When Jay shared this poem, in her endlessly-listenable-voice, at our 2026 Poetry Salon, she shared that pregnancy with a toddler and a job (and all the other things) wasn’t allowing much time and space for writing poetry… but there was some comfort in fellow-poets who insisted that it’s all poetry, every littlest piece of it.

Jay is one-third of the inner circle of the Society of Secret Poetry Appreciators, and may in fact be the most poetical of us all (she buys poetry, lots of it, which is a real sign of commitment, IMO), so I entreated her to lend her voice to the poetry micropodcast, even though she had to navigate newborn nap times to make it happen.

Jay’s yoga teaching is on pause while she tends new humans, but if you want to hear more of her voice, you can enjoy her older meditation tracks and chanting at Insight timer!

Which line rang inside you? Or where have you tripped over poetry somewhere of late?

Everything Is Poetry If You’re in the Mood for It

I’m on a second date with this guy;

we’d been on a first date and had quite a nice time, so we organised a second date (you know how dating works).

Anyway,

this guy is going to town on a little ramekin of aioli.

It’s a communal ramekin, by the way.

I just want you to bear that in mind while you imagine him

scraping the sides with his index finger, almost knuckle-deep,

twisting it round and then just (for want of a better word)

rawdogging aioli into his mouth.

He looks at me and says,

through mouthfuls of garlicky mayonnaise,

Y know,

not everything is poetry, and I’m like, uh

(clutching my pearls),

I don’t know how to tell you this…

Y’see that moth,

frenzied and full of longing,

the one that’s been throwing its little moth body at the street lamp for the past ten minutes because it literally can’t imagine a world without brightness?

Poetry.

Or d’you remember when the waitress said ice cold, dropped casual similes into conversation

through loose fingers

like dice across a Monopoly board?

Poetry.

The way neither of us have eaten The Last Chip, but we both keep eyeing it, watching it get slowly colder,

and doesn’t love sometimes exist like that, occupying the space between what we really want and what we’re willing to take?

That’s poetry.

And then he pulls a face and I’m like oh, calm down,

I’m not saying I’m in love with you, it’s literally a second date,

God forbid a woman talk about metaphor.

Okay, moving swiftly on.

What about the way

people profess they are nursing a tea, like Earl Grey might need winding or burping or, at the very least, to be cradled between compassionate palms?

I mean, that’s basically Shakespearean.

What about the way beetroot stains your fingertips pink, or almond milk curdles in coffee, or the sound of floorboards creaking when nobody’s even walking on them, as if the house just needs to clear its throat?

What about the bus stop

with its wet, warped bench, damp graffiti, someone’s blunt-carved declaration,

I woz ere,

as if being was ever something we had to prove?

And you,

with your aioli devotion,

elbow on the table like you’ve had a long week, but there is life in you yet.

It’s almost reverent,

how you push, then scrape

and swirl from the curve of the ramekin.

I mean, it’s one of the worst things I’ve ever sat opposite, but if I was in the mood, you might just be poetry too.

As for the rest of it,

the reflection of the moon on the water,

the knowledge that in Sweden they have a specific word for it and the word is mangata

which literally translates to mean moon street.

I mean, come on!

The way the fridge knocks its little light on every time you open the door, or the half-second before a kiss, or IKEA’s Billy bookcase assembly instructions, which might as well exist

as hieroglyphics for perseverance.

The voice notes you listen to on repeat or the photos you don’t look at but can’t bring yourself to delete or the way this warm light is falling on your face

or the fact that light is even something that can fall, and

the sun is something we can catch, what is that if not poetry?

He looks at me. For a long while. Pondering.

Then he goes,

Fair

Like, sorry, that’s his entire response to everything I’ve just said.

And then,

D’you wanna go somewhere else for one more round?

I know a great wine bar by the Underground.

Wait a minute…

And, reader, I married that man.

Nah, just kidding, literally never saw him again.

~ by Georgie Jones

Book: AND THE WORLD SPINS ANYWAY

Poet/author: Georgie Jones

https://www.poetryjones.com

Poem: Everything Is Poetry If You’re in the Mood for It

Okay, so this is awkward, in a way, because it’s evidence that I have been incubating this idea, for this exact mini-podcast, it seems, for over a year, because, as I was looking through my voice notes on my phone, ostensibly to delete a bunch of rantings to myself, I found this offering. And it delighted me, to be reminded of my delight, and of these conversations. If I had a personal astrologer, I would email him and say “okay, now, David? is it auspicious now?” But really, any day is a good day to marvel about hummingbirds, and to read Mary Oliver. So whatever Mercury and Jupiter are doing, here it is.

(Everything that follows is transcript, so you can read, read and listen, or just hit play.)

