PQ: When and how did you encounter your 1st Quebec poem?
BC: My reflexive answer is the song “Suzanne” by Leonard Cohen. That was in grade 7. Teaching songs as poetry or “poetry put to music” was new then, in the early ‘70s, and this song was relatively new. I appreciate the enlightened English teacher – an elderly British man -- who played it on the little record player in front of the classroom. The poem – or song – is very Montreal, isn’t it? When I first went to the Vieux Port, there she was –Our Lady of the Harbour. It’s a very bohemian, romantic piece, and may have planted the seeds for my attraction to this city.
PQ: When and how did you first become interested in poetry?
BC: When I wrote my first poem, at the age of 16. Oddly enough, this too was in a classroom. A substitute English teacher had us do a poem based on the famous William Carlos Williams poem about eating the plums in the refrigerator. The product of that exercise I still consider worthwhile; it later got published in a university magazine.
But the Toronto suburb of Downsview was not a very auspicious place to cultivate an interest in poetry or become a poet. Hardly anyone there even read a book! I didn’t find a proper sense of community or environment until I went to University of Toronto. There I did an undergraduate degree in English – mostly poetry courses – and fell under the sway of TS Eliot, Yeats, Dylan Thomas, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and others. Then I started to build a body of my own work, and consider poetry a primary interest.
PQ: What is your working definition of a poem?
BC: A poem is an instance of concentrated, rhythmic language that strikes us with a revelation of what it is to be alive.
PQ: Do you have a writing ritual? If so, provide details.
BC: I’m a rather impulsive writer who goes through cycles of productivity and non-productivity. But I do have an ideal ritual: to get up in the morning, have the day relatively free before me, brew a good coffee and sit down and create. I try to arrange my circumstances to allow that ritual to happen. When I manage to actually do it, that’s when I’m usually at my happiest.
PQ: What is your approach to writing of poems: inspiration driven, structural, social, thematic, other?
BC: In my 20’s and 30’s I was very inspiration driven, which meant of course that, as I became more self-critical, my production became very sporadic, and eventually – shortly after I arrived here – shut down altogether. This of course was very distressing. Eventually, I discovered a song-writing voice; I wrote about 60 songs over a space of ten years – even went so far as recording an album – before going back to poetry. Right now, I find that I can open up my laptop and let the words come – and I can often shape them into something that surprises me, something quite good. Some poems are riffs on language; others are spurred by reading or experience, and a few have been driven by a need to deal with a certain theme.
PQ: Do you think that being a minority in Quebec (ie. English-speaking) affects your writing? If so, how?
BC: Quebec is a province of minorities, and the most beleaguered minority is the so-called majority, les francophones. Being surrounded by French, and speaking it every day – I lived on the Plateau for eight years before moving to the more multicultural Mile End – means I’ve absorbed French vocabulary and expressions, and these can inform and influence the words I choose in English. I have a number of poems that bring French phrases and sensibilities into English; these include my prose poems, which follow, after all, what was originally a French form.
PQ: Do you think that writing in English in Quebec is a political act? Why or why not?
BC: This strikes me as a very tiresome question; it seems to hark back to the early years of language legislation, or at least when Lucien Bouchard was in power. Generally speaking, I support that legislation, despite some of its absurd implications – sign measuring, and the like. And generally, it has worked in terms of preserving this French corner in an otherwise English-dominated North America. Of course, I chose to come here after that legislation was in place and its effects were already apparent. There was no question to me about learning the language of the majority, and I’m sure would do the same if I moved to any other place. A language is a richness, a blessing, an alternative way of seeing things. The only reason I write in English is that it is language I dream in, that I’ve mastered.
PQ: Why do you write?
BC: Primarily, for the joy of it – there is almost no greater pleasure than the rush of creating a good poem. All the aesthetic decisions involved in drafting and honing can be a great pleasure as well. I love the music of language, and poetry, it seems, is what I’m best at. I also write because through this form of expression, I learn even for myself what I am thinking and feeling. My best work comes as a surprise: if it fails to surprise me, I’d say that’s a strong indication that it fails as poetry.
PQ: Who is your audience?
BC: Myself, and -- readers. Listeners, too, if they listen well.
PQ: Do you think there is an audience, outside of friends or other poets, for poetry?
