How did you first engage with poetry?
One of my mother’s favourite stories was about the first words of my sister, who, as a toddler, pointed to an earthworm and said “ribbon walking.” Metaphor was everywhere and as valuable as fact in our family. My mother was a writer; my father studied explosions; my sisters, my brother, and I read a lot and drew a lot and made houses out of cardboard, and fabric—you get the idea. And we lived in the country on a farm— so birth and death were happening… all this was formative. And my mother read us A Child’s Garden of Verses and Winnie the Pooh and Robert Frost and Dylan Thomas, but I didn’t love that stuff so much. If you Google “The Purple Cow” you’ll find a favourite poem of mine at age seven.
Later, at Mount Allison, I studied history, but I would write in my own sort of descriptive narrative style and try to play it off as academic argument. I took a class with the poet Douglas Lochhead and I handed in one of these “research” papers and he called me on it. But he also asked me to write poetry instead of papers for the rest of the semester. I’m grateful he recognised that I am not a historian: I do not have a head for the past and its dates, the men and the battles.
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