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

Bended tree on 09 March 2013

 

Rowan trees outside Loyola Chapel, Concordia University, November 2010

Trees on UBC Campus (3)

Trees on UBC Campus (2)

More rowan trees...

The rowan tree tells us to embrace the future and our vision of life

Rowan trees in Vancouver

You don't see many rowan trees in Montreal but they are common in Vancouver. The abundance of the rowan berries and their deep orange colour make it a particularly visible tree, it stands out among all of the other trees. And it must have always stood out from other trees, it was important to the Celts who gave it added significance as a source of divination. The rowan also suggested to the Celts the presence of the divine in the mundane.

Often, when the unconscious mind makes itself heard, it is when we have passed through a significant time in one's life, a time of change, or insight, or struggle. This may happen when we become aware of messages from dreams, or some other experience occurs, a series of synchronistic experiences, a period of creativity, or an experience of the divine, of God communicating to us. Perhaps we are not aware of the significance of what is happening when it is happening, but it is clear later on that one has passed through a important event in one's life. This is what the rowan tree suggests to me when I place it in the context of what I have written and done this summer, it confirms to me the psychic importance of this summer.

Despite even my own expectations and idea of myself, I have always embraced the future, believed in the future and believed in going where life may take me. I may seem fairly conservative but that's my persona; in fact, I have not really lived a conservative life at all. I have had an introverted and mental life, a life of creativity and deeply felt emotions, a life of poetry, teaching, partnership with my wife, family, and a lifelong relationship with God. The rowan tree, whether fully grown on a residential street in Vancouver, or not much bigger than a shrub on Spanish Bank Beach also here in Vancouver, reminds me of this lesson in life: we need to embrace the future and speak our vision of life no matter how few people agree with us. This is what life is all about if you want to live fully.

Trees on UBC Campus (1)

Apple Tree on Belmore

My interest in trees as an archetype goes back at least to my first book, The Trees of Unknowing (Vehicule Press, 1978), and probably before. The obvious allusion in the title of my book is to The Cloud of Unknowing that I first read in the early-1970s. While in Mexico in 1984 I found a copy of The Cloud of Unknowing and read it again with great interest. Just a few months ago I returned to this book, and read it with even greater interest than the other two times. It is a part of the via negativa , with (curiously) some suggestions of Krishnamurti's philosophy.

Trees. Roots; earth. Branches; sky. Union. The mundane unites with the divine, and mundane, coming from mundo, world, earth, is the appropriate word. And then the discussion of the divine. What seems lacking in contemporary poetry is a discussion of the divine, of God, and our relationship with the Divine. It seems to be totally absent from the discussion of poetry by poets. No wonder the soul of the poet is never discussed, but without a poet's soul how can we have poetry?

These photographs (and many others that I have taken) of this apple tree in our backyard remind me of the many hours of pleasure I have had sitting looking out at this tree. In the evenings I can see neighbours' lights through the trees. Seeing these things is a pleasurable activity, it is a feeling of being in the country in the city, a feeling of calm and, oddly enough, of transcending time.

Vehicule in Vancouver

A few weeks ago I was doing some research at UBC's Rare Books & Special Collections and University Archives. Part of this research was reading Brian Fawcett's "NMFG," an acronym for "no money from the government." NMFG, a magazine of poetry and poetics, ran from 1976 to 1979.

Vancouver was especially important back in the 1970s, that's where contemporary poetry was happening in Canada. This is no longer the case and I suspect there is no single place in Canada that is the center for new and important poetry in this country. I remember visiting with Richard Sommer, who was a poet and had been one of my professors at Sir George Williams University, after he and his family had visited Vancouver and been influenced by the poetry scene there; Vancouver, truly, seemed like a Mecca as compared with Montreal at that time. Richard was a little bit of Vancouver in Montreal, someone who made a significant impression on me back then.

I need to qualify these comments on NMFG and the Vancouver poetry scene by saying that NMFG represents only one aspect of the Vancouver poetry scene back in the second half of the 1970s; there were other groups, other poets, other poetry scenes in Vancouver. My impression has always been that Vancouver was a pretty open and welcoming place for poets. It has always seemed to me to support and welcome poets, support a literary community, and not try to drive poets away. I can't say the same for Montreal, where a literary community exists but it is fragmented and divisive. I remember receiving a letter from bpNichol commenting on this. This is also one reason why the Vehicule Poets were so important in Montreal, we had no single aesthetic commonality but we were inclusive and supportive to each other.





I noticed two items of interest in NMFG's back issues that I want to mention here: first is a short message from Artie Gold, suggesting that the gay content in the journal was detracting from commentary on poetry. Good old Artie, you wouldn't make this comment in today's politically correct world. But you also wouldn't get away with the "boy's club" of poetry found in NMFG; check out how many women poets are published in its pages, in many issues it's none. These intellectual men running NMFG come across as embarrassingly mysognynistic. As well, another comment, while American poets found a welcome home in Vancouver back then some of them don't seem to have thought Canadian poetry worth their time. I wonder if some of these same people will one day be seen as little more than long-term visitors to Vancouver, as footnotes, and not really part of the poetry tradition in Canadian Literature? Maybe someone will address this issue in Anvil Press's forthcoming Making Waves: Reading BC and Pacific Northwest Literature, edited by Trevor Carolan at the University of the Fraser Valley.

