Diane Tucker : part five

How important is music to your poetry?

Very. I’ve loved and been involved with music almost all my life, from elementary school choir to musical theatre to singing contemporary music to singing in my present church choir for more than twenty years. The rigour of baroque music thrills me, as do the more raw rhythms of western Medieval music. But I also love the music of my own time. The three songwriters that have likely influenced me most as a poet are Paul Simon, Joni Mitchell, and Bruce Cockburn. All are musical geniuses and their lyrics can be immortally beautiful. Paul Simon in particular is brilliant at making poetry out of the patter of everyday speech.

Music lives in the body and in a poem in much the same way. It integrates us in a way nothing else seems to be able to.

Diane Tucker : part four

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

To renew the ear, Gerard Manley Hopkins always helps. Read aloud, preferably. There is a fantastic YouTube video of English actor Cyril Cusack reciting Hopkins: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfH_z8llCr8  I’ve listened to it many times. “There lives the dearest freshness deep down things…”

To renew the heart, Christina Rossetti is good. We are kin under the skin, she and I. I especially love her raw, despairing poems like her tour de force, “The Heart Knoweth its Own Bitterness”.

Diane Tucker : part three

What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?

No other form distills language to its musical and lexical essence like poetry. It’s like the concentrate of a substance found in other writing in diluted form. This is why it was considered for millennia, in the west anyway, to be the highest form of writing. I certainly wouldn’t make that claim anymore, but its uniqueness remains. Because the best poems require the most precise language in its most mellifluous order, poetry remains the headwaters of expressive language.

Because of this I think it can, as well, slow us down and make us pay attention to the world in a way that’s much less encouraged now, and less do-able. When we have an hour, our minds race with achievements or tasks to be finished and cannot be still. Poetry offers this stillness, often by way of prolonged, focussed attention.

Diane Tucker : part two

How does your work first enter the world? Do you have a social group or writers group that you work on ideas and poems with?

I meet with a small group of poets on a sort of ad hoc basis, every few months, to share new work. It’s a great bunch, perceptive and encouraging! Covid restrictions have made it difficult – we did meet on Zoom a couple of times – but we’re working on meeting together again in the flesh soon!

I spent a long time in a local writers’ workshop in the nineties and early 2000’s and fell out of the habit of it. I thought those days were done, but this more recent group that formed slowly through poets Daniel Cowper and Emily Osborne is giving me a good kick in the pants again.

Diane Tucker : part one

Diane Tucker is a poet, editor, fiction writer, and playwright from Vancouver, BC. Her work has been widely anthologized and published in more than seventy journals in Canada and abroad. Her first poetry collection, God on His Haunches (Nightwood Editions, 1996), was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. Nostalgia for Moving Parts is her fourth book of poems.

How did you first engage with poetry?

I have a strong memory from when I was about seven years old of hearing Carly Simon’s song “You’re So Vain” and being struck by the phrase “clouds in my coffee”. I thought of how my parents’ coffee looked when they put milk in it, how it billowed out and did look like clouds. The connection fascinated me, this triple-layered metaphor. I felt so drawn to this idea of one thing being another thing in that way, like magic!