There was always a pen or a pencil and a book of blank pages. Then one day a black vinyl sketchbook Carolin gave me, inside which came figures drawn, printed or pasted, if sourced from a magazine or, like a leaf, from Nature. In my early twenties -- poems brought to life through an interest in reading them, especially new ones (like mine might be).
The magazines that published new poems were in the UVic Periodical Library, and I can still see myself walking through its doors and strolling excitedly towards them, spaced out flat on gun metal shelves. Prism International, Antigonish Review, The Fiddlehead ...
My first submissions were rejected. One from The Fiddlehead included a clipped-on note encouraging me to "Please re-sumit!" A second submission to The Fiddlehead was returned with notes on the pages! A third had notes on the pages but also a paragraph on a separate card identifying what the editor thought I was and wasn't doing.
My fourth submission to The Fiddlehead contained five poems that did not so much come to me, as ideas or feelings, but through me. These were poems that felt easy to me, too easy, but in another way felt right, as in true. Two of them ("Hitch-hiked" and "Leaving Liberia") were accepted for publication (No. 138, Winter, 1984) by the person who had read my work from the first submission, Fred Cogswell.
I never met Fred Cogswell, but last week I was notified by my publisher that our book 9x11 and other poems like Bird, Nine, x and Eleven is one of five titles shortlisted (by judge Fred Wah) for the Royal City Literary Arts Society's 2019 Fred Cogswell Award for Excellence in Poetry. Yet another of life's infinite circles returned.
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