Can you tell us what it meant to be a Vehicule poet? In what ways, if any, does that history influence South China Sea?
When I was in New York in 1973 and 1974 I was playing in a five-piece rock band called Bogart.
In late 1974, I became disillusioned with the music business and quit the band. I moved up to Montreal and ran into the Vehicule Poets, all six of them. So together we became a seven-piece poetry band. We were hardly ever on the stage at the same time, but poetry is more metaphysical than music.
I very much see the Vehicule Poets as a band. But that’s my interpretation. The other six probably see it differently. In fact, I know they do. I draw a lot of context from working in music. I used to put out books like albums.
For ten years we collaborated on a lot of things. And then we all went off to our solo “careers.”
Which is more the way that writers operate. For a decade we were really involved with one another’s work. In the eyes of other Montreal poets, we were probably a seven-headed monster.
The Vehicules are my best friends in poetry. What it meant for me is that I had company, I had a genuine and loving community. Writing can be a pretty lonely business. For ten years I had close companions. And we still come back to one another. Every now and again we recelebrate the joys of our youth.
Montreal, in the seventies and early eighties, is a place I went back to, in memory, in South China Sea. While I was writing the book Artie Gold died. And then Ruth Taylor died. And then Sonja Skarstedt died. So they were with me when I was out on the road in China. Their deaths were prompting me to remember.
Poetry often teaches us about patterns and rhythms, however minute or subtle. What patterns have you observed in your own life in the process of putting together South China Sea? In other words, how does poetry reveal pattern?
What I got interested in, in working on South China Sea, were the rhythms of memory. How do we remember? Why do we remember? What prompts or provokes us to remember?
I knew it was a “memory book.” I started writing it at the same age my grandmother was when she started to fall into dementia. I was thinking, I’d better remember things while I can still remember.
So the patterning I saw was what we call on the back cover “the dance of memory and experience.” The way lived experiences were calling up memories fascinated me. And that’s really the engine of the book. That’s the patterning I see. How a meal in Guangzhou takes me back to Montreal and Artie Gold. How being in China makes Montreal so lucid and so easily recoverable.
Being in a position to remember. And the specific lived experience recalls a specific memory.
Without the lived experience there isn’t a reason to remember. And there isn’t a reason to remember this specific memory.
When I’m working on a book I’m really deep inside the text. What I’m writing is as real to me as everyday life. Often, it’s more real. I think all writers live their books. But there’s also living the writing of the book. That’s an experience people who aren’t writers maybe don’t have. I think that was especially true with South China Sea. When I was writing about Artie in China he was there with me. He was alive in China, even as they were scattering his ashes in Montreal.
Why was poetry the ideal genre for your autobiography?
Although one of my favourite books is The Autobiography Of William Carlos Williams, it winds up I have some kind of argument with the genre of autobiography. There were things I just didn’t want to do.
I didn’t want to narrate and I didn’t want to lie. Telling “the story of my life” is, possibly, one way of falsifying. And then there are the outright lies. I wanted to be truthful and to be true to the moments. So my autobiography is a collection of moments, with no attempt to corral them into a narrative. There’s no attempt at narrative consistency. There’s this, and then there’s this.
Maybe I’m having an argument with autobiography that other writers just don’t have. For me, it was important to subvert some of the dominant features of prose autobiography. It seemed to me that a poet would write his autobiography in poetry. Writing it in prose made no sense to me at all.
If we live our lives in poetry, in poems, why would we create a story of our lives that we would then render in prose?
In South China Sea, you write “Memory changes the emphasis (p. 113).” Much of this work is based in memory — what emphases changed in putting these moments to paper?
Many of my ideas about memory have been shaped by Dorothy Livesay’s poem “Green Rain.” When I was living the moment this is how I thought about it, and this is what it meant to me. But now that I’m looking back on the moment, this is how I think of it, and this is what it means to me now.
That poem really struck me when I first read it back in 1975. It rang and it resonated. Poems can change you.
