Spending the year with new(ish) books by friends, locals, and other Canadian poets old and new. Follow along daily on BlueSky and Instagram.

I think this may actually have been the first book of poetry I bought way back in 1990 when I was in my first year of an English Undergrad degree. I had of course rad some poetry before getting into University, but only poems that were anthologized in textbooks and course packs. I had never actually read, let alone purchased, an entire book of poetry all by the same person. I have a very distinct memory of my English 101 instructor, Sandra Mallett, spending an entire week on contemporary Canadian poetry, not the old canon, but new Canadian Poetry. And there I found Patrick Lane.

I didn’t know it at the time, but the course of my life was shifted when I read that poem. The poem was called “You Learn” and if I recall, it was in his collection from 1971 called Mountain Oysters – but I could be wrong. Aaaaaaaaand now I have just given myself a mission. Anyways, I was so affected by this poem that I actually went out to try to find a copy of that book. I didn’t find it, but I did find the newly-published “Winter” and bought it without even opening it.

Why did his poetry have such an effect on my 20 year-old brain? I came from the same set of circumstances as Patrick. My entire childhood in a tiny, resource extraction town, in the interior of BC was spent, not necessarily alone, but definitely lonely, and mostly in the library. All my male role models were miners, taciturn smokers and alcoholics, hard-working men with hard lives. Existence was work and work was brutal. Emotions, reflection, were things you felt only when you were at least 6 beers deep. Life was unexamined, fearful, and often violent. These were men who did not read poetry, let alone write it. Discovering that someone could, and someone had, come from that same place and found a way to be a writer was my road to Damascus moment. “Shaka, when the walls fell.”

Another aspect of this affinity is in our complicated relationship to winter. Winter as described by Patrick is a kind of shibboleth I think. My entire understanding of life, the universe and everything is filtered snow. Winter is the platonic base state of existence. My wife doesn’t understand. She hates winter. If after we die we get to choose whatever moments from our lives we want to revisit, to stay in, I will spend much of mine in a high mountain valley, standing in the pines, as the snow falls and falls and falls.

Re-reading it this past week, and it has probably been nearly 20 years since I last opened it, I can see now how much my own style was influenced by him. The lines I pulled from 6 poems are below but I could have highlighted something from each and every poem in the book. But I leave you with these and the hope that this is enough to encourage you track down a copy and read it for yourself.

This is what has been driving my creativity this week: I once again became that small, impossible music: