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

I am looking forward to it very much. Although I live in Cobourg, I have never had the opportunity to give a reading here. It will be a great thrill.

Please tell us about your most recently published book and also a little about any other books you've had that "saw print."

My most recent book of poems is Boxing the Compass (Montreal: Signal Editions, 2009). Carmine Starnino, the editor, thought it would be a good idea to pull together the best of my work over twenty-five years. He made the choices and they are better than any I could have made. The book includes some recent work such as a long sequence of poems on my journeys across the United States by Greyhound and Amtrak in the aftermath of 9-11.

I have had two earlier books of poems: Republic of Solitude (St. John's: Breakwater, 1994) and Crossing the Straits (Toronto: St Thomas Poetry Series, 2004).

What can I say about them? I feel better about letting other people say things. Here are some quotes from reviews of Crossing the Straits:

George Elliott Clarke (Halifax Herald): "Rick Greene crafts poems as intricately sculpted as those miniature schooners that old salts stick in clear bottles. His writing adopts the precision of Ol' Tom Eliot, the openness of George Bowering (our first poet laureate), and the narrative cadence of E.J. Pratt." W. J. Keith (CBRA): "a diction that is dignified, precise, and always appropriate to the occasion… A fine achievement." Amanda Jernigan (ARC): "Greene's use of the organizing metaphor is canny; it makes us read the book as more than the sum of its parts … his verse is so masterfully economical …." . Marney Parsons (The Fiddlehead):"…beautifully apt … accomplished … Here are deeply thoughtful poems about the nature of the soul's journey through life …" Jeffery Donaldson (UTQ): "Greene writes a formal but no less intimate and familiar lyric, usually autobiographical but also historical (both ancient and ancestral). This fine book has a kind of Joycean, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, arc to it, … Greene heads off to forge in the smithy of his soul the uncreated conscience of his race."

Of course, forgive me for quoting the reviews - it is boasting by proxy.

At POW!, do you plan to read pieces from your book (or books)?
Do you plan to read new, unpublished work?

Mostly published stuff, but maybe a three or four that are recent and unpublished.

How would you describe your poetry?

That is a terribly hard question to answer. It is, by most standards, formal. I often use strict forms, and my use of free verse is fairly conservative (for example, my lines are relatively long and break on substantial words); my work is becoming more and more observant of the world around me, but the core is religious and I have keen sense of providence. So what I see is only the beginning of what there is to see. I am blessed with a good ear, and I like to think that my words have a distinctive music. I tend to move about in poetry a fair bit - Newfoundland, England, Ontario, the United States, and other places. I am not the slightest bit prolific - years can go by without my writing a word.

When did you start writing poetry and what prompted it?

I was an earnest teenager. Isn't that how things always start? But I learned a great deal about the craft of poetry in the 1980s from a British poet named Peter Levi. Several Canadian poets have had a great impact on me - A. F. Moritz, John Reibetanz and Philip Gardner - Gardner is to my mind Canada's best poet, but hardly anyone knows about his work. I reviewed it a few years back in the National Post. Kildare Dobbs is a very great Canadian writer, and he and Sheldon Zitner helped me, by example, figure out to get my sense of humour into poetry. There are poets throughout the world whom I respect greatly - Gwyneth Lewis is the national poet of Wales, and she is very fine. I admire Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, Geoffrey Hill, and Richard Wilbur. Among an earlier generation, I have an unbounded admiration for Edith Sitwell, a poet whose biography I am writing, and for her brother, Sacheverell Sitwell. I think my poetry has been heavily influenced by Stephen Spender, especially in his observation of concrete things and complex situations. Eliot and Yeats, of course, though that no longer "goes without saying."

What inspires you to put pen to paper / fingers to keyboard?

Even though my poems are often funny, they are also sad. Many people die in my poems. I am told that I am a writer of elegies - poems in memory of the dead. Also, I think the world is radiantly holy. Even to describe the world in the most concrete terms is an act of rejoicing. Pen to paper is a kind of gladness.

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

The process varies from poem to poem. A sonnet is very inward and intense, the rhyme scheme forces one word and image back on another, and the effect is very concentrated. Other times I write blank verse (unrhymed lines of ten syllables) - this is more open-ended and expansive. When I have written a poem, it has to be commented on by other poets, and I rely on a workshop at Victoria College at the University of Toronto. Poems have to be rewritten brutally. I have poems of say twelve lines that have gone through forty drafts. Most beginning poets don't realize this is what you do. Even a free verse poem is subject to enormously rigorous technical standards. Some things I write don't make the grade and they vanish into the deeper places of my hard drive.

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.
How do you respond to that?

A good poem will have depths that are not exhausted at a single reading or a second reading or a third. This includes poems which are, at a glance, accessible. So I guess that poetry requires a certain patience on the part of readers - a willingness to be surprised and surprised again by the same words. On the other hand, human beings live in words, and like fish we are unlikely to forget about the water for long. Words are our home, and that is the guarantee that poetry will persist.