The following interview is part six of an eight part series of conversations with BC poets. All interviews were conducted by Rob Taylor.
Between worlds
I spotted a tiny spider on the bedroom floor.
So small it was that I was not afraid. And tried
to gather it in my palm, release it outside.
So lithe, so quick, it evaded me each time,
and took three tries before I let it go at last
on the porch in the morning sun.
I was careful because I thought you might
be watching. How surprised I am at your visits,
the nights so quiet I hear tree frogs sing as I
search for the moon rising behind the firs.
I sleep and wake and find in the early hours
the air moving and billowing in the empty chair,
minute stars floating upward, and ask in my mind
if it is you. Before I finish the question,
the word yes arrives in my mind. I have come
to believe you are there, wanting to amend
the past; I ponder how you travel between
your world and mine, if the stars form their own
constellations in your sky, if owls
call there at dusk and do the tree frogs too
come alive in chorus where you live now,
and is poetry breathing in you still, and how
was it when they took you in and welcomed you,
and did you drop your old life behind as if
it were a matter of changing from old clothes
into new, fresh and bright as ten o’clock
on a summer morning.
Reprinted with permission from
Between the Bell Struck and the Silence
(Caitlin Press, 2024).
Rob Taylor: The dead inhabit the poems in Between the Bell Struck and the Silence: they watch, accompany, approach, turn just out of sight. Could you talk a little about the interactions between the living and the dead in your life and poems? Do you see the poems themselves as a way of conversing with the dead?
Pamela Porter: From the time I was a young child, I’d wake in the night to see white-robed figures staring down onto my bed. I didn’t know who these figures were but as soon as one of them realized that I could see them, they were gone in an instant. I once told my mother about the figures and she said, “That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.” But even now I sometimes still wake and see them at the foot of my bed. They seem to be benign beings and they disappear as soon as they know I’ve caught a glimpse of them. It’s a mystery to me. I don’t know why they come, or what they are looking for. I suspect they are just checking in on me, but I don’t know why.
RT: Speaking of “checking in,” a major theme of these poems is attendance: to the dead and dying, to the living, to both the natural and human worlds. I think true attendance is always paired with attention. Could you talk a little about the importance of attendance and attention in your poetry? How did your attending to the deaths of others influence how you attend to the world?
PP: When my father was dying, someone at the facility said, “It is an honour to sit with the dying.” I think it means that when someone is close to death, there are other beings that come into the dying person’s space and communicate with them. I said to my father, “No one dies alone.” And he replied, “Yes, someone is coming for me.” I think there is much more to dying than we know, and to the transition from living in one’s body to moving on into the next world. I also think that spirits from the next world come to meet us when we are ready to go on to the next place. Apparently, there are colours there which we can’t imagine until we get there. That’s all I can say about others I’ve known who have passed over. If I get there, I’ll tell you what it’s like. I think it’s very similar to attending to this present world in a careful manner, like watching a flower blossom, so that we don’t miss much of the wonder and beauty of this world.
I think the dead come to us from time to time when they have something important to tell us, and it behooves us to listen to them as best we can.
Pamela Porter
RT: Do you think the ways you attend to the world shape how you see the dead? Do you sense them as being similarly attentive to us?
PP: Yes, I think the dead are often attentive to us. I remember just after Patrick Lane died, my husband had a terrible cough and went to sleep in one of our kids’ rooms. I was awakened by his coughing and realized in the middle of the night that Patrick was sitting in a chair beside my bed. He had already started to dictate to me a letter for his wife Lorna, which I somehow understood I was to write down. I wrote it there in the dark, and when I finished writing I put down my pen and paper, set them on my desk in the bedroom and went back to sleep, oddly, having understood that I was to take the letter to Lorna, which I did. I have to say I have no idea how the dead do these things, but the next morning I got up, found a nice card in a drawer in my desk, and wrote the note carefully so that it would be readable to the living. The experience was truly unworldly. I’ll never forget how I, as someone who can’t keep up with anyone’s dictation, managed it all, but I did. And Lorna received the letter, which I left on her front step, and was grateful. It was just something that I can’t really explain to the living. I think the dead come to us from time to time when they have something important to tell us, and it behooves us to listen to them as best we can.
RT: Another theme in Between the Bell Struck and the Silence seems to me to be loneliness, or at least the act of being alone. What do you see as the relationship between poetry—its making and its reading—and loneliness?
PP: I think having time alone is very important to the poetic process. I go to a writer’s group once a month in which we have a prompt set up to get us going, and after we’ve looked at each others’ prompt, we then bring out our poem that we brought to the group for responses. I find that being in the natural world is important to the creative process, for which I’m lucky because I live on five acres with several horses, and three barn cats who are sweet, cuddly and hilarious all at once.
