Robin Durnford : part five

Why is poetry important?

This is a big pretentious question, but I think it’s extremely important. Poetry is more important than ever. Poetry isn’t capitalist. I mean I know it’s Instagrammable now, but poetry itself cannot be monetized (or can it?). Well, literature can’t (or can it?). But actually, although I lean this way politically, I also know that poetry cannot be socialist. It can try! Poetry, like all art, is about telling the truth, about being honest, about saying fuck the bullshit whatever the bullshit of the day may be. People get so intimidated by canonized poets these days, but, Jesus, so many poets were ignored and basically drummed out of the discourse of the day. That asshole Dylan Thomas, I forgot about him, he was telling the world something, but it wasn’t anything that it particularly wanted to hear, but his words? They had music. I’m a romantic that way. I believe in aesthetics. I don’t think making something beautiful, though, should make you snotty towards the world or those who don’t get it. I can’t say I’m always good at this, but I do know that poetry is not for poets. Poetry should be for the world. Actually, Thomas’s own “In my Craft or Sullen Art” sums it up!

Coda: This was fun. Thanks for giving poets an opportunity to talk and be heard!

Robin Durnford : part four

How important is music to your poetry?

Music is central to my poetry. The music of language, that is. I feel very strongly that poetry should really need no accompaniment. The music should come from the sound of the words themselves, in their chosen order, and the syllables and the silences and the line breaks should make up the notes. Language itself is music. That’s poetry. The accents, the dialects, the combination of verbs and nouns, the rests leading up to intensity, the quietness, the noise of language. For me this is the struggle and the pleasure of poetry. For me form is a bit of a ruse, although I strongly admire those who make original music out of the frames that make up sonnets and villanelles and odes (although these days I often find them boring to the ear). I live for the sound of the language, of people’s voices, the way they talk when they don’t know anyone is listening. This was my childhood in the outports and quiet corners of Newfoundland. This is my poetry.

Robin Durnford : part three

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.

Robin Durnford : part two

How did you first engage with poetry?

This is going to sound morbid, but after my father died in 2004 we needed some lines to put on his headstone. I wasn’t a poet then, just a mere PhD student, but I didn’t want something clichéd. I wrote some lines that people liked and ended up on the grave, so that was technically my first ‘publication.’ After that I just kept writing. I filled a whole notebook with verses that summer, trying to deal with the shock of what had happened (Dad died of a sudden death heart attack without any goodbyes to anyone), so that was the basis of my first book. I would say, though, that poetry was always in me. When I was a teenager I used to read poems from poetry anthologies and perform into hairbrushes in front of the mirror like a rock star. It’s just that where I came from poets were thought of as people from the olden days, all of whom were dead.

Robin Durnford : part one

Robin Durnford was born in St. John’s and grew up on the west coast of Newfoundland. She is the author of three books of poetry: A Lovely Gutting (McGill-Queen’s 2012), Fog of the Outport (Jackpine 2013), and Half Rock (Gaspereau 2016). She now lives in Montreal.

What are you working on?

A collection called Gap-Toothed Girl about the gaps and spaces in my own identity (I literally have a gap tooth which I’m partly proud of and partly ashamed of). The collection’s about the parts that don’t seem to fit. When I look at other people they always seem so ‘together’ and whole and sure and fully formed. They are who they are. I always feel uncertain. My identity shifts all the time. One day I feel really feminine, the next I’m more masculine. Most days I’m Sam’s mom, but I don’t want that to be my whole identity either. I want to go out to dinner with my husband and have sex afterwards. My commie-pinko politics has mostly stayed the same for the last twenty years, but I don’t like checked box liberalism or leftism. I need to have the power to dissent, to disagree, to be cantankerous, but also to be loveable! The voice, though. I hope my poetic voice holds the poems, and so my self, together.