Bringing together artists and poets to create beautiful poetry postcards, that are distributed throughout Little Free Libraries in Saanich. The project celebrates local poets and artists, connects visual art with the written word, and brings poetry into the everyday places and spaces of our community.
Poetry Postcard No. 1
About the Poet
Kath Healing (they/them) is a queer, agender, multi-disabled poet and writer based on Vancouver Island. Their work moves between page and performance, exploring what happens when lived experience collides with the systems meant to name, classify, diagnose, explain, or contain it. Drawing on disability, gender, class, trauma, and the strange bureaucracies of everyday life, their writing is interested in what survives translation and what refuses it. Originally from the UK, they now live and write in Canada.
About the Artist
I hand wrote and re-wrote this piece by Kath Healing many times as I tried to figure out how best to put a vision to these words. What I love about this piece, and poetry in general, is the way it finds the line between saying the least with the most potent words. I felt that watercolour would be the best way to match the word choice, both emotional and deliberate, speaking to the depths of the human and more-than-human experience. Collage became an important way of mimicking what can happen when working on any great writing: the act of cutting up, the power of the edit. The ways in which removing extra detail can enhance a work of art, and the act of re-arranging. When working on this project I was inspired by the importance of creativity in daily life and how vital it is to have the handwritten word and act of painting in my life; those two actions allow me to connect with my soul. Many thanks to Kath Healing for the beautiful poetry excerpt from ‘Moth's Whimsy’, Jesse Holth the inaugural Saanich Community Poet for thinking up this wonderful project, Saanich for supporting the arts in our community and each one of you for engaging by taking this postcard and reading this poem.