Lucy Black talks to Laurence Hutchman about his latest collection of interviews with ten contemporary Canadian poets.
LB: Congratulations on pulling together this new and wonderful collection of interviews, Laurence. Working my way through the conversations, I felt entirely engaged in a dialogue about the development of a contemporary poetic tradition as it moves forward from the work of early Canadian poets. You, yourself, are recognized as an accomplished poet and I wonder if you would share how engaging in these conversations has led you to reflect upon your own creative work?
LH: It was very stimulating to interview ten of the most exciting poets in the country. Although I cannot determine how these conversations will influence my writing, but I do enjoy hearing these poets speak about their styles. Brian Bartlett’s return to haiku, through the exploration of poets such as Issa and Basho, led him to the discovery of the possible ways to write in this ancient Japanese form. He comments, “Haiku needs a balance between solidity and ellipsis, substance and suggestion, peace and silence.” Al Moritz’s work fascinates me because of his use of surrealism as he draws on poets as diverse as Andre Breton, Octavio Paz, Czeslaw Milosz, and Ludwig Zeller. He makes unexpected “leaps” in his poems in “The Butterfly,” and “The Sentinel.” I’m attracted to George Elliot Clarke’s longer poems Canticles, influenced by Ezra Pounds’ The Cantos, written with the wild rush of images, the use of foreign languages, the numerous allusions he uses to develop his ideas of the history of slavery throughout world history. Sue Sinclair ‘s poetry engages us with her philosophical approach, creating a strong form and structure and juxtaposition of unexpected images that she integrates into her argument. I think that each of the poets I interviewed provides exciting ways of writing poetry.
LB: Brian Bartlett speaks of being rivetted by Yeats’ mix of clarity, craft and complexity.” Each of the poets interviewed strongly feels layout the components that underlie and comprise their work–including such things as literary tradition, global perspectives, philosophical approaches, the development of aesthetics, the importance of sound, language, and music. Having interacted with this gifted group of writers, and having carefully considered their interviews, I wonder if you could share any over-riding feelings or thoughts that have stayed with you.
LH: When you interview such excellent writers there are certain feelings and thoughts that naturally remain with you. For example, regarding composition of writing, Roo Borson compares it to the improvisation of a piano player “so it felt like the music could move in any direction at any moment. In fact, its movement would be limited by the sort of music it was, but not knowing what comes next opens everything up, so the listener can sense the range, the breadth, of a field of possibility.” She brings special attention to her subjects whether it is a Chinese shikumen residence, Roman ruins, or her Toronto neighbourhood. I was drawn to Bruce Myer and John B. Lee’s in-depth exploration of history: personal, local, national, or international. Travis Lane speaks with keen insight about creating the elements of style of a poem. “Every poem needs its own sound, its own development–the words should be arranged as they are because that is the only way they can say what needs to be said. Attention, concentration, and dedication–it’s all there in the works of these poets.
LB: John B. Lee indicates that among his biggest challenges is “living in what is an essentially anti-intellectual culture.” He elaborates on this point and then concludes with a final question, “how to awaken the deep reader in a culture that doesn’t read.” In addition to writing, you have also been involved in several academic communities as a university professor. Accepting the veracity of Lee’s comments, could you share how you have been able to navigate an academic career in conjunction with your work as a poet?
LH: I think that John B. Lee’s statement is accurate. We are living “in a culture that doesn’t read.” During my academic career, I wrote articles, book reviews, co-edited Coastlines: the Poetry of Atlantic Canada, and attended academic conferences in several countries. The Université de Moncton accepted creative writing for academic credit, so I obtained research grants for creative writing. At the Université de Moncton in Edmundston, I taught a wide variety of courses, encouraging students to develop their writing skills and literary criticism. By engaging in creative writing, I made the poems come alive through lively discussions and expressed why it was important to appreciate literature. In my language classes, students would write personal journals and poems. I also thought it was essential to encourage poetry in the larger public, so I gave readings and workshops through the League of Canadian Poets and The Writer’s Federation of New Brunswick, along with many readings in Canada, the United States, Ireland, Bulgaria, and China. In 2001, I founded the Alden Nowlan Literary Festival running from 2001-2004, which celebrated significant New Brunswick Poets Fred Cogswell, Robert Gibbs, and Travis Lane.
LB: Tell us about your decision to write this book. What inspired and/or motivated your interest in the subject matter.
LH: My interest in Writers’ Words Volume 11 began early in the first volume. At that time, I was writing critical work on Al Purdy, and I thought that one way to gain more insight into his poetry would be to interview him. As I was staying in London and working on a research grant, I had an opportunity to interview James Reaney and Colleen Thibaudeau. After conducting a few more interviews, the thought of turning the collection of interviews into a book was born. It was published in 2011 by Guernica Editions. The second book came naturally as I still had interviews with John B. Lee, Roo Borson and Colleen Thibaudeau, poets that I had not used in the first book. I approached my publisher, Michael Mirolla, and he agreed to publish it. In my opinion this book would be of interest to students of literature, literary critics, professors, and poets. It is already in many libraries. On a personal level, I wanted to push the borders of my own writing, so what better way than to read excellent contemporary Canadian poets.
LB: Tell us a little about your key priorities when you were working on this manuscript.
LH: I chose writers who I thought were among the best of contemporary Canadian poets and representative of distinct styles of writing. The interviews are quite extensive because I wanted to explore their work from their first books to their most recent books, to show how their aesthetics evolved and their poetry changed over time. For instance, Roo Borson’s work changed from her earlier focus on her poems rooted in North America, including her younger years in California, to concern with Japanese and Chinese subjects. Sue Sinclair’s discovery and the use of philosophy allowed her to develop an argument effectively in her poems through structure and language. In addition to questions concerning craft, I also asked the writers about significant events in their lives. For example, I asked Al Moritz about the effect of the Vietnam war, racial conflict in the 1960s and the industrialization of Mahoning County. With George Elliott Clarke, I asked him questions based on my reading of his memoir Where Beauty Survived: An Africadian Memoir.
