My Life Changed - Lesley Strutt

“Your life changed because of that poetry workshop you took with Patrick Lane, Lesley,” my best friend said to me one day. She’s not given to hyperbole. What she said was the simple truth. That first poetry workshop with Patrick changed my life because he challenged me to listen deeply to myself. 

I wasn’t even supposed to be in that 2005 Booming Ground workshop at UBC. I’d applied to the beginner’s class but there weren’t enough students, so I was invited to the intermediate class with Patrick. I accepted the offer, though I was shaken. I didn’t feel I was good enough. 

He was a tough teacher, at least for me. The poems I brought to class in the first few days were overworked pieces of shit, and he said so, though not in those words. He would pick out one good line and tell me to drop the rest. The other students were far along in their writing careers and produced beautiful work. I heard the difference and learned from listening to their work. I learned from listening to Patrick listen. 

Once when I was reading my latest piece in a clipped, too-fast voice, he slammed his hand down on the table to stop me and said, “Never disrespect your poetry. Start again.” 

Finally, I began to really listen to myself. I dug deep, deeper than I’d ever dared, and there I found parts of myself I’d denied or ignored or buried. The poem I brought to class the next day after a long sleepless night, wasn’t pretty, or poetic, or romantic the way I thought my poetry should be. It was a stark poem portraying an abused woman, the moment she realizes she’s abused, and she stays. 

Water Boiling

The pot is boiling on the kitchen stove.

Into it she drops:

two hands small as butterflies

two eyes wide open

two flat feet

and something hard, something heavy –

        turned to stone.

The sudden splash of water, quick

as his last slap,

snaps her head back.

She is so still

in the fading, the light

then. She lifts a spoon and

stirs

until

she’s done.

When I finished reading that poem, the class was silent. Patrick let out a deep breath and said, “Now, that’s a poem.” I published that poem in the 2007 issue of the Canadian Woman Studies Journal devoted to ending woman abuse. I had turned a corner. 

When I began to listen to that inner voice, I could no longer put myself back into the closet and hide. I started to tell myself the dangerous truth. I left my marriage of 20 years. I started my life over with the intention of listening to myself no matter what the consequences. I wanted to live my life with the kind of honesty that asks everything of you, without compromise. But even the best of intentions can be abandoned, and I did so many times. 

I took other workshops with Patrick over the next 7 years. He held my hand to the fire each time and though I was often angry at him for doing it, I was grateful. I came away with another part of me peeled back, and each time I’d produced at least one poem that stood the test. With practice, I believe I’ve become the kind of person who tries to live as honestly as possible. Toward the end of his life, and at the time I met him, Patrick was certainly trying to be that kind of person. But all through his life, he wrote poetry that told the truth. He couldn’t hide when he wrote. It mattered too much.

AS HEARTBEAT, AS SIBILANCE - For Patrick - Wendy Donawa

Salt air scouring the cliffs and April sun
on the grassed slope about to burst
into a blue tide of camas washing the wind.
From the corner of your mind’s eye, conjure
the meadow, the women, their digging sticks,
canoes loaded with camas bulbs, the coastal trade.
Meadow, women, canoes, all fade in time’s solvent.

The drought has frightened my rosemary bushes into
indigo astonishment. Press a branch between your palms,
breathe and breathe that aromatic gift before it’s gone.

How briefly the starburst spangle of crabapple blossom
flares, already carpets the path to the lake.

Sift and settle of fog swallows the sun.

All is ghost and patina, rust and tarnish,
And gravity, inexorable, drags roots down into the dark.
But bless the carrion, their work beneath surfaces.
Bless microbes and insects at their intricate tasks, and
small burrowing creatures scuttling from the owl’s claw.

Bless the mutable mutable world where we gather
to laugh and weep over good bread, over dinner’s steam
of cardamom, ginger, cumin rising like a blessing,
and remember how he conducted his poems like music,
taught us cadence as heartbeat, as sibilance.

Alchemy of the always-inadequate word, his sorcery,
words clamber the backbrain from the wordless deep.
The word is never the thing—but we struggle to craft
the startling, the lovely, the ambiguous,
.
and remember how he raised his head slowly from reading
to tell us with kindness, and surgical precision,
how to make our poems better.

                   
                                                                  Patrick Lane
                                                    March 26, 1939 - March 7, 2019

The world has lost a great writer. Writers, poets and others have lost a great mentor, friend, husband and in the end, family man. This is the space for all of these people to come and leave a tribute to the man, poet and novelist.

Please feel free to send a poem, of his, yours, or lines that make him live in your memory. Also send along stories of how you knew the man. You may leave a comment on a post, which may be made into a post by the admin people, DC Reid and Daniel Scott.

Alternatively you may send us an email that we will convert to a post. Feel free to follow this site, as the intention is to send along as many words about Patrick as we can. The purpose is to pass on memories so those who were near to him may remember him, and also learn how he influenced the lives and writing of many poets who surrounded him in his vast land of Canada.

DC Reid: dcreid@catchsalmonbc.com.
Daniel Scott: pepoetry2@gmail.com.

"Patrick Lane has always walked the thin ice where truth and terror meet with a kind of savage intuition."   
                                                                                    Vancouver Sun

"Patrick Lane shouldn't just win the GG's award, he should be canonized."
                                

