Len Gasparini : part one

For over a half-century Len Gasparini has been one of the most original voices in Canadian poetry; a life experiencer “who emerged from the counter-culture of Jack Kerouac and the Beats,” as one critic said. Gasparini is the author of two-dozen books, including his Collected Poems, five short-story collections, two children’s books, numerous essays, and a one-act play that drew rave reviews in Montreal. His work has been translated into French and Italian, and anthologized here and in the U.S. Götterdämmerung, his latest book, is an eco-poetic tour de force that reads like a prescient postscript to T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland. 

Photo Credit: Lisa Pike

How do you know when a poem is finished?

I’ve always had a rhythmic instinct for poetic endings; perhaps it was stimulated by my reading of O. Henry’s short stories when I was a teenager. Interestingly, in the Fall 2017 issue of subTerrain, critic Brian Palmu in his review of my chapbook Death and the Maiden, noted that I was “a master of endings”; and he quoted Robert Frost: “Any fool can get into a poem, but it takes a poet to get out of one.”