[excerpt: interview]

Laurence Hutchman: in conversation with Tim Lilburn

Ralph Gustafson, George Johnston, P.K. Page, Fred Cogswell, Louis Dudek, Al Purdy, Anne Szumigalski, James Reaney, Brian Bartlett, Roo Borson, George Elliott Clarke, Travis Lane, John B. Lee, Daniel Lockhart, Bruce Meyer, A.F. Moritz, Sue Sinclair, Colleen Thibaudeau, Di Brandt, Herménégilde Chiasson, Lorna Crozier, Mary Dalton, Keith Garebian, Robert Hilles, Liz Howard, Tim Lilburn, and John Steffler…

“My, my,” Lily Alice, my late grandmother (Prairie-born, late-in-life alfalfa farmer in the southern Okanagan), would have remarked at the sight of the many, many poets with whom Laurence Hutchman has conversed, “that man’s a talker.”

All kidding aside, across the three volumes of In the Writers’ Words (published between 2011 and 2026), Hutchman, an accomplished and prolific poet himself, has talked shop, and at length, with dozens of poets.

Taken together, the interviews and the books that contain them, serve as an archive of the writers behind the verse—their histories, processes, changes in direction, inspirations, interests, questions and concerns, philosophies, and beliefs; and, of course, their sentiments about poetry itself.

Plus, in the case of Vancouver Island resident Tim Lilburn (Numinous Seditions: Interiority and Climate Change), a poet’s reminiscences “recreational crime” (in his adolescence) and a brief (juvenile) career in hockey: “After mulling this offer over for a few weeks, I decided to let this opportunity pass. I didn’t think I could match the competition. I never had a decent shot, part of the problem being my stick, which had the flexibility of a 2X4.”

The British Columbia Review would like to thank Laurence Hutchman and publisher Guernica Editions for permission to reprint the following interview excerpt. —BJG

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Laurence Hutchman: In the introduction to Living In The World As If It Were Home Dennis Lee wrote, “He grew up in a rough neighbourhood where his father was a mailman, and his mother worked in a dress store. His main after-school interests seem to have been hockey and fighting.” What stands out to you about your experience growing up in Regina?

Tim Lilburn: I grew up in northwest Regina, a couple of blocks west of the then CNR Lewvan Line in a neighbourhood that stretched to Benson School, a little beyond even, and included the often empty Government House, the former residence of the Lieutenant Governor of the North West Territories and Wascana Creek. The neighbourhood was and is solidly working class; both of my parents worked, my mother in sales and my father as a letter carrier and later in city sortation. The area was semi-rural at its western fringe. My brother and I could leave our house, cross the Government grounds, Luther College’s practice field and be at the creek at the point where it left the city in about twenty minutes. We roamed freely; it was an outdoor and unconstrained life, especially in summer. The Pelletier family lived two doors down, and my brother and I connected ourselves to it, John, the son a little older than I, his three sisters and their parents.

I don’t want to make my growing up to seem too bucolic, the creek, the roaming. Our pack, the Pelletier kids excluded, dabbled in recreational crime, what we supposed to be imagination-expanding crime, one botched B&E, regular shoplifting (also failed) and fighting. It felt like we were always on our toes ready for a possible brawl or a cashier looking away to talk to a customer. I managed to veer away from this form of life in my early teens, but some friends held on to it. I was close to more people who ended up in jail than went to university.

I was also involved in sports, hockey, football, baseball. I was too small to go on in football, too clumsy for baseball but hockey fit fine. I played in an organized league in the Regina Pats development system at the bantam and midget levels. I was far from a star but in midget was selected to be on the second all-Regina all-star team, and on the strength of this, was invited to a try-out with the Pats. After mulling this offer over for a few weeks, I decided to let this opportunity pass. I didn’t think I could match the competition. I never had a decent shot, part of the problem being my stick, which had the flexibility of a 2X4.

LH: What was high school like for you?

TL: My family had difficulty graduating from high school. My mother had a Depression era grade eight, after which she worked on neighbouring farms and later for well-to-do families in Winnipeg and Regina. My father left school after grade eleven to help support his family, and I was kicked out of high school as I was about to enter my final year. At first, though, I found high school enthralling, illuminating. Real thinking seemed to be a possibility. I discovered the work of John Steinbeck in a grade ten English class, and in him I found the social and emotional power of literature. I tried to get into Whitman at this time, and I may have stumbled across Dylan Thomas, or this encounter happened a little later. With friends, I was listening to the Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde. Another enlightened English teacher drew me into writing. But I still had a lot of wildness in me, and I took a run at school authority and ended up being expelled. I had an idea I would hitch-hike to Southern California and winter there (maybe Steinbeck whispering to me) and had my girlfriend drop me off at the south edge of the city. Thankfully, no one offered me a ride, and I walked back to town in the evening.

