INTERVIEW WITH SUSAN MCMASTER

What makes this particular work of poetry unique?

These poems are playful -- lighthearted play, serious play. Some bounce across the page simply full of the energy of living, the delight that comes from matching sound to meaning to visual dance. They want to be spoken. Some roll around the words in lament, chant, the sideways language of dreams or song that takes its heft more from the weight of the words than from their everyday surface meanings. Like a guessing game, a crossword, there's a pleasure in discovering meanings in an unexpected, surprising way. Even deeply serious poems, that deal with loss and death, step out lightly, gently, offering spaces between the words, letting love and memory and grief and hope weave a unique pattern for each reader. We're together in this business of life and death, and the poems invite a partner into the dance.

Why is poetry the genre of choice for this book? Why not memoir, or a book of short stories?

Poetry is what happens in the moments between narrative. It's why and how and if and maybe. Poetry is spaces not declaration. Poetry is the song that sets the measure for the story, that gives it resonance. Poetry is not about a life, an adventure, it's not the tale of any one person, but the capturing of the echoes between us. The underlay and oversong.

Is this poetry marketable today?

Everyone needs poetry. At the highest and lowest and hardest and most wonderful times, we want it to mark and to say what can't be otherwise said. We need poetry for the important things -- birth, love, hope, fear, loss, grief, hope. Poetry is the language of the deep self; by its ameliorating song. In poems, we can encompass who we are, overcome shame, fear, separateness. In the poem, it's all right to be human and flawed, and it's possible for a moment to be an angel.

How much of this book is autobiographical? Or do you blur the lines between fiction and truth in your poetry?

Less and less of my poetry over the years is a simple narration of the facts of my life. Take the long poem, "Ordinary", which deals with something almost everyone has to face sometime: the death of a friend from cancer. The autobiography of this piece draws on my experiences with a friend's mother's death from old age, a friend's death on the operating table and another's from cancer, the almost-death of one of my children (who recovered), the serious, long-term illness of a sister, and of another friend. It also comes from a kind of inner world where the shape of the poem grew slowly unaided by fact.

They came from things I have done, like walk in the Gatineau woods, or work in a cancer hospital, cleaning the room and preparing the bed for a new occupant when the pain-wracked person I talked to just yesterday finally dies. Some of these pieces came whole out of nowhere but my imagination, if that's a place. And yet, as I put the long poem together, it began to grow into a single story and a single person, a friendship and grief and renewal as real to me as any actual experience. I can taste that glass of milk, see that room, put features to that beloved friend. I know what the pool on the rock looks like, and how the river flows under the starlight.

This happens with all my poems, as I write them. They move from the initial impetus into another, very present, reality. And I hope it happens with readers, that they too can move into and through the spaces the poem opens, to find their own friend, come to terms with their own grief, discover their own comfort. Is this universality? To me, it's more like uniqueness, shared.

Is this poetry a departure for you, or a continuation of ideas you set a long time ago?

These poems go farther than I've ever gone before into uncertainty; they open doors, without predicting what's behind them. I've taken risks in these poems, letting them sit out there without forcing declarative meanings out of them. All the final couplets that sum up the poem's journey are gone. I've protected none of my faulty and strange internal world from exposure -- it's there, not because I'm interesting, but because we all are, and all our worlds are odd and frightening and marvelous.

All my poetry in my life has dealt with paying attention to the human tangle, how we walk through our tales and keep going. In these pieces, I
wander through strange and convoluted woods -- and surprisingly, keep meeting readers there, who are relieved and excited that someone is describing this terrain. I'm amazed by this. I didn't know that anyone else thought like I do (and yet I've always known we all think in extraordinary ways).

Do you have any mentors? Influences in your life as a writer?

Openness, laughter, risks, freedom to follow and always go farther, the ear and the heart pulsing through all: that's bpNichol's gift to me. George Johnson told me I'd have more to say, many years ago. Elizabeth Brewster told me she was interested in my words. Margaret Atwood's honed words, Anne Szumigalski's deep and lyric ones, have filled me with joy. Bronwen Wallace told me at a crucial moment that I had it just right. And there are my writing friends, another story, a long list, absolutely necessary.

Is there something to be "learned" in the process of writing for the writer?

It doesn't matter at all, and everything does. Give over, stop protecting your shabby privacy, and it will drift away from you, shed its individual rags and tags, and become a balloon to pull us all along. Give, and don't look to measure the return.

What kind of advice would you give a poet today in Canada?