Q: How long have you been in Ottawa, and what first brought you here?
A: I’ve been in Ottawa since September 1996, a lifetime. I first came to Ottawa in 1979, two lifetimes ago. After a particularly grueling project I’d quit my job as a computer programmer in Toronto and gone off, destination undetermined.
After about a year and a half my employer asked me if I’d come back to work on a project in Montreal. I’d wearied of undetermined and liked the idea of going back to Montreal, so I got on a plane, and found myself on a project, not in Montreal, but Ottawa. I was never very good with the fine print. I left Ottawa again, for about a decade, first to complete my studies in France, and again to work in Spain, but Ottawa is now as home as anywhere could be.
Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here?
A: Other than adolescent angst, I’d say late adolescent angst, in my twenties and, quite suitably for the theme, I was very isolated. Stuck at a computer terminal programming until dawn, I had fantasies of hanging about in some café—somewhere—and the attendant brilliant literary conversations. I did once walk into what seemed a likely place in Toronto, and promptly did an about face.
I suppose the closest I’d been to such an experience was in a bar in Amsterdam—of course—where a rumpled gentlemen came over to chat, commented nicely on a friend’s paintings, then danced out of the place shouting “I need a miracle every day!” The barman came by afterwards to inform us that we’d been chatting with one of the Netherlands’ greatest poets. I have no idea who he was—perhaps Remco Cambert, whose work I now very much admire? He would have been about the right age.
About a year after that brush with a literary great, I was with my computer in the second sub-basement of the University of Ottawa’s Morrisset Library—you didn’t know there was such a sub-basement, did you?—when Seymour Mayne called to let me know that he would admit me to his creative writing course.
Q: How did being in such a community of writers shift your thinking about writing, if at all?
A: Seymour’s course provided me for the first time with a context. Seymour himself and his students offered truly constructive criticism to help me write the poems I was trying to write. I succeeded on occasion, and I have a few rather decent poems from that period; when I failed, the failures were also very much mine, as it should be.
When I returned to Ottawa in 1996 I called on Seymour and Mark Frutkin, asking them if they would like to meet a few times a year to exchange poems and conversation, and to please extend the invitation as appropriate. The group—in fact groups—have been fluid, but some of us continue to meet, irregularly.
Q: What do you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What does Ottawa provide, or allow?
A: Before the plague, I had been making an effort to get out to readings, such as the Tree Series, to hear others read, though rarely to jump in for an open mic. I don’t think I’ve changed that much since I walked out of that café in Toronto 40 years ago.
Context is everything, I think. Well, context and trust. For my part, I’ve been fortunate to find in Ottawa a very small number of very talented poets with whom I can share poems, whose judgement I trust, and who trust mine. We will discuss a poem or a stanza or a line or a line break or a comma for half an evening—any poet will tell you that “of course you do”, then leave it to the authors to decide for themselves what happens next to the poems.
Though I have moved about a fair bit I’m not sure I can say much about what Ottawa has to offer that elswheres don’t offer. The City of Ottawa has been quite generous and has helped finance several of my projects over the years; I’ve tried to give back, reading cases of books for book awards and the like, but other than that, I couldn’t say what is particular to the poetry community in Ottawa. I don’t think that it is especially influenced by any sort of government town mentality. It is very Canadian, though, in that it is awfully, sometimes awkwardly, polite.
Q: Have any of your projects responded directly to your engagements here? How have the city and its community, if at all, changed the way you approached your work?
I once witnessed a very experienced and widely published writer tear down a less experienced—though in my opinion, brilliant—poet, telling her that he didn’t consider what she was sharing worthy of poetry, only to share something similar a few minutes later.
In my experience, in this town, this country, that is the exception, though. I find that open mics—those I’ve gotten to anyway—tend to be just a little too nice, too complacent. Everybody gets applause, not a just a bit, but a lot. Just like every performance at the NAC gets a standing ovation.
It’s a tough, miserable, soul-gnawing business, poetry. And, yes, we should encourage all poets, especially novice poets. But maybe we should also encourage each other to take a step back and try to see our own work with a cold, critical eye. Not a sneer, no, but honest, constructive criticism.
Though I only attended a few times, I regret the closing of the Umi Café on Somerset Street. There were some excellent drop-in poetry workshops. Everyone welcome and welcomed, and a focus on the poem rather than the poet as we honed our “craft or sullen art”.
It’s a difficult balance, but an essentail one, not just in poetry but in life, I think. We need both empathy and honesty,and maybe just a little education. It will make us better poets and, most importantly, better humans.
Q: What are you working on now?
I can’t say. I don’t.
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