Richard Harrison was born in Toronto in 1957 and saw the Leafs win the Stanley Cup ten years later. After graduating with degrees in Biology and Philosophy from Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario, Harrison remained there and taught at the university for another seven years. He then moved to Montreal and earned an MA in Creative Writing from Concordia University. In the mid-1990s, Harrison and his family moved to Calgary, where he had accepted a one-year appointment as the Markin-Flanagan Writer-in-Residence at the University of Calgary (1995-1996).  Harrison taught at the University of Calgary for one additional year and then moved to Calgary’s Mount Royal College, where he continues to teach Creative Writing and English.

Richard Harrison has published four books of poetry: Fathers Never Leave You (1987); Recovering the Naked Man (1991); Hero of the Play (1994); and Big Breath of a Wish (1998). His poems from Hero of the Play were featured on CBC Television’s Adrienne Clarkson Presents, and Big Breath of a Wish was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award. His work has been featured in a number of anthologies, including ICE: New Writing on Hockey.

Harrison’s poetry covers such a wide range of topics and ideas, that he is able to appeal simultaneously to devotees of poetry and to people who perhaps have never read an entire book of poetry in their lives. His poetry on hockey proves to even the most skeptical reader of poetry not just that the term hockey poetry is not an oxymoron, but that in fact the words naturally belong together.

STANLEY CUP

At the centre of the circle of the Champions of the
World, Mario Lemieux hoists the Cup, kisses its silver
thigh, the names of men where his will soon be cut
with a finish pure as a mirror; around him, the
tumult. And Scotty Bowman, the winningest coach
in the NHL, named his first son Stanley when his
Canadiens won it in ’73 with a stonewall blueline and
a dizzying transition game. Every player of every
team who ever won the Cup gets to take it home; it
has partied on front lawns, swimming pools and in
the trunks of cars, and even the man who left it on
the side of the road and drove away, still he thinks
of it as holy. And that word - holy - appears most
in the conversation of veterans who know how the
touch fades, the shoulder takes longer between days
of easy movement, how Bobby Hull passes over his
chance to drink champagne from its lip when the
Hawks won it in ’61 because he thought there’d be so
many in his life. Some take the Cup apart, clean the
rings, make minor repairs in their basements, and
then inscribe on the inside of the column the un-
official log of their intimate knowledge: This way
I have loved you.

Richard Harrison – from Hero of the Play

In the same way as Harrison’s hockey poetry make the reader look differently at both hockey and poetry, the poems from Big Breath of a Wish reframe what any adult might perceive as meaningless babble from a baby or toddler to profound utterances that mark the path of that child’s gradual and remarkable discovery of language and meaning. They also capture moments and feelings that are instantly recognized by any parent, and which remind us that of the unspoken bonds we share with all parents in our private, day-to-day lives.

BIRTH DAY: THE VIDEO

The space of writing does not open like a door even though it is the
eve of your first birthday and the windows of our city shimmer
tonight like candles waiting for the big breath of a wish. We videoed
your birth, your mother and her midwives and I together in the
bedroom of our house; we thought of your first present to you as the
address of your birthplace, the familiarity of your first bed. You were
stuck in transition for a long time. I tell you this not to exact a price
but because of the way my eyes were opened on your mother that
day; away from where she groaned in the bedroom we took ourselves aside and discussed a C-section, the trip to the hospital unless or if.
I admired her also the way I admire athletes, exerting herself for a
purpose - we used this language to prepare ourselves - those groans
were the groans of a woman who did not allow the body to stop her.
But I find it hard, almost impossible, to watch the video now; it
unshields me in a way I did not think it would, in a way being there,
holding her, then you, did not. When I say I will write this, she tells
me, remember how she was born because they lost the sound of her heart,
why I had to push so hard and fast, tearing skin because of that silence. May
this always be a gift we give; we could not wait to hear you.

Richard Harrison, from Big Breath of a Wish

Author profile by Paul Martin, May 2003

Interview with Richard Harrison

Richard Harrison is currently at work on his next volume of poetry and on a second, expanded edition of Hero of the Play. To learn us more about his work and his upcoming books, we asked Richard the following questions over e-mail. Here’s what he had to say:

PM: Tell us a little bit about what led you to start writing. What made you choose poetry?

RH: I wish I knew how to answer this question in an original way. (Insert "laughs" here.)  Richard Wilbur got it right, though, when he talked about "Art's Debt to Art" in his essay by that name. There is no "origin" for art in us: we all heard or saw someone doing it and it twigged, it triggered something that said, "you should do this, too."