On this day, I was chatting with a lovely friend who was telling me that she was sitting and watching the first hummingbirds arrive at her feeder as she was talking to me and it reminded me of the newsletter my friend Monica had just sent out for the Society of Trees and these amazing facts that she was sharing about hummingbirds, one of which is, that they are, in order to be as fast as they are

light air-filled creatures

Like most birds.

This is what she wrote:

in addition to their hollow bones and hollow feather shafts, their bodies are filled with air sacs. Bird skulls even contain hollow passageways to capture more air. Bird bodies are so light that in fact their feathers often outweigh their skeleton. And of all the birds, hummingbirds are the lightest. Of the 240 species of hummingbirds, the largest, the giant hummingbird, weighs in at 20 grams. The smallest, the bee hummingbird, weighs just a single gram. Sy Montgomery in his book The Hummingbird’s Gift says, “they are little more than bubbles fringed with iridescent feathers, air wrapped in light.”

I didn’t cite all this to my friend Shelley but I did say, “Oh, did you know that hummingbirds are so light and their feathers weigh more than their bones?”

And she said, “Yes! Once I got to hold a hummingbird in my hands for a half an hour.”

It had been caught in her greenhouse and when she realized it was there, it seemed evident that it had spent probably the entire night flying up to the upper reaches of the plastic trying to get out and then coming back to the ground and catching its breath and trying again. When she finally found it, it was so exhausted sitting there, that it let her pick it up. She carried it outside and instead of flying off straightaway, it sat there in her hands for maybe half an hour.

I shared with her that I just recently learned the idea of tissue memory — that our cells and our tissues actually retain memories of these experiences in our bodies. Tissue memory is often thought about in terms of trauma because that’s a way that trauma gets stored but the flip side of that is that beautiful moments are stored in our cells as well.

We retain physical impressions or physical memories of beautiful moments, in our tissues.

How lovely to think my friend Shelley has this set of imprints in her body of a hummingbird sitting in the cup of her hands!

Maybe the internet had been listening to me. When I went inside, there was Mary Oliver’s poem, Messenger, in my news feed. Here it is.

This is the opening poem in Mary Oliver’s slim volume, Thirst. The volume is dedicated to her partner of many years, Molly Malone Cook, who died in 2005.

Messenger

My work is loving the world.
Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird—
equal seekers of sweetness.
Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.
Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.

Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?
Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect? Let me
keep my mind on what matters,
which is my work,

which is mostly standing still and learning to be
astonished.
The phoebe, the delphinium.
The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.
Which is mostly rejoicing, since all the ingredients are here,

which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart
and these body-clothes,
a mouth with which to give shouts of joy
to the moth and the wren, the sleepy dug-up clam,
telling them all, over and over, how it is
that we live forever.

Bill catches wind of my accent, locates it accurately, then asks, “Do you know A. B. Paterson?”

That’s not where I thought he was going, when he started with “do you know?” My brain was preparing to scoff, (unlikely, 28 million Australians, the odds are low…) but actually, OF COURSE I know Banjo Paterson. He wrote The Man from Snowy River and Waltzing Matilda. He was, when I was a kid, a household name, the poet absolutely everyone had heard of.

“Do you know the Man from Iron Bark?” he asked me, and once again, my brain was derailed from its anticipated destination because I thought he was going to say the Man from Snowy River, which I probably could recite myself, but I do not know the Man from Iron Bark.

Bill, aka Billy Milly, knows it by heart.

What are the odds? That I would drive so far out of my comfort zone, into the deepest backcountry of the SLRD, and run into a secret poetry appreciator, right here in our campground?

“You know, I’ve started this thing,” I tell him. “We could record you, if you want to be part of it.”

His eyes lit up, and we made a date, if we survived the presence of grizzlies, and our writing retreat schedule.

He and Anita wandered over the next evening. He’s got a twinkle in his eyes and scrinkles around them and rough hands that have known labour. A retired heavy duty mechanic, he was a ranger on the Bowron Lakes for 6 years. He and Anita have been together 47 years (45 of them married), and only ever slept one day apart. They hike and paddle and ATV and pick huckleberries together, and wherever they stop in BC, they buy books about the local history, to learn about the place.

He needs to stand, to “do” this poem, so after we’ve chatted a while, he pushes back from the picnic table, sets his boot on a rock, rubs his hands over his face, and closes his eyes for a moment, locating the file in his brain.

One take, we said. And I put my phone at his feet, and hope his voice will carry over the wind and the river.

Well, it carried. It carried us away, all the way to Sydney town, and to the shearing sheds of Ironbark. Hope you enjoy this regaling as much as we did.

