Interview in The Artisanal Writer

I was recently interviewed by Sabyasachi Nag, the author of Hands Like Trees (Ronsdale Press, 2023), and the interview was published in The Artisanal Writer on 18 February 2024; see below:

Farewell, Darkness

4h ago

ekstasis editionsGirouard Avenuej krishnamurtiMapping the SoulSelected Poems 1978-1998

Award-winning Montreal poet, Stephen Morrissey talks to Sabyasachi Nag about a compilation of Selected Poems from 1971 to 2021, Farewell Darkness (Ekstasis Editions, 2023).

Sabyasachi Nag (SN): In this collection, (it seems to me) you have selected more poems from your latter works than from your earlier works. Is that a fair conclusion? What were the considerations at play in the selection process? How did you choose to leave out the work that you ended up leaving out? When you went back to poems that you wrote 30 or 40 years ago how did you know which poems to select (or rather, what were the considerations that informed your choices)

Stephen Morrissey (SM): Some of the early poems in Farewell, Darkness, Selected Poems were published in my first selected poems, Mapping the Soul, Selected Poems 1978-1998 (1998). The poems published after 1998 are taken from Girouard Avenue (2009), A Private Mythology (2014), and several chapbooks. I included poems that were thematically consistent with the other poems in the book. Unlike most selected poems, there are no chapters or dates indicating which book the poems were taken from or when they were first published, it is a single body of work, it is one long book made up of poems written and published over a fifty year period that represents what I have done in poetry.

SN: In your long, illustrious, and extremely productive career that includes nine books of poetry, several chapbooks and two volumes on poetics what has been the most challenging work for you to write? Why?

SM: I began writing poetry in 1965 but I didn’t feel that what I was writing really expressed what I wanted to say. My first “real” poems were written in the early 1970s, when I was in my early twenties; for instance, “there are seashells and cats” and other poems that were in my first book, The Trees of Unknowing (1978); my apprenticeship as a poet was from when I began writing poems in 1965 to when I wrote what I felt were poems I could stand behind from around 1974. A second experience of writing a “real poem”, a long poem that was significant to me, was in April 1976 when I wrote “Divisions”; it was an achievement to write this long poem, it was cathartic and confessional.

SN: In the preface of this collection you say, “My experience is that where we begin as poets is where we end.” Can you elaborate?

SM: What concerned me in my writing, themes that were present from when I began writing poems, are still present in what I am writing now. Something like the transience of life is a universal theme, all of my themes are universal and timeless. I didn’t invent these themes, I discovered them as I wrote new poems; you don’t always decide what you want to write, the writing comes to you.

SN: If one may attempt to summarise the main themes in this collection being (awareness) and belonging (loss) seem to have been important drivers for your poetry. Your father’s early death had a profound influence and the past is a recurring theme. You point out in the preface “When I began writing poetry my themes were the transience of life, family, grief at losing close family members and romantic love…many years later I am still writing about the (same) but giving more emphasis to some and less to others.” What made you stay close to these themes particularly? What do you make of the changes in emphasis?

SM: I wrote about “The Great Reconfiguration” in The Green Archetypal Field of Poetry (2022), it is when an event causes one’s life to change radically. One’s life changes from one minute to the next; for instance, I was born into a middle-class family, we rented a large flat in Montreal and we had a country home, we had a car, we were a family of two parents and two children, we had many relatives, we were a 1950s family. And then my father died and everything changed—his death was the “great reconfiguration” of my life—with his death, we became a single-parent family, we were two sons raised by a single mother; my mother had to find employment and my brother, who was only ten years old, helped her keep track of the family expenses, he also worked washing floors in an apartment building. For me, even as a six-year-old child, it was a descent into grief, death, guilt, and remorse. But this was also the descent into the underground, into the darkness where one suffers at one level but at another level, one may also discover a richer and more significant life, as I did with poetry; it is a new life deepened by what you have learned about life. In Greek mythology this is the myth of Hades, of Persephone’s journey to the underworld; and while the descent to Hades is a journey to darkness, it can also be the discovery of one’s authentic and meaningful life. There is a second myth that represents my psychological or spiritual journey, it is the Garden Myth, the fall from innocence into experience; and, as we read in William Blake’s poems, there is a higher innocence after the fall; the higher innocence is a meaningful life.  

SN: You started writing in the early seventies, right after the post-war avant-garde movement and about when the Beat generation (Ginsberg and Kerouac) and the New York School (Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch, Ashberry) and the Black Mountain poets (Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov) were working feverishly down south. There is an aspect of confessionalism and existential angst in your poetry through those years that seems to be similar to some of Robert Creeley’s work but at odds with the works of the Beat Generation poets and say the NY school and the post-modern work of other Black Mountain poets. And you say, “The great theme of literature is the journey of self-awareness.” Was this choice to situate your poetry among family and grief and love a conscious defiance of the ‘trends’ or something else?

SM: By “confessional” I mean writing poems that deal with aspects of one’s life that are usually kept private. Up to the mid-1950s, with W.D. Snodgrass, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath, most poets weren’t overly confessional. Confessional poetry refers to expressing the darker experiences in one’s life and even T.S. Eliot was confessional in some of his poetry however much he deplored the self in poetry. John Keats, in 1819, referred to the world as a place of “soul-making”; confessional poetry is also an aspect of soul-making, it emphasizes the journey to self-awareness. What confessional poetry has always aimed to do is bring to awareness the “human shadow”, that area of consciousness we are either not aware of or that we keep hidden; and this is the journey of self-awareness.  

