Catherine St. Denis reads “The Essential Involvement of the Harpist”

“Only pain is intellectual, only evil is interesting.  
This is the treason of the artist: 
a refusal to admit the banality of evil 
and the terrible boredom of pain.”
      — Ursula Le Guin


As a child, I thought acid rain would burn holes 
through my tongue. It was the older kids
who warned me. They told stories of a girl
who mangled her foot riding her bike 
with bare feet, a boy who suffocated 
inside his snow fort, winter wresting
the life from him like a child predator. Did we learn
this from our parents? Fear was an all-season attraction. 
Gore, a sideshow under thumbnail, a splinter jesting:
Only pain is intellectual, only evil is interesting.

I have learned to celebrate the certainty of lug nuts,
the sartorial elegance of penguins,
the swaying hips of drapes against the breeze. 
But, still, lug nuts threaten to work loose,
drapes become drab in airless rooms, 
penguins are always in peril. Every poet is part wrist— 
poised, graceful, split-skinned, bones churning 
inside like a sack of pearls. Nothing is interesting without
contrast. We want the killer and the harpist.
This is the treason of the artist:

to spoon the embellished world back into hungry   
mouths. Poetry MSG; nothing is new,
just more flavour-infused, more itself 
than it ever was. At twelve, I stood shoeless 
in our frozen gravel driveway, the world asleep,
singing softly to a god I had no faith in, upheaval
in my family, breath warming the light snow
that descended toward my face. I had been kneaded
and baked into the bread of repression, a flour weevil,
a refusal. To admit the banality of evil,

one must first steep in it. Consider the upskirt photographers,  
consider the god-complex nurses and the frenzied 
dictators, all their wicked dendrites, the draw of their maws.
Perhaps only the persecuted, the misused, the executed 
can lay claim to an indifference toward malevolence,
their tired bodies saturated with the filth of it, the strain.
It’s the poets who mend the feet of injured girls,
tend fires that light the mouths of our dead, 
unburden us from the heft of our apathy chains 
and the terrible boredom of pain.

Lise Rochefort on “The Essential Involvement of the Harpist”

In this poem, St. Denis has crafted a successful Glosa. Beginning with Ursula K. Le Guin’s four-line “cabeza,” it flawlessly incorporates subtle rhyme with artful philosophy. The work is grounded in strong, personal images, and precise diction to guide a reader’s reflections on pain, beauty and creativity and their roles in inspiring the poet, and artist, in society.

Bios

Catherine St. Denis

Catherine St. Denis is the winner of The Malahat Review’s Open Season Award for Fiction. She placed in Grain’s Hybrid Forms Contest, was a finalist for the CBC Poetry Prize, and was twice a finalist for PEN Canada’s New Voices Award. Her work is featured in Best Canadian Poetry 2025.