Lorna Crozier answers the telephone. “It’s just so beautiful. I’m sitting in my study which has a sliding glass door which leads to a deck which surrounds a pond. The turtles are out right now sunning on a rock, and I can see an orange ribbon of fish that lie underneath the water lilies which have just started opening up.” Lorna uses her words to paint a vivid picture of a property I cannot see. But then she is a poet. “The wisteria is in full bloom. It’s very strongly scented and it’s wafting through my screen door.”
Lorna talks lovingly of the home and garden, particularly the garden, she shared with her partner and fellow poet Patrick Lane. The garden figures prominently in Lorna’s story, a place and a time she celebrates in her 2020 memoir Through the Garden. Today, she’s working on a follow-up and in a departure of sorts, collaborating with BC musician Barney Bentall. And why not? Switching genres has always come easily to Canada’s most prolific poet, the author of 21 poetry books, six anthologies, three non-fiction books and three books for children. In 1992, she won the Governor-General’s Award in literature and in 2011 she became an Officer of the Order of Canada.
She’s driven, she says, by something Earl Birney said.
“Earl Birney described the writing of a poem as like having an interior itch that you had to scratch, and that’s what takes me to writing a poem,” she says. “I know there’s something that’s stirring inside me.”
Stirring and often dormant until a walk along the Sidney waterfront or puttering in her garden releases a burst of creativity.
“I find walking will often get a poem going in the head,” she says. Mind you, there are days when she’s not writing at all. “I read every day, but I don’t write every day,” she says. And when she does write, she’s not entirely sure of the outcome. “I just face a blank page when I’m writing with no idea about what I’m going to do with it or whether words will come or skip away from me that morning.”
She’s arguably Canada’s most popular poet, largely because her poems are so easy to read. They’ve been called “accessible.”
“I’m not quite sure how accessible they are,” she says humbly. “Wherever they fall on that scale is not a decision I consciously made.”
Nevertheless, the public has responded. Her poems are personal, observant and not weighed down with a lot of metaphors. Take for instance, this excerpt from Blizzard:
Walking into the wind, I lean into my mother’s muskrat coat,
around the cuffs her wristbones have worn away the fur.
If we stood still we’d disappear. There’s no up or down,
No houses with their windows lit. The only noise is wind.
and what’s inside us. When we get home my father
Will be there or not. No one ever looks for us.
“I like to use words with clarity,” she says. “I very much think that language doesn’t have to obfuscate. On one level, I’d like the poem to be clear, but I’d like it to be open and the more you think about it or the more you read it, the complexity is not obscured in any kind of excessive vocabulary.”
One reviewer called them poems about nothing.
“I seem to delight in what’s common in the common object,” she laughs. “I find it so fascinating to look closely at nothing and find something that is there. I think that’s what poets try to do – show us more than we can see. I believe that’s the task I’ve given to myself.”
She agrees with the Chinese saying, poetry is like being alive twice.
“Definitely. I don’t know if there’s anything better than when creativity washes over you and you know you’re on a roll. It’s not forced. It’s almost as if you’re channeling. I just find that journey is the most exhilarating thing I can do.”
When I ask her what sparks an idea, she replies “resistance.”
“Resistance is often the place that poetry begins,” she says. “It might be a dark energy but an energy nonetheless that can really propel a piece of writing and so that’s a place I try not to refuse to go to.”
Resistance certainly plays a major part in her story – resistance to the status quo, to conventionality, and to what was expected of her.
Lorna grew up on a farm outside Swift Current, Saskatchewan.
“They were very bright, but they were not learned,” she says of her parents. “There were very, very few books in the house. But I always had an over-developed sense of curiosity, of wanting to know how things worked in the world and I had a desire to express that wonder.”
She married and became a high school English teacher. It was a prescribed life. She liked her job, but she wanted more.
“I was writing for myself. I wasn’t sending it out. I wasn’t workshopping it with anybody. I was just bumbling along. Less than two years after my vows, I yearned to be free and dangerous and on the run. I just knew I wanted to live more the life of an artist and live with another artist.”
A summer poetry workshop in the Qu’Appelle Valley, 57 kilometres west of Regina, sparked the transition.
One of the instructors, Patrick Lane, was already an accomplished poet, a major figure on the creative scene. Fuelled by passion and a mutual love of writing, they started an affair. He asked her to leave her marriage. He left his.
“I wanted him. I wanted the craziness of what we’d create together. Even if we didn’t last, I didn’t care who got hurt.”
She had indeed become free, dangerous and on the run.
“We really had this astounding partnership. It just felt good to be so finely matched,” Lorna says of their relationship. She and Patrick shared an idyllic life on Vancouver Island, looking after their two cats Basho and Po Chu, their garden, and their long-term communal project cleaning up Coles Bay Park across the street.
“We phoned [the Capital Regional District] and said you’ve got a real ivy problem (choking the trees) and they said, ‘yeah, we know but we don’t have the staff to do anything about it.’ So, we took it on our own shoulders rather than letting it go. It was a huge task. It took us at least three years of working two to three days a week, but we did it. Both Patrick and I thought it was one of the best things we’ve ever done. It was our own, small contribution to saving the environment.”
