George Ellenbogen is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Morning Gothic: New & Selected Poems. His books have been translated into German and French and he is featured in a documentary film, George Ellenbogen: Canadian Poet in America. A Montrealer by birth and upbringing, he lives in Boston.

Gerard Beirne: You had the opportunity to study with Louis Dudek as a young student at McGill University in Montreal. He was, in his own way, an important and influential figure in Canadian poetry and founded Contact Press with Raymond Souster and Irving Layton, publishing your first book as part of the McGill Poetry Series at quite a young age (with Leonard Cohen’s book being the first one published in the series). How important was that relationship with Dudek for you?

George Ellenbogen: Yes, important. At least that…probably more than that. I first knew Louis as a student in his Comparative European Lit (1750-1850) course in 1952. It ran for the whole year and I followed it up with his course which covered the next hundred years. I’d say that most of my university education came in those two courses. I’d need pages to list the writers: among others, Voltaire, Schiller, Goethe, Ibsen, Shaw, Tolstoi, Lawrence, Joyce, Gide, Proust, Dostoievski, Neitzsche…the list goes on, the reading never ended. Louis did very little talking in those classes, not much beyond making introductory comments, though those were usually provocative enough to generate a lively discussion. When I took his class, I had no idea of how I would eventually earn a living, but I did know then and there that I was going to be a writer. I was certain of that. I’m sure his presence turned me in that direction.

GB: The remarkable Canadian writer, Robert Kroetsch, said to me one time (after  hearing that I had lived for a number of years in northern Manitoba) that usually Europeans go West in search of adventure but that Canadians go North. He also wrote that “to write is, in some metaphoric sense, to go North. To go North is, in some metaphoric sense, to write. One goes North at the very point on the page where the word is in the process of extending itself onto the blankness of the page.” I just love that. I know that you worked in the Arctic for six months as a young man. How was that as an experience for you, how did it influence your writing, and was it the writer in you that led you there in the first place do you think?

GE: I like that equivalence of going north to going into the unknown, for both adventure and writing. There’s something of that in Henry Taylor’s fine poem “Riding a One Eyed Hors.” I think there’s something of that in my own memory, but it extends above that thinly populated 150 mile band that crosses the country from Montreal to |Vancouver. Beyond that nothing,  nothing in the rear view window…as a matter of fact, there’s no longer a rear view mirror. No trees. Nothing. Turf and perma frost. That’s it. For me, one of the distinctive conditions that Canadian writers face is that they’re leaning into or leaning against northern darkness.  Compare, rather contrast this to what Austen or Fielding confront in their milieus where everything is SEEN, nothing hidden.

The irony in my own case, Gerard, is that while in the Arctic, I never wrote about that landscape, that reality. It might be that I was looking for a “rear view mirror,” for what connected me to the world |I had left. It's only now, in the last stages of my writing career, that I find myself interested in how my time in the north shaped me, and I’m currently in the process of mapping out my stay in the Arctic..

GB: Later you South and spent a large portion of your life in Boston. Was that a difficult move to make, leaving Canada? I know when I left Ireland (shortly after the publication of my first collection of poems) it felt as though I was walking away from a literary community I had barely just encountered and had to find my way all over again. Did you experience anything like that?Do you think it impacted your writing in any way? Has it been possible to maintain connections with the Canadian poetry scene?

GE: Though my early years—childhood, adolescence, undergraduate work at McGill—were all in Montreal, and my vocation as a writer chosen there, I’ve lived in several places since—the Arctic, Mexico, Greece, England, Spain among others, and really don’t fasten my identity to any one place nor for that matter to any one literary community. Email and skype permit me to stay connected to artists living in different places

When I was in the Arctic, as I mentioned, part of me—through my imagination and my writing-- was in warmer places. It may be that I rarely have both feet in the same place. .

By the same token I’ve never seen myself as fitting neatly into a specific school of writing. While listening to the free verse gospel circulated by my mentors Dudek and Layton through Contact Press and writing poems in free verse—lots of them, I never lost my taste for forms or the practices of traditional poets. In my last collection, you’ll find poems in quatrains, terza rima, sonnets, among a variety of forms. And I remain a sucker for villanelles. Love them.

