Marilyn Lerch (born May 26, 1936) is a Canadian poet, teacher, journalist and activist. She is the author of five collections of poetry that explore the rough edges of love and betrayal, healing and hurt. Her poems combine keen observations of nature's beauty with sharp, and sometimes despairing, commentary on its destruction. In the words of one reviewer, her poetry "often unites the green universe of the garden with the red-and-black world of politics and war." Her work also probes, sometimes with mordant humour, the accelerating effects of technologies propelling humanity toward planetary catastrophe. "I began to have an image of myself as a poet who was standing in a very indefinite, immense space, and I'm pointing at things that I think we need to pay attention to," Lerch told an interviewer in 2014 after publishing her fourth book of poetry.Hersey, Linda. "Poet laureate calls us a 'species in transition.' Moncton Times & Transcript. February 14, 2014 p.D3.
In 2022, Lerch published Disharmonies, a poetic conversation with Geordie Miller in which the two poets condemn capitalism as a system organized around plunder and profit and instead imagine a world that is dedicated to satisfying human needs.
From 2006 to 2010, Lerch served as the President of the Writers' Federation of New Brunswick and from 2014 to 2018, as poet laureate for the Town of Sackville, New Brunswick where she lives.
Several of Lerch's poems have been set to music. She collaborated with Canadian composer Lloyd Burritt on the song cycles "We Move Homeward" and "Moon Loves Its Light," first performed in 2011 at Songfire, a music festival sponsored by the Vancouver International Song Institute. Burritt also set her poetry to music in his works "Triptych Three Songs on Three Abstract Paintings" and "Quintessence." Canadian soprano Allison Angelo recorded four Burritt/Lerch songs in her 2015 debut album Moon Loves Its Light. Nicholas Piper's choral composition "The Trees on the Edge," commissioned by the Ottawa Bach Choir, took Lerch's poem "New Orleans Obliquely" as its text. Alasdair MacLean used Lerch's poem "We Move Homeward" in his choral and orchestral composition of the same name, first performed in Halifax, Nova Scotia on March 7, 2000."Art Attack," Telegraph-Journal, June 25, 2011, p.F2.We Move Homeward for chorus and orchestra by Alasdair Maclean, Chronosphere Music, February 2000.
Career
Marilyn Lerch was born in East Chicago, Indiana, which she has described as "a little industrial town snug up against the Illinois border." After graduating from Indiana University, she taught high school English in Gary, Indiana before moving to Washington, D.C. in 1967 where she continued her teaching career while also working with activist groups opposed to the U.S. war in Vietnam. Lerch dropped out of teaching for almost two years to work full time organizing demonstrations against the war."Marilyn Lerch lives life with a purpose," Times & Transcript, April 9, 2012, p.A8.
In 1992, she earned a master's degree in holistic education from the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology. Her thesis was based on a year she spent teaching English to about a dozen, mainly African-American, Grade 11 students in a poverty-stricken and violence-prone neighbourhood in Washington, D.C. Lerch developed an integrative learning model designed, in part, to lead her students to become aware of the forces and relationships shaping their lives; develop trust in themselves; regain the joy of learning and learn to express kindness toward themselves and others. A key part of the method involved a Council or talking circle adapted from Indigenous American custom in which students would speak as they held a talking stick that was passed clockwise around the circle. At the end of the school year, Lerch judged the integrative model an overall success based on student academic performance in reading, writing and communications skills; student evaluations of the class; her own assessment and administrators' interviews with students.Lerch, M. (1992) The Implementation of an integrative education learning module in an urban public high school. (Publication No. EP15301) [Master's thesis, Institute of Transpersonal Psychology Menlo Park, California] ProQuest Information and Learning
After retiring from teaching, Lerch moved, in 1996, to Sackville, New Brunswick, a small town she had visited during summer vacations. She began writing poetry and became active in movements for peace and social justice. She also campaigned against the extraction of shale gas and supported measures to mitigate the effects of climate change.Lerch, Marilyn. "News, views from the Tantramar Alliance Against Hydro-fracking," Sackville Tribune-Post, April 10, 2013, p.A7.Tower, Katie. "Solutions proposed at Sackville climate change forum: Adaptation efforts will require mobilization, resiliency, political will," Sackville Tribune-Post, February 5, 2020, p.A5.
Lerch has also been an active member of PFLAG Canada, an organization that supports the rights of members of the LGBTQ community.Hammock, Janet. "Third annual pride week planned in Sackville," Sackville Tribune-Post, September 24, 2014, p.18.
In addition to her activism, she taught creative writing at Westmorland, Springhill, and Dorchester prisons as well as the Nova Institution for Women in Truro, Nova Scotia. She served as President of the New Brunswick Writers' Federation (2006-2010) and as poet laureate for the town of Sackville (2014-2018). As poet laureate, Lerch wrote poetry for commemorative events, organized readings by local poets, sponsored literary contests and in her own words, inspired "young and old to love what only poetry can do.""Town of Sackville appoints Lerch as new poet laureate," Sackville Tribune-Post, December 11, 2013, p.A3.
