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.
No comments:
Post a Comment