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Oct. 3, 2005
Poet Out to "Poem" Public
By ERIN BROWN — Regina Leader-Post
If you're out and about in Regina this week, you might get "poemed." Random Acts of Poetry, a week-long event where poets
recite to people at random, is back in Regina for another year. It started last year across Canada and has grown in popularity, expanding to
include poets in Britain and Ireland.
In Regina though, Moose Jaw poet Gary Hyland might surprise the city with a poem or two as he takes to the streets. "I just say
'Hey, would you like to be poemed?' and people look at me quizzically and I tell them a little bit about the whole thing," he said. The
poets donate their time to the project. The listener also receives a copy of the book of poetry, all in hopes of showing the public that
poetry is "approachable and enjoyable," said Hyland, a retired English teacher and Order of Canada recipient.
Poetry, he explained, is an individual experience that allows the listener to feel, interpret and hear the voice present in the poem.
Hyland is one of 27 poets who will perform poetry across the country this week. The event is supported by the Victoria Read Society and
Abebooks.com, a book retailer that donates towards the cost of the books distributed by the poets.
Click image to enlarge.
Random Acts of Poetry 2006
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Former boxer & Mayer of Regina Pat Fiacco responds to a poem about boxing from Gary
Hyland. The poem was a knockout!
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Presenting Works of Snow to ESL student.
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Reciting poetry in Regina's Wascana Park.
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Poetry rides the airwaves with CBC's Colin Grewar.
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A Pig for Poetry - CBC reporter pigs out on poetry with Hyland
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Random Acts of Poetry 2005
| CBC Anti-lockout Caravan
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Lieutenant Governor's Tour
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| At Moose Jaw meeting, August 2005
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With students in Canora, October 2005
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| University of Regina Induction
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Order of Canada Induction
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| Receiving Honorary Doc of Literature Degree, June 2005
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Governor General Clarkson presents Order of Canada, September 2005
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| Cultural Centre Reception
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Saskatchewan's Centennial
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| Wayne Gamble (host) and audience at reception, September 2005
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Premier Calvert presents the Saskatchewan Commemorative medal
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| Launches of Hands Reaching in Water
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| Victoria: Lorna Crozier reads
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With Sister Ida Marie Grenon, to whom the book is
dedicated, in Regina.
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| Group of readers at Moose Jaw launch, L-R: Bob Currie, Jim McLean, Byrna
Barclay, Paul Wilson, Hyland. Missing Ted Dyck.
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With Doris Bircham (left) and Anne Slade, writers and quilters, with the quilt they
made for Gary. It has over 300 signatures of well-wishers.
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| Hyland Tribute Reception May 5, 2007
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| With wife Sharon Nichvalodoff.
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With Bob Currie (l.) and filmmaker Jeff Beasley.
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| Artist Gus Froese presenting portrait to Gary.
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Canadian Literature
Winter 2004
Excerpt From "Artistry to What End?” by R. W. Stedingh
Gary Hyland's The Work of Snow, on the other hand, is an auspicious book that similarly sets out to map the emotional latitudes
and longitudes of a personal cartography. However, he does so skillfully and is a master of his craft. In poems that reflect on childhood,
marriage, the seasons (with the accent on winter), the earth, Al Purdy, Anne Szumigalski, and John Hicks, the nostalgic tone, often elegiac,
dominates. Although maudlin at times, Hyland's diction evokes a sense that the poet is beleaguered by an enormous sense of loss. Yet it is
his laconic memories associated with people and places, physical and spiritual, that sustain his sense of belonging, and to the extent that
he charts this territory successfully, he gives us the blueprint of a ground we all share.
This common ground has everything to do with empathy and feeling, even sentimentality, that mortal sin in the canons of Modernism and
Post-Modernism, which Hyland has studied and wisely ignored. Especially in the elegies, Hyland recaptures the spirits of the dead and makes
the burden of their loss lighter. In "Audrey" he remembers a feisty waitress in a border town who gave her tips to runaway girls
and whose humour was either selfdeprecating or, when directed at the poet, outrageously offensive. In "Angel Bees" he recalls Anne
Szumigalski in a parable about poets being stung in honeycombed brains by bees the size of hummingbirds. In "November Waltz" he
likens memories of his deceased mother, father, and grandparents in a graveyard to a dance with vanished bones left in his arm's embrace. In
"Lament for Purdy" Hyland blesses "with gruff praise” a man who did the same and remains for many the personification of
Canada. But the best of Hyland's elegies is "Air for One Just Fallen," dedicated to the memory of John Hicks. It is superior for
its avoidance of lugubrious praise. It ends as follows:
No matter. Art
never made substance of sentiment
without a flaw in the dance.
