Patrick O'Reilly

I did. We were taught poems in school of course, but a lot of what we were taught was either this flowery Victorian stuff that didn't appeal to me back then, or these Newfoundland folk poems, "The Squid-Jigging Ground" or "Skipper Dick's Feast," that you could tell weren't very good, but you were being taught it more for social reasons than anything else. Every once in a while you'd be given some rock lyrics from the 70s and told to think of those as a poem. 

There was some of it I liked. I liked Poe. I liked Robert Service. But it wasn't really until I started looking through the text book on my own and I found stuff we weren't talking about in class, Emily Dickinson, or Edwin Arlington Robinson. What really took my head off was a poem by Lawrence Ferlinghetti called "The World Is A Beautiful Place To Be Born Into." It was free-verse, and it was fast, and funny, and dark; it sounded like someone talking to you, and what they were telling you was absurd, but also angry and a little scary, because it was about the atomic bomb blowing everyone up. It was so different from all those other poems about the somber daffodil or the King's Grenadiers. That hooked me--that it seemed so simple compared to all the other poems I'd read, but that it still had something dark and hard to understand in the middle of it.

I started writing in high school. I would go to this coffee shop, and just write all my poems on napkins; then, on the way home, I'd stop into the local thrift shop and stuff them in the coat pockets. Just these waded up balls of poems that I knew I wanted to share, but didn't know how or why. So I was writing poetry, but I didn't know that anyone else wrote poetry. In school everything we read seemed to stop at WWI or a little later, so I just assumed it was a thing people gave up on. 

I had no awareness of modern poetry, and certainly no awareness of poetry by people from my part of the world. It wasn't really until I got to university that I discovered there was this whole world of journals and poetry slams and all these amazing contemporary writers. And that there was a whole tradition of poets from Atlantic Canada that I knew nothing about, but whose poetry sounded a lot like my own, those patterns and voices. Seeing that, I felt like I had permission to really start talking poetry seriously, reading it and writing it, and thinking of myself as a poet. 

I was helped a lot by some of my professors, especially Andrew Titus, who introduced me to spoken word poetry, and Kathy Mac who introduced me to a lot of amazing Atlantic Canadian women writers.

There are lots of kinds of poetry, so there are lots of jobs. Some poets are memory keepers, or prayer leaders, or entertainers. Some teach us about social issues, and give voices to people who don't have a lot of power. Some are comedians. All are valid. I think my job is to collect coincidences. Things like how green is the colour of plants and leaves and vegetables, and it's very healthy and clean, but it's also the colour of mold and decay and bones that have sat in moss for a hundred years. Dead things go green. It's a coincidence, or a contradiction. Those things might not mean anything, but noticing them keeps me invested in the world, lets me see the world as surprising and precious and worth protecting. And maybe by writing down all these coincidences and contradictions, I can persuade others that the world is surprising and precious, and get them to start noticing coincidences, too.

My poem is called "Renews 2121," and its one of a series of poems I wrote about Renews, the outport where I grew up. They're all in different years: "Renews, 1992," "Renews, 2017." "Renews, 2121" is the only one set in the future.

I hated Renews growing up. It felt boring, and didn't have much in common with the other kids. Sometimes I wished a big tsunami would come and wipe out the whole town. One day I learned that, if climate change keeps going at this pace, Renews will be underwater in a hundred years or so. I got what I wished for, but it was sad: the woods and the beach I liked to go to would be gone, everyone I'd ever known would just be washed away.

Then I got to thinking how there are all these epics--Gilgamesh, and the Iliad, and the Bible, creation stories from China and Australia and Chile--that all begin with a flood, or at least with people sailing somewhere, drifting on these endless bodies of water. And if you go back far enough, we all descended from these aquatic creatures that climbed on land. It seemed like all the great literature began in water. I thought Newfoundland should have a big epic poem like the Iliad, especially if it was about to disappear forever. I didn't think I was the best person to write it, but I figured I could at least write the flood. 

There are so many poets and poems here that I love--HD and Lucile Clifton and Sylvia Legris. It's hard to pick just one, but I choose "The Bow" by Bertrand Bickersteth. I think he's absolutely amazing, and this poems shows you (just some of the reasons) why.

The first line is so arresting. One plain sentence. But it tells you so much about the speaker: they are not self-important, they are from this one particular area, but while they claim not to know much, you feel they're about to tell you something vitally important. 

After that, the whole poem is basically crying to be read aloud. Try to read it silently: you can't. The rhythm is syrupy in some places and slick in others, with these big, round, bold vowels and so much alliteration. Or they repeat, or rhyme in unexpected places. But because there's no punctuation, even though you're totally holding on to these words with complete attention, you're never quite sure of the meaning--you've got to go back, and re-read, and re-try the meaning, find where each sentence ends. 

So you're always re-understanding the poem. When you come to that last line, you know its an evolution of the opening, that there's something beyond knowing the speaker needs. But the grammar has changed ("only know" to "only knows"), so the speaker has, in some way, changed; what the speaker (maybe the river itself?) "only knows" doesn't disturb them, it disturbs in them. It's such an enigmatic phrase and you feel all the open space of both a prairie and a question. Just an outstanding poem that I always find new thoughts in.