How did you begin writing, and what keeps you going?
I wrote my first poem when I was eight years old. That was under my own steam. I wrote occasional poems throughout public school both as assignments and just because I enjoyed it. I also attempted to write novels. In my teens I wrote dark satire influenced by John Lennon‘s books and love poems and letters influenced by love which I was constantly in. I always knew that I would be a writer and that was a steady vector through my life. It was a certainty. My plan when I finished high school was to go to University of Waterloo get a math degree, go into law, go into politics, become Prime Minister of Canada and then write after that. But I did four months of math and when I got onto my co-op job between terms I started to write in earnest and didn’t go back to school. I’ve been lucky enough to keep at it ever since – poems, songs, novels, plays, aphorisms, and a fair number of newspaper articles mostly for Now magazine. Whatever it was that initially made me certain I would be a writer is what keeps me going. I get a lot of joy out of writing. I do also have to credit the ancestors who envisioned and fought for the socialism that has helped to fund me. And in the present day the people of Canada through their agencies the various arts councils which have made the financial aspect of it a little less onerous. One other thing – I lived for at least a couple of decades at the Bain co-op where I had a rent subsidy. When my income went down my rent went down. As during those years I was supporting a family I couldn’t have afforded to live in Toronto without it.
Plus I have a partner (the one in the Marsha Kirzner poem) who unreservedly believes in my talent.
What poets have influenced the ways in which you write?
As a poet I was influenced a lot by Neruda, Mayakovsky, Irving Layton, Leonard Cohen, Jacques Prevert, Rimbaud, Baudelaire (Paris Spleen) Margaret Atwood, Gwendolen MacEwen and the surrealist manifestoes of Breton. As a songwriter I was influenced by the Beatles, Dylan, The Stones Jim Morrison, Bob Marley, and later by hip-hop (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9qCwMMX3FM) and lately by Neo Soul (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tITr2lRqdMo) and again by Leonard Cohen (and my song about him: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AppyaqdMw1Q&list=RDAppyaqdMw1Q&start_radio=The)
You mention in your author biography that your « words have been debated in the legislature, posted in the Transit system, quoted in the Farmer's Almanac, turned into a hit song and sung on Sesame street. » How have you been able to move your work into such a variety of spaces?
It came about pretty naturally in the flow of my life. I’ve had a long run. I had always been inspired by children’s literature and had always written rhyming children’s poems for what they now call middle school kids. But when we had our own children and I got immersed in picture books I saw that that was a high art and got ambitious to create in that mode. My adult poetry was always written somewhat surrealisticly (http://halvard-johnson.blogspot.ca/2014/03/robert-priest-hand-poems.html) but now, for little children, I was writing about the real world – poems/songs celebrating nature, seasonal change, (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f40nMLLxfZg&t=3s) familial love, playground equipment etc.(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrErwR3Xk4Q) In these poems by the way even though I wasn’t writing technically like Neruda I was influenced by his odes to common objects. A kind of cross fertilization. Having children also lead to my children’s novels and my plays Knights of the Endless Day and Minibugs and Microchips.
I have always had an aphoristic mode as well. Even in high school – I distinctly remember in math class having a series of aphorisms about vectors just pop into my head and getting really excited about it. I wrote my first song at the age of 12. It was just after the Beatles had broken big in the world and the fact that they wrote their own songs inspired me. I was walking along behind a girl I had a big crush on. She was kind of big but beautiful. So to the beat of my footsteps I wrote a song about her which I still know. Songs began to come to me unbidden all the time as did poems in my early 20s. The creative act was always accompanied by a high feeling and a great jolt of joy which was good enough reason in itself to write them down. So given my natural predilection, a poetic upbringing through my mother and through the library system’s books plus time to create at the expense of unemployment insurance, welfare and sporadic arts grants I’ve continued to be able to let the creative Chi take me. This has been a great blessing. I am grateful for it. At some point in my late 20s when I had put out a children’s album the CBC hired me and my co-writer at the time, Eric Rosser, to write at least one song a week for a children’s show. We didn’t get paid much but once a week a news-related children’s song was broadcast coast to coast including one just before the repatriation of the Canadian constitution and another kind of prescient one about cruise bouquets – using the war technology of cruise missiles to deliver bouquets to one’s loved ones. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z608h5Oec-k&list=RDAppyaqdMw1Q&index=2)
I still love a lot of those songs. By my late 20s and into my 30s I was writing poetry by day, finishing up with a children’s poem and often doing gigs with my bands at night. I never stopped working because working was my play. In that era (the 80’s) the Canadian content regulations came into being and in order to stimulate Canadian music the big media companies put together a fund called Foundation to Assist Canadian Talent on Records. (FACTOR)
Through this I eventually got some money to make a record and some videos. (My first record was funded by a Canada Council grant to write poetry which I had already written so I used it to make the Robert Priest EP ) Here’s a cut about the murder of John Lennon backed by the Jitters (https://soundcloud.com/robert-priest/01-little-gun) here is the Ontario legislature having a bit of a kerfuffle about my (with Al Booth) anti-Harris song: free Ontario (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2q4aqSGCAI&list=PLv4Yid1tq2jiP3d91__PeTLxInweb_7OE&index=8)
Lately you’ve been working on prose poetry. What do you see as the difference between your work with the prose poem, compared to your work in the lyric mode?
