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George Whipple is without doubt one of the most accomplished Canadian poets living today. Born in Saint John, New Brunswick, he grew up in Toronto, and now lives and writes in Burnaby, British Columbia. A member of the League of Canadian Poets, he has been profiled in Canadian Author and Poet's Market (US), is listed in Contemporary Authors, and his poetry has appeared in nearly all of the major literary magazines in Canada.

George Whipple's first collection of poetry, Life Cycle, was published in 1984. Since then, six books of his poetry have followed including Passing through Eden (1991), Hats Off to the Sun (1996), Carousel (1999), Tom Thomson and Other Poems (2000), Origins (2003), and Fanfares (2003). An eighth volume of his work, On Parade, will be forthcoming in 2005. His poetry has been acclaimed for its sensitivity and mastery by such notables as Alberto Manguel, Louis Dudek, and Northrop Frye.

Our interview was conducted in Vancouver in May 2004.

RWS: George, when did you decide to become a poet?

WHIPPLE: A poet is born. He has no more control over this than the choice of his parents or the colour of his skin. My mother read poetry to me as a child, and as soon as I learned to read, I memorized such children's poems as Robert Louis Stevenson's "My Shadow," and Eugene Field's "Little Boy Blue." I remember prattling my first poem when I was four or five which my mother then copied out in the family album. My enjoyment of life has always depended on a harmony with nature which I feel compelled to express in poems. As far back as I can remember, I have had epiphanies of eternity unfolding in time. I have not paper, pencils, similes, or metaphors enough to convey the singular solace, the indelible pleasure I enjoy as I palaver with the laurel, bend an attentive ear to the badinage of buttercups, the shy blue stutter of the aster. I write more than I know and can take no credit for what I hear and write down as if it were my own.

RWS: What poets had an influence on you as a young man?

WHIPPLE: My influences were predetermined by my own talent. In my early teens I responded to Edgar Allen Poe's musical incantations, and later to the rich verbal textures of Francis Thompson. As I matured I tingled to the gladsome wit and spiritual aspirations of Herrick and the Metaphysical Poets, Herbert, Donne, Marvell, and especially Thomas Traherne.

Finally, I discovered my contemporaries in Louis Untermeyer's definitive anthology Great Poems of the English Language and was overwhelmed by Hart Crane's "logic of metaphor" which consists of the compression of language into explosions of music. Crane explored the subconscious, the source of all great art, as no one had dared before.

Since then, I have read thousands of poems from Edmund Spenser to John B. Lee, who lives in Brantford, Ontario, and is the greatest living poet in English.

RWS: Northrop Frye found in your poetry fascinating analogies to the arts of painting and music. Have these arts greatly influenced your work?

WHIPPLE: For a year in my late thirties I turned from poetry to the purer language of painting in order to shape and colour my emotions. Painting gave me more satisfaction than writing did, but I became bored and missed the challenge of changing vowels into music and consonants into colours, and so I returned to the frustrating but more exciting work of poem-making where a word, because of its differing connotations for each reader, is worth a thousand pictures.

As for music, I admire it above all the other arts because of its pristine materials, its ability to be reverential without being referential as language is doomed to be - although the purest poetry surrenders to the reader's imagination, as music does, its ultimate interpretation.

All in all, I can't say that painting and music gave me more than marvellous pegs upon which to hang many of my best poems, although my love for drawing has probably influenced my wish to design each poem aesthetically within the page's frame. And I enjoy sculpture so much that I like carving a few poems into the shape of their subjects: a sailboat, bouquet, tombstone, etc. Such artifice in a utilitarian age puts people off, but like it or not, all art is artifice, a synthesis of all the senses, an imitation of reality, not reality itself, however "realistic."

RWS: Many of your poems revel in the discipline imposed by aesthetically pleasing forms. Can this discipline be taught?

WHIPPLE: Although poetry cannot be taught, it can be learned by constant reading, constant writing and re-writing. The joy is in the making. But a poem is only the by-product of an ineffable vision, just as publication is only the urn-burial of its ashes.

There were no poetry workshops before this generation. I learned from reading hundreds and hundreds of poems, some of which sharpened my hearing, cleansed my sight, and showed me how to dance within the chains of my limitations. It's not what I feel but what I can make others feel that is important.

It might be noted in this connection how Dylan Thomas's great elegy for his father, "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night," was written in one of the most severe poetic forms, the villanelle, not only to control his grief as a son, but also as an artist to compress the imagery and to strike the rhymes and off-rhymes like the tolling of a dirge.

RWS: One critic has likened your poetry to alchemy. Is poetry a matter of magic or craft?

