Montreal-born writer Claudia Coutu Radmore has lived, taught
and created art in Quebec, Ontario, Manitoba, and China. She is the President
of Haiku Canada. She started catkin press in 2012, and along with several full
collections, Accidentals (Apt. 9
Press, Ottawa) won the 2011 bpNichol Chapbook Award.
On Fogo, poems short-listed for the
2017 Malahat Long Poem Contest, was published by The Alfred Gustav Press,
Vancouver, in 2018. A poem from the camera
obscura (2019, above ground, Ottawa ) is included in The Best Canadian Poetry of 2019.
Ask her about her recent keen
interest in gasometers, and how coal was/is transformed into gas...
Q: How long have you been in
Ottawa, and what first brought you here?
I never actually got right to
Ottawa. I lived for about twenty-five years north of Sharbot Lake in fairly
remote settings. The last six of those years, my residence was an 800 square-foot
house that I designed and had built, with a sixty-foot pond instead of a lawn,
where deer, bears and other wild things felt at home. When Ted and I married we
needed a bigger home, so moved to Carleton Place. Since then, maintaining
poetry connections in Ottawa has meant a lot of driving, forty-five minutes
each way in good weather. But those connections with the Ottawa poetry
community have been really important to me. Ottawa also meant access to poetry
publications that I never even knew existed. Lightbulbs went on!
Q: How did you first get
involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here?
I began writing rather late, and
never suspected that I would focus on poetry. It began with a journal in 1990,
because I thought that if I was going to write a novel one day, I should start
writing something. Looking back at the end of a year, I noted that some of my
writing had short lines, that they looked something like poems. So I wrote more
like that and self-published my first three books in 1992 and 1994, the
beginning of Bondi Studios Press. Those were the days of actual cutting out
poems and page numbers, gluing them on the pages, and photocopying the pages. I
found that I enjoyed the book-making process. Later being part of the poetry community
in Ottawa meant I was meeting ‘real’ poets, workshopping in a group called
Mother Tongues that met in the Mother Tongue bookshop. I joined the Arc board as an editor, and
learned so much there. Then as co-director of Tree with rod pedersen and Rona Shaffran,
my poetry network grew, and I was part
of the challenge to bring in exciting poets; I got to know them, buy their
work.
Q: How did being in such a
community of writers shift your thinking about writing, if at all?
When I was working alone, making
my books, selling them to friends and at local fairs, it was all just fun.
Sharing my writing, getting feedback, being known locally as a writer, was all
positive.
But the Ottawa community offered
so much more! I found poets dedicated to their craft, poetry that taught me
more what poetry could be and what it could do and what it could mean. I’d had
a few poems accepted by journals, but didn’t understand the import of
publication, really. Early acceptances were in Victoriana, paperplates.org,
and a journal of The University of Hull in the UK. But my eventual learning
curve was due to reading, learning about making better poems in workshops, and
experiencing thousands of poems, having to argue one way or another for or
against poems when I was on the Arc
editorial board.
Q: What do you see happening
here that you don’t see anywhere else? What does Ottawa provide, or allow?
For a long time, I wasn’t part
of a group, and felt rather stranded. There I was writing by hand, transferring
what looked like poems on one of those ancient computers, while raccoons slept
on the deck. The first poets I met were Terry Ann Carter and Ronnie Brown, both
of whom I met by travelling once a months, a three-hour drive, to The Valley
Writer’s Guild meetings in Kemptville. They held poetry contests, and all of us
won in those contests. It was the first chance I had to see whether my attempts
were poetry at all. One year, we took
them all, first, second and third places. Coincidentally we all had Honda
Civics. I don’t remember how I heard about the Writers’ Guild, but this was way
before meeting the Ottawa community, and I was determined to meet at least some
others who wrote poetry. Terry and Ronnie were my first Ottawa connections.
This connection also brought me into the haiku world.
The main thing I saw in the
Ottawa community was lack of ego. Experienced and oft-published poets swam with
new poets, and for the most part, there was as much interaction as a writer
wanted. Workshops were offered, and there was a great deal of encouragement.
Opportunities abounded for writers at all levels to read with each other, have
their work heard and applauded. There is nothing like clapping hands to make
you want to write poems again.
And then there was VerseFest,
and the opportunity to be part of that organizing committee. I saw how
committed poets were in Ottawa to spreading poetry. I saw the planning and time
put into an important project. I saw inclusion and cooperation, among
organizers, and got to hear and meet poets from many countries. Ottawa poets
are friendly. There are hugs. Not a bad feature.
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 was born in a city, and though
I loved the rural life, I’d forgotten what a city has to offer. The greatest
thing was network, and because of the spirit that existed among Ottawa poets,
my work changed because of the wide variety in the kinds of poetry offered, for
free, of a Tuesday night listening to, and meeting poets, or a Tuesday morning
with the Ruby Tuesday writers’ group, or once a month with The Mother Tongues.
I could workshop with Paul Tyler, with Stuart Ross, with Souvankham
Thammavongsa, Steven Brockwell. I could hear many of our Canadian treasures say
their own poems. It has been an education. My approach to poetry became more
serious, but it also became braver. Cameron Anstee asking me, one evening after
the open mic at Tree, whether I had any more ‘poems like that’, poems that when
workshopped had been criticised from every angle, was a wondrous happening. That he parlayed my poems into a chapbook
called Accidentals was a small
miracle, and cosmic encouragement.
Q: What are you working on now?
I’ve had an interesting eighteen
months with camera obscura, a
chapbook from your above ground press, being published as well as over twenty-five
poems accepted in journals, mostly Canadian, along with many acceptances in
Japanese-form anthologies internationally.
Two new collections are
submitted to presses at the moment, one a rewrite of the box poem collection (like
the poems in camera obscura) after it
had been rejected a few times, but now newly edited by Jason Heroux of
Kingston, it may have a better chance.
The latest collection I’ve sent
out is about a gas tank. Literally. I grew up across the street from one of
those huge gasometers and it made an impression on me that I never quite
realized until I started thinking about what it meant to me, to my early years,
to my community and its growth.
I’ve just finished final edits
for a book with Aelous Press with Allan Briesmaster as editor. Poems in it
range from the purely narrative about my parrot, about my family, about Fogo
Island, and about a rabbit. Other poems are more experimental in form and
content. My hat comes off to Allan Briesmaster for seeing value in such a
varied collection. rabbit should be
out in June.
