The following interview is part seven of an eight part series of conversations with BC poets. All interviews were conducted by Rob Taylor.
from Crowd Source
late summer to early spring in tributaries
family forms destined for consolidationsometimes a cloak above Grandview Highway
in parallel commute to the dissociate autos below
(contents possibly alert and moved)sometimes they fly past my balcony storeys up
could I lean outwe would brush feathers and remember each other
rarely conspicuously alone across open countryrarely flapping in particularly straight lines
maneuvering as the fray demandswings broad and rounded with the wing tip
feathers spread like fingersa patient, methodical flapping movement is air
we hear the moving, rare in the city to hear the air
Reprinted with permission from
Crowd Source
(Talonbooks, 2025)
Rob Taylor: Your new book, the long poem Crowd Source, explores the daily migration of Vancouver’s crows (sometimes up to 15,000 of them!) to their roosting place at Still Creek in Burnaby. You write about visiting Still Creek, “Thousands were they to turn on me, / could whittle me down to the bones.” Could you tell us a little about your first experience at the roost, surrounded by all those birds?
Cecily Nicholson: My first visit to Still Creek happened quite by accident over a decade ago. I was on a trek from the Burnaby Lake area and ended up on the Central Valley Greenway in the late afternoon as crows were beginning to arrive, filling the trees there with such a voluminous presence. So loud! Since moving to Vancouver in 2000 I had noticed the crows streaming across the sky, to where, I didn’t know. I learned later about the place being part of the ancient Brunette River watershed.
My first time visiting the creek deliberately to be there for the arrival of the crows was incredible. First, there were no crows in earshot beforehand. Aside from the stories and the feathers, you wouldn’t know thousands of birds were about to arrive. And even though I expected their arrival, it was still a surprise. I was in awe and felt humbled, mesmerized, and yes, more than a little unsettled. At times I nervously closed my eyes to rely more on what I was hearing. I would say though, I was experiencing as much discomfort sitting alone on a decrepit bench in a somewhat wild place in the gloaming as I was about being in proximity to so many intelligent birds. To visit in the wee morning hours before the light returns and the birds begin to stir was even more unnerving.
RT: Crows aren’t the only crowds that gather in Crowd Source, which contains crowds of crowds (“in each outlined body, a singular body / is the possibility of collective amassing,” you write near the end of the book). Coming together are also protesters, mourners, consumers, salmon, blackberries, trees, cars, pollution…
Did studying Vancouver’s crow migration spark your thinking about the ways the city “collectively amasses”? Or was it the other way around, your interest in crowds leading you to the crows? What can the crows teach us about how Vancouver does, or doesn’t, come together?
CN: My work often touches on collectivity, perhaps now more than ever in our precipitously balanced world. I’m aware of a range of ways that people gather, how some forms of crowd are sanctioned and encouraged, for commercial consumption say, and how gatherings to counter a status quo are often stigmatized and policed. An outlined body suggests an absent one, a death perhaps. I was thinking about how crows gather when one of them dies. Also, about how deaths at the hands of police or as a result of state violence require ongoing rallying cries.
Studying crows’ movement, communication, and relations was a grounding experience. They informed my thinking significantly; I tried to stay open to that influence and to take lessons from their ancient ways of gathering and dispersing. I am fascinated by how people (collectively) relate to crows (and corvids), whether East Vancouver, New York, Mumbai, Kinshasa… rarely do they take an ambivalent stance. Some people hate crows. They’re great thieves. They can destroy lawns and get into garbage. Some people are terrified by them and their relation to carrion. Metro Van has an online tracking system for aggressive crows. Crows’ aggression usually manifests in defense of their young, approximately half of whom die within the first year. Some people relate to crows as a matter of origin, identity, spirituality, neighbourhood, and community. Like, I would probably always defend a crow; I quite relate to them and am I from Vancouver now? Like most people I experience moments of pause turning to the sky to watch the crows stream by. They are especially commanding when moving collectively and this happens daily. It is good to think about free things that we have in common.