SN: How conscious have you been about modernity in your poetry? What poets, trends or movements have impacted your work the most? As a teacher of poetics, how important is ‘modernity’ as an ideal for a young poet?

SM: All I can suggest is what I have learned from experience. Young poets need to read widely, this includes poets from the Modern Period, poets who rose to prominence from approximately 1915 to 1945; for instance, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, HD, and William Carlos Williams. But, as well, young poets should know something of what is being written today; I did concrete/visual poetry, cut-ups, sound poetry, visual collages, and other experiments in poetry that were current at the time. It is also important to meet and be friends with other poets, to talk about poetry, to lay the foundation of being a poet. Poets need to listen to their inner voice, that is where creativity is discovered; creativity has nothing to do with what is fashionable.

SN: Through this collection, you seem to be aware of your poetics– “poetry/creating areas of silence” pg. 38; “only poetry justifies language/and when poetry ceases there’s disharmony” p39; “we should let the poem grow” pg. 41; “Poetry is only the modification of the old” pg. 53; “I am sick to death of these old poems that wear blank expressions” pg. 54 etc.? Can you say a few words about your career-long curiosity about poetics and how it evolved?

SM: I am curious about the mechanics of writing poetry, remembering that a poet sometimes discovers what he or she wants to say in the act of writing. But I also felt, when I was young, that the actual act of writing was somehow special and if this is so then it is special because it is the voice of one’s soul. This is a shamanic approach to poetry, an approach that includes the ancestors and significant dreams.

SN: At one point in the collection, you say “emancipating my being…was always the point…the single point of education” pg. 34 and a few pages earlier (in what seems like one of the early attempts at concrete poetry) the line “Regard as sacred the disorder of my mind” repeats through the page in various motifs, lengths, and degrees of clarity. When you juxtapose the two ideas – poetry as the process of awareness of the psyche (the current state of affairs in the mind, such as disorder) and as also the saviour, the emancipator (if you will) – do these ideas look counterpoised in any way, or are they the same thing – you become aware and hence you are saved?

SM: That was my premise; my intuition was that if I could write about something then I could resolve that issue, I could express it, make sense of it; from an early age I was concerned with expressing my inner self, with  “emancipating my being”. I had a lot to work on; for instance, I was always an outsider; my father died when I was six and my stepfather died when I was nineteen; I was the youngest of a large extended family and the older members, aunts and uncles and grandparents, were all dying over a several year period; I failed twice at school and this certainly makes one an outsider, children can be cruel about anyone they can make fun of. What made these events worse, for me, is that nothing was ever discussed, my father died, and he was rarely, if ever, mentioned again until we were all much older. I did not come from a demonstrably loving family, I resigned myself to this life. No wonder, in the mid-1960s, I turned to both writing poetry and writing a diary as a way to express myself, as a way to understand my life; no wonder I became a confessional poet without having heard of this type of poetry. Human consciousness has a natural intelligence and a desire for wholeness and love; consciousness has an innate proclivity to move towards wholeness and love. It was J. Krishnamurti’s books that helped me the most, and hearing Krishnamurti speak at Saanen in Switzerland, at Ojai in California, and in New York City. And in all of this, my focus was poetry not because I wanted to be a poet, but because it was my path in life, it was my calling.

SN: Can we talk a bit about the formal choices in these selected works? Nearly all the poems are unpunctuated (or sparsely punctuated), the lines are short (two/three/four words mostly), the language crystal clear and the breaks are startling at times yet devoid of any showiness; sometimes empty spaces denote the pauses in breath; the tone is confessional, and the voice carries an aspect of endearing vulnerability that makes the reader trust it. How did you arrive at this form? In so much that most of the titles included in this collection are formally similar, what made you stick to the forms that you started with?

SM: Punctuation, line breaks, length of lines or fragments of lines, like themes, this is all discovered in the act of writing. And to write directly, honestly, authentically, and without artifice, you have to be brave to write something—to enter the unknown—even though your desire is to censor what you are writing. The main thing is to have the courage to write without censoring yourself, it is the truth-telling function of poetry, of consciousness. I wanted to be as direct and simple in my writing as possible, the line breaks indicate how the poem is to be read, the length of lines is direct and simple but this is a lot more difficult to do than one might expect, it requires a lot of editing, of living with the poem and working on it until you feel you have said exactly what you need to say. 

SN: In reading this book it is impossible to walk away without experiencing a strong undercurrent of a cyclical worldview as we encounter in Zen and Hindu philosophies (“the whole earth is a movement of waves and stones” pg.18; The Secret Meaning of the Alphabet…discover/…becoming/ the rain running/ down the windowpanes. p..g 52; “death/is not the closing of doors; pg. 65; “I divested/the past in meeting you,/and meeting you again/and again and again/into infinity.” pg. 118. In some places “the emancipation of the being” leaps out of the page and through the clear, unambiguous, enormously vulnerable voice brings an awareness in the reader that is available mostly in the reading of philosophy. Could you talk a bit more about it?

