Marilyn Lerch

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.

In 2022, Marilyn Lerch and Sackville poet and professor Geordie Miller published Disharmonies, a series of dialogues or calls and responses divided into 12 sections, that explore the poet's roles and responsibilities in a 21st century world of capitalist exploitation, natural collapse and the COVID-19 pandemic where, in Wendy Trevino's words, "poetry is not enough." The pages are divided, with Miller's prose and poetry printed on the left and Lerch's on the right.

At the official launch of her book in February 2019, Lerch suggested poets must write about contemporary issues. “Poets have to tell the tale of our time,” she said. “It’s not an exaggeration to say we are being hunted by powerful forces whose consequences are often deliberately kept secret or unknown; forces that have already violated the carrying capacity of our Earth; forces that have created unprecedented inequality giving power to the few over the many.”

That We Have Lived At All: poems of love, witness & gratitude, published in 2018 by Chapel Street Editions in Woodstock, New Brunswick, is divided into six parts.

The Physics of Allowable Sway is self-published by Devon Avenue Poetry Books, printed and bound in 2013 by Gaspereau Press. Marilyn Lerch's fourth poetry collection takes its title from "Once I Dreamed," a poem that opens with its narrator dreaming about, "a slow, determined climb to bedrooms where, / one by one, I slew the family, / then from the bottom of the darkened stairs, turned and saw / processing down, in single file, / all the dead to be slain again."

Writing in the Spring 2009 issue of the Montreal Review of Books, Bert Almon singled out some of Lerch's poems for special praise:

Witness and Resist, published in 2008 by Morgaine House of Pointe Clair, Quebec, includes poems that call attention to suffering and injustice. "Elegy for Joseph Terry Riordon" describes the suffering of a Canadian military policeman exposed to toxic chemicals and depleted uranium during the 1991 Persian Gulf War. (A note explains that his widow declined a military funeral after the government refused to recognize that he suffered from Gulf War Syndrome.) The poem "Maria Luz Continues" is about a Washington bus tour guide who tells passengers that the Pentagon is the world's largest office building with 24,000 employees, then reveals that the she herself and her son, were beaten and violated during the 1973 military coup in Santiago, Chile "while somewhere in this iniquitous hive, glasses were raised."

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.

In 2007, while Marilyn Lerch was serving as President of the Writers Federation of New Brunswick, she was asked to help promote literacy in New Brunswick, a province with one of the lowest literacy rates in Canada. She recruited members of the Federation to interview 17 adult learners, from ages 19 to 71, and tell the stories of how they struggled to overcome their problems with reading, writing and basic math skills. The project resulted in the 2009 book Breaking the Word Barrier: Stories of Adults Learning to Read that Lerch co-edited with Angela Ranson.

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.

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 four-year terms 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."

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

Marilyn Lerch has published five collections of poetry (2001-2018).

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.

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.

Lerch pays tribute to Paul Celan and Walt Whitman and engages in an imaginary dialogue with Adrienne Rich's "Usonian Journals 2000".

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."

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.

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.

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.

Lerch responds with a story about a 1971 protest in Washington, D.C. in which a comrade declared that one day everyone will be carrying a red flag. "Our mindset, a moment of belief," Lerch writes, but adds a second story from a Socialist Workers Party conference in 1973 where a comrade said he thought a violent revolution wasn't necessary. "Leon turned over in his grave," Lerch writes, "about 80 comrades fainted dead away, the rest kinda went crazy. For me it was axiomatic: capitalism created systematic and systemic violence against all who opposed it. Violence came from the ruling classes; violence would be returned from the oppressed and the proletariat. Class warfare. No way out. But having just turned eighty-five, I want to believe in massive non-violent civil disobedience, but I don't know, don't know."

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.

Almon notes, however, that Lerch has been "a political activist for left-wing causes since the 1960s" and he writes that some of her work in Witness and Resist is more rhetoric than poetry: "When she excoriates her native country, the United States, for redneck attitudes or developing the bomb, some readers may give intellectual assent while feeling that the poems smack of editorials."

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.

Part IV called "In These Anthropocene Times" ponders the fate of the Earth in the 21st century when "the turning point is past, / the worst is yet to come." In "What Do You Have to Say for Yourself, Poet?" Lerch writes: "I say / we know we cannot go on like this / and we know it will go on like this." The poem identifies "a pitiless system" of rage and suffering: "Technique / in its own context, / eats its own tail, / squeezing culture to a pulp." It concludes by affirming the need for artistic resistance "sing play paint / write / dream / our truths" with "seeds of goodness/ seeds of courage / still being sown."