Although they were both poets, they pursued different paths. Patrick drew upon his past experiences; Lorna reacted to the here and now. They helped each other with their poetry. Sure, they argued a lot over technique, vocabulary and syntax, but there was never any competition or jealousy over the other’s success.
“We kind of lived with the cliché ‘don’t go to bed angry with each other.’ Neither of us held things inside for very long or allowed resentments to build up. We both grew, but we grew differently,” Lorna continues. “We were each other’s best friend, editors, gardening partners, lovers, yet we challenged each other, and I think made each other better people than we would have been on our own.”
Academia called them a literary power couple.
“We both felt it was heart-warming to be referred to as a pair. It didn’t lessen either of us as individuals or dilute our singularity.”
Then in January 2017, a subtle change.
It began as an irritation. Patrick felt his neck and shoulders stiffen and his upper body freeze. He would appear to get better but then another ailment would take over. His right leg ballooned. He lost his appetite. He couldn’t sleep. Doctors couldn’t determine what the problem was.
“I swore I wouldn’t play the dutiful wife,” Lorna says mindful of her first marriage. Yet, Patrick was often in pain, incapacitated and unable to perform simple mechanical tasks. Lorna fought to keep herself and her husband on an even keel. Keeping up with lecture schedules (Lorna even took over some of Patrick’s commitments), maintaining the house and taking her husband in and out of hospital led to bouts of fatigue, irritation and depression.
“I don’t know if there’s anything more debilitating than watching someone you love fade away, watching someone who is very strong and physical hardly being able to get his legs off the mattress onto the floor,” she says. “It was a constant challenge not to think. I had to keep my head above water to help him so I couldn’t show I was depressed all the time.”
Patrick passed in 2019. His death released a torrent of emotions, which Lorna articulated in her book Through the Garden. It is a thoughtful, loving, and poignant account of their time together. Now she’s coming to terms with being a survivor.
“Through the Garden was about the grief of watching someone you love diminish and the worry of them not getting better. Now I’m working on poems and perhaps some prose about what it’s like to have to redefine yourself as a solitary human being after having been with someone for 40 years. I’ve started writing about a different kind of grief, the grief of being left alone.”
Meantime the ivy has returned to Coles Bay Park.
“So now on the anniversary of his death, I go out with the six grandkids and his two sons, and their wives and we have a day of ivy work, including the little six-year-old working beside me this year and saying ‘Grandma, we do this so the trees can breathe, right?’”
Yes, the trees can breathe, but for Lorna, clearing the ivy is a connection to a shared life. So too is maintaining the garden in her Island home.
“It’s both a real place where I spend hours weeding – my hands are chapped, and I can’t get the dirt from under my fingernails – but it’s also a place of meditation and longing and connectiveness. He shaped the garden. He touched every stone in our yard, he deadheaded every plant, so I do feel the tactility of him still here.”
Life is quieter now, a result of Patrick’s passing and COVID-19. Prior to the lockdown, Lorna used to go to the gym every day, but the pandemic forced her to work out in its parking lot instead, taking walks in the neighbourhood, and doing yoga by Zoom.
She also used to lead two workshops a year, one in Honeymoon Bay on Vancouver Island and the other in Kingston, but because of COVID she chose not to teach online.
“One-on-one is just such a more pleasant way to gather and to teach than seeing a flat, one-dimensional face online. I’ve always loved the face-to-face, warm connection with people.”
She intends to resume the workshops in early 2022.
Settled and reflective, she says poetry is about attentiveness and no, the advancing years haven’t dulled her capabilities.
“I think I’m really lucky to be a writer because, for some of us, our brains remain sharp, although there’s no guarantee they will, but I think I’ll be able to write until I’m in my hospital bed. Thank God my art is writing and not dance or music. If I have any concerns, it’s that I don’t want to start repeating myself. I want to be able to move forward and surprise myself. Can I remain as engaged with the world as I need to be?”
She’s still enthralled by nature, by life and the human condition. Driven, as always, by the need to scratch that itch. Writing, she re-affirms, is the most exhilarating thing she can do.
“I still wake up in the morning and find some small beauty. It’s a small beauty I’d like to polish and find words for.”
Snapshot
If you were to meet your 20-year-old self, what advice would you give her? “To believe in myself and to have less fear about inadequacies. I had no faith that I would become a writer. It would have been lovely to have less concern and less worry and just say ‘you know what? I’m going to make it.’”
Who or what has influenced you the most and why? “I think the earth, I think the sky, all the animals, and the garden. It’s both a real place where I spend hours weeding, but it’s also a place of meditation, longing and connectiveness. I do feel the tactility of [Patrick] still here.”
What are you grateful for? “I’m grateful that I can still walk and see and hear. I’m grateful for meeting my husband 40 years ago and having the life I had with him. I’m grateful for his two sons whom I’m close to and the gift of being able to be a grandmother not having children of my own.”
What does success mean to you? “It doesn’t mean prizes and it certainly doesn’t mean making money. I guess it means being able to keep on going and to take delight in the things I do best.”
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