WHIPPLE: Poetry is indeed magic, an incantation beyond analysis. Like all poets, I scarcely know what I'm writing until I examine the first draft coolly, consciously, after the heat of composition is over, noticing its failures of expression and its potential as a poem worthy of more work. Then I apply every ingenuity of craft to define and refine, organize, energize and recreate my original musical vision.

Although three things frighten the post-modern editor - religion, rhetoric, and rhyme - magic without craft is unfocused hocus pocus, just as craft without magic is children's verse unworthy of adult respect.

Poetry has been seduced and raped by prose and is near death, its shallow grave already being prepared by the tone-deaf and bleary-eyed. But it will rise as it always has and flourish for a new generation when the present one has passed away from sheer boredom.

Yet one must be wary of casting stones. One's own unacknowledged failures and weaknesses are those most often recognised and despised in others.

RWS: Is great poetry simply a matter of beautifully-made forms?

WHIPPLE: Poetry began as pictographs, metaphors of stickmen on the walls of caves meaning "them" and developed over aeons into the rich language of analogy which we enjoy today. I try to inform my work with varied shapes to please the eye and wordplay to satisfy the intellect. Most important of all, I try to provide for the soul a sense of the unsayable striving to be heard within such music as I can muster.

Poetry like everything else in life is a balance. Poetry moves between the vernacular and the oracular, vision and revision, what is written and what is rewritten in the imagination of each reader.

Form is content and shouldn't be ignored. Form is what survives when meaning becomes assimilated and forgotten. Great form is recognised by how well each word, line, and stanza has met its potential and seems inevitable, beyond improvement.

RWS: Are there any philosophical concerns that you consistently address in your work?

WHIPPLE: Any subject may spontaneously occur to the mind and be used as a matrix around which to model feelings into the shape of a poem.

Poetry should not attempt to say what can be better said in an essay, play, story, or sermon. Although my poetry enjoys a variety of forms and subjects, none of these were premeditated but appeared beneath my hand in the process of writing. The poem propels; I only navigate.

Yet I must admit that some roads are more pleasing than others, especially the one that leads to the lakes and forests of this vast new Eden of Canada, which has blessed me with the opportunity to play Adam and cultivate the garden of my poetry with indigenous symbols, idioms, and vocabulary.

RWS: There are a number of literary critics, including Northrop Frye, who measure a poet in terms of his/her capturing and perpetuating the "myth of concern" of his/her times. Do you consider yourself a man of your times?

WHIPPLE: One is always and inevitably a man of his times, and his "times" are the impressionable years from fifteen and twenty-five when his cultural tastes crystallize once and for all. If he is a poet and has the necessary talent, courage, and ambition, he can leave behind more than a time capsule of interest mainly to historians. He can leave behind enduring artifacts that transcend time and stir future generations not only with aesthetic values but a lasting appeal to the senses, something eternal for both mind and spirit.

RWS: What do you consider your greatest strengths as a poet to be?

WHIPPLE: Some critics have commented kindly on the broad range of my work, its Romantic richness and Classic clarity of language, its experiments with a variety of forms, and also certain spiritual insights that have used my work as a Ouija board to spell out my joy of this world and foretell of joys yet to come.

RWS: In collecting individual poems into a book, do you have an overall thematic progression in mind, or is there another modus operandi employed in making the decision about which poems to include and which to exclude?

WHIPPLE: Each of my seven books to date has the same thematic arc. That arc follows the life cycle of us all and allows room for every human experience:

1. birth, infancy, childhood, and youth;
2. the wonders of the natural world;
3. sexual awakening;
4. the arts (poetry, painting, music, etc.);
5. religious awe; and
6. death.

RWS: What do you think of Marshall McLuhan's statement that "Art is anything you can get away with"?

WHIPPLE: I recall instead Eliot's remark: "The minor poet borrows; the major poet steals." One of the most glaring literary thefts of all, not to mention Shakespeare's lifting of lines and plots from Holinshed and Plutarch, is Yeats' lovely sonnet, "When You Are Old and Grey and Full of Sleep," which is a word-for-word steal from Ronsard's original in French but is never printed with that attribution.

Every poet gets away with murder. There are far more slaughtered poems on his killing-room floor than ever see life in a book.

Many poets who dominated their generation and thought they were "getting away with something" were supplanted by those of far lesser reputations: Pope by Blake, Byron by Keats, Tennyson by Whitman. It's not easy to beat the rap of posterity. As Emily Dickinson wrote, "Fame is a fickle food on a shifting plate." I've stolen a few dozen phrases and even a few lines for bloodhounds with tenure to sniff out if they have nothing more important to do. Most of my little jackdaw pilferings have been glittering nouns and bits of prose from the most mundane sources which I have remounted and given new life.

RWS: You have beautifully translated poems by Jules Leforgue, Françis Jammes, and other French poets. Has translation helped you in any way with your own poetry?

