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after words
- Wilfrid Laurier University Press
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51 after words Reader: I suppose we could start by asking you: where did you start as a poet? Writer: Well I don’t really know. Reader: Your early experiences of being a poet, I mean. Was there maybe a teacher or a parent who got you on to poetry? Writer: OK. My mom and dad read a lot, my dad especially. He had only taken grade 6 and had to leave school because his parents wanted him on the farm. Or didn’t believe in education, I don’t know which. I remember one time just before he died, about the only time he talked about it, he didn’t say much, he never did, but I could hear hurt in his voice, and anger. Anyway he was a reader and he read mostly westerns and science fiction, but he read different stuff too. He’d be in from the field for dinner and he’d sneak in a little reading after he’d eaten, get so engrossed he was pretty much unaware of anything else. My mom, who had taken grade 11, which was pretty advanced for someone at that time in a poor farming and mining town, never read as much, probably because she got almost no time for her own. (Later, she read a lot, and took great pleasure in word games.) I also had a fabulous teacher for grades 4 to 8. Mr. Third. He believed with a passion in reading and writing and he had an enormous lot to do with what happened to me. One of the best times for all of us in that schoolroom—and we were a varied and straggly lot let me tell you—was when after noon hour he would read to us. We groaned when he stopped, wished he would never stop reading. Reader: I wonder if you could say a bit more about where those interests took you and how they brought you into poetry? Writer: Slowly, indirectly. By sheer chance quite likely. My dad said to me one day: what are you going to be when you grow up? I must have been 9 or 10 52 / after words then, and by this time, doing well at school. (The first three grades were shaky for me, I think. I found school strange and bewildering at first.) I hadn’t given it much thought really, but I remember saying mechanic, mechanic or truck driver. They seemed to me something special. No you’re not, says my dad, you’re going to university. I had no idea what that was but right then and there I knew I was going to university. When I got to high school I didn’t do much reading and I did no writing whatsoever, no poetry that is, and very little of any kind. I was busy with jobs and sports and eventually romance, and helping my dad at the school where he had become janitor when we moved into town in 1958, part of the drastic wipe-out of the family farm in rural Saskatchewan. But I did know I was going to university, and later I knew I was going to be a teacher and I was going to specialize in English and biology, biology probably because my sister, Lynn, was at the U of Saskatchewan studying biology (and mathematics). Reader: Could you tell us more about school, what it was for you? Writer: I always loved learning poems by heart in public school, read with pleasure the ones in our readers and with a special sense of finding the Canadian poems which had not yet been obliterated from school books. And at university I loved English classes, saw my first honest-to-goodness writer, Earle Birney, met a couple of people who were actually writing. One thing led to another and through a series of accidents I ended up taking an honours degree and then a master’s at Saskatchewan and finally a PhD at Rochester in New York state, where in 1971 I wrote a dissertation on the American poet Robert Duncan. A few years later I arrived at the University of Manitoba and that’s where things really broke open for me. I was teaching poetry, loving it. I was also writing about it, and I got caught up in the wild whirl of Canadian literature at Manitoba in the 1970s. Those were exuberant ebullient years when everything could happen, we could do everything we thought...