“Praise Talk, Appreciation, is the Basic Language of Poetry”: A Conversation With Di Brandt

Note: A longer version of this interview is forthcoming in Laurence Hutchman’s, In the Writers’ Words: Conversations with Eight Canadian Poets, Vol. III (Guernica Editions, 2026).              

LH: I met the charismatic writer Martín Prechtel at Robert Bly’s The Great Mother and New Father Conference in Nobleboro, Maine, in 2001. In the unnamed poem “after Martín Prechtel” in Now You Care, you talk about him and his vision. You agree with him that there are still “spiritually intact communities on the earth.” What kind of influence did he have on you?

DB: I studied introductory Mayan shamanism with Martín Prechtel in Santa Fe, New Mexico one summer. It was a deeply influential course. And he’s an amazing, eloquent, challenging teacher. He was teaching us “spiritual ecology” in the Mayan mode. I had already thought about many of the things he was teaching us in rigorous exercises he assigned us each day, but working so hard for many hours each day to engrain practical engagements with the spirits of nature and the divine was galvanizing for me. After that I was able to think and write about my emergent “indigenizing” spirituality in a more open way, and to practice it more specifically in my own daily life and teaching.

One of the many practices he taught us was the extravagant praise talk of the Mayans. He pointed out that praise talk has become a narrow practice in modernity, used mostly to court a sweetheart (briefly), or sell cars. He taught us that there is a sensitive soul in everyone, in every living thing, a shy soul, that loves beauty and gentleness and seeks kindness and appreciation and love, even the elements, the air, water, fire, earth. And that beautiful praise talk addressed directly to them, with specific appreciations for them, can help gentle the world, greatly, for us, and for them, and for the whole. Of course praise talk, appreciation, is the basic language of poetry, and it was also a much valued practice in the traditionalist Mennonite Darpa I grew up in, and so this extravagant way of speaking and feeling and acting toward others was something both deeply familiar to me, and a great relief to hear affirmed in a much grander and deeper way even than I knew about.

Learning to write poetry in the modern way meant learning to pare away the flowery adjectives and adverbs. Daphne Marlatt, my early creative writing teacher, said things like “You can’t use three adjectives in a row, it’s just not done,” and “Ok, you can use the word ‘spectacular’ but only once.” (Once in a poem, or once in a book, or once in a lifetime, I wondered, ha ha.) But if you think of iconic pared away modernist poems like William Carlos Williams’ “The Red Wheelbarrow,” you can see how he sneaks in praise and the appreciation of beauty, of colour and form and the sustaining interrelationship of the elements and the human even so. Tomson Highway is a brilliant artist of praise talk. Listen to him talk sometime. He is incredibly extravagant in his engagements. I love that.

LH: Tanis Macdonald writes, “[Di Brandt’s] work broaches complex and volatile subject matter, and is valued for her assertion that poetry must be at its core concerned with the political power of language.” Can you speak more about this?

DB: I was surprised that Tanis Macdonald picked Speaking of Power as the title for her little teaching anthology of my poetry for Wilfrid Laurier University Press’s teaching series, when there are so many tender subjects my poetry is interested in, the erotic, the land, the maternal, the wild beauty of nature and our own human experience, especially in childhood, the ecopoetic. The weather, wildflowers, dogs, the river. Barefoot pleasures. And occasionally steel toed boots. Also language tactics, how to bring the mythopoetic sensibility of spiritually infused orality onto the contemporary page without losing its flavour. The hard hat. The megaphone. The plastic goggles. The umbrella. How to heal from violence, how to transform situations from hostile or unforgiving ones to softer, more creative ones, openings into beautiful new ways of being, that are fed by the old ways of being, by the ancestors who are watching us, praying for us, supplicating us, watching over us. If you read the Afterword I wrote for that little anthology, you can see how I talked about my evolving poetics at the time, a statement I’m still very proud of.

Maybe all that adds up to “speaking of power” in the way Tanis MacDonald meant it. I should add that I’m very grateful to Tanis for the many fabulous essays and reviews she’s published about my work. She’s been one of my most attentive and perceptive critics over several decades.

LH: In the introduction to So this is the world & here I am in it, you speak of the devastating effects of poisoning of farmland by fertilizers in Reinland. In the poem “Zone: <le Détroit>” from Now You Care, you argue that people’s industrializing is a major cause of health problems. To find an answer, you address First Nation’s Chief Tecumseh with the question: “How can we recover?”

DB: “Who will sing us back into—” is the question I ask in the poem you’re referring to, calling on Chief Tecumseh to come back to us “from your green grave,” to sing us back into sacredness, connectedness to the earth, to the divine, to the life spirit that makes life possible. The “Zone” poems are set in the hyper-industrialized landscape of southern Ontario, where I was living when I wrote them.

