#sparkchamber 082420 — Robert Quinn
Poets often speak of poetry — poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance [Carl Sandburg], poetry is a way of taking life by the throat [Robert Frost], it was at that age, that poetry came in search of me [Pablo Neruda] — as if their lives depended on it. Today, #sparkchamber is thrilled to welcome such a poet, Robert Quinn. Robert is of Algonquin ancestry, his band originates from Northern Quebec, Kebaowek First Nation. He recently published his first volume of poetry, Flowers from a Wino’s Garden — a collection of poems written roughly between 1970 and 1984.
“It’s all old stuff, stuff I carried around as a young single guy, pieces of paper and note pads here and there starting in 1970. Back in the early 80’s I bought an old Underwood typewriter and typed out what I thought were the better ones and then placed those typed sheets into a folder and carried those around with me for years. A few years ago, I was unpacking boxes and came across the folder of poems and thought I’ve got to do something with these.”
Taking a step back, he was born Robert Mitchell in North Bay, Ontario in 1956. Raised by his grandparents until eight years old, then went to live with his Mother and her new family, moving to downtown Toronto [Cabbagetown]. “My name was changed to Robert Quinn through adoption.”
In his own words:
“Around 1970 I was 14. I started leaving home, a lot. A stepdad and a Mother with lost dreams did not make a happy home. I never had a plan, just to run, to run and not be there. There are so many stories, some so deeply buried they dare not show their face.
The old man liked to take out his own disappointments on my body by any means available. Belts and boots, but mostly his fists. When I was 16, he broke my jaw so I left for good. I would walk the streets of my neighborhood in downtown Toronto. Late at night I would come back and look at that main floor apartment of Moss Park. I kept thinking maybe, as I walked away, I would feel different, changed. As if something magical would happen and change the past and make everything ok, or normal. But no, it was always the same ugly emptiness that would creep inside me.
In 1976 I began working for an insurance company where, in 1978, I met my wife Nora Hall. We were married in 1984. Around then, I typed these poems, put them in a file folder, and carried them with me ever since.
I’ve always had the desire to capture my ideas and pull them into the world as poems. Your first big emotion, I guess, is love. You meet somebody at 14 or 15 and you think about them all the time and you just write down what you feel about them. It’s always been like that for me.
But then I became more of an observer. I lived on the streets for two years — surviving mostly by my wits, with some begging, borrowing and stealing thrown in with some poor decisions — and I just wrote about things I saw, experiences I had I that I guess at that time were important to me so I wrote them down. I didn’t keep everything of course. I lost a lot of stuff over the years but I somehow managed to keep what I have.“
His published collection is a small fraction of a lifetime of work — “much of which has been lost to the wind, on the floors of bars, to lovers and anger. In my memories and dreams, I still walk the streets of Cabbagetown. An older man trying to capture something of my youth to explain those feelings of rock bottom loneliness and hunger. Now, as I walk away from that old apartment, I am changed, I am different. Now I know love. That was very difficult for my family. They were incapable of love, and I understand that now.”
Robert is working on a second volume of poems, but in the meantime, he offers work frequently on Facebook — well worth the follow!
1.] Where do ideas come from?
They come from all over the place, it just depends on the experience. I wrote something about watching a rich guy in a car downtown [Toronto] and an old homeless man, one of the winos, or drunks of the neighborhood, walking by the car, and how these two people from such different backgrounds didn’t even notice each other. Another time I was looking out a window when I lived on Seaton Street and I was watching these two kids toss a bicycle tire at the streetlamp and at the base of the lamp an old man was just simply sitting there. And that inspired me to write. Sometimes it happens right away but sometimes I have to give it some more thought before I can actually write about it. When I was younger, writing was more immediate, more in the moment, now I take more time for reflection. I am always writing in my head but some of my thoughts I just let them go. If I feel an immediate connection with a subject matter, I am more likely to follow that thread than if I look at a person or situation and don’t feel that.
There was a cop who used to be in downtown Toronto in the early 1970s, he was a published poet and I got to know him pretty well. He used to inspire me a lot. I would tell him I didn’t know what to write about, I was 16 or 17 at the time, and he told me to just write about the doorknob or a dresser. Such a simple thing but you could take it anywhere — like how many hands have touched the handles on the dresser and you could imagine people putting their clothes away, or packing up for a trip somewhere. It was a great device for dealing with writer’s block. I still use this technique today if I am feeling stuck for an idea. I think of a doorknob or dresser to prompt my writing. Even if it doesn’t go anywhere, it helps to keep you in the habit of writing about something. The process is going on in your head, but you are physically capturing the ideas.
2.] What is the itch you are scratching?
I’ve written a couple of things about my mother — she passed away a few years ago. We didn’t have the greatest relationship and I kept in a lot of things about her. I started putting my thoughts on paper and was even shocking myself about the things that were coming up. I’ve been sort of purging ever since she passed as a way to process my feelings, to process the melancholy. I’ve felt this in other areas of my life, like after a wonderful vacation or a weekend and then you have a feeling of melancholy that comes over you when it’s over and you have to go back to work on Monday. You feel sad that the good times are ending and you have to go back to reality. I used to experience this feeling a lot and identified it as melancholy. I then wrote a series of poems where I made melancholy into a person and now I don’t feel the melancholy anymore because I’ve personified the emotion and it can live on the paper and not in my body.
3.] Early bird or night owl, tortoise or hare?
I am night owl for sure. That’s when I find I get most creative — after it gets dark and I have space and time to read or watch documentaries that interest me or just think about things. But then again, there are mornings when I wake up with an idea and I have to capture it right away. Whether or not that idea goes anywhere and bears more work isn’t immediately obvious, so I write it down and come back to it later when I have more time to spend with it.
I am a combination of tortoise and hare – sometimes I can write really quickly and complete a poem in as little as 5 minutes and I am really happy with it. Other times ideas take more time for me to think about and process, so much more like the pace of a tortoise.
4.] How do you know when you are done?
I don’t know quite how to describe how I know when I am finished with a creative impulse. I just get a feeling that I am happy with something and that’s how it’s going to stay. Other things like the melancholy idea, I wrote 10 different things about melancholy starting with melancholy 1 all the way up to melancholy 10 — they weren’t all done at once, but they were done because the idea kept occurring to me and when I looked back at all of them, they all seemed to have something to do with the women in my life, whether it be a sister, my mother, or former girlfriend. Melancholy might never be done, by the time I get my second book done we could reach melancholy 20. Then again, there might not be anymore.
