Neil Flowers : part one

Neil Flowers was born in Montreal.

His published works include Taxicab Voice, Suite for the Animals, Some Kinds of Earthly Love, A Signal through the Flames, and an account of a near-death experience that appears in Ostomy Canada, Summer 2020.

He is at work on a novel, Acts of Treason, and freelances as a screenplay doctor and editor of medical texts.

How did you first engage with poetry?

I had what you might call three firsts. When I was eight or nine, in our house was a copy of The Golden Book of Children’s Verse or one very similar. “The Owl and the Pussycat” was in it and “Jabberwocky.” I was a lonely kid. I sunk right into the worlds of those poems and that book. Imagining the characters in their pea-green boat with Owl serenading Pussycat, it was entrancing, funny. I read the Lewis Carroll poem quite a few times puzzling at the language, later enjoying the silliness. And there were colourful illustrations! The lyrics to “John Henry” were accompanied by a watercolour of this huge black man swinging a hammer with a steam locomotive in the background. When I was fourteen, I had my first encounter with canon poetry. Our grade ten English teacher taught us the form of the Petrarchan sonnet and had us read “Ozymandias” and “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer.” I remember that day with perfect clarity: The class room at Etobicoke Collegiate in Toronto where we read the poem; the teacher (Mr. Cooper), who was handsome but cultivating a short, dark widow’s peak; being riveted by both poems, one about the ephemerality of everything and the other about the glory of reading—big ideas in dense little packages; and turning from the poems to look through the windows at the sunny day and the football field outside. In that English class we also read Browning’s “My Last Duchess”, which had a profound effect on me in how a poem could consist solely of a character talking and that character damning himself. When I finally understood the irony, when I got the poem, I thought it was the greatest poem I’d ever read, which it probably was for me to that time, and it was about a narcissistic loathsome murderer. You can feel his obsequious, evil, pinched soul every time you read the poem. When I went to university in Ottawa, I had the very good fortune to take a class in modern/contemporary poetry from the Canadian poet Robert Hogg. We read the big Americans—Williams, Pound, Olson, Ed Dorn, Levertov, Creeley—and a bunch of Canadians like John Newlove, Daphne Marlatt, and Frank Davey. In terms of my own work, taking that class and reading those poets made all the difference. A poem could follow its own path, its own energy, whatever that might mean. “Who knows what a poem is until it’s THAR, it walks it talks it struts its green barazzo”, Olson says, summing up nicely what WCW and Creeley said about composition by field and that form is an extension of content.