A ‘small glass bell over astonishment’

Interview by Laurence Hutchman            

In some circles, Lorna Crozier is a household name.
Certainly, she is in mine.
Over many years, we have had lively conversations
regarding poetry, and I decided it was time to convey
these ideas in an interview that will introduce the poet
and her distinguished work. —Laurence Hutchman

Laurence Hutchman: When I read your poems, I’m struck with the way in your poems you engage the world directly through a natural sense of rhythm, original diction, provocative metaphors, and celebratory tone. Did you always have this facility or was it developed over time? 

Lorna Crozier: Part of a poet’s voice is a deep, internal rhythm: the way the body moves through the world, the speeding up of the heartbeat brought on by specific things that spark and dazzle, the catch of breath at beauty or its opposite. Stanley Kunitz describes rhythm as the taste of the self. My taste of self, to borrow his phrase, creates, without me thinking about it, the cadence in the poems, the word choice, the metaphors. As to the celebratory tone? When I’m not despairing, I am head-over heels in love with the world and its creatures—how can I not attempt to praise them in my poems? Poems allow the writer to place a small glass bell over astonishment, and let it linger and not slip away. 

LH: You have incredible concentration when you observe nature. The clarity of the poet and the ability to create art is often based on the power of concentration that directly impacts the accuracy of the poet’s observation. “The task: to see clearly / so that even the ear becomes a kind of eye.” How did you develop this capacity?

LC: Perhaps I was lucky as a child to grow up in a house that had few cultural distractions. There were only a few books, neither of my parents were readers, and the art on the walls consisted of copper-pounded constructions my father had won at a curling bonspiel.

It was in nature that I sought and found beauty. “Nature” is perhaps too big a word for the small-city neighbourhood I grew up in, the yards of my friends and the back alleys where we ganged up and played games that involved a lot of running. We were outside all the time, traveling the town on foot or on our bikes. Alone or with a friend, I remember kneeling on the sidewalk and following strings of black ants to their nests, marvelling at the white eggs they carried in their jaws. We listened to crickets singing in the rock wall that separated my yard from the neighbour’s, we caught bees in mason jars and let them go, we tried to rescue damaged birds. It was obvious to me that if I paid attention, the beauty and curiosities that my domestic space lacked would reveal themselves and enrich my life.

LH: The prairie is an integral part of your life, and however small or insignificant it seems for some, this town in Saskatchewan where you were born and raised helped you to gain a self-knowledge; your identity resides here on the maternal and paternal side. We learn about your life, or more specifically your identity, by going through the pages of Small Beneath the Sky. 

LC: When I started writing Small Beneath the Sky, I didn’t want to write a memoir about my early life, though that’s what the press, Greystone, encouraged me to do. I didn’t think my childhood stories were dramatic enough. To give myself permission to get the words on the page (I’d already signed the contract), I decided the book would be less about me and more about the territory where I grew up, the grasslands of southwest Saskatchewan. What fascinated and fascinates me still is the effect of landscape on character. I would be a different person if I’d been born and raised on Vancouver Island where I live now. Images born in Saskatchewan that appear in my poems are there because that’s the place that formed my cells, my blood and bones. It’s the place that most occupies my imagination.

LH: In this memoir and in the book of poems Inventing the Hawk, you express a deep emotional connection without romanticizing your life in Saskatchewan when considering your relationship with both of your parents. This is evident when you are praising your mother’s perseverance when dealing with life’s difficulties, and standing firmly behind your father, a hard-working, honest man whose drinking was affecting both of you. It seems that you found a kind of understanding that protected you from being too sentimental in your poems, especially when confronted with your father’s illness and death.

LC: I wouldn’t call my father “honest,” though his felonies were of the minor kind, cheating Patrick, his son-in-law, when he sold him a second-hand car, lifting pipes from the oil patch and selling them and, when he drove a fuel-delivery truck, surreptitiously trading a tank of oil for a purebred pup. He was also a selfish man who drank too much, spent little time at home and never attended my brother’s hockey games or my school plays. But I learned in my mid-thirties, with Patrick’s help, to accept who he was and love him anyway. That love was always balanced with seeing him clearly with all of his foibles. I tried to write about him in that way, and that approach, perhaps protected me from sentimentality.

