Margot Van Sluytman: the poet as shaman

Mother, I searched for scars in ox bone and tortoise shell,
desired the simplicity of a symbol: the stark perfection of moon,
horse, rain. But my heart is the relic, the pale artifact: a bruised
bone, an oracle (from Weight of Wings, April Bulmer)

There's a no more eloquent and impassioned voice for the joyous and healing dance of poetry than that of Canadian Margot Van Sluytman. Her writings & activism are refreshingly different from the noisiness of most of today's Canadian arts scene. She's a poet, publisher and victims activist known for her work as an expressive writing/transformative language arts facilitator as well as her promotion of the concept of restorative and transformative justice through The Sawbonna Project. Margot's is the shaman's strong clear voice that never wavers, sustained by a single unique vision, & that places her in the company of contemporary spiritualist teachers like Sister Helen Prejean, Ronald Rolheiser, Edwina Gateley, and Matthew Fox. Last year she shared the stage with Sr. Helen Prejean, author of Dead Man Walking, who enthusiastically supports Margot's vision about how speaking our voices is an act of transformative living for social change.

She is also recipient of The Queen Elizabeth the Second Graduate Scholarship, as well as The Seeds of Joy Award from The National Association for Poetry Therapy. Her published books include Sawbonna:  A Real Life Restorative Justice Story and The Other Inmate. Mediating Justice-Mediating Hope. Poetry and Workbook for Restorative Practices has recently been translated into French.

Propounding a view of language with an innate ability to heal has drawn her, again, into a clear poet-shaman tradition that seems to have all but disappeared today as a viable expressive vehicle. Canada has always seemed the place for a poetics rooted deeply in native spirituality. Chris Faiers has recently given a lovely anecdotal tribute to Milt Acorn as a shaman and elder figure in a Canadian 'people's poetry' movement: the voice not just of a people but of seasons, landscapes & whisky jacks. "I fondly remember", says Faiers,"his impromptu lectures as the wisdom sharing of an elder and a shaman-in-the-making." If divining the hidden in the poetic heart is a gift only a few possess, the poet-healers among us—Van Sluytman, Milt Acorn, Katherine L. Gordon, April Bulmer— ought to be venerated as transmitters of a vital cultural & spiritual tradition. They speak what we all are.

Margot, like Acorn, is the voice of human community, history & and the particularly 'restorative' powers of poetry invoked through a type of natural language such as poets, gurus and peace activists employ, one that redefines poetry as primarily a speech of gathering & acceptance: more a celebration and dance than written artifact. Her Yahoo! poetry group Dance With Words is just such a celebratory act. It's a kind of appeal to her writers to join in a common cultural legacy of ancient folklore, art, spiritualities (from any tradition) & earth-worship, Margot acting as both moderator and poet-healer who excludes no one from the dance. To use a term from the writings of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, 'planetization' is the ideal the poet-healer works toward, or a spiritual globalization that unites creative cultural forces into a 'One World' consciousness.

It's particularly instructive to hear Margot speak in a "Planetary Spirit" radio interview of the gift of the poet-healer as she's developed it through the story of her father's murder and the painful process of reconciliation with both the murder & murderer. As she's said, gift comes with the work, & the work of 'restorative healing' can be a particularly terrifying one. What better test of her own restorative justice idea than the act of reconciling herself to the man who murdered her father so many years ago: what better way for the emotional & expressive language of poetry to meet head on what it most fears? And yet out of this terrifying encounter came The Other Inmate, her book about forgiveness & renewal, a work that clearly validates Margot's 'planetization' vision.

Margot's writings are also decidedly Gaia-centered, a poetry attuned to powers of natural processes found in rocks, places & people & preserved always through an ongoing dialogue between the past and present. In a CHEX (Peterborough)Television interview, entitled "Wild Self - True Self: Poetry as Surrender Not Control", she mentions elements of nature that "speak poetry", using amber as a strong poetic symbol of human history, of dialogue with a prehistoric time past registered as creative force and inscribed in verse. In relation to what's been created, & preserved in ancient amber & mud, caves and the guacharo, the poet is a "wild self" figure who connects with the earth's own ancient poetry. The gift of this sort of openness to nature is achievable through a vital nature & words nexus.

Margot Van Sluytman is the "raven who speaks" (as a first-nations shaman once named her): for through her the language of the poem is alive to the feeling and movement of amber, mud & fall trees (It's interesting that the great Milton Acorn was also said to have conversed with ravens & taught their mysteries). "Poetry", as Margot defines it, "is concretizing the essential and exquisite emotions that we have in the depth of the darkest, and in the heights of the brightest" (CHEX interview). Though never meeting her in person & only knowing her through online, email and phone correspondence, I sense the depth and heights of her convictions as if I'd known her all my life. And in a sense I already have since her message is an ancient one & dear to our Canadian psyche.acilitatorxpressive Writing/Transformative Language Arts Facilitator