I slip into prose poem mode sometimes when I’m feeling too confined. My aesthetic for the prose poem is looser than for lyric poems. In a lyric poem the density requires every part of the poem to be “poetic”. In a prose poem one can flow into it knowing that the poetry of it might only emerge in the totality. Plus you don’t have to worry about linebreaks. A prose poem is form without form. And it can provide a lot of room for an idea to roll and unravel. You can always edit it down to make it more compact like a lyric poem. I like to get loosely on a roll and run with it. A prose poem can be a fairytale, or a mock essay, a surrealistic revel or a narrative account in plain language. For me anyway. I’m all for everyone coming from their own aesthetic on this. Here’s a prose poem that Ray Coburn made a track for: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ajAfYJEO7Y)
How important was mentorship to your early work? Was there anyone who specifically assisted your development as a writer?
My mother wrote poetry and composed stories and she encouraged me to do the same and insisted that I was a great talent. When I was 19 I moved into a house where the son, a guy named Ernie Spitzeder, was a writer and he encouraged the spirit of that in me.
When I was about 20 a novel writer named Leo Simpson was very impressed with me. That bolstered my already quite high opinion. I write my best when I feel like I am very significant writer. They weren’t exactly mentors but Irving Layton, Gwendolyn McEwan, John Robert Colombo, Milton Acorn and Alden Nowlan all made it known to me that they thought I was an important new voice in Canadian poetry. Bronwen Wallace was also a very big help to me.
You’ve published multiple poetry collection as well as recordings of songs. What is the difference between working on poetry and songwriting? Are you able to work on both concurrently?
Writing a poem is different for me than writing a song lyric. My early songs came to me with melody and words together. So that’s different. I would often hear them in my head when I was walking. Some of these were decent songs and my 1st EP (which was funded by a grant to write poetry I had already written) contains 5 of them, some of which got radio play and press. (https://youtu.be/KqglQW6MdlY) But ultimately I wasn’t as delighted as I wanted to be with my sense of melody so I started to write with people who I thought had the gift. From there on no I did still write some of my melodies I mostly wrote lyrics which other people put to music. But even writing song lyrics for me is different than writing poetry.
The vast majority of my poetry for books doesn’t use formal prosodies or rhyme. These poems make their own structure as they proceed. Whereas writing a song lyric I’m leaning into the rhythmic template and the small demand of the rhyme – getting some impact out of expectations built into these ancient structures. Of course I’ve just written about 30 iambic rhyming sonnets for my next book and indeed some of my songs use no rhyme at all and proceed more or less like lyric poems. There’s a lot of cross-fertilization that goes along with the ecologies of these various poetic modes. So songwriting these days is mostly a collective effort. Most often I will write a lyric and then sit with a composer — sometimes Allen Booth, sometimes Julian Taylor and mostly listen and somtimes make suggestions as they compose a melody before my very ears. This is so exciting. Other times Julian for instance might have a fully realized melody but only part of the words and I will sit with him and help him finish off the words.(my favorite — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGrSoWw1g-4) With John Capek or David Bradstreet I send them words and they send me back a produced track containing the words put to music.(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6a3Ho3r8aY&t=1s) Sometimes Dave sends me just a melody (as in his song “Imagine Me Home”) and I completely compose words to it. All this is good for the brain and good training for the other modes of writing because skills constantly migrate into other arenas. I don’t think I’ve ever cowritten a poem with anyone and wouldn’t want to. (actually I did one poem co-write with Charlie Petch and Ikenna Igebulla). Song collectivity is fine but in the poem I’m the master. “Song Instead of a Kiss” which was a hit for Alannah Myles was originally sent as a lyric to Nancy Simmonds who I had done a lot of cowriting with. She placed it before Alannah at a strategic moment and the song emerged from the 2 of them in short order. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAhKH3VEqjQ)
Can you name a poet you think should be receiving more attention?
Well I definitely am as averse to big headedness as anybody but my
poor soul down at the bottom of its well is insisting on yelling “MEEEE!” But the 1st person who comes to mind other
than that is Wally Keeler otherwise known as People’s Republic of Poetry. He’s
done some avant-garde provocative, self endangering stuff that is truly
brilliant and unique. I can’t encapsulate it here but do yourselves a favor and
look him up. He’s the finest exemplar of the avant-garde spirit this country
has ever had.
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