BC: Actually, “audience” – with its roots in the auditory and relation to words like
“audition” and “auditorium” – connotes a throng of listeners, so it strikes me as a more suitable term for performance art, i.e. spoken word. The word has a very contemporary, crowd-pleasing feel; although I love doing poetry readings, I see who attends the typical reading – mostly other people who write or try to write poetry, family, friends – so that inclines me to answer no to your question.
“Readership” is probably the more appropriate word for poetry, at least for the kind of I write. If “audience” is taken to include readership, then the answer becomes obvious. In the long term, yes… and only for a tiny minority of poets and poems. Those that get anthologized, get on academic curricula and the like. That become part of the cultural heritage. If me and mine be among them, only time will tell. If time – or rather humanity – continues. Even that is in doubt.
Funny though, I almost forgot to mention my blog and the internet, with which I’m quite involved. That does broaden the current sense of “audience” quite a lot. But almost all of those who follow my blog, leave comments, or read poems on my site – whether they come from Montreal, Switzerland, or Kentucky – are still other poets.
PQ: Does your day job impact on your writing? How?
BC: Actually, for the most part my day job is an evening job. Teaching English as an Additional Language is in some ways a stimulus; relating to it through my students makes me relate to it again as new, in all its eccentricities. It’s also a very social job, a nice break from the solitude of writing. Insofar as I have to be on call for supply work during the day, and open to other things like translation contracts to supplement that income, my routine can be turned upside down, and it can be hard to get back into a creative rhythm.
PQ: How many drafts (beer too) do you usually go through before you are satisfied/finished with a poem?
BC: I now write and revise with my laptop, so what constitutes a draft has changed somewhat from way back when, in the typewriter era. I’m quite confident now of my cuttings, pastings, and deletions, but when I start to feel unsure the changes I’m making are improvements, I copy and paste the whole poem within the same file and continue shaping the pasted version. After I’ve reached a point where poem feels done, I print out all drafts, and then delete all but the most recent draft. I keep all the hard copies my so-called drafts… rarely, but it has happened, that I’ve gone back to a draft and found it better than a revised version. Most of the time, I go through about six or seven “cut and paste” drafts, although the majority of changes that have taken place in these early drafts have disappeared into the ether. Then on the printouts I make handwritten changes, fine tunings, which lead to new printouts. There could be as many as 20 of these – or as few as one or two. As for beer, well, I prefer wine – or coffee. For the average poem, I drink about as many cups or glasses as drafts I go through.
PQ: Do you write with the intention of “growing a manuscript” or do you work on individual poems that are later collected into a book?
BC: Mostly I have done the latter. With Passenger Flight, after writing about 20 prose poems, I got the idea of writing a book of them, and then deliberately wrote in that form until I had enough to put together a book. This was a new experience for me; it may never be repeated.
PQ: What is the toughest part of writing for you?
BC: Making the switch after the long, intensive period of editing – putting together a book manuscript, say – back to raw creativity. Someone said – I don’t know who – that you write loose but edit tight. Writing and editing are definitely very different activities that seem to draw on different regions of the brain. After obsessively scrutinizing every word before it goes to print, it’s hard to put those reflexes aside in order to generate something new. Sometimes, it requires a long fallow period.
PQ: What is your idea of a muse?
BC: She’s a nearly impossible combination: caring, daring, and beautiful. She’s young, wise as the ages, loves the poet’s poetry, inspires it constantly, and is never ever banal. She makes love with total abandon, then disappears into mists so that in anguished longing the poet composes the most magnificent love poems ever written, just to bring her back. And yet she is always there, somehow, supporting the poet’s serene creation. In other words, she probably doesn’t exist. Yeats had Maude Gonne; she came pretty close: was daring, beautiful, but almost utterly uncaring (it’s hard even to get that combination right.) My partner is the closest approximation of a muse I’ve found in the so-called real world. Yes, I could say she is my muse.
PQ: Do you have a favourite time and place to write?
BC: Right now, most of my creative writing I do in the morning, right after I’ve woken up with a cup of coffee. This, at the kitchen table, a pleasant, sunlit place with lots of plants and art on the walls. I also like to write in cafés. Blogging, revising, and other writing-related work (i.e. this interview) I’m likely do at any time, anywhere, but often late at night or in the wee hours of the morning – in my home office.
