Sharon Thesen
Sharon Thesen
Quick Facts
Name
Sharon Thesen
Date of Birth
Awards
Popular Works
Biography
Ever since she spent five years of her early childhood in spare, poor, but hot and lovely places in BC’s Southern Interior, in the towns of Vernon and Kamloops, BC, Sharon never did quite take to the landscape and mood of Vancouver, though she lived there from the mid-60’s to the late 90’s, aware often of how envious her friends from Toronto were that she lived in such a beautiful city, as Vancouver was so often referred to, perhaps more in those days than it is now.
But the fact is that Sharon has lived in a lot of places and even within those places, moved around a lot. (This would be expected of someone with a Uranus-Moon opposition in her birth chart.) She went to nine schools in twelve years, and left Prince George twice: once when she and her brother were moved to a kindly (but very religious) foster home in Vernon, BC, for a couple of years while her mother was being treated for TB at the Tranquille Sanatorium in Kamloops; and again, after they had moved back to Prince George when she was 13 and she had gone to high school, she left, or fled, Prince George and moved to Vancouver on her own and got a job as a junior secretary at a big radio station, CKWX. She had been writing poems, loving poetry, for years and after a bit more chaos (reflecting her Piscean ascendant) , ended up at SFU, the new university on the hill in Burnaby, BC, in 1966. She got married that year, too. She and her then-husband, Brian Fawcett, studied poetry with Robin Blaser and edited a poetry magazine called Iron. Robin Blaser became a life-long friend and mentor. By 1972, Sharon was a single mom with a young child, Jesse, and again working as a secretary. She finished her M.A. around that time as well, which attempted to discern Coleridge’s poetics through his writings on Shakespeare’s plays.
In the mid-70’s, Sharon was hired to teach English at Capilano College in North Vancouver, which she did for more than twenty years, teaching Creative Writing there as well and being involved with The Capilano Review as poetry editor. At the same time, her own work was being published by Coach House Press, Talon Books, Oolichan Books, McClelland & Stewart, and House of Anansi, which published her first edition of The New Long Poem Anthology. A second edition was published by Talon Books. Anansi published four of her books (Aurora, A Pair of Scissors, The Good Bacteria, and Oyama Pink Shale.) while she was in the process to moving joyfully back to the Okanagan with her husband Paul Mier, and teaching Creative Writing at UBC’s Okanagan campus, where she became Professor of Creative Writing.
In the late 80’s, Sharon had begun working with Ralph Maud, an SFU professor whose specialties were Dylan Thomas and Charles Olson, on a large collection of letters between Olson and the heretofore unknown Frances Boldereff, a book designer and author of many books on Blake and on James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Sharon ended up typing the entire correspondence from the original typewritten (Olson) and hand-written (Boldereff) letters, comprising, in the end, about 600 published pages divided between two volumes, A Modern Correspondence (Wesleyan U. Press) and After Completion: The Later Letters (Talon Books). While at UBC’s Okanagan Campus, Sharon co-edited, with poet Nancy Holmes, Lake: A Journal of Arts and Environment.
Sharon retired from the university in 2012. Since then she has been teaching her own Pinecone Poetry Workshops on various types and aspects of poetry and poetics, from elegy to investigatory to the long poem (her favorite form), under the general rubrics of Lyric Energy and “Everything Belongs,” which reflect her Libra/Scorpio personality as well as her poetics.. She has a new book coming out in 2021, “The Wig-Maker,” in which she has transcribed into a book-length poem the harrowing life story of a friend and neighbour, Janet Gallant. Sharon considers herself a dual poetic citizen of both the Cascadia geographic region and Canada. She was born in Saskatchewan, but has lived almost all her life in British Columbia, and has been permanently inspired by the aesthetics of The New American Poetry, a 1960 anthology edited by Donald M. Allen, which also influenced the famous “Tish” group of poets in Vancouver in the early 60’s.
Sharon has been nominated three times for the Governor-General’s Award and the Dorothy Livesay Award, and she won the Pat Lowther Award for A Pair of Scissors. Her 1976 edition of Phyllis Webb’s selected poems, The Vision Tree, won that year’s Governor-General’s Award.
Sharon has been honoured by the establishment of an annual Sharon Thesen Lecture at UBC’s Okanagan Campus, and by its inaugural lecture by poet John Lent in November 2020.
Other aspects of and events in Sharon’s life so far, her real biography, can be found in her books, especiallyThe Receiver(New Star, 2017).Her archives are at the McGill University Library in Montreal and at Simon Fraser University’s Special Collections in Burnaby, BC.
