In our April issue we published a poem called “Two Cowboys” by Elise Partridge, a poet from Vancouver. I was the first person at the magazine to read the poem, and I immediately fell in love with its clarity, subtle complexity, and power. Last month, “Two Cowboys” reappeared as one of the poems in Partridge’s excellent new collection, Chameleon Hours, published by the House of Anansi.
On the occasion of her new book, I asked Elise a few questions about her work and new poems.
What attracts you to the lyric mode?
I think it’s the mode that best suits my gifts and inclinations; in any case, it was the one I was most drawn to attempt, and pursue. That said, in the future I’d like to incorporate more dramatic elements into some of my poems, for example perhaps try to write monologues for different voices. I also regularly get inspiration from short stories and would like to write more poems that include narration, however compressed.
“Two Cowboys” is a very specific description of a scene, something you actually saw. Can you tell me about how the poem evolved from an observed moment to its final iteration?
Yes, one day in downtown Vancouver I noticed a man hurrying along gripping the hand of a child I took to be his son. While it’s not unusual of course to see people in Western garb here, I think this pair caught my eye because they were dressed identically—in black suits, ties, hats and boots—and because one almost never sees children that age dressed all in black. There was something in addition quite striking about the man’s haste and his angry mien, and the child’s stumbling anxiously, trying to keep up. Often if I see something I might want to put in a poem, I jot down notes right then and there, but—though I did somehow know I would want to write about this scene—I didn’t record it then. I don’t remember what finally impelled me to start the poem, but the image remained fresh in my mind when I began setting it down several years later. In any case, the poem became a challenge for me on a number of levels—what details to include; how to handle both description and narration in a three-beat line.
“Two Cowboys” actually wound up getting more comments, in draft, from friends and editors, than most of my poems—usually I don’t show a poem anywhere until I’ve gotten to the stage, through many drafts, where I feel it’s as finished as I can make it and I need someone else’s perspective. As it happened, at a certain point I was rushing to complete “Two Cowboys” to include in a manuscript (it turned out later I did have more time just to sit with the poem—often it takes me a couple of years before I’m sure I’m finished with something and want to publish it). Thus “Two Cowboys” got shown not only to my husband, but to several friends as well, and to my editor, Ken Babstock.
The version of the poem they all saw had five stanzas. I already knew it was too long and diffuse, and somewhat dull, but it took a lot of fiddling to figure out what to delete and how to rearrange. Some of these readers had already helped that way by remarking on which aspects of the poem they found particularly effective or moving. One also asked me some piercing questions about assumptions I was making that ultimately helped me decide what I wanted to keep and what tone I wanted to convey.
Much of your work has been published in the States, including in the New Yorker, and this new book is being simultaneously issued by the University of Chicago Press. In other words, you have more southern exposure than many Canadian poets. Does this effect the way in which you see your work fitting into a Canadian poetic tradition? Not to force you into any immodest comparisons, but what strain of poetic thought do you see your work coming out of?
I think writers inevitably belong in some way to their native countries and languages, but are also often hybrids of their own making, based on their sensibilities, influences, and so on. As an English-speaking North American (a dual citizen of Canada and the United States) I’ve been influenced by all kinds of literature in English—British, American, Irish, Australian, Canadian—and by literature translated into English, especially Polish, Russian, German, Latin American, and Chinese.
I don’t, alas, read any foreign language besides French, but Francophone culture is also very important to me. I’m an immigrant in Canada, and one of the nicest aspects of coming here was eventually finding poets with whom I felt a very strong kinship, in terms of who we were reading, what we were interested in, and what to some extent we were trying to do in our writing. One exciting discovery was that a good many poets here had not abandoned rhyme and metre—by which I’ve always been fascinated—the way numerous American poets had in the nineteen-sixties, seventies and eighties. In the States during those decades, “free verse” dominated; rhyme and metre came to seem outmoded in many minds, though certainly not all. Here in Canada, it seems metre and rhyme were never quite as scorned; acknowledgment of their powers and possibilities remained, and informed what some poets were doing. There’s little arid formalism here; not always, but often, I notice a sense of curiosity and exploration about how such resources might be used.
I’ve certainly learned too from Canadian poets who might be considered more “experimental” than I am, people who don’t use “traditional” metres or stanzaic forms, or much if any rhyme, even if in the end our writing is quite different. I’m inspired by the range of work being attempted in Canada now. And as to what Canadian tradition I might fit into—if I can place myself among living poets here, I do feel a bond with many, some older than I am and perhaps even more in the rising generations. I would certainly like to see Canadian poetry get more “southern exposure.” I think there is a great deal that could both inspire and invigorate American poetry, and many more readers in the US who might simply enjoy and learn from Canadian poetry.
The book’s second section documents your experience with cancer. How do the other sections relate to that section, and to what extent does it govern the rest of the poems?
Your asking that question helped me see more clearly that each section in the book contains poems about death, loss, and suffering; about love and its transforming and consoling powers; about striving of some kind, often in the face of adversity—about how people choose to live their lives, or what kind of life is perhaps thrust upon them. Many of the poems I suppose ask implicit questions about fullness of life or lives somehow thwarted, diminished, ended too early—about how we spend our time, treat our fellow human beings or our environment.
I know these issues came into very sharp relief for me partly because of my experience of cancer and my trying to decide, with an uncertain prognosis, how best to use my own time. The third section of the book contains elegies for young friends who died of cancer. One, Gabriele Helms, an energetic, extremely accomplished immigrant from Germany, someone I consider a Canadian hero, spent much of the last two years of her short life working to help other young women with the disease. Another, Rhonda Maretic, who was wonderfully vital and humorous, did cancer advocacy work as she was dying, also while trying to take care of her young family. I saw some of the agony these women went through, and how they would have given anything to live.
Many of the poems in my book, I can see when I look at them together, reflect an urge not to waste one’s life—by being self-destructive or selfish—an urge to live as intensely and variously as possible, as happily as possible. The experiences I describe in the second and third sections (the “cancer” sections) definitely affected some of the poems in the first and fourth sections—for example, those poems that depict lives blighted because of social injustice, economic circumstances, materialism, various forms of human destructiveness. But the experiences described in the “cancer” sections also inform the poems elsewhere that describe love, hope and determination. When I was sick, I often felt sustained and renewed by the love and generosity of other people, and that was an extremely moving phenomenon that I wanted somehow to record.
What are you working on now?
A third book of poems and also some essays and short stories.
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