How is it that the “improvements” of modernity have come with so much toxic poisoning of the landscape and our own bodies? Encountering the scary extent of the poisoning of the land there made me understand and value the resistance to modernity that my own people, the Mennonites, tried to enact until the 1960s or so. They’ve more or less capitulated to all that now, few of them are environmentalists in the old way anymore.

Still, that was the vision I grew up with, and it helped me to remember the Indigenous people and ways of southern Ontario, still living in a certain environmentalist resistance to this gradual poisoning of the land and ourselves there. And everywhere. I think it’s sad that the Mennonites gave up on this vision at the very moment it was becoming interesting and valuable and necessary to the modern mainstream. I’m glad the Indigenous people have figured out how to keep those old ways of respect and reverence for the earth and self-restraint and communalism alive for us all to relearn, now.

LH: In an online interview in Canadian Mennonite, you said, “Like most poets, I began paying attention to poetry very early, with Bible readings and poetry recitations as part of our family German language and culture.” Can you speak about the German influence in your life and the year you spent in Berlin?

DB: Our family language was not German, it was Plautdietsch. People used to say that was a local dialect variant of German, but now some people are suggesting that it’s a much more ancient language than German (with its many shifts over the centuries). It’s a lot like Yiddish, and Dutch, and Middle English, as in Chaucer, and the Scandinavian languages. Some people say it’s the Ur-language of all northern European variations spoken now.  Our church services were held in German, and much of our inherited poetic and folksinging repertoire, robustly practiced in the Darpa, was German.

I spent a sabbatical in Berlin because I had met a Berlin playwright, Jenny Erpenbeck, at a writers’ retreat in upstate New York, and translated her famous play, Katzen haben sieben Leben, into English, at her invitation. (It was later published in PAJ, an American theatre magazine, as Cats Have Nine Lives.) Literary translation, as you may know, involves a very deep engagement with the soul of the writer, and the text, so to speak. And in this case, I felt the play reflected a completely different sensibility and outlook than the kind of theatre we’re used to in Canada. It was hard and shiny and violent and unsentimental, and yet there was a bright throughline of … hope? Going on despite difficult and dark times? Her play was one hour long, but had played for three years in the Deutsche Theatre. I wanted to go to Berlin and find out what that theatre scene was like, how that kind of dark playfulness was created.

But when I got to Berlin, I found it was a very resonant “roots” place for me. The Mennonites I grew up with were from northern Europe, from the lands now bordered by the Netherlands, Belgium, and northwest Germany. We were exiled from northern Europe in the desperate aftermath of the Inquisition, and spent centuries in eastern Europe and then in Ukraine. All that time we managed to keep our old outlook and language and customs. We came to Canada, to western Canada, in the late 1800s and worked hard to establish ourselves here.

Tomson Highway has spoken and written extensively about the sensibility and social economy of Cree, never abstract, never earnest, never controlling, always open to the comedic and multidimensional and transformational, and how important it is not to give up those qualities, or indeed to lose the language as we all move into the world language of English in the modern time. Those qualities apply to Plautdietsch as well, and if you think about it, the Romantic project in poetry was to somehow recover those qualities as the world moved into the modern.

We were a bit embarrassed about our High German language practices in the Darpa by the time I was growing up. German was not so much a spoken language, as the language of the Bible and church and the venerated Romantic poets. We occasionally had German teachers in school who were echt Deutsch, having grown up in modern Germany, and they enjoyed telling us how archaic our German was. Still, when I spent that sabbatical year in Berlin, I was proud to know something of the language and tried to get away with pretending I was an echt Berliner. (It never worked, though I kept trying. I looked the part, so as long as I kept my mouth shut, I was good to go.)

I spent a lot of time at the internet café at the famous city centre, Alexanderplatz. All the world, it seemed, came through that café to check on their loved ones on the rented computers. (It was before the era of cell phones.) None of us could speak Hochdeutsch accurately. We all stumbled through it in our various accents and sentence fragments, accompanied by sign language like pointing and other gestures. That was a really educational experience for me, finding out there was a whole other way of speaking and living in German that was not about precise grammar and diction and syntax, the way we’d been taught in school, hearkening always back to our lost ancestral homelands, but rather about communicating clumsily yet efficiently, in a kind of world German patois, in many accents. I loved that! I became a world citizen there.

LH: John Thompson and Phyllis Webb were excellent practitioners of the ghazal. You adapted it in your way in the sequence “Dog Days in Maribor.” Why did you call the poems anti-ghazals?

