Bruce Whiteman : part five

How important is music to your poetry?

Technically, it is the central quality of my work, and one of the aspects of poetry that distinguishes it from prose and makes a poem great rather than good (or lousy). Music is what we mean when we talk about a poet’s ear. I understand that not all or even most poets have actual musical training, but the best, trained or not, have an instinctual ability to find the musical reality of language. I do have musical training, and classical music is, along with poetry, one of the two main passions of my life. So I feel hypersensitive to the music inherent in “the best words in the best order,” to cite that famous Coleridge bon mot. As readers we tend to notice music most when it is overdone, as it is in many of Poe’s poems. But unconsciously it is there at work in any great poem, and usually when a reader comments that a poem is “beautiful” that is what they are responding to. 

Bruce Whiteman : part four

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

Oh yes. There are a lot of poems I read and re-read, that are like emotional support animals. Given that my poetic roots are in Anglo-American modernism, I often go back to Yeats and Stevens and Williams. Poems like “Sunday Morning” and “The Idea of Order at Key West,” “Sailing to Byzantium” and “Lapus Lazuli,” much of Pictures from Brueghel and Spring & All, boost me up and renew my faith in poetry. Basil Bunting’s Briggflatts is another example, and many of Creeley’s poems, especially the early ones. These are all poems with an intense sense of music, a quality that I aspire to in my own poems.

Bruce Whiteman : part three

What other poetry books have you been reading lately?

I do a lot of book reviewing, mostly for quarterlies but also for newspapers. So I read a lot of poetry, both Canadian and American, for review. I recently reviewed Margaret Atwood’s latest book of poems, Dearly, and Don McKay’s new book, Lurch, both of which I liked a lot. I reviewed Steven Heighton’s Selected Poems for a newspaper review last spring, and found much to like in it as well. I often get assigned the poetry chronicle in The Hudson Review. They send you thirty or forty poetry books, from which you choose four or five, and there are often pleasing discoveries among them. Most recently, I thought Kim Addonizio’s Now We’re Getting Somewhere accomplished and high-spirited. Ken Norris’s South China Sea is a fine book.

Bruce Whiteman : part two

Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began?

It has, yes, markedly. In a way, that change still reflects those two early poetic compulsions, love and something much larger and less personal. Until I was in my early thirties I wrote personal lyric poems based in my own experience, primarily of love and desire. I’d read The Cantos and Paterson and The Maximus Poems, and loved that poetry; but it did not represent an approach to form and content that I felt compelled to follow or use or imitate. But in the early 1980s I came to a point when I felt that the lyric poem was exhausted, or I was exhausted by it anyway, and I deliberately set out to locate a different and less personal kind of poem, even radically so. I was especially interested in conserving the musical aspect of verse, while finding a way to reduce my own controlling consciousness as a necessary presence in my work. So I started to write a long poem—that seemed then almost inevitable—but I chose to write it in prose poetry. No fussy decisions about line endings or indents. Just sentences. And in choosing that approach to poetic form, I was sure that I would discover a broader content as well. Which I think I did. The title of that long poem, The Invisible World Is in Decline, has, in the almost forty years I have been writing it, sometimes felt constrictive. Its theological implication never seemed very important to me, at least at the start. In any case, the lyric poem came to seem quaint and surannée, to use Baudelaire’s word, though I did eventually return to it and wrote both kinds of poem simultaneously. My long poem is now done. The final book, Book IX, will be published in the spring of 2022. 

Bruce Whiteman : part one

Bruce Whiteman was born near Toronto in 1952. His career as a rare book and manuscript specialist began at McMaster University and included McGill University and UCLA. He now lives in Peterborough, Ontario. He has published extensively as a poet, reviewer, and cultural historian. His most recent collections of poetry are Intimate Letters (ECW Press, 2014), Tablature (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015), and The Sad Mechanic Exercise (Gaspereau Press, 2019). He is the editor of Best Canadian Essays (Biblioasis, October 2021). Forthcoming in 2022 are the final book of his long poem, The Invisible World Is in Decline (ECW Press) and a collection of essays and reviews (Biblioasis) tentatively entitled The Live Air: Essays and Reviews, 1978-2020. He teaches part-time in the School of Continuing Studies, University of Toronto.

How did you first engage with poetry?

There were two factors, really. Both took place in high school. The first was unrequited love—a girl in Grade 9 whom I fell for but from whom I got nothing in return. Poetry suddenly seemed a way to express feelings that I could not share with anyone and in part did not understand myself. My first little book did not come out until ten years later, but that experience of teenage attraction invoked my first writings. More importantly, I think, when I was sixteen my brother, Neil, introduced me to T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land by sitting me down and reading through it with me, explaining the cultural and literary references as we went along. Until then I had had no idea that poetry could address such various and broad content. I later grew rather to dislike Eliot, and still have mixed feelings about his poetry and criticism. But he was like a sentry at the Gate of Horn for me as an aspiring young poet. From him I passed on to more significant (for me) poets like Pound and Williams.