The Man from Ironbark

It was the man from Ironbark who struck the Sydney town,
He wandered over street and park, he wandered up and down.
He loitered here he loitered there, till he was like to drop,
Until at last in sheer despair he sought a barber's shop.
"Ere! shave my beard and whiskers off, I'll be a man of mark,
I'll go and do the Sydney toff up home in Ironbark."
The barber man was small and flash, as barbers mostly are,
He wore a strike-your-fancy sash he smoked a huge cigar;
He was a humorist of note and keen at repartee,
He laid the odds and kept a "tote", whatever that may be,
And when he saw our friend arrive, he whispered, "Here's a lark!
Just watch me catch him all alive, this man from Ironbark."

There were some gilded youths that sat along the barber's wall.
Their eyes were dull, their heads were flat, they had no brains at all;
To them the barber passed the wink his dexter eyelid shut,
"I'll make this bloomin' yokel think his bloomin' throat is cut."
And as he soaped and rubbed it in he made a rude remark:
"I s'pose the flats is pretty green up there in Ironbark."

A grunt was all reply he got; he shaved the bushman's chin,
Then made the water boiling hot and dipped the razor in.
He raised his hand, his brow grew black, he paused awhile to gloat,
Then slashed the red-hot razor-back across his victim's throat;
Upon the newly-shaven skin it made a livid mark
No doubt, it fairly took him in — the man from Ironbark.

He fetched a wild up-country yell might wake the dead to hear,
And though his throat, he knew full well, was cut from ear to ear,
He struggled gamely to his feet, and faced the murd'rous foe:
"You've done for me! you dog, I'm beat! One hit before I go!
I only wish I had a knife, you blessed murdering shark!
But you'll remember all your life the man from Ironbark."

He lifted up his hairy paw, with one tremendous clout
He landed on the barber's jaw, and knocked the barber out.
He set to work with nail and tooth, he made the place a wreck;
He grabbed the nearest gilded youth, and tried to break his neck.
And all the while his throat he held to save his vital spark,
And "Murder! Bloody murder!" yelled the man from Ironbark.

A peeler man who heard the din came in to see the show;
He tried to run the bushman in, but he refused to go.
And when at last the barber spoke, and said "'Twas all in fun'
T’was just a little harmless joke, a trifle overdone."
"A joke!" he cried, "By George, that's fine; a lively sort of lark;
I'd like to catch that murdering swine some night in Ironbark."

And now while round the shearing floor the list'ning shearers gape,
He tells the story o'er and o'er, and brags of his escape.
"Them barber chaps what keeps a tote, By George, I've had enough,
One tried to cut my bloomin' throat, but thank the Lord it's tough."
And whether he's believed or no, there's one thing to remark,
That flowing beards are all the go way up in Ironbark.

A.B. (Banjo) Paterson

Friends, if there is a phrase or an image here that speaks to you, let us know. It is a lovely way to feed the storyteller, to offer back to them a note, an image, that resonated.

Moksha

by Phil Gardner

I breathed life

into tired lungs today,

and was caught by

cottonwood limbs

dancing in the breeze;

dendritic fingertips

swaying in surrender

to Grandfather Sky’s

boundless breast.

All was Moksha:

resonance of wind chimes,

songs of sparrow and swift,

and air which tasted so sweet.

“I don’t want to leave this place,”

I said.

“I don’t want to go back

into that body

which carries so much weight,

so much sorrow that’s not even mine.”

But the sorrow and the ancestors

called me back all the same;

as did those yet to be born.

And I felt the weight

and became a child again,

for a time,

angry at the unfairness of it all,

then shameful for letting

the anger speak.

Now I quietly sit

and watch the play

of demons and angels

within,

each trying to get the upper hand,

each trying to win.

Meanwhile, the Great Ash tree

weathers such wars,

and holds the nests

from which the sparrows sing.

And as a reminder, we will aim to share a weekly “mini podcast poem” through the summer. Subscribe, or tell your friends, if you think they might have a little secret poetry appreciator lurking somewhere inside. (Honestly, you NEVER KNOW who. It’s quite a delicious secret handshake to have with someone.)

AND, if you feel called (please do!), send our editor Lisa a voice recording (you can just use your phone, all of these so far have been recorded that way), or an email, to pembygrl (at) gmail (dot) com. (Does that stop the bots from finding me?)

Over to Kerry.

I Think Every Human Being…

by Matt Moberg

I think every human being
eventually has a moment
where they are standing outside in sweatpants
that have lost the will to be pants,
holding a trash bag, a divorce, a parking ticket,
or some other receipt from the universe
that says, “surprise, this too is part of it.”

And then the sky bruises purple.

And the air touches your face
like it knows your whole story.

And suddenly you realize:

all the real is actually unreal.

The dirt.
The breath.
The weird little bones in your hands.
The fact that we are here,
on a floating rock with pollen counts,
paying bills,
missing dead people,
loving living people
who say “leaving now”
while still fully naked and looking for socks.

