Richard Harrison

I was very lucky when it came to poetry. My father recited to my brother and me when we were children, and I learned the cadence and beauty of the English canon from him. In high school, I had two wonderful teachers, Peggy Roth and Charles Humber, one a teacher of drama, the other of English Literature, who brought the same love for poetry I learned at home into the classroom. My favourite poems then were Yeats’s “The Second Coming” which appealed to my teenage awe of apocalyptic spectacles and the imagery of ancient Egypt, and “Fern Hill,” which was as close to a pure music of the syllable as I’d ever heard. In my first year at university, I encountered Patrick Lane when he was touring with his 1978 New and Selected. In his poems about his life in logging camps and his travels in Mexico and South America, I found how much power poetry could have when it was made from the words of a witness full of sorrow at what needs to be told but still compelled to tell it. And the beauty of his work. I also saw that poetry as powerful to me as the poems rooted in his homeland were to my father could be written about Canadian life -- and that maybe some of them could be my own. And that's when I resolved to try. 

I started writing poems in the summer between graduating high school and going to university. I had written some poetry for school exercises before that, but writing because I wanted to write happened later. The first poems were amusements. I was working on an archeological dig north of Toronto and it was the arduous work of making my way through the soil with a palette knife and a toothbrush. In archeology, the depth at which an object is found in is as important as the object itself because the earth keeps time in layers. So you dig to reveal an artifact for the present but also to preserve its place in the past. I suppose that’s a poetic principle, too. I amused myself and my fellow apprentices with limericks and rhymes about the work. It didn’t teach me much about the forms of poetry, but I learned a lot about poetry’s value as a binding power in the community. Time passes well with poems. That got me started writing, and it opened my eyes on my own life to see how rich with poetry it had been. Within two years, after hearing the great Canadian poets who visited my university in my undergrad years read, and falling in with that coterie of young, hungry poets that you can find in any university, I realized that whether I ever became a poet or not, I had to try; I didn’t want to find out at 40 that I’d missed the chance. At first I was self-declared. I suppose, starting out, you need to think yourself a poet before there’s any evidence so you can become a poet once the evidence leads to people telling you you are — particularly if they’re the people you think of as poets. What you can know from the beginning, though, about yourself and poetry is that you love to write it.

To be part of the creation of poetry, whether that’s your own or someone else’s. In the end, poetry is a community act. You learn to write your own through your interactions with other poets (in person or on the page), the people in workshops you attend, editors you send poems to, editors who work with your poems or manuscripts. And you contribute to other people’s poetry with your reactions to it, your willingness to discuss poetry with them, your enthusiasm for poetry itself. And even though you become a poet because you need to, by extension, your job is to contribute to the life of the community you become part of.  The place your poems take in the world -- what role they play --  is something that you discover in the writing and after. 

 “With the Dying of the Light” arose from my last conversation with my father before he died. I also think of it as his last lesson to me about poetry. My father died of dementia, but he didn’t forget his poems, or me, the way some do when the dementia runs its full course before it takes the life. So my father and I recited poetry to each other, the way we did when I was young and he was strong and whole. My father always loved Dylan Thomas, particularly “Fern Hill” and “Do Not Go Gentle,” but in the end, he did “go gentle into that good night” and it was right; he had lived a soldier’s life of rage, so he needed to put that life down before he died. And that is what he did, and that is what I hope I captured in that poem. That poem was a way for one poem to talk to another as well as for one life to talk to art. I don’t know whether all of that comes through in the piece, but it’s what I think of when I read it.

I hope that William Stafford’s “Ask Me” is the last poem I forget.