RT: In “Personal Distance” you write that “as a child, a vacant lot / was all the wild I knew.” You just mentioned how much “wilder” your world is now. How has your relationship with wilderness changed over the years? Are there ways in which that relationship has stayed constant?
PP: That’s an interesting question. My early years were in Albuquerque, New Mexico, which I loved because the weather was dry and sunny, and yes, a vacant lot was “all the wild I knew.” It wasn’t until I graduated from university and was accepted to the MFA writers’ workshop at the University of Montana, with Richard Hugo as director and teacher, that I discovered there was much more to the world than I understood. I remember taking a car trip with my family from Texas to California, where my grandparents lived, and finally seeing a mountain range. I was mesmerized. From the time I was in early elementary school I had dreamt of the mountains. Fortunately, Missoula, Montana was just what I needed topography-wise, and in the early summer, when nothing was happening, someone lent me her horse to ride around on. The horse was very gentle and kind and I rode bareback around the Rattlesnake Creek area and had such a good time. I never wanted to leave. Eventually I met the man who would be my husband and partner, and both of us wanted to see the western states, so we did. Sometimes it takes decades to find what you’ve always been looking for. Now I live on the west coast of Canada and am quite content with the land and the horses that have joined us here.
That’s why we don’t want to be too logical in poetry, so that the part of the brain that silently slips forward can be recognized and honoured.
Pamela Porter
RT: Two birds—ravens and owls—appear frequently in Between the Bull Struck and the Silence. Both seem intimately connected with the dead: owls “resemble the soul of one just now leaving the earth,” while a dead loved one is “in the room, but silent, like the raven she had seen the day before.”
PP: For several years, once dusk came to our area, which is quite wooded, we’d hear owls hooting at sunset. The sound was so lovely, somewhat like the sound of a flute, that I listened to them each evening. Across the road from us was an untouched, wooded area where I could hear owls quite often. Unfortunately, those lots were purchased by someone who built five houses, and most of the owls left. A few still flew back in the night. As for ravens, they are very intelligent birds and they will sometimes perch on your windowsill or on a branch nearby as they hunt for food—rats, mice, etc. Also, I’ve seen a Cooper’s Hawk in the forest where I run with my dog. The Cooper’s Hawk has a very sad call, as though it’s crying, even though the sound is lovely. I’m fortunate to live so close to the forest where I can hear those bird calls.
RT: In a poem about riding a mule down the cliffs of the Grand Canyon, you write “The body / must go with the mule. The mind must trust.” Could you talk a little about that experience?
PP: We’ve ridden down into the Grand Canyon on mules twice now: the first time was in a snowfall, and we really needed to trust our mules to get us down into the canyon. Our daughter, who was about ten at the time, came with us and loved it. We also took mules down the canyon in a warmer season. The mules have cleats on their feet for traction and when they are startled, they will back up rather than go forward. That’s why, during breaks on the trail, they had us park the mules facing over the precipice. I kept thinking, “trust your mule. Trust your mule,” and all was well, but you had to keep your mule very close behind the other mule.
RT: “Trusting your mule” feels like a metaphor for religious or spiritual faith, but also perhaps to the faith involved in writing. Is writing for you an act of faith, in some way, the mind trusting the “mule” to get it to the right place?
PP: Yes, writing for me is an act of faith, and I rely on the right half of my brain to bubble up thoughts and ideas. It’s kind of a wait-and-see proposition, but as I begin to think about what wants to go into a poem or prose piece, the thoughts start to rise. It’s interesting, and I don’t really think about it much when I’m writing because I’m listening to that still small voice that brings thoughts that I might not have written down if I hadn’t been trusting them to come through. The left brain acts in such a dominant manner that I sometimes overlook the message the right brain is trying to get across to me. I believe that the right brain needs to be attended to or else the left brain that thinks of schedules, time frames and all the other day-to-day things we have to do, will ultimately drown it out.
People said to me, “When are you going to give up?” And I said, “Never.”
Pamela Porter
RT: In its relentless attention to a particular loss—a love-filled haunting—this book reminded me of Jack Gilbert’s The Great Fires, written for his late wife, Michiko. It reminded me particularly of his poem “Alone,” where Gilbert’s wife returns to him as a dalmatian (in your book, people return as cats and wolves, among other things!). How wonderful it was, then, right near the end of the book, to come upon your poem “What we feel most has no name,” a poem whose title is drawn from perhaps the most famous poem in The Great Fires, “The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart.” Could you talk about the influence of Gilbert’s poetry in your approach to the themes of love and grief, and the lingering presence of the dead?
