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On Writing A CHILD WHO WILL FISH: 22 CATCHES [From (Muse)letters, League of Canadian Poets, 1996] There is always going to be a child who will fish a book out of the garbage heap. 1. The letter from the editor asks “who or what influenced, or influences, your writing of poetry?” Although you would rather
be trolling through poems, you begin a 2. The wooden pillars on the front porch of the house have recently been painted white. I have a pencil and the urge to cover those flat surfaces with the kind of evenly-spaced ripples in my mother’s letters to my aunts. From knee-level to as high as I can reach at four, I wear that pencil out creating a sea of unreadable waves. An epic on the theme of defiance. The critical response to my first literary effort is a spanking. 3. In his mail Mr. Pomoski discovers the third edition of The Home Street Clarion. He puts all else aside to read the latest on
his neighbours. The paper is standard stationery folded to make 4. Mrs. Graham runs the fish pond at the Church of Our Lady church bazaar. The boy pays his nickel and dangles the pole over a bed sheet. A yank on the line and he hoists the basket containing something heavy. He mentions a ball glove or some baking. But, no, it’s a book, a hard-covered, pictureless thing called Poems Worth Knowing. He throws it at his laughing friend who says it’s the same book his sister uses in grade eleven. 5 Kempels are the first on Home Street with a rooftop TV aerial. Unless his Mom wins one at bingo they’ll never have TV, and he’s read his comics ragged, so he picks up the stupid fish pond book. Nowhere worth a nickel. Worse, several of the pages are blank where poems should be. A lousy defective book, but damn near the only one in the
house. He reads: “The Pobble who has no toes/Had once as many as we.” He reads: “Fear 6. It thrills him, the book, in ways that even Wonder Woman doesn’t. There are hobo songs and spirituals, rhyming stuff and non-rhyming stuff, wonderfully silly things and solemn things, lines as polished as pearl and rough-edged lines in dialect. And writers with magnificent multiple names—George Gordon Noel Lord Byron, James Elroy Flecker, Alfred Edward Housman, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Walter Savage Landor. 7. Eleven or twelve years old, I read “Kubla Khan” over and over for hours, intoxicated. From Xanadu did Coleridge, a stately pleasing poem make me. 8. There is a poem entitled “To Alberta,” that sounds like a gloopy hymn and the opposite page is blank. He writes a real 9. Later, the boy submits one of these poems to his grade seven teacher, and she selects it for display at the local exhibition. Entitled “The Wagon Train,” it begins “The wagons creaked over the dusty tracks/The sun beat hot upon our backs./The women were weeping, the children were crying/The water was gone, the horses were dying.” The resourceful pioneers eventually find an abandoned well and all are saved. 10. Over thirty years later, asked to comment on my influences, I cannot find the book, but I can recall stanzas and entire
poems, though I never tried to memorize them. 12. The same records playing endlessly at home. Roused by his father and his buddies, drunk and sentimental, singing after midnight. Poet-songwriters: Hart, Mercer, Parish, Hammerstein, Porter, Ira Gershwin, Webster, Cahn, Harbach. Exhaling star dust. “The melody haunts my reverie.”
14. On one pre-bar visit I find Eliot. I return to him many times, fascinated, puzzled. On another, it’s Cummings. I am working
as a CPR file clerk and steal away into a storage closet to write poems that careen from mock-dignity and despair to flippant
brashness. From “Dust stuff puffing at their feet/designates the spilth path” to “Touch your bawdy, your realeyes/sacred as
brasscuspidors.” An authentic closet poet. 15. At university, I discover Auden. How he makes superior poetry of urgent social issues. Browning, Pound, Rilke, Lorca (his sonidos negris), Neruda. And, through friends, the approachable, glorious Canadians, unsanctified by English courses: Layton, Birney, Klein and Scott. 16. Having graduated, where to live? I think about being a part of this place, apart from this place as I had planned. Mitchell, Hicks, Szumigalski and Currie are homesteading. I will try to file a claim. 17.Working in Toronto the summer of 1968, I see posters for a reading by a poet I’ve never heard of. There must be 500 people
in the old burlesque theatre. A small dark woman in a spotlight, 18. Summer workshops with real writers. “How do you describe a glass of water?” Kroetsch quoting a French novelist. And, “Every poem is a failed translation.” Mandel challenging: “What are the rules of poetry and which ones can’t be broken?” “Why the tyranny of the left-hand margin?” 19. Should you mention the women, from Charlotte to Sharon, who inspired so much of your worst material? No. 20. Crozier scathing in the Moose Jaw Movement poetry group:
22. Surly and suspicious you came to poetry, consumed it joyously, aimlessly. Influences? The book you read last night. The poem you read this morning. Where do they stop? Where do you begin? Catch twenty-two. And still you cast your hook.