Some people relate to crows as a matter of origin, identity, spirituality, neighbourhood, and community. Like, I would probably always defend a crow; I quite relate to them…
Cecily Nicholson
RT: In its local focus on Still Creek, Crowd Source will remind many of your other local collection, From the Poplars, which focused on Poplar Island, off the coast of New Westminster. I think many writers would be hesitant to write such books, in fear of alienating readers unfamiliar with the specific locations. Could you talk about your path to writing location-specific books? Have you felt hesitation about it yourself? Has your experience writing, and publishing, these books influenced how you write on other subjects, or your thoughts on writing in general?
CN: From Gwendolyn Brooks’ A Street in Bronzeville, to the speculative world of Cathy Hong’s Dance Dance Revolution, to Garry Gottfriedson’s The Flesh of Ice, centred on the Kamloops Indian Residential School, there are many examples of projects that focus or include a focus on specific locations. It is interesting how a book centering one’s individual body, home or relations, typically would not be considered local. The nature of something being local doesn’t necessarily mean that it will be unfamiliar.
Crowd Source irrevocably is about crows, their movement, but also about their sensing, communication, and relations. There are over forty species of crows and ravens. They are linked to human culture, and they commonly move between roosting and foraging areas across urban centres all over the world. Every city that I’ve read from this book in so far, I’ve ended up in conversations about their local crows and crows that people have known. People also ponder the history and nature of their local roosts. It’s been a lovely experience.
Colonially known as Still Creek, the main common roost for crows in our local is part of an ancient watershed. It is a site of urban enclosure. The work of stream-keepers and the daylighting of buried watercourses is thankfully a wider movement. Along with the work of Still Moon Arts Society, groups like The Peninsula Streams Society and The Pacific Streamkeepers Federation do incredible restorative work on this coast. Globally, the diminishing of wetlands is a slow-moving catastrophe. Attending to a local example of this was within my grasp. I take on poetic research that is accessible and that I can remain in relationship with long after the book object manifests. I consider the “land beneath the city,” as I recall Dr. Sarah Hunt drawing attention to in a lecture she gave years ago. Like From the Poplars, the attention to Still Creek demonstrates methodology, however helpful, for decentering dominant human narratives.
RT: The poems in Crowd Source are often sparse, filled with gaps which allow the reader to breathe and reflect. UK poet Glyn Maxwell, writing about spacing and line breaks in On Poetry, once said:
poets work with two materials, one’s black and one’s white. Call them sound and silence, life and death, hot and cold, love and loss: any can be the case but none of those yins and yangs tell the whole story. What you feel the whiteness is right now—consciously or more likely some way beneath that plane—will determine what you do next.
I don’t think Maxwell meant what he said to have racial overtones, but in the context of your book (which your publisher describes as “continuing Nicholson’s attention to… Black diasporic relations”), it feels apt: the black words on the white pages of the text, the black birds against the white sky of the interstitial images (“even when / there are thousands in the sky / the sky is not black with them,” you write), the Black diasporic poet writing in a White-dominated society. Could you talk about the interplay between black and white in this book, both what you took on consciously and what might have been operating “some way beneath that plane”?
CN: In my insistence that this book continues attention to contemporary climate crisis, social movements, and Black diasporic relations, I didn’t intend for those threads to be read in isolation from each other. Regarding impositions of blackness, in a North American context engaging with the idea of a “crow” meant contending with how the bird has figured into racializing tropes embedded in supremacist hierarchies. An obvious consideration would be the construct of the folk trickster, “Jim Crow,” a pejorative term for African Americans (part of my ancestry), a stock minstrel character, and the placeholder for a series of state and local laws enforcing racial segregation and discrimination that remain influential today. The “Dandy Crow” character, originally “Jim Crow,” of Disney’s 1941 movie Dumbo is an example among many.
Blackness and the colour black is subject to unconscious bias that extends from racist hierarchies. We can think about the ways in which black things are used to represent a lack, darkness, something negative or generally to be feared given the absence of light. For me to frame my experience as “diasporic” is not meant to separate colour out from “relations.” Among my relations, how we gather, communicate, and relate is always a murmuring below the plane, as it were. Alongside that murmur I am also committed to confronting the ways in which I benefit from settler-colonialism even as I am subjected to anti-black racism. Further, my relations extend beyond Black community.