Poetics Statement
I share a lot the poetics-ideas and statements and beliefs and practices that other poets have made over the years and centuries. I can’t offer anything original or new. I struggle with the poem, it struggles with me. I don’t find writing poetry easy, it’s just that poetry is the place where I can leave the pressure of normative discourse behind—or try to. It’s not to make admirable statements but a place to be free and alive, to discover things, that is, the profound and usually hidden connections between and among things in the world, in time, in space, in language. For me, poetry and life are the same urge—that is, real life, which is so large that it is hidden until you start writing the poem and then more and more of it is revealed. My general belief is what Charles Olson wrote in his essay “Human Universe”: “Art is the only twin life has, its only valid metaphysic.” I would distinguish imagination in general from poetic imagination, in that poetic imagination reveals, while imagination reconstructs, which is what Coleridge said about primary and secondary imagination, not intending to devalue “secondary.” Even so, poetic imagination is modest. It has to be. It is not Disneyland, but rather, kind of suffered. It has more to do with Bugs Bunny than Captain Marvel. I don’t write poems to be a successful person. I was telling a friend the other day that I have pledged myself to the Path of Error, since much of my imagination is taken up with mistakes, injuries, illusions, ilnesses, temptations, amazements, and feats of strength and mercy such as you find in trapeze artists and nurses. In this way, I’m following beloved John Keats and his “negative capability”—the ability to be in doubts, mysteries, and uncertainties. Including, underlying everything, the mystery of the divine. Poetry is a spiritual second-sight, or, as someone, I forget who, defined it: “one last look at the ducks.”
Sample of Poet's Work
from Being Adults
2. Saved
At what elevation
do the recipes change.
Housewives in the Andes
substitute this
for that. Or everywhere
any old measurement
will do. Last night
my young friend & I
talked about bullfights,
sought in vain
for the word that comes
to me now: minotaur.
My young friend is newly aware
of the Devil--St. Paul
he says with his lovely mouth,
in Ephesians, he says
with his shoulders & everything
across from me--& I am angry
with my friend.
Going to Skidegate
I take home my homunculus and my purse
Across the busy parking lot on a hot day
To the Pharmasave where it is also busy.
People waiting for the blood pressure monitor.
People picking and choosing their Scratch-and-Wins.
People with Mars bars and aspirins--
That was the lady behind me. I had a glossy uplifting
Magazine and a jar of night cream
And a pair of warm soft socks
So my homunculus would be comforted while the ferry heaved
And bucked across the Hecate Strait
And we’d have Mars bars to eat
And magazines to trade
Once we got to Skidegate.
The Shepherdess
A painting in oils, 1899
Preceding her, a dozen or so greyish sheep.
Clayey puddles gleam in ruts, scrub bush
vague on the horizon. Dark red, dark blue
her vestments: a holy thing, the hour.
The activity. Even the farthest-to-the-left
sheep holds dear to the flock.
Her switch is benign, nearly forgotten.
They are being led out to pasture.
Why would anyone just take off, or be bad?
The sky is a large creamy portion, nor star nor planet
visible. Dew-soaked chilly grass. As yet,
immanence reigns. It moves softly forward,
it speaks in bleats. The shepherdess is silent, accustomed.
Every morning he turns away from the view
and toward his easel. A few years later
someone will mention he married
a woman he met on the train at the moment
it crossed the River Wye.
But now it is only the River When that he thinks about.
And the old pale colours of the land.
The Old Man Is Taken Away in an Ambulance at 2 a.m.
taken from the house upright strapped in a chair then lifted
to the stretcher in the front yard among champion dahlias
the old man’s wife in a brown silk suit holds at 2 a.m.
an umbrella over the attendants as they tuck and arrange
pillows and blankets to keep the rain off him on his way
to the open doors of the mercy vehicle leaving in the back
yard his kitchen chair under a bower of zucchini blossoms
The Pangs of Sunday
You’ll go to Banyen Books on Sunday Afternoons,
a searcher after meaning. So much meaning, so
little time! Was it to be mental or physical, your
ailment, in the end. In the end the ailment revolved
around love, mental or physical. Across the road
was the health food store, the herbalist, and the pains
and the ills of real estate & car insurance even though
it was a matter of proximity
and luck, how you arrived anywhere with no one
to witness and adjust, no one to drive the car. I
could get my fortune told in the sweet
cafe of Sunday by the woman with the bangle bracelets
and the low voice and the black, tangled hair--who else
to believe?--you only hoped your tip would be enough
to jumpstart the engine of your happy fate idling
while you got settled with your purse, etc.,
and turned up the volume on the radio.
