Beginnings

Many years ago – anyway, more than twenty – I stepped off a transcontinental train onto the extraordinary soil of Saskatchewan. It was May 21st, early summer in the old country, but snow still lay cold in the low spots of this
enormous landscape.

Having received an education with a heavy list to litword (lovely ships and boats and seas goodbye) I jumped off that train with words ready on my lips to greet the first poet I should meet in this poetic land.

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The train has stopped for no apparent reason

In the wilds;

A frozen lake is level and fretted over

With rippled wind lines;

The sun is burning in the South…

(“En Route,” Duncan Campbell Scott)

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Gull Lake set in the rolling prairie –

Still there are reeds on the shore,

As of old the poplars shimmer …

(“At Gull Lake: August, 1810,” Duncan Campbell Scott)

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Lorsque le blanc Hiver, aux jours tièdes mêlés,

Recule vers le Nord de montagne en montagne…

(“Terre nouvelle,” Albert Ferland)

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And yesterday had I not murmured under my breath as we left Manitoba behind on our westward journey?

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Farewell to Winnipeg, the snow-bright city,

Set in the prairie distance without bound.

(“Farewell to Winnipeg,” Roy Daniells)

Later I was surprised and disappointed to discover that this was a country that did not know its own poets. In vain I might cry out names like Smith, Birney, Choquette, Hertel, Livesay. Canadians seemed to have been brought up in the conviction that there were no Canadian poets; they would counter feebly with Wordsworth, Tennyson, and (sometimes) Dylan Thomas. Thank goodness all this has changed now and we are beginning to appreciate our own writers. Sometimes their works even appear in English classes in our schools.

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For four years I lived in the wild south country of Saskatchewan, “Down on the Muddy,” as they say there. It is a country of salt lakes and desert and rolling boulder-strewn prairie. Only in the green coulees are there songbirds, for that is where the trees grow. Heroic memories of those times remain with me. Life was hard and isolated. Some of our neighbours still lived in sod huts or even in basements with roofs of turf. Once we tried to race a prairie fire while we were driving into town; it easily beat our sixty miles an hour.

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As long as I can remember I have always composed poetry. I don’t say ‘written’ as I often used to recite my own verses before I could read or write. I can still remember the various methods I would use to ensure that my spoken poem would not tail off, would come to the satisfactory dramatic ending. When I was five years old I learned to read, and that was the end of that part of my career as a poet. I have never been able to accomplish a satisfactory extemporary poem since.

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Although I wrote a good deal during my first years in Canada I made no attempt to publish. In England I had begun to publish in a few little mags – had made a small name for myself – but here I felt that I was another person, had something different to say. Someone – I wish I could remember who it was (I would like to thank him) – introduced me to the Provincial Library in the second year of our life in Saskatchewan. Thanks to that person (whoever he is) I was able to read and encouraged to write in those first few years. When we eventually came to live in Saskatoon, I started to send poems to various literary magazines and began my life as a Canadian poet.

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In the end I think it is the sense of community that I found in Saskatchewan rather than the sense of space and isolation that has most influenced my work. I write mostly about people, their tragedies and loves and quirks. I am happy with the various groups and individuals with whom I have written; whom I have helped; who have helped me. I suppose, that in a place of great spaces and few people, every person is more important than he is in the crowded countries of the Old World.

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I still miss the sea though. Shots of rolling ocean on tv never fail to bring tears of longing to my eyes, but if I were ever exiled from the prairies I should suffer much more than this. For here I am: a prairie person and a prairie poet. During these last years Saskatchewan has become not a place for writers to leave, but a place to live and a place to write, in company with other prairie poets.

(1974)