Lerch also formed the Sackville Writers' Group and Roving Poets. In 2007, she took part in a national campaign funded by the Canada Council for the Arts called "Random Acts of Poetry" in which she dropped by classrooms, offices, the local hospital and theatre to recite from her work.LeBlanc, Joan. "Random Acts of Poetry take place in town", Sackville Tribune-Post, October 10, 2007, p. A2.
Poetry
Marilyn Lerch has published five collections of poetry (2001-2018).
Lambs & Llamas, Ewes & Me
Lambs & Llamas, Ewes & Me is a cycle of poems published in 2001 by the Springbank Press with illustrations by Maskull Lasserre. It was printed in a limited edition of 110 copies using a foot-treadled, Chandler & Price letterpress. The book was designed and printed by Jamie Syer on French-made specialty paper and bound with wool from the sheep on Syer's farm in Bergen, Alberta.Lambs & Llamas, Ewes & Me by Marilyn Lerch, Springbank Press, 2001
In her introduction, Lerch writes that she had always been touched by the activity of shepherding even though she grew up in a town with steel mills, chemical plants and oil refineries. Yet, she felt there was something magical about watching over sheep on the Syer farm in the summer of 1998 "accompanied, however reluctantly, by an unforgettable llama named Tarragon."
"Caring about creatures innocent and absolutely helpless was a way, perhaps, of caring for something undefended in myself," she explains.
Every afternoon, retreating from a steamy Alberta sun, Number 109 and her two lambs come to visit and read my poems. They nudge them off the bale to get a closer look, crinkling and smudging the lines. I think: it is good that poems taste of mud and hot breath.
Moon Loves Its Light Moon Loves Its Light is a collection of 67 poems published in 2004 by Morgaine House Publishing of Pointe Claire, Quebec. Its four sections feature a wide range of poems including ones of arrival and departure such as "We Move
" and "The Cave Painters of Lascaux: Creating As They Came." "Ceremony For A Friend" describes emptying an urn "tilting into the fast-running current/a stream of ashes like a banner unfurled/ rippling toward the pulling-away sea...beige scarf on dark moving water." "Tantramar Manifesto" warns fellow poets that they are deceived by the flatness of New Brunswick's Tantramar Marshes dyked to hold back the Bay of Fundy's high tides. Instead, the poem calls for breaking through the "obsolete defenses" to "let in the flood" and urges poets to abandon their complacency and restraint: "Let us / slide down the low-tide banks of Tantramar / and risk the sucking red mud, / riot in language, lingua flexa,/ kick-ass syntax, improvisatory, / shake the ground with our eyes."Moon Loves Its Light by Marilyn Lerch, Morgaine House, Pointe Clair, Quebec, 2004.
The book also contains poems about the coup d'état in Chile on September 11, 1973, the 2001 September 11 attacks in the U.S. and the 2002 bombings in Bali, Indonesia. Another recalls the events of August 6, 1945.
A six-page poem called "A Disappearing Act" satirizes the effects of on-screen, online culture with its discontinuity, pornography and commodification where disappearing users become "SURF-ACES," "SKIMMY DIPPERS," "E-COMMERCE SHOP LIFERS" and "AUTO-MATES. An autobiographical poem called "Father Take 1" celebrates "Happy times/by the large avuncular Philco/listening to the Hit Parade, sugared/cinnamon toast and hot tea commingling" when the poet visited her father in "my childhood's second home/not his place, his sister's" and the "Lovely times" as he sometimes walked her home "when the dense, unhurried fall of snow/muffled East Chicago's grind and grime":
when I'd tuck my hand in his, close tight my eyes, squealing as he led me into snowbanks Don't stop, Daddy, walk through our door and stay forever.
But in "Father Take 2," the poem records that he carried off the bag of coins she kept under her pillow when she was five: "He was gone and they were gone" and his denial of what he had done "leaving me a gate unhinged/swinging, swinging back and forth/between his theft and mine."
Writing in Atlantic Books Today, Michael deBeyer notes that Lerch's first poem, "We Move Homeward" expresses the theme of the poet's moving toward, but also away from home. He points to lines in the second poem, "Tantramar Manifesto" that show how to do it: "We live on a curve to somewhere/and must risk dropping out of sight/to follow it." "Lerch takes the risk," DeBeyer writes. "She follows the curve, to Niagara and Toronto, El Salvador and New Zealand. Her journeys are eye-opening, political, and reveal a keen sense of justice." But, he adds, she also returns to her many homes throughout the book. "Each return, each poem, is wrought with resolve and compassion. Behind Lerch, the moon provides its cold light of observation, its romantic light of inspiration."DeBeyer, Michael. "Poetry is where the home is," Atlantic Books Today, Number 45, Fall 2004.
In his review of Moon Loves Its Light, George Elliot Clarke urged readers to "get this book. Read this poet." Clarke wrote that the book revealed Lerch to be a poet "awake to everything: her locale, her family, her personal experience, all that impinges upon her consciousness. The result is a wide-ranging, expansive, endlessly surprising work."Clarke, George Elliot. "Poetry of politics," Sunday Herald, The Nova Scotian, July 16, 2006, p.15
Witness and Resist