Glen Sorestad
What it's like to be a young poet
Where Does the Poet Come From?
In Robert Kroetsch's inventive poetic reflections in The Seed Catalogue, he asks and re-asks the question, "How do you grow a poet?" When I consider that I have been writing and publishing my own poetry now since the end of the 1960s, I've many times pondered that very question in relation to my own poetic journey. In fact, I think I've answered the question in interviews and in classrooms many, many times now. Each time, it seems to me, with a different answer. Even now, I can not be certain just what the right answer is to that question. Nor whether there is ever one correct answer at all.
As far back as I can trust my own memory, I have been in love with the sounds of language, with music and the musicality of spoken words, from my earliest memories of childhood nursery rhymes to the experiences of listening to both music and song, story and verse. I read before I ever went to school and I still think of reading as one of the most pleasurable experiences we are granted as
humans. Reading, for me, opened the door to more enjoyable sound and rhythm and the magic of story. Is the poet formed in the cradle with the sound of mother's singing, father's voice intoning "Wee Willie Winkie runs through the town..." in that sweet tranquillity that comes just before sleep? Is the poet's beginning as a listener?
Or does the poet begin with the joyous clash of vowels and consonants and the tumbling roll of syllables in the mouth? Between the ages of ten and fifteen I went to a one-roomed country school and
one of the sharpest memories of my education there was that I enjoyed literature, especially memorizing and reciting poetry, something that appears to have fallen from favour in contemporary
education. We were asked to memorize a relatively small amount of poetry each year, but I memorized many, many poems between grade six and grade eight especially, some of which I can still recite today. "On either side the river lie/Long fields of barley and of rye/That clothe the wold and meet the sky/And through the fields a road runs by/To many-towered Camelot"...I write this entirely from memory and there may be imperfections in what I have written down. But I loved the wondrous sound of Tennyson's "The Lady of Shallot" when I was twelve or thirteen, loved it with a passion. I still do. I loved the alliterative lines of Walter de la Mare, the pounding hoof beats of the highwayman's horse in the poem of Alfred Noyes. Though, of course, I never told anyone this at the time. I was, after all, a normal adolescent and didn't talk about my feelings at all. Was this the poet, already becoming infused with poetic hormones?
In a prairie town high school Literature class I had a truly remarkable teacher who read poems with zeal and verve to his mostly uninterested students, most of whom could not wait to be finished
with school and either back on their family farms or off finding work in some more exotic locale. I was sixteen and not much different. But I loved hearing Mr. Clotsman pour his heart and soul into
the poetry he was reading. I didn't know that he wrote poetry. He never told his students. I thought poets lived in England or the United States and were mostly dead. One day he read a poem that I think may have changed the world for me, though I didn't really know it at the time. He read Anne Marriott's "The Wind Our Enemy" and when I heard it, I was spellbound and my skin was prickly. Here was poetry that was not about distant times and places, or ladies locked in stone towers, but poetry about something that was close at hand, something I'd heard my parents and farming relatives talk about many, many times through my childhood. I was completely caught off-guard. And furthermore, the author was alive and lived in Canada. It was an amazing revelation: poetry could be written about ordinary people and places, just like those with which I was so familiar. Did the poet emerge from this realization?
Even with the memories I've described, I didn't actually write a single poem then at least not that I recall. I had to wait another fifteen years, until I reached my thirties and was a married man with a family, before I finally began to write poems and thus embarked on the long journey to becoming the poet I am now. I am still on that journey, still in love with words and sounds and rhythms. A well-read or well-recited poem still sends shivers up and down my spine, just as it did when I was a small child and a boy in a country school and a teenager in a stuffy high school classroom. I hope poetry never loses this mysterious and powerful effect for me.