For related information see: CREATIVE WRITING COURSES: AN OXYMORON? Published as the first
"On Becoming a Writer" column in Freelance, the journal of the Saskatchewan Writers Guild. There's the story of the neurosurgeon at a party who confides to a novelist, “One of these days I'm going to knock off for a month and write a novel." To which the novelist responds, "I know what you mean. Soon as I'm finished this novel I'm dashing off, I'm going.to hack out a few tumors." What makes people think that writing is simply the easy natural pursuit of a natural impulse? Is it not more like air traffic control, a profession requiring serious commitment, sophisticated training, complex skills, and strong personal qualities such as the capacity for near-total commitment and a tolerance for stress? Of course there are a great many self-taught writers. These people burn with dedication and, often, genius, but even they usually conduct some sort of self- training program, often through intense study of one or more masters. Hemingway studied Ivan Turgenev and Knut Hamsun, apprenticed with Gertrude Stein, and practised the discipline of journalism. The best of the creative writing courses provide similar experiences, though on a scale limited by time. Quality experiences conducive to the development of writers can be planned and delivered. Good writing programs do not dispense dogma or claim to impart the one true ultimate guaranteed formula for literary immortality. They will not distort your voice, crush your vision, or dress you in a uniform of workshop cut. Interestingly, Isaac Bashevis Singer, like Hemingway, studied Turgenev and Hamsun, and yet Hemingway's and Singer's styles are unmistakably different. True, some great authors damn creative writing courses. W.H. Auden called them "dangerous." William Gass comments, "It's probably impossible to teach anyone to be a good writer." In characteristic hyperbole, Kingsley Amis is said to have attributed most of the calamities of the last half of the twentieth century to writing workshops. On the other side of the desk, numerous writers extol creative writing programs. John Irving praises the courses he took at the Iowa Writers' Workshop because he was "encouraged and helped." Anne Sexton and W.D. Snodgrass raved about what they learned from a class with Robert Lowell. As Logan Pearsall Smith says, "Fine writers should split hairs together, and sit side by side, like friendly apes, to pick the fleas from each other's fur." Those writers who assert that their craft cannot be taught are usually aware of the extent to which their performance is instinctual and are denouncing a "write-by-numbers" methodology that attempts to produce assembly-line masterpieces and make writers fabulously rich. The best writing programs take no such approach, make no wild claims and promote no particular systems or schools. What they do is provide the circumstances for learning more about writing well. As Jack Hodgins, a former instructor at the Saskatchewan School of the Arts, antecedent to the Sage Hill Experience in that province, notes in his handy book A Passion for Narrative, "writers can be helped to be better." He even acknowledges that learning to write better "cannot be accomplished so effectively between the covers of a book as it can in discussions between teacher and student." Much writing ability may be inborn. But one's innate skills can be enhanced, and writers can be better informed, intelligently guided, and successfully motivated. A creative writing course can be a catalyst. It can also help eliminate unnoticed bad habits and unproductive struggling. John Irving feels he may eventually have picked up many of the things he learned at Iowa, but “time is precious for a young writer." A good instructor is not unlike a perceptive coach or editor who provides expert advice and assistance while respecting the learner's individuality. The responsive participant, in effect, develops self-editing skills. Richard Wilbur, who taught Gail Godwin and John Irving, states, "A pro can point out obvious flaws in your swing." Perhaps John Gardner sums it up best. "The truth is that, though the ability to write well is partly a gift—like the ability to play baseball, or to outguess the stock market—writing ability is mainly a product of good teaching supported by a deep down love of writing." One of Gardner’s stellar pupils, renowned short story writer and poet Raymond Carver, declared that the detailed individual assistance he received in Gardner's course "was invaluable to me in my development as a writer." Besides the guidance of an accomplished instructor, a creative writing course provides opportunities to interact with other writers, exchanging tips and ideas, developing critical skills, and making valuable contacts. Because participants arrive with different backgrounds, needs, expectations, attitudes, and abilities, no two will have the same experience or derive the same benefits from a creative writing course. Yet time and again participants agree that the outcomes are rewarding, that these courses challenge one to write better, and that they provide ongoing inspiration and commitment. Someone once said, “Writing can be taught but it can’t be learned.” This observation may not be as flippant as it sounds. What participants take away from a writing program may very well depend on what they bring to it. Yes, air traffic controllers need extensive training to operate complex technology in life or death situations, but
language is the most intricate technology ever devised, and our survival may well depend on how well we employ it. The last word
goes to Raymond Carver: "Certain aspects of writing can be taught and handed over to other, usually younger, writers. This idea
shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone interested in education and the creative act. Most good or even great conductors, composers,
microbiologists, ballerinas, mathematicians, visual artists, astronomers, or fighter pilots learned their business from older and
