autobiographical reflection

There are millions of poets on this planet. Just the literal verbal kind, not counting those who make their lives into conscious-living poetry. Counting those who dabble over decades, fall off for a decade or two, return or not.
Although even the continent of poet seems like a tiny village, still, it’s a wonder when one crops up again without even being sought out.
I see at Geist that Cornelia Hoogland’s Little Red Riding Hood poems are finished and were picked up by Wolsak & Wynn. Neat to see that progression.
Because I go to who is in town whether I’ve heard of the person or not, I happens to come across her when she was about 4 books into writing. In 2008, I heard her read a sample of them in progress at The Muses at Rasputins, which has since burned down.
Tim Wynne-Jones is appointed to the Order of Canada. He was the first Writer-in-Residence I ever took my poems to, me a bundle of nerves with a side-slung knapsack.
I had made my first best-of collection of my own poems when I was about 9. After years of secret scribbles, years more workshopping with teachers and friends, years after I made my first few chapbooks (in primary school and high school), I got praise from each high school teacher at being promising. My poems were in the yearbook and school newspaper, but I had an “in” because I was the editorial board or editor for both of them for years.
in 1988, Wynne-Jones was the first non-teacher, non-peer, non-neighbour, non-family, non-church-member to see my poems.
It was winter? Or was it spring? Was I trembling from cold or nerves? It was warmer, fall. I must have been 16. I remember the quaking of getting up the nerve of my best-of poems to go, make an appointment with the librarian.
I remember the strangeness of going to his office in the library, a cubbyhole with a chair inside, back around the corner of checkout desk, where only staff go.
Coming past the last set of florescent lighst, I thought I must be mad, but was fully prepared for laurels and had to make myself known. I had to speak to this important fellow and quaking at having to do it again once he’d looked them over.
I can’t recall if he said bring them back or bring back more. Or if I did or didn’t. He did say I should read more and write less. I was too verbose and old-fashioned. (I’d mostly read 1800s poetry and novels at that time.) The top poem I brought was a rhymed allegory of mountain range travels and travails to gloryland. (It was copiously footnoted.)
If it were the age of internet perhaps I could have got right on that reading thing but I didn’t see anything other than what I was already accessing. It’s always good to ask more question. I continued writing, unabated, dozens of poems a week, as usual.
The next potential mentor would involve much the same process except this time, an envelope shoved under the door of Christopher Levenson, a portfolio sample for admittance to his university poetry class in 1993. It was a similar shake and close eyes and scurry away.
He didn’t acknowledge them so I assumed I wasn’t in, until the second or third week of class when he phoned my house to blast me for not showing up after he’d gone to the trouble to read my portfolio. He introduced everything from Beowulf to the beat poets to rob mclennan who presented on now. I hardly said boo the whole term but I heard. It was in that class where I would meet Warren Dean Fulton and Jim Larwill as well.
Warren would eventually slide back thru Ottawa, a publisher and still poet. His Pooka Press has published my writings a few times.
Jim Larwill and I and a few others spun off into a post-class group for a while. It grew, going from house to house and fissured. I left. The remains put out an anthology with Broken Jaw. I met Jim at an open mic and we rediscovered each other like no time had passed and I rejoined the on-and-off-again Omnigoths.
rob mclennan I’d take years to say more than a meek hello and run away then read from afar, but he eventually became my first lasting mentor. I took a few rounds of his workshops. (As in the 101 course, I hardly uttering an audible word for a term). I was being oriented to the century and contemporaries of poetry, what editing a poem means, inquiring into what poetics is and a more rigorous approach of what poetry expects beyond regurgitative expelling from one person to one person. There’s more of a community and one is within many.
You never know where a step will lead. A footfall of the same depth or into another cosmos.
I still am a baby in the field, not Moses, certainly, but there’s something like a fractal unfolding and however much I read, learn or do, there’s still an infinity in all directions.