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| 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.
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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November 2012 – June 2013
Revised October 2024
Montreal
