"What's on the Page Is the Only Thing That Counts" Poet Bruce Meyer on Finding Inspiration and the Power of a Good Ending

For most of us, and especially in this day and age, life moves at a terrifyingly accelerated rate. We are permanently busy, focused on whatever is coming up next, unable (and, in some cases, unwilling) to simply slow down and be present in the moment. The ability to appreciate the small and delicate tapestries that make up our lives, and our world, seems to be a disappearing art. For those feeling this way, award-winning Canadian poet Bruce Meyer's new collection, McLuhan's Canary (Guernica Editions), will come as a much-needed breath of fresh air.

Training his lens on the quiet, subtle ways in which we find meaning in our existence, McLuhan's Canary collects themes of love, patience and natural wonder to paint a dignified portrait of human endurance.

We're very excited to talk to Bruce today as part of our Poets in Profile series, where he discusses his first experiences with poetry, his views on the current Canadian poetry community, and how a first text with an old friend provided a spark of inspiration.

Open Book:

Can you describe an experience that you believe contributed to your becoming a poet?

Bruce Meyer:

Being read to as a child. Children, until they can learn to read themselves (or in my case teach themselves to read at a very young age), need to be read to. Reading, being able to see what someone is talking about and not just hear words, is, by far, the most important learning experience for a child. Poetry should be the first thing people read to children because words and images work in so many ways and on so many levels. Imaginations need to be fed.

OB:

What is the first poem you remember being affected by?

BM:

Wordsworth’s “Lines Upon Westminster Bridge, 1802.” My mother read it to me one afternoon before my nap when I was about three. I marvelled at the houses being asleep and the window blinds like eyelids. I then taught myself to read and write and wrote my first full poem at the age of five.

OB:

What has been your most unlikely source of inspiration?

BM:

Inspiration comes from many sources. Sometimes I hear a line or wrestle with an idea. Other times, I get a rhythm. But my main source of inspiration is something from my own life, from what I see or love or experience. My most likely source of inspiration was watching my daughter bake bread. In McLuhan’s Canary, my new book, the title poem came from texting for the first time with my friend, H. Masud Taj, who was on the other side of the world. Our responses were instantaneous. The world shrank for me in that moment.

OB:

Do you write poems individually and begin assembling collections from stand-alone pieces, or do you write with a view to putting together a collection from the beginning?

BM:

I start by writing poems as one-off pieces, but usually, within about ten poems or so I know where the poems want to go and the book evolves from there. All of my books, either poems or short stories, revolve around a single word. Shakespeare’s plays do that as well. There is a core concept that keeps wanting to make itself known as I am working on a manuscript. For that reason, I work on several collections at once and have a backlog of unpublished work.

OB:

What do you do with a poem that just isn't working?

BM:

I write about four or five times more work than I will eventually need. I put things in a holding file. Sometimes, even years later, I will go back to a poem, reinvent it or rework it. As I assemble a manuscript. I pull things, add things. A book is a bit of a puzzle that gradually comes together.

OB:

What's more important in your opinion: the way a poem opens or the way it ends?

BM:

I see the whole poem in my mind before I ever set pen to paper. I often lop off a beginning because openings tend to be the weakest portion of a poem. The end of a poem is very important. I love the idea of the line the pulls everything together in a memorable statement.

OB:

How would you describe the poetry community in Canada? What strengths and weaknesses do you observe within the community?

BM:

The poetry community in Canada is a mixed bag. There are poets I am very close to, the Black Moss Poets, the Exile Poets – and many of them have published with Guernica Editions. I feel a tremendous affinity for those voices. They are good people and excellent poets, but they don’t get the critical attention they deserve because there is a clique that runs the poetry scene and no one else can get a word in edgewise. The future will sort things out. I’m certain of that. Those who run the board aren’t the ones who will be remembered in the end. Canadian awards are a sham, too. The really great poetry being made in this country is recognized overseas, not here. Poetry that entertains, that speaks directly to its audience, gets dumped on in Canada. That doesn’t happen in other countries where the idea of the poet as someone speaking to an audience is extremely important. I don’t like the back-biting. What’s on the page is the only thing that counts.

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Bruce Meyer is author of more than sixty books of poetry, short fiction, non-fiction, literary journalism, and literary criticism. He has had two national bestsellers, The Golden Thread: A Reader’s Journey Through the Great Books (2000) and Portraits of Canadian Authors (2016). He is twice winner of the E.J. Pratt Gold Medal and Prize for Poetry and the Gwendolyn MacEwen Prize for best poem. He was the inaugural Poet Laureate of the City of Barrie. He is professor of Poetry at Victoria College in the University of Toronto and professor of Creative Writing and Canadian Literature at Georgian College in Barrie.