Biography
Stephen Kent Roney was born long ago in roughly the part of Canada Al Purdy calls “the country of defeat”; transported in youth to Montreal, where he briefly took the same route home from school as Breavman in Cohen’s "The Favourite Game." Since then he’s slept around: Kingston, Syracuse, Toronto, Wuhan, Seoul, Cebu, Athabasca, Kamloops, Al Ain, Doha, Chonan, Jubail. In most of those places, he taught English; having been burned by the fires of the academic inquisition to the third degree. He maintains fiercely that the proper medium of poetry is memory; or at least he thinks he used to think so. This explains everything. Canadian poetry is about the life of everyman. Influences are William Kurelek, Andy Warhol, Blake, Coleridge, Dylan Thomas, T.S. Eliot, Leonard Cohen, Irving Layton, Al Purdy, Lewis Carroll, Jack Kirby, and Rene Descartes. In most circumstances, he does not speak of himself in the third person.
Micro-interview
I read hugely in high school. I read everything by Leonard Cohen, Irving Layton, Robert W. Service, and some Al Purdy. The two poems I found most memorable and important were Dylan Thomas's "Fern Hill," and Yeats's "The Second Coming."
The first poem I recall was when I was age four. It was about being a cowboy. At that time, I thought of myself as a cowboy poet. Now I'm just a cowboy.
A poet is a prophet, and a prophet is someone who tries at all costs to see the truth and say it. Plato to the contrary. Plato was a liar.
Bike-Twister, Dennis Lee