Early Encounters with Poetry

A couple of interview questions recently posed to me got me thinking about my early encounters with poetry. For though my first book of poems has just been published a couple of decades after my first book of stories, I actually wrote poems first. And, if my memory can be trusted, I also read poems first.

I told Open Book that the first book I remember reading myself is A Child’s Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson, and that the opening lines of “The Lamplighter” still stick in my head:

My tea is nearly ready and the sun has left the sky;

It’s time to take the window to see Leerie going by;

For every night at teatime and before you take your seat,

With lantern and with ladder he comes posting up the street.

Since we had moved to Canada from Scotland not long before I learned to read, I had a romantic notion that my well-worn paperback copy of the book was one of the few possessions we’d carried across the Atlantic with us. But when I pulled it off the shelf for a nostalgic flip though, I found a sticker inside the front cover indicating that it had in fact been bought for 85 cents at the Saskatoon News Agency.

Another book which would have been a family heirloom had it survived was The Big Green Poetry Book (not its actual name, I’m quite sure, but just what everyone called it on account of it being a hefty tome with a green cover). Alas, the relative who sorted through my grandparents things after they died wasn’t much of a reader and she tossed it out in short order. The only books she thought worth saving were a pair of prayer books and a bible. My mom and I nearly cried. That book had been one of my grandpa’s most treasured possessions. He didn’t have the opportunity for much schooling, but he pored over that book. He had many of the poems in it memorized and was often called upon to recite them of an evening in the pub or at family gatherings.

When I was in second grade, I won an honourable mention in a public speaking contest by reciting one of my grandpa’s favourite performance pieces from The Big Green Poetry Book, “Father” by Edgar Albert Guest:

My father knows the proper way

The nation should be run;

He tells us children every day

Just what should now be done…

In retrospect, this astonishes me. Not the honourable mention part, as doubtless that was a 70s version of getting an award just for showing up, but that I did it at all given how excruciatingly shy I was.

The next poetic encounter I recall was courtesy of a library book sale at which I picked up a copy of a biography of Edna St. Vincent Millay that had been withdrawn from my local branch, The Poet and her Book by Jean Gould. I think I was about twelve, and I see from the call number that it was catalogued as adult nonfiction (yes, I still have it too), but it read like a children’s novel and I, who had by then begun scribbling things in notebooks, was utterly swept away by it. I wanted to live in 1920s Greenwich Village, and stride about in men’s tailored suits, and be called Vincent. Of course, I couldn’t do that, at least not the 1920s part. But I could write poems, and I did.

Sadly, they weren’t very good poems. I wrote stories too, and my stories got interesting a lot sooner than my poems did. I‘m sure now that was because, despite those early encounters, I didn’t read nearly as broad a range of poetry as I did fiction. I had a very narrow idea of what a poem was, and since I never came to write that sort of thing well, I swore off poetry altogether in favour of fiction for a couple of decades. Eventually though, the impulse to write poems came back, sparked by new encounters with a blizzard of great books, some specifics of which I will share in future posts.