Biography
Deanna Radford is fascinated by our relationship to the Internet and the physical space it occupies in our lives. Her poetry examines these things and how this tool of communication intertwines with our most personal and emotional connections. Experimental poetry, music, art, the environment, and social justice inspire her practice.
In prose, Deanna has written about literature, sound art, and music for Arc, Broken Pencil, Herizons, Musicworks, MUTEKmag, and others. Her poetry has been published by Art + Wonder, The Capilano Review, carte blanche, Free City Radio's Art & Social Change, The Headlight Anthology, Occulto Magazine, Vallum, and others.
As a performance poet, Deanna appeared with Kaie Kellough and Margaret Christakos in Klara du Plessis' Deep Curation series in Fall 2019. She belongs to the Tuned Air Trio with musician Eric Lewis and singer Ayelet Rose Gottlieb. Her poetry/sound band Cloud Circuit launched its début EP (Archive Officielle Publications) in Spring 2020. The group performs regularly and will be recording its first full-length album in Spring 2023.
Deanna has been a judge of Poetry In Voice recitations, is a former curator of the Atwater Poetry Project, and a graduate of Concordia University's MA in creative writing. She is revising her first manuscript of poetry for publication. She loves dogs and when not immersed in poetry, spends her days booking concerts at Montreal venues Casa Del Popolo and La Sala Rossa.
Micro-interview
"Two views of a cadaver room," by Sylvia Plath and "The Waste Land," by T. S. Eliot had a profound effect on me. I loved learning these poems and still love reading them.
In junior high I was huge music fan (still am.) After copying out dozens of song lyrics by my favourite artists, I realized I could do the same by writing poetry. While I wasn't a great student at the time, I always did well in English and writing poetry helped me. It was a way to express myself and to get through the difficult times. It was satisfying to play with words, images, and ideas on the page and to create.
I stopped writing poetry in my late teens and turned to music and art journalism. After moving to Montréal from Winnipeg, I returned to poetry. The same things I first found appealing were still there and it freed me from the constrains of journalism. It was fun! When I became comfortable writing and speaking about poetry is when I started to identify as a poet. I believe we all have poetry within.
The job of the poet is to honour the particular ideas, feelings, or gestures that compel them as witness to their own moment in time.
Poetry is an essential form of human expression whether spoken or written. Anyone can engage in and with it.
With poetry, we can share joy, commemorate, create, dream, protest, document, and seek solace. Great poetry speaks to the human condition.
It can make magic.
It can move us as listeners, as readers, as humans.
In "fluorine," Rita Wong captures the "mundane acts" as part of the human relationship to the natural environment and hazardous materials powerfully. She writes,
“...unless otherwise
informed crowded alloys detect no
health damage until generations later i
brush my teeth with nuclear intensity
the cavities i avoid destined for others
fall into hazardous-waste piles up as
i sleep...”
Not only does the poem speak of how hazardous materials are ingrained our daily lives and the fallout from using them, but it also shows how intimately connected they are to our lives. I love this poem because of how much it conveys in a single stanza, especially human empathy and our responsibility for these matters at the same. If I had to choose one poem to memorize from the anthology, it would be "flourine" for these reasons. It's as relevant now as it was when it was published in 2007. And because it's beautiful to look at, like a puff of breath on a "cold crisp morning."