And still,
the moon clocks in.

No applause.
No benefits.
No note from management saying,
“Great work being ancient and luminous again.”

Just the moon,
working nights
like a single mother with no applause,
packing silver lunches
for every dark thing
that still has to rise.

Tell me that isn’t holy.
Tell me there is a better word
than sacred
for the way light keeps returning
with no guarantee
we will actually stop and take note.

I know people who believe in therapy,
probiotics,
tarot,
twelve-step meetings,
manifestation journals,
and waiting exactly eleven minutes
before texting back
so they do not appear emotionally available,
even though their whole nervous system
is standing in the driveway holding flowers.

And underneath all of it,
every ritual,
every doctrine,
every smoothie with chia seeds,
the prayer is the same:
Please let me be loved.
Please let me be forgiven.
Please let this strange little life
mean something
before my lower back
submits its formal resignation.

What is going on?

For real tho—What is this place?

This unbearable tenderness
of being alive long enough
to watch steam lift from coffee in winter
like a soul practicing leaving.

To see your friend laugh so hard
they slap the table
as if joy is a mosquito
they are trying to kill.

To hear a child say “pisghetti”
and, for one shining second,
realize language
has finally been improved.

I know I already noted this in the first piece,
but the older I get,
the less use I have for certainty.

Certainty has never made me pull over
because the sunset looked like God
dropped a jar of peach jam
across the whole midwestern sky
and decided to be lazy
and not clean up.

Certainty has never made me gasp
at rain on hot pavement.

Certainty has never found me
in the cereal aisle,
holding Captain Crunch,
suddenly remembering
that everyone I have ever loved
was made from stardust,
hunger,
and a series of decisions
we probably should have slept on.

No.
It has always been awe.

Awe was the first church.

Before steeples.
Before committees.
Before men got involved
and started making rules about skirts.

Awe was there
with its wild hair
and muddy feet,
saying:

Look.
Look again.
Look until looking
becomes love.

Awe, and soup.

Awe, and someone rubbing your back
when you are sick.

Awe, and old couples at Target
arguing gently about avocados,
as if marriage is not one vow
but ten thousand errands
performed beside the person
who knows exactly
how you like the cart pushed.

Maybe gratitude
was never meant to sound elegant.

Maybe gratitude sounds like:

“Damn.
That woodpecker is trying
to beat that tree from itself.”

Maybe gratitude sounds like:

“Thank you, body,
for continuing to drag me through this world
despite the many slim jims
I have done to you
at gas stations.”

Maybe gratitude sounds like:

“Thank you to the dogs
who lose their entire minds
when we come home
as if we have returned from war
and not Walgreens.”

For me, that might be my gospel.

That joy that does not wait for us
to be impressive but only needs us
to come through the door.

Because the truth is,
this life is devastating.

And ridiculous.

One minute you are 22 and invincible,
driving too fast,
eating gas station nachos
with the confidence of a Greek god.

The next minute you are googling,
“Can sneezing cause a hamstring injury?”
and the answer is,
apparently,
“Welcome to the second half of your life.”

But even now—

even tired,
even grieving,
even emotionally held together
by iced coffee, playlists,
and one very specific wolves hoodie—

we keep finding reasons
to stay soft.

We plant tomatoes
even though grief is real.

We bake bread
even though the news is on fire.

We send photos of the sky
to people we love
with captions like,
“LOOK,”
as if beauty is an emergency
and we are all volunteer firefighters.

We keep saying,
“You have to see this,”
because wonder
is the oldest form
of resurrection.

So here’s to the believers
and the atheists
and the agnostics
and the people whose entire theology
is just trying not to cry
in the DMV line.

Here’s to the people clinging to faith.

Here’s to the people clinging to Xanax
and oat milk
and the one group chat
where nobody pretends to be okay.

Here’s to the tender-hearted weirdos.

The accidental mystics.

The ones who can contemplate mortality
for six straight hours
and then become emotionally attached
to a perfect peach.

The ones who know
despair has a mouth,
but so does laughter.

May we never stop being drop-kicked by beauty
in the middle of a Sunday afternoon.

May we never become so polished
that we forget how to stand
in the Starbucks line of existence
with our dumb, gorgeous hearts open,
feeling the enormity of it all
rattle around in our bones
like thunder
looking for somewhere to laugh.

And may we remember:

whatever else this is,
whatever mess,
whatever miracle,
whatever cosmic group project
no one was prepped for—

all’ve it is astonishing.
that we are here.
that we have loved enough to be ruined.
that the moon keeps showing up.
that bread exists.

So pass it on.

Tear off a piece
with your bare hands.

Take it in as you take it down.

And then go outside and look at that moon.

