Biography
Born in Kitchener, ON, but raised in Heart’s Desire, Trinity Bay, NL, James Langer is the author of Gun Dogs (Anansi), which won The Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. In 2013, he co-edited The Breakwater Book of Contemporary Newfoundland Poetry. He has written both formal and free verse and hybrids of the two. His primary influences have been Seamus Heaney and Les Murray though he cites many authors as influences: Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, Derek Walcott, Carol Ann Duffy, and Alice Oswald, among others. He earned his master’s degree in English from the University of New Brunswick in 2006 and has taught creative writing at Memorial University of Newfoundland. He lives in St. John’s.
Micro-interview
Yes, I started reading poetry in high school when a teacher introduced me to the work of Robert Frost. But I read it secretly, preferring to be viewed by my peers as an athlete rather than a bookworm. I grew up in rural Newfoundland on the outskirts of a tiny, struggling fishing community, and Frost’s “Birches” really made an impression on me. In that poem, the boy is too far from town to learn baseball, has to fetch the cows and make up his own games. That was me, except I went out and in to fetch a horse. I still remember where I was the first time I read that poem.
I didn’t write my first poem until I was twenty-one, and it was wretched. But even twenty-some-odd years later, I rarely think of myself as a poet. Way too much baggage, and I’m suspicious of the posture. So I figure I’m only a poet when I’m writing poetry.
To make tiny machines with words. Tiny machines to merge head and heart in a sustained event that passes.
Watching things change to remain the same.
Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art.” Because you get to remember the line “The art of losing isn’t hard to master.” And because the rhymes are mnemonic devices, so it’s easier. And because, full disclosure, I’ve always had a crush on Elizabeth Bishop. In love with the way her mind works.