I got on with my writing life. I’d pretty much mined out my youthful lyric vein anyway, and had already begun the process of learning that human life is not quite about my feelings--and that the "I" part of it was the one I have the least shot at articulating accurately. The years started passing, swiftly and pretty happily, and I ended up in different parts of the geographical, human and literary universes.

Then, a few months ago a likable young magazine editor in Vancouver asked me to look at a magazine I’d written for and helped to edit while I was at university in the late 1960s and early 1970s. He wanted me to write something about the ethos of the magazine, about writing and editing in general, and specifically about what elements of writing and literature I’d changed my mind about over 30 years.

I’ve never archived my past very diligently, so I had to ask the editor for several back issues of the magazine. He sent them on, and when I read them through I was pleasantly surprised. The writing was slightly better than I remembered it: intense, self-dramatizing, technically quite competent. The poems I’d written for it were as obliviously sophomoric as any of the others. Or were they more so?

I’d been in my late 20s when I wrote those poems, and it hadn’t been a happy time for me. I’d begun to get a dark inkling that my first wife and I might not make it, and that neither would a lot of other things that had once seemed pure and sure. This quite naturally got into the poems I wrote, and it made them embarrassingly personal and coded, whiny elegiacs of how hard and complicated adult life was. I should have been making thorough and precise registrations of the things around me or trying to figure out what I might be able to do to save my marriage and make my life more satisfying and interesting. Alas, I was more compelled by the Virgilian gloom I detected at the edges of everything, and I couldn’t see that most of it was emanating from inside my own dopey head.

One of the poems I published in the magazine, a lament that draped itself across its pages in a William Carlos Williams graphic layout, particularly interested me. It was titled, rather unhelpfully for anyone but its author, "Pachena Bay". I’d written it after making a trip to the west coast of Vancouver Island in the spring of 1970. The poem seemed content (as I was in those days) to ward off the depressing relentlessness of adult life with a humourless sort of cosmological cynicism--we may be fucked up, but so is the universe, etc. The poem mooned about the observed peculiarities of the coastal light after twilight, and about the sheer number and brilliance of stars, which it pronounced, in a half-cooked pun on its west coast setting, the "end of the known world". From that static Apocalypse, it perceived "the white snarl of the breakers//the lip//curling in the roar of//a heavenly smile. //To have love//slip away//always//slip away."