The Porcupine's Quill

I am an inveterate re-reader, as many of you know. I find great comfort and joy in picking up favourite books from long ago and revisiting them. Often I find myself in a completely different stage of life than I was when I first picked up a given story. And while not everything improves with age and time and distance, there is a particular kind of pleasure in discovering that an old favourite can still make you laugh, or cry, or think or swoon.

One such book that has stood the test of time is Robyn Sarah’s poetry collection A Day’s Grace, published by the Porcupine’s Quill twenty years ago in October. In celebration of this milestone book birthday, Robyn kindly answered some of this porcupette’s burning questions, and as a special bonus, recorded a reading of six poems from the collection!

A Conversation with Robyn Sarah

The Porcupine’s Quill (PQL): A Day’s Grace incorporates poems written over the course of five years. What was the editorial process like when it came to choosing which pieces to include, and in which order?

Robyn Sarah (RS): It always takes years for me to accumulate enough poems for a collection. If a poem doesn’t seem to be working, I set it aside unfinished. So choosing which poems to include is a non-task: when I have enough finished poems for a book, I collect them—though I may eliminate one or two because they seem not to belong with this body of work, and I may import a leftover poem from years ago that didn’t belong then, but seems to fit now. I sequence a collection by spreading manuscript pages over the floor, moving them into clusters that have elements in common; then I sequence the poems in each cluster, looking for interesting juxtapositions – similarities or contrasts. There are always a few “singles” left over, and I’ve found these often fall neatly into place as bridges when I go on to sequence the clusters. I began A Day’s Grace with the poem “A Solstice Rose” because it contains the phrase I chose as book title.

PQL: Several of the poems in the collection specifically mention poetry. In “Poem”, you write: “A poem is a small machine / to move the heart.” In “Vidui”, you write, “Poetry is my firepan.” How have these conceptions of poetry shaped the way you approach your writing?

RS: I think it’s more the other way around: the conceptions grow out of engaging in different ways with the experience of writing poetry. Your question has made me realize how many of the poems in A Day’s Grace explore this subject—something unique to this collection. Maybe after thirty years of writing poems, I felt a need to reflect on what I was doing? William Carlos Williams defined a poem as a “machine made of words”; in “Poem” I considered what might be the purpose of such a machine. “Vidui” (the Hebrew word for “confession”) alludes to the synagogue service, in which prayer is a substitute for long-abandoned Temple offerings: my poem, in turn, asks whether poetry is an acceptable offering in place of prayer. Other poems touch on the role of dream and meditation in the creative process. 

PQL: The idea of time—its passage, the consideration of specific moments in time—appears in several of the poems in A Day’s Grace. Would you say the book represents a snapshot in time, whether it be a specific time in human history, or a time in your writing life?

RS: The passage of time has been my underlying subject as a writer almost from the beginning: even when I seem to be writing about a particular moment in time, an awareness of “time past” is often a part of that moment. This book’s subtitle, Poems 1997–2002, reveals its larger moment: collectively, these poems span the turning of the millennium. I turned fifty in 1999. An awareness of historical time and of human mortality runs through the collection.

PQL: A Day’s Grace is celebrating its 20^th anniversary this year. Are there any poems or themes that you think have aged particularly well?

RS: I’ve always tried to sound a universal note—to write about perennial subjects that will not date. But if I had to single out poems in this collection that seem particularly to speak to the present day, I might mention “Baggage” (which actually predates the rest of the book by nearly twenty years—one of those “leftover” poems picked up later) and “Here/There”.  Both deal with identity and cultural history, with attachment to place and past, as well as with uprooting—themes very much in the forefront today. “A Vision of the Future”, a poem that projects forward, invokes timeless human vignettes of civilians in war’s aftermath; sadly, all signs are that this poem will continue to age well. There’s also a poem called “Circa 2000” (written circa 2000) in which I tried to play the future historian looking back on that millennial moment: what was going on that might later be seen as significant? Twenty years later—did I guess right?   

PQL: Several of the poems from A Day’s Grace were later included Wherever We Mean to Be (Biblioasis 2017), a selection spanning four decades of your work. In preparing such a long-ranging selection, what did you observe about the evolution of your work?

RS: Actually I noticed a surprising consistency. Thematically, from the earliest to my most recent work, I’ve been concerned with time passing and how humans experience time; with the role of memory and imagination in our immediate moment, and with the metaphoric subtexts to be found in daily-life encounters. Formally, every one of my collections has exhibited a variety of poetic modes: free verse, poems in traditional or invented forms, prose poems. But as I’ve gotten older, I see there are more and more poems built on allegory and/or on philosophical questions, and that when the poems do focus on “immediate” experience, it is just as often a long-ago moment being relived as one currently being lived.

PQL: Today, reading is typically a solitary and silent pursuit. What do you think reading aloud, whether as part of a live poetry reading, or as part of an audio recording, adds to the meaning and/or enjoyment of poetry?

RS: I love reading aloud—poetry (my own and others’) as well as prose, and I’m told I read well. But I don’t always enjoy live poetry readings. Not all poets read their own work effectively—either they rush it, or they don’t project or articulate so that every word can be heard. Professional actors, too, often read poetry badly—they overdramatize it, not recognizing that the emotion in a poem is built into the words themselves; no theatrics necessary to bring them out. Hearing good poems read aloud or recited can add hugely to the enjoyment and understanding of poetry, but only if the reader’s vocal presentation does justice to it as poetry. It’s unfortunate that in our present-day culture, this is a bit of a lost art.

PQL: You have chosen to record six poems from A Day’s Grace for us to enjoy. Which ones did you choose and why?

RS: I chose three poems mentioned here as ones that I think have aged well in speaking to our present time—“Baggage”, “Here/There”, and “A Vision of the Future.” I chose “Tony’s Sharpening”, about the sound of a knife-grinder’s bell on a summer evening, because it illustrates the way “time past” can be part of the present moment, investing it simultaneously with nostalgia. “Hearth” reflects the theme of human mortality that runs through the collection; and “Poem” seemed a good one to end with, given the number of poems in this collection that reflect on a poet’s vocation, craft, and higher purpose.

PQL: Is there anything else you’d like to add? Any questions that I should have asked?

RS: I was surprised you didn’t ask about my title choice. The phrase “a day’s grace” has a double meaning. As an expression, a legal term, we understand it as the stay of a deadline, a bit of extra time granted (to deliver the term paper, pay the rent, file our taxes…)—suggesting both urgency and a momentary reprieve. But the phrase can also be understood as the transitory loveliness that a day, any day, holds out to us if we’re paying attention—willing to be surprised, ready to be grateful. I wanted to invoke both meanings: a day’s brevity, and a day’s gifts.

Listen to Robyn Sarah Read from A Day’s Grace

As Robyn mentioned above, she recorded a selection of six poems from the book for our enjoyment. Please click the play button below to listen:

A Day’s Grace is available for purchase at porcupinesquill.ca, or, you may choose to order a copy from your favourite independent bookseller.

Thank you for celebrating with us the longevity and continuing power of these poems. We hope you’ve enjoyed this feature, and we encourage you to purchase a copy to add to your own collection!

Cheers,