The Interview : Karen Solie

Rachna Singh, Editor of The Wise Owl, speaks with Karen Solie, one of the most distinctive and lauded voices in contemporary poetry, and a 2025 T. S. Eliot Prize winning poet for her luminous new collection Wellwater. Born in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, and raised on her family’s farm in the province’s southwest, Solie has carved a remarkable poetic trajectory across two decades. Her debut Short Haul Engine (2001) was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize and won the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Modern and Normal (2005) and The Road In Is Not the Same Road Out (2015) were both finalists for the Trillium Poetry Prize. Pigeon (2009) garnered the Griffin Poetry Prize, the Trillium Poetry Prize, and the Pat Lowther Award. Her fifth collection, The Caiplie Caves (2019), was shortlisted for both the T. S. Eliot and the Derek Walcott Prizes, and her selected poems, The Living Option (Bloodaxe, 2013), was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Solie’s contributions to poetry have been recognized with the Latner Poetry Prize, the Canada Council’s Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award, and a 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship. She has held distinguished residencies at York University, UC Berkeley, and Massey College, and is currently a half-time Reader in Creative Writing at the University of St Andrews.

Thank you, Karen, for talking with us. It is a privilege to delve into your work.

It's a privilege to be asked!

RS: Your poetry has long been admired for the way it listens—to the stubborn eloquence of llandscapes, to the freighted histories beneath them, and to the strange, discordant music of the present. In Wellwater, what kinds of silences or murmurs did you find yourself listening for, and in what ways did they modulate the book’s tonal atmosphere?

KS: Perhaps this is true of artistic process generally – it definitely describes my previous book, The Caiplie Caves – but I didn't know what I was listening for until I heard it. While writing the poems that appear in Wellwater, someone I hadn't thought of much, really, in many years, a relative long dead, occurred to me (to use the verb that seems most appropriate). She just appeared in my mind as I was literally staring at the walls in a temporary rental whose colour seemed to off-gas 1970s rural Catholicism. Aspects of her difficult, modest life mingled with details – real, imagined, and told to me – from my own, and others. I was raised Catholic, with all the gothic concatenations of mortal claustrophobia and mystical expanse that involves, and the stubborn idea of God's presence and absence which can be so painful. Premonitions and regret, consequences and foreshadowing, were already swirling around in the time of the writing during and post-pandemic; and when I lost some good friends later, there was a degree of magical thinking. There was anger, too, at the greed and corruption that wants to keep people in a state of precarity and division as they're easier to control that way. The book is about loss in many respects. Though we can feel reduced by loss and sorrow, confined by it and to it, I also wanted to gesture toward expanses of love and potential, and even to anger directed where it should be directed, which it often isn't.

RS: This collection is steeped in the anxieties of our time, ecological fragility, economic unease, the instability that shadows daily life. Yet the poems remain intimate, meticulous, lyric. How did you navigate the challenge of translating such vast crises into the scale and compression poetry demands without diminishing either their scope or their complexity?

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KS: Thank you very much. I don't know how well I have navigated that challenge. But I do think that particulars, ideas, side by side can generate an arc between them, and that energy is the poem. In "Merry Christmas from Hegel" Anne Carson calls this 'speculation:Speculation being the effort to grasp reality in its interactive entirety. The function of a sentence like; 'Reason is Spirit'  was not to assert a fact (he said) but to lay Reason side by side with Spirit and allow their meanings to tenderly mingle in speculation".  Metonyms can open like boxes and release implications of the whole. A statement of belief casts a shadow of doubt. Clarity breeds ambiguity. On a technical level I suppose I tried to pay attention, in syntax and line, to what silence could offer as a space, a time, for speculation.

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RS: Place has always been a tensile thread in your poetics, from the wide-angled quiet of the Saskatchewan prairies to the rugged, salt-bitten edges of the Scottish coast. Did moving between these geographies, literal or imagined, open unfamiliar pathways into the book’s inquiries into value, vulnerability, and renewal?

KS: I've been moving between temporary dwellings in Canada, and in Scotland, for many years now. The Caiplie Caves was largely set in Scotland and poems from The Road In Is Not the Same Road Out were written there. The pathways aren't unfamiliar, necessarily, though they have become more precarious and the light is failing. The same challenges – unaffordable housing, inaccessible health care, reduction and automation of programs and services – affect Canada and Scotland as they do
many, or most, other places. Money is its own country. The situation has only become more urgent. We're at a crisis point in a cycle that keeps repeating. We all know this. In some respects "value" is not even about exchange anymore so much as it is about sacrifice – destroying everyone, everything, one's own principles, in order to 'win'. The hope is that we can find it in ourselves to resist the divisions we're manipulated into – and create, for one reason or another – in order to reaffirm what
we do truly value. It's less idealism than survival now.