more accomplished practitioners." Amen. THE DESIRES OF THE POEM These are a few thoughts on my practice of poetry. Each poem wants to be itself. It doesn’t mind having siblings, a vague family resemblance, but it wants no twins. It also demands to be the favourite, the one you visit most often, the one visitors cannot resist. You work with the material of the poem, listening, trying to find the thoughts, feelings, shapes and sounds it contains. To guide a poem from impulse to page is to listen and respond to its yearnings. To make it the favourite, however temporarily; you steal time from other desires, obligations, devotions, diversions. Until it alone becomes the one you would kiss and fold into a pocket and carry everywhere. You never write such a poem, though there are fleeting moments when you think at last you have. Yosemite Sam with a pan full of shining copper pyrite dancing deliriously in and out of the stream. Still, those moments are one reason you continue. There is something mysterious beneath all of this conscious shaping which others explain as a dictating presence, a voice within, a type of possession, a seduction, an energy field or a rapture. The poem is like a sleep walker who finds himself swaying precariously, one foot over an abyss. Extending its hand for help, the poem calls out, a sub-lingual emanation. From that call, you may decipher a memory, an image, a longing, a phrase, a sensation, an event, an idea. There are too many times you cannot respond. There are too many times you do respond but lack the skill or strength to haul the poem onto solid ground. You’re never entirely sure how the poem got there out of mind, as it were, walking alone. You are sure, after all these years, that, whatever the fate of the latest poem, another will eventually follow. As long as you dare to allow things of the world to attach like burs to your emotions and ride into your mind, they will converge and coalesce there and eventually many will stumble out into the world. Seasoned as you may be, it is still difficult to witness their awkward attempts at grace. To save the poem from the brink, you try to help it find its voice. It doesn’t want your voice. What is it for a poet “to have a voice”? To speak predictably? To sing within a range of pigeon-holed measures? To always make the same vibes? To be tonally sparse? Here, they say, this is your voice. See how well it suits you, how handsomely it gleams in the light, the strong brown leather straps dangling like the legs of insects from its sturdy canvas sides? Here put your arms in these commodious sleeves. We’ll just buckle them behind you, out of the way, so you can sing all night for us. Like the bird whose eyes saw last a needle white with heat. The poem wants a confederate but not one who is strait-jacketed. It’s dark enough out there on the streets. The poem desires a wide-eyed, multi-skilled, multi-voiced clairvoyant of unlimited range, who doesn’t care for anything else. It never finds one, but some poems find reasonable approximations in some poets some of the time. And those are the ones I love most.
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list that crawls down the margin, nearly fills the reverse side. Who and what hasn’t
influenced you? Where does it stop? Where do you begin?
four sides, each painstakingly printed with ballpoint in two
columns, broken by headlines, stick-figure cartoons, the usual box with a four-line poem about someone’s dog. No editor on the
masthead but he knows this is the work of the lad next door, the boy who bounces a ball off his shed. Mrs. Kempel, Mrs. Saigeon and
Mr. Roga receive the three other near-identical copies. This issue features a front page story about Mr. and Mrs. Lipschki belonging
to a nudist colony, authenticated by Billy Lipschki who has shown the reporter dozens of photographs of his parents, pot-bellied and
sagging on boulders. It is the last edition of the paper. The struggling artist encounters censorship.
death?—to feel the fog in my
throat,/The mist in my face.” And: “On wan dark night on Lac St.Pierre/De win she blow, blow, blow.” He reads until this
stupid stuff ricochets in his head for weeks. He doesn’t know which poets are major, which are minor. He is far too young to
observe that the book has a traditionalist, anti-metaphysical, romantic bias.
poem in one take, “To Saskatchewan,” transcribes it unchanged onto the page. It begins “Where wheat fields green blow in the
wind/And hawks the heavens ride” and deteriorates from there. One by one he fills the blank pages of the book with masterpieces.
His first poems and already he is in a volume with Frost, Yeats and Tennyson. Which of his two middle names should he adopt?
13. Teenhood. Tough. Cool. Beer and girls. Hanging with the the ex-grads who get him into the bars. They meet at nine. No one
knows that at seven he goes to the library, randomly reads poetry. The first book is Collected Poems by someone named Edith Sitwell.
Caring more for how they sound than what they say, her words shun the gravity of line. Exciting, how they break and reassemble,
surprise with powerful images: “Baskets of ripe fruit in air/The bird’s song seem . . .” The surge of possibilities.
long black hair over a flowing white robe, looking like a priestess
against the black curtains. Her lines as enchanting: “All my friends are dying of hunger,/ There is some basic dish I cannot
offer.” Yes! After that, I read everything I can find by Gwendolyn MacEwan. In bookstores, I find other poets who excite me—
Atwood, Mandel and Newlove. Especially Alden Nowlan.
“Another so-what poem, Hyland.” And, “People have to stop bringing their first
drafts.” And, “Great! That works!” Crozier reading poems for which you can offer no suggestions. Rock-solid. Full of daring,
penetration, deftness. There is no formula. They are so much of her, you would have to be her to write one. You wish you were.
21. Crozier says, “Read this. What a book!” It is Praise by Robert Hass. What a book. She says, “Read this.” It is
Satan
Says by Sharon Olds. What a book. She says, “Read this.” It is Newlove’s The Night the Dog Smiled. God.
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