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Excerpted from Doris Hillis’ interview with John Hicks in Voices & Visions:

Hillis: Do you find poetry comes easily to you?

Hicks: I’ve never worried too much about it. Sometimes poems come quickly; cometimes I have to puzzle over them. But then I just put them away and pick them up again later. I don’t get frantic over them. I let the poetry stay in my mind. Often, if I leave it, it works itself out.

Hillis: Does your poetry require much revision?

Hicks: That varies greatly too. Sometimes it does; sometimes it doesn’t need much. There is a mystic saying, you know: you write what is dictated to you.

Hillis: Do you agree with that?

Hicks: I like the expression. It appeals to me . . . but I wouldn’t go around beating a drum about it!

Hillis: I think to write poetry it is necessary to attend, to sit quietly.

Hicks: There’s no doubt about that. That has happened to me. When you’re just sitting quietly and not thinking about it, then a phrase pops into your mind for no reason. That’s what is meant by something being dictated to you. You don’t go looking for it.

Hillis: What other poets’ work especially appeals to you?

Hicks: Oh, the poetry of T.S. Eliot, Auden and Frost. Their work really gives me a lift. And a number of others too.

Hillis: I think your point of view in poetry is quite close to T.S. Eliot’s. Eliot was a thoughtful poet, yet highly sensitive to the reality around him. He was also a staunch Anglican, a High Churchman – attracted by the music of the liturgy of the church. I feel an affinity between much of your meditational poetry and Eliot’s Four Quartets. And what about Dylan Thomas and e.e. cummings?

Hicks: Oh yes, you are bringing up all the old names.

Hillis: And contemporaries?

Hicks: I do enjoy their work, such as represented in Gage’s Canadian Anthology and later. There’s such great variety. I heard Louis Dudek say something on CBC radio that caught my notice: “The creative mind is a tinderbox of explosive contradictions.” That’s a good remark, isn’t it?

Hillis: Yes. I think creative work often grows out of the tension of opposites. Now regarding process, do you find your poetry comes to you with an inspirational rush?

Hicks: It has done . . . but I don’t think it’s typical. My poetry often emanates from a word of phrase or rhythm.

Hillis: I’ve notices you pay very close attention to the sound of language.

Hicks: Yes, the sound has to be absolutely right. The sound must balance itself in every line.

Hillis: I think you have an expert ear for the nuances of sound and your poetry has a beautiful lyrical quality that puts you in the tradition of Eliot, Yeats, Thomas, and Frost. Do you find yourself setting aside part of every day for the writing of poetry?

Hicks: No. As someone once said, it’s really with you all the time, twenty-fours hours a day.

Hillis: And from time to time it surfaces?

Hicks: Exactly. Sometimes it gets onto paper; sometimes you are left thinking about it. I can believe (without seeming too high-sounding) that poetry is a way of life. It stays with you. It’s the life you’re living. And probably it doesn’t show. People don’t avoid you because your mind is somewhere else.

Hillis: You must have seen quite a change in the cultural environment in Saskatchewan over the last twenty years, especially as a result of the Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild and the many writers’ workshops and seminars held in the province.

Hicks: Yes, that’s right. It has been quite a revolution. . . . But I think there is a danger – and this is just a side effect, not a criticism – that a revolution like this brings about a whole flood of people thinking, “Everybody can do it” . . . and creates a lot of “hangers-on.” As a result, much of the stuff that’s coming out isn’t too important.

Hillis: I know good, well-crafted poetry is important to you and me, but I think to our society in general, poetry is somewhat irrelevant. Does this worry you?

Hicks: Oh, I don’t think so. You must expect that. The same happens in music. You cannot expect everybody to consider a Brahms symphony or Beethoven string quartet as easy-listening, which they are to us.

Hillis: Have you experienced times when you just can’t write poetry?

Hicks: Yes, but I’ve never suddenly decided I can’t do it. I don’t think I’ve ever been frustrated over writing. But I have found if you read other people’s work, an idea will often spring up in your mind that has nothing to do with the reading. A word may trigger something that is actually ready and waiting, and will bring it to the surface.

Hillis: I notice your poem “Now is a Far Country” appears both in the book of the same name, and in Winter Your Sleep. Is there a reason for this?

Hicks: I just wanted to refer back, to make a connection with the earlier work.

Hillis: The cover-picture of Now is a Far Country suggests specific landscape. It reminds me of the road to Waskesiu. Yet your poems are not closely related to place, are they? In my mind, your “Now” is resonant of the “now” in T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets . . . the Eternal Now, the moment when Time and Eternity intersect . . . or specifically, the moment when the poet is in touch with the Muse.

Hicks: Well, that’s interesting . . . and your interpretation reinforces my belief. I like to be told what something means. I like to hear what other people think. All I can say is: as far as I’m concerned that title wasn’t directly related to Eliot. It was one of those titles that appeared from deep inside. But a very special incident did touch off that poem. I passed a stranger on the street one day, and for a second, our eyes met. That moment touched off the poem. Writers call that a “springboard.” That’s a nice work, isn’t it?