The Bikers at Lund, July Long Weekend
Laces trailing
through the mouths of vipers
& blue hearts scrolled on their arms
girls trim & skinny from Nanaimo
fling too-loud laughter like
indifference around the cinnamon-bun shop
at the terminus of the highway, the long road
that starts at Tierra del Fuego & struggles upward
to Lund
where conquerors dismount among the sailboats
and the locals tearing prawns apart
under the pergola of the seafood patio--
we play at it, being invaded
by this naughtiness
beetle-headed with black metal carapace,
loud roars, grim wristbands, bulk of body
new lordship of the sparkling marina
where an old gent yanks at an outboard
& the dank pub hasn’t quite opened yet
& the refurbished hotel waits with bated breath
for the bedsprings of the evening
at the end of this little long road
marked with pushpins on the wharf’s map
though the way north never ceases & Earth falls upward and back
again its own green fire alive in the lonely icebergs
of Tierra del Fuego--
as bikers brood in biker fashion
& bonfires like neurotransmitters burn along the beach
at Lund until sunrise.
Bibliography
upcoming: The Wig-Maker. New Star Books, 2021.
The Receiver.. Vancouver: New Star Books, 2017.
Oyama Pink Shale. Toronto: Anansi, 2011.
From Toledo. (Chapbook). Prince George, BC: Gorse Press, 2007.
Scrap Book. (Chapbook). Edmonton, AB: The Olive Reading Series Collective, 2006.
Weeping Willow. (Chapbook). Vancouver: Nomados, 2005.
The Good Bacteria. Toronto: Anansi, 2005.
A Pair of Scissors. Toronto: Anansi, 2000.
News & Smoke, Selected Poems. Vancouver: Talon, 1999.
Aurora. Toronto: Coach House, 1995.
Po-It-Tree: A Selection of Poems and Commentary. (Chapbook). Burnaby: SFU, 1992
The Pangs of Sunday, Selected Poems. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1990.
Sheet Music. (Chapbook). Burnaby: SFU, 1982.
Radio New France Radio. (Chapbook). Vancouver: Slug Press, 1981.
Artemis Hates Romance. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1980.
The Imagination of Awakening. Monograph. Archai 2, 1973.The Beginning of the Long Dash. Toronto: Coach House, 1987.
Confabulations: Poems for Malcolm Lowry. Lantzville, BC: Oolichan, 1984.
Holding the Pose. Toronto: Coach House, 1983.
Editor:
The New Long Poem Anthology. House of Anansi Press,
The New Long Poem Anthology, 2nd Ed. Talon Books.
Charles Olson and Frances Boldereff: A Modern Correspondence. With Ralph Maud. Wesleyan U. Press,
After Completion: The Later Letters of Charles Olson and Frances Boldereff. With Ralph Maud. Talon Books,
Get to Know the Poet
Why poetry (as a form for writing)?
I think because of the built-in structure of sound, rhythm, and audio/visual information in time and space (metrics, line breaks, spacing) experienced by the writer, and the reader, as something like a musical score, creates or produces a way of thinking/perceiving relatively freed from the necessary discursive continuity of the prose line—regardless of any tendency to parataxis, as in prose poems. In other words, freedom, but even so a rather anxious freedom. Though I am a conservative poet in that my poems look a lot like everybody else’s on the page (as distinct from, say, Nourbese’s Zong or bp Nichol’s sound poetry patterns), with stanza breaks, enjambments, a clinging to the left margin, I do tend to take risks in my lexicon and in the longer sequences and series, in which a number of different voices are heard speaking, a number of different world views combine, a number of behaviours—a plenitude that is not chaotic, because everything takes place in a rhythm. I enjoy writing critical prose, but I’m incapable of writing prose fiction. My mind doesn’t work that way. Poetic form allows me to appreciate “the magic of persons” (a term Robin Blaser used) and the magic of situations all at once. Poetry is more like nature—some would say wild nature—than civilization. This is something I derive from my abiding interest in the Romantic poets—Coleridge, Blake, Shelley, Clare, Keats. You can walk around naked in a poem, you can converse with whales and other, sometimes dead, poets, and weep over the death of a mouse. You can let other people say what they want and need to say, for themselves. Of course, this can be done in prose as well—think of Annie Dillard’s essays or the fiction of John Banville. But it’s both harder and easier to do, I think, in the more concentrated articulations of poetry which paradoxically create spacious possibilities. You can preside philosophically or critically over a scene or a situation in a poem, or not.. You can do anyting, say anything, and the only dots you need to connect are the ones between your own synapses and the synapses of the world. Poetic metaphor enacts this experience.. The language of a poem, the way its perceptions are laid out, does have the effect of changing your mind and getting your heart’s attention, because poetry is beauty. People don’t read poetry to “escape.”