GB: You taught at Bentley College for a long time holding many positions including Department Chair. How important has the act of teaching been to you and what is the main impact you would like to have left upon your students?

GE: I did teach at Bentley for a long time, forty years! Including chairing which for reasons not necessary to explore was hard to avoid. Though for a limited time, I enjoyed it, even though I had to put my writing aside.

But I loved teaching and still do. And occasionally I get to do some, either during a book tour or when invited to teach an intensive creative writing class over three or four days, something I’ve done over the past ten years, primarily in German universities. In such situations I’m not required to sit on soul drying committees. I also avoid the semester long process of sinking all of my energy and attention into student writing at the expense of my own. But no regrets. Given the choice once again, I believe I’d do it all over.

GB: You visited Ireland some years ago staying on Valentia Island and visiting Doolin, and you will be back again this month reading in Sligo. Also, you completed your PhD dissertation on Swift’s poetry. What was it about Swift’s poetry that drew you to him? What other Irish writers, if any, have been of influence to you?

GE: Let me look at these as separate questions, including one which is how I came back to an academic life in the first place. When I left for the Arctic, it never occurred to me that I would return to the university and become a teacher. Leaving had been so liberating.

I’d been away for several years before deciding to return for graduate degrees. I did so because I was looking for a way of supporting a family, and earning a living by teaching, ie talking about books that I liked, something I would do for the joy of it, was like robbing the Bank of England on a daily basis and getting away with it.

As for my thesis topic, I was looking for someone I could connect with, and Swift, though traditional in many of his political and religious views, had an iconoclasm running through his veins that I connected with. (And who else in the century wrote anything as touching as his Stella poems. I can’t read them aloud now without having my voice break.)

My interest in Ireland is a totally separate matter. That started in the early 1950’s when I had a summer job washing the windows at Windsor |Station in Montreal with Jerry Clifford, who’d been in Ireland between 1916 and 22. He had a whole nestful of songs and stories and generously shared them with me. My interest in Ireland dates from that encounter.

But I can’t say I’ve been influenced by any Irish poet or by any poet, or for that matter any single writer or event although so many have written things that I carry in my memory and imagination. But influence is really a complicated matter, Gerard, isn’t it? I think we’d both find it improbable to conclude  that because A reads B attentively, moreover enjoys him, that he necessarily becomes molded by B. It’s not that simple. And if he (A) did, if he could have his sensibility so easily stamped, how seriously would we take him, how much would he fall in our estimation?

GB: Your most recent collection of poems is Morning Gothic – New and Selected Poems. How have your poems changed stylistically over the years do you think? Does the aging process play any role in formal qualities?

GE: I think I’m like the aging athlete here. Some of what I had is gone and will not return. I’ll leave it to the critics to identify those features. But I think I’m smarter, at least a better editor. That comes from making peace with my early teachers.

In order to encourage us in face of a literary audience hostile to the new directions in poetry, they, our Contact Press mentors, so indulged us that we saw all of our work as wonderful…otherwise, why would we have written it? The experience of writing for over sixty years makes it more difficult to labor under those delusions. I’m far more willing now to scrap pieces that don’t work.

GB: Your memoir, A Stone in My Shoe, recounts memories of your family and growing up in an immigrant Jewish neighbourhood in Montreal. Was there anything in particular in the memoir form that appealed to you? How was the experience of writing it for you?

GE: A Stone in My Shoe was an accident. My late partner and I were at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, an art colony, Evelyn working on a memoir of growing up Arab in America,me editing my last poetry collection, Morning Gothic. I finished earlier than I expected, and ignoring the protocol at such colonies which discourages disturbing writers at work, got this abrupt response from her …"why don’t you write about Montreal, you’re always talking about it” And I did, but not with a plan…more like the process Theordore Roethke hints at in the line “I know by going where I have to go”. I’d never done a memoir before, had no idea how to go about it.

Instinctively I felt it wasn’t like building a table (which I’d done) or a boat. With neither blueprint nor outline, I wrote about the memories that surfaced. Much of the material was familiar—the people, for example; I’d lived with them. For other presences, buildings, for example, where I knew only facades, I turned to real estate records, old street maps. Michelangelo talked about a piece of sculpture emerging from a mass of stone. Well, gradually a structure emerged for me-- of parallel journeys:  that of my parents from their European origins to urban America and the one taken by my brother and me from my parents’ values to those we eventually acquired.

