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Stephen Guppy's Heaven

© Darren Anderson

Great poetry allows the reader to feel a unique emotional relationship with the words. In my opinion, Stephen Guppy's Understanding Heaven is packed with honest emotions. We as the reader can see life through the poet's eyes, and can therefore relate to the experiences. There is so much introspective poetry in the markets these days that for some critics, a question may be raised as to why they should read Understanding Heaven. Simply, the poems within are crafted and polished with emotional precision, and the book itself is edited with patience and skill. After I finished reading the book, I was struck with how the poems seemed to have a William Blake quality to them. I was fortunate enough to speak with Stephen Guppy about Understanding Heaven, and this is what he had to say about his writing philosophy and Canadian poetry in general.

Q: What first inspired you to pursue the art of poetry?

A: Probably rock music. I was glued to a transistor radio throughout adolescence and got interested in writing song lyrics. Not surprisingly, the first book of poems I bought was by Leonard Cohen. At some point it dawned on me that most song lyrics are pretty boring, and I shifted my interest to poems on the page.

Q: Your book Understanding Heaven seems to explore Blake's perspective of Innocence and Experience. How much of an influence do you think Blake had on your writing?

A: That's an interesting theory, though I wasn't aware of any connection when writing the poems. The main thematic core of those poems is birth, childhood, and parenthood. That sort of led to poems about the end of life; there's a brief suite of elegies in the third section. The book was inspired by the arrival of my children. Having kids teaches you're transitory: life passes through you.

I've always been interested in Blake and the line of poets he's part of (Milton, Shelley, Plath, Blake); that's the visionary take on poetry. I'm also very interested in Blake's theory of time-that our limited perceptual equipment cages us in three dimensions when we actually live in at least four. As far as direct influence goes, I wouldn't presume-Blake's out of everyone's league in many ways, and he's certainly well out of mine.

Q: Do you think Canadian poets have a distinctive voice? In other words, in your opinion, what makes Canadian poetry Canadian?

A: I think the Canada Council makes Canadian poetry Canadian-it's politically expedient to be as Canadian as you possibly can. The fact of the matter is that efforts to find a distinctly Canadian poetry didn't amount to much. In the US, Objectivists (and then Olson, etc.) began a particularly American poetics by changing the form of poetry-they abandoned traditional metres and forms and began to write in a colloquial voice, using "breath rather than metre". They also rebelled against Platonism and the grounding of poetry in European myth. There's really no equivalent movement in Canada-our Canadianess is a matter of subject, not form. If you read Atwood, what you're seeing is a bunch of poems about Canadian subjects (bilingualism, anti-Americanism, colonialism, regionalism, etc.). There is nothing original or even remarkable about the form and language of those poems. In formal terms, they could have been written by any American or British poet of the same generation.