SWARD: What do you understand by the word "spiritual"?

MACEWEN: It's a very simple word for me. As I understand it now, it refers to a perpetual and overwhelming reverence for life and a kind of heightened consciousness of all things going on around one at all times. It's a state of being continually conscious and therefore experiencing a heightened degree of beauty and of pain and of anguish and a sense of the miraculous. Most people only occasionally experience such things, but I feel that the mystic is experiencing them all the time. I would hate to think that poetry is written solely out of blinding visions because it would be dreadful poetry if it were not tempered with intelligence and a feeling for craft. But of course poetry without some kind of transcending vision is pretty dull poetry.

SWARD: I find I go back to that poem of yours "The Absolute Room" over and over again. "We came to a place which was the centre of ourselves…" That poem has a place in your book, The TE Lawrence Poems, and I wonder what the figure of Lawrence means to you?

MACEWEN: The figure of Lawrence always fascinated me. Lawrence himself was by no means a mystic. But he was fascinated with Arab mysticism, Semitic mysticism. Lawrence was drawn to the desert Arabs, these Bedouin because they felt such great joy in renouncing the pleasures and treasures of the world. It was almost a sort of voluptuousness in not having anything, not owning anything. Their relationship to their god was a passionate one, intense and passionate, and Lawrence was constantly in awe of this. He could never achieve it himself. I am more of a mystic than Lawrence was. I feel closer o the kind of passionate fervor that the desert Semites felt towards the god in that vast nothingness, the feeling of identification with the Infinite, the One, the All, and the nothing, however one wants to put it. I think for Lawrence these were only concepts that fascinated him but didn't touch him.

SWARD: Do you yourself follow any regular devotional practices.

MACEWEN: No, not at all. I think life is a devotional practice in itself, living consciously day by day, being aware of the sheer wonder, the sheer mystery of all things at all times: that is in itself a perpetual prayer.

SWARD: After reading your latest book The T. E. Lawrence Poems, and the earlier travel book, mermaids and Ikons, based on a summer spent, in Greece, I identified very strongly with the power that the Mediterranean and the Middle East have had on you.

MACEWEN: Wel1, the Lawrence book had been on my mind for a long time, but I only wrote the poems last winter; they came to me very easily, very smoothly. I suppose I am drawn to Lawrence by the extraordinary step he took from a British world into a totally Arab one. He follows his "destiny," but it turned out to be a very ironic, negative destiny. Like him, I am fascinated by that part of the world. It was natural for me to assume his persona; the whole book is written in first person. It's a lot of fun taking on another voice; you can say things which are impossible otherwise. It's relatively easy for me to do because I've written fiction and drama where I use voices other than my own.

SWARD: Would you say there's an innate connection for you between prose and poetry?

MACEWEN: Yes, and for me there's an inter-relationship between all forms of writing; it's just a question of stance. One of the obvious differences between prose and poetry is that fiction takes so much longer, is really harder work, in terms of the ability to sustain ideas over a long period of time. The mind is involved in different processes. I find, though, that when one is known primarily for poetry, as I am, then one's prose becomes invariably known as poetic prose. People will say, "This is a poet's novel," whether or not it's particularly poetic. It is unfortunate because I don't regard myself as a poet only, but as a writer.

SWARD: When DM Thomas described that journey from poetry to prose, it felt, to me, like going through the eye of the needle, a painstaking expansion outward. There are obviously many ways of doing it.

MACEWEN: Yes, there are. Finally, it's difficult to say subjects work better in prose than in poetry, why, for instance, the TE Lawrence book came out as poetry. It might well have been a novel in the first person, but it wasn't. I don't know all the reasons why.

SWARD: Would it then have contained much more detail?

MACEWEN: Yes, I think we're close to the main point here. He provided so much detail himself, in The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, in his letters and so forth, that it would have been pointless to go over it again. I wanted something tighter than a story.

SWARD: Can we change direction and talk about poetry readings? Do you enjoy them?

