Tim Lilburn is the author of twelve books of poetry and three essay collections. His work has been translated widely, and garnered awards including the Governor General’s Award, The Canadian Authors’ Association Award and the Homer Prize. A new essay collection, Numinous Seditions: Interiority and Climate Change, will appear from the University of Alberta Press in November.
Tim will be showcasing new/ previously unpublished work at the festival.
Interview by Barbara Pelman
Barbara Pelman (BP): [Based on a sample poem provided, “Controlled Burn Theurgy”]Is this first section of your poem mostly arising from intuition, or is it arising bit by bit with you sitting at your desk working?
Tim Lilburn (TL): I quite like the bird’s eye view, and it is this perspective that is driving things in the early section of “Controlled Burn Theurgy,” a taking in of large areas of the Saanich Peninsula, Willows Beach, the view of Mt Baker from that beach, and, closer to home, sights like the west side of SṈ, AḴE coming into bloom. All these vistas are linked and blended in a swim of imagination, a complex dynamism of life. That early part is an act of what Charles Olson called proprioception, a taking in of one’s surroundings, a locating of self, some of these details experienced, others invented at my desk.
BP: Which comes first for you: The image? The word? The phrase? The idea?
TL: What comes first is a push from within myself, a degree of yearning toward some non-apparent saying; in “Controlled Burn”, this is an attempt to capture some of the late winter feel of early COVID times. Usually, for me, the first things that appear on the page are a few phrases. Unwritten but present, as well, are intimations of a kind of music, a flowing longing that will be the rhythmic foundation of the poem. The drive and (frankly) joy of the poem is a “controlled burn” (fire sent into fire) trying to deal with the gloom of the pandemic and climate change effects like the 2021 heat dome and the fires that were part of it.
BP: What is your writing practice? Do you have your own theurgy, rituals that help? Staring out the window? Going for walks?
TL: My daily habit is to get up very early and take in what is happening, the dawn chorus in summer, hummingbirds stirring. I try to be available to what comes from without, word, creature, peril.
BP: What is the overall form your poem plans to take? How do you know when you’re done? (This is probably two questions.)
TL: The poem for me is done when it runs out of steam, when it gets most of itself set down. Then come endless revisions. And these revisions are done when the poem feels more received than written. This is how I like to work. The poem finds its shape as it unfolds.
BP: In your poem you mention the unsold copies of “Thinking and Singing: The Poetry and Practice of Philosophy”. In what ways do you connect poetry and philosophy?
TL: I have an interest in philosophy, especially the philosophy of late antiquity. I am not an antiquarian or a scholar, but I believe that what can be learned from Platonism and Neoplatonism in its early Islamic and Christian forms is very valuable today. I have written about this in my new essay collection Numinous Seditions: Interiority and Climate Change. By the way, those copies of Thinking and Singing are still unsold, so if anyone wants a copy, let me know. For me, poetry and philosophy flow together, along with mystical theology.
BP: Many people have compared poetry to prayer, and talked about the connections between them. Your poetry feels very much like prayer to me. Can you say more about this?
TL: Well, what you are pointing at, I think, is this confluence of philosophy, poetry and mystical interiority. In the West, over the last four hundred years, there has been a strenuous attempt to pry these three forces or preoccupations apart and denigrate each of them. This prying apart, successful in a grim way, is the origin of many of our present ills.