I stumbled on a poem by Ada Limon, likely on instagram, (because for a while there, my algorithm knew I liked such things, and so it delivered and delivered and delivered, like a frenzied zucchini plant, until I was stealth bombing people with excess zucchinis, and I had no room left on my screen for all the screenshot poetry.)

She’s in my top 5, said Mary, who is a poet and a poetry appreciator, of such depth, that she has a “top 5”. I email her whenever we’re doing something poetical up here in Pemberton, and I imagine she’d be here, if she could, for every little thing we host, but health has its own demands, and so I just try to conjure the things with words and let her know that her influence and inspiration is enfolded into it all, and send little email reportages and hope it’s not giving her FOMO. But we all need those little cheerleaders who say, oh that secret passion you have, that’s not weird, or at least, it’s not ONLY you… and I want her to know.

In September, I was organising a late November poetry event for Whistler, at the behest of the Whistler Public Library, and Mary was one of the poets they’d asked me to feature, so we were organizing a conversation. She read me poems into a zoom room.

She sent me poems. She sent me this one. Ada Limon again. Who has become a little thread between us.

“Question/invitation”, I emailed her.

Would you consider reading this aloud into a voice note on your phone, with a little intro explaining who you are and why you would offer this to a community of secret poetry appreciators or why you think she’s so great?

I’m thinking about starting a little scrappy weekly poetry podcast - super short little offerings breathing life into poetry as a kind of medicine…

She did. Straight away. It has lingered in my inbox, since. For nine months. That is an apt gestation period, I suppose. Sometimes, I feel frustrated at myself, at how little I get done of the Vast Imaginarium of Ideas and To-Dos, how much seems to be in the WIP pile, seemingly neglected. But this is what a baby, the garlic, so many slaps and tickles from the Universe come to remind me… Most of the work happens when you stop trying so hard. When you let things take root. Gestate. Divide, divide, divide, take their own form. And in their own good time, a fruit! A harvest! A new thing!

Substack has a voice option… I tried it the other day, when I was cooking and wanted to be reading an article at the same time. Played the recording, instead. Eleanor Robins, who is a fan of poetry, magic, memory, community, read it herself, so it was her voice, not a robot, and I love love loved it all, and thought, yes, it’s time. All our voices are needed.

Disembodied voices banging out snark on Facebook make my heart hurt. I think community flourishing needs another kind of forum. And maybe this could be part of it.

I want to share with you too, in a way that I hope won’t expose or embarrass her, that Mary made a generous donation to the Secret Poetry Appreciators, because “it’s where my heart is - lift up the new and those trying to make a space.” Alongside two Neighbourhood Small grants, Mary’s generous gift was a green light for us, to turn a thing that could easily be small and secret, into something a bit braver.

So here is Ada Limon’s poem, from The Hurting Kind, read by Mary MacDonald, poet and patron saint of the Society of Secret Poetry Appreciators.

The Hurting Kind

On the plane I have a dream I’ve left half my

torso on the back porch with my beloved. I have to go

back for it, but it’s too late, I’m flying
and there’s only half of me.

Back in Texas, the flowers I’ve left on
the counter have wilted and knocked over the glass—
I stay alone there so the flowers are more than flowers.

At the funeral parlor with my mother, we are holding her father’s suit,
and she says, He’ll swim in these.

For a moment, I’m not sure what she means,
until I realize she means the clothes are too big.

I go with her like a shield in case they try to up-sell her—
the ornate urn, the elaborate body box.

It is a nice bathroom in the funeral parlor,
so I take the opportunity to change my tampon.

When I come out my mother says,
Did you have to change your tampon?

And it seems a vulgar life all at once. Or not
vulgar, but not simple.

I’m driving her now to the Hillside Cemetery where we meet
with Rosie who is so nice we want her to work
everywhere. Rosie as my dentist. Rosie as my president.

My shards are showing, I think. But I do not know what I mean
so I fix my face in the rearview, a face with thousands
of headstones behind it. Minuscule flags, plastic flowers.

You can’t sum it up, my mother says as we are driving
and the electronic voice repeats, Turn Left onto Wildwood Canyon Road,

so I turn left, happy for the mundane instructions. Let us robot at once.

Tell me where to go. Tell me how to get there.

She means a life, of course. You cannot sum it up.

- Ada Limon

When I moved to Pemberton
7 years ago this month
I stumbled upon a literal ‘Gong Show’.

Seriously! A traveling ‘sound therapist’ with his family in a Sprinter van who moved from town to town, setting up his massive collection of planetary gongs and sharing their sonic brilliance, found himself in Pemberton.

As I sat in the gathering of 8-10ish souls a lady to my right introduced herself as Lisa.

Pemberton being a town of maybe four thousand people, we would often cross paths and exchange pleasantries.

