You have long been an activist for peace and disarmament. What’s the relationship between poetry and activism? Would you be a poet if you were not an activist, an activist if you were not a poet?

I fear this may sound facetious, but would I breathe in, if I didn’t breathe out? I experience poetry (as writer and reader) as an activation, at once, of language and self: a vivid liberation of the customarily dormant expressive energies of each! And I conceive of peace not primarily as an aspiration but rather the activation of its own transformative potential. As some pacifists like to say, while the bad news is “there is no way to peace,” the good news is “peace is the way”! A peaceful society, I think, would be not just one secure from attack (from within or without) but one providing—and in turn sustained by—securely self-expressive, self-organizing ways of being human: and this seems intimately related to the self-creative self-organization of language at work (and play) in poetry. The problem is that ‘peace’ has come to mean, in our world culture of violence, something admirable but weak that needs protection; just as—not coincidentally!—poetry is often written off as pretty, but pretty inconsequential, language. In reality, both are about reality, and thus true power: about real-izing the power of the real world again.

(I suspect you may also hate the political cliché “campaign in poetry, govern in prose”? First of all, when was the last campaign, in Canada or anywhere else, that could other than slanderously be described as poetic?! But to advocate governing in prose—which I assume means realistically—suggests a sinister, impoverished sense of political power as inherently and inevitably power over, the bureaucratic-technocratic authority to manage and administer otherwise unruly, dangerously disorganized publics and communities.)

In my life, peace came before poetry, not as a priority, but in the sense that I was possessed by images, fears and dreams of war—the First World War, first of all, then The Bomb—before I encountered (and, I’m certain, was saved by) the Angel of Poetry. I started writing poetry in my mid-teens, by which time I’d been, in my small way, a war resister for what felt like my whole life. And when it came to my choice of university degree in England, I guess I chose peace—Peace Studies, at Bradford University—over English literature, though poetry became ever more important to me—and seemed ever more crucial to a just society inhabitable planet—as my studies progressed.

What was your experience returning to the topic of the 9/11 tragedy, and to the poems that you wrote about it at that time?

When I decided to write a new sequence, to mark the twentieth anniversary of the atrocities, I wasn’t too worried about reopening an old wound: I knew I had remained unrecovered, not least because, in terms of its psychic, social and global ramifications, the day has yet to end, has proved truly interminable! But when I reopened an old newspaper—The Cape Breton Post of September 12, 2001—to look for material and imagery, I soon realized I was not only registering in a new way but even deepening the wound. That, of course, was the point, to go deeper into, and make rawer, the event and its echoes: and perhaps it paid off, in terms of the intensity of the poetry, that I was far less prepared than I thought I was! As a result, certainly, the violent dis-locations, and sometimes cacophonous turmoil, of the 2020 Voices sequence stands in the sharpest aesthetic contrast to the eerie minimalism (uncanny cubism?) of the 2002 Blackbox Angelus poems, pieces I remember feeling I wasn’t so much writing as handling like objects, taking carefully from a long-buried ‘box’ somehow ‘surfaced’ by the shock of the crashing planes and towers: ‘objects’ not miraculously intact but on the contrary, marvellously fragmented, suggestive as much as expressive of themselves.