LH: What inspired you to start writing poems and to continue writing them?

LC: In grade one, my teacher tacked a poem I had written on the bulletin board and asked me to read it to the class. Maybe if I hadn’t received that pat on the head, I wouldn’t have become a writer. As for why I continue?  I’m a restless person, always trying to understand my place in the world, and to articulate all the losses we as humans are heir to. I’m happier when I’m in the arms of poetry than when I’m not. I love the way poetry makes writers open their ears and eyes and gives them time to pause in the light of wonder, and then move on, with some of the shine still inside them, and if we’re lucky, in the poem as well.

LH: In the late sixties and seventies, the international feminist movement emerged. Writers such as Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, and Germaine Greer fought for women’s rights, and more precisely for equality. What, as a young woman, did you learn from them?

LC: I read the books and was affirmed by them. Those writers gave language to what I was feeling and asserting as a young woman, but it was watching my mother’s power struggles with my father when I was a child than made me a feminist. The books gave me words for my rebellion and my vow to live differently, for instance to be the first in my extended family to go to university so that I’d be able to make a decent living and not depend on anyone else for financial support. The other writer who later had a profound effect on me was Adrienne Rich, her essays especially and the book Of Woman Born. And how could I not be influenced by the poetry of Margaret Atwood, not only her powerful woman’s voice but also her scalpel-like style, her line structure, her unusual way of exiting a poem. 

LH: There is also feminism reflected in the Canadian woman writers of this time: Bronwen Wallace, Mary di Michele, Anne Szumigalski, along with numerous others. Did your relationships with these writers influence your writing?

LC: Bronwen Wallace, Mary di Michele, and I were peers and good friends. I read with them at various festivals, spoke to Bronwen’s students in Kingston and Mary’s in Montreal, and travelled with Mary and others for a literary tour of Chile in the 1980’s. Bronwen and I had an epistolary exchange that lasted several weeks about the undermining of women’s narratives by a particular stream of postmodern language poets. Among the three of us, it’s hard to say who influenced whom, but we admired each other’s writing and shared similar concerns though we came at them in different ways. Anne Szumigalski, on the other hand, was the age of my mother and the first living poet I met. It was at the Saskatchewan Summer School of the Arts where I went in 1976 as a shy, aspiring poet. Though I never studied with her, and I’m not sure I’d call her a feminist, I loved her idiosyncrasies, her strange and compelling narratives and I read her work with delight. It showed me another thing poetry could be. 

LH: In 1978, your life dramatically changed when you met the poet, Patrick Lane. This meeting led to a lifelong commitment. 

LC: Most people can pinpoint one or two incidents that have radically changed their lives. In my case it was meeting Patrick Lane. I go into the story in detail in my book Through the Garden : A Love Story (with Cats), but to give a shorter version—when I was thirty, and he, thirty-nine, we became lovers, feisty, independent, onery and passionate from the time we met until his death almost forty years later, and we lived a daily life as artists who vowed to let nothing get in the way of our writing, not even each other. We protected each other’s writing time, we gave each other hope, edited one another’s poems, and pushed one another to be the best we could be in our poetry. There were sad times and extraordinary times, but we cherished one another, and I miss him terribly.

LH: A year later, both of you collaborated on the book of poetry No Longer Two People. You wrote: “These poems are the result of our desire to praise the moment of one and the moment of two and the terror when, because of language we were at times lost between those moments.” This book was quite controversial. Can you comment on this?