To be honest, I’m not exactly sure how we started sharing poetry, but we did and it became a welcomed exchange when my email lit up with Lisa’s name and a note saying, “ I read this today and thought you may enjoy”.

Time passed, maybe years passed, and we connected more regularly through our amazing local Village Yoga studio. More poetry exchanged via text, life presented some dramatic challenges, or “plot twists”, as Lisa would say, and poetry provided comfort and community.

Lisa had the brilliant idea, as she so often does, to say “what if we put this out to the community and have people record a poem they love into their phone and we share it through my blog”.

“Perfect,” I said. “I’ll be happy to start it off and put a piece together” and sent her a recording.

What a beautiful idea it turned out to be as many folk participated. And so began our communal interest in poetry.

Who knew there would be such enthusiasm to share either their own work or that of established and published artists ?

In an earlier post Lisa shared how our little adventure grew and broadened into larger and more anticipated events.

Photo from Open Mic Night at the Museum (2025) of Kerry Dorey, flanked by Lisa Richardson and Jay Molloy, by Brenda Bakker.

We are looking forward to our upcoming offerings over the summer and this fall with another Open Mic at our historic museum here in town and potential ‘pop ups’ at Teas or other local gatherings.

We are blessed to live in such a diverse and inspiring community of writers, musicians and artists of all sorts who have emerged from the woodwork to share their beauty and vision. What could be better.

- by Kerry Dorey

In that vein, in April 2025, Kerry, Jay and Lisa, three friends through the Village Yoga family with a shared interest in poetry and a habit of sending each other poems via email or text on instagram DM, partnered up to host a Poetry Pop Up at the Pemberton Library. Our lovely friend Lisa Sambo also joined to anchor us in the language of the land we gather on, and celebrate the poetry of Ucwalmictws.

We put out an open invitation for folk to join us for a cozy candle-lit evening of poetry sharing, discussion, sound healing and nervous system resetting, in honour of National Poetry Month.

A favourite poem to share out loud, was the entry fee. We would “pass the mic” around. People were invited to choose something they love, something that speaks to them, maybe even an original of their own. Just listening was also an option, because attention is the highest form of love.

More people wove across town and into that library space, with notebooks tucked under their arms, and wobbly voices, and wild-thumping hearts, with favourite poems to share and personal poems to offer, than we anticipated. It was amazing.

In October, we were back for more, with some new friends in Angie Wilde and Quentin deLorenzis lending sound engineering and awesomeness, to storm the stage with Open Mic Night at the Museum.

We broadened the invite beyond “straight” poetry, because what else is music, song, or comedy, but poetry in dress-up. We said, “Who’s got a song, a tune, a poem, a tale, to share? The vibes are speakeasy, only with tea and kombucha flowing instead of hooch. You don’t have to sign up in advance to seize the mic. Just tuck a little something in your pocket, bring your instrument or notebook, and come see how the walls of the Soo building lean in at the possibility of hearing the humans laugh and sing and share… you might find you just can’t help but get up on stage… or that you are happy to listen and revel in the creative froth of the community you find yourself in.”

In November, we took the show on the road, because those Whistler folk were jealous, and we moderated a panel called Call + Response at the invitation of the Whistler Public Library, featuring Mary MacDonald, bronwyn preece, Laura Sharp, and Lisa Sambo.

Come National Poetry Month in April 2026, we were variously juggling work, trips abroad, the joys of gestation and other sundry life commitments. It was all poetry, because everything is, but there wasn’t a lot of capacity for event planning, so we hosted a private Poetry Salon, inviting a handful of people to share poetry aloud.

Lisa and Lisa also collaborated to host a Gratitude Aloud Forest Journaling session in celebration of Earth Week for Stewardship Pemberton. (Photos by the wonderful Crystal Conroy.)

An attempt to collaborate with Alice Willits and Ilse Pedler, the Thrutopian poets of Great Britain, in the spring, was postponed, with a prayer sent out to the Universe to energize the initiative if it was meant to happen, (and an email to Sarah Stewart, farmer and Thrutopian-ally, to ask for help putting a Neighbourhood Small Grant application together,) and what do you know, here we are, approaching the solstice, when all things are brought into the fullness of light, and we have grant monies ready to energize a host of workshops and gatherings and opportunities.

So, to gather all these threads into one place, and make it easy for folk to engage their inner poet, and follow along with upcoming shenanigans, we’re creating this little virtual home base. Please follow along and join this little creative experiment in the use of our shared attention to breathe and speak life into things we want to cultivate and strengthen…

Kerry Dorey is a multi-hyphenate: he’s an actor and a voice artist; he leads sound baths at Village Yoga; and—between you and me—he’s a member of Pemberton’s growing Secret Poetry Appreciation Society.

