Maureen Hynes : part one

Maureen Hynes is the author of seven books, five of which are poetry. Her latest collection is Sotto Voce (fall, 2019), which was shortlisted for the League of Canadian Poets’ Pat Lowther Award and the Golden Crown Literary Awards (U.S.). Maureen’s first book of poetry, Rough Skin, won the League’s Lampert Award, and her 2016 collection, The Poison Colour, was shortlisted for both the Lowther and Souster Awards. Maureen’s poetry has been included in over 25 anthologies, including twice in Best Canadian Poems in English, and in Best of the Best Canadian Poetry, 2017. Maureen is poetry editor for Our Times magazine. http://maureenhynes.com/.

Author photo:  Vivek Shraya

How did you first engage with poetry?

In my particular Catholic high school in the 1960’s, though there were contemporary Canadian poets in the texts we studied, they were often skipped over, not analyzed or even discussed, in favour of more classical poets—Keats, Spenser, Yeats, Spenser, Blake, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and of course, Hopkins. I’ve kept these high school texts all these years, and it surprises me to find I’ve written out, on a separate piece of paper inserted into the book, John Mansfield’s poem, “On Growing Old” (“Be with me, beauty, for I am growing old,” it begins). I suppose it was the romantic idealization of beauty that appealed to me as a 16-year-old, rather than what I wanted to carry with me as I faced the prospect of growing old.

Somehow my friends and I discovered Raymond Souster’s Ten Elephants on Yonge Street, and that set me on a search for poets who were in writing in Canada at that very moment. I remember having a big twinge of jealousy, many years later, when Helen Humphreys told me that Margaret Atwood had come to her high school to read poetry; and that she (Helen) had always had the sense that poetry was a contemporary experience.