DB: That was Phyllis Webb’s term, to give permission to fool around with the form, I think. I was going to write “after Phyllis Webb” but then I thought, wait, it should be “after Phyllis Webb, after John Thompson, after Ghalib, after Haziz, after …” So I thought perhaps the “anti” could suffice to evoke the whole interesting intercultural genealogy of the form. Perhaps I should have spelled it out more. An interesting form to play with. Did you read Tanis Macdonald’s interview with me on my ghazal practice? I was going on and on about how the disjunctive sequencing of couplets allows you to disrupt normal linear habits of thought and writing, and how much fun it is to find out what the throughlines are, nonetheless.

She was interested in those throughlines, and challenged me to admit to a sort of pattern in life, despite its disjunctions. Or something like that. “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will,” as Shakespeare’s Hamlet put it. Is there? If you live long enough, you begin to see the larger patterns at play in everything, how incidents and tendencies and connections tend to repeat themselves, the large replicative patterns at play in nature. The intricate ways we are all interconnected. The precise magic balance of elements that makes life possible and sustainable in the ongoing.

But I think I was interested in exploring the ghazal for other reasons at the time. I was travelling a lot then, with my poetry career, and engaging briefly (though deeply) with many different people and cultures and communities and landscapes, and histories and social codes and general vibes … how to gather myself together with that much fragmentation and constant engagement with the new? The ghazal was a great form for that!

LH: What drew you to the writing of Laozi’s Dao De Jing? In your book, Glitter & fall, which is subtitled Laozi’s Dao De Jing, Transinhalations, you speak about the poems, contextualizing them in your own life with reflections on the prairie, living next to the Red River, making allusions to your Mennonite background and other literary works. What did you discover in writing this book?

DB: Ah, the Dao De Jing. What a magical, sacred little book, what a magnificent visionary tradition and community it engendered. I was intrigued by the idea that the main sacred text of a whole spiritual tradition could be this small simple sounding book of poems. And then I was encountering a lot of visiting Chinese professors in those years. I was privileged to hold the first Canada Research Chair in the Creative Arts in a Canadian university, at Brandon University, in southwestern Manitoba. We had an exchange program with Dalian University there. I never went to China, but for a few years, China came to me!

The Dao De Jing was somewhat familiar to me from the old counterculture days of my youth, when people like Alan Watts and Ram Dass and the Beatles were transporting liberatory spiritual strategies into North America from it, non-Western anti-heroic, feminizing concepts like “going with the flow” and “let it be” and “be like water.” I found the Dao was quite different, rereading it now, from how we understood it then, though. There was nothing anarchist or “drop out” about it. It was, in fact, a carefully considered set of careful prescriptions for how to live on the earth without violence, without fear, without domination, without resistance, based on a grand vision of the harmonic relationships that sustain the cosmos, and our place in it.

I had the idea of retranslating the version I was reading, with the aim of bringing the concepts closer to home for me, transporting them into the here and now, on the Canadian prairies, in the maternal feminine. Many contemporary translations of the Dao De Jing do the opposite, they ditch the ancient local references to the emperor and the city gates, for example, to try to fashion a generic practice that can be done anywhere, even handily in the locality-denying globalizing postmodern. I wanted to do something else. I wanted to retain all that local colour, but by transposing into the local colour of my own time and place. And I wanted to feminize the text, by changing all the gendered references from “he” to “she.” The earth became She, the Divine became She, the emperor became Queen, the people became women.

I thought that might stretch the meanings of the text too far, but just the opposite happened: the whole thing opened for me, in the spiritual and imaginative sense! Later I found out that many people in fact regard the Dao De Jing and Daoism, the practice that came out of it, to be “feminine.” Some like that about it, some don’t. For me, there was a powerful recurring goddess presence in it, which is also part of the Daoist tradition, though not so much in this text as such.

I borrowed the term “transinhalations” from Robert Majzels, who was also working with ancient Chinese texts and transposing them into the present, though he did it with more formal experimentation. I wanted to keep the old stances of reverence and humility and homage to the Divine. And to honour the Daoist tradition while engaging as a visiting poet with the poems. What a surprise it all was! I began having visions, and found out that many people working with this tradition or in it have visions. What a powerful text and tradition it is!

I am very grateful for the opportunity to create this collection. It was deeply transformative for me in the spiritual sense. I didn’t become a practicing Daoist in the conventional sense, but yet I think I did acquire some Daoist understandings and imaginative habits that have stayed with me. The ones I perhaps cherish most are the ones most different from my own Mennonite Christian Darp upbringing. The ones about removing yourself from the hustle and bustle and center of things socially to engage more deeply with the invisible Divine, to draw it (Her) down into the self, the life, the surround, for enlightening purposes. Well, that’s the poet’s life, essentially, isn’t it, too. How lovely to find a text that offered so many inspirational passages for reflection and transinhalation.