PP: I’m looking at “Sonatina,” in The Great Fires, in which spirits cling to the wire fence while they “yearn to be material,” as in alive and solid in real life, “trying to touch the whiteness / those sleeping men had around their hearts.” And I ask, “Where did that come from?” How Gilbert says, “Between the mind’s severity and its harshness. Between honesty and the failure of belief.” But that’s Gilbert for you. He gets started and the right brain chimes in and we’re in a different place: “Maybe when something stops, something lost in us / can be heard…” Much like William Stafford’s, those unassuming lines show up and take us to a completely different place. That’s why we don’t want to be too logical in poetry, so that the part of the brain that silently slips forward can be recognized and honoured. The dead, who we think are gone forever, are still with us whether we think to acknowledge them or not.
RT: The book also draws extensively from the work of two other poets for whom grief was a central theme: Patrick Lane, whom you’ve mentioned already, and Linda Gregg. Together they provide some sort of inspiration (the title, an epigraph, etc.) for ten of the book’s poems. (The poem “Between worlds,” excerpted above, was similarly dedicated to Lane when initially published in The New Quarterly). I’m curious about your strong draw to these two particular poets who died days apart in March 2019. Did their deaths, so close together, in some way spur the writing of these poems?
PP: Yes, Patrick Lane’s and Linda Gregg’s deaths coming close together caused me, and many of us in the Victoria poetry community, to grieve. Linda Gregg’s work was quite stimulating for me, and Patrick was an excellent teacher who read our poems very carefully. He would change something in our poems that created a new thing in us that we didn’t see for ourselves. He’d be reviewing my just-fresh poem and point to the exact spot where something needed to be changed. He was a sharp reader and if I watched as he altered something, I’d try to remember that. My favourite time was when he’d read over the poem that I’d just written, and he’d say, “I wouldn’t change a thing. There you go, kid!”
RT: Another poet your poems sometimes remind me of is Mary Oliver, who wrote (in my favourite poem of hers, “Poppies”), that:
Of course nothing stops the cold,
black, curved blade
from hooking forward—
of course
loss is the great lesson.
I’m curious what you’d say to this—is loss the great lesson in life?
PP: I think loss is a great lesson, but not the great lesson. I worked at writing for years and years before I got anything published. I started with writing stories for my children, and that was a good lesson. I continued to write and send my stories and poems out and got multiple rejections. Finally, I wrote a story for younger readers about my friend Georgia and the flood that she and her grandparents endured, and the discrimination they lived with. I sent that story out to Groundwood Books in Toronto and at last one of the editors called me to say it was a good story, but it needed work. I told them that I was willing to do the work. The editor said that they would help me with the story. I did everything the editor said to do and sent the revised story back to them. I had been trying to write a publishable book for years. Finally, they called me and said they liked the changes I had made and wanted to publish the book. There was no one at home that morning when the editor called me to give the good news. I hung up the phone, went into the living room, sat down in a chair and sobbed. I counted how many years I had been trying to write a publishable book—I had been working at this for 26 years. But that acceptance gave me the push I needed to write the book I wanted to write, which was The Crazy Man, a book that won the Governor General’s award. People said to me, “When are you going to give up?” And I said, “Never.” That launched my career in writing books for young people and for writing publishable books of poetry, which also won awards. Now I tell writers, don’t give up. Our losses can turn into wins if we are persistent enough.
Born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Pamela Porter immigrated to Canada in 1994, where she joined workshops with Patrick Lane and Lorna Crozier. Patrick Lane called her “a poet to be grateful for.” Her work has earned many accolades, including the inaugural Gwendolyn MacEwan Poetry Prize, the Malahat Review‘s 50th Anniversary Poetry Prize, the Our Times Poetry Award for political poetry, the FreeFall Magazine Poetry Award, the Prism International Grand Prize in Poetry, the Vallum Magazine Poem of the Year Award, as well as the Raymond Souster and Pat Lowther Award shortlists. Her novel in verse, The Crazy Man, won the Governor General’s Award, the Canadian Library Association Book of the Year for Children Award, the TD Canadian Children’s Literature Award and other prizes. Both The Crazy Man and her later novel, I’ll Be Watching, are required reading in schools and colleges across Canada and the U.S. Pamela lives on a farm near Sidney, B.C., with her family and a menagerie of rescued horses, dogs and cats.
Rob Taylor’s fifth poetry collection is Weather (Gaspereau Press, 2024). He lives with his family in Port Moody, BC. You can read more of his interviews on his website.