SM: When I was young, in the late 1960s, I used to visit my brother, who was a student at MIT, in Cambridge, Massachusetts; I remember visiting the Harvard Coop and buying V.K. Chari’s Whitman in the Light of Vedantic Mysticism (1964), a book I still own. I read Colin Wilson’s Poetry and Mysticism (1969) and W.T. Staces’ The Teaching of the Mystics (1969), and later I wrote several essays on R.M. Bucke’s Cosmic Consciousness; Bucke was a friend of Walt Whitman and wrote about Whitman’s cosmic vision. There were other books that made an impression on me, for instance, books by John Cage and D.T. Suzuki, and others. But after I began reading Krishnamurti’s books in the early 1970s I knew that no organized set of beliefs, no organized religion, was really of interest to me. Krishnamurti was, for me, the great teacher of exploring the psyche, more so than C.G. Jung. Late one night about twenty years ago I took a taxi from the Vancouver airport to where I was staying; I asked the Indian taxi driver, “Who do you think is the greatest Indian of the Twentieth Century?” His answer, which shouldn’t have surprised me, was Krishnamurti. For Krishnamurti freedom is a pathless journey, it is a journey to awareness.  

SN: Has there been a relationship (in your writing life, that you are aware of) between your writing practice and how your writing has been more or less of a spiritual activity integrated or interdependent on the community around you?

SM: Community is important, but poetry is a solitary activity and we must defer to this; fortunately, for me, as an introvert, I have enjoyed the company of a few people, I didn’t need a lot of people around me. All of my life I met people who were kind and compassionate, who saw more in me than I saw; for instance, a high school teacher, Mrs. Sophia Monton; but also, at McGill University, I was a student of Louis Dudek, and he was a terrific influence and an inspiration for what the poet’s life can be. In the early 1980s, I became friends with George Johnston, a poet, translator, and by then a retired professor at Carleton University; he was a wonderful generous man. And I had many long conversations about Krishnamurti with R.R. Skinner at his home in the UK. Also, my wife, the Vancouver-born poet Carolyn Zonailo, has been a blessing to me for the over thirty years we have been together. This doesn’t really answer your question but one never knows where life will take you; the constant is to be aware of life and to understand your life; for me, this meant writing both a diary and poetry, and that has made all the difference in my life.

About the Author

Stephen Morrissey was born in Montreal, the city where he still lives. He was educated at McGill University; while at McGill Morrissey won the Peterson Poetry Award. He has published ten books of poetry, several chapbooks, and two volumes on poetry and poetics; Farewell, Darkness, Selected Poems (2023), which collects poems that were published from 1971 to 2021.

The Stephen Morrissey Fonds, 1963 – 2014, are housed at Rare Books and Special Collections of the McLennan Library of McGill University. Visit the poet at http://www.stephenmorrissey.ca

Three Vehicule Poets interviewed

Here's an interview Ken Norris, Endre Farkas, and I did last spring; with thanks to Carolyn Marie Souaid for her excellent questions and Collett Tracey for her equally excellent and perceptive introduction. Thanks to rob mclennan for publishing it on periodicity.

Here's the link: periodicity journal.

Interview in Artisanal Writer, July 1, 2022

I was interviewed by Artisanal Writer, a web site dedicated to the art of writing poetry. To read the interview on their website requires getting a free subscription; otherwise, here is the text of the interview below.