WHIPPLE: I Englished a few French poems long ago to distract me from an Ernest Dowson-like infatuation with an Eaton's waitress. I can't say if those poems contributed to my original work. French poetry is my one hobby, and I always carry some to beguile the soul with its fragrance of wild cherry, its shimmering Debussy and Monet Impressionism. A cheval is a much more elegant animal than the heavy beast we call a horse. That is the romance of the Romance languages in a nutshell.

Although the prosaic elements of imagery and meaning can be reproduced, the difficulty in translating poetry is how to transpose the music of the original onto a different instrument and still create a poem viable in its own right. I can recall a few memorable successes: Louis Untermeyer's Heine translations, Gilbert Murray's of Aeschylus, and Roy Campbell's of Baudelaire.

I fear for those who invest too much time in reading the translations now flooding the bookstores. As a whole they are an unholy mishmash, neither prose nor verse but a one-size-fits-all prosody that muffles the ear to the singular strengths of the English language.

RWS: How do you feel about literary criticism? Do the comments of critics bother you?

WHIPPLE: From his lofty peak on Olympus, Auden refused to read reviews of his books because "they are not meant for me." The rest of us, having volunteered a lifetime of energy to subsidise our art, will not turn up our noses at whatever crumb of recognition falls our way, although, to paraphrase Rilke:

• My poems bloom
• in hothouse bliss
• enjoying my attention,
• sheltered from the critic's Arctic kiss,
• the fool's misapprehension.

To put it briefly, a poet cannot lie. Every line he writes reveals his moral strengths and weaknesses, his intellectual vigour, spiritual courage, emotional depth and range. His aesthetic is his morality, and one bad line is a crime against all poetry.

RWS: What kind of advice would you offer a beginning poet?

WHIPPLE: If you truly believe that what you have been called to do is good for the soul and not just blackening white pages with your ego, then go with my blessing. Ignore the penny-wise who serve the Muse of Money and scorn you as naive. Sometimes I sense they are envious and would write also if they could. But don't think that when there's lightning God is taking your picture.

RWS: Please briefly describe your publishing history.

WHIPPLE: My first book was Life Cycle, published in 1984 by Hounslow Press. It was welcomed by a host of laudatory reviews such as Louis Dudek's in the Globe and Mail. He said the book contained "poems that take your head off in a daze of delight," and Northrop Frye called it "a very rich volume full of inventiveness and remarkable experiments." Alexandre Amprimoz added his praise in Quarry, Barry Dempster in Poetry Canada, Laurel Boone in Canadian Literature, Martin Singleton in Poetry Toronto, Michael Williamson in the Canadian Book Review Annual, and I am eternally grateful to many others.

My second book, Passing through Eden, was published six years later by Glen Sorestad's Thistledown Press, followed by Hats off to the Sun, and Carousel by that most amiable of editor-publishers, Richard Olafson of Ekstasis Editions.

In 2000 I was granted every poet's fondest wish, a deluxe edition of my selected work called Tom Thomson and Other Poems from John Flood's Penumbra Press. Lastly, Fanfares from Ekstasis and Origins from Antonio d'Alfonso's Guernica Editions appeared in 2003. I am grateful to all the editors and publishers who have published my work, especially in the present harsh literary climate for poetry.

My poetry has also appeared in ten anthologies, one of which, Introductions: Poets Present Poets, contains an appreciation of my work by the venerated Margaret Avison. Another one called Poetry and Spiritual Practice, edited by Susan McCaslin, has a generous selection of my poetry in addition to a short biographical note.

Finally, two literary textbooks contain examples of my work: The Art and Craft of Poetry, (USA), edited by Michael Bugjeda; and A Musical Clockwork, edited by Susan Ioannou.

RWS: This may sound like a jejune question, but what rewards do you find as a poet from the writing of poetry?

WHIPPLE: First of all, therapy. The greatest poet and the least amateur gain the same emotional relief from expressing their feelings in verse. Eliot wrote "The Wasteland" in a sanatorium, and no poet quite understands how other people can live without this release. The poet inhabits for the time of writing that magic realm where the most palatial of yachts is outclassed by the Platonic yacht of his imagination, a craft more swift and luxurious than any other. By publishing a book, he has the hope, however faint, that he will bring a moment's pleasure to like-minded strangers. Writing poetry gives the god-like power of creating something out of "airy nothing," a means of communicating the incommunicable, a way for the living to reply to the unseen witnesses all around us who have left their poems for us to answer. If he wins a prize of some monetary worth, he will make his mother very proud after years of frustrated hopes on behalf of her child. And finally, I think the title, poet, still has a certain mystique about it in the public mind despite its being tarnished by hip-hop and poetry slams. All countries take advantage of the cultural prestige the poet freely offers as ambassador.