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RS: Your poems are known for their supple yet exacting language; spare, intricate, and alert to the world’s granular textures. Was there anything different about how you approached your craft (in terms of diction, cadence, or image-making), during the writing of Wellwater?

KS: I may have become more attuned to silence writing The Caiplie Caves, more drawn to, at times, a straightforward syntax that is nonetheless strange – or, perhaps, more strange in its straightforwardness, an unfamiliar presence in the familiar structure. Poets I return to do this, and I try to learn from them. One's thinking and ways of perceiving and, for lack of a better word, "voice,"
change over time – at least, that's the hope – and differences in the writing might reflect this. I like details, the names of things, how significance accumulates, crescendos and decrescendos of syllables. But there are times a person needs, wants, to speak more loudly than at others, and perhaps in Wellwater the quiet was difficult and strange and often just what was there.

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RS: You work closely with emerging writers at the Banff Centre and at St Andrews. Does the pedagogical space (its conversations or questions) impact your creative process? In what ways, if any, does teaching alter your relationship with a poem-in-progress?

KS: The Banff Centre dissolved the five-week Writing Studio program in 2021, sadly. My conversations with students address the same questions and problems I have in my own writing. I don't anticipate this changing. Some of the advice I offer, however sincerely I believe it, is advice I wish I could put into practice more easily. To not overdetermine the poem, for example, to follow
where it leads and be open to surprises that might even undermine the original intent. It sounds flaky, and maybe it is in part, but it's also possible only through meticulous attention to technique, to all of what phrasing and structure might suggest. I see old questions and problems through different lenses in working with different students, in different situations. You know you're making progress when the writing gets more difficult. I don't know who needs to hear that more – them or me. I continually encounter students whose commitment to writing and thinking well gives me hope. On a practical level, when I'm teaching I don't have much time to read for pleasure or to write, so that slows things down considerably.

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RS: Wellwater has already entered a luminous public life, from the Forward Prize to the T. S. Eliot shortlist. How do you think about such recognition alongside the solitary, private labour of writing?

KS: I'm certainly grateful for it, and it is encouraging. When it comes down to it, though, it doesn't make it any easier to write a poem.

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RS: Throughout your work runs a subtle yet persistent interrogation of what we value (culturally, ecologically, artistically). Did Wellwater in any way redefine your concept of “value,” or did it crystallize thoughts that had been gathering quietly over years of writing and living?

KS: I don't know about "crystallize," as I'm as unsure about most things now as I ever have been, and possibly more so. I do suspect, generally speaking, that we're increasingly distracted from what is valuable to us as humans among other humans and among other creatures in favour of what we feel we are entitled to as individuals. Humans have always been greedy and self-interested, but distraction from the common good is an accelerant. It's a tactic. At the risk of quoting myself, a poem in Wellwater called "Yarrow" references "a time when scarcity is a strategy" Distracting people with the message that they're put upon, not getting what they're entitled to because other people are getting things, has legitimised and popularised – certainly more so than I've ever seen in Canada – the sentiment among groups of people that if a social program, for example, means that those seen as "undeserving" will benefit, they don't want to benefit either, they'd rather see it destroyed. An idea of value that appeals to the best in us, rather than the worst in us, is dangerous to power. And I have to believe in the best of us; there's evidence of that, too.

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RS: And finally, Wellwater carries within it the ache of profound personal loss. The grief of losing your father and close friends seems to refract through the book’s textures and tempos. How did this personal loss reshape the poems, formally, emotionally, or spiritually?

KS: Some of the poems I wrote prior to my dad's death, and prior to the deaths of my friends, read differently to me when revising the book. Some details, statements, some entire poems, seemed less important, and were cut. Phrasings were modulated. After Dad died, I finished the book because I didn't know what else to do, even though I felt sometimes I didn't have the heart for it. But however those poems turned out, I also maybe rediscovered that heart – whatever "heart" means,
however it's been altered – in writing them.

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Thank you, Karen, for sharing your insights and for opening a window into the making of Wellwater. We wish you abundant creative fulfilment in the years ahead, and look forward to the many poems yet to come.

Thank you for your very generously phrased questions.