With me the first poem was the one my father recited -- he loved to recite poetry. I believe now that holding on to the great poems of the English language was his way of staying sane and civilized -- of staying alive -- during his days as a soldier in WWII. The poems reminded him of his humanity. I really believe that. But when I was a kid, his reciting of poems like "Pied Piper of Hamelin" or "Second Coming" or "Fern Hill" were tremendous moments of contact between the two of us. Maybe the best times we ever had in terms of understanding one another.

It was that contact within a poem that I think lay dormant in me until I got to first year. I was going to be a biologist, but I did write poems then, too, "on the side." And so I got invited to hear some of the best poets in Canada read when they visited, and I remember Pat Lane reciting "If" -- a beautiful poem arising out of obscenity -- and thinking, "I want that." And poet after poet confirmed that desire -- in person: Robert Kroetsch, bill bissett, Riley Tench, Ward Maxwell, Mary di Michele -- then in their work: Sharon Olds, Dylan Thomas, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Yeats, dionne brand, Sappho -- as one of my student's says, "it just goes on like that."

PM: Were there certain poets or writers in other genres whose work inspired you early on? Whose work do you most admire today?

RH: The poets I've mentioned, of course. Writers in other genres: I owe enormous thanks to Margaret Laurence who treated me very early on like a real writer. There are a lot of writers she did that for -- it wasn't a question of offering criticism or advice on where to publish (in fact, if I'd asked for the latter, she'd have ended the relationship; real writers, she thought, should do their own market research). She just started talking to me like I belonged in the room with her. Adele Wiseman did the same. William Stafford, the late American poet, was a great teacher -- When I gave him what I thought was the completed manuscript for my second book, he told me to throw the  whole thing away. Hmmm. I'm talking more about what I learned from writers as mentors rather than what I took from their work, aren't I? Oh well.

Poets whose work I admire most today? Let's do this by asking, right now, if I could take the work of only 12 poets to a desert island, who would they be? Hopkins, Homer,  Pier Giorgio di Cicco (he's back!), Karen Solie, Patricia Young, Sharon Olds, Carolyn Forche, Wilfred Owen, William Butler Yeats (though I'd keep them apart from one another), dionne brand, Sappho (Anne Carson's translation), Lorca, Vallejo, Paul Muldoon -- is that 12?

PM: um, 14.

OK. Call it a poet's dozen.

PM: Each of your books is focused around a particular theme or idea. With Hero of the Play you write about hockey and then with Big Breath of a Wish you deal with your young daughter's discovery of sound and language. How has this affected your approach to writing and your thoughts about the function of a BOOK of poetry where all the poems are so clearly connected?

RH: Hmmm. That's a good question. Right now I'm working on a book that isn't explicitly connected in that way, so it's a good time to think about that.

I'm of two minds about this. I mean, my first book was, like most first books, pulled together after I'd been writing for a while -- I think it's about 10 years' worth culled and edited and so on. I learned in making that book, Fathers Never Leave You, thanks in large part to Kenneth Sherman and Betsy Struthers, that a book of poetry didn't just "gather." It had to be composed. So for the next three books, Recovering the Naked Man, Hero, and Big Breath, I was more conscious at the time that I was making a book; the book's composition stood to me in relation to each poem the way the composition of a poem stands in relation to the verses. More and more I started thinking in terms of "book of poems" rather than "poems I would later put in a book."

I think that that's one way artists grow in general -- the way bands go from trying to get "The single" to thinking in terms of the album. That's certainly the way John Lennon described it, and I think it's one of the reasons the Beatles' music survives so well; they -- and, after The Breakup, John and George -- weren't trying to surround a hit with "the other songs," they were crafting a whole piece, putting the songs in particular order, letting, perhaps, early songs suggest later ones.

And whether that's true of them or not, it's certainly what happened to me in terms of books. And I have to thank Timothy Findley for a lot of that. He was another whom Margaret took under her wing, and even though I think he found my work quite distant from his own -- particularly the hockey book -- he did see that I was writing a book, not collecting poems, and he offered me some really good advice about writing a whole piece based on his experience as a playwright and novelist.

On a pure tangent here, I really do look at other poets' books in the same way I look at my own. Even though, you're right, Hero and Big Breath are explicitly thematic, you could take individual poems out of them and see them as independent works. And of course, that's what happens in anthologies. My students think that Elizabeth Barrett Browning just sat down and wrote "How do I love thee?" when in fact that's only one of the over 50 sonnets in Sonnets from the Portuguese -- and all of them deal with finding the proper language of and for love. In a sense all the best poems are parts of thematically-linked periods in their makers' lives. Every poet's work owes something to the work he or she did before it. I just found that writing with that understanding up front helped me make the poems. And led me to places I wouldn't have anticipated.

I know that's a long answer. I hope it's a clear one.