LC: A book like No Longer Two People, two poets/lovers in dialogue, hadn’t been seen in Canadian literature before. The outrage, I think, was that some felt we had bared our bodies and our souls in public, but in reality the poems are highly metaphoric and mythic. We were reading the collected works of Jung at the time and talking about archetypes and the anima and animus. Jung’s ideas and the electricity of our first months together sparked the series, which was written rapidly and with little concern for what others might think. The writers around St. John’s College at the University of Manitoba, including George Amabile, Robert Kroetsch, and Robert Enright were excited about the series and encouraged us to publish it with Turnstone

LH: You and Patrick published Alden Nowlan, Selected Poems with Anansi Press in 1996, which provides critical information about his style, the nature of the man and his contribution to Canadian literature. Could you elaborate why you were drawn to the work of this significant Canadian poet?

LC: What serious poet or reader of poetry could not love Alden Nowlan’s poems? He has a huge heart and a clear, vital spirit that vibrates below the surface of all of his work. He also has a love for the local, for people who normally don’t attract notice and wouldn’t know what to do if they did. I still consider him to be one of the best in this country or anywhere else.

LH: In the section “The Sex Life of Vegetables,” of The Garden Going On Without Us, you  write entertaining poems dealing with the members of a vegetable garden, such as carrots, radishes, and cabbages. In a similar vein to Sharon Olds, you found an original way of speaking of human sexuality.

LC: Sexuality is something that I didn’t want to throw a black cloth over in my writing. There was such repression when I grew up, and even in the sixties and seventies the double standard of my youth persisted. Women were still pressured to be “good girls,” and to deny desire. I want all of the human animal to be in my poems, and at times, I want to be bawdy, though it takes some bravery to dare to be that now in my mid-seventies. I wrote the Sex Lives of Vegetables series over forty years ago before I knew of Sharon Olds, and I find it amusing that the poems are still being censored in high school classrooms.

LH: I would like to turn to a few questions about the craft of writing poems. Poetry is often considered an oral art. One of the most important aspects of writing is rhythm.  How do you achieve this sense of music through words?  Is metre very important to you when writing a poem? When you write how aware are you of the individual sounds of words in your lines?  

LC: Music is what guides me through a poem. It’s the sound of one word or phrase , beyond any meaning, that leads me to the next, and on and on until the end of the poem. In the beginning I’m unlikely to know what I want to say so I trust the music. The half rhymes and alliterations, the rises and falls and the dance they do together are  much smarter than my conscious mind. I read every draft out loud, and sometimes compose when I’m walking, the fall of my steps and the swing of my legs and hips in every line. That natural rhythm is what I’d define as my inborn cadence, I don’t follow a formal meter, though I formally scan a line if it feels bumpy when I want it smooth. Muriel Rukeyser talks about a study that showed a group of people, too far away for their faces to be visible, approaching a camera. Those involved in the study could recognize someone they knew well—a spouse or sibling—by the way they walked. I could identify my own poems from a distance by focusing on their movement. 

LH: You have said that the line is distinct, yet another important aspect of the line is the line break, the space where one line transitions to another. There are so many possibilities of line breaks such as mimesis, dramatic change in an idea, etc. Your line breaks serve several different purposes. For example, in the poem “Still Life” from The Garden Going On Without Us, you create a kind of drama of emotion as in “frozen / moment,” “breathless / lake” “when you don’t know / I am looking,” “When you are / mad with guilt…”. Can you comment on this? 

LC: The versatility of the line is one of the reasons I write poetry. It guides the way the reader’s mind moves through the poem. The terminal word in the line is the place of most emphasis and it can tilt the floor under the reader’s feet. The enjambed line stands alone and has a certain meaning, but when you read on and complete the sentence, a second meaning occurs, and then another and another. It’s one way poems can contain so much more than their space allows. The line is also of course a unit of rhythm, of cadence and breath. It builds silence and pause into the poem and the hesitation at its end, emphasized by punctuation or not, creates suspense. There’s what Denise Levertov calls a half-comma at the end of the unpunctuated line which, in making the reader hesitate before moving on, makes the package of words stand on their own, more emphatic than if they’d been included in an unlineated sentence. The reader has no idea what is coming next in many free-verse lines. They expect one thing but the poet gives them another. The possibilities the line promises delight me.

