OF PUCKS AND PROSE
A hockey poet from New Brunswick explains how the game he loves has inspired a 27-poem tribute to our national pastime
Hockey players don’t often use terms like diction, word choice, and rhythm. But hockey poets do. Matt Robinson is a player and a poet. A career house-leaguer, the 31year-old is an all-star when it comes to writing verse. Robinson, who pays the bills working as a residence co-ordinator at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton, has already published two poetry collections.
The Halifax native will complete the hat trick later this fall, with the release of no cage contains a stare that well, a collection of verse dedicated entirely to the frozen game.
“I’d always written pieces around hockey just because it was something that, as far as an image bank, had always been a part of my life and still is,” Robinson said. “ And a little while back I got to thinking about hockey, and what characterizes it, and the flow and the overall movement of it, and how it might be interesting to write a poetry that was reflective of hockey.”
Robinson’s work doesn’t fall within the realm of Stompin’ Tom at the good old hockey game. His 27poem tribute to sticks and pucks inhabits a higher intellectual plane, one where the circular life of the Zamboni driver becomes art, and a basement full of old goalie sticks a metaphor for the splintered relationship between a father and son.
“My dad has read splinter, and he immediately assumed it was about him,” Robinson said. “It really isn’t. I still do have a ton of broken goalie sticks in my dad’s basement, and he is moving, but aside from those two basic points it’s not particularly autobiographical. My dad is not that crusty old man, and we’re not estranged.”
Robinson finds inspiration in his childhood hockey memories, his ongoing relationship with the game as the goaltender for the UNB Law Litigators — a squad he backstopped to a league championship last season — and in the stands, where he is a regular at UNB Varsity Reds’ games.
The poet was there on March 28, 2004, for a loss that lives in infamy in UNB hockey circles. Frederiction was host to the Canadian Interuniversity Sport championship, and the Reds faced their Nova Scotia rivals, the Saint Francis Xavier X-Men, in the finals. The game went into double overtime and then, with the Fredericton crowd buzzing — and believing — the X-Men struck.
“The arena had been rocking — with about 4,500 people packed into it — and there was that sense, at the end of things, of the entire place just dropping dead, and the immediate focus was on the players’ handshake,” Robinson said.
His poetic rendering of that hold-back-the-tears moment, when the crowd fell silent and the Reds shuffled forward to press flesh with the winners’, appears on this page.
Robinson logs overtime, and then some, on each piece he writes. He spent two years working on his latest book, with each poem going through 50 to 60 versions. All the fiddling with words has yet to make him a wealthy man, leading to a suggestion from his newest fan that Robinson might want to approach the NHL and see if he can’t land a high-paying gig as the league’s poet laureate.
“That would be a neat idea,” Robinson said with a laugh. “ And they could certainly use a PR guy, especially after last season.”
no cage contains a stare that well is published by ECW Press. It will be available in early October at Chapters, Indigo Books, and on Amazon.ca. Other titles by Matt Robinson include: A Ruckus of Awkward Stacking (Insomniac Press, 2000) and how we play at it: a list ( ECW Press, 2002).