PM: It is. Turning to Hero of the Play, I've said before that the words "hockey" and "poetry" are not words that one would automatically associate with each other -- until one reads Hero of the Play. Once I'd read your book, I looked at the game, and maybe even poetry, a different way. Has writing about hockey also changed your perspective of both?

RH: Thanks. Um. Yes. My view of both things has been shaped by the experience of writing that book. Lots of what I've just said came out writing it, particularly the idea that poems could lead to the discovery of other poems: "The Feminine" in that book prepared me to write about Manon Rheaume when she -- in life -- answered the objections I'd heard and understood in that first poem. Same with the Don Cherry poem, and the one about my Dad looking like Paul Coffey skating up ice. In many ways I found that by continually working at the theme in that book, I discovered language for things that had waited a long time to be spoken of -- like the expression on my Dad's face when I finally outran him.

In terms of hockey itself, I found it almost impossible to cheer for a single team after writing the book. The book was all about how hockey was a universe -- or failed to be a universe -- in which the things that really mattered to me didn't attach themselves to any teams in particular but which needed the concept of team nonetheless. So in a sense I lost that specific and special connection I see when I'm talking to people who "bleed blue" for the Leafs, or cheer for the Canucks no matter what. And I miss that. Maybe it's not so much the book as the condition of the game itself -- players moving all over the place, payroll determining so much of what's done. Maybe the process of making this art has only mirrored what's happened in life. But I think I've had more of a hand in it than that. The artist is a participant, and in sense in writing the book, I've created in myself the player's loyalty -- to the other players -- rather than the fan's loyalty to the rink.

PM: Like many writers in this country, you make most of your living as a teacher of writing. Teaching, though, is clearly far more than a day job for you; I know from seeing you in action and having spoken to your students that you are a gifted and inspiring teacher. Is there a connection between your teaching and writing? In what ways does one affect the other?

RH: Sounds like my job-interview question. But thanks again. I think the two things affect each other the way any two creative acts done by the same mind mutually affect one another. Leibniz once said that wisdom is understanding that all things are connected, and as you age, you'll be given the chance to see how. I love him for that. I love my students. I love teaching them. I love seeing them growing as minds and as people with what they read and write. In many ways I teach my students with the sense that we're in this together to make the best work appear on the page. When I have that sense of shared mission with them, just as I have had it with people whose poems and essays and stories I've worked on with them, then there's very little difference between teaching and editing. So in that sense, teaching and writing spring from the same source. I don't mean writing as in "finding out what to say"-- either life or the Departmental assignment sheet will tell you what that is.

I mean writing in the sense that you work with the words that have got themselves down on the page the way you work with clay that somehow found its way to your wheel. Teaching for me is very much a project of sharing mastery, of helping people gain control of their language. If you can do that, then all the good stuff that comes from education can get in -- and I mean the power to think about your life, about books, about your art, about your future and your wounds. And once that is allowed into their lives, I see my students start taking charge of their own learning. And then we're away. I'd like to think that the subjective experience of learning is the same as the subjective experience of being taken into a poem -- either as writer or reader -- an ecstatic experience, literally one in which you forget yourself for a while and return to that self different -- and happier -- than you were when you left.

PM: Finally, would you like to give us a sense of your latest work? Is there a new book in the works?

RH: Today the title is "Worthy of His Fall" and it looks like it's going to be a book about mortality, at least my mortality -- yours, too, if the poems work. My children are growing, my parents aging -- my Dad's just got through a bout of cancer; many of the people I've named already today are dead, people very important to me. The world has slid into war. So I'm feeling my own limits -- I think probably everyone is -- much more now than 3 or 4 years ago. That sounds like a lot of laughs, doesn't it? It can't be as celebratory a book as either Hero or Big Breath, but I hope it's as beautiful if not more than these. I remember when Emma got sick right after her birth, and then a couple of years later, Lisa, my wife, and I had to prepare ourselves, and one of the things that ran through my mind was "what is this trying to teach me?" Not that I believe in a divine mind or plan or power behind events, but I found that asking that question made me grow through things. It was my way of not only dealing with things, but letting the world in, particularly when it was bringing things I didn't want or like. The title poem is from a sequence about my father's cancer -- but less about the cancer than about the family truths that came out as a result of it. I would never have wished that sickness on him, but I know that through it we both came to an understanding of each other and the world that we had never had outside the poems we'd recite by heart together. When I think of the poems already written for it, I think of them as returning me to that most primitive feeling I've had with the words as they came from my father's mouth.

PM: Thanks for taking the time to talk to us, Richard.

RH: Thank you for asking. It's been good to think with you.

Paul Martin
April 25, 2003