LB: Please share with us a little about your research and pre-writing process.
LH: In contrast to the first book, I decided to use the email format as opposed to taped interviews that I had in the first volume. I also thought that the interviews would be extensive so that I could trace the development of the writers’ work and style from their first books, their education, aesthetics, the influences of other writers, along with the social and historical backgrounds. In preparing for this book, I read as many of the writers’ books as I could, which included their poetry books, essays, and memoirs. I also looked at essays by critics on their works, as well as other interviews. For example, I read Brian Bartlett’s books, including his early volumes, his book of reviews, All Manner of Tackle: Living with Poetry, articles, and his book of nature writing Ringing Here & There A nature Calendar, book reviews on his work and personal conversations with him.
LB: We know that words have power. When were you first aware that your ability to write could be transformative?
LH: After grade 11, I spent a summer out west and wrote a travel journal and then started to keep a regular journal, which I still keep after all of these years. When reading Richard Aldington’s biography, D. H. Lawrence: A portrait of a Genius But …it occurred to me that I could become a writer. Soon after that, I began to write poetry and to read poetry seriously, including T.S. Eliot, Al Purdy, Irving Layton, Leonard Cohen, and Margaret Avison. I was especially attracted to Keats’s idea of “negative capability” to capture the essence of an experience, or the dynamic process of the actuality of thought. I like poems that are truly transformative where one can go through the metaphors that simultaneously involve not only ideas, but sound, rhythm, and syntax. Sometimes the poem takes you to a place that you haven’t been able to imagine before, to see something as if for the first time, something of symbolic purpose, of deeper philosophical significance. This happens in my poems “Spoon” and “Pencil” where ordinary utensils or objects are shown in a more universal context. Sometimes, the poem takes you into another person’s life to witness the interaction of an individual within a larger context of history.
LB: If you had to choose one book that has influenced your writing life, what would that book be and how did it influence you?
LH: I think that I will choose Al Purdy’s Cariboo Horses. I picked up this book in the Kipling Public Library in Grade 13 and I was fascinated by his subjects: “The Cariboo Horses, “Song of the Impermanent Husband,” “Roblin Mills,” “The Country North of Belleville” and “Transient.” Later, I was attracted to his style of writing, the form, structure, metaphors, revealing how he expresses his vision. Most of my PHD dissertation is devoted to the study of his major poems. In “Transient,” he conveys through metaphor, sound, and synesthesia, a sense of travel and knowledge of the larger world:
after a while the eyes digest a country and the belly perceives a mapmaker’s vision in dust and dirt drawn deep thru the nostrils down to the lungs and spurts through blood stream campaigns to the lower intestine.
Purdy in “The Country North of Belleville” and in his “Roblin Mills” poems demonstrates how we can map out our personal story until it becomes a universal one. I found that reading his poems brought me back to the place where I grew up, Emery.
LB: Tell us a book that you have returned to over the years and read more than once.
LH: That book would be James Joyce’s Ulysses. First, I saw Joseph Strickland’s adaptation of it in his film. When I travelled to Dublin a few months later, I visited the Joyce’s Martello Tower and Museum, walked on the Sandymount Beach, and stood in the doorway of 7 Eccles Street, the frame of which was still standing, although the house was in rubble. It was the house which served as a model for Leopold and Molly Bloom in the book. I was intrigued by the scenes of the novel, Stephen Dedalus’ monologue on Sandymount Beach, his visit with Leopold Bloom to Nighttown, their walk home to Bloom’s House. It was a fascinating account of the intellectual and artistic Stephen Daedalus, the compassionate, wandering Leopold Bloom, and Molly Bloom in her incredible 18-page wide-ranging, sensual soliloquy. I loved Joyce’s playful polysemous words based on his incredible sense of the etymologies of numerous languages, the myriad allusions to history, literature, the Bible, Shakespeare, and his ingenuous Homeric structure. I love to return to passages in this book, savour the sounds of the sentences, discover new meanings in the words– always discovering something new.
LB: During the course of this writing project, were any of your beliefs or perspectives challenged or stretched? If so, please explain.
LH: I think that my perspective changed after the interview with Daniel Lockhart. At the time of interviewing him, the events of the unknown graves of Aboriginal children emerged. This fact changed many of us because of the way the children had been taken away from their parents and how they were abused in residential schools. Through his interview, I learned more about Daniel Lockhart’s tribe and his Aboriginal heritage. He spoke about the importance of ritual “the gamwig, or Big House Ceremony, of my Lenape ancestors” and the presentation of famous Canadian figures in Devil in the Woods. I had been familiar with the works of Aboriginal writers Pauline Johnson, Louise Bernice Halfe, Richard Wagamese, Jordan Abel, Billy Ray Belcourt and Liz Howard. At the Canadian Writers Summit, I met Thompson Highway who spoke of Aboriginal Writers in his book Oral to Written: a Celebration of Indigenous Writing. I realized that we needed to know much more about Aboriginal history, culture, and literature.
Laurence Hutchman was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and grew up in Toronto. He received his PhD from the Université de Montreal and has taught at several universities. For twenty-three years he was a professor of English literature at the Université de Moncton at the Edmundston Campus. Hutchman has published 13 books of poetry, co-edited the anthology Coastlines: the Poetry of Atlantic Canada and edited two volumes of In the Writers’ Words. His work has received many awards and been translated into seven languages. He lives with his wife, the artist and poet Eva Kolacz in Oakville, Ontario.