LH: You have spoken about the importance of the ending of the poem. Do you have a sense of where the poem is going to end when you first begin to write it? Why is the ending of the poem so crucial?

LC: I never know how I’m going to end a poem when I start writing. If I did, I’d be bored and wouldn’t bother. I’ve learned to give the poem its head and let it take me where it wants to go. Hopefully, it finds the barn like a hungry horse and doesn’t just stop for no good reason or end up in the wrong place with no hay and no grass to chew on. The ending doesn’t work for me if its summative and clicks the poem shut. I want it to lead readers back in to the first line and what follows. It should make them want to read the poem again, partly to see where the ending came from and to understand the organic structure of the poem, how it holds together from the first line to the last. The ending shines a light on what has gone on before, yet it shouldn’t be predictable or expected. There needs to be a surprise but one whose clues have been laid from the opening phrase and carried through to the conclusion.

LH: French poets, Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, and Stéphane Mallarmé wrote prose poems in the nineteenth century. The form has become more popular now as poets began to write prose poems in English. You also were drawn to this form. In your opinion what are characteristics that differentiate the prose poem from a traditional poem? 

LC: I’ve written two books in the prose-poem form. One difference is of course obvious: the line is the unit in poetry; in the prose poem, it’s the sentence. But beyond that I like the prose form because it allows for more thinking to enter the poem, not just the thinking that images and metaphors do, which is a lot, but the exploration of ideas in a different way, the kind you find in essays. The markers of poetry are still there—the music, the tropes, the brevity—but there’s a bit more room to roam.

LH: You have said that you have been influenced by a number of writers, including Margaret Atwood, John Newlove, P.K. Page, and R.M. Rilke. These are powerful writers representing distinct poetic voice. What particularly drew you to these poets?

LC: I can’t go into a detailed appreciation of these writers—I’d need to do a long paper, but the three Canadians are amazing crafts people. They give you a handbook in craft with every poem they write. Rilke is something else. He shows you how deep it is possible to go in the writing of a poem. He shines an amazing intuition and intelligence on all the important questions. And he’s radically daring and imaginative. Imagine being able to write “My feelings sink as if standing on fishes”!

LH: Like Anne Szumigalski, you write poems from different angles and from unusual perspectives. The poem in the section “She Makes Me Beautiful“  from Human and other Beasts and “The Foetus Dreams” from The Weather are examples of this. By changing perspectives, one expands the possibilities of the poem and gives the reader the chance to see the poem from different viewpoints. 

LC: It’s a relief to be able to move out of one’s own personality, at least as far as it’s possible, and take on another’s perspective in a poem, whether it be Biblical characters as I do in Apocrypha of Light, or a character that lives in one’s imagination. I think doing that opens us up to empathy and to new territories to discover, ones that subvert and expand our own. 

LH: In your poetry the boundaries become reversed—human beings become animals and animals become humans as in the poem “What comes after” from Whetstone. You clearly empathize with nature, with animals. You try to feel what it is like to be in their skin. Can you elaborate on this point?

LC: How wonderful it would be to walk through my garden, even for a few minutes, in the body of my cat. I do the best I can to imagine the sensations of living in another’s skin, of looking at the forest through the eyes of an owl, of feeling the grass through the belly of a garter snake. Poems are shamanistic. They allow for shape shifting, at least of our minds if not our bodies. 

LH: I observed that you are always trying out new forms. The ghazal is an Arabic form concerned with loss and romantic love. Robert Bly is renown for his ghazals. When I had lunch with him, he talked about the form from his published collection, The Night Abraham Called to the Stars. You dedicated one section to ghazals in the book “If I Call Stones.” What triggered your interest in writing in this form?