The Artisanal Writer

Stephen Morrissey

Artisanal Writer Jul 1 Stephen Morrissey talks to Sachi Nag about his craft and artisanal habits. 1. "There is an elusive quality in these poems, a sense that the author is unconcerned whether you read them at all", says Michael Cameron about your first title, The Trees of Unknowing, Montreal Writer's Forum, 1979. Do you agree? Was there any specific life event that evoked this collection? What are some of the key influences in this work? Does this title in any way coincide with your own spiritual journey? I understand what Michael Cameron is saying, but no one publishes a book unless they want it to be read. The important thing for me regarding The Trees of Unknowing (1978) is that these are the poems in which I found my voice as a poet. Finding your voice is significant for any poet, it's when you have the authority to write without second-guessing your work. No single event lead to writing this title, it was a series of events: I published my first chapbook in 1971; I started writing the poems in The Trees of Unknowing in 1973; I was a student at Sir George Williams University and graduated in 1973; I attended Krishnamurti's talks in Saanen, Switzerland, in 1973; I completed my M.A. at McGill, where I studied with Louis Dudek, that was in 1976; I met poets who became life-long friends and I gave poetry readings at Vehicule Art Gallery. The title of the book alludes to the 14th century spiritual text The Cloud of Unknowing, but The Trees of Unknowing isn't influenced by it at all except for the title. 2.  "Mostly short lines, down to one word a line "spaced out" so the reading of the poem is slowed down; part of the reading is the placement of the poem's talk on largely empty pages," says Isaac Osborn about Divisions (Coach House Press, 1983). "Its silences border on an art transcending technique and even viewpoint. The images are elemental, there are few adjectives," Michael Cameron says of The Trees of Unknowing; could you talk about how you achieve this silence on the page—is it premeditated or is it something that happens during your writing—when what is spoken is framed in by the unspoken or unspeakable? This is something, the subject of composition in poetry, which I have thought about for a long time.  Years ago I spoke with Allen Ginsberg and he repeated what many poets were saying in those days, referring to Charles Olson's essay "Projective Verse", that lines in a poem correspond to the length of the breath of the poet. I never agreed with Olson's connection of breath with composing poetry; to me, the lines of free verse, as printed on a page, are consistent with readability, with communicating with the reader, and with the emotion the poet wants to communicate. Years ago I saw that poetry is the voice of the human soul, this is not original to me but it was something I knew intuitively. Instead of Olson's connection of breath with line breaks, it seems to me that if a poem is the voice of the human soul, then poems are transcriptions of the soul, and lines of poetry are patterns of thought, expressing what the soul has to say. What the soul perceives, the poem says. 3. This sense of family memories is the unflinching recognition of the fact that "grief anchors us to points in time" and that we define ourselves through our experiences of loss," says William Blackburn of Family Album. Why did you write this book? In what way is this title related to previous titles? Snap shots of family life, glimpses of the past, anecdotes, and long forgotten memories recalled in poems, existential doom and gloom, a bleak Edward Hopper environment, this is some of what is in Family Album (1988). My mother spoke often about the family; she had a terrific memory for the names of relatives and what they did; of course, poets can be interested in family and family history and never mention this in their poems. For me, beginning in my first chapbook, Poems of a Period (1971), I wrote about family, I didn't choose this subject, it was given to me, and more is involved in this than grief. From when I was young I kept a diary and I wrote down what relatives told me about their lives and their memories of the past; I was always writing something. I felt there was heroism to everyday life and I worked to record what people did, what people said, and some of this went into what I wrote in poems. In fact, I have written on a lot more than grief, love poems for instance. And yet, grief is an emotion that we don't leave behind, it comes paired with other emotions and events in addition to losing someone; and while grief diminishes it doesn't go away. Remember Queen Elizabeth II's comment, "Grief is the price we pay for love." 4.  You have said somewhere that Carl Jung influenced the Shadow Trilogy. J. Krishnamurti's influence on your previous titles is widely acknowledged. Can you say a bit more about these two influences? Do you see them as influences that compete with and balance each other or do you see them as complimentary? I am not an expert or authority on the writings of C.G. Jung or the teachings of J. Krishnamurti and I am not a follower of any philosophy or any person's ideas about life. Jung's approach is to go deeply into one's psychology and he gives some terms that help one to do this; Krishnamurti's approach is to free oneself from preconceptions, he advises to question everything. In either instance the direction is towards thinking for oneself. The thing about Jung is that he affirms life, he says that the psyche has a natural affinity to wholeness, and I have experienced this in my life. Krishnamurti's teaching, very simplified, is to question everything including what is currently popular or fashionable, to be your own authority; he writes, "Truth is a pathless land." Jung and Krishnamurti are different but both have made enormous contributions to our attempt to understand ourselves. 5.  Much like Family Album, Girouard Avenue is about family history. Could you speak a little on how and why family history plays such an important role in your work? Family history, one's ancestors, is a part of our inner being, but many people don't know the names of their grandparents, they know little about their family history. Everyone wants meaning and purpose in life, to connect with the past, with where we live, and to see ourselves as more than isolated people stranded in the present moment, but we are increasingly a people who have no history, no traditions, and who are part of a growing deracinated global population that doesn't care where they are living. I've spent a lot of time researching family history, it is something my brother and I have done together, and it is also a part of my spiritual journey. 6.  What made you a poet? "The Great Reconfiguration" is an essay in The Green Archetypal Field of Poetry (2022), and is about how a single event in one's life can be sudden and change a person to the roots of their being. I came from a middle class family, we had a nice home in a nice neighbourhood, we owned a car, we owned a country home, and my father had a good white collar job. All of that ended when I was six years old and my father died. Everything changed; we became a single parent family and my mother had to work; my brother, who was only ten years old, assumed adult responsibilities beyond what are expected of a child; and I was left to more or less fend for myself in an emotional sense, to deal with grief by myself. The death of my father is the Great Reconfiguration of my life, it is when everything changed in my life, and a few years later I met these changes by writing poems about my father, my family; and yet writing poetry was a calling, it was never a conscious decision on my part. The genesis of writing poetry began with my father's death, it set me apart from other people, it influenced my whole life and got me writing poetry; writing poetry actually saved my life. 7. What does it mean/suggest for you to think about your craft with each published work? If you were to associate an image with the development timeline of your writing craft what would that look like? Each book is a part of a continuum, each book builds on the previous book and, when seen as a totality, a poet's books are the books of his or her life, they are the narrative of one's life. But as for an image that represents this body of work, beginning with my first book, The Trees of Unknowing (1978), the single image would have to be the tree, the tree of life, the family tree, and the tree that is on the landscape or in one's backyard. It reaches into the sky, to the light, but its roots go deeply into the earth, into the darkness. Both the light of the sky and the darkness of what is below the surface of the earth are symbolized by trees—branches and roots—; one moves us upward and to being creative, and the other moves us downward, into Hades, and we know that this is also a place of great creativity. But I also love trees for themselves; we live in a small house but we have an apple tree, a sumac, a tamarack, a ginkgo, a maple tree, a fir tree, and a row of cedars, all on a small city lot. 8.  What was the most satisfying aspect of your recently completed work? My recently published work on poetics, The Green Archetypal Field of Poetry (2022), brings me a lot of satisfaction, a lot of happiness, it is a summing up of years of work, years of thinking about poetry, years of being a poet; it follows and develops on what I wrote in my previous book, A Poet's Journey (2019). Poets write poetry but part of being a poet is to write on poetics, to say why we write, what it means to write; writing on poetics isn't poetry but it explains something of the poet's vision. I suggest to young poets to go with their intuition, don't be afraid to theorize about poetry and to take risks, don't be afraid if your ideas are eccentric, non-conformist, or different from what everybody else is saying. Just go ahead and write them down, you may be on to something important. 9. What are you writing against or towards? I have written about grief and regret, death and loss, but there is more to my writing than this; in fact, my writing has been an affirmation of life. The act of writing poems is an affirmation of the creative spirit. I am always writing towards affirming life. 10. What is your definition of a successful piece of writing? Who decides that? I don't have a definition of a successful piece of writing, but a poem that doesn't work is easy to spot. That's part of the beauty of poetry, it is elusive, it changes, it is different according to various factors including the poet, when it was written, and what it is about. No single factor produces a poem that works, two poems may be successful for different reasons. As for the poem's critical success, T.S. Eliot wrote that time is the only real critic, or test, of poetry and he was right. Poets have no way to control which of their poems, if any, will be read, or discussed, and for how long. Author Bio Montreal-born poet Stephen Morrissey is the author of twelve books, including poetry and literary criticism. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree, Honours in English with Distinction, from Sir George Williams University in 1973. In 1976 he graduated with a Master of Arts degree in English Literature from McGill University. In the 1970s Morrissey was associated with the Vehicule Poets. The Stephen Morrissey Fonds, 1963 - 2014, are housed at Rare Books and Special Collections of the McLennan Library at McGill University. Stephen Morrissey married poet Carolyn Zonailo in 1995.

