|
Click here to listen to Lorna's interview with Joseph Planta of website thecommentary.ca, Nov. 12, 2009.
On beginnings . . .
“Grade 1 for me was a significant year in my development as a poet.
Over 40 years later I can still see my teacher, Miss Brye, tacking what
I remember
as my first poem on the bulletin board for everyone to read. In retrospect
I can say the poem was terrible, but at six I was brimming with pride.
I’d written about my dog, a toy Pomeranian unimaginatively but appropriately
named Tiny. She had caused me endless hours of suffering because she often
fell ill. Having grown up on farms, both my parents were used to feeding
dogs scraps, including chicken bones. In a dog as small as Tiny these bones
split into shards that tore through her digestive and intestinal system
and made her howl. Sure she was dying at least once a week, I had a ritual
spot on the second floor landing where I would fall on my knees and promise
God anything if he’d save her – I’d give up Double Bubble
gum, I’d do the dishes, I’d stop bullying the little girl next
door whom everyone thought was cute. Tiny lived to the ripe old age of
14 but in my poem, I imagined she had died. It was full of pathos and sadness,
with hope shining through in the refrain that I repeated to myself on the
way to school like the line from skipping song. ‘And we shall meet
in heaven, by and by.’
By this time you should feel relieved that I’ve forgotten the rest;
the refrain was the best part, but even though the poem was egregiously
sentimental, it taught me two important things about poetry. First, it
felt great to get so much attention and approval from something I’d
created, something that came from inside me. I’d had no idea that
anyone else would be interested or connect with what I had to say. Secondly,
I learned the importance and delight of lying. The poem was based on a
lie – my dog had risen from the dead again; she was alive and barking – but
all my classmates and my teacher believed my version of the story. They
showered me with pity and concern. I didn’t have the heart to tell
them the poem wasn’t based on the truth, so I lied again, and thanked
them for their sympathy. I enjoyed the role immensely though I was a little
apprehensive I’d be found out.
What I learned but would not have been able to put into words at the time
was that although there needs to be an essential truth at the heart of
poetry, poets often lie to get there. A more polite word would be “invent.” My
love and worry about my dog had been real, but I intuitively knew what
bit of reality I had to change to make the poem more moving. I learned
that the “I’ in the poem is not 100 per cent the author, but
that it is partly a made-up character that puts herself at the demands
of the poem. The poem was better if the dog was dead; ergo, the dog was
dead.”
(from “Comic Books, Dead Dogs, Cheer Leading: One Poet’s
Beginnings” – In
2 Print mag. 1998)
On the Bible as inspiration . . .
“I have always wanted to turn what’s been silent into language, whether it’s been
animal or female or the silence of lost places, like the small city where I grew
up. I’ve always wanted to find a place in literature for my father and men like
him, for the unheard and illiterate. The Bible is a great minefield for this
kind of translation, and I became passionately involved with it. Lot’s daughters
had no say. Where was Sarah, Abraham’s wife, when he was going to sacrifice Isaac?
What was Isaac’s mother doing when Abraham pulled out the knife? You don’t get
to hear the mothers in the Bible. I wanted to put Sarah in the story. I wanted
to give her something to say about things that were going on. I found the original
text inspiring, for the beauty of the language, for the simple power of the tales,
and for the spaces it leaves for other interpretations.”
(from an interview with Clarise Foster in Contemporary Verse 2: The Canadian
Journal of Poetry and Critical Writing. Volume 25, issue 3)
On what she looks for
in poetry . . .
“I want poetry that surprises. But not in a cheap way. Does the language—does
the music—take you to a place where you haven’t gone before? Robert Frost
was one of the first to say this—he said some very smart things about poetry. ‘No
surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.’ If a poem goes bing!
in me and makes me say, ‘Wow! I've never heard this before’ then I’ve
found something that will be precious to me. There is a kind of logic that sound
creates—that rhythm creates and that metaphor creates—which is the
essential logic that lies at the heart of a good poem. It’s a kind of thinking,
of proposing, of reasoning that can teach us the most because it’s done at a
level beyond thought. That’s what I’m after in what I read and in what I write.
Again it’s not conscious, at least not at first, but you know when that special
thing
is there in the images and the words and you know when it’s not.
(from an interview with Clarise Foster in Contemporary Verse 2: The Canadian
Journal of Poetry and Critical Writing. Volume 25, issue 3)
On the attraction
to poetry . . .
“A poet is always on the edge of the unsayable—trying to turn it
into something that sounds. It can be a dangerous self destructive edge, but
it doesn’t have
to be. Poetry has such an amazing energy, one I don’t feel in even the best of
fiction. There’s always that slide between silence and speaking, and the friction
that’s created between those two planes—what we cannot possibly say, but
what we say anyway—is remarkably charged. That’s why I’m attracted to poetry
again and again, no matter what.”
(from an interview with Clarise Foster in Contemporary Verse 2: The Canadian
Journal of Poetry and Critical Writing. Volume 25, issue 3)
On process . . .
“What I am trying to establish when I write is a movement back and forth between the profound and the ordinary. I can remember sitting at home in my kitchen early one morning, watching the light pouring in the window—it looked as if it were bending around the curve of our old stove, giving it a grace and luminosity I’d never noticed before. The stove had a glow about it, as if it were transforming into a new kind of being that needed to be recorded, needed to be thought about. The beautiful is often in what we usually don’t notice.”
(from an interview with Clarise Foster in Contemporary Verse 2: The Canadian
Journal of Poetry and Critical Writing. Volume 25, issue 3)
Some of the poets she’ll always be reading . . .
Alden Nowlan, Margaret Atwood, Jack Gilbert, Charles Wright, Brigit Pegeen Kelly,
Linda Gregg, Louise Gluck, Patrick Lane, Rumi, Rilke, Tomas Transtromer, James
Galvin, Robert Bly, Yehuda Amichai, Stephen Dunn, Phyllis Webb, Don McKay . .
.
|
Above: Lorna makes the cover of Contemporary Verse
Above: Meeting a ferret.
|