So when I was writing South China Sea I had “Green Rain” in the back of my head. In a memory poem I would reflect on a moment in the past and wonder what it really means now, or what does it really mean in the long run?
As I suggested earlier, experiences were selecting the memories. I didn’t go out of my way to be all-inclusive There are a lot of things I’d written about previously that I didn’t revisit. I could have revisited all of that stuff and possibly seen it differently. But I was interested in filling in the blanks. I was writing about childhood and young adulthood for the very first time. That was interesting to me, and that all had “the wisdom of age” being applied to it.
Young love was inarticulate. Now that I was older I could say with a great degree of accuracy how I felt when I was young and in love. I felt like I could finally do justice to young love.
What does the word “home” mean to you?
There’s an easy answer, and there’s a more complicated answer. Let’s do the more complicated answer first.
The word “home” is probably the most loaded word in the English language for me. It means, and has meant, many different things at different times in my life.
My “home life” as a child was idyllic, until it became almost horrific. It went from being a total dream to being a total nightmare in nothing flat. In South China Sea I picked a few things I liked about childhood to write about. But I made no attempt to document it in full.
Similarly, the “home life” of my middle years, of my married life and subsequent divorce, is mostly MIA in South China Sea. But I’ve written about that elsewhere, and at length.
The last poem in South China Sea is “Forty Years Gone—The Road Home.” It’s always dangerous to read your own poems and interpret them, but I read that poem to say that “home” is a state or condition of openness. Receptivity.
I often ask people I am getting to know if they have experienced life as one continuous lifetime or as a series of selves. I feel like I’ve had multiple lives in one lifetime. So it makes sense to me that a word like “home” could possibly mean seven different things to the different selves.
The easy answer is: what the word “home” means to me now is “where I am.” For a very long time, it was where I wasn’t.
In your new pandemic chapbook, Hawaiian Sunrise, your poems take a much different turn than most other poets’ during the past year and a half. In “Early Morning Waves,” you write: “You can’t expect everyone to write at the Ontario cottage / and come up with something different. I travel—” Is finding different shores essential to your poetry? How did the pandemic affect your approach to travel through poetry or maybe, conversely, poetry through travel?
For good or ill, travel has been essential to my poetry, and to my life. The family I grew up in never went anywhere, so I went everywhere.
It was the pandemic, but I managed “to escape” to Hawaii for a couple of months. And, knowing what we now all know, I should have stayed there even longer.
The pandemic really clipped my wings. I was forced to stay in place. That doesn’t come naturally or easily to me. The last ten years of my teaching career I only taught half-time. I was only in Maine four months a year. So to have been in Toronto for fifteen of the past seventeen months goes against all the ways that I aspire to live.
As a writer, I felt completely incapacitated by the pandemic. Everybody I knew was writing their plague journal, and I had nothing. There was nothing I could say. When I “escaped” to Hawaii I experienced a sudden rush of freedom. I felt free to speak. Some of what I had to say was pretty nutty, but maybe nutty could be entertaining.
I wrote eighty poems in Hawaii. Hawaiian Sunrise showcases seventeen of them. It wasn’t Covid-free in Hawaii, but it was a whole lot better. Everything was still off-balance, as was I.
What are you currently working on now?
I’ve been working on a book called Three Winters for a few years. It’s written now, but I’m going to have to go back and edit it. It’s about the winters of 2018-2019, 2019-2020, and 2020-2021. The first winter has been previewed in my above/ground chapbook Hong Kong Blues. The second winter is when the Chinese government swooped in, quelled the democracy movement in Hong Kong, and took over. And the third winter is our recently eclipsed pandemic winter. Hawaiian Sunrise is one part of that. There are two other sections: one called Cultural Marginalia and the other called The Traveling Wilburys Collection.
I wrote about three winters and stumbled into all of this History. I would have been happy to just be an older lyric poet writing about my thoughts and feelings, but the world had other plans. It’s maybe an interesting document of the times.
