I was born in Toronto
in 1940. The family moved to Markham in 1947 to be closer to the countryside.
We lived happily on 1/3 of an acre in an old brick house, raising
all kinds of animals (from hampsters and guinea pigs to eventually
a goat) and chickens.
In grade eleven I transferred from the Markham School to UTS in Toronto,
graduating in 1958 with an entrance scholarship to Trinity College
at the U. of T. There I studied Philosophy and English for my first
degree, followed immediately by a second degree in Divinity, and ordination
in the Anglican Church. By then I had fallen in love with history,
which I'd always hated when it was a matter of wars and treaties and
politics, but which I found fascinating when I discovered it could
also be about ideas, especially theological/religious ideas. I did
a master's at Yale, and then a doctorate back at Trinity, serving
as curate for part of the time at St. Simon's church in Toronto. At
one point I was working fulltime at St. Simon's, teaching part-time
at York University, and writing my doctorate.
I spent three years teaching at York, then two years of a post-doctoral
fellowship at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies at U.
of T. From there I went to McMaster Divinity College for six years,
returning to Atkinson College at York for the balance of my career,
teaching religious studies. For the last decade I also taught graduate
courses at Trinity College on fifth- and sixth-century themes.
I have been married three times. I have one son from the first marriage,
and three from the second. They have turned, sometimes to my surprise,
into wonderful young men. Between us, Cathy and I have seven children
(she provided me at last with a daughter!) and grandchildren becoming
too numerous to count.
Along the way I have lived in and sometimes wasted excessive amounts
of money on interesting houses, engaged with some wonderful gardens,
enjoyed making wine of wildly different qualities (and from wildly
different substances), spent happy times at cottages on various lakes,
savoured much wonderful music both ecclesiastical and secular, done
a bit of oil-painting (one of my paintings is on the cover of This
Grace of Light), and been honorary assistant in several Anglican
churches, whose congregations I have never failed to become very fond
of. Currently I am exceedingly fond of the congregation of St. Mark's
in Port Hope.
On-Line
with Patrick Gray
So, what
brought you to poetry?
It's not what brought me to poetry, but who. The answer is "my
parents". They read us A.A. Milne's Now We Are Six and When
We Were Very Young and the Winnie the Pooh books when my brothers
and I were in fact very young. Also Beatrix Potter. I guess I thought
it was perfectly natural to hear, read, and eventually to write
poetry. After all, both Winnie the Pooh and Rat from Wind in the
Willows at least dabbled in poetry.
As a family, we listened to Max Ferguson's original Rawhide radio
show on CBC, and that's where I first heard a very different kind
of poetry when Max played Dylan Thomas recordings. We bought the
recording of Child's Christmas in Wales, and it didn't take me long
to find Thomas reading poems like Fern Hill on the flipside. This
was powerful poetry unlike anything I'd ever heard, and I fell in
love with it.
Of course I was also exposed to the rich poetry of Anglican worship:
biblical passages, the psalms (read or sung extensively and daily
in chapel at college), hymns.
Still, I only dabbled in the stuff for much of my life: a few poems
for the school yearbook, the college literary review, that kind
of thing. It took a major change in my life, and a year of living
more or less alone on an island while I went through it, to turn
me into the much more active writer I am now. It took misery to
get me going, and now even happiness can't seem to stop me!
How would you describe your poetry?
I'm probably not the best person to describe it, but I'll give it
a try. It's very personal, I suppose, tapping into deep feelings
about nature, my experiences with other people, people I've cared
about or been touched by for good or ill, especially in the family.
For example, when we in the workshop had the challenge of writing
an elegy (or was it a threnody? Anyway, it was to be about someone
who'd died) I wrote about one of my brothers and two friends, people
whose deaths dated back as much as half a century, writing the poem
released deep feelings of grief and loss.
I write free verse, with only the occasional rhyme. While I want
a poem to distill things in denser and richer language than I would
normally use in conversation, I hope it sounds natural.
How did your poetry evolve?
Like anyone else, I began writing in familiar forms. Some of my
early poems were sonnets. During my "island experience"
the poems began to come out in free verse, the way they evidently
wanted to sound, and they just seemed to have a voice of their own
that was recognizably my voice. They take a slightly different form
each time, but they always sound like my poems, not somebody else's.
If I try to write something in a different voice, it sounds false
or forced, and I don't bother even trying anymore.
What inspires your poetry?
Nature, certainly. There's a lot of nature in This Grace of Light.
Less of that now. But concern for what's being lost-for instance,
I wrote a lamentation for the passing of the traditional Ontario
barn-which includes not just nature but also the history of our
times and places and people. Love, often the poet's standard. The
human struggle with living within the limits of time, and accepting
the implication, which is death. The folly of war and the approach
to addressing human problems that it represents.
Much of your poetry has reflected your family history in verse.
Is this a way of keeping a family record, albeit from a very personal
perspective?
Not intentionally. One of my sons did say to me within the last
couple of years, "Dad, you're the only one left who remembers
the stories. Instead of thinking that someday you're going to write
a complete family history, why don't you just sit down in front
of a video camera and tell us all the stories you can remember."
I still mean to do that for him and the other boys, but in the meantime
the poems do some of that job. The job they really do for me, probably,
is the one I referred to in the poem "Genealogy": They
help me to discover who I am by "echolocation".
Your thoughts on the CPW.
I love the Cobourg Poetry Workshop. For me, I'm always writing with
the idea of a hearer or hearers-I'm looking for that "waiting
ear", as I put it in one poem. It's an act of communication,
of sharing. And I like to hear poetry that's different from mine,
other voices, to show me things I'd never thought of, in words I
wouldn't have chosen myself. It's fascinating how poetry that, if
I saw it on a page, might not make any connection with me, can be
wonderful when I hear it read by it's author.
Who are your favourite poets?
As you'd guess, I love Dylan Thomas. Probably I've spent more time
with T.S. Eliot than with any other poet, because I love his use
of language, and we share a deep interest in religion. Ditto for
Hopkins, and of course Donne and Herbert, and the other so-called
metaphysical poets. A friend introduced me recently to W.S. Merwin,
someone I think will become a favourite.
What are you reading these days?
I've been buying poetry books by and from our various Third Thursday
readings, including the big collection by Paul Durcan I got for
a song-fascinating not just for the poetry, but for the view it
gives into Ireland over many years. I dip into Madeleine l'Engle
from time to time. In prose, I've found recent adaptations of Dickens
and Austen for the big or small screen have set me reading or re-reading
things like Emma and Little Dorrit.
Which poets do you most admire?
Is this different from the previous question about which poets are
my favourites? I think I admire the same ones. Well, I should say
also that, in another way, I admire-in the sense of being amazed
by- the people who do things with poetry that are utterly unlike
what I do: performance poets, really good rhyming poets, the Four
Horsemen.
How did your recent book come about?
I wasn't thinking about a book, really, just enjoying writing poems
and sharing them with the CPW. But other people were publishing,
including several in the North Shore series with Hidden Brook Press.
Richard Grove heard me for the first time, I think, at a reading
in Belleville, and eventually This Grace of Light was the
result of a conversation we started there.
Read about Patrick's
book
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