Focusing on the Word at Wintergreen Studios - Sept, 2012

The written word appears to have become the focus for the summer season line up of special guests at Wintergreen Studios. The majority of presenters recently have been either writers or poets, which is perhaps not so surprising since the studio recently entered the realm of publishing with its Wintergreen Press. The press has put out four titles to date.

Rena Upitis, founding director and president of Wintergreen, which is located on Canoe Lake Road just east of Godfrey, said the predominance of writers for this season just naturally evolved. “We were really lucky this year to attract four great writers: Steven Heighton and Helen Humphries of Kingston, poet Patrick Lane and upcoming in September, Lawrence Hill. We love having writers come and it seems to be just a growing thing,” she said at the public dinner and reading given by lauded Canadian poet Patrick Lane on August 24.

Lane, who has no less than 899 poems to his credit, headed up a four-day poetry workshop at Wintergreen that was attended by 12 eager poets. Louise Carson from St. Lazare, Québec, explained what Patrick had stressed so far in the workshop. “We worked on punctuation, which can often be a huge bug-bear for poets. But what he seems to be focusing on is relating the concrete to the abstract and getting us to understand that how, if you go too far in one direction or the other, you can either overstate or over mystify the reader. The idea is to get that balance and to use the concrete as a way to underline the abstract,” Carson said.

Lane is a master poet who has been practicing his craft for over 50 years and who has achieved that magical balance. His most recent collection called “Witness-Selected Poems-1962-2010” won the Governor General’s Award for Poetry and is a testament to the fact that he knows of what he speaks. His poems brought forth gasps from the audience who seemed to hang on his every word.

Lane opened the evening with a poem called “The Mad Boy”, an account of a developmentally challenged young man who lived down the street from him and who Lane would often see escaping from his caregivers. “As he goes he keeps looking back at his pursuers who follow him into the light, in the boy’s face is both glee and terror, he knows they will catch him, they always do…and the boy will wait for them just short of where the road breaks, and now he is happy as they hold him in their hands. He laughs at the run he has made again, his face lifted up into the sun reflects the knowledge he knows is his, that for him, the only escape is surrender, that giving himself up is his whole life…”

Lane ended his reading with a poem he read by heart called Antelope in the Snow. It came from an event in which he said he had in his “classic Patrick Lane way", endangered his own life, the life of his wife, and the lives of a herd of antelope by making a car trip on a fiercely cold day in the prairies many years before. Temperatures had dipped to below -40 degrees Celsius, and Lane described how he got out of his car and disturbed a group of concentrically circled antelopes, who unbeknownst to him were in a protective formation to shield them from the cold. They scattered when he ventured too close. “I felt terrible about that incident for a long time but not so much anymore.”

The poem reads, “This too the antelope in snow. Is it enough to say we will imagine this and nothing more? Who understands that failing, falters at the song. And still we sing, that is beauty. But it is not an answer anymore than the antelope, most slender of beasts, most beautiful, will tell us why we go, going nowhere, and going there perfectly in the snow.”

Lane’s advice to poets: “Read. Good writing comes out of good reading. Good readers make good writers. Really good writers are writers who have read a great deal and who have come out of a great tradition.”

For those wanting more of that tradition, Lawrence Hill, author of The Book Of Negroes, will be leading a workshop at Wintergreen from September 14-17. There will be a dinner and public reading on September 15 at 6pm. For information visit www.wintergreensdtudios.ca or call Wintergreen Studios at 613-273-8745.

Read Nunc Dimittis

In Patrick's Collected Poems, Nunc dimittis is on page  250, and in his Selected Poems, that won the GG, on page 166.

It is intended that you read both poems, for their similarities, and dissimilarities.

 Nunc dimittis

It is morning and I am kneeling
in the garden
                                               - Patrick Lane

As if forsythia were a yellow pathway

                                                              through wandering air

to the face of the girl in Vermeer’s painting

                                                                       asking why her fine

skin cheek is afraid.

As if the last river gorge of Atlantis

                                                          were a silver ring

of silent blue water.

As if Picasso’s

                         African women of Avignon

                                                                     could turn to horses                     

and their snorts leave

                                   the Austrian Wittgenstein,

the German Heidegger,

                                      the Husserl

                                                         in their endless coming to now? 

Am I genuflecting in the garden?

                                                      I don’t know,

                                                                

but three griefs I cannot understand:

                                                           the small Teresa,

fingers spread to and

                                  away from awakening; a mythical god’s

insistence on joy;

                             the splinter of rose emerging

                                                                              from my face.

Ours is a cold country,

                                     and espaliered fruit in southern sun makes it

no less cold, on the most august day.

Can the windmill undo its spiraling?

                                                           I would like to know.

As if green tomatoes

                                  come after cold, before the girl’s cheek,

one who walks green water,

                                              arbutus skin

                                                                   that peels like pages

of a white book. 

Would you, if you could 

                                         tell the girl how it will be,

that her painter is the residence of her questions,

                                                                               the dry river gorges

of Osoyoos, of Keremeos?

I return to the garden and my feet touch not the ground.

Green tomatoes rise into my hands, the girl’s windmill,

hydra blue against blue of windsock,

                                                            full cheeked on neck of land.

Can a pearl be afraid?

                                    Her windmill

                                                           turns to me

and asks whether it may now take its leave.