LC: I’ve not only included ghazals in three of my books but written a small collection of them called Bones in Their Wings, and I concluded the series with quite a long essay about the form. I discovered them not through reading Bly, though I read him closely later, or through Ghalib, Hafiz or Rumi, but through the Canadian John Thompson, who wrote a dazzling collection of ghazals called Stiltjack published by Anansi in 1978. It blew Patrick and me away when we read it. We loved the sharpness of the imagery and the disconnectedness of the couplets. Thompson called the form “drunken and amatory” and those qualities remain what it attracts me to it. I want my poems that are not ghazals to have that same radical movement within them, that same inspired discursiveness. Patrick’s collection, A Linen Crow, A Caftan Magpie is a superb exploration of the form. 

LH: In the preface to A Saving Grace,how did you become interested in writing about the character of Mrs. Bentley, from the classic of Sinclair Ross’s As For Me And My House. It is intriguing how you interpreted the character Mrs. Bentley and constructed a narrative like the scenes of a play. In fact, you later worked on the play based on your series of poems about Mrs. Bentley.

LC: Mrs. Bentley, whose first name we never learn, is one of the most fascinating characters in Canadian literature. Critics either love or hate her. I was infatuated with her spiritual connection with the landscape I grew up in, the short-grass prairie of southwest Saskatchewan. As a character created by Ross, who spent his early childhood and young adulthood in the province, she portrays the landscape with great accuracy and beauty, even though it’s going through a drought and little is growing. 

Ross’s novel was the first in which I’d encountered my homeland in literature. He made me realize it was possible to come from that place, which at times seemed like nowhere, and tell its stories in book form. My friend, the poet Tina Biello, is embedding the poems I wrote in Mrs. Bentley’s voice into a play set in a small town in contemporary times. Many of the stories I tell through Mrs. Bentley’s persona in A Saving Grace veer away from Ross’s narrative and into my own family history. My parents, who grew up in the Depression, regaled me with tales of the drought and their impoverished life on their family farms. I wanted to embed what they’d told me in between Ross’s plot details and characterizations. I also wanted to give this complicated woman more agency. For example, she remains loyal to her difficult husband in the novel. In my series, she has an affair. She becomes a combination of Ross’s marvellous invention, my mother’s stories, others I came up with when I researched the Dirty Thirties, and my own relationship with that beautiful and harsh landscape. 

LH: In Small Mechanics, you take an unusual perspective trying to see things as things in themselves, moving from a more anthropomorphic viewpoint to a world of possibility when showing grass, butterflies in the poems “Facts” and “Lichen.” 

LC: I like to remind myself that each thing in the world exists as its own entity, with or without the human gaze. Part of a poet’s task for me is to see what that thing is in all its facets by finding the factual but also embedding it with the imaginative. I love Montaigne’s line “See how many ends this stick has.” The poet always sees more than two. I also go back to Ponge’s phrase “the thickness of things.” That idea was behind my Book of Marvels: A Compendium of Everyday Things. I turned my poet’s eye on the doorknob, the rake, the wheelbarrow, mops, zippers, etc., to discover their complexity and their imaginative possibilities. In doing so, I hope the poems announced that everything is interesting. As Gwendolyn MacEwan wrote, “I wish I could be bored by something.”

LH: In your books, especially after Small Mechanics, there is a shift in focus. We can observe greater leaps from one idea to the next, from one metaphor to the next which creates a different type of poem, inviting the reader to decipher the gap, and make the link. Were writers such as John Asbury, Robert Haas, and W.S. Merwin influential in this change in perspective?

LC: I am a great fan of Robert Hass and W. S. Merwin for different reasons. Hass’s poems have such a deep intelligence and yet such an engagement with the natural world. Merwin’s takes on the world are so unusual that sometimes you feel as if he’s writing in a different language. For the length of the poem, you suddenly understand it. It’s obvious, I think, that he has done a lot of translations. The feel of other mother tongues enters his poems. The leaps within my poems in the work after Small Mechanics I think have less to do with reading Hass and Merwin and more to do with working in the ghazal form, extending it beyond the couplet to three-line stanzas, and when I wasn’t working in that form, trying to pull its discursiveness into free verse poems, working harder to let the free associations make their own kind of sense and inevitability beyond the linear. I wanted to disrupt the poem’s cohesion, yet find a way that it could hang together. 

