Carleton Alum David O’Meara named Ottawa’s Poet Laureate
By Emily Putnam
“Read. Think. Read. Think differently. Think strangely. Read.”
For David O’Meara, Ottawa’s 2024 English Poet Laureate, this playful yet profound advice to aspiring writers captures his approach to art and life. A celebrated poet and Carleton English Graduate, O’Meara brings a unique blend of intellectual curiosity and artistic flair to his new illustrious role.
“It’s a real honour to be asked,” he reflects. “There are many interesting, worthwhile things that can be accomplished in the position. I see a great value in advocating for art.”
Established in 2017, the Laureate program seeks to inspire creativity and community through a deep and shared love of poetry.
O’Meara, however, admits to feeling a tension between the recognition and his belief in the artist’s role as an outsider. “Artists are agents of reflection and dissent and therefore eschew the establishment. I’m always a little uncomfortable being ‘named’ anything.”
“Fundamentally, I believe artists work underground. How I balance the position will be the test,” he says.
O’Meara succeeds Albert Dumont as English Poet Laureate. An Algonquin elder, Dumont used his two-year tenure to highlight Indigenous issues and successfully advocated for renaming the western leg of the National Capital Commission’s parkway along the Ottawa River. It is now called Kichi Zibi Mikan, meaning “Great River Road” in Algonquin.
A Distinguished Career
O’Meara’s career is marked by both innovation and acclaim. He has authored five collections of poetry and published his debut novel, Chandelier, in 2024, which tells the story of Georgia, a twenty-year-old grappling with severe depression after the death of her best friend as she arrives in South Korea.
He says the pivot from poetry to novel writing was a distinctive process.
“I want to be surprised continually and counted it a success when I was. Part of the work was creating characters as a vessel for paradox and articulation.”
“Character is the essential task; language is its vehicle. Everything flows from there. “
“With them, I was inspired to create a memorable picture through a jigsaw of the characters’ inconsistencies within a texture of articulation. In that way, it’s much like poetry, but with a heavy foot on the narrative pedal,” says O’Meara.
He is a winner of the Ottawa Book Award and the Archibald Lampman Prize, director of The Plan 99 Reading Series, founding Artistic Director for VERSeFest (Canada’s International Poetry Festival), and a jurist for the 2012 Griffin International Poetry Prize.
Notably, Gord Downie made a direct reference to his poem The War Against Television in the song Leave on In Violet Light, The Tragically Hip’s 2001 album.
O’Meara credits Carleton University’s English program for shaping his literary foundation.
“Gaining a wider knowledge of literature—its history, movements, techniques and applications—was essential. I gained that knowledge in the various courses available at Carleton,” he says.
He recalls a particularly formative workshop with Christopher Levenson during his second year of studies, saying, “It was the first time I’d received feedback from a whole classroom of like-minded but critical students.”
Beyond the classroom, O’Meara immersed himself in campus arts as a member of Sock ‘n’ Buskin Theatre Company, the independent theatre troupe at Carleton.
“At one point, I was Artistic Director,” he explains. “The collaborative effort in those productions was very exciting. And I had some really tremendous professors at the time, notably Ben Jones and Jack Healey. Their dedication and passion for a living and evolving awareness of literature was infectious.”
A Vision for Ottawa’s Literary Community
Reflecting on the city’s literary scene, O’Meara describes Ottawa as “home to a rich variety of voices” and “very supportive toward its own variousness.” He encourages aspiring writers to engage with the community, noting that “for those who wish to show up, the writing scene is very welcoming and energizing.”
Collaboration, he emphasizes, is central to his creative process. “It’s not creative to think the same way continually,” O’Meara says.
“Collaboration vexes, in a healthy way, your natural but stubborn instincts. You have to get outside your self-interested aesthetics and accommodate another vision. The result might be a mess. You are giving up control. Ideally, you both are, and the result is not a compromise, but energy. If the right elements come together, the difference of approaches can lift one vision into a wider response.”