Bruce Whiteman : part one

Bruce Whiteman was born near Toronto in 1952. His career as a rare book and manuscript specialist began at McMaster University and included McGill University and UCLA. He now lives in Peterborough, Ontario. He has published extensively as a poet, reviewer, and cultural historian. His most recent collections of poetry are Intimate Letters (ECW Press, 2014), Tablature (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015), and The Sad Mechanic Exercise (Gaspereau Press, 2019). He is the editor of Best Canadian Essays (Biblioasis, October 2021). Forthcoming in 2022 are the final book of his long poem, The Invisible World Is in Decline (ECW Press) and a collection of essays and reviews (Biblioasis) tentatively entitled The Live Air: Essays and Reviews, 1978-2020. He teaches part-time in the School of Continuing Studies, University of Toronto.

How did you first engage with poetry?

There were two factors, really. Both took place in high school. The first was unrequited love—a girl in Grade 9 whom I fell for but from whom I got nothing in return. Poetry suddenly seemed a way to express feelings that I could not share with anyone and in part did not understand myself. My first little book did not come out until ten years later, but that experience of teenage attraction invoked my first writings. More importantly, I think, when I was sixteen my brother, Neil, introduced me to T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land by sitting me down and reading through it with me, explaining the cultural and literary references as we went along. Until then I had had no idea that poetry could address such various and broad content. I later grew rather to dislike Eliot, and still have mixed feelings about his poetry and criticism. But he was like a sentry at the Gate of Horn for me as an aspiring young poet. From him I passed on to more significant (for me) poets like Pound and Williams.