Poetry has always been in the wings for Dorey; he was an actor for more than 30 years in Toronto, and when he moved out to Pemberton and began leading sound baths at Village Yoga, poetry became central.

“I realized I’d been sort of working with language all my life,” he remember. “And started reading poetry more for the sound baths that I do, because when people are lying in a space and trying to sort of just relax, sometimes just the notion of listening to some words being read to them can guide their thinking.”

Poetry through sound baths

However you engage in poetry is legitimate; old English poets never quite resonated with Dorey, so he looked to more contemporary writers. That was his in. And pairing recitations with sound baths has become a go-to medium for him to share poetry with others.

In the same way you can crank up some tunes on your drive home to decompress, Dorey uses sound baths to transition the body from a fight-or-flight state into a rest-and-digest state using chimes, gongs and a host of other instruments.

“The bottom line is just that it creates the opportunity for people to just relax and be able to transition their body from this sort of sympathetic fight-or-flight state that we’re always in to this sort of parasympathetic rest-and-digest state,” he said. “Because we don’t really know how to rest very well and we don’t really know how to let go very well.

That’s not to say the impact of a sound bath is going to be the same for everyone; much like how listening to any song can resonate differently for different people, sound baths can elicit disparate emotions and reactions based on who’s listening.

“I’m not going to tell you this is exactly how you’re going to feel, because everybody is going to experience it a different way depending on what they bring into the room,” said Dorey.

“They can make you go, ‘Oh, I remember this,’ or, ‘This makes me feel anxious,’ or ‘It makes me feel relaxed and peaceful.’”

A few years back, Dorey decided to pair his sound baths with poetry readings. Listening to him—which you can do at Village Yoga or through Lisa Richardson’s Wellness Almanac blog—you can hear why the pairing is so natural; Dorey’s voice is deep and resonant, gravelly but clear with an emotional core. It complements the sound baths.

“I think poems have a beautiful way of just pointing at an idea, and poets are able to articulate something that we can only sometimes think about,” he said.

“And so some poems that will resonate about just being present, being in the moment, thinking about the little things that pass us by during the day, that a poet is able to articulate and say, ‘Oh, this is something that I’ve noticed, and maybe it’s important that you have a think about this, too.’”

‘I think we’re the start of it’

Dorey said Richardson—repeatedly voted Pemberton’s favourite local writer—was one of the first people he met when he moved to Pemberton six years ago. And in turn, he was one of the first she asked to be a part of the Society.

“Lisa just has a love of language, and an enthusiasm that is contagious,” said Dorey. “We just started sharing poems back and forth with one another.

“She asked me what I thought about inviting other people to sort of share poems. And so I said, ‘Well, I’ll start it off for you and I,’ and I did a poem and it sort of just started these people going.”

The Society is here to stay—and it’s growing. Richardson and Dorey, along with Society members Johanna Molloy and Lisa Sambo, led a poetry pop-up at the Pemberton & District Public Library in April.

“[Johanna] is a beautiful writer and is Irish… I just could listen to her speak forever because she is a beautiful voice,” said Dorey. “And Lisa, I’ve only just met her, but she brings a cultural element to it and shares some beautiful things about the local language.”

Becoming a part of the Secret Poetry Appreciation Society is easier than you might think; whether it’s in writing or spoken aloud, produced by others or written at your desk at home, you just have to love poetry.

“I think it’s anybody who wants to be involved, anybody who’s the secret admirer of poetry,” said Dorey. “Come, and we’ll hold space for you.”

After that recent poetry pop-up at the Pemberton library, the Society is looking to share its love of poetry—and hopefully bring fellow secret poetry appreciators out of their shells around the Sea to Sky.

Dorey sees it as the start of Pemberton’s poetic tradition.

“I think we’re beginning it. I think we’re the start of it,” he said. “We’re collaborating with all these people. And there’s clearly an interest, you just sort of put it out there and see how it resonates with people.”

https://www.piquenewsmagazine.com/local-news/how-to-build-a-secret-poetry-appreciation-society-10589365

Kerry Dorey, Jay Molloy and I had this idea.

Officially, we’re the Society of Secret Poetry Appreciators, but you should know that this is a made-up thing. Like, we made it up.

Everything in the whole world started this way, you know… the stock exchange, your favourite restaurant, the TV show you and your friends quote endlessly, democracy, white supremacy… it all started as someone’s made-up idea that they acted on and somewhere along the line, others began to treat as real.

Open mic, Jay and Kerry said.

I was skeptical. I have trouble watching stand-up. Too much of an empath. When you’re not funny, I suffer for you. I encouraged my deeply shy best friend to join the debate team in high school and when she gave her first speech, she shook so hard she dropped all her notecards and couldn’t recover her place once she’d picked them all up out of order, and I sat there dying, thinking, I did this to her. She was a perfectly happy and fulfilled person until I forced her to stand up in front of people.