The second item is Brian Fawcett's review of the first anthology of English poetry in Montreal (English Montreal Poetry of the 1970s) published by Vehicule Press back in the mid-1970s. I know the anthology very well, I taught it for several years to my college-level Canadian Literature students, and I know personally many of the poets in the anthology. The review misses the point of the anthology which was a gathering of what was happening in English poetry in Montreal back then; we'd had years of the poetry community growing smaller and smaller, and finally there was a kind of Renaissance going on mainly due to our efforts at Vehicule Art Gallery. The anthology's editors (Norris and Farkas) were fairly democratic in choosing who would be in it, and it was the first evidence in print that Montreal poetry was coming back to life. You might trace the more open and inclusive aspects of the present-day poetry scene in Montreal back to this anthology, it was one of the signs that things had begun to change for the better. We'd had Dudek and Layton's public quarrel before Layton left for Ontario and Louis seemed to stop making public statements until he wrote the introduction to my first book, The Trees of Unknowing (Vehicule Press, 1978). As well, the separatist movement was growing in Quebec and the English-speaking community was being increasingly marginalized. The Vehicule Poets, beginning around 1974, were the first poets in Montreal at that time who were awake to contemporary poetry whether in the States or in the rest of Canada; however, NMFG couldn't have known any of this.

Douglas Lochhead's new book, review

Painting by John Hammond, 1905; Hammond was based in Sackville, New Brunswick

Looking into Trees, by Douglas Lochhead 

(Sybertooth Inc., Sackville, New Brunswick, 2009) 

Review by Stephen Morrissey 

Go wind, go green, go move it into great shiftings “looking into trees” Douglas Lochhead’s extensive body of work shows a lifelong dedication, passion, and commitment to poetry. The poems in Lochhead’s new book, Looking into Trees, as one finds in his other books, are pared down and concise. As the title suggests, we may look into trees, but what do “trees” suggest, what do they mean to the poet and to the reader, what is our meditation on trees? As an archetype “trees” have always interested me, beginning with my own first book of poems, The Trees of Unknowing (Vehicule Press, Montreal, 1978). First, one thinks of the roots of trees, of being rooted in the ground of our existence, the physical, the earth from which life generates. There is also another aspect to trees, there are the trees’ branches that reach into the sky, into the heavens above us. Trees, then, suggest both the physical world and the spiritual realm. Trees also suggest a meeting of the two worlds, the material and the spiritual, the human and the divine. 

Indeed, Looking into Trees is a wonderful and evocative title. It is not looking at trees, which is a passive act, but looking into trees which suggests an investigation— “I will look into the situation”—this also suggests taking care of a situation that requires some open-ended study. Four poems in Lochhead’s book stand out, they are those entitled “Exhibits for the Lord,” numbered one to four. These poems give the reader a portal through which to enter into both the poetic and spiritual experience. This perception is an awareness of the presence of God in Lochhead`s daily life. When is God present to us? In the poems, God is present all the time. In the first poem, the “exhibits” are in the form of a morning and evening walk and seeing flowers growing in people’s gardens, these are all “exhibits for the Lord.” There is an ambiguity in this: are they exhibits or evidence for the presence of God, or are they what we present to God as an exhibit, or evidence, of our belief in Him? The second poem’s exhibit is that of the presence of children. In this poem we move from the world of experience to the uncorrupted world of a child’s innocence, and this is a cause for prayer. Prayer in this poem is not the ostentatious exhibition of ego that Jesus warned against, but spontaneous prayer that is a conversation with God. I am told that Einstein did not believe in God, but he nevertheless engaged in an on-going conversation with God. Prayer, then, is a conversation with the Divine. 

An experience of God, it seems to me, comes uninvited, unannounced, in God’s own time. We wander, as I have done, in the exile of a self-made desert until we return to God, as I have also done. Exhibit three presents this to us. It is sometimes enjoyable to read a detective novel, to be distracted when we can`t sleep. This, however, might also be the time when God makes His presence felt; Lochhead writes, “... words took me up saying REJOICE/ and it was God’s day again…” The fourth exhibit reminds us that in our daily living—the “Holy Living,” and “the slide rule possibility of Holy dying”—there is the constant presence of rejoicing, for one who is living in the presence of God is also rejoicing that God is in his life. The reproductions of paintings in Looking into Trees, by Kenneth Lochhead (Douglas Lochhead’s brother), who is an eminent visual artist in his own right, enhance the poems in the book. The paintings present a similar vision of life as one finds in the poems, and they show that, as I have always believed, poetry and visual art have more in common than poetry and other genres of written expression, for instance the novel. 

Notes: 1. My review of Douglas Lochhead’s Upper Cape Poems (Goose Lane Editions, Fredericton, 1989) appeared in the Antigonish Review, nos. 81-82, spring-summer 1990. 2. I also recommend these other books by Douglas Lochhead: Collected Poems: The Full Furnace (1975) A & E (1980) The Panic Field (1984) The Tiger in the Skull, New and Selected Poems 1959 – 1985 (1986) Upper Cape Poems (1989)

Images of trees

regard as sacred

"Regard as sacred the disorder of my mind."
-- Arthur Rimbaud

Notation: The various line breaks in this concrete or visual poem, the reordering of the words, and the permutations and fragmentations of the words suggest both the disorder of the mind and a new “sacred” order of the text from the deconstruction of the original text. Reading the poem, not necessarily from the upper left hand side of the page scanning right and down, but beginning in the middle, or at the bottom and scanning left and up, or through the middle, in other words randomly, with the white spaces signifying a unit of silence, equivalent to the missing word, and beginning with a single voice but then also adding, and reading simultaneously, with a second (or third or fourth) voice, turned the concrete poem into a sound poem, again suggesting disorder but also creating a new aesthetic order or experience.

(This is how we read this poem in performance; pretty standard instructions. But it also emphasized that the way a poem is presented on the page is the notation of how the poem is to be performed; again, pretty standard instructions).