I do love experimenting with the page as well as the words. In Crowd Source there are several examples of poems that have something happening “in the sky” and “on the ground” of the page. In book form I’m not sure how successful these are, but there is an ongoing effort to parallel the river above and the highway below (as I started to think of it). “The white sheet” is certainly not “nothing.” I understand the page spatially, dimensionally, and sonically as pause (time), atmosphere, quiet, rest, mystery, absence, wonder… but not so much in terms of whiteness. Crowd Source is printed on 100% post-consumer recycled paper and the paper has various bits of errata in it. If it’s white, then it’s off. The ink has a grey cast. I did intend the possibility of words being read at times like birds, black or otherwise.
Every city that I’ve read from this book in so far, I’ve ended up in conversations about their local crows and crows that people have known. People also ponder the history and nature of their local roosts.
Cecily Nicholson
RT: Early on in Crowd Source you write about how the folds on either side of a crow’s syrinx (vocal organ) “produce different sounds // in theory two different songs that is / two impressive vocal repertoires at the same time.” The book teems with dualities (the sky and the ground, the river and the highway, the two paths on either side of Still Creek…), and I’m curious if you see it as performing two vocal repertories at the same time. If so, would you say that’s specific to Crowd Source, or true of all your poetry? Perhaps of all poetry in general?
CN: The main dualities of Crowd Source form between what’s happening in the sky and on the ground as well as the two sides of the creek (one side being well maintained and the other being overgrown). And there is this consideration of vocal repertoires. I spend time in this book reminding the reader of the fact that a crow is a songbird. We tend to think of songbirds as pretty little things balanced on a reed, misty breathed and precious—and they are that, as well as the blunt and muscular crows with their sometimes-jarring caws. Maybe their song is in the register of heavy metal or crunk or throat singing—nonetheless musical.
People have ancient genealogical connections to birds. At some point humans developed vocal chords while birds evolved with syrinxes. The syrinx is far more efficient than vocal chords, though we are able sometimes to make the same sounds. There is a poem Sue Goyette posted on her Instagram last June, that I didn’t come across it until after finishing this book. It speaks beautifully to your question on vocal duality:
Songbirds have a two-part vocal structure to produce sound
which means they can sing two different songs at the same time.
This is perhaps what we’re developing in these so many days
of genocides and settler atrocities, and tent cities, and police violence,
and the loss of creatures and the climate crisis, and the flowers
and the glory of trees despite it all, the full strawberry moon,
and each other. It’s not cognitive dissonance, we are singing a duet.
One of wonder and praise and love and one of rage
and frustration and alarm and loss. But we are singing.
(Reprinted with permission of the author)
Poetry allows for multiscalar and multidimensional work, and my practice tries to approach that. To that end, I read poetry with an ear to harmonies as well as collisions in method, meaning, materiality, and abstraction/expression.
I read poetry with an ear to harmonies as well as collisions in method, meaning, materiality, and abstraction/expression.
Cecily Nicholson
RT: Near the end of Crowd Source, you write about the “problem of prosody” and the attention paid “to vocabulary and imagery / rather than prosody.” I was often struck by the musicality of the poems in Crowd Source, with lines such as “a good stinging / sometimes it’s good to be stung / the pleasant numbing” singing out to me, so I was intrigued by this “problem.” Could you speak a little more about the “problem of prosody” in the book?
CN: The notes that led to this poem came from reading Wallace Stevens’ work at greater length. “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Blackbird” was a framing element for the sections in Crowd Source. It is a stunning imagistic poem and so much more. Stevens did not rigidly adhere to metre; however, he was intricately attuned to sound and the rhythmic interplay of words. Sometimes it seems that musical effect and patterns preside in my own work as a compulsion. I am phonologically led despite my research. Conducting that musicality takes effort, nothing is inherently meaningful. Worse, the lyrical can be cloying for a reader. While I was interested in writing a collection that was in part pretty sounding (songbirds, okay), for me that intention is also dangerous grounds for the illusion of apoliticality. I have to keep anchoring my thought in the material and to take care to not get swept away by an unconscious tune.
