Local Poets: There is Beauty in Not Escaping |
| Print | |
| Written by Dahlia Liwsze |
| Tuesday, 25 August 2009 00:00 |
|
Reunited she quivers on my shoulder hello hello again and then ... stops being a wild thing, submits once more to being a loved thing. -- Claudia Coutu Radmore, "Bird Quiver"
While poet Claudia Coutu Radmore does not often write about escape, she was inspired to compose some poems, including "Bird Quiver," when her beloved lorikeet, Desiree, escaped from their home north of Sharbot Lake one windy August day in 2004. The bright orange-beaked and rainbow-coloured parrot bit through the plastic screen of her cage and flew about 45 km across the Canadian Shield. A fruit-eater, she landed on someone's shoulder at a resort in Westport and made her way to the punchbowl. 
Desiree (Photo courtesy of Claudia Coutu Radmore)
Frantic to find Desiree, Coutu Radmore placed an ad in the Frontenac News and was unaware that a young cook from the resort lodge had also put one in a Westport paper. The two were soon reunited. "I think Desiree is constantly yearning for the freedom of the air and trees again," said the Montreal-born poet and writer who now calls Carleton Place home in an e-mail interview. "[But] she knows nothing of eating in the wild. She would otherwise perish in the cold or be attacked." She added that she had been slightly jealous of her feathered companion and "those moments at the top of trees [and] how easily she could fly from one to another. [I] imagined what it would be like to fly up there with her. It brought back the memory of my first flight across the Atlantic Ocean, what it was like to fly above the clouds. The clouds with the sun rays on them were magical kingdoms." What did help Coutu Radmore escape for a day from her stressful childhood as the oldest of five children growing up in a poor Catholic family was reading Heidi when she was eight. "My parents had unhappy, unfulfilled lives, and it seemed we were all doomed to live lives like theirs if we didn't escape in some way. I escaped through reading, and through having an education, through the satisfactions of teaching," she said. After graduating with her BFA from Queens University in 1984, Coutu Radmore volunteered with the Canadian University Services Overseas and trained preschool teachers in Vanuatu from 1985 to 1988. Her first publication was a teacher-training manual in Bislama, one of Vanuatu's three official languages. When she returned to Canada, she taught in Quebec, Ontario and Manitoba before retiring in 2004.
Claudia Coutu Radmore (Photo: Dahlia Liwsze)
While she is "more into the here and now . . . and how we can't escape from the most important things such as who we are," Coutu Radmore is penning a poem about the escape of a slave in New France. "[She] escaped accused of setting a fire which burned a good part of Montreal in 1743. She was captured and condemned, hung, and her corpse burned, the ashes thrown into the St. Lawrence." The poem is part of her current manuscript, a minute or two/without remembering, featuring lyric poems spoken in the voices of her French-Canadian ancestors, the Cottu (Coutu) family, and other contemporary relatives from 1672-1792, who settled in New France. "The story of Angelique the slave is a well-known part of the history of those times," she said. "I try to write about what matters in any particular life. If this sounds banal, then look at it like this: all humans are equally important, all living things are as important as humans. All periods of time are of equal importance. Therefore, I often attempt to call attention to the commonalities in all forms of life, whether those are contemporary or historical, social or scientific." Another local poet, Rod Pederson, agrees with Coutu Radmore's positive, humanist viewpoint. "I'm an optimist and am more inclined to take solace in celebrating the good things in my life than whining about the few things I might like to change. Life is good. People are good," he said in an e-mail interview. As an officer in the Air Force for 36 years, Pederson travelled throughout Europe, the Mediterranean, the Middle East, Canada, the US and the Caribbean before he retired in the rank of lieutenant-colonel in 1998. His various life experiences provide much poetic inspiration. "The theme that most often captures me deals with the ways in which popular conceptions of our lives differ from the realities. I believe that people are intrinsically good and that they are happy in their lives . . . We are told too often that people are 'in it for themselves,' that they don't look beyond themselves. But this is so clearly not true. Everywhere we choose to look, to really look, we find our neighbours contributing selflessly to their communities; consider, for example, all those -- our neighbours -- who give their money and time to help others in need, ranging from those suffering medical conditions to those who need refuge from violence in their homelands. Canada could not be the best country in the world -- and it is the best country in the world -- if people were only interested in themselves." Born in Edmonton, Pederson has lived in the nation's capital since 1981 and considers himself an Ottawa citizen as well as one of Canada and the world. While he nearly completed a B.Sc. in Mathematics in 1972, he was inspired to pursue an Honours BA in Literature after encountering Leonard Cohen's poetry in a downtown Halifax bookstore. He graduated from the University of Manitoba in 1978. Pederson has been directing the Tree Reading Series at Arts Court since January, and he published a chapbook called Loving Her in 2008, which was translated into Arabic. He also says that he does have one poem, "Tailgunner," that addresses escape and is based on his late father-in-law's experience with World War II. "He was traumatized by his experiences and spent the rest of his life trying to escape from his guilt at having survived, when so many others had not. He slipped into the most remarkable peace when he realized that his lung cancer was terminal and he was finally going to die," he said. "Tailgunner" is part of Pederson's latest project, a growing series of pieces "evolving as a work of prose." The unnamed series centres on people who have suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of their war experiences whether they were fighters or peacekeepers, for "their subsequent lives are often dominated by those experiences, and seldom in a good way." As for Pederson himself, he has "very little" in life from which he would like to escape except maybe "from the burden of those things I have not had time to do. The list is long and time isn't, so some things get left off and I often feel guilt or regret over them." His secret to escaping from life when it "became a little too dry . . . [and] . . . too immersed in the technical" in the past was T.S. Eliot's Collected Poems. He carried them around for over 20 years. "I would take the book out of my briefcase for a few minutes and enjoy the beauty I found in it. I suppose I could say I found life among the machines," he said. "I like to think that my writing is directed toward an improved understanding of the realities of lives. You could say, too, I suppose, that it is an escape from the morbid and widespread idea, shoved at us by so much of the media, that life is 'brutal, nasty and short.' Life is, in fact, beautiful." For those interested in escaping to the world of poetry, visit www.treereadingseries.ca to find a schedule of the readings, which take place every second Tuesday.
To order a copy of Claudia Coutu Radmore's Arctic Twilight, go to http://www.bluebutterflybooks.ca or e-mail This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it to get Ode to a Rubber Duck: An Explanation of the Whole World.
To receive a free copy of Loving Her, e-mail Rod Pederson at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . Don't wait -- there are only six or seven copies left!
Bookmark
Email this
Comments (2)
A wonderful lady
My sisterinlaw is a loving, caring, wise woman, with a natural ability to clearly and flowingly scribe all she has learned in her walk with life. With her gental, helpful words, Claudia has been able to help me recently. Through her works she can lead us to a more positive way to think and live.
A humanist woman
As a haiku poet myself, I encountered Claudia in one booklet of hers : Tracing your Ribs. I really liked her writing and wanted to meet with her to discuss about life and love. When I finally did meet her, she was exactly this vibrant woman I had discovered by reading her. Plus, she seems to be genuinely interested in human beings, she listens well and her advise if full of humanistic qualities including sensivity. I love her and respect her immensely. Always in a good mood, willing to lend a hand. And a good sense of humour too. Janick Belleau |
Subscribe to this comment's feed
