Building on River: A long journey to book of poetry
Local poet imagines world of early Ottawa lumber baron in new book
“I always wrote, but I didn’t write literary material until shortly before I retired in 2000. I wrote briefings, memoranda, cabinet documents, position papers, speeches; anything to do with government.
“I was itching to do something creative, and somebody told me about a workshop on creative writing at Carleton, and I thought, That’s it! I’ve worked with words all my life. I’ll make something out of words.
“I started with short fiction, and that first workshop was only three months, but by the end of it I was hooked. I took other workshops with different people. I did Humber College’s graduate program in creative writing and worked with Isabel Huggan. I took UBC’s master of fine arts, and part of that program was that you have to do a number of different genres, so I tried screenwriting, literary translation, poetry, non-fiction — as many as I could — and I got really interested in poetry then, and it’s become my obsession in the last five or six years.
“An initial trigger for Building on River was a historical plaque down near LeBreton Flats. And it became clear to me that this was a major industrial centre, and I had never thought of Ottawa that way, even though I grew up here. I certainly was familiar with the remnants of an industrial past — the smell of sulphur dioxide on certain mornings, the booms of logs in the river and the piles of saw logs over at the E.B. Eddy plant — but I had no idea how important the scale was. Booth’s plant on the Chaudière was, at one time, the largest in the world, and that got me interested. And then I started reading about him, and he’s so interesting and there are so many quirky tales about him.
“And I remember my mother talking about Booth. She grew up on Renfrew Avenue in the Glebe, when it was a brand-new suburb with no pavement and no trees. She and her friends used to go on skis down the canal to the Arboretum to go skiing, and she mentioned the lumberyards by Dow’s Lake, tucked in by Carling, where all the Booth-related names are now: Opeongo, Madawaska, Kippewa, Jackson, Booth and Frederick. So that was probably something that impelled me to dig in to him, too.
“I was casting about for something more than just a one-off poem about him, something I could keep nibbling at over time, and I just started working on Booth. I became fascinated with the language of the time and the names of the tools and the whole apparatus of lumbering and milling and so on. I just got hooked, and about 3½ years later I said, ‘I’d better stop now, because nobody’s going to want to publish a 1,000-page book of poems about J.R. Booth.’
“The book basically follows the arc of his life. It starts with a poem in the voice of the river — the eternal voice — and then starts with 1827, when Booth was born. And it moves from there, following his career path, until his death.
“I was trying to focus in close on emotionally powerful moments or turning points in his life. I wanted to create a picture of his life as if you were watching a man in a darkened room walk across the room by strobe light — flash … flash … flash … flash — and you fill in all the connective tissue that I didn’t fill in.
“When I started out, I thought, ‘I’ll find the definitive biography and write poems from it,’ but there isn’t one. And I know there’s a school of thought that says you should never make up words to put in a real person’s mouth, even if they’re almost 100 years gone. And I can see the reasoning behind that, but I’ve been to a lot of panels and have read debates about it, and my conclusion was as long as it was clear that it was a work of imagination, then I felt I wasn’t doing violence to the person.
“I don’t know what he’d think about it, except maybe that I was foolish to waste so much time on something that’s bound to not be lucrative. But I would hope that he would think that it was in many ways true and respectful of him and what he achieved, without being worshipful.”
And then I started reading about him, and he’s so interesting and there are so many quirky tales about him.