That the Poet Here Describes

When I started writing poetry seriously in the mid-1960s, I found myself on rather unstable ground. Whatever tradition there might have been of addressing the darker realities of contemporary life had become suspended for a more personal or confessional mode, the kind associated with Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton. Much of this shift had to do with the Cold War and a resulting relativism in the arts. Criticism reflected the transition. ”Poetry makes nothing happen,” the critics would say, quoting W. H. Auden’s elegy “In Memory of W. B Yeats.” I felt as if I was pushing against the current.

I’d grown up poor and dysfunctional in Vancouver, under the protective wing of the Baptist Church, but reading Slaughterhouse-Five and Generals Die in Bed in university as well as the great anti-war poems of Wilfred Owen and Randall Jarrell made me want to speak out against iniquities...