Robert Bringhurst, winner of the Lieutenant Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence and former Guggenheim Fellow in poetry, trained in sciences at MIT but made his career in the humanities. He is an officer of the Order of Canada and recipient of two honorary doctorates. He lives on Quadra Island, BC.
At turns loving, elegiac, playful, angry and humble, The Ridge is a collection of poems that takes readers back through geologic time and the history of our collective home on earth, forward to the future of inescapable planetary destruction, and deep within, to the heart of the ways we choose to be human – all rooted in the rich teachings about language, being and meaning offered by what he encounters singing, standing, walking, flying, flowing, growing or being silent in the woods of Quadra Island.
Interviewed by Amy Reiswig. For a longer interview, please see Amy’s article in Focus Magazine.
Amy Reiswig (AR): You have had such a long career, and many of your previous works explore similar themes of language, being, and meaning. How does this new book connect to and build on your thinking about these issues?
Robert Bringhurst (RB): A long career! That must be true, but it’s actually never occurred to me. My career is like my backside. I guess it must be there, but to tell you the truth, I’ve never seen it. I sit on it sometimes. Once in while – mostly in private, I hope – I might briefly scratch it if it itches. Otherwise, I very rarely think about it.
Being, meaning, and language, on the other hand, are things I’ve been thinking about and exploring all my life: three inexhaustible subjects, unimaginably ancient, huge, and brand new every day. So they always have something to teach me – and whatever it is, it’s something I want to learn. That, I hope, is the connection between my recent and earlier thinking on these subjects: that it continues to come, first-hand, from the unimpeachable sources. From meaning and being and language themselves, not from repeating myself or from parroting anyone else, and not from any thoughts of career advancement.
AR: Many of your poems in The Ridge explore different forms of communication – for example, speech, silence, and song – in both the human and non-human worlds. As someone who has also written many books of prose, some touching on those same topics, what allows poetry, as a genre of perhaps greater music and gesture, to point to what you call “the breathing space between meaning and meaning”?
RB: There are many species of poetry and many species of prose – along with many kinds of language that are neither and some kinds that are borderline or both. And that’s just within the human realm. We know too little, much too little, about language outside the human domain. It took an astoundingly long time for people even to register that the silent languages of deaf human beings are genuine languages, not vague pointing and waving. Many linguists, even now, will tell you that nonhuman language doesn’t exist – yet we see it and hear it in action every day if we spend time in the real world. Given how little most of us know about the subject, I think it’s pretty risky to generalize about poetry and prose. I can say, though, that for me, writing prose has proven a good way to think about many things, and writing poetry has turned out to be, among other things, a good way to see what I’ve actually learned.
Another thing I can say is, prose doesn’t seem to exist in oral cultures. It comes into existence in cultures that have developed a system of writing. Poetry, on the other hand, is everywhere. You find it in every oral culture and every literate culture too – though in some literate cultures it can get a little bizarre. Given that poetry is much earlier and more widespread than prose, is it possible that some kinds of poetry have something in common with nonhuman language – something that is, perhaps, lacking in prose? That’s an unproveable hypothesis, but I’m fond of it.
AR: In one of the ten poems with one title – “Language Poem” – you say: “All any language does, in any case – / and all it ever can do – is to try to nudge / the unsaid into place against / reality.” For you as a writer, are the limitations of language a frustrating set of barriers to push against or a liberating chance and place to play?
RB: Both. Human language is a self-transcending medium, but it’s still completely inadequate for the job of describing reality. That’s why we keep on talking, I suppose, but it’s also why, if we stop talking for a while, we sometimes get a sense of how much more there is to hear, how much more than we can say.
AR: You describe humans as an “example of a transitory form” and note that even the seeming solidity of bedrock “flows, like everything else.” For some, these might be threatening thoughts. Do you think that some of our resistance to changing behaviour (around the climate emergency, for instance) stems from the anxiety that can come from seeing our tiny selves against the backdrop of geologic time?
RB: Time is what we live in, and time is a permanent puzzle – but it seems to me the larger your sense of time, the richer you are. You have to live in the moment – but if you’re trapped in that moment and can’t step back from it, even to yesterday and tomorrow or last year and next year, or to previous and subsequent generations, then you’re truly disadvantaged. And a lot of people are.
