Don McKay

Don McKay, CM (born 1942) is a Canadian poet, editor, and educator.

Quotes

'Baler Twine'

• Poets are supremely interested in what language can't do , in order to gesture outside, they use language in a way that flirts with its destruction.

• The nature poet may (should in fact ), resort to the field guide or library but will keep coming back , figuratively speaking, to the trail - to the grain of experience.

• The first indication of one's status as a nature poet is that one does not invoke language right off when talking about poetry.

• Admitting you are a nature poet, nowadays, may make you seem something of a fool!

• We inflict our rage for immortality on things, marooning them on static islands.

• Before the wonderful, terrible wrestling with words and music there is the state of mind I'm calling 'poetic attention' ... a sort of readiness ... a form of knowing.

Other quotes

• As I grew older the poetic surround becomes more important. I realize that the 'poetic attention' was more important to me than poetry was. The 'poetic attention' being a kind of longing without the desire to possess.

• The meditative approach acknowledges that one moment will inevitably lead on to the next. We accept immortality instead of fighting it off.
  • 'The Appropriate Gesture' interview with Ken Babstock Dec 2001.

• There's a place
  between desire and memory, some back porch
  we can neither wish nor recall
  • 'Apparatus' 1997 McClelland & Stewart Nov 2014

• Phenomenology is one name for the path back from the object to the thing, the counterbalance to the objectification or 'progress'.Poetry is another.
  • 'Paradoxides' 2012

Quotes about McKay

• McKay's meditations on times evidence acquire a similar heft, proposing, in their discipline of mind and generosity of spirit, a way to be at home in the world.
  • Judges Citation 'Strike/Slip' Griffin Poetry Prize 2007

External link

• Essay -Baler Twine