How did you first come to poetry? What is it about the form that resonates?
I started writing poems at twenty-one years during a period of personal doubt while I was engaged in academic studies. In those days, there was no Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing available, and the best way to learn about literature was through an Arts degree with a major in English Literature. Mind you, my training came much earlier: my father was an English professor and who read poems to me as a child, when I learned to love the form – its emotional impact and power of inference, its appeal to the heart and to the mind – long before I tried my own hand at writing.
Aesthetically, I was drawn to poetry for its minimalism and musicality as well as for its heartful meaning. Also, I love the oblique level of reference through imagery and tone and the poem’s power to draw the reader without them being aware.
How does a poem begin?
Although an idea or an emotion may provide the underwater surge for a poem, I first must find an image or a phrase or a particular scene from narrative that lingers in my mind before I can set words to paper. (And, yes, I am one of those primitives who still must write the first draft of a poem longhand and on paper.)
For instance, in “Albatross” from In Another Air, I had the legendary seabird with all its paraphernalia of literary and magical association in combination with the image of a particular bird that has been found dead with its stomach filled with plastic that it has mistaken for food. My worry about climate change and pollution provided the mental setting for the poem, but it was the specific image of the bird that I saw on the media that was the catalyst for the poem.
With a poem such as “Widdershins” from Uninterrupted, the concept of earth’s orbit being clockwise along with our righthandedness and the surprising orderliness of the universe coincided with a refreshing sense that humans may depart from habit and that order and that in certain cases a bit of altruism may be the spark. Also, of course, there was the image of the young man on the skateboard talking to his girlfriend while he held his dog on the leash, managing all three tasks with apparent ease.
With a poem such as “Nothing prepared me for winter” from I forgot to tell you, the piece originated with a couple of verses that lingered in my head, “The trees raised their bare arms to the sky/ in an attitude of something like prayer.” So the poem about a car crash that was nobody’s fault evolved with several repeating lines whose obsession included all such accidents that happen in winter and that can lead to death in the natural world.
I also write narrative poems and have written a poem in the form of a letter written from a fictive young woman Fanny to her fiancé John Hartnell, a shipboy on Franklin’s third voyage and who she had been told but does not know for sure, is already dead. This poem attempts to understand the tragedy from the point of view of one closest to one of the sailors who died. In the case of a narrative poem, the starting point for me might be a tableau (another kind of image) in which there is a looking backwards and forwards in time.
Having said all the above, I actually follow no formula for writing poems and find that each poem is slightly different in the way it begins and develops.
Have you a schedule by which you work, or are you working to fit this in between other activities?
As I am at present self-employed, I do have the luxury of shaping my schedule depending on what particular contracts are looming. (Poetry after all does not make money.) I rise early and after breakfast and walking the dog, I will work on my poems, at least for an hour or so before I work on other projects. When deadlines threaten, of course, I have to alter this pattern. Also, I often write down the bones for a poem at other times in the day if the inspiration comes to me, but I do not develop the poem until the clear space of a morning is available. Writing poems takes work as well as inspiration.
Of course, when I taught English and Creative Writing as a sessional and when I had young children, this schedule was not possible and I had to fit writing poems in when the opportunity struck.
What are your favourite literary
journals?
I have many favourite print journals, including Arc magazine, Dalhousie Review, Exile ELQ, Freefall, The Fiddlehead, Grain, The New Quarterly, The Queen’s Quarterly.
The Goose: A Journal of Arts,Environment and Culture in Canada is an excellent online journal that features both academic papers and poetry.
A favourite blog of late is https://thissingingland.ca/. I love the way the creator Candace Savage has put together poems alongside photograph and information about wildlife so that the impact of each form is strengthened by the companion forms. Also, I find the LCP Poetry//Pause a wonderful blog featuring poems daily. And I cannot forget Talking About Strawberries All The Time which offers a swath of poems for the reader to get a feel for a particular poet.
Who are some writers you are reading lately that most excite you?
I recently read Margaret Atwood’s Dearly and do admire her work as a poet. This collection that centres on her deceased husband writer, Graeme Gibson, who suffered from dementia during his final years I found particularly moving. Also, I found John Steffler’s And Yet a complex and puzzling but pre-eminently philosophical book with many buried wry and human truths. Randy Lundy’s Blackbird’s Song is a collection of lyrical nature poems with an authentic indigenous voice that is set against the prairies.
Among the novels I have read recently, I would mention Nadifa Mohamed’s The Fortune Men about the last black man hanged in Cardiff, Wales, which I consider ranks with Richard Wright’s Native Son. The work attempts both to be accurate historically and is also poignant. When I admire a writer, I read other works by the same author, and so would also commend The Orchard of Lost Souls and Black Mamba Boy which are also written with intrinsic poetry and humanity. Also, Rivka Galchen’s Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch is subtle and wise while it lays bare human vulnerability and culpability. Colm Toibin’s novel about Thomas Mann, The Magician is a book that has taught me much about German society pre- and post-World War II, and more importantly about human beings and fine writing.
At present I am reading David
Zieroth’s early works Clearing and Mid-River and aim to re-read
all his books to date. I have always admired David’s poems, which show his
genius even as a young poet starting to put words to paper. Zieroth’s The
Fly in Autumn won the Governor General’s Award in 2009, and indeed I have
enjoyed following the development of his poetry, always intricate, moving and
wise.
Also, several pieces have been published online with the League of Canadian Poets’ Poetry//Pause and https://thissingingland.ca/. The poem “Widdershins” was showcased in front of the Commercial Centre at Manitou Beach and published in the local magazine Manitou Matters for the month of November 2021.
Please see my website: https://gillianharding-russell.ca/
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