Neil Flowers : part five

How important is music to your poetry?

''The idea that music and poetry can be separated,'' Ezra Pound wrote, ''is an idea current in ages of degradation and decadence when both arts are in the hands of lazy imbeciles.'' I play blues piano and I know the history of African American music pretty well. In addition, I grew up with jazz and classical music. My father loved the former; my mother was a Wagnerian soprano; my brother, Bruce, plays some of the standard piano repertoire. 

These musics find their way into my poetry, sometimes literally, as in “Skag Line Blues” and another, “Slow Drag Funky Butt,” the verses of the latter poem built on a straight ahead twelve-bar blues structure though more complex verbally than most blues and structured in stanzas rather than call-response. I generally ground my poems in quotidian reality like the contexts of the blues or old English/French/Scots ballads or WCW’s poetry. No music is more grounded than early blues and it speaks in the vernacular. I abjure overly academic or oppressively intellectual poetry, though as I say this I confess to a lifelong addiction to Ezra Pound’s work, and, as much as I am circumspect about T.S. Eliot himself, The Waste Land, which I read when I was pretty young, provided a first model for how poems could incorporate disparate voices, snatches of song, change directions, be non-linear, be structured mosaically. Blues, jazz, classical: Their examples exist as possibilities, swirling in my head, when I’m working on rhythm or development. The example of dissonant music is important to me. Poems can squawk, bleat, dance around crazy, spill this way and that, dash off to somewhere else honking and horny.

Neil Flowers : part four

What other poetry books have you been reading lately?

Selected poems of Apollinaire. Christopher Logue’s translations of Homer’s Iliad, i.e., Kings and All Day Permanent Red. Bob Hogg’s Cariboo poems. I want to read George Bowering’s Kerrisdale Elegies but I can’t find a copy to borrow in Los Angeles, where I currently live.

Neil Flowers : part three

What poets changed the way you thought about writing?

WCW. Ezra Pound. WWE Ross. Raymond Knister. Shakespeare. Camus. Browning. Blake. Melville. Robert Creeley. Keats. Olson. Coleridge. Daphne Marlatt. Villon. Rimbaud. Bob Dylan. Sharon Dubiago. Chaucer. Powwow singers. James Agee. Wallace Stevens. Robert Johnson. Memphis Minnie. Phyllis Webb. John Newlove. Lorca. Basil Bunting. Lao-Tzu. Frank Davey. Michael Ondaatje. DH Lawrence. Ron Hansen. Pessoa. ee cummings.

A couple like Camus and Hansen are not per se poets, but still. Ron Hansen’s novel about Jesse James is a prose epic, with poetic style. Bob Hogg was my most important mentor. I mention him here, above, in the first question. He introduced me to the work of WCW, EP, the Black Mountain poets, Daphne Marlatt, the TISH poets, and Basil. In fact, Bob introduced me to Basil himself when he came to Ottawa for a reading. We went to dinner later, an unforgettable evening. Basil told me, to the effect: “When you write a poem, put it in a drawer for a year, if you can still read it then without wincing, go ahead and publish it.” Every poem in my new book, Polyphonic Lyre, has been in the drawer for at least a year, some for several. George Bowering taught a class at SFU in Vancouver in which we read modern and contemporary Canadian poets in depth. No one in Canada should receive a degree in English without having taken Bob and George’s classes. Those seminars were utterly invaluable to me as a writer. What they taught, and their own examples, and their unabashed Canadian perspective without being rah-rah nationalistic, pointed the way. 

Neil Flowers : part two

How does your work first enter the world? Do you have a social group or writers group that you work ideas and poems with?

A line will come to me unbidden. Like Spicer with his Martian radio. Maybe I’ll hear something someone says in a crowd, or on the literal radio when I am driving, and it sparks a poem about swans and a Sibelius symphony. Something nags from the inside or outside. I consider that a first entrance into the world, like WCW in the poem about spring where the scrappy little pieces of vegetation begin to emerge. I carry a writing book if I am away from my laptop. I’ll scratch down in the book whatever I can grab. Lines/words/phrases come and go fast. Sometimes, like a few days back, this will turn into an extended improv writing session. This one was maybe twenty minutes. I sat on the grass of a low hillock beside a street and let the writing go wherever within the parameters of two characters I am developing for a novel. It was surprising and satisfying. I get home. I type it into the MS, working on it as I do. I think I have a whole scene. I’ll get back to it in a couple of days.

I don’t belong to any writer groups. I tried a couple but didn’t find them helpful. So many participants in these groups seem limited to the subjective, confessional voice, as if the only poets they ever read are Anne Sexton and Robert Lowell. I have two superb editors who are friends, Rod Bradley and Bob Hogg. Poets themselves, they talk fluently about rhythm, line breaks, enjambment, sounds, the mechanics, and so forth. Bob misses nothing. Not a syllable. Rod once told me to swap the places of the penultimate and ultimate stanzas of a poem about Leonard Cohen. I couldn’t believe he was telling me this. I almost felt insulted. But I did. He was 100% dead on about the change. 

I rely on those two guys. I’m so lucky to have them. Their insight and generosity never fails.

Neil Flowers : part one

Neil Flowers was born in Montreal.

His published works include Taxicab Voice, Suite for the Animals, Some Kinds of Earthly Love, A Signal through the Flames, and an account of a near-death experience that appears in Ostomy Canada, Summer 2020.

He is at work on a novel, Acts of Treason, and freelances as a screenplay doctor and editor of medical texts.

How did you first engage with poetry?

I had what you might call three firsts. When I was eight or nine, in our house was a copy of The Golden Book of Children’s Verse or one very similar. “The Owl and the Pussycat” was in it and “Jabberwocky.” I was a lonely kid. I sunk right into the worlds of those poems and that book. Imagining the characters in their pea-green boat with Owl serenading Pussycat, it was entrancing, funny. I read the Lewis Carroll poem quite a few times puzzling at the language, later enjoying the silliness. And there were colourful illustrations! The lyrics to “John Henry” were accompanied by a watercolour of this huge black man swinging a hammer with a steam locomotive in the background. When I was fourteen, I had my first encounter with canon poetry. Our grade ten English teacher taught us the form of the Petrarchan sonnet and had us read “Ozymandias” and “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer.” I remember that day with perfect clarity: The class room at Etobicoke Collegiate in Toronto where we read the poem; the teacher (Mr. Cooper), who was handsome but cultivating a short, dark widow’s peak; being riveted by both poems, one about the ephemerality of everything and the other about the glory of reading—big ideas in dense little packages; and turning from the poems to look through the windows at the sunny day and the football field outside. In that English class we also read Browning’s “My Last Duchess”, which had a profound effect on me in how a poem could consist solely of a character talking and that character damning himself. When I finally understood the irony, when I got the poem, I thought it was the greatest poem I’d ever read, which it probably was for me to that time, and it was about a narcissistic loathsome murderer. You can feel his obsequious, evil, pinched soul every time you read the poem. When I went to university in Ottawa, I had the very good fortune to take a class in modern/contemporary poetry from the Canadian poet Robert Hogg. We read the big Americans—Williams, Pound, Olson, Ed Dorn, Levertov, Creeley—and a bunch of Canadians like John Newlove, Daphne Marlatt, and Frank Davey. In terms of my own work, taking that class and reading those poets made all the difference. A poem could follow its own path, its own energy, whatever that might mean. “Who knows what a poem is until it’s THAR, it walks it talks it struts its green barazzo”, Olson says, summing up nicely what WCW and Creeley said about composition by field and that form is an extension of content.