Interview with Poetry Quebec, January 2010

View of Montreal from Pointe-à-Callière, museum, 2017

Here is the complete (unedited) text of my interview with Poetry Quebec from January 2010. 

 -------------------------- 

 Interview with Stephen Morrissey 

1. Are you a native Quebecer? If not, where are you originally from? Why did you come to Quebec? 

 I was born in Montreal in 1950. My family moved from Ireland to New Brunswick around 1837 and my great great grandfather, Lawrence Morrissey, moved to Montreal from New Brunswick a few years later. On my mother’s side, John Parker, my grandfather, moved here with his wife and young son around 1910 from Blackburn, England, and he worked as a fireman with the City of Montreal. I’ve researched and written my family’s history, and this can be found at www.morrisseyfamilyhistory.com. Some poems written out of this research are in Girouard Avenue (forthcoming fall 2009), my new book of poems. My paternal grandmother lived at 2226 Girouard Avenue in N.D.G. for about forty years and, for me, it represents a psychic center that I often visit in dreams. 

 2. When and how did you encounter your 1st Quebec poem? 

 When I was a student at Monklands High School in the mid-1960s, I studied North American Literature with Mr. Dewdney, who was a terrific teacher. This course was mostly, if not all, Canadian literature, and we read poets and some fiction writers (for instance, Stephen Leacock) from the 19th and 20th Centuries. I loved the writing we studied and the poems of Bliss Carman, Archibald Lampman, and Charles G.D. Roberts have stayed with me all this time. We read Earle Birney’s “David,” one of the greatest Canadian poems. There were also English Quebec poems in the course textbook, A Book of Canadian Poems, An Anthology for Secondary Schools (McClelland and Stewart, Toronto, 1963), which was edited by Carlyle King, a professor at the University of Saskatchewan, and of which I still have a copy. I always took for granted the importance of Canadian literature since we studied it in school; and there were always poets and writers living in our community. The first Quebec or Montreal poem that really made an impression on me, that really touched me deeply, was A.M. Klein’s “Heirloom.” Later, I wrote a poem of my own, influenced by Klein’s poem. I used his title, and included it in my first book, The Trees of Unknowing (Vehicule Press, 1978). I was very impressed when I saw Endre Farkas’s play on Klein, Haunted House, at the Segal Centre for the Performing Arts, in the winter of 2009. Farkas’s play portrayed Klein’s life and showed how important Klein was to the development of Canadian poetry. 

3. When and how did you first become interested in poetry? 

Even when I was young I knew of Irving Layton and Louis Dudek. I remember they had a public falling-out that was in the newspapers, in letters to the editor, in the early 1960s. Max Layton, Irving’s son, was a student at West Hill High School with my older brother. I used to walk along Somerled Avenue to Willingdon School where I was a student. I would pass an apartment building I had heard was owned by Irving Layton. Montreal poets were famous nationally. F.R. Scott was a law professor at McGill University, a constitutional lawyer, and one of the founders of the CCF. He was widely known for his successful 1959 Supreme Court defense of Frank Roncarelli against the Quebec government. The premier of Quebec, Maurice Duplessis, intervened to deny Roncarelli, a Jehovah’s Witness, his legal rights. Scott’s intervention saw the eventual reinstitution of Roncarelli’s civil rights. However, I believe poetry was F.R. Scott’s passion and it is primarily for his poetry that he is remembered. Are poets born or are they created from the experiences of their lives? I think, in my case, it’s a combination of both. I always loved to write, especially poetry, but perhaps I was also driven to write by the circumstances of my life. Had I been more extroverted I may not have become a poet; perhaps introverts naturally gravitate to solitary activities, like writing poetry. I began writing poems when I was around fourteen years old and it took over my life. I’d sit in school and daydream, I’d stare out the window, or I’d write a poem. In the evenings, when I was avoiding doing school homework, I wrote poems. I was the editor of my high school’s literary magazine, and I published some of my own poems in it, but anonymously. Two excellent English literature teachers at Monklands were Mr. Boswell and Mrs. Montin, both encouraged my interest in English literature. I remember attending summer school at nearby Montreal West High School for a failed math course—I sat at the back of the class and wrote poems—of course, I failed the course and never took math again, but I’m still writing poems. 

 4. What is your working definition of a poem? 

 Poetry is largely metaphor, but it is also concise language, language imbued with some quality of music, and language that communicates an emotion. Poetry usually builds on the work of earlier poets, so there is a tradition or a lineage to the kind of poetry one is writing. Poetry is much more open-ended today than ever before: we have concrete and visual poems, sound and performance poetry, poetry that is computer generated, and so on. The study of ethnopoetics has embraced poetry by indigenous people from around the world, this literature was formerly of interest mainly to anthropologists. Diversity has increased the definition of poetry and the varied field of poetic expression open to poets today. In general, what I perceive as a “real” poem makes me want to write poetry. It inspires me to write. However, no single definition of poetry will suit everybody. 

 5. Do you have a writing ritual? If so, provide details. 

 By ‘ritual’ I guess you mean some repetitive, perhaps obsessive and compulsive, task that has to be done before one can write. The tennis great, Rafael Nadal, has his obsessive rituals, for instance listening to a certain piece of music and having several showers before entering the court, lining up bottles of water beside where he’s sitting during a tennis match, and so on. I don’t have any ‘rituals’ like this, I just do the writing. 

6. What is your approach to writing of poems: inspiration driven, structural, social, thematic, other? 

 CZ, who is a poet and editor as well as my wife, often gives me titles for poems and I can usually direct my inspiration into whatever the title suggests to me; at other times, I’ll sit and write and later, with a lot of editing, I’ll find the poem hiding in what I’ve written. When I’m writing, I don’t know in advance where the writing will take me. I think of this writing as improvisation, on a title or a theme, on what these suggest to me, or on an emotion. Of course, the process of writing poetry is a lot more complicated than this but it gives a general idea of my approach to writing. 

7. Do you think that being a minority in Quebec (i.e. English-speaking) affects your writing? If so, how? 

 This question raises a lot of contentious issues. I feel that over the last thirty or forty years Quebec politics—the question of Quebec’s separation from Canada and the language issue in Quebec—has soured and made unpleasant the experience of living here for many people, including myself, in the English-speaking community. This situation is complicated and affects one’s daily life although I doubt it is a subject for much poetry written here. 

 8. Do you think that writing in English in Quebec is a political act? Why or why not? 

 English is one of the most used, most spoken, languages in the world, so when English is your mother tongue you don’t really think too much about writing in any other language or that writing in English is a political act. Politics—government and how best to govern the country—have always been of vital interest to me, as a social democrat and as someone who believes in the western liberal tradition. Politics are defined by where one lives and when; poetry is not defined by time and place. My calling in life has been to poetry and not to politics. 

9. Why do you write? 

 Writing, being creative, is a celebration and an act of affirmation. For me, this is an important aspect of writing poetry. We need to embrace life and not accept an attitude of denial that is so easy to fall into. The very act of writing affirms life, even if the content of the writing is negative or questions ultimate values. Some of my work deals with death, regret, and grief, all negative subjects; but for me, writing the poems I have written has also been to rise above personal experiences. To write poetry is to affirm being alive. 

10 Who is your audience? 

While a poet’s first reader is himself, there are also many others who read poetry. I give numerous readings in Montreal, and there are always people who speak to me after the reading. They thank me for a particular poem, they have questions or express interest in something mentioned in the poetry. I’ve read my work to audiences across Canada and in different parts of the United States. There are many people who are readers of poetry, although maybe not as many as those who read detective novels! When CZ and I were in New York City last year we read at Haven Art Gallery in the South Bronx. We spent a delightful hot summer evening meeting both audience members and other poets who read at that event. It was really quite exhilarating to meet so many people who value both poetry and poets. Later, we visited the New York Public Library where we found copies of all our books, available to readers there. Our books are also in major libraries across Canada. So, you see, the audience is there and it is a large one. I was one of the eighteen poets who gave readings for the Montreal Gazette’s online poetry reading series this summer, 2009; each poet read only one poem. What a varied group of poets! This type of experience was impossible before the Internet; now, anywhere in the world, people can see Montreal poets read their work. With the Internet we have an international audience that is beyond anything possible in the past. My website, www.stephenmorrissey.ca, also includes some of my poems, and it has at least sixty new visitors at the site every day from all parts of the world; again, this kind of exposure for poetry was unheard of just a few years ago. CZ and I co-founded www.coraclepress.com and publish online poetry chapbooks and, more recently, print medium books. The online chapbooks reach an enormous audience in all parts of the world. The opportunities for publishing have increased with the many literary sites and magazines. In terms of audience, I don’t think there’s a better time to be a poet than now. In the future readers will be able to purchase books, printed on demand; we are increasingly moving away from print medium to digital. I welcome these changes. 

11. Do you think there is an audience, outside of friends or other poets, for poetry? 

 Audience is there, at readings, online, or listening to literary programmes on the radio. I’ve read my work before audiences at conferences, universities, high schools and grade schools, coffee houses, church basements, and other places. There is also the more personal experience we have of audience, one day you meet someone reading a book of poetry, and they’re the last person you would expect to read poetry but there they are, carrying a book of poetry and reading it on the bus, or where they work. One of the best public reading experiences I’ve had was at the N.D.G. Food Depot over the course of several years. Here was a group of people who needed to visit the food bank to make ends meet. These audiences applauded after each poem, and were genuinely enthusiastic and appreciative of my reading. Many came up and talked to me after the readings. I was deeply touched by their welcoming and positive response. 

12. Does your day job impact on your writing? How? 

Writing requires time to write. A day job that gives you time to be by yourself is what poets need. If your day job takes up too much time, writing will be impossible. Poets also need time to revise their work, read what other poets or writers have written, and time to daydream. It is very difficult to write poetry if your day job demands too much of your time, your thinking, your being. I have been blessed by having a college teaching position that has allowed me to enjoy the work I have done to make money, but also the time that is needed to do my writing. 

13. How many drafts (beer too) do you usually go through before you are satisfied/finished with a poem? 

 As many drafts as it takes, but seemingly more drafts as I get older. A poem might take fifty drafts, or be publishable with the first or second draft, although, for me, this seldom happens. The editing process is laborious and takes up a lot of time. When CZ edits a poem for me it goes a lot faster, she is not only a brilliant poet but has many years of experience editing poetry, and this is a gift that is not found in many editors. 

14. Do you write with the intention of “growing a manuscript” or do you work on individual poems that are later collected into a book? 

My ambition has always been to write a thematically cohesive book. I remember, in high school, running home at lunch time and listening to the Beatles’ “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” I believe this is one of the first concept or thematic albums. Then, there was also Frank Zappas’s parody of the Beatles’ album, and that was also fun. It was from the Beatles that I had the idea of a thematic book of poems, and I’ve followed this ever since. My new book, Girouard Avenue, is the most cohesive and thematic of all of the books I’ve written. It took many years to write Girouard Avenue, I must have started the writing in 1995, and then I’ve waited years to publish the book, my first since 1998. Girouard Avenue begins with a prologue, “Holy Well,” a memory of Ireland from where my family originated, but it is a mythical Ireland, a place of the unconscious mind, and then the poem also reflects on where we are today, in Montreal. The unconscious has always been important to my work, as it must be to any poet, for where do the poems come from but the unconscious, that place of dreams, mythology, and psychological and spiritual depth. There are four long poems in Girouard Avenue, the first two are poems of place, of different homes where we lived in Montreal. The first of these is “Girouard Avenue Flat” which celebrates my grandmother and includes family history. She lived for over forty years at 2226 Girouard Avenue, renting a large flat below Sherbrooke Street West in Montreal. This home was busy with the daily life of a large family, which included seven children. Many played musical instruments. Other family members also lived there, due to illness or old age. Even my parents and my brother and I lived on Girouard Avenue in the early 1950s, with my grandmother, my Aunt Mable, and my great aunt Essie, because of my father’s heart condition. Before that we had lived a few blocks away on Avonmore. This was my parents’ first home after they married in 1940, but a small 3 ½ room apartment wasn’t a good environment for a family of four people when one of them is seriously ill. After the war it was difficult to find a larger apartment to rent, so off we went to Girouard. By 1969, after my grandmother died, there was just my grandmother’s two very elderly sisters left living there and I talk about visiting them with my brother at Christmas. The next poem is “Hoolahan’s Flat, Oxford Avenue,” where we moved in 1954, after living at my grandmother’s for the previous two years. “Hoolahan’s Flat, Oxford Avenue” is a poem of the 1950s, of television, and family. In this poem I purposely avoided being overly confessional or emotional in favour of a kind of reporting on the times in which I lived, what they were like, in a fairly matter-of-fact way. I mention my first friend, Audrey Keyes, the girl next door, and over forty years later Audrey saw the poem online and contacted me, and we’ve become friends again, as though no time has intervened. These first two poems in the book are of places where I lived in Montreal, but they are also significant for other reasons. More happened in these two flats than just daily life. These homes were foundational to the development of who I am as a poet and as a person. Even as a child I felt there was a bravery and heroism to everyday life as it is lived by everyday people. There is a courage in average people that has always interested me. I’ve loved stories of family, of who did what and when. These family stories are framed by history. These accounts have an aura of historical reality; my poems about family are also poems of spirit, of courage, of dedication to family and everyone working hard. This is what I want remembered, so that these people aren’t forgotten, so that the ancestors are suitably remembered. “November” is the third long poem in Girouard Avenue. The month of November is the time when I have always been closest to the unconscious mind, to dreams, to Spirit, to what the spirits say to me. The days are growing shorter, we are moving relentlessly into winter, and the fabric between our material world and the other world is at its thinnest. Now I return to my father departing for Boston in 1956, where he died a few weeks later; but I also reflect on the importance of the railroad in Canada. Many members of my family worked for the Canadian Pacific Railroad. The railway was an important form of transportation in the past. In this poem there is the juxtaposition of the personal with the impersonal, but always memory of the people I am descended from and who I honour. But a poet is more than this: a poet affirms life and writes from a vision that reminds the reader there is more to life than mundane activity, there is epiphany, spirituality, aesthetics, and dignity even in the most humble people. The final poem in the book is “The Rock, Or a Short History of the Irish in Montreal” and uses my own family’s history in Montreal, from when they arrived here around 1844, to recall something of the history of the Irish in Montreal. The Irish were an enormous immigrant population here; people who mostly arrived with nothing, which is also the story of the Irish in other North American cities. Within several generations these Irish immigrants rose to become doctors and lawyers, politicians and leaders in government. The Irish have always believed in education and fighting to survive. There is the Black Rock, a memorial to the Irish who arrived in Montreal in 1847 from famine-ridden Ireland, only to die in fever sheds located near present-day Victoria Bridge. Here you can see the heroism I am referring to. Families came all this way from Ireland, so hopeful, so desirous of a new life, and then five thousand of them perished soon after arriving. It’s a tragic story but at least they opted for survival and a new life, rather than give up and die in Ireland. Having said this, perhaps there’s a balancing of tragedy and bravery that I find compelling. It is also my own Irish sensibility that causes me to perceive tragedy and melancholy in what I see around me, in the stories and lives of people. Even my father’s story is a combination of bravery and tragedy: he was a man of such intelligence that he rose from the working class to quite a prestigious executive position in the C.P.R., but he had rheumatic fever when he was a child and this eventually caused medical problems, scarring of his heart, that caused his early death. He didn’t give up, he lived as long as he could, he had a family, he did his best despite knowing that his life would not last as long as other people’s. Had my father lived for just another six months medical advances were achieved that could have extended his life for many more years. But that was not to be. His death when I was only six years old changed my life, and perhaps it made a poet out of me. The last poem, the epilogue, is “The Colours of the Irish Flag,” which celebrates marriage, family, and love. But it is also a poem about being strong, not being defeated without a fight for one’s survival, or the survival of what one believes in. You don’t just roll over and give up, you fight, you struggle, you go the distance, you don’t be a coward, you be a man or a woman. We’ll have no cowards here. You can see that I feel very strongly about all of this. 