Except perhaps
in your new
circumstance.
But this book is not all lamentation. There are lively, admirable poems here, extended personifications of winter, spring and the earth,
for example, which are vivid, lyrical allegories of great power. And there are poems like "Practice of Great Harmony" containing
true wisdom and advice for any writer or reader:
Move while rooted. Walk as a tree might walk,
directed by the trunk, to where the light draws.
A tree that seeks the image of a long
intent, without stutter, without pause.
Be like the tree that thinks leaf and moves because
it hears inside itself a slow green song.
Hyland confronts and celebrates aging Article By: VERNE CLEMENCE
appearing in the Saskatoon StarPhoenix, Saturday June 7, 2003
You could say that poet Gary Hyland found his muse in a church bazaar fishpond. And he wasn’t amused.
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“I was in about Grade 6,” the Moose Jaw native recalled in a recent interview. “I was annoyed at having received
this thing…I took it home and threw it in the closet under my hockey gear.”
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But he dug it out again one winter later on. He had read his entire comic collection several times and he needed
something new.
But when he opened the book, he got annoyed all over again. He chuckles at the memory. “Lo and behold, it was a
flawed book. I’d paid a nickel for this book and there were pages that had no printing on them.”
But he started to read the poems anyway, and he discovered he liked them. And in time he solved the problem of the
blank pages by filling them in with his own poems. He recalls the thrill of seeing his writing along side the work of William Shakespeare
and other masters. He didn’t understand all the poems in the book, but he loved the language of poetry and the images it conveyed. “It
was magic,” he says.
That was many years and several published collections ago for the 62-year-old Hyland, and the magic is still there.
That will become obvious to anyone who reads his latest, The Work of Snow.
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The book earned Hyland the Thistledown Press 2003 John V. Hicks Memorial Award. Though it’s by no means the first time he
has been honoured for his writing, he feels that this one is special. “I’m very pleased,” he says “It’s the inaugural award, for
one thing, and John (the late John Hicks, poet laureate of Prince Albert) was a good friend.”
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In fact, one of the poems in the book is a tribute to Hicks. Thematically, the collection dwells a lot on aging, and on
the reflection that comes with age. Hyland says he was addressing the harsh realities of life in some of the poems. He also points to the
winter imagery as being a major part of the overall theme of the book.
But this book is neither a dirge, nor a paean to old age. There is more than a hint of joie de vivre in some of
these poems, and wry humour as well. An example is “Audrey”, a poem written in memory of Audrey Johanessohn: “Her massive hand crushed
mine / ‘Well, I’ve heard good things about you,’ / then looked me up and down, / ‘but they musta been lies’.” And later: “Had
me a fifty-buck makeover over. / Looked like a goddamned movie star. / But whoever dates Lassie?”
“Reflections: The Love of Mirrors,” talks about the changes that come with growing older, and what the mirror
reveals: “In the way of mirrors. Yours watches you try / expressions, your tongue, your degrees / of modesty. It sees your blemishes, your
secrets / and never whispers them. As you settle down / your mirror accepts those deepening lines, / the thinner graying hair, the sagging
parts.”
A certain harshness creeps in with “Learning Time,” a poem that follows life’s cycle from cradle to grave. The
last verse confronts us with our own mortality: “You squeeze a mid-life crisis between / the knee operation and the hip replacement. / And
there you are – an arthritic apparatus / for grandchildren with seasons flying / off like the boy-next-door’s pigeons / (his name a blur
in the flurry) the time / he set them free. And then, and then / you’re in bed, and it isn’t long at all.”
The winter imagery is stark, but not without beauty in “The Winter Moths.” In the second verse: “White Decembers,
/ small and quick, / are taken for flakes / of snow, specks / of frost. // Dime-sized / Decembers glaze / playground swings / and slides,
poles / and wire fences.”
This is reader-friendly poetry from the sure hand of a writer who has points to get across, but can be playful when he
wishes. Hyland uses the language with precision and respect, no doubt in keeping with his 30 years of teaching high school English.
He retired from the classroom nine years ago, but not from his life-long habit of working hard. While still teaching he
co-founded Coteau Books, the Saskatchewan Writer’s Guild, and the so-called “Moose Jaw Movement,” a group of activist artists. He also
helped start the Sage Hill Writing Experience.
He has started several organizations since retiring, among them the umbrella group Arts in Motion. As founder and now
Artistic Director of the Moose Jaw’s Festival of Words, he has received a Saskatchewan volunteer medal, and a medal from Saskatchewan
Parks and Recreation.
Thistledown Press publishes The Work of Snow. It sells in paperback for $16.95.
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