BEFORE POETRY THERE WAS ILLITERATURE: A.F. MORITZ ON THE HIDDEN, LOST, OR SCORNED ASPECTS OF SELF Isabella Ranallo and Sophia Wasylinko
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.f. moritz has published 23 books of poems that have been awarded the Griffin Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Award in Literature of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the Ingram Merrill Fellowship, selection to the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets, Poetry magazine’s Bess Hokin Award, Southwest Review’s Elizabeth Matchett Stover Award and the ReLit Award. Three of his books have been finalists for the Governor General’s Award.
change much, but I put in some wording to bring it up to date and to relate it to the George Floyd murder. sw:
What is it about this concept of time that intrigues you as a poet?
am:
Time is the thing that fascinates and troubles everybody. William Blake says, “Time is the mercy of eternity.” We’re going much farther than physicists trying to find a definition when we say these poetic things. If you concentrate on poetry, you find it really is the substance of life. Poetry is the art of language and rhythm.
Moritz is the Poet Laureate of the City of Toronto (20192023). He has translated seven books of poetry and a novel from Spanish and French, and in collaboration with Theresa Moritz has written biographies of Emma Goldman and Stephen Leacock, and The Oxford Literary Guide to Canada. He holds a doctorate in 18th and 19th-century British poetry. We sat down with him on March 2nd to talk about gardens, George Floyd, Rodney King, Redpath Sugar, and illiterature and this is what he said. sw:
am:
You wrote the long poem “The Garden in the Midst” and the essay “The Poet’s Garden” in 1992, and the coda in 1993. Why did you decide to publish them in The Garden 2021, nearly 30 years later?
ir:
I was passionate about writing them, but the struggle to make ends meet was such that by the time I might have been able to publish them, it was years later, and I was on to other things. In 2020, I was convalescing after a health issue and I couldn’t do anything for almost the whole summer. I live right in central Toronto, so I was watching the George Floyd protests on television and hearing them right outside my window.
In “The Garden,” you refer to the poem as the model for the “fraternity of all things in the universe of humanity.” In As Far as You Know’s “Before Definition” you say, “Let poetry have a place before definition.” Later, in the afterword, you call the hospital workers’ burgeoning humanity “poetry and the germ of poetry.” Can you talk a bit more about these connections as a central theme in your work?
am:
When I talk about poetry’s exalted role, I don’t mean that only the poet has it, or we only have it when we read or write poetry. When I talk about the way poetry is in conflict with the evil things about technology, I don’t mean you find the opposition to those things only in poetry. I think you see the struggle between poetry and the technical spirit appearing in many places.
At the time of the LA so-called Rodney King “riot” in 1992, I had participated in the Toronto echo riot. I thought, “I can’t go out and join the protests, but I’ll look at that book.” I started rewriting it in dialogue with some African-diaspora friends of mine. It didn’t
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If we think about language as words laid out, poetry puts them into a singing flow, which restores them to what they really are: a great, creative, cooperative, ongoing dialogue. The element of language that is analytical and pins things down in space, and tends to falsehood, is contradicted by poetry. That’s one of the things that makes it the greatest art, the greatest human endeavour.
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