Hillis: Many of your poems in Now is a Far Country deal with the poetic process: your source of inspiration, how you write; why you write.

Hicks: Well, if that’s so, then maybe the poetic process is somehow a parallel of living.

Hillis: And, as I mentioned previously, I see your poetry as profoundly influenced by musical form. It affects subject mattter, structure and language.

Hicks: That’s true, of course. Its most pervasive influence has been one of discipline: the strictness of various musical forms. I can think of the sonata form, for instance; how it begins, develops and ties itself up at the end.

Hillis: Sometimes you have an antiphonal movement.

Hicks: I’m sure the influence is there, but I like being told if it’s so. It reinforces something inside me.

Hillis: Some of your poems are written in the spirit of e.e. cummings, and like him, you have achieved a lightness of language by the unusual placing of words. Your emphasis, however, has been on the use of nouns in the place of adjectives. From your poem “First and Gracious Sight” I can recall such phrases as “firstflower look,” “snowdrop moment,” “in dance shimmer” and so on, a displacing of words that gives a delicate tentative quality.

Hicks: One reviewer described that as “sprung syntax.” I thought: that’s not bad!

Hillis: And much of your poetry has beautiful flowing movement and many images . . . lines that stay in the mind like “Come with me down the halls of loneliness/ where memory is adrift like smoke” from your “Twenty Steps Go Down To Earth,” or from “The Speech of Your Country”: “The speech of your country is like music/ resisting translation, sufficient of itself in phrase and cadence/ flowing eloquently towards the perfect understanding.” They have a lovely lyrical measure. But then too, I notice a sharper satirical quality in ome of your poems. In “Biscuits la Menagerie,” for example, you seem to be taking a rather unkind poke at some of the third-rate poets writing today!

Hicks: I hadn’t thought of that! Well, there you are – that’s another level!

Hillis: Another poem that has the long line is “Trees at Night” in Winter Your Sleep, and you use it so effectively: “They beckon to me, but I give no sign of them and I will not go;/ not within reach of their hands, not into the shadowy places.”

Hicks: Yes, the long line has always appealed to me. It seems to have a musical scan behind it.

Hillis: And I not too that you often like to play with syntax and line-endings as in the poem “The Stillness of the Wood.”

Hicks: In that poem, every line ends with a little word like “a,” “the,” “in,” “as.” That resulted from a comment made by a literary magazine editor. He said he didn’t like poems where the line suddenly ended in a little word. So I thought to myself: why shouldn’t I write a poem where every blessed line ends in a little word! I did that on purpose! And I discovered you have to be very careful not to use the same word twice!

Hillis: You certainly succeeded. Another facet of Winter Your Sleep was the appropriateness of Neil Wagner’s cover design – the winter-snow scene, the still silent moment in the park . . . no people . . . no animals . . . just trees and a snow-covered park bench. This suggests the meditative tone of the book . . . and the four sections suggest both the cycle of the seasons and the phases of the human lifespan. Your final section “The Ritual Hours” of the monastic day symbolizes mankind’s tru relationship to God.

Hicks: That’s a sound interpretation. There’s spomething about the monastic life that takes hold of me . . . that appeals to me. I also have a poem “Love’s Hours,” in a similar form, in Silence Like the Sun.

Hillis: In all your work you are exploring the interior life – the mind, soul and spirit. There always seems to be amovement forward in time . . . but, at the coclusion, your poems take on a more objective view-point. The personal looks back over a lifetime and meditates upon it, thereby seeing time in terms of eternity. Once again, I felt that sacred music, especially the Christian liturgy, has had powerful influence on your work.

Hicks: Well, I don’t really think poetry has to be explained. In fact, Morley Callaghan said an interesting thing on CBC “Anthology”: A writer should never explain. Let it be there. Let it remain to be looked at.

Hillis: I would like to talk to you about an image that recurs in your work – the window in a high building from which the poet surveys the world.

Hicks: Yes, the little window. . . . I have a private sensation about a little room with a window and my looking down on what’s going by. It may be tied up with a sense of security, so whether it means a refuge from insecurity, I don’t know. But there is that picture. . . .

Hillis: And also this feeling of journeying on, as if life were a pilgrimage.

Hicks: Your interpretation is very close. So the more you can say that I just agree with, why, the easier for me! I find it hard to be in disagreement with too much. You see, regarding poetry, I am aware of everyone’s point of view and, in a way, I believe everyone’s response is right. You do set out to make an effect, after all.

From Voices and Visions: Interviews With Saskatchewan Writers by Doris Hillis. Regina: Coteau Books, 1985. pp. 121-144.
Used by permission.

read his obituary in the Prince Albert Herald
read “Legend: the Stones” and “A Book Called Winter”
return to John V. Hicks
return to Spotlights