Tuesday 11 September 2018

Robin Durnford : part three


When you require renewal is there a particular poem or book or author that you return to?

These days Elizabeth Bishop. For a long time, I ignored Elizabeth Bishop because she was too close to home—she wrote about moose in Nova Scotia—and I thought she was too prosy. What an idiot I was because when I finally really paid attention to her work—I taught her collected works in a ‘Canadian’ literature course—she knocked my socks off, and she blew my students’ minds. I love her. I love how much she traveled and how bored she sounds when she reads her own poetry. You can find “The Fish” on Youtube. It’s pure, one hundred per cent not caring and not giving a shit in the best possible way (she gave a lot of shits about the poetry itself I might add). I also come back to Sylvia Plath, again and again, all of her work. Seamus Heaney’s Opened Ground has been opened so many times you can’t see the words on the spine. Sometimes I go to Gerard Manley Hopkins for the pure weirdness and his rock ’n’ roll sound. I also like punk rock, especially David Bowie and the Pogues, in combination with Codco and maudlin Irish folk songs and recitations which never fail to make me cry.

*To steal a line from Eden Robinson, who says her biggest influences are Dolly Parton and Stephen King, mine were probably David Bowie and Codco.




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