Finding one’s voice in poetry

4 October 2024

All poets need to find their voice, this requires talent, perseverance, and commitment to writing. From when I began writing poetry, in 1965, I knew I had to find my voice, I knew I had to write poems that I could stand behind --poems that were true to my inner self-- and those poems would accurately express the experiences that had formed or created my life. For me, the discovery of my voice in poetry was an important development in my work as a poet; I knew this instinctively, and I spent years writing every night until I finally wrote a "real" poem. 

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The journey to being a poet includes writing, study, reading, and having a few poet friends; it's a journey in that you don't know where you are going until you get there, and you never know if you will write a genuine poem until you write one. Discovering my voice in poetry was a breakthrough in my writing. In my early twenties I had written poems, for instance “there are seashells and cats”, and this was my true voice. This discovery of my true voice is shown in the poems in my first book, The Trees of Unknowing (Vehicule Press,1978); these were my first poems that I felt were genuine poems, poems that I could stand behind. Finding one's voice in poetry doesn't mean that you will stay writing the same way, what you say changes and how you say it changes, but that is only after you find your voice; another important poem, in my body of work, is “Divisions”, it was written over three days in April 1977.

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Writing Divisions (Coach House Press, 1983) happened during a period of emotional conflict, of unhappiness, of catharsis. Did Matthew Arnold say that poetry is our religion? This is a shared experience between poet and reader because the poet gives expression to spirit, soul, and psyche and the reader recognizes these important qualities in themselves. What one says in poetry changes as one gets older; nothing is permanent and content is also subject to change, but there is an ineffable quality to voice that doesn’t change; voice is the vehicle for the human soul and what it is experiencing, observing, and moved by, this becomes content, and it needs to be true to one’s inner being.

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November 2012 – June 2013

Revised October 2024

Montreal

"the nation is divided . . ."

 

The Unicorn Rests in a Garden
(or The Unicorn in Captivity)
by an unknown artist, 1495–1505

When the nation is divided

there is no nation: when history is discarded

the old regret what life has become;

there is no nation when people

have lost belief in the soul; there is no nation

when people are divided and turn on each other;

when the nation turns its back 

on what made it a nation

there is no nation:

    ships don't reach harbour,

    cod fish so plentiful off Nfld's coast are gone,

    the massacre of buffalos, a mountain of bones 

    on a bleak autumn morning,

    flash mobs stealing everything from stores,

    crows, carrion, and crowds of people

    live in darkness, 

    goodness is ridiculed, vulgarity         

    celebrated, macabre faces in clouds, 

    mobs pounding on old people's front doors:

what is old is cancelled

as decreed, as legislated; 

and people love ignorance and renounce

their own culture; 

they are crossing the bridge

cities burn and the ruins 

are ploughed into dust—

                                            11 May 2023

Monsters of power and bureaucracy

 

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau

I think it was back in the fall of 1983 when I arrived at Newfoundland's St. John's International Airport to give a reading from my new book, Divisions (Coach House Press, 1983) at Memorial University. I remember that when I arrived there was a group of people greeting what appeared to be a man of some importance from Ottawa; the following year, 1984, was the terminal year for Pierre Elliot Trudeau's government. I wondered about how solicitous they were and my intuition told me this was no ordinary bureaucrat, this was a man with power, someone who had to be dealt with with kid leather gloves.  And that's what happens to a government when it's at the end of its life, privilege and entitlement have settled in and become obvious, the self-importance of people is obvious, and monsters of power and bureaucracy are obvious. There are some of us with hypocrisy radar, we see it, we hate it, we condemn it. 

    The times they are a changing, or so they say, and you can't stop time, change, or  whatever the future holds; as Heraclitus wrote, "You can't step into the same river twice", if the river is the water in the river then it is always changing, even the river banks are subject to erosion and change. Justin Trudeau was never Pierre Elliot Trudeau, he doesn't have his father's intelligence or his education; Trudeaumania doesn't apply to Justin however much Justin craves popularity. I keep hearing people saying, usually about climate change, that we are in an "existential" crisis; but we are also in another existential crisis, that the existence of our values, our traditions, our way of life, is threatened by progressives and the woke. These people, including Justin and his gang of politicians and the people who run the CBC, don't think we even have any Canadian values, traditions, or a way of life, and that is a big part of the problem in this country. As always, you have two types of people: those who want change even though they either have no idea where it will take us, or it will take us somewhere the population doesn't want to go, and you have other people who want to conserve the best of the past and they see the Liberal government destroying what made Canada a great country in which to live. 

    In the first half of the 20th Century Argentina was one of the most prosperous countries in the world with one of the highest GDPs. What happened? A military coup  d'état happened, political instability happened, and Argentina has never recovered her former affluence. Is it possible that  Canada is the next Argentina? We are already not as well off as we were before Justin was elected: our standard of living is declining; home ownership is impossible for the average person; Montreal used to be a renters market, rents here and across Canada are now prohibitively high; food is very expensive; homelessness has increased; drug addiction has never been worse than now; the medical system and health care is collapsing; medical assistance in dying, doctor assisted euthanasia, is now a part of our health and social care, and death is sometimes offered to people who, with a little help, could return to living useful lives; the population has swelled to over 40 million in the name of increasing the number of workers in the country; Justin has denigrated the military and Hockey Canada, it is obvious that traditional male dominated activities are suspect and foreign to him; he has normalized and imposed political correctness on the country; he has worked to destroy freedom of speech in Canada, he promotes cancel culture; he has promoted woke and progressive causes that are essentially opposed to traditional Canadian values; he has betrayed English speaking Quebecers and our constitutional right to use our language; he does not adhere to the truth, so he's a liar; he is a narcissist; in sum, he is not a serious person and he has made us look like we, as a country, are not serious. 

    Why would anyone think that the Justin Trudeau years have been anything but a disaster? So, if Pierre Poilievre is abrasive it is not only that his personality is abrasive or that he is politically ambitious, it is because he can clearly see the damage Justin has inflicted on the country. How did Justin do it? He spent us into debt that we, as a nation, will never see paid off; he is a poor manager of both the economy and the government; his causes are gender fluidity, diversity, and climate change, he is truly woke and progressive; and he comes from a class of people who are rich and careless and spend their way out of every mess they create, but he's spending his way out the mess he's created with our money. And the country is a broken mess because of the disaster of Justin Trudeau.