My 2025 creative collaborators were enthusiastic, however, about standing up in front of people. In April, they had backed me when I said, “I think we should invite people to a night where we all sit in a circle and read our favourite poems out loud to each other.” So it was my turn to say, YES. And so we continued the merry adventure of making it up as we went along, because that is how new things come into the world.

Jay went scouting for locations. She met with Charmaine at the Pemberton Museum and explained the vision and also, that while we had applied for some money from the Pemberton Literacy Table, we didn’t have funding yet. We were really just exploring our options.

“Don’t let that stop you,” Charmaine said. “Just pay the $10 event insurance and we’re happy to have you.” Suddenly, we were a go.

Before we knew what was happening, 50 people had registered online and suddenly people were getting a “sold out” message on our Eventbrite listing. Undeterred by this roadblock, a stalwart mysterious poetry appreciator named Saadia messaged the Museum asking how she could get in, and Charmaine dutifully forwarded the request to us. How on Earth a tourist visiting Pemberton had heard of our little grassroots made-up thing was another mystery, but Jay emailed her a welcome, and HERE’S THE POINT OF THE STORY, a week after the open mic actually happened, blowing all our minds with the generosity and talent of the audience and participants, Saadia emailed us to say “thank you for such a warm welcome. We were in Pemberton as a family on our first trip away from home, after my husband died in January, at just 58 years old. He was the most wonderful kind human and we are heartbroken. The love and support from family and friends is helping us to carry on, but there is something about the kindness of strangers that is particularly touching.” She referenced poems and songs shared during the open mic that spoke directly, unexpectedly, to them. “I assure we were not the only ones who were moved to tears. My husband would have loved the evening. It seems we were exactly where we were supposed to be.”

Somewhere along the way, made up things become actual medicine. So go ahead and make something up. Our communities are so hungry for it. If you’re sitting around waiting for an official person or an official group to do it, you might be waiting a long time, because a lot of their time gets spent in meetings, doing official things. (Go join their official group. They’re usually all eager for new people.) Or find a couple of friends, have a meeting powered by tea and brownies, book a venue, speak your vision out loud, send out the invitations. I suspect you will be as gobsmacked and delighted as we were by who shows up. (Shout out here to Angie Wilde and Quentin de Lorenzis who also showed up as fellow organizers in the most perfect and magical way.)

But here is the catch. Culture needs real estate.

If the Museum hadn’t offered their space, (edit: their utterly perfect tailor-made for community events and open mics and grassroots-vibing things space), our idea would have died before it got up and dancing.

Humans need third spaces in which to gather.

And culture needs outlets. Actual real estate. In which to take place.

And our communities, here in Whistler and Pemberton, need people and officials and organizations, to lobby for it, protect it, envision it, fundraise for it, fund it, value it. Not the culture alone, but the real estate dedicated to it.

If you’d asked me when I was younger if poetry could ease grief or if communities needed cultural spaces or if anyone other than artists and rich people needed art, I would have said, I dunno, probably not. And most of us, now, have an endless personalized download of culture and content in our hands, on our devices. Who needs to do “content” in public? But I didn’t know what grief was. I didn’t know that sharing made it lighter. I didn’t know how relentlessly complicated and heavy and lonely and confusing life can sometimes feel. And how ineffable. And how the effort to turn that into a song or a joke or poem or a painting, and to share that, and to witness and be witnessed in the wrangling and wrestling of it, is, quite possibly, the whole point.

And definitely the way through.

And it takes space. Actual physical meat/meet-space.

Let’s make it so.

I got to stand at the gate of the museum in the dark waving a lantern that Jay was smart enough to bring, for 45 minutes before the event started… in the lovely company of David Cross. I felt like a lighthouse keeper. Over here! poets! dreamers! over here! I’d hear a crunch crunch crunch of feet on dirty wet road, and wave the lantern above my head… And people came out of the dark, through the little gate, carrying guitars and drum bags and violin cases and notebooks and I’d say:

“hi! I’m Lisa! Welcome!”

And they’d say, “Do you need to see my ticket?”

“No. Come on in. Go towards the sparkly lights. There’s tea inside. Are you thinking of sharing something tonight?”

“No. No I don’t think so,” they’d say. “Just here to listen….” and walk over towards the lights, with their guitar case/violin case/travelling drum/notebook in their hands.

So they listened, and I guess they heard the call: go share your thing.

24 people did.

It was some kind of magic.

I was literally blown away by the level of talent. By the gorgeousness of the songs and the voices and the words. By the humour and the bravery. And by the delightfully warm and responsive audience, who took on the task of putting these performers on their shoulders and carrying them across the waters of shyness or trepidation.

Here is the gallery, captured by our dear friend Brenda Bakker.