Geoffrey Cook talked with Richard Sanger at his home in Toronto in May 2001.

G.C.: Can you give us some biographical context for your first collection. I’m thinking specifically of the poems about immigrant experience. Did your family immigrate?

R.S.: My mother is Canadian from way back, from United Empire Loyalists probably. Her surname is Ketchum and there’s a school in Toronto named after one of her ancestors. My father was originally English, though his mother, like mine, was Canadian (and red-haired). In Shadow Cabinet, the second section is the autobiographical one, while the first section is a kind of gallery of different people. I think I developed a feeling for the immigrant experience when I myself lived in Europe: in Scotland, Spain and Germany. When I eventually came back to Canada, I found it an interesting and rich part of the country that wasn’t very present in Canadian writing. It’s perhaps big in fiction now but not so much in poetry. In poetry what tends to happen is that a particular voice, say an Italian-Canadian one like Mary di Michele’s, is launched, but what I’m more interested in is creating a composite that isn’t necessarily just one experience - I like the idea of depicting different characters, different experiences, some that wouldn’t necessarily find their way into poetry otherwise.

G.C.: I was going to ask you the daunting question of where you see yourself in the context of Canadian Literature, specifically poetry, because your irony, formalism and ideological content seem to me to be unique.

R.S.: That’s very flattering... I suppose what I find off-putting about a lot of Canadian poetry is how insular it is. With our fiction it seems that we’ve become very international in flavour if not necessarily in outlook. By which I mean we’re bringing a lot of strands of the world into Canada but not necessarily knowing all that is going on out there in the larger world. Perhaps poetry has been that much more insular because it’s a smaller pond. I think any poet who writes can’t just be ambitious as a poet and want to get to the top of that particular dungheap. They have to have ambitions for poetry (as well as for themselves) and want to elevate poetry in a larger sense. And that is only more true in the world of Canadian poetry because it’s an even smaller dungheap so when you climb to the top of that you’re not really that high.

Where do I fit? I don’t know—I suppose I’m affiliated with the Montreal Signal poets, Michael Harris and co. They published my first book and have been a kind of beacon in adverse times (or bad-verse times). I like Don Coles, Ricardo Sternberg, Bruce Taylor and Anne Carson, to name a few. And I feel there are a lot of very good poets of other generations we ignore: Richard Outram, some of John Glassco, Anne Wilkinson, Lampman and Scott ... Also a lot of exciting younger poets coming up now: David O'Meara, Carmine Starnino, Ken Babstock, Anne Simpson, Sue Sinclair, Tim Bowling.  And I read a lot of British and some American. Some of my favourites are the Northern Irish: Heaney and Paul Muldoon. I like him a lot. Ciaran Carson, who’s a contemporary of Muldoon. James Fenton - a virtuoso, but doesn’t seem to have much to write about now. Don Paterson, who’s a young Scottish poet; Selima Hill, an English poet. In the States: Gertrude Schnackenburg, she wrote some wonderful poems; she’s getting more religious right now...

G.C.: Why did Spain become so much more attractive than Germany or Scotland for your work?

R.S.: I suppose it was because I was young and single and discovering Spain. Getting away to a foreign culture seems to offer you all kinds of freedom and a fuller enjoyment of things that are important to you in life: girls, booze, whatever... But I’ve been wondering recently whether those great experiences don’t arise from something that is biologically programmed anyway and could have occurred anywhere: I could have been in Markham when I was 21 and it would have been the same experience. In any case, when I was living in Spain, I became friends with a man who is now considered one of the leading Spanish post-war poets, Jaime Gil de Biedma, who died in 1990. I was living in Granada, in my early 20s and I was reading this great poet from Barcelona and the great poets who influenced him were Auden and Eliot. This was a strange thing: it was unusual for a Spaniard to know English so well. And even stranger that I, a young English-speaking poet, was learning about poetry and about Spanish through Gil de Biedma’s poetry and his poetry was leading me back to English, the language I felt I was fleeing. I hadn’t found contemporary poets in English compelling or exciting and I became so much more excited about Spanish poetry because it seemed to be about all those big things that young guys want to talk about, those big words that make us so unhappy, love, death and all the rest. It wasn’t necessarily Lorca that I fell for but poets like Antonio Machado, Luis Cernuda, Miguel Hernandez and others. You also had the Spanish Civil War - this obvious case of wrong against right. All these great passionate things seemed to be so tied up in Spain. I think in Shadow Cabinet I’m attracted to, but also a bit ironic about the significance of those things for a young man.

