David Hickey grew up on Prince Edward Island, in western Labrador, and along the north shore of Quebec. A past recipient of the Milton Acorn Prize and the Ralph Gustafson Prize for poetry, his work has appeared in magazines and journals across Canada and the US, including Arc, The Antigonish Review, Descant, Elysian Fields Quartery, Event, The Fiddlehead, The Gaspereau Review, Grain, The Malahat Review, Maisonneuve, and Prism International. An avid runner and backyard astronomer, he now lives and works in Fredericton. In the Lights of a Midnight Plow is his first book of poetry, from Biblioasis books.
Ian LeTourneau interviewed Dave Hickey by e-mail in June 2006.
Dave, you currently live in Fredericton and I know you grew up in PEI, so how important is place for you? I've noticed lots of ocean imagery in your book-water as "a nod of blue," "driftwood // crowned with rotting seaweed," and "kelp's tangle." The rhythm in some of your pieces also evokes place--there are a few colloquialisms, especially early on in the collection, and the rhythms are often conversational. Is place a preoccupation, something you consciously try to incorporate in your poetry, or is it something that evolves naturally? How important do you think place is to your poetry?
I think it's safe to say that place, notions of home, and things of that nature are ongoing preoccupations for me. I wrote most of these poems not long after I had left PEI, so in a way they represent whatever I had been meaning to write about while I still there, but hadn't really managed to do so until I arrived in Fredericton. So I suppose in my case the old adages hold true, all that stuff about needing distance from a place before you can write about it. Of course, I only moved 3.5 hours away, so maybe I just needed to quit slacking off and get some writing done. Probably a little bit of both.
As for the colloquialisms: you're right, there was a conscious effort on my part to capture certain voices in these poems. I think, more than anything, my desire to do so just grows out of the affection I have for the people I've been listening to all these years. Of course, there's also a sense of loyalty there too.
I wondered about those poems in your collection where you quote another poet's work in an epigraph and respond in your poem, often in an argumentative manner. Some notables include Tim Bowling and Marlene Cookshaw. Is there any sense of discontent with contemporary Canadian poetry? Or do you find it just a productive way to leap into a poem of your own?
Almost all my arguments are with myself. In the case of the Bowling poem, I was looking for a way to counter my own Romantic sensibilities, and found an entrance point in that particular line. I do take your point, though; it is argumentative. And rightly so. I very much appreciate the opportunity writers have to address each other in their work, whether they do so subtlety or in a forthright manner. Poetry could well be an open-ended conversation, one in which we're welcome to address whatever voice we may be hearing at the time.
Does that mean I'm discontent with contemporary Canadian poetry? I don't think so. A little reactionary, perhaps. But beyond that I think I'm just the type of writer who really enjoys grappling with whatever he happens to be reading at the time.
Speaking of whatever you happen to be reading, some of your other poetic subjects seem to rise from this as well. I'm thinking of the poem that responds to a pamphlet about erectile dysfunction. But then, the subject of "Amusement Park Dragons," one of my favourites, must be a function of experience, derived from what you have seen, smelled, felt and then transformed with your imagination. Does either source (intellectual stimulation from books vs. real physical experience) have more poetic possibilities? And how do you know something can make a good poem when you see it?
Good question. I often think of what Frost said, about there being the poems we encounter in world, and then, quite apart from them, their afterthoughts, or the words we manage to put down on the page. That's not to say that they're entirely separate things, but I do know from my own limited experience that the narrative is always a little different from the experience it represents, and that metaphors, however apt, always wander a ways from what they describe, and take on a life of their own. And that's not a bad thing at all. I think writing should be transformative, willing and able to push the boundaries of whatever it's negotiating, whether it be textual or visceral in nature. And personally, I find "real physical experience" has an intellectual energy all its own. I've gotten a lot of ideas for poems during bike rides and evening runs, perhaps as many as I've found from reading books, so maybe the trick is to strike a balance between the two.
Along those same lines, the part of writing that I enjoy the most is not having a clue where I'll find the subject of my next poem. I think it prompts me to try new things. The truth is, I'm a man of a thousand hobbies, very few of which I manage to keep up all that well. Lucky for me, that's not the point at all. Poetry is a great way to participate in the world. It's also the opportunity to reflect, in an intimate sort of way, what one may find there. Which takes me to your last question, about knowing something can make a good poem when you see it. I think, more than anything, this is what distinguishes one poet from another. What's a poem to me may not be a poem to you, but that's not to say either one of us is right or wrong.
