2024 Calgary Team Regional

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.

When I was a teenager, the only hippie in my high school went to my homeroom. To my chagrin, he tried to befriend me, and the cool girls disdained us.

Soon I figured out that he was real, and they were fake. Armour was a poet. Once he introduced me to poetry, we became best friends, and wrote together regularly to old records in a PMQ basement.

There's a magic to writing something that you know a fellow poet will read soon. This informs my work as a writing instructor at Alexandra Writers Centre in Calgary; I want to share the magic with others who need some in their life as much as I did back then — and still do. 

After I began writing, we started taking bus rides to downtown Ottawa so we could have experiences worth writing about. We stumbled into a poetry open mic in progress at Cafe Wim, run by Steve Zytveld. All the poets in the room that night became friends and mentors as years went by. rob mclennan, a prolific published poet and micropress publisher who has inspired many, handed me poem pamphlets and information about more readings. It was a welcoming community for all ages and all styles of poetry, with open mics that included featured readers to inspire everyone. That's exactly the community feel I want to encourage with the work I do as an organizer, host, and promoter of poetry events.

Leonard Cohen said poetry is a verdict. If that's true, I guess we are lawyers... or judges? of the truth. 

In that case, we have the most underpaid role of the legal profession! 

More seriously, there are many jobs that poets do — and I'm not talking about the day and evening jobs that many of us who might not be career students, or married to a supportive partner, have to do. (I myself am also an administrative assistant and security guard, and have worn more hats than a preschool tickle trunk could hold). 

Speaking for myself, the job of a poet is to inspire readers to use their imagination, slow down, and enjoy the page. The job of a poet who has been writing for some time, who has a book, who likes to teach, is to be a good mentor, and a good person as well. There are many unworthy mentors out there breaking hearts. I intend to be one of the good ones, whenever I have the good fortune to teach, help edit a manuscript, give a reading, give a pep talk to a discouraged writer, or wherever poetry takes me. And of course, I especially love sharing poetry with young people; learning to use your imagination by exercising it in the writing of a poem can help you creatively problem-solve, creatively love, and creatively bring happiness to yourself and others for the rest of your life.   

Stuart Ross has been a big inspiration to me, ever since he launched The Inspiration Cha-Cha, his first trade press book, in Ottawa when I was a teen.
So the first thing I did when I came to Poetry In Voice was look for his poem. 

“I Have Something to Tell You” is classic Stu. His point of view is that of someone absurdly simple, who speaks calmly and plainly, without contractions, about surreal experiences like — in this case — their shoulders turning into cameras. To be able to deliver a surrealist poem from such a calm, neutral observer character adds to the surprise and humour when body parts start becoming incredible objects. I just got a copy of his latest book at the time of writing this, Motel of the Opposable Thumbs, and it's my favourite birthday present (thanks Mom!). 

I was introduced to poetry in grade eleven at the age of sixteen. I think the poem that struck me the most at the time was "Jabberwocky" by Lewis Carroll. I was enthralled by the sounds and the surrealism, how fantastic images placed in realistic contexts could make us question our perceptions of reality. That poem taught me that "meaning" is not necessarily the most important thing in poetry — that imagery is probably more important, and that a good poem leads the reader to create his or her own meaning by appealing to archetypes and to the subconsious.

At the age of sixteen I started keeping a daily journal. This was the same year I began reading poetry in earnest. Journaling got me over the fear of writing whatever came into my head and I started to trust that voice. I kept the practice up for years and the journal entries steadily evolved into poems. In college I studied poetry and literature and took all the creative writing courses. That's when the poetry really started to flow. I began to think of myself as a poet when I published my first poem in 1978 at Axiom Magazine when I was 22.

A poet's job is to bring the reader or the listener into the poem and offer an experience that leads to some kind of revelation and affects the reader's world view. I think too many poets try to expain their feelings in their poems and that kills imagery and robs the reader of the chance to find their own epiphany in the poem. The poet's job is to meet the reader at that place where personal experience overlaps the human condition. Through identification with that experience, the reader is given a window into the human condition and a chance to discover new things through that extension of their own experience.

“A Breakfast for Barbarians” by Gwendolyn MacEwen. Much has been written about this poem so there is probably not much I can add. What I like most about the poem is how it uses the most mundane, everyday things, like forks and knives, and a wooden table to expose our deepest desires for companionship and expression and experience beyond the ordinary. The comparison of our passions to eating breakfast, the first meal of the day, is such a great analogy. It hits straight to the soul. She also appeals to the mythical in her opening and through many rhetorical lines, repeated anaphorically. Throughout the poem there are primordial references that appeal to that blood-and-guts need we all seem to have to feel life burning within us.