Musings on the poetic process
TARA HENLEY Just before the American poet Weldon Kees disappeared in1955, likely jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge, he called his friend, New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael. “What are you going through?” he asked her. That, Tim Bowling tells fellow poet Raoul Fernandez, “often strikes me as the only real question.” Their revealing correspondence appears in What the Poets Are Doing, a new collection of CanLit conversations named for the famed Tragically Hip song.
If you think an entire book about the poetic process — chronicled though email interviews, no less — sounds depressing or dull, you are not alone. You are, however, delightfully mistaken.
This gem of a book sees several generations open up on writing, loss and life, and is a riveting read. The project is a followup to 2002’s Where The Words Come From, this time edited by B.C. poet Rob Taylor and covering everything from #MeToo to reconciliation.
There’s Steven Heighton thinking through the scorn of internet culture and cybermobs. Book reviews, he notes, still sometimes offer collegial critique. “We’re in the midst of a terrifying partisanization of culture — both aesthetic and political,” he writes. “And maybe one way to intervene in the crisis is through small gestures of respect.”
Elsewhere, Dionne Brand muses about the intimacy of working as a telephone operator, Katherena Vermette shares a friend’s advice (it’s irresponsible to tell a sad story without also telling how to heal from it) and Linda Besner jokes about what stops her from throwing in the towel on poetry. “You quit on a tiny, struggling club you were once a member of, and now they’re going to have trouble making the rent ... and also who will bring the doughnuts now?”
Perhaps most poignantly, we find Liz Howard moved to tears after Armand Garnet Ruffo comments on the generation gap, saying he could be her father. Howard’s father, it turns out, died of alcoholism at 51, and she recounts the day she was called to the hospital.
Poets ask each other what they see outside their windows, if their houseplants have flowered yet. And, not surprisingly, how they make a living. If there is one theme that emerges here, beyond writing the pain and pleasure of being human, it is this — this struggle to be able to write at all.