G.C.: Earlier you said that you used ‘composites’ in some of the apparently autobiographical family poems. The sequence in the book - “Spanish Divan” - uses male and female voices. Did you find these “other voices” helpful, attractive? Did you find “dramatic monologues” useful?

R.S.: Yes, I love them . In part, for me it comes from reading the poetry of Jaime Gil de Biedma: in addition to Eliot and Auden, he got me to read this book called The Poetry of Experience by Robert Langbaum. It’s a very good book that talks about the dramatic monologue in modern poetry and how there is a tradition running from Browning and Tennyson to Eliot and Robert Lowell and some others. The most sensational argument that the book makes (if a book of literary criticism can be sensational) is that Eliot is not the big break from Browning and Tennyson as he and so many people claimed; that there is a continuation and a development of the dramatic monologue. I liked very much the idea of creating a whole character, a kind of play in one poem (I’m thinking of “My Last Duchess” and some of those Tennyson monologues). Reading that book led me to understand perhaps what the appeal of “Prufrock “ or “Gerontion” was as well.

G.C.: Do you still write poems using obvious persona?

R.S.: Yes; I love doing that. In addition to those you’ve mentioned, there’s one called “Touring the Atrocities” in Shadow Cabinet about a poet who goes off to Chile in search of “some hot new injustice”. I’ve tried to update this in my new book with a poem called “Cavalier” in the voice of an aging English professor who tries live out the poems he teaches—the poem being, say, “Gather Your rose-buds while you may” or perhaps Wyatt’s “They flee from me that sometime did me seek”. Another reason why I have been particularly interested in writing that kind of poetry was that, as a young poet, I felt embarrassed by what poetry was and by what the popular, social perception of poetry was: like meeting someone else and they say “What do you do” and you say “Oh, I write poetry” and they think you’re going to talk about butterflies and the ineffable flutterings of your diaphanous soul. They perceive you as some kind of immensely delicate, hypersensitive creature. I like very much the idea of putting the poem into the voice of someone who isn’t the poet. This is one of my quibbles with contemporary poetry: if poetry wants other people to be interested in it, it has to talk about other people, other than poets. So create a monologue of someone using the immense resources of poetry which are often not used in a lot of contemporary poetry - use those resources to give an idea of a real, living person. There’s a wonderful Robert Lowell poem called “A Mad Negro Soldier Confined in Munich” which does exactly that. It‘s a person, not a poet speaking. You don’t have to worry about “emotion recollected in tranquility” or all that other stuff. At the same time it’s really compelling speech.

G.C.: Your Phd thesis dealt with this issue, didn’t it?

R.S.: Yes. It was called “Telling Words: Direct Speech and Narrative in Four Twentieth Century Poets”. I began with Plato’s argument in the Republic. He chucks the poet out of his city for “imitation” (mimesis) . What he actually means, when he gives examples, is what we call direct speech - speaking in the voice of someone you are not. He’s really chucking out the tragic poet - the dramatist - because he doesn’t like direct speech. In the Athenian education system and the world of poetry that Plato was talking about, people would have to learn and recite poems; and if a poet used direct speech in their poems, they would be introducing characters - disreputable ones - who would be bad role models for these young, impressionable boys. Therefore, the poet would encourage these people to become poor citizens. Plato has this long list of people he wants to chuck out or who you shouldn’t be like: women, oarsmen, madmen, and other riffraff. And then two millennia later, Wordsworth in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads argued in favour of poetry speaking in the language of common men. So I made the argument that I don’t think had been made before: when Wordsworth says that the poet shouldn’t be speaking just in the voice of the poet, but that he should be speaking in “the language of man speaking to man”, he actually means speaking in the voices of people who are not the poet.

And if you look at the Lyrical Ballads themselves, you see that in the ballads there is a lot of direct speech, where it isn’t the poet speaking. So the argument was that Wordsworth says exactly the opposite of Plato, consciously, or unconsciously. And that he argues the opposite of Plato: that this, by expanding our capacity for empathy and understanding, does make us better people. Then I looked at direct speech in Lorca, Auden, Borges, and Walcott. At the same time I was writing these poems that were dramatic monologues, and starting to write plays myself, and somehow I didn’t really put the two together, but later realized “Oh! That’s what I was doing: writing about what I wanted to do.”

G.C.: There is something like a critique of poetry and the poet figure in some of the poems in Shadow Cabinet: a suspicion of poetry, I guess, like Auden’s when he writes, “Poetry makes nothing happen”. He seemed to always be suspicious of the presumption and preciousness of poetry and poets, or of the egotism and irresponsibility...