MACEWEN: Yes, very much. I always have. I feel that poets have no right to give readings unless they can do it well. I've been to so many boring poetry readings-- I think we all have-- where you wish the poet would just go away. I think the best readers are those who thoroughly enjoy what they are doing, even to the extent of hamming it up a bit. I am always aware when I read that the people in the audience have come out to hear me, often through bad weather, and over some distance, and I therefore owe them something. Too many poets forget to look at their listeners, address them as people, let them laugh, allow them to relax. It's not such an intensely serious thing that no one can have fun. The reader must know something of how to present himself on a stage; otherwise he should get off it.

SWARD: I agree. Now and then one can at least offer an anecdote of some kind

MACEWEN: Yes. The story of how one has come upon a title, for example.

SWARD: What would you say to a writer just starting out?

MACEWEN: Well, I always find this very difficult. I'm on their side totally, regardless of what they are writing, because I remember what it was like. I prefer not to get involved. I'm not happy in those situations, because what little I can say is not really going to make much difference to a person's future. It's a very heavy responsibility; and there's no final word on poetry, nothing that can be said that will tie everything up. After all this time, the only thing I'm sure of is that a poem is good when it makes me shiver, feel frightened, startled. I Would tell a young writer to be bold always, to dare, to take risks.

SWARD: What sort of climate did you find when you began the early 60's?

MACEWEN: Well, it seems there was a real poetry explosion then. Suddenly, people were talking about poetry; poets were reading and getting audiences out to hear them. it was all very exciting. Poets who have now published several books and become quite prominent were all around at that time. Contact Press was still going and, in fact their publication of my first book, The Rising Fire was, I think, one of their last books.

SWARD: How did you get yourself through the rejection slip phase?

MACEWEN: Oh, I went through years of that, but it never really bothered me. I can never understand writers who got upset about rejections. I just took it as a matter of course. I was in a very formative stage of my work and I knew it. I was probably overwriting, but it was also necessary to overwrite in order to learn. It seemed quite logical to me that if I sent out half-a-dozen poems maybe one would be accepted, maybe none.

SWARD: You've been writing a long time.

MACEWEN: I've been writing seriously since I was about eighteen and had some poems published in The Canadian Forum when I was younger. It was always natural for me. I realized that writing was what I could do and do well. That's why I didn't go on to university. Everyone thought that I would, that it would be an obvious step. But I didn't want to spend a lot of time having to learn what literature was all about. I simply wanted to make it myself, and I knew that it would take years of work before I'd get anywhere at all.

SWARD: Speaking of work, the kind you must sustain over long periods, of time, we're back again to one of the big differences between prose and poetry.

MACEWEN: Oh yes, the sheer effort of memory in prose is enormous -- simply remembering from day to day what one has written the day before, whereas with poetry you can often see the whole poem at a glance.

SWARD: So, do You find yourself re-reading constantly?

MACEWEN: Well, I can usually hang on to a thread for about a hundred pages or so, but then I have to stop and track back, especially as I tend to do a lot of research. The Egyptian novel., for instance, King of Egypt, King of Dreams took me five years to complete, but I loved every minute of it. Keeping track of all the names and details was a tremendous effort, though.

SWARD: It's total immersion, isn't it?

MACEWEN: Yes. I enjoy writing when there's an intellectual challenge in front of me all the time. I could write an awful lot more poetry than I do-- you know, mood poetry, descriptive poetry. But I don't feel this challenges me enough intellectually. The Lawrence poems did, though, because I had to work with historical facts and philosophical paradoxes.

SWARD: Do you really feel poetry is limited that way? I find much of yours has a strong metaphysical root.

MACEWEN: Poetry is not limited at all. But I can't write only poetry. I spend hours a day as a writer, not only as a poet. I need to be involved in a novel or some larger work. At the moment, I'm doing a play.

SWARD: You use mythology extensively in your work but I never feel that you escape to it, or hide in it. It seems to me you rediscover it in your own world.

MACEWEN: Exactly. I'm aware of the mythic proportions of life itself. The mythic shape of events.

SWARD: It has been said by critics that the ecstasy you achieve in your poems is never without the sense of cost, even loss. I see that vividly in all your fire imagery.

MACEWEN: Yes, I accept both joy and suffering. From that acceptance comes, I think, a more enduring beauty.

