What are your thoughts about reading your poetry in Cobourg at the POW! Festival?

For two summers, years ago, 1985, 1986, maybe, I taught poems at The Ganaraska Writers' Festival in Port Hope. It was held at Trinity College School, the boys' school, the boys away for the summer.

Lots of good folks taught there also then: Joe Rosenblatt, Leon Rooke, Jane Urquhart, the late Joan Finnigan… I haven't been in the area much since then.

We are excited that POW! will function as a launch for your brand, spanking new book. Please tell us about your book and also a little about any other books you've had that "saw print."

Well, books don't so much "see" print as become it, taking those long twisted sketchy routes up from cursive explorations, then getting woven into paths that are standardized as type, sometimes, eventually…

My first book was published in Mexico City in 1973 when I was 20; full of typos (both me & it), but a lovely embarrassment nonetheless. I got on my knees & smelled the pages.

Since then I've published when I could, usually every 4 years, not counting chapbooks & broadsides…

I was lucky to have had Brick Books as my publisher for 20 years. I did 6 books with them.

My most recent publications have been White Porcupine from BookThug in 2008, and in 2009 Ghost Gum from Beautiful Outlaw Press.

I am very pleased to have this new book with Pedlar Press. In The Little Seamstress I have returned to the use of individual titles, while continuing to explore the sequence.

There are some essay-poems too. And increasingly the triptych intrigues me.

At POW!, do you plan to solely read pieces from your book? Do you plan to read other work as well?

I'll probably just read from The Little Seamstress, unless there are requests…

When did you start writing poetry and what prompted it?

I started before I knew any better; & luckily, eventually, it became a compulsion, which means I couldn't stop if I wanted to & just have to follow the pull, the push, the vowels, the quirks.

This compulsion is evolving too, from statement to listening, from personality to "a mind of winter," from meaning to keening.

Can you describe (a little) your writing process in creating a new poem?

I have worked in & from daily notebooks since I was sixteen. Most of what I gather this way isn't the poem, but a practice toward the poem, a tinkering so rough it is close to drawing.

I keep to the notebook as long as possible. I don't rush to poem, unless poem rushes to me. (When it does, it is usually epigrammatic or phrasal.)

What nags has promise. I gather words & quotes & expressions diversely. Waiting.

Am reluctant to spell out. Reluctance is prolific!

The POW! Festival is built on the notion that poetry should not be relegated to an existence as "a niche art form" that the average person doesn't care about.

I used to agree, vehemently, but I don't any more.

I am driven to make something akin to a dry stone wall
out of nothing but vowel sounds.

I call the results my song, a mere squeak.

Akin, because I admire dry stone walls. They rock…

A mere squeak --- the all-consuming ambition once
of a fossil in one of the stones…or an actual live cricket…

But I know my squeak is no fence. Or fossil. Or cricket…

A language wall, then? No.
As DH Lawrence says, "Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me."

One has to get so small & quiet to hear my poem
the listener almost vanishes…

As I need to almost vanish to make it…

There is no average person.
I don't mean we are all unique.

I mean something akin to what Gertrude Stein means
when instead of saying some large number she writes "one & one & one & one…"

I try to talk of this poem not of poetry.

Trust the urge to make, not the desire to be heard.

To write a fresh line has never been to aver the age…