the idea of the poems as tectonic plates, how they fit together but I also wanted to preserve some friction, some energy.
DC: Your use of forms throughout your poetry collection is striking. Poems such as “Pandemic Haiku” and “Charge” are written in two very different forms, one a haiku and the other a ghazal. Do you begin writing a poem with a form, or set of stylistic choices, in mind? Or do you allow the poem to guide you in which shape it wants to take?
IL: I think for the most part I do start with an idea of the form in mind. The haiku and ghazals are obvious examples. I really do tend to think in sonnet form, predominantly. I like rhyme and believe it can be done well, but most of my poems, most of my sonnet-like poems, are in blank verse. There’s something striking visually to a 14-line block of text—it looks so simple, yet it can contain an astounding thematic and technical variety. The haiku in particular were a way for me to get back into writing during the early days of the pandemic. I found I had way more time for reading, but like many others, writing was proving difficult. On my walks I started collecting observations and trying to shape them into haiku before I got back home.
DC: Would you say sonnets, then, are your favourite form?
IL: Yes. If you gave me nothing but sonnets to read and study, I would be happy. I love seeing what poets can do with it. I return often to Robert Lowell’s great sequence History.
DC: From 2016-2018, you were the City of Fredericton’s Cultural Laureate. During your time as Cultural Laureate, you organized the first annual WordFeast Festival. What was that time like? From my understanding, you also must create and publish poems as a Cultural Laureate. I understand you published a chapbook, Core Sample, in 2017. Did your poems you wrote during this time as Cultural Laureate end up in either your chapbook or your recently published Metadata from a Changing Climate? Do you have a favourite poem that you wrote during that time?
IL: I was tasked with writing 4-6 poems per year for occasions of my own choosing. Poems I wrote for the city’s Christmas tree lighting ceremony or the State of the City address were never published, they were more of an occasion, but some of the poems I wrote during that time can be found in Core Sample and Metadata, like “Murmuration: Starlings on the Saint John River” and “Chickadees.” One of the goals in “Murmuration” was to get across the idea that when a collective comes together for one purpose, great things can be achieved, just like how a flock of starlings, known by the collective noun murmuration, can be breathtaking and inspiring. That’s one of the ideas in that poem. It’s probably my favourite I wrote during that time. “Chickadees” I wrote to be presented at the New Year’s Levee at Government House, the home of New Brunswick’s Lieutenant-Governor. The chickadee is our provincial bird, and I had a lot of fun writing it—they really are “emojis//of cheerfulness.”
DC: Were these Laureate poems different from poems you had previously written?
IL: I’m just now realizing that perhaps the laureate poems are my two most hopeful poems in the collection (it might have something to do with the different audience?). That’s probably not a bad note to end on!
This interview was produced in collaboration with the English Department of the University of the Fraser Valley.
Ian LeTourneau is the author of one previous collection, Terminal Moraine (2008) and two chapbooks, Defining Range (2006) and Core Sample (2017). From 2016–18, he was the City of Fredericton’s Cultural Laureate. By day he is the Managing Editor of The Fiddlehead and Studies in Canadian Literature, and by night he is publisher of the chapbook press Emergency Flash Mob Press. He lives in Fredericton, NB.
Publisher: Gaspereau Press Ltd. (May 1, 2025)
Paperback 8″ x 5″
ISBN: 9781554472741
Dakota Casey is an undergraduate English major at the University of the Fraser Valley. She currently lives in Abbotsford with her fiancé.
