Chimwemwe Undi is a free press in Winnipeg

Chimwemwe Undi is a poet, editor and lawyer. He is the 2023-24 Winnipeg Poet Laureate and won the John Hirsch Emerging Writer Award at the 2022 Manitoba Book Awards.

His first book, Scientific wonderPublished by Toronto's Anansi Publishing House, it will launch on April 16 at McNally Robinson Booksellers' Grant Park location. Charlene is hosted by Charlene Diehl, director of the Winnipeg International Writers Festival.

Free Press: A copy of the jacket Scientific wonder His poems, he says, “consider what has been left out of the history and ongoing realities of Winnipeg, Manitoba.” Can you open it up a little bit for me?

Chimwemwe Undi: I'm interested in the stories we tell ourselves about what place is, especially when that place is a form of home, and even when those stories aren't in front of our eyes. I am interested in the tension between the narrative told to immigrants like my parents when they arrived here about Canada and their experience of the nation-state.

I'm thinking of something like Portage and Main or Portage Place or rivers – on the surface they are easy emblems that we use to call the city, but in reality are the result or product of politics and capitalism, urban planning. supports a certain type of citizen, a certain notion of what a “citizen” of this city or province or country is, more than a legal definition.

I'm interested in the difference between how a person in a therapist's office describes their family home in one day.

Supplementing formal education with Indigenous History Month book lists and the like is one thing, but I'd like to understand why this supplement was necessary in the first place.

FP: To me “R. v. Grant”, 2009 Can you tell me about the case where the Supreme Court ruled that Toronto police had arbitrarily and unlawfully detained a black man for “behaving suspiciously” in a “high-crime” neighborhood, prompting a three-verse ruling?

CU: The erasure poems in the collection are made from decisions of the Supreme Court of Canada where the affected party is a black person, but their black impact has not been specifically addressed or questioned by the court or the majority. About the classes I learned about these solutions.

I was interested in how erasure can be used to do the opposite of redaction: to reveal rather than hide, to make documents speak and focus on what they are meant to erase and the tradition of their creation.

FP: Tell me about Dean Gunnarson's poems. What about the Winnipeg-born escapist was a good dress code to write poems about?

CU: I wrote the bulk of these poems during two residencies in Reading Mountain National Park, through the Manitoba Arts Council's Deep Bay program. I went there with the intention of writing a book, this book, but I'd never done it before, so I didn't know how.

My husband found a deck of cards with pictures of Dean Gunnarson in one of the drawers. I had never heard of him before, but I started reading about him and the poems came to me, as they do sometimes. I'm fascinated by it and the idea of ​​a life designed to escape limitations, whether those limitations are imagined or self-made.

FP: Tell us about working with editor Kevin Connolly Scientific wonder. What questions did he ask you/your poems?

CU: I loved working with Kevin! He immediately understood what I was aiming for and helped me get there without getting in my way, which I think is a great editor/poet relationship.

Good poets don't necessarily make good editors, but my respect for his poetry, which is so unique to mine, has pushed me to expand the words, phrases, cadences that I actually accept and that are readily available to me. We also went record shopping and eating empanadas in Toronto, the perfect editor/poet relationship.

FP: You're in the middle of a period as Winnipeg's Poet Laureate, succeeding Duncan Mercredi and Dee Brandt. Tell me, what does this role mean to you as a poet, as a Winnipegger?

CU: It has been an honor and a privilege to be the Winnipeg Poet Laureate! It was so much fun bringing poems to as many rooms as I invited and talking to people about the role of poetry in their lives.

That was my favorite part – people come up to me and tell me that they used to write poems or still do or read them secretly. It happens everywhere I go, I try to go everywhere.

It is a real and deep joy to be an ambassador of the art I love and the community of artists I love.

Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg/Condition 1 writer.