SWARD: That accounts, too, doesn't it for the notion in Shadow-Maker that one must absorb the darkness? But then, I think your phrase "the ruinous light" of Greece also includes annihilation.

MACEWEN: Exactly, light can be a disaster, especially in Greece. I like that phrase "disastrous light"; I must remember it. Greek light is almost painful in its clarity, whereas light to us is softer. In Greek tragedy the climax of everything took place at high noon. With us it would be at midnight.

SWARD: Many readers, and I'm one of them, have found a dreamlike quality in your work. You draw from the outside in, creating a wholeness. Maybe that's part of the poetic process, but it seems particularly smooth and natural in your work.

MACEWEN: For me, outer and inner reality are the same thing. My dreams are extraordinarily vivid. I assumed every one else's are. In an interview with a new magazine called Dreamweaver I described a kind of dreamlife and a dream world that I find to my surprise is much more intense than most people's. I thought everyone dreamt in colour with a cast of thousands. I have what feels like almost total recall of dreams. It's wonderful!

SWARD: I find that I really have to unplug myself from a number of activities; when I'm travelling, for instance, or holed up in a cottage somewhere working on a project, then the inner and outer lives really start to connect.

MACEWEN: Yes, that's interesting, because I do lead a very quiet and private life. I am not involved in the frantic pace of living that many others have to cope with.

SWARD: Do you think that writers need to dissociate themselves from that craziness?

MACEWEN: Certainly, if they want to get anything done. On the other hand, since they don't have the same sort of schedule as most people, then there's the freedom to come and go at will.

SWARD: Yet., there are writers who feed on the frenzy, the involvement.

MACEWEN: That's true. I suppose my involvement with the world is essentially a mystic one.

SWARD: I find something visionary in your work, that sense of seeing through, to us. Time vanishes; there's an immediate correspondence no matter how geographically or historically "remote" your subject might be.

MACEWEN: Well, I've been writing some new poems in the past month which have a fluidity that pleases me. Perhaps the strenuously paradoxical elements in some of my earlier work are settling down. Of course, when a writer is interviewed he always says he's in a new phase. And in fact he always is.

SWARD: The continuity is always there, though.

MACEWEN: Yes, but the mood changes, the stance changes. I was much more excitable in my twenties; there was a nervous energy at work. Whereas now I see that my lines in poetry are getting longer and longer. I'm not satisfied with short, breathless lines any more. It bores me to read skinny little poems. I seem to be seeking- a long sustained line rather than that breathless quality.

SWARD: There's a different kind of thoughtfulness coming in.

MACEWEN: There must be. I'm more interested in bringing ideas around to completion, to see them through a cycle. I had to do this in the Lawrence poems. Lawrence being such a multiple paradox. I was faced with an interesting challenge; to present those conflicting tensions and see them through to some kind of conclusion. It wasn't enough just to state them. I think poetry has to do more than simply describe moods such as despair; there's an ethical responsibility in poetry as well. It Must suggest some type of solution to the human dilemma. Art should be redeeming in some way spiritually therapeutic. What I'm saying basically is that the artist must do something about these negative states. He has a responsibility to find meaning in them.

SWARD: Have you always felt that?

MACEWEN: Yes. I've always felt that it isn't enough to write poems about how happy or how sad I am, or for that matter about my own personal condition as such. I have to go beyond that. My own state becomes significant only when it reflects something universal.

SWARD: Don't the poems themselves allow you to do that?

MACEWEN: Yes, that's when one starts becoming instructed by one's own poetry.

SWARD: it occurred to me earlier that your exhaustive research might well replace that formal education you bypassed, deliberately.

MACEWEN: Yes, I'm self-taught. I love researching things, exercising my memory. And there are languages, of course. I studied Arabic for a time, and I'm fairly fluent in modern Greek. I find I can learn a lot more by working on my own.

SWARD: Is there a store of subjects you have, or do you reach the point where you want to write, but are without a specific theme?

MACEWEN: That Would be bliss because it would mean that my mind could for a while be empty. No, it's quite the contrary. I'm afraid I'm never without a theme. It's a question of being overwhelmed by ideas. The hard work is in just choosing which one is to take precedence.