Working on that book was fun, the experience of swimming underwater and seeing everything known for years with possibly the addition of some squiggly marine life—the comfort of familiarity and, paradoxically, the pleasure of discovery…seeing myself grow as I might in a photo album and at the same time seeing myself in a light that I’d not previously absorbed.

GB: I asked about Irish writers earlier, but what other writers inspired you through the years?

GE: When I think about writers that made a difference for me, I don’t think of nations, rather individual writers. Swift, Shaw, Yeats and Joyce would have mattered for me if they came from the moon. What makes them matter for me is not the exclusive property of any one nation, more the ways sounds and letters get magically transformed from glimmerings into worlds that raise my eyebrows, Machado de Assis on the one hand, Knut Hamsun on the other. I mention Hamsun deliberately, because I was moved by Growth of the Soil, when I read it in Louis Dudek’s class as an adolescent, unaware of how his ruralist bent led him to his early sympathy for Hitler. I’ve not read Hamsun since. I’m curious as to how I would now react to that novel. Again to return to your question, I don’t really think of nations when I read…or when I write.

Strangely enough, I’m in the process of bringing out two memoirs within one set of covers: Evelyn’s Teaching Arabs, Writing Self about growing up Arab in America and my own A Stone in My Shoe: In Search of Neighborhood, about growing up Jewish in Montreal. The volume, which will include several essays and an interview, is coming out in French and \German, and, hopefully, in Englsh. Here is an instance where I am concerned with countries and communities and the importance of building bridges rather than walls. Let me share with you the statement that will appear in this volume:

Before Evelyn Shakir died in 2010, she and I worked simultaneously on the two memoirs in this collection, reenactments of and reflections on the communities that shaped our lives. The books were published separately, Evelyn’s with Interlink in the US, mine with Vehicule in Canada. Both had their day and their audiences. Why then publish them together now?

Perhaps it was a way of continuing a relationship by mingling memories, mingling words. But it was more than that. For the thirty-two years that we had lived together, newspaper editorials and cartoons and posters had reminded us constantly that we were creatures apart, Arab and Jewish, cultures so often seen at one another’s throats.

I believe those conflicts made us all the more aware of the cultures we lived in, wrote about and celebrated. They also made us aware of each other’s culture, not merely as something distant and exotic, but as rich, vivid, and varied, in which we could envision parts of ourselves and the shared values that connected us to each other.

Though most of us seek to survive and to leave a world in which our children and grandchildren can survive, more and more we find ourselves in a world gone amok with survival no longer a certainty. Prominent among the explanations for this current predicament is how we respond to difference, to what is now commonly termed “the other,” with bristling, threats and violence, a truth confirmed by the several genocides in the last century.

On both sides of the Atlantic, we hear once again a swelling of rage building from the distant past through the Nuremburg rallies and echoing to our own time. And because mutual slaughter and its rhetoric are so longstanding, we become intimidated, inundated, and resign ourselves to their consequences as we would to an act of nature, a volcano or a tsunami. In so doing we lose faith in ourselves, in our very voices.

The publication of these two memoirs, not separately, but side by side, as they were written, as they were lived, is intended to provide those voices. They emerge from rituals of daily living in two cultures, cultures viewed by us not as enemies but as neighbors as they go about their daily activity, weaving cloth, hammering metal, building bridges, growing their gardens, dancing over the newborns, raising them. The lyricism in their actions extends from one to another, hands to hands, as they join not merely to tolerate other presences, but to celebrate them.

In these two memoirs, we reach out to our readers, to converse with them, for a better time.

GB: Looking back at your life and body of work now, is there anything you have learned about writing you would like to pass on?

GE: I’d have to think about this…and probably for so long that I’d be long dead before I came up with an answer. Most likely anything I’d have to say has been out there for a long time.. No need for me to repeat, for example, the affection that a writer has to be feel for the smallest elements of language, ranging from the letter “c” to a semi colon. That’s axiomatic. So is the acceptance of uncertainty, the willingness to follow the path that your instinct or your credo insists on; as to this point, I think in “Ballad for Mr McLeish” Louis McNeice says it unforgettably.