LH: There is a sense of joy and celebration in “Gracias” and other poems from Walking to Mojácar written in Spain. What in particular created this sense of gratitude in your poems?

DB: Don’t you think there’s a sense of joy and celebration in all my poetry? Even though there’s also sometimes great grief and lamentation, and sorrow. And sometimes rage. Well, life is beautiful, and fun, and exciting, isn’t it? Even though it’s also sometimes dangerous and streaked with pain. Why isn’t everybody dancing, as Winnipeg writer Maara Haas asked in the title of one of her poetry collections.

The culture I was brought up in, the traditionalist Mennonite, was in many ways still a ceremonial culture, in which we lived our lives through our communally shared rounds of celebration and ritualized lament. Personal feelings were not considered important or primary the way they are nowadays in modernity. When the ritualized ceremonial rounds were flourishing beautifully enough, you didn’t need personal feelings, you could sink into that communal singing, and joy, and forget about yourself, and be uplifted by it. Certainly we were never allowed to complain, about anything!

We had a hymn, “Praise God from whom all blessings flow,/Praise him all creatures here below.” But I always misheard it as “Praise all the creatures here below.” Praise is a suspect practice nowadays, among many people, but traditional cultures valued praise, however ritualized, greatly. Martín Prechtel, the Mayan shaman I studied with in Santa Fe, taught us lavish Mayan greetings in his school. Nowadays we use fancy language of praise in very limited instances, in romantic courtship, if at all. In commercial advertising mostly! He taught us the value of lavish courtship, of the shy spirit in everyone, in everything, every living thing.

Sensitive people know about this. Poets know about this. But all people could be taught to talk praise talk the way Mayans are, on a daily basis, in everything. What if we could persuade scientists they need to learn the language of polite, gracious, lavish courtship to engage with their subjects of study, wouldn’t that be transformational?! I’ve been rereading Carolyn Merchant’s book, The Death of Nature, where she documents the downgrading of thinking about nature in European intellectual circles in the 17^th and 18^th centuries. Traditionally, nature was a goddess to be worshipped and revered and treated with grace and humility and gratitude. After that nature was an inert dead thing, to be manipulated and improved and changed however men wanted. How sad. The contemporary environmental movement has a lot of work to do to recuperate more reverential ways of relating to nature. Singing to the trees, for example. Singing to the cows. To the fields. They would love that. We wouldn’t need so much artificial and chemical intervention if we could reconnect with their spirits in a courting, gracious, appreciative way again.

The new thing in those Mojácar poems, I think, was the conscious intention to write “praise poems,” addressed to actual people, focussing on their best attributes. People I didn’t know very well. There was very little of the “personal” in it. I was just observing them and extravagantly celebrating their best attributes. It occurred to me that I had begun to be swept up into the modern habit of ironic complaint, when in fact I had been brought up in the traditional poetic practice of “praise and lament.” How could such a privileged, wealthy culture as the modern be so consumed with complaint, complaint, complaint? I chose consciously to return to those old stances of celebration and gratitude and praise, even in the midst of sorrow and fear, and it shifted something in me, my writing ever since then has been much less centered in my own experience, more able to accommodate others’ experiences in an intersubjective, collaborative, and intersubjectively, earthly, cosmically, divinely honouring way, I think.

LH: Can you talk about musicality in poetry generally, and how you achieve such rhythmic and musical effects in your poetry?

DB: That Darp upbringing was intensely musical as well as poetic! Our church hymns were sung in robust four-part harmony. Our poetry and music loving Oma insisted on beautiful group singing at family gatherings. The women sang or hummed all day long while they worked. The children were all expected to carry tunes and harmonize well from an early age, and were often featured in choirs and duets and trios. We all knew a vast repertoire of songs by heart, both church hymns, and children’s songs, and folk songs. It was a singing culture!

People often ask me about “musicating” the language, to use Julia Kristeva’s word, but it’s not something I do consciously. All that rich musical training comes into my writing naturally. In fact, I’ve been chided for bringing musicality into my academic writing, where many people feel it does not belong. I tried taking it out, but I was dismally unsuccessful. Instead, I developed my own poetic style of writing essays, which got me narrowly through grad school, and has served me well ever since! I’m not the only person who likes to write poetic prose! Smaro Kamboureli edits a Writers as Critics series at NeWest Press, and chose me for her 10^th Anniversary publication, titled So this is the world & here I am in it (2006). That sort of tickled me pink!

Interviewed by Laurence Hutchman

Jack Simpson

Published online on February 10, 2026