R.S.: Yes, I think you’re right, and I agree with Auden on the moral question of not wanting to use the persuasive rhetorical powers of poetry for political ends. Imagine you have this wonderful gift and you can persuade people to do anything, so what do you persuade them to do? Though perhaps he would never have said so, Auden saw he was in such a position: he saw that when he wrote “Spain” and some other poems. So his next question was: “What do I tell them to do? Do I tell them to rush to the barracides or what?” And I think he thought long and hard about that and decided the thing he had to tell them to do was to think about their own lives. It’s a difficult thing: it’s not glamourous; it’s not yelling out; it’s to reflect on why you do the things you do, and how you do them and what leads you to your actions. Auden wasn’t leading people (his readers) to an answer or giving them one answer. He was essentially saying, “You find your answer for these things”. I think in one of his essays he says that good poetry can’t tell people what to do; it can only present situations or parables Then you have to imagine what you would do in that particular situation. The whole thing about the quote “Poetry makes nothing happen” is that at the end of that stanza he also says “Poetry is a way of happening, a mouth”. Even though the first is the famous line, he undercuts it. He’s saying that poetry does make something happen, and a poem can cause us to reflect on things.

My other way of thinking about poetry and theatre and all kinds of art is: we only have one life. The great thing about art is that it allows us to inhabit and experience other lives. For example, I live beside this Chinese rooming house. I’ve seen these people; I’ve spent a good deal of time living beside them, but I don’t know them. It seems to me that with a good work of art in 15 minutes or an hour or two, you can know so much more about the essential experiences of someone’s life. I suppose that is part of what these dramatic monologues are about. Through imaginatively putting ourselves through these experiences, we somehow enrich our own lives, and, as I think Auden would argue, that we are more able to make moral decisions about life. Though I might not use the word “morality” as much as Auden would.

G.C.: There are these “other voices” in your poetry which provide irony and sophistication, but there is also a more romantic poet figure. I’m thinking of some of the Spanish poems and some of the new poems you showed me, in which the poet says: “I want to lie on the mattress / I lie on, drink white wine, / and read, and be, Lord Byron...” [see “Wish”]. Now, part of me thinks these figures are also ironically represented and that is part of the same critique perhaps, but I’m not convinced.

R.S.: I think there’s a genuine yearning for feeling and experience, for life. I mean, who wouldn’t want to be Byron? I have a poem about a dinner of the Signal Poets that Michael Harris hosted which reflects on all these weird people and what they had in common :“forty odd (some truly) poets” as it says. A line in the poem asks whether the motive for poetry is “some childhood wrong we have to right”. It’s just a pun, but many people seem to have this idea that writing is and has to be therapeutic. I suppose that I’d like to think that poetry could be a slightly healthier activity. Often rooted in sorrow and injustice and need, yes, but nonetheless aiming at something a bit more than mere healing, I’d hope. I mean, be more ambitious: aim at transport, deliverance, whatever. Take us away, out of ourselves, and then let us come back with something new.

G.C.: Tell us about your plays. How many have you got?

R.S.: I’ve written 5 or 6. Not Spain was published and got nominated for the GGA. Two Words for Snow will be published soon. I’ve got another one called Some Mother, which I’m revising and I hope will be put on soon. I began to write them partly because Debbie, my wife, was getting more and more involved in the world of the theatre and I was going to see lots of plays with her. And it partly grew out of this interest in the dramatic monologue. I began to think that there were limitations that poetry has, that some of the ironies that I was using in poetry weren’t that palatable to the poetry-reading audience, though not necessarily to the larger public. In my early poetry I was deliberately trying to be un-poetic in a certain sense, in not having a “figure of the poet”. Or if I had a figure of the poet, I was in some sense making fun of or undercutting him. I suppose now I see that people go to poetry for certain reasons: to read about mortality or love or whatever. There’s perhaps no reason to deny them those things; you can write about them honestly and sincerely, if you wish, or sarcastically and caustically as well. But you don’t always have to write about them in one vein.

The theatre is also an immensely stimulating world to be in for a poet who’s used to sending poems out to magazines and waiting five months for a reply. To have an actress who is looking for words, and wants more words so she can declaim them and do things with them is a wonderfully gratifying experience. The popular perception is that actors are egomaniacs, but don’t forget that they also have to go out on stage and say those lines, so they read those lines pretty well. And they figure out what to do with them . So they are in a very practical way, very good editors and critics.