I made a more structured get-away a month or so later. My United Church minister put me in touch with an outfit in the village of Naramata in the Okanagan, which welcomed youth like me who were in some difficulty, vocational, psychological, spiritual. I am very grateful to the Naramata Centre Winter Sessions for welcoming me and engaging me in their projects. I felt heard and supported in this community and, while there, continued the writing experiment I’d started in high school. But Naramata didn’t heal me. My late teens were full of drinking, drug-taking, suicidal ideation and the almost complete absence of direction.

LH: Looking back on your early twenties, which moments from that wild chapter do you remember most vividly?

TL: In the summer I turned twenty-one, a remarkable event occurred to me. What to call it? How to describe it? An epiphany? An interior shift? Socrates’s turning around of the soul, philosophy’s terminus? A lyrical correction? It was some sort of conversion, alteration, quintessential, unmistakably Christian, but a touch odd in that respect. The moment and its comet’s tail was a shock. It was like suddenly realizing where I was. The experience was a sharp notification of the expanse of what was possible. Though I didn’t grasp it at the time, a force that drew out all of me, the writing, the philosophy, the dreaming, the eros to know had clicked on. I was a very long walk away from the later Plato days, the time of writing the essays in the book Going Home, say, but I see now that this moment was my version of meeting the Socratic daimonium.

What was this new place, I wondered. I looked for other footprints in the sand and came upon Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain, the poetry and some of the tamer prose of John of the Cross, The Cloud of Unknowing, Margery Kempe. You couldn’t find anything as wild and deep as this in the United Church, my mother’s church with its beautiful Social Gospel. I learned that a Trappist monastery existed in St. Norbert, Manitoba and wrote to the community which graciously invited me to visit, and a particular mode of life was underway. My head straightened out; I went back to university, finished my BA and eventually got enough credits in Education to get a Saskatchewan Teachers’ Certificate. Late that winter, I entered the Catholic church.

Are poets contemplatives? No. Not all or even many would be comfortable with this description. But the deep looking we are talking about here does turn up as a factor in the poetry of certain writers: Jan Zwicky, Basil Bunting, John of the Cross, etc. Here poetry, plunging philosophy and mystical theology come quite close to one another.

LH: The book Names of God marks a shift in focus from the spiritual lives of saints in section one to the tangible elements of farm life of the second section in poems such as “Stones,” “Sunflowers At Prime,” and “Pumpkins.” The latter is a tour de force with its onomatopoeia, a wide range of allusions and a cavalcade of images reminiscent of the energetic movement of Allen Ginsberg’s poems. How did such a poem with a cornucopia of images come about?

TL: Your question points to a bit of a mystery. The same ekstasis you see in parts of Names of God stretches into Tourist to Ecstasy, my second book, and even into From the Great Above She Opened Her Ear to the Great Below. And there was eruptive joy behind that early tumble of language. Looking back, that linguified joy seems strange or oddly placed because the years in which those three books were written were a time of instability, failure, drifting, bereftness—leaving the Jesuits, having no stable income, working as an incompetent farm hand, all this occurring alongside that cascade of words. Strange. But something significant was being launched at that time. I felt close to the animals and plants I was working with and wanted to talk about this, sing within this. With Moosewood Sandhills, I took another direction.

LH: What does your process of writing a poem look like, and how do you recognize when it’s truly finished?

TL: Poems for me almost always start with confusion: a phrase pops up, and I write it down and wonder what it is. I spoke of “nudge” and “bother” earlier. Sometimes the inaugural phrase comes out of, or is influenced by, something I’ve been reading or something I have seen: the cliff behind the house in the early morning in that early light, how it looks like a breaching whale or mammoth shark surfacing with speed.

As Lydia Davis says “the first pleasure is this encounter with something coming in.” When this beginning cluster of words is on the page, others join it, some to be later discarded, and gradually a form appears, coming more out of the poem than intention, and I spend considerable time thinking about this form—what might be it in its deepest truth. That cliff/whale/shark link is menacing; it speaks of engulfing power released, my amazement before this power in stone, and I want this energy to permeate the whole poem. The energy I speak of here, in my mind, is eros, its astonishment, its delight, on display in the Names of God poems, but in fact in different ways in all my work.

When is the poem finished? When it walks away from you. The poem has no further need of your ministration, and it turns away and strides toward the reader.

LH: You begin your book of essays, Going Home, by quoting George Grant from his book Technology and Empire: “Descendants of European settlers never would be able to hold the gods of the New World as their own, so never would be ‘autochthonous’ where they are, no matter how long the history of their stay on the continent might be.” One day, when you returned to Regina, you experienced the sensation in which the buildings seemed to be floating, and you contrasted it with “the Aboriginal men, still moving and talking in the park, certainly were autochthonic; they rose effortlessly from the ground.” Your next books attempted to overcome this separation from nature and establish a real relationship with the land. Can you delve deeper into what this relationship means to you?