RT: Ah, I hadn’t noticed that the book had thirteen sections. What a wonderful nod to the Stevens poem. In my last book I tried to write away from musicality, too, though my concern was with precision (that in pursuing music I was sometimes misrepresenting the image). I wouldn’t have framed this as political, but I do see the line from my thinking to yours. I’m wondering now, though, if I don’t just have to get better at this poetry thing all around—that the most precise form of seeing weds material to its appropriate music. The conscious tune, in a sense.
CN: Yes! I agree that the coalescence of material and its conscious tune is a helpful way to frame the effort. Precision, as you note, is also a concern I share. I can’t see a way out from the subjective nature of this seeing and hearing, so I’m also listening (reading) for what accumulates collectively or dialogically. In my mention of apoliticality, I mean that regarding aesthetic and sonic considerations, however stunning the representation of an idea or thing is, it is never neutral. “No language is neutral” at this point is an adage for many of us. I don’t mean that a particular political stance is necessarily warranted or must itself be articulated, rather, that from the pastoral to the agitprop there isn’t a position outside of the politics. Even the “looking” changes things. Perhaps it is the work of the poetry and our conscious positionality that elevates the outcome.
I spend time in this book reminding the reader of the fact that a crow is a songbird. We tend to think of songbirds as pretty little things balanced on a reed, misty breathed and precious—and they are that, as well as the blunt and muscular crows with their sometimes-jarring caws.
Cecily Nicholson
RT: Dionne Brand’s words are always ringing in our ears, aren’t they? Another voice I was pleasantly surprised to encounter midway through Crowd Source was Vancouver poet Jeff Steudel’s. You quote from Steudel’s poem “Roost,” in which he describes the Still Creek crows as “a collective lung.” Could you talk a little about the importance of that epigraph to the book? How did other Vancouver poets’ writing about the crows influence your approach to the subject?
CN: The late Jeff Steudel’s poetry first enters into the text as an intro to the fifth section, which is a meditation on other people’s stories about crows. This book has an opening epigraph, middle, and end. I was inclined to envelop Steudel’s work in the midst. When I returned to this project the year before last, I struggled to remember who it was that had written in such a compelling way about Still Creek and the crows near home. I pulled from my poetry collection the works of Rita Wong, Wanda John-Kehewin, Hari Alluri, Steve Collis… a bunch of folks, and began to reread from this stack of books because I couldn’t remember. It was only a few books in before I opened up Foreign Park. And it was only a few poems in when I realized, this was the book. I relate strongly to the details observed and the cadence with which they are delivered. I didn’t know Jeff, but wanted to surface this work in respectful homage, as it still lives at the heart of our local poetics. We quote for citation, to back up our position, and we quote when we cannot say it better. This was a case of the latter. Vancouver poets influence how I think about place immensely.
RT: Speaking of local influences, in your acknowledgments you write about how you were first sparked into writing this long poem more than ten years ago in a workshop run by Marie Clements and Rosemary Georgeson. In the intervening decade, you published three other books! How did this project live/endure amidst the others? Did the writing of those other three books influence how Crowd Source developed over time?
CN: Marie and Rosemary conducted a writing group and special art projects with the Downtown Eastside Women’s Centre (DEWC) for many years and for most of those years I was the staff who worked the evening shift when their group ran and was the liaison once the centre closed to the public, serving the meal and shutting down the facility after. It was during that time that the poems for Triage began to surface. Rurally, I grew up “birding” and caring for birds (protesting the drainage of wetlands and the destruction of habitat, farming and collecting eggs, sometimes eating birds that we raised)… it’s a long story. I associate crows most readily with the city. There are crows in poems in all of my books (crowds for the most part, too). Perhaps it’s about what feels urgent at any given time. Crows have been a ubiquitous presence; I just didn’t have a vision for how to write this book until recently. Once I realized I could set aside the word “crow” and focus instead on their movement, the pieces began to fall into place.
Cecily Nicholson is the author of five books, including From the Poplars, recipient of the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, and Wayside Sang, winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award for poetry. Her collaborative practice spans museum, artist-run centre, and community-based arts organizing and education. She is an assistant professor at the School of Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia and the 2024/2025 Holloway Lecturer in the Practice of Poetry at the University of California, Berkeley.
Rob Taylor’s fifth poetry collection is Weather (Gaspereau Press, 2024). He lives with his family in Port Moody, BC. You can read more of his interviews on his website.