G.C.: To go back to poetry, how much to you think about technical matters such as line breaks, metre, rhyme, form and so on. Are there things that you like to do or get stuck in? Do you find yourself saying, ‘Well, I’ve done that type of line or stanza and now I have to do something else’?

R.S.: I think an awful lot about that when I’m writing poems. There are poems I’ve worked on for many years. But then there are also poems that come quite freely, such as “High Park” in this new manuscript. As I was writing Shadow Cabinet I began to understand more about metre and form and maybe I’m more self-conscious about that now. But at the same time I find myself wanting to be freer of those things. So I don’t really know—or perhaps I do know but only with regard to the particular poem I’m writing. I do feel that the poets I want to read are those that have a command of technique, who can turn it on and turn it off, who have a very good reason for doing what they do. And I do believe with Auden and Brecht - and I think Brecht is where Auden got it from - that any person who calls themselves a poet should be able to write a lyric on the Queen Mother’s new hat for tomorrow. It might not be absolutely stellar, but the poet should be a craftsman who can manufacture something on demand. There are also particular poetic effects that I like, like off-rhyme, James Merrill’s rhyming masculine with feminine rhymes in his early poems (i.e transLUCence/unLOOSE) or the way the Welsh poet Vernon Watkins would rhyme three lines by mixing consonance and assonance (i.e. instead of making horse rhyme with course, he’d make horse rhyme with, say, hearse and with floor). I suppose, in part, this is what interests me in poetry. You can have traditional form and North American free verse, but you have this great range of effects in between that so often aren’t used in contemporary poetry. Paul Muldoon is doing very interesting things with rhyme. There are a lot of other poets who use half-rhyme: Pinsky uses it very deftly in his translation of Dante. And Heaney used it a lot. I think it’s a sort of British-Irish tradition. Yeats used it a lot.

G.C.: When you were putting the first manuscript together, did you work with an editor?

R.S.: I talked to friends, like Ricardo Sternberg and my wife. I was sort of superstitious: I wanted to have 36 poems; to make sure every poem had been published; I wanted to make sure that it was absolutely the best it could possibly be. Of course, I discovered that what’s published in magazines isn’t always the best. I was very, very picky about what I put in, and my criteria tended to be formal, that is, so that the poem pleased me in a formal way. I sometimes feel that Shadow Cabinet left too much out. My next book will be probably fatter. I’ve also got another manuscript that I’m working on, which will certainly be more unified and have more of a common theme running through it.

G.C.: Is there such thing as a ‘perfect book’? Doesn’t this somehow give the lie to a more organic connection between life and art (which may also be a type of deception)?

R.S.: What’s perfect today isn’t going to be perfect tomorrow. That’s the problem. I think at the start of my writing career I was too fixated on this pursuit of perfection, where you can literally spend the rest of your life working on one poem, and you probably end up with not very much. I think the challenge at a certain point for a poet is, once you’ve mastered things, you need to find a way of writing that allows you to keep exploring. You’ve developed this style, you’ve found a way of writing, you’ve found “a voice”: What do you do now? I think you have to find a way of accommodating your writing to your life, to the world, to other things, so that you can roll with it somehow and record what is important in your life and in the life of your fellow human beings. It’s not necessarily that poetry becomes a diary of events, but that somehow it contains the essential lived experience of your world. There’s a wonderful book of poems by Louis MacNeice called Autumn Journal which was all written in one autumn - I think it was 1936, during the Spanish Civil War. He found a way of ‘loose writing’, though it’s not slack. It’s all about the historical events of that period. He was lucky: it was 1936 and there were a lot of things happening. And there’s probably a larger poetry-buying public which would be interested in such a poetic record of events.

G.C.: So what about the new manuscript. What’s happening?

R.S.: It sounds like a couple of publishers are interested in it. So I’ll see what happens. It will be probably a more personal book than Shadow Cabinet. I haven’t divided it into sections.

G.C.: Must one divide a book of poetry into sections?

R.S.: What worries me is that some people, the careful close readers, give too much meaning to the sections. So I thought I might run it right through. It has love poems in it (including one that keeps reappearing), a number of sonnets, an elegy or two, some winter poems, and some poems about history. There’s this meditation called “High Park” about walking in the park with this Bosnian friend of mine. The ballad from Not Spain will probably be there. And then there are translations: from Brecht - a song that he wrote for Kurt Weill, “Zu Potsdam unter den Eichen”; from Rimbaud - “Le Dormeur du Val”; and of a poem “The Father”, by a Spanish poet I know, Alvaro Salvador. All of this prepared in the manner of the house—with irony and feeling.