Until recently, if you’d bothered to ask me how I thought my poetry had changed over the past third of a century or so, I might have replied that two sources of inspiration have increasingly contributed to the work: dreams (usually in the form of lines overheard, so to speak, in sleep and transcribed on waking) and the practice of translating other poets.
But after reading through my six collections, then weighing in on Karen Solie’s triage as she selected the poems for this book, I see that my reply would have been wrong. Dream materials and the act of translation have nourished the work from the start. My first published poem, “Nightmare,” is a transcription of a dream — or, if I remember right, a kind of translation of imagery into verbal form. Another early poem, “Restless,” features a refrain translated (by means of a century-old, twenty-five-pound dictionary) from an Old Norse lyric I’ve never been able to find since. And the suite of poems at the centre of my first book, Stalin’s Carnival, consists of pseudo-translations I wrote after first roughly translating an actual early poem by Josef Djugashvili (the young man who later translated himself into Josef Stalin).
I wrote my second book, Foreign Ghosts, while backpacking through Asia and then teaching English in Japan, where I practiced a kind of diseased frugality in hopes of saving enough money to write full-time on my return. I also taught myself some Japanese, and I see now that translation and mistranslation, both verbal and cultural, are the tectonic forces underlying that collection.
In the four books that follow, dream poems appear with increasing frequency, along with free translations — approximations, I started calling them — of poems modern and ancient, renowned and obscure. In The Address Book and Patient Frame I sequestered these approximations at the end, but in my most recent collection, The Waking Comes Late, I integrated them with my own work. While this approach might seem to propose an equality between lines of my own and, say, classic cadences by Sappho, the interleaving really just reflects how the material in any one book emerges from a single creative period, a unified process of reading, writing, and revising. I work on approximations concurrently with my own poems, so the two forms are always in dialogue on my desk — my engagement with a poem by Georg Trakl, say, inspiring a poem of my own, which then suggests ways to improve the translation. I regret there wasn’t room to include more approximations here, especially my version of Rimbaud’s hundred-line Le Bateau ivre, on which I worked for two years, loving every arduous minute.
Discerning patterns in your own work, even if it takes decades, is still easier than trying to explain them. But I will say this much. From the start, the part of my mind that conceives real poems (as opposed to the ego that forces fakes) seems to have worked to subvert my tendency to overthink and over-explain the world. It has recruited me into the role of stenographer to my nightmind; it has nudged me toward difficult, hence usefully estranging, languages and the act of translation — which, like dreams, demotes the bossy, noisy ego, since translators must submit and apprentice themselves to the source text and labour in service to it.
And then music. That’s the other thread that holds these poems together, I hope, across decades. In my teens and early twenties I wrote songs, then began to focus on poetry — though the poetry always seemed an extension of the songwriting impulse, and perhaps by not singing the words, or accompanying them on guitar, I placed a healthy pressure on them to make their own music.
These last few years I’ve returned to music. Maybe I sensed it was time to take my poetry back to its roots — back to where poetry itself began, long ago — in song. Or maybe, as John Prine put it, “Your heart gets bored with your mind and it changes you.” Sing the words instead of write them and it’s harder to overthink them — so at last nothing stands between your heart and your hearer. If I’m lucky and poems, too, keep coming, I’ll hope this arc of return infuses the work with a deeper music, a fuller openness.
I’m grateful to my poetry publisher, House of Anansi, for bringing out this selected poems volume. Thank you especially to Karen Solie; to Anansi’s poetry editor, Kevin Connolly; and to its managing editor, Maria Golikova.
— Steven Heighton, Kingston, November 2020