Blaine Marchand : on Catherine Ahearn, Ottawa’s (and Canada's) first municipal Poet Laureate

 

 

[ed. note: Blaine Marchand presented a draft of this piece earlier this week as part of the Ottawa Poets Laureate reading, to acknowledge Ottawa poet Catherine Ahearn, not only Ottawa’s first poet laureate in 1982, but Canada’s first municipal poet laureate. A livestream of the event was recorded and lives online here.]

 

 

 

 

Catherine Ahearn (nee Firestone) was born in 1949 in a prominent Ottawa family. She attended Rockcliffe Park Public School (1955-1962), Elmwood Private School (1962-1966), both in Ottawa, as well as McGill University in Montreal between 1966 and 1970, where she obtained a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in French Literature. She also spent a year studying at the University of Aix-en-Provence in France (1968-1969). Subsequently, Ahearn obtained her Master’s in Arts from the University of Ottawa in French Canadian Literature in 1971, and her doctorate from the University of Ottawa in French Literature in 1979, with her final thesis on French surrealism.

 

It was Catherine, who approached then Mayor Marion Dewar, with the idea of creating the Poet Laureate for the city. The mayor was enthusiastic about the idea, suggesting Catherine become the first to hold this position. Being completely bilingual, she was the perfect choice. And, it was the first municipal poet laureate program established in Canada, leading the way for other cities to follow suit.

 

In 1976, she published two books of poetry L’Âge de l’aube and Daydream Daughter, which was published by McClelland and Stewart, won the AJM Smith Poetry Prize from Michigan State University. L’Âge de l’aube appeared to good reviews in Paris. Between 1980 and 1987, she published four books of poetry. She also wrote a novel, a young adult book as well as film and television scripts.

 

When she became poet laureate, I interviewed her for the Ottawa Citizen. I remember that she was elegant, thoughtful, charming and witty. She moved away from Ottawa and so I lost track of her. But it seems fitting to remember her on this occasion when the Poet Laureate position is being revived thankfully through the efforts of VERSeOttawa, led by rob mclennan.

 

I will read a poem from her book Concha and Rezanov, which was published by Anthos Press, founded by Ottawa’s third poet laureate, Patrick White. The book explores the love between 16-year-old Concha Argüello in San Francisco and Senator Nikolai Rezanov, of Czar’s government, who had come to the city.

 

 

The Love of Us

And in the beginning

Was the womb
And the womb grew
And the womb became love.

And in the beginning
Was the manhood
And the manhood grew
And the manhood became love.
And in the beginning
Was the word
And the word grew
And the word became us.

The womb and the manhood
Grew into one;

And the womb and the word
Grew into love.
And the womb said:
Love creates poetry;
Absolute love creates eternity.
And the word said:

Poetry recreates love,
Absolute love recreates eternally.

 

(Concha And Reznov, by Catherine Ahearn; Anthos Books, 1987, page 76.)

 

 

 

 

Blaine Marchand's poetry and prose has appeared in magazines across Canada, the US, New Zealand, Pakistan, India, France and Ukraine. He has won several prizes and awards for his writing. He has seven books of poetry published, a chapbook, a children's novel and a work of non-fiction. He has completed a new collection, Promenade.

Active in the literary scene in Ottawa for over 50 years, he was a co-founder of the Canadian Review, Sparks magazine, the Ottawa Independent Writers and the Ottawa Valley Book Festival. He was the President of the League of Canadian Poets from 1991-1993.

 

rob mclennan : an interview with David O’Meara

 

 

 

 

 

David O’Meara is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently Masses on Radar (Coach House Books, 2022), the winner of the Ottawa Book Award and the Archibald Lampman Prize. His 2013 collection, A Pretty Sight, also received both honours. His first novel, Chandelier, appears this month with Nightwood Editions. He is the Director of the Plan 99 Reading Series and was the founding Artistic Director for VERSeFest (Canada’s International Poetry Festival). David has served as Poet-in-Residence for Arc Poetry Magazine, as a faculty member at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, and as a jury member for the Griffin Poetry Prize. He was recently announced as one of two poets laureate for the City of Ottawa for 2024-2026. He lives in Ottawa, Canada where he tends bar.

[David O'Meara launches Chandelier in Ottawa at 6:30pm on Wednesday, September 18 at The Rainbow; he and French-language poet laureate Véronique Sylvain give their first official readings as Poets Laureate for the City of Ottawa as part of an event through the Ottawa International Writers Festival, Tuesday, October 1, 2024 at 6:30pm]

rob mclennan: What first started you writing poems?

