You won’t find a drill, hammer or saw in Helene Levasseur’s tool box.
The instruments that she uses for her craft are a rhyme book, dictionary and thesaurus.
She has a penchant for words, relishes language for all its quirks and its power to hurt or heal.
“Poetry is writing music, composition, you can encompass anything,” says Levasseur, who founded Holy Wow Poets in 2009 to connect with others fond of words and verse.
For Levasseur, writing has been cathartic. She began penning her thoughts after an accident in 1989 that left her with a serious brain injury.
With her speech slurred and “eyes crossed”, Levasseur was “living in a fog.”
She began writing songs, learned to play the guitar and found the lyrics were lifting her spirits.
“It’s therapy,” says Levasseur. “Poetry is therapy. It’s a medicine. It’s healing. It’s a metamorphosis in so many ways. It’s grand. It’s a release.”
A decade later, a friend in 100 Mile House sent her an email, in the form of a verse and dared Levasseur to reply, lyrically.
Her reply turned into a collaborative, rather lengthy, rhyme and prompted her to wonder if there were like-minded people in Maple Ridge who wanted to share their poetry with others.
Since it began in 2009, the monthly drop-in poetry group has gathered a membership of 25 that includes published poets. The group is now working towards publishing an anthology to feature everyone’s work and hopes to host a reading on the main stage of the ACT eventually. Each monthly gathering usually has a theme. Yesterday, the group pondered New Year’s resolutions with poetic flair. Next month, they will write about Cupid.
“I know nothing about poetry,” says Levasseur. “My love for it came from writing music.”
Levasseur described the group in a rhyme: “If you’re a poet, and you know it, come and show it.”
“People think poetry has nothing to do with them,” she says. “They refuse it until they hear it. Everybody can relate to poetry. It goes deep inside your heart and it reaches people.”
• The Holy Wow Poets will meet in the lobby of the ACT in Maple Ridge on Feb. 14 at 7 p.m. The theme is St. Valentine’s Duo and poems will focus on romance.