LH: Some poets are tempted to write ekphrastic poems. You collaborated on the book In The House the Spirit Builds with photographers Peter Coffman and Diane Laundry. Jan Zwicky also collaborated with a photographer Robert V. Moodie when they created the book, Sixty-Seven Ontological Studies. What challenges, if any, did you encounter based on the images of “the special place” in Wintergreen?

LC: I’ve collaborated with photographers twice, first with the nature photographer Ian McAllister on a book based on the Great Bear Rainforest and called The Wild in You, and then with Peter Coffman and Diane Laundy on The House the Spirit Builds set in Wintergreen. The challenge in both cases was to write poems that didn’t explain or explicate the photographs but could sit alongside them, offering a different entry into the images. I hope the photographs and the poems together create a third entity which illuminates both.

LH: After some difficult years in Saskatchewan, you moved from Regina to Victoria, and have lived here for more than 30 years. In what way did this move change your writing?

LC: I had to encounter and get used to a totally different climate and landscape. Words like “rhododendron” started to appear in my poems. But the big difference was that I began a full-time academic job, teaching the writing of poetry. I had to become aware of poetry in a different way—to figure out aspects of craft that had been intuitive so that I could teach in a pragmatic way. I had to also come to terms with keeping my own sense of ambiguity and a comfort with the unknowable. You have to have a certain amount of assurance to stand in front of a classroom, but too much can hurt your own work and misrepresent the wild side of poetry.

LH: You and Patrick taught Creative Writing at the University of Victoria for many years. What were the important aspects of writing that you try to teach your students? Mary Oliver said that poets are born, not created. Do you agree with this idea? What advice would you give to younger poets now? 

LC: I like teaching the technical aspects of poetry: the function of the free-verse line and the various ways you can shape it, the oral aspects and the ways you can enrich the music, the difference between image and metaphor, the various effects of different kinds of diction and points of view. I don’t think we can ever know enough about those things. At the same time, there’s a sensibility and a belief in the numinous that perhaps can’t be taught. But doing a lot of reading and hanging around creative people can go a long way to helping someone who isn’t born a poet to become one. I’ve encountered students who drove me crazy in classes because I didn’t think they were “getting it.” They went on after graduation to be fine, fine poets. The best advice I can give is to read, read, read, and don’t be afraid of being influenced by those who have gone before you. Patrick encouraged students to perform daily piano exercises, especially ones that helped them learn about half rhymes and hidden rhymes. 

LH: At the end of the interview, I must ask you, what are you planning to write next as you open a new chapter in your life?

LC: M&S last year published After That, a book of poems about loss and grief. I don’t know if I’ll continue in that vein or not. I always find that I fall into a period of silence and stasis that seems to last a long time after a book comes out, as if it has to float further and further down the river away from me before a new thing comes into view around the bend. Because I had so much fun writing The Book of Marvels, I’ve started a new compendium of things, in alphabetical order. Again, they’re prose poems. For now, the manuscript opens with “Accordion,” and I’ve written the last poem, “Zero.” When I’m ready to get going again, I’ll probably start working on the letters that fall in between. 

Laurence Hutchman grew up in Toronto and now lives in Victoria. He received his PhD from the Université de Montreal, and for twenty-three years he was a professor of English literature at the Université de Moncton at the Edmundston Campus. Hutchman has published 13 poetry books, co-edited the anthology Coastlines: The Poetry of Atlantic Canada, and edited two volumes of In the Writers’ Words. Guernica Editions will publish volume III of In the Writers’ Words in the spring of 2026. His poetry has received many grants and awards, including the Alden Nowlan Award for Excellence, and has been translated into numerous languages. [Editor’s note: the above interview is Laurence’s first contribution to BCR.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an online 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.

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