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Is there a book you return to again and again, a work that would make life on a desert island bearable? Each weekend, between Canada Day and Labour Day, Globe writers share their go-to tomes – be it novel, poetry collection, cookbook – and why the world is just a little better for them.
Poems have always been like hit songs for me – I remember my favourite lines, but forget the verse. So I go back to them often.
There is one book of poetry that has been with me for many years. To call it an anthology does it no justice. It is closer to a family photo album or songbook, something you return to often to open the mind.
Twenty years ago, I was one year into my first "real" journalism job as a reporter at a newspaper in Sault Ste. Marie, Ont. I took the job over the phone, having never visited the place. I covered natural resources – "rocks and trees" as the other reporters liked to call it (there was no "environment" reporter) – and aboriginal affairs. The newsroom was a driven crew of young reporters, from different towns and cities across the country. We were always yearning for more.
My recent life had followed me to Northern Ontario. After graduating, my future wife and I lived in a tiny apartment in the village of Eden Mills just outside of Guelph, Ont. It was a place that was teeming with writers and all ilk of the creative industries that I considered journalism to be a part of. The great novelist, Leon Rooke, lived across the street and I remember watching with admiration as he watered the hanging plants outside his front door in his white briefs – his wild, white hair dancing the sun. It was a veritable Shangri-La for writers.
In the Sault, I was living my dream as a reporter – but my long-simmering creative passions were left unfulfilled. And Sault Ste. Marie was not the kind of town where soaring literary readings emanated from kitchens as I'd experienced in Eden Mills. I kept a journal, wrote the occasional poem and joined a folk-music club. But mostly, I chopped a lot of wood. There were times that I wondered (and loudly): What the hell am I doing here?
Somewhere in my search for enlightenment, I came across an issue of Rampike – a slim and edgy literary magazine published by Karl Jirgens. It was filled with poetics and word art; it felt more like a German avant-garde comic book than a Canadian literary journal. It felt like another time. And I loved it. My reporter instinct kicked in: Who is this Jirgens fellow and what far-off Eastern European country does he publish this journal from? As it turned out, Jirgens was teaching literature at Algoma University, at the time a Sault Ste. Marie offshoot of Laurentian University in Sudbury. He was literally right down the street. I read Jirgens's first novel A Measure of Time and immediately signed up for a night course in modern and postmodern poetry.
If the class was the rain of creativity that I needed, then our textbook – the 800-page-plus tome Poems for the Millennium: The University of California book of Modern and Postmodern Poetry, Volume One: From Fin-de-Siècle to Negritude – was the sunshine. It is a weighty title that, I think intentionally, avoids the word anthology. Gary Snyder, the original Dharma Bum, describes it most aptly as "a sourcebook for the future."
Edited by noted anthologist Jerome Rothenberg and the poet Pierre Joris, the book took my early, predictably Canadiana notions of poetry – Purdy, Layton, Cohen – and turned them on their head.
For a kid who came of age in the 1990s, the book was a revelation: To understand my future, I needed to understand the century's beginning. And I did it through the creative genius of the modernists. Poets and artists who lived, as Rothenberg and Joris write, through "a time dominated by nationalism and ethnic conflict, with totalitarian ideologies still in their early stages and science and technology on the move toward new and ever faster transformations."
My literary canon was suddenly being uploaded like an iPod in perfect order. Better yet, I could make my own playlists: Blake, Baudelaire, Cendrars and Duchamp in the morning; the great Russians – Mayakovsky, Kamensky, Kandinsky, Khlebnikov – at night. The Dadaists? I'd save as diversions. And on. And on. And on.
Over time, this book has helped me to define what I love about poetry. These tiny doors can open up big, emotional wanderings for me. Or I can stay closer to home, venturing just one or two strides into this new landscape. More than a distraction, these trips fortify the mind.
And I can share them or keep them tight. I have read my favourite excerpts from Rilke's Duino Elegy for friends around the campfire; just the other day I reread Alfred Jarry's The Passion of Jesus Christ as an Uphill Bicycle Race in a strange homage to the Rio Olympics.
Back in poetry class, for my final project, I embarked on an emotional and twisted tribute to the Russian Futurist movement. I wrote it as a fugue. Somehow it brought together my love for poetry and my current state of mind in one great polyphonic spree. I got an A.