Rather, it just points to singular qualities of our own imaginations, and even more so to the inherent flexibility of poetry--how it's able to accommodate so many subject matters, and just as many modes of discourse. I'd like to add too that I stop and give my head a shake any time I think I'm developing an intellectual monopoly on what constitutes poetry. A friend of mine once told me that he hopes poetry is always larger than his mind's ability to accommodate it, and I couldn't agree with him more. I think our willingness to entertain a variety of poetic sensibilities, paired with our ability to see them for what they are, enables us to advance not only our own appreciation of what we're up to as writers, but also to get the most out of what poetry has to offer. Not always the easiest of things to do, for certain, but the rewards make it more than worthwhile.
Well, there is certainly no intellectual monopoly in your book on what constitutes poetry. The forms you use, for instance, are diverse: from free verse to patterned stanzas to a whole section of sonnets. Is form something you play with intentionally, to test boundaries or do you just let the poems find the shape they want? Are there any particular poets who have been instructive or influential in your use of forms?
I'm in the habit of trying out a variety of visual rhythms when I'm working on a poem. Usually, over the space of a few months, it becomes clear which one suits a particular piece best. It was actually only in the case of the "River Liberties" corona that I purposely set out to write a poem a certain way. And even then, I thought it would end up much differently than it did. I'm learning, however slowly, that poems typically have a mind of their own. Spend enough time with them, though, and they eventually make their intentions known to you.
The poets I read and re-read seem to have mastered this business of unveiling the poem in its most natural state. Writers like Seamus Heaney, who employ a variety of metrical lines and forms even as their poems maintain a plain-spoken quality, are the ones I return to most often.
There's much talk these days about a resurgence in the use of traditional forms, particularly among younger poets. What's your take on it? You make great use of the sonnet form, for instance, in "In the Human Performance Lab" and the aforementioned "River Liberties" corona-what's the appeal of these forms for you?
I'm really hesitant to call anything I've written a true sonnet. After all, even if the poem amounts to fourteen lines, there's still the matter of the turn, the octave and the sestet, the rhyme scheme, not to mention the well-measured lines. But I do believe there are advantages to laying out poems in specific ways, and in taking advantage of what the page's typographical landscape has to offer.
Yet, I'm also aware of Dana Gioia's belief that too much verse written today amounts to not much more than "pseudo-formalism," or writing that only pretends at the forms that make poetry great. It's true that we too often mislabel poems, referring to them as this or that for convenience sake, or perhaps because they bear a slight resemblance to some predecessor. The risk in doing so is inevitably a watered-down conception of poetry-one that limits what we're able to do, and ultimately what we're able to enjoy. Mind you, on the other side of things, there's also more of grey area here than Gioia acknowledges. I think a poet can still renovate old structures, making room here and there for whatever he or she needs to include. Form, with all its potential hindrances, can also be a wonderful lever, opening up our minds in such a way that makes it possible for new ideas to surface where we least expected them. In the end, the extent to which we take advantage of it is entirely up to us.
Since this is your first collection, do you plan on reading any of your reviews?
Sure, why not. As with all things, some people will probably enjoy it more than others, but as long it gets read, I'll be happy.
A mechanic polishes
a season's worth of sweaty
prints, each smudge of warm
evening air giving up
its leathery grip as the moon
punches its own pass
through the dusk, riding
high above a circus of lights.
Before he locks up,
the mechanic will tug them
towards a plywood
cave, and the dragons, wheels
sparking along the pavement,
will huff out the last
bit of summer before settling
their wings to rust.
In 2004, a year before he died, Richard Outram gave a manuscript of 115 unpublished poems to Anne Corkett and Rosemary Kilbourn. According to their introduction to the book which resulted, South of North -- Images of Canada, the collection was "written in three months in response to a request from the Arts and Letters Club of Toronto to provide a text for a song cycle commissioned from the composer Srul Irving Glick, in celebration of the Club's ninetieth anniversary in 1998. Of the 54 poems...continue reading
You were born in Toronto, but raised in Ireland. As a writer, do you feel conscious of having a foot in each world? Do you see yourself as having a unique perspective, and do you see strong distinctions between Canadian writing and Irish work?
I do have a foot in both Canada and Ireland, but in that I am hardly unique: millions of dual-citizen Canadians daily experience what James Joyce called "having two thinks at a time", and are the better for it. I am well schooled in the literatures of both countries, so maybe I do enjoy something of a unique perspective on Canadian literature, but while some sharp distinctions exist between Canadian and Irish work, there are also...continue reading