TL: Moosewood Sandhills and Going Home were the first two books where I tried to escape from the lightness, the untetheredness, I had just discovered in myself. Out of the blue, I was engulfed by the conviction that I had no substantial link to where I was, nor did I know how to build one or even to imagine what such a link might look like for me and neither did my culture: its buildings, beliefs, political economies floated inches above the ground as did I, leaning elsewhere. We were here but not here.

These two books and other exercises I engaged in, sleeping on the land, holding the gaze of a deer, were attempts to build or grow a weight that would allow me to sink into a place. Psychology was of no help here. These matters, far from being a kind of interior hypochondria, were life or death issues for me. The death being the common death of an inattentive life.

LH: Around the time you left the Jesuits, your first book of poems, Names of God, was published by Oolican Books. While attending a writing workshop in Fort San, Saskatchewan, Gary Geddes encouraged you to submit a manuscript to a publisher. Can you share the journey of how the book came to life?

TL: In the early 1980s, I started to feel a little wobbly in the Jesuits. I’d just finished a M.A. in philosophy at Gonzaga University, and it was clear I was not going to be able to continue into PhD studies in the Order. I also wanted somehow to get back into poetry in a more focused way. The Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild had set up a summer workshop at the old TB sanatorium in the Qu’Appelle valley for poets who were close to completing a manuscript, Gary Geddes leading it. I signed up with a handful of poems, some of which found their way into my first book. Gary was and is a brilliant, generous editor and was very supportive of the work I showed him. At the end of the two week Fort San session, he told me that if I could come up with twenty or so more poems like the ones he’d seen, he would help me find a publisher, or, if this didn’t work out, he’d go back into publishing—he’d just sold Quadrant Press—and do the book himself. I am still grateful to him for his support. His generosity and affirmation emboldened me.

LH: In Moosewood, Sandhills, you dug a root cellar, a weem, to be close to nature. The poems are reminiscent of Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale,” where the speaker identifies himself with the bird. This concept is also evident in Hopkins’s poem “God’s Grandeur,” particularly when we engage with it from a more intimate perspective. What are your thoughts on this idea?

TL: I’ve never been that handy with tools; I had no idea what a lag bolt was and had no clear notion of how to build a wall. I’d run out of steam in some writing project and was looking for something else to do. A friend had put into my mind the idea that I might build a root cellar with a south-facing exposure. One afternoon in late summer, I just started digging into a sandhill behind the house, and eventually I came to a depth where I couldn’t throw the sand out of the hole without it just trickling back in. Once I’d built the room in the pit, I buried it and made a descending path to the door, the only visible part of the structure. The roof was flat and made of plywood, topped with straw bales. In the end, I did keep some carrots in the cozy subterranean hut. I wanted to find some way into where I was, and this digging and building were part of the undertaking. I slept there in the hole a couple of times. On hot days I would go there to read.

It’s quite possible the people who now own the property in the sandhills have no idea of this buried structure. I built it to last, so suspect it’s still there, lots of concrete and rebar in the footings. The buried room seemed to me to be an outpost, as you suggest, a reaching into a wild world I didn’t know well, a kind of desperate probe.

LH: In your three books, Moosewood Sandhills, To the River and Kill-site, you seem to move away from Descartes, Kant and more traditional philosophy toward a first-person point of view in the works of modern philosophers Heidegger and Husserl. You were particularly interested in Husserl and his “philosophical approach that focuses on the structure of experience and the way it is directed toward objects or phenomena.” Can you talk about what led to this shift in your thinking?

TL: These three books are a sort of unplanned trilogy in that all of them come out of an extended encounter with land in the Saskatoon area and other north central Saskatchewan locations, the South Saskatchewan River, Moosewood Sandhills, Big Quill Lake, the Porcupine Hills, places I would wander through. I was still searching for a feeding home and a more substantial self. And I was coming to realize how impoverished I was in these ways. The shift in these poems from what I was writing in the Eighties and early Nineties is not philosophical but stylistic and having to do with breath and the line.

Why did this shift occur? It’s still a mystery to me. At the time, I was disturbed by this new voice, but decided to go along with it since there seemed to be no choice. I had no access to the old way. This kind of sudden, unbidden alteration has happened throughout my writing life: a prairies realism (poems mostly unpublished) preceded Names of God; everything changes between Kill-site and Orphic Politics; Assiniboia makes another shift. After a time, I come to welcome the new way.

LH: Which authors have had a lasting impact on your worldview and writing style?

TL: So many writers have influenced me. Let me come up with an abbreviated list—Christopher Okigbo, Xi Chuan, Tomasz Rozycki, Jan Zwicky, Peter O’Leary. On the essay side of things I’ll add Merton, Henry Corbin, Ibn ‘Arabi.

LH: You taught Creative Writing at the University of Victoria for many years. What insights can you share with aspiring poets?

TL: Find your eros, the elemental thing that must be said in you, and then do what you want. And find good and honest editors. Have a good time.

The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors: Trevor Marc Hughes (nonfiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

“Only connect.” – E.M. Forster