David O’Meara: Old poems. Film dialogue. Song lyrics. Famous quotations. Rhetoric, but the classical Aristotelian sense of it. What Cicero refined as the manipulation of words and phrases to create an effect. Composition as persuasion. The addiction of a well-wrought phrase. Art springs from an initial emotional response, and since I can’t dance, I think I felt that words seemed the best tool for response. At a certain juncture, I needed to organize my thoughts in the hope to transmit and transform them. Early on, it was probably just clumsy attempts to understand myself and show off a little.

rm: Who might you have been showing off to?

DO: Only to myself since I kept very quiet about my writing ambitions for many years. At an early stage, it’s a game of trying to impress yourself while generating a form of patient objectivity and self-apprenticeship. Bluster with dedication.

rm: Where and when did you first encounter other writing, or other writers? At least my high school library had a copy of an Irving Layton collection, For My Brother Jesus (1976), and certain of my peer group were attempting to write as well, which prompted my own early attempts.

DO: Early access is so incredibly important. Before the internet, those high school libraries, if they were stocked with a few (and usually it was only a few) contemporary voices, could be instrumental in accessing poetry beyond the Romantics, Yeats and Robert Frost. Like your experience, there were a few Atwood, Birney and Al Purdy books available at Fellowes High School in Pembroke. In the early eighties, finding them was electrifying. Though the collection lacked in diversity, it was life-changing to see a poem called “The Beavers of Renfrew” in a book. It gave agency to the regional and the vernacular. Suddenly and astonishingly, poetry didn’t have to be about English abbeys and Grecian urns. And you could write the way people around you talked.

rm: I know you originally know Ken Babstock from those Pembroke days. At what point did you each realize the other was attempting poems?

DO: We knew each other and had lots of literature and music chats in dingy Pembroke cafes. If memory serves me correctly, we skated around admitting we were attempting our own writing until Ken published a couple of his poems in the high school yearbook. I was viridescent with envy. It was the year I graduated (Ken is two years younger than me) but from there we started a letter correspondence (pre-internet) and included poems. Our initial bluster evolved into valuable and candid critique, which we continued for years.

rm: The first time I met either of you was in 1994, I think it was, when you and Ken read together at The Manx Pub. How did that reading come about? Where were you in your writing by then?

DO: Have we known each other for thirty years? Wow. Yes, I still remember that reading. The Manx had just opened a year earlier and Chris Swail, a co-owner with a lit background, wanted to ramp up the cultural presence in the bar, so he started a series named after a brainwave (?) with Rob Manery. I was friends with Chris, and he knew I was writing (I’d had a couple of poems published in The Antigonish Review and Fiddlehead), so he asked me to bring Ken along (also with some early publishing credits: he beat me to The Fiddlehead by six months) to open for a Scottish guy who had a couple of actual novels at the time. I was nerve-wracked beyond belief since I didn’t have much experience doing readings. The sense of exposure is still hard to swallow. They were, beyond a doubt, very terrible poems. The solution to nerves then was alcohol and bravado. I feel like we all went to the Sportif and played pool afterward.

rm: Yeah, that sounds right. That was The N400 Series, which Manery ran until he left for Vancouver, two years later. I tagged along for the pool, which you might not recall. Most of what I remember from that event was John Metcalf attempting to talk to Ken afterwards about a manuscript, and Ken (possibly through nervousness) seeming to brush him off. What was the process for you between that reading and what became your first collection, Storm still? How did you get from there to there?

DO: I kept writing, reading, reading, exploring approaches to style and technique, getting more self-critical. I’d write ten poems, let them sit, change them, and then throw out eight. The manuscript grew and shrank. I sent stuff off to the magazines and journals. It’s hard to imagine the not-so-long-ago days before Submittable. Those pre-stamped self-addressed envelopes in envelopes. I worked in Montreal. I hitched to Vancouver, worked maintenance in a hotel, flew to Japan, eventually back to Ottawa, all the while checking in with friends who I was using as my return address. A version of the manuscript got turned down by 4 or 5 publishers. I cut stuff. I wrote more. Just before moving to teach in South Korea, I sent it off again. Rejected. I wrote some poems in Korea, mornings and evenings after work. When I arrived home a year later, the manuscript went in the mail again and was accepted.

rm: When thinking back to those early days, do you see a difference to the way you approach a poem now? Who were you even reading to influence the poems of that first collection? Do you begin with rough notes that cohere into shape through revision? Do you begin with an idea, or even a line?

