A novel can survive a careless sentence. A poem usually cannot, because a poem is the form in which every choice is exposed: which word, which image, where the line ends, how much empty page surrounds it. That is why reading poetry can feel difficult at first, and why it rewards you more than almost any other form once you slow down. Contemporary First Nations, Métis and Inuit poets use all of these tools, and some use them to do things only poetry can: setting a Cree word on a line by itself so the reader has to stop, or erasing most of an old government document so that the few words left behind tell the truth the document hid. This topic gives you the vocabulary and a step-by-step method. The example poems here were written for this lesson so you can practise on complete stanzas; for real poems, read the poets named below in their own collections.
Imagery
nookomis sets the kettle on
before the sun is up.
Steam climbs the cold window
like a road
I have not learned
to walk.Imagery is language that appeals to the senses, and in a poem it usually does more than decorate. Start with the literal picture: a grandmother, a kettle, steam on a cold window before dawn. Then look for the figure of speech, here the simile comparing the steam to 'a road / I have not learned / to walk'. The comparison turns a domestic moment into a statement about inheritance: the grandmother's world is a path the speaker can see but has not yet travelled. Notice what the image is made of, too. Steam is warm, visible and fleeting, so the road it forms is beautiful but easy to lose, which raises the stakes of learning it now. Good image analysis always moves through those three layers: what is literally there, what it is compared to, and what the qualities of the image suggest.
Line, line break and white space
| Feature | What to look for | Effects it often creates |
|---|---|---|
| Line break | The word that ends a line, and the word that begins the next | Puts weight on the last and first words; can create a double meaning across the break |
| Enjambment | A sentence that runs over the end of a line without punctuation | Pulls the reader forward, creates suspense, or delays a key word |
| End-stopped line | A line that ends with punctuation | A pause or sense of completion; a steady, deliberate pace |
| Caesura | A pause in the middle of a line, often a comma, dash or gap | Breaks rhythm, isolates a phrase, imitates hesitation or breath |
| White space | Indentation, gaps inside lines, short lines, wide margins | Silence, absence, slowness; space for what cannot be said |
| Stanza break | A blank line between groups of lines | A shift in time, place, speaker or thought |
Voice and code-switching
The speaker of a poem is the voice that talks in it, and it is not automatically the poet: even an autobiographical poem shapes a self for the page. Ask who the speaker is addressing and in what tone. Marilyn Dumont, a Métis poet from Alberta, uses direct address and sharp irony in A Really Good Brown Girl (1996), including a poem addressed to Sir John A. Macdonald. Billy-Ray Belcourt, from Driftpile Cree Nation, won the Griffin Poetry Prize for This Wound Is a World (2017), which moves between lyric poetry and critical thinking about love, grief and queer Indigenous life. Code-switching means moving between languages, or between varieties of a language, within one text. Louise Bernice Halfe, a Cree poet from Saddle Lake Cree Nation and Canada's Parliamentary Poet Laureate from 2021 to 2022, writes in Cree and English together, from Bear Bones & Feathers (1994) onward. When a poem switches into an Indigenous language, ask what the switch does: who understands it, what cannot be translated, and what it means to bring a language that governments tried to suppress back onto the page.
my mother says nibi
the way you'd say a sister's name —
not water, not resource, not supply,
nibi, who remembers
every hand that ever reached for her.Erasure and found poetry
Found poetry takes language from a source that is not a poem — a newspaper, a law, a letter, a report — and rearranges or reframes it so it can be read as one. Erasure poetry is a kind of found poetry made by removing words from a source page and leaving the survivors in their original order, often in their original positions with blank space around them. Nisga'a poet Jordan Abel built Injun (2016), which won the Griffin Poetry Prize, from public-domain western novels, searching them for a racist slur and reworking the language around it. For Indigenous poets these forms are a way of talking back to the documents that described Indigenous peoples without them: the source's own words are turned against it, and the white space shows what was silenced. When you read an erasure, compare it with its source, look at what was kept, and ask what the removed words were doing.
SOURCE (an imagined official report, written for this lesson):
The agent reports that the children are quiet at the school, and that
in time they will not remember the songs their mothers sang at home.
ERASURE:
the children
will
remember the songs their mothers sang