SWARD: Do you keep them inside, or do you have to write them down?

MACEWEN: Oh. both. It's never, never a question of having to look for an idea. The problem is getting rid of the excess ideas. I don't think I've ever had anything that I would call a writer's block. I don't understand the phrase, really. Yet, maybe that's because I always have one large project in the works. I keep working even when I don't feel like it. I wouldn't feel like a professional otherwise. I can understand not being able to complete a poem sometimes, but that's not writer's block.

SWARD: Do you do a lot of revision.

MACEWEN: In prose, yes. Not too much in poetry, and that's because I write poetry much more slowly and carefully than I did before. I spend a long time on one line now, but I know it's just right when I do get it down. I'm just more confident of my own voice now, and also, I usually get one line that contains the germ of the poem, and the rest follows relatively smoothly.

SWARD: Have others motivated you?

MACEWEN: When I started, I read as much as I could of modern poetry, and I suppose I was most excited by Hart Crane, who I think is a poet's poet., a very difficult, but moving poet, if you have the patience to read him. I may not feel that way now. And I guess the overall strongest influence was Yeats. Also I find, like a lot of writers, the more I write, the less I want to read. So I'm a very poor readers now; I don't keep up with current books at all. Perhaps if I didn't write for a long period of time I would read more. If you look around, you'll see I have no bookshelves and no books except those I'm working with. The few books I own, I keep in trunks or drawers.

SWARD: I reviewed your adaptation of The Trojan Women produced by Toronto Arts Productions, a couple years back, and I remember commenting on the power of your language. Is dramatic writing beginning to interest you even more now?

MACEWEN: Yes, I think it's very exciting. Leon Major, who directed The Trojan Women, feels keenly that more poets should write for the theatre; it's such a natural situation for them.

SWARD: Your forthcoming play encompasses the ethnic, largely Greek, experiences of New Canadians.

MACEWEN: Well, this is a contemporary play. It's not like The Trojan Women. I wrote it originally as a stage play, and now Leon Major and I are turning it into a television play. It's such a different type of writing.

SWARD: What kinds of pleasure does the play give you as a writer?

MACEWEN: I enjoy drama because it's less solitary than other forms of writing. One gets to work with the actors eventually.

SWARD: interesting. I was listening to Michel Tremblay talk at a theatre conference in Montreal recently and he's just done the other thing -- gone from some years of theatre writing to producing novels. For him, it was finally bliss to work alone.

MACEWEN: Yet, but I think most writers will do anything for company, given half a chance. Most writers are dying for someone to interrupt them when they're working.

SWARD: How do you deal with the loneliness?

MACEWEN: Oh, one just gets used to it. I've been writing for over twenty years now. It's not really a painful loneliness. It's a quality of life I'm accustomed to.

SWARD: For me, the loneliness appears either before or after the intensity of writing- when I come out of it and everybody's either running around, or disappearing because I haven't been there for them.

MACEWEN: But it's never a despairing loneliness.

SWARD: Back to the play. Unlike the Trojan Women, there is no mythological framework informing your current play?

MACEWEN: No, and I'm learning to write the kind of dialogue that people actually speak. It's refreshing. I'm forced to think about concrete situations and dilemma and imagine what individuals would really say, not just how a poem about these things might sound. It's new for me.

SWARD: I wonder if this new direction will come into future work?

MACEWEN: Probably it will. Yet I'm not sure where to go with contemporary dialogue. I listen to talk in the street or wherever, and I'm always aware that people mean so much more than they say, so simple speech doesn't seem rich enough to express your inner thoughts.

SWARD: But in theatre you're lucky if you can work with a director who really understands those forces behind speech and can unleash them on stage.

MACEWEN: Yes, I think I still have to learn to accept that and understand that so much else happens to a script after it's written. I'm always fairly open to suggestions for change. But not in poetry, of course. The poem always stands alone.

1982-2000 by Robert Sward. All rights reserved. No portion of this interview may be used in any form without written permission from Robert Sward, his estate or heirs.