DO: I was reading everything I could get my hands on. Poetry was a drug. I was hooked, jonesing for the next hit. The pre-internet days, what you could find in bookstores, or what you borrowed hungrily from friends. The contemporary Canadians, the American voices. The Brits and Irish through Faber volumes. Translations from Asia and South America. Always the question, what effect are these poets creating and how do they do it? Differences of approach? I learned, over time, to not decide what the poem was about before I started it. So, it usually begins with an image, or a phrase, and the poem becomes an investigation into why it feels important. From there, it’s all blowtorches, sledgehammers, spokeshaves, and sandpaper: a free-for-all to get through the poem’s self-indulgent tendencies to form an evocative, arresting shape. I need to surprise myself—a line, a metaphor, an emotional admission—in order to feel the poem is successful. A poem is a thoughtful conversation with itself to learn why it exists. I don’t understand how poems work, which is probably why I keep writing them. The most important goal is re-readability. What makes anyone want to re-read a poem? Shocks of comprehension, complex arrangements of thought, the pleasure of language.

rm: You’ve had numerous poems over the years that have emerged from travel. How does one write about a place or an experience without sounding like a tourist? Is this something you worry about?

DO: I think the danger in writing about travel is forcing profundity out of exoticness, and consequently a tendency to write “poetry.” The poem’s effectiveness is primarily in the words, regardless of where it takes place. Whether you are single-handedly bringing a train to a halt in the Tunisian desert or going to Loblaws to buy a bag of carrots (I’ve done both without writing about them), you can’t know if it’s significant until you experience and process it. Likewise, whether it’s a subject for good art. The carrot sometimes makes for a better poem than the train. The travelling I’ve done has led to some poems. Much hasn’t. I haven’t worried too much about sounding like a tourist. Most of the time I am. There’s a strength in acknowledging we're encountering things for the first time, with all its awe, ignorance, and humility.

rm: In an interview with Open Book in 2021, you mention that a poem “shouldn’t try to be a poem. It should just talk to you.” It sounds as though this consideration is still in play, so I’m curious as to how you began to compose a novel. Was there something in the shape or idea that compelled you into a different direction, or were you deliberately trying something new?

DO: I guess a story suggested itself and I shifted gears. Writing a novel is a different way of talking through the paradoxes. As an engaged reader, I want an interplay of confusion and clarity. I like being confronted by contradiction, then surprised by revelation. Narrative and lyric trajectories operate differently, but complementarily. One is essentially causal (this event led to this event) while the lyric embraces illogical shifts based on association and comparisons (this event makes me weirdly think of this other thing) which is basically metaphor. I think of them as occupying horizontal versus vertical planes. Kipling versus Imagism. The art floats inside the two extremes. A novel leans more heavily on the narrative, though has shift. It’s another version of those horizontal and vertical planes. Like a good poem, I wanted my characters to dwell in uncertainty, reveal and surprise themselves as recklessly as possible. Their anecdotal evidence constitutes a world, the way images do.

rm: An interesting consequence of attempting a new form is in how one’s relationship to prior forms might shift in tandem. Do you see a difference in how you approach writing a poem since composing a novel?

DO: Yes and no. One thing informs another, doesn’t it? The prose nudges the poetry; the poetry tugs at the prose. The work widens or compresses. It’s those horizontal and vertical lines in action. There’s always a part of me that doesn’t understand how art works. One needs to continually ask “what is the essential information and where does it go?” And “how will language achieve both communication and pleasure?”

rm: You were recently announced as one of two new Poets Laureate for the City of Ottawa. What are your plans for your two-year post? What do you think you can bring to the position?

DO: I’m keen to keep organizing literary readings with local poets and I’m also eager to partner with other arts and cultural organizations in order to bring audiences from different disciplines into the same space. And, in the spirit of throwing stuff at the wall, I’ve got a wild bunch of stupid ideas to generate a bit of spontaneity, fun, profundity, and potential failure. Stay tuned.

 

 

 

 

 

Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of more than thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, he won the John Newlove Poetry Award in 2010, the Council for the Arts in Ottawa Mid-Career Award in 2014, and was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2012 and 2017. In March, 2016, he was inducted into the VERSe Ottawa Hall of Honour. His most recent titles include On Beauty: stories (University of Alberta Press, 2024), the poetry collection World’s End, (ARP Books, 2023), a suite of pandemic essays, essays in the face of uncertainties (Mansfield Press, 2022) and the anthology groundworks: the best of the third decade of above/ground press 2013-2023 (Invisible Publishing, 2023). An editor and publisher, he runs above/ground press, periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics and Touch the Donkey. He is editor of my (small press) writing day, and an editor/managing editor of many gendered mothers. The current Artistic Director of VERSeFest: Ottawa’s International Poetry Festival, he spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com