Poets Marylin Lerch and Geordie Miller started a conversation about their work near the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, and it turned into a collaboration that is being celebrated tonight, at the launch of Disharmonies, a poem written by both Miller and Lerch and printed here in Sackville by Hardscrabble Press.

The gathering starts at 7 p.m. at Struts Gallery, and will be outside, weather permitting.

CHMA caught up with Lerch and Miller in a shady backyard, with the howling Sackville winds in the background:

Here’s Miller and Lerch reading a selection from Disharmonies:

Lerch is a retired teacher who has been living and writing in Sackville for 26 years, and served as the town’s Poet Laureate from 2014 to 2018. Miller settled in the town in 2015, when he started teaching poetry at Mount Allison. He’s also chair of the board for Sappyfest.

Miller says the collaboration started with Lerch, a mentor, reaching out to find out what Miller was working on.

“She asked, are you writing? And what are you writing? And I found I was writing these kind of weird, angry poems, which I guess wasn’t so strange in the fall of 2020,” recalls Miller. “So we started sharing the poems back and forth… and it started to gather some momentum and eventually became a book.”

Disharmonies is letterpress printed and sewn together by Keagan Hawthorne, founder and owner of Hardscrabble Press.

“You know how things happen in Sackville,” says Lerch. “People show up.” Hawthorne is a poet himself, and set up his micro-press shortly after arriving. “He started almost immediately being part of the literary community,” says Lerch. “And he’s very enthusiastic about producing beautiful work.”

“One of the challenges was how to reproduce the conversation,” says Miller. “Keegan did a wonderful job of laying it out, and there’s a slight difference in the colour of the print, so you can distinguish our voices from one another.”

From start to finish, Disharmonies is a conversation. Miller describes it as on happening “across generations, but between two like-minded individuals… About revolution, and about the situation that we find ourselves in.”

And while the conversation was born within the COVID-19 pandemic, the pandemic itself is not the thrust of the work.

“COVID was an x-ray machine that showed the system,” says Lerch. “It really was enlightening… How it was handled and what it did and who it affected and who was making money. All of this indicated the system that holds COVID.”

Miller says he hopes people feel called by the poem. “These are poems oriented towards, I would say, a revolutionary horizon,” says Miller. “I think that in listening to each other and talking to each other, we learn things from each other. And we hope others can join the conversation as well.”