RWS: How would you define beyond these comments your poetics and your method(s) of composition?

WHIPPLE: Poetry teases the intellect with ideas turned into pictures, time into music, coincidence into rhyme, while metaphor implies that all that is one great Is. The ideal reader enjoys the exercise of completing the poem with his own creativity, taking advantage of the gaps the poet leaves for him to jump across. A poem is heard differently by each reader and thus shares in a minor way the ambiguity of music which by its nature has no design on the listener but to entertain the senses and subliminally now and then to stimulate the soul.

I am never without pen and paper, and I have a loose-leaf binder packed with the seeds of potential poems picked up and jotted down on my daily rounds: a way-out phrase, a provocative vocable, a new idea or novel rhythm - seeds which may germinate, and after careful cultivation, bear fruit worthy of being published. While working on a particular poem during days or weeks, I am constantly amazed at how just the one needed word will inevitably be overheard in the subway or on the radio or will leap out from a page of prose or shout from a billboard.

I have been working to achieve a style as hot as Soutine and as cool as Klee where images from the deep pool of the subconscious are printed on the sounds that words make when they meet and mate. Such a style involves the maximum freedom within a matrix of restraint where the traditional and new, the sacred and profane, the symphony musician and subway busker may jam happily together.

RWS: Are there any other work habits you'd like to share?

WHIPPLE: I write my first draft in longhand, type it, then revise it in longhand, retype it and so on. I revise each poem as often as the number of its lines - twelve times for a poem of three quatrains and forty times if necessary for a poem of forty lines. But this is only a minimum since many poems are rewritten twice as often or more. I like to average one concrete noun per line in order to hold the poem from sliding off the page. Also, I try to avoid starting my lines with an indefinite article or conjunction. This helps to tighten the syntax and firm up the texture.

I employ all of the language tools: metaphor, metre, analogy, anagram, anaphora, rhyme, rhythm, rhetoric, slang, alliteration, mimesis, synesthesia, lofty hyperbole, low humour, wit and free association, among others. If things get critical and the poem is on life-support, I attempt to revive it with transfusions from poems kept in reserve for this purpose.

I hope I don't shock anyone unduly when I declare that I continually thank God for everything He has helped me to write. I do not work alone.

RWS: Is there anything you'd like to add to that?

WHIPPLE: Yes. I would like to say how every artist, despite the sad experiences of Gaugin and van Gogh, needs the encouragement of a friend, an "ideal reader" to approve and help him improve his work through long years of labour, neglect and despair. Speaking for myself, I could not have endured and accomplished what I have without the prompting of Toronto poet, Ralph Cunningham.

I would also like to express my gratitude to the invisible hand of The Canada Council, whose grants have funded my publishers in their heroic endeavours on behalf of poetry written by Canadians.

Three Poems by George Whipple

Alchemies
When hockey rinks are melted back
to fountains, park attendants spray
thawed rainbows from a hose:
birds flower in the trees:
dogs with countless flickered paws
wag the sidewalk with an unleashed pack
of shadows shadowing the April sun.

Now the first sweet sniff of pollen tells
the nylon-winged and sunlit heart of bees
to beat more fast, and faster yet
if all the hiveless honey in the hills
is to be lifted to their gloating cells
before the summer, temporal as thyme,
fades on the stem and withers to regret.

Where cedarlings reflect the yellow song
of daffodils, what alchemies! - from seed the sod,
from earth and ultraviolet rays the rose;
from chlorophyll and rain, green petal-juice.
The pestle of the spring grinds winter to a pulp,
converting ice to daisies, phloem to flame,
and lights the torchlit tulip in its bulb.

from Life Cycle (1984)

Apples
I bite an apple by Cézanne:
indelible/inedible, a diffident
half-truth of expectation and surprise:
the taste of red, the feel of round.

All apples seem the same.
And yet by different laws
one stays as ripe as always
- August in a glance -
while others spoil.

This match I strike still kindles the Bastille
and the Reichstag. In its flame
St. Joan writhes at the stake.
The sin we cannot not commit we dread.

Between necessity and chance these apples
grow - evocative and vivid on no tree
in white gardens of the mind
that neither live nor die.

from Passing Through Eden (1991)

Jermaid
They make us smile,
those hairy thugs, the Goths
who slaughtered half of Europe
to leave a few exhausted axeheads
in the toybox of the Louvre.

Yet all our history books foretell
that from some digging not too far from here
your skull or mine, subpoenaed by the ages
will cipher to rapt eyes the only evidence
we lived. Aliens will sift through tons
of sand for bits of stone - our fingers.

What candle's tears,
by dawn, have not congealed
into a brittle residue of former light?

from Passing Through Eden (1991)