Here we are in the Digital Age, slathered with real and phony information, which is delivered at lightning speed, and the result is that a lot of people are culturally and chronologically poorer rather than richer. Even historical time – the time of written records – is unimaginable now for a lot of people, though it goes back only a few thousand years, and it may go forward a lot less than that. Anthropological time is forty or fifty times deeper than historical time, but because it’s prehistoric, it’s largely hidden. Geological time is much vaster yet – a million times deeper than historical time – and the wonder is that it isn’t entirely hidden. People have learned to read a lot from rocks. The canvas is huge, but the information is relatively sparse, and it’s delivered very slowly. But is it threatening? Don’t most of us still respond with astonishment and humility when we see the night sky or the evolutionary calendar, or anything else that is so much bigger than we are?
The widespread denial of climate change does have something to do with its scale – but the first problem is that it’s anthropogenic. Humans rarely like to take responsibility for problems they’ve created. And the problem is global rather than personal or national or tribal. So it requires – or it did require, back when we might have done something about it – real collective action and collective self-denial on a global scale. That’s hard to elicit in the absence of a global mindset. And the problem came, essentially, from our burning too much fuel. So of course it reared its head just as billions of humans grew accustomed to the luxury of burning too much fuel – and they weren’t about to give that luxury up.
People who resist effective response to the climate emergency are suffering from anxiety, alright – but I don’t think it’s anxiety about their personal insignificance in the geological time-scale. It’s anxiety that their suicidal dreams might just collapse: they might be unable to buy what they’ve dreamed of buying and fly where they’ve dreamed of flying. And anxiety that someone else might sacrifice less than they do, causing their relative status to fall.
AR: In the poem “Stopping By,” you say “in / the aftermath of love, we start to learn.” Do you see that as part of your work as a poet – to help push readers, perhaps especially urban readers not in as close contact with nature as you are, closer to the love of place and being that we need in order to learn? And is there still time for that love and learning to make a difference, or do you see humanity as already inexorably trapped “here aboard the deathboat”? Or, as in many of the paradoxes in your poems, can both be true?
RB: I do want people to learn what they can learn, and love is an essential part of learning. But I don’t think I can push people into it. Not with poetry in any case. Poetry, it seems to me, is almost all carrot and almost no stick. Real literature is food, not candy, and not cattleprod.
And yes, I do think love and learning make a difference, and the difference they make is meaningful and large – but it doesn’t eliminate arrogance and greed, nor does it cancel their effects. Food and water and fresh air make a difference too, an enormous difference, but they don’t eliminate death. Is that a paradox? Perhaps it’s just a fact, revealing some of the complexity that’s typical of facts when you take a closer look at them.
AR: I see you’ll be part of the poetry walk at Mary Lake this year. There’s a lot of movement in The Ridge, as you write about walking and dancing and flowing and that “Words, like speakers, / are in motion very nearly / all the time.” You also describe the way trails connect us “with tangible / reality, each other, ourselves.” What, for you, is the connection between nature, movement, writing, and listening? And is there a special ‘something’ that happens when poetry is spoken and heard outside?
RB: I spend a lot of time with tables and chairs, because that’s how writing and reading are done, but I’d much rather walk in the forest than sit in the house. My mind, like my body, doesn’t work very well if it doesn’t get outside fairly often and stay there for a while. The mind, it seems to me, is a tiny part of the real world, not an alternative to it. The mind has its own identity, like a butterfly or a tree, but those things too are parts of the world. Being what they are doesn’t put them in opposition to the world they inhabit.
Humans have been singing songs and telling stories for, it seems, a couple of hundred thousand years. There’s a fair chance other hominins had been doing the same thing for a lot longer – three or four million years – before we killed the last of them off. Outdoors is also where the whales, frogs, and birds sing. In other words, doing poetry outdoors is not unusual at all. What’s really strange, in the larger picture, is treating poetry as an indoor sport or parlor game, the way we tend to do: reading and writing it in silence, and reading it aloud only at preappointed times to people seated in neat rows in auditoriums or other indoor spaces.