Six Questions interview #74 : Peter Richardson

Peter Richardson’s first three books of poetry appeared with Véhicule Press in Montreal. A TINKERS’ PICNIC (1999) was finalist for the Gerald Lampert Award; AN ABC OF BELLY WORK (2003) was short-listed for the Acorn-Plantos Award; and SYMPATHY FOR THE COURIERS (2007) won the Quebec Writers' Federation’s 2008 A.M. Klein Award. BIT PARTS FOR FOOLS, released by Goose Lane Editions in October 2013, was nominated for the 2014 Archibald Lampman Award. His poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine (Chicago), The Fiddlehead, Sonora Review, The Malahat Review, Prism, Poetry Ireland Review, and The Rialto (UK) among others. A retired airline worker, he lives with his wife, Martine, in Montreal. A fifth poetry manuscript, TIARA OF FISH HEADS, is currently making the rounds.

How long have you been in Ottawa and what first brought you here?

We lived for fourteen years in a hillside suburb above the Gatineau river—we being Martine Chapdelaine and myself. She had gotten job as a federal translator back in 2003, and I had just retired from the airlines. We tilled a backyard garden over a wooded ravine and raised our daughter, Sophie, in a neighborhood that was twenty minutes by foot from the woods. Then, in 2017, with Sophie finishing high school, we sold our house and moved back to Montreal. I miss Gatineau's quiet and its proximity to a national park.

The trade-off, in moving to Montreal, is that I can look out my study window (which fronts on Duluth Avenue a block west of Parc Lafontaine), and see a parade of humanity walking, jogging, skate-boarding, mono-cycling and solo-monologuing past from dawn till dark. It’s a carnival. Sometimes it contains moments that would fit in a stage play. A couple of poems have come from that bustling view.

How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here?

Well, I’ve been writing since I was a child—first stories, then in my teens, sing-songey poems modelled on William Butler Yeats and Dylan Thomas. In my twenties I tried glomming onto the Black Mountain poets and the Beats. I was writing sporadically. Haphazardly finding a voice. Between 1970 and 1986, I think I wrote about ten poems. In fact, I didn't start writing every day till 1986. At that time, I was attending a reading at a now-defunct bookstore called La Librarie sur le Parc in Montreal. One of the Open Mic readers that evening announced that his workshop was looking for new members. I thought: Okay, I'll try this for a few sessions. It wound up being several years. That was followed by another workshop that lasted for ten years.

Then, in 2003, Chris Levinson, who lived in Ottawa at the time, invited me to join a workshop he'd started with a few friends, years earlier. It was a fantastic workshop. What a sharp group of poets! We met at Mother Tongue Books, whose co-owners kindly allowed us to use their space after hours. The owners should’ve received community service medals.

How did being in such a community of writers shift your thinking about writing, if at all?

Well, the Ottawa writing community is such a patchwork quilt of different groups of people. They are writers who often have different aesthetic allegiances with regard to fiction and poetry. Yet, I found Ottawa to be such a congenial place. I wonder if that is rare for a Canadian city. Is it because of Ottawa's size? I mean it's half the size of several other Canadian cities, but it has this thriving arts community. Maybe a population of a million is a just right. In Montreal, I've had to rebuild a network of writing colleagues. The ones I knew from fourteen years ago had mostly decamped. So it has taken time. We're a more fragmented bunch here because we live and work within a larger linguistic community. And I enjoy a number of the French-language poets in Montreal, among whom is Patrice Desbiens, a displaced Franco-Ontarian from Timmins. Also, being a semi-reclusive crank has slowed my process of making connections here.

What do you see happening here that you don't see happening anywhere else? What does Ottawa provide or allow?

When Rod Pederson and a couple of other likeminded poets put together VERSEFEST, more than ten years ago, they set in motion a project that I think is unique in Canada. The dozen or so different poetry venues in the city were brought on board to welcome readers from Ottawa and elsewhere in the country (and, my God, Ireland, the UK and the States). It’s a one-of-a-kind shindig that showcases such a broad spectrum of aesthetics and styles. An oasis every March.

Have any of your projects responded directly to your engagements here? How have the city and its community, if at all, changed the way you approached your work?

Well, I gave a couple of workshops as part of the Ottawa Public Library's program to introduce people to poetry. That was wonderful. But I haven't written any Ottawa poems, though I notice that you do. You evoke the city, here and there, in your work. I've started doing that in Montreal to the extent that a few of the poems in my new manuscript mention certain streets and neighborhoods. I like the idea of being rooted in a specific place which, in turn, ought to ideally find its way into a writer's oeuvre.

What are you working on now?

Tiara of Fish Heads, my fifth poetry manuscript, is currently making the rounds. I expect it to take a while. The small presses are swamped with submissions. And it's not as though they're subsidized by a multimillionaire poetry lover who died and left them all a bundle as is the case with Poetry Magazine. Proceed at a turtle’s pace and enjoy the forest floor is my motto.