Jeremy DeJong & Michael Harris interview Harry Thurston

Which poets influenced you as a poet?

I was afraid you might ask that.Early influences were people like William Carlos Williams the early 20th century American poet, D H Lawrence, A. J. M Smith, Dylan Thomas – these were people I read very early on. I took away something from each of them and I suppose I took them on—you encounter these people before you move on in your own reading and discover other people. More recently, people like Pablo Neruda, the Chilean poet, Mary Oliver, contemporary American poet, Canadian poets - again it’s really an eclectic sort of bag. Like most Maritime writers I read and admired Alden Nowlan; similarly, people like John Thompson, another Maritime writer. So it’s a fairly long list and it’s a list that changes with time. There are people you read less of and others you go back to and discover more than you did the first time.

What would you say was the first poem you remember having a significant effect on you?

Well, you know, a poem that I remember from grade school, which was a standard poem, was “David” by Earle Birney, a narrative poem, where a young man is lost on a mountain; and narrative remains important to me as a poet. We’ve tended to get away from narrative in poetry but it certainly was one of the important functions of poetry if you think of things like ballad and the oral tradition where things are passed down. Well, in grade schoool that one stands out. When we went to university, we didn’t take a whole lot of contemporary poetry in high school and it wasn’t until university that I encountered 20^th century poetry. The poets that struck me at that time were the early imagist poets led by Pound - I’ve already mentioned Williams. D.H. Lawrence - some of his poems from that period, like “Bavarian Gentians.” Suddenly, I saw an element of poetry that had eluded me –the language was plainer, the images were sharper – it was that kind of breakthrough in my own reading that led me to start writing.

What would you say that the value of poetry in society is?

I think there is a social role for poetry. It’s more obvious in different eras. When society is politicized by major events as it was in the thirties with the rise of fascism, there sas a school of social poetry that directly addressed society’s issues, values, principles. And that’s a valid function for the poet as it is for any other writer as it is for any other writer whether it be a essayist journalist or novelist. That direct kind of response to social issue has been sublimated –it’s not as current. Poetry has tended to become more inward --looking inward than looking outward, and that’s valid too. We read poetry for a whole variety of reasons and one of them is self-discovery – you know, we use the poetry as a kind of lens for that. But there’s still a role I think for the poet to address crises. My latest book, When Men Lived on Earth, I consider it a book of social poetry because much of it rotates around the theme of what we are doing to the environment. I Approach it two ways, I think, in the poems and in my writing generally. In the bokk there are poems about seeing, sort of enlightenment, that comes from oliving close to nature, and there are poems which are clearly more polemical, where I am making strenuous arguments about slocietal values, against mainstream societal values, That makes critics uncomfortable –the reviews to the book, you know, responding personally to your question, have been very favourable but if there is anything that makes them uncomfortable is the poet, that is “I” making statements in my poems which is not very fashionable.

Yes, we’ve heard that from our English teacher a few times.

Yes, but frankly I don’t care, I think I was aware before I published the book that there would be a sector of the literary community that would react negatively to that.

(Dog barks, interrupting flow of thought)

“The owl and mouse” and “whirligig” and “snipe” and “River Otters” and “Chimney Swifts” are the selections we have chosen. did you have a particular theme in mind when you were writing these five poems?

Well, it’s obvious that a common thing is: there is a major theme for animals. But, I think each poem serves a different purpose. I guess poets can be accused, as lawyers can be accused, of harping on the same old thing over and over again …looking for common threads; the subject is a common thread, but the other aspect of it is an identification with animals and the natural world and what they can teach us. If I could just look at the “Owl and the Mouse” poem. It’s an obvious, or maybe not so obvious, play on Aesop’s fable. The title echoes that. But, ultimately, Aesop’s fable was about morals; they attempted to teach a moral. What I’m saying about nature is, in a sense, quite contrary to that. I’m saying that nature is in a sense amoral, not immoral, because to be immoral one has to be conscious of what you’re doing, breaking the rules and so on. Nature doesn’t operate that way. So you could look at the poem and respond to it in a number of ways and say - O, my goodness the poor mouse (laughs) – you could identify with the mouse or you could identify with the owl. What I’m saying is I’m not identifying with either. I’m simply observing what’s going on out there. Two lives become one. That’s exactly what happens. I didn’t have this in mind when I was writing the poem but I went to a production of Hamlet the other day in Windsor Theatre (Acadia U.) and there is a passage in there where, you know, a satirical/ironic passage in there, where they talk about baiting the hook with the king, because this is what happens, you know—we go into the earth, the worms eat us, we bait the hook with the worm, and, of course, the fish eats the king. And so, it’s that kind of almost – I’m saying here -- look at the way nature works and don’t impose your own value system on it.

There are a couple of reasons for it --the italicized passages - beyond that acknowledgement in a sense. “Like smoke returning to the fire” was actually what Cathy said - so poets steal, but at least I italicized it (laughs) but more than that, it’s a poem about both origins and where we are going and in that sense it is a very feminine poem about going back to the beginning to that primordial state… the last line is the swift s…… unfurling the future…… it is a poem that (moves) from the past to the future… it is a poem that relies quite heavily on images from biology and physics like time zero is reversed usually comes from physics and …. In the darkness –those lines are being inspired in part by the figure of … You know my background in science, which is what I studied in university, emerges quite frequently in the poem and it sometimes leads me to writing images which are certain yet no t ???? but they are part of my vocabulary which may not be part of every poet’s.

This is great, because many students wouldn’t know the answers to these questions.

Hmm… No, and you’re not necessarily supposed to. And it’s interesting to be asked because it makes you think, it makes me think, yeh, where did this stuff come from.

When you mentioned that science comes into your poetry. Do you find that it has a wide appeal in its subject matter.

Poetry doesn’t have a wide appeal you know it’s one of the tragedies, in a sense, of modern poetry…perhaps it never had a huge appeal since the days of the balladeers. Having said that, I write in more than one voice and it depends upon the subject very often. So, you have this rather austere, very highly controlled poem, you know, “The Owl and the Mouse,” or even the “Chimney Swifts” to some degree, where the language is rather formal and very concise, right? In those poems I think it’s very obvious what I’m doing; it’s not as obvious in “Chimney Swift”, a little more difficult to grasp, it would take a different kind of reading, but then there are poems in the book probably most notably the last one “Fathoms” which has been written for voices and has been recorded for radio and the language is the vernacular, it’s the every day, and I always read that poem at my readings and I always read it last. The response to that poem is pretty broad – I’ve had people come to me whom you’d not expect, I mean on average not moved by a poem, but they are by that one. I mean going back to what I said earlier about “David” – it’s a story poem and people get gripped by the story; it’s written in a language which is vivid and uncommon, poetry is far more accessible. For me it’s important as a poet to write in that voice sometimes-not only because I think it is a valid thing to do, as a poet, to draw from that source which is pretty rich here in the Maritimes – one doesn’t write to appeal to a wide audience but I’m conscious of the need for poetry not to bearchaic, to appeal only to poets.

What do you think of memorizing poems?

Ha! I don’t memorize enough of them. In a sense I’m guilty of not following my own inclinations. I think reading poetry is very important, for the poem. I never think of a poem as really being finished until I’ve actually read it to an audience. And it’s amazing what happens- I’ve even stood up and read a poem and edited while I was reading and I can think ahead two or three lines and think “my god, that word should be there” so, you know, poetry is, even today when it’s not quite so obvious, because… we’re not using prosody as much, when we’re not using traditional forms as much, we’re not using rhyme as much, all of which kind of blend themselves to memoriazation and reading –sound is as important as any other element in poetry –but perhaps I’m getting off base here. I should even ask if you think it was important for other people to memorize the poems, or if it was important for the poet to read the poems from memory. Which were you asking?

More “other people” –students or anyone who was looking at becoming a poet.

Yes, well I think what it would do. Certainly I read poems when AI was going through high school, I memorized “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” the whole damn thing…which is a great poem, a really great poem. I think the value in it is it does help put you in touch with the sound of the piece, the rhythm of the piece. Too often the approach is “what does this mean?” What is the content, what is the motivation of the author, what is the author trying to say- I think some of it actually is contained within the rhythm of the sound of the poem. So it is very very important to appreciate that element of poetry. And some poets, Dylan Thomas being a shining example, what he is saying is very very simple but the way he says it, the sound of those poems is what makes them phenomenal, so from that point of view, the short answer is “Yes!” (laughter)

This sort of ties in with what you said earlier, but why do you avoid set meters in your poems?

I don’t so much avoid it as, when I started to write I was influenced by people who were writing in free verse and there was very little experimentation at that time. There are a couple of poems in this book which are written in traditional forms the poems of “Elms and Men” is a sonnet with the regular abba rhyme scheme. “Atlantic Elegy” is written in blank verse, 10 syllables per line with no rhyme, and it’s a long poem, and when I first read it, I mean blank verse sort of comes out of the British vernacular anyway…when I first started writing that poem, which was commissioned by the way, I wrote the first section of it and then looked at it very calmly and realized it was ten syllables, and as an exercise for nobody’s satisfaction but my own I wrote the whole thing in blank verse. The majority of my work does not conform to, adhere to, meter but on occasion I like to experiment with it, and I think, I think there is going to be a return to more traditional forms to a greater degree than there has been. I see it some young poets. It’s marvelous to behold, and if you read people like Seamus Heaney and Elizabeth Bishop you see how they are able to maintain a very accessible voice while remaining true to traditional forms. For me, I admire them.

What kind of poems do you think would appeal to people in general? Do you think that People like Robert Frost still have a wide appeal?

Well, Frost is an important poet. He should be read but I think that to go Frost was one of them early on, again, not so much for form, but the fact that he was writing about rural subjects which was very much the subject of my first book, his use of storytelling, the naturalistic imagery of poetry, you know, all of those things were important for me because you have to learn confidence, in a sense, of your world, that your experience is valid, relevant to other people’s experience. So, as a young writer I read Frost, he was a foundation (?)but to get back to your original question .. . .

(And here, o hang your heads in shame, endeth the tape, but not the interview which has sadly sailed into the ether. O to be everready, Michael and Jeremy)