“We are made of what we see, the places we frequent, but also of what we are told about them. The accounts of landscapes given to us by fiction, documentaries, news stories, and our traveling friends gradually constitute within us a kind of inner country where we gather images from the outside world to create our own personal geography.” Véronique Côté

A kind of fog has settled behind my eyes and between my ears lately. If last year we had been asked to wait at home for two weeks, of course we wouldn't have wanted to believe that patience would turn into fear, boredom, and dismay for the months to come. I felt like I was eating the same soup reheated in the microwave twice. How can I cope with days that paint such a bland, beige picture?

 

If I am still alive and in my right mind, it is because I went back to basics by focusing on what was poetic within my four walls.

 

I would be lying if I said I came up with the idea myself, but it was while revisiting Véronique Côté's essay * La vie habitable* (Documents, Atelier 10, 2014) that I found renewed inspiration. Côté explains that survival requires poetry, that it serves to pause everything in order to reconnect with oneself and stand before a mirror to find what she calls "wild answers" to questions that aren't even asked, such as "How do we live?" and "How do we live together?" I see it as a call to embrace the lightness of everyday life, suggesting that if I take the time to infuse poetry into "objects and places with initially narrow purposes," they will infuse reality with their shimmering existence.

 

So when I write poetry , I'm not talking about those grand gestures that stop the earth from turning, I'm talking about the little things that make everyday life more beautiful and simpler: repotting plants in fresh soil, traveling with the 50 steps that separate me from my favorite convenience store where you win the lottery when there's red wine, even if it's cheap, being enchanted by the cacophonous voices of the Greek cafe under my balcony or taking the longest route to get from point A to point B so I can finish my podcast right when I get off the bus.

 

And if I dread another lockdown, I console myself and rejoice in knowing that poetry will be waiting for me like a buoy in the ocean.

Marianne Pépin

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