15. What is the toughest part of writing for you? 

Because every poet is different, what is difficult for one poet may be simple, or come easily, to another. I’m sorry I can’t be more specific. Writing is a lot of work and requires dedicating your life to this art. What is tough changes with time. Consider poetry all hard work; it’s all tough. 

16. What is your idea of a muse? 

 A muse is what Sharon Stone portrays in the film The Muse. A muse brings a man to life, and my life since meeting CZ has been transformed by her. The feminine animates the empty or damaged shell that is the condition of some men or women. A muse inspires creativity. There is always a price to be paid for having a muse; it’s not something to be trivialized, the muse needs to receive presents for her work, and not cheap baubles, as Sharon Stone‘s character made clear in this film. There is no free ride in this life. Creativity is a lot of work with a few moments of rest, but worth every minute of the journey. You can always rest when you’re dead, because living is to embrace life and accept the challenges of inspiration more fully, more consciously. The idea of a muse is no simple topic, and you don’t have to be a poet to be moved by a muse. 

17. Do you have a favourite time and place to write? 

I’ll write just about anywhere and at any time. I’ve written poems during classes when I was a student and I’ve written while classes of my students are writing a test when I was the teacher. I’ve written during other people’s readings and while lying in bed with the only light being from a flashlight. I’ve written sitting on a lawn chair balanced on a rock in the middle of a river. I’ve written sitting on a beach in both Vancouver and Mexico. I’ve written during snowstorms and heat waves. I’ve written in hospital cafeterias and waiting rooms. I’ve gotten up in the middle of the night and written down a poem that came to me in my sleep, or that I was writing in my mind while still awake in the dark. I’ve spent innumerable hours sitting at desks writing poems. This isn’t just my experience but probably the experience of many poets. 

18. Do you like to travel? Is travel important to your writing? Explain. 

I can’t say that I like to travel, although I’ve done my fair share of traveling. I enjoy travel on business, for a conference, or to visit relatives or friends, but being a tourist for its own sake doesn’t interest me. I agree with Thoreau’s sentiment when he said, “I am well traveled in Concord.” 

19. Do you have a favourite Quebec poet? If yes who and why? My favourite Quebec poet is Louis Dudek. I don’t think his work is dated at all, it’s contemporary and significant. One day more people will hopefully realize how accomplished and important a poet Dudek really was. Doug Jones is a gifted poet and John Glassco, who is mostly known for his memoir, is also a very good poet. Artie Gold is a terrific poet who was very talented and creative. Of course, I always enjoy reading what friends are writing, such as Carolyn Zonailo, Sharon H. Nelson, Carolyn-Marie Souaid, and others who are my contemporaries. For many years I’ve liked Deborah Eibel’s original voice in poetry. Ian Ferrier is a wonderful spoken-word poet. I meet and hear interesting new Montreal poets, talented younger voices, at readings that I give or attend. It is with great sadness that Montreal’s poetry community lost the poet and painter Sonja Skarstedt who died this summer, 2009. Emile Nelligan, St-Denys Garneau, and Anne Hébert are three poets I teach in translation, and I continue to enjoy their work very much. All of these poets stand out for me as exceptional. 

20. Do you write about Quebec? If so, how and why? If not, why not? 

Some poets write from a specific place that they are identified with, but they always transform the specific into the universal. So, Charles Olson’s Glouester and William Carlos William’s Paterson are places that are identified with these poets but are also places that have been transformed into an archetypal geography that represents the human condition in general. That’s why I named my selected poems Mapping the Soul: Selected Poems 1978-1998 (Muses Company, Winnipeg, 1998). In my writing I am not only interested in a geographical location—for instance, Montreal—but in the manifestation of the soul in this place, in the expression of the landscape of the unconscious mind, this is what interests me. I won’t always write about Montreal, but in the writing I have done that refers to this city, and the work I am doing now, I am attempting to transform the city into something more than a specific place, but always retaining the specificity of the place.