The Root Cellars of Elliston: An Interview Between Poet Richard Brait and Consulting Editor Barbara Carter
Barb Carter, Consulting Editor, in conversation with Richard Brait on his poem “The Root Cellars of Elliston,” the runner-up of The Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse Contest for 2024. The poem will appear in the upcoming Issue 172 of The New Quarterly.
Barb: What prompted your visit to Elliston, Trinity Bay, “The Root Cellar Capital of the World”?
Richard: My visit to Elliston was in the summer of 1978. I was a law student at Queens University and came home to St. John’s for the summer. On weekends, my girlfriend and I would often drive “out around the Bay” with our tent and camping supplies – most of the land in Newfoundland is unclaimed, and there were no commercial places to stay in any case, so we’d stay beside a river, on the verges of a stony beach, basically anywhere that was scenic and protected. Elliston was one of the places we went to, though I don’t recall giving the whole root cellar topic a lot of attention at the time. The real source of my interest in root cellars was the work of print-maker Don Wright. I visited his workshop at Saint Michaels, south of St. John’s, and became interested in his work – it was all about the connection of man with nature. When Wright contracted Aids through the blood supply (he was a hemophiliac and so needed frequent transfusions) his work became focused on mortality, and root cellars were a common subject matter. I’m not sure exactly what role he envisioned root cellars playing – he talked about death resulting in a union with nature, a disappearing into it, and I took him as representing them as the places where that might happen. But I’ve taken my own, more positive, approach – if they’re perfect for the storage and preservation of vegetables and fruits, why not something even more meaningful.
Barb: Why not indeed? With each reading of your poem, I am transported to Newfoundland, not only by its unique setting, but also by its characteristic diction. The speaker invites the reader into one of these “earthen forts dug into the rocky ground” warning “it’s hard to stop the bivvering–/ it’s so cold and damp even at the height of summer.” The reader is reminded that the root vegetables are kept separate from “the grander crops”, “apart from the mushrooms, the tomatoes , and/ those blueberries gathered in our dippers each fall—“. And as the poem turns to speculation of the possibility of the speaker’s own mortality preserved in the root cellar, the reader becomes a guest at “a scuff” complete with “a brace of fiddles and squeeze-boxes, the participants all dancing in “stockinged feet”. You have made it impossible for me, and I am sure for others, to resist the lure of this outport. Do you have a particular connection to Newfoundland that encourages you to create it for others?
Richard: My father was a career Bell Canada engineer and we moved to St. John’s when he became President of the Newfoundland Telephone Company. While I did all my university “away,” I fell in love with the place and came back to practice law in St. John’s. I ultimately left Newfoundland for greener career pastures, but I’ve been coming back to our fishing camp in Labrador for over 40 years with several Newfoundland friends. My first collection of poetry “Giants Brought Down to Their Knees” is subtitled “a Newfoundland Memoir in Poetry” and it is indeed comprised of poems that relate my experience of Newfoundland – incidents from my own life and stories told around our wood stove at the camp. Of course, poetry is fiction, so sometimes, as in “The Root Cellars of Elliston,” the real world is just a jumping off place for the poem. As the Newfoundland tourism video, from which I borrowed the title of my collection, says about Newfoundland tales: “rest assured, everything is true, especially the bits that are made up.”
Newfoundland diction, of course, is part of the character of the place. In my earlier Newfoundland poems, I didn’t hesitate to have my characters speak in the slang of the province, but that has moderated in my more recent poems (and in revisions to the earlier ones). Craig Teicher, my MFA advisor at Bennington College, was pretty firm on the point that colloquial language is no longer favoured in poetry, and I’ve taken that to heart, particularly since I personally don’t speak like a Newfoundlander (there are exceptions!). Hence, I generally confine my excursions into “Newfoundland English” to particular terms such as “biverring” (shivering) and “scoff” (a big celebratory dinner) – and a great source for these is The Dictionary of Newfoundland English (editors: Story, Kirwin, and Widdowson). Of course, much of Newfoundland was settled with Irish immigration, and my mother’s side of the family came over to southwestern Ontario from County Tyrone during the Irish potato famine. So, I do favour a bit of an Irish way of speaking and hence terms like “grand” creep in that way.
Barb: Not only does the poem transport its audience to a specific place, but it also nudges them to consider their own mortality. John Vardon, TNQ’s Lead Poetry Editor, was reminded of his aunt’s favourite saying: “Saints preserve us” when he read the poem, but he commented wryly that he doubted his aunt had the root cellar version of preservation in mind. I am so impressed by the originality of the ironic parallel you draw of the possibility of the speaker’s body also being preserved “at that perfect temperature,/ never less than zero, never more than four point five” in the root cellar. Can you tell me what prompted this imaginative leap?
Richard: Yes, I love those Newfoundland/Irish sayings too – in all their grandiloquence and constant references to religion. My favorite, which I’ve used in a later poetry collection to describe someone who is talkative, is “she could talk the hind leg off the Lamb of God.” This one is credited to George Horan, one of my law partners when I was in Newfoundland. George, at the time, was struggling with religion and whether it had meaning. And really, this poem of mine is doing the same thing. Of course, we all hope there’s an afterlife, but nothing in what we’ve learned in the sciences over the last 200 years has done anything but contradict the notion.
To answer your question directly, I’m not entirely sure where the creative leap came from. I tend to set up my architecture for a poem and then just start writing within it. And it’s sometimes surprising what comes out. The last step in my process is to take the prose I’ve written and to “versify” it. I’m told that’s how Yeats wrote his later poetry. And when I versify, I do two main things: (i) create lines and stanzas, and (ii) “lift up the language” (credit my mentor Laura Lush with that phrase!) by introducing figurative language, interesting images, … anything that might startle or entertain.
Barb: The “surprise” in this poem is a gift to reader and poet. The movement of the poem is also mesmerizing. Along with the speaker, the reader contemplates the “moist earth walls” that “stave off the drying/ and darkness the sprouting” for the root vegetables housed there, and dances for the celebratory “harvest at the end of our age, the raising up from humble vaults”. But it is the final third of the poem that catches in my throat and makes me quiver. May I ask the intent of the change of tone that concludes the poem, that has me reading again and again the final six lines: “I’ve never been much, after all, for puffy clouds,/blinding light,/ and all those angels/without any sign of the wear and tear/ of honest toil, and the wonder and worry/ of nights by a lovely, terrible northern sea.”
Richard: A tough question. I was educated as an engineer, and then a lawyer, and there are two indelible concepts which those callings impressed on me: (i) what are your facts (there can be no analytics or conclusions without them); and (ii) when you express yourself, your audience must be left in no doubt as to what you mean. So, I do believe in setting a solid base before you hit your readers between the eyes with your message. I remember Paul Muldoon saying that most poets “start too soon” – his point being that you should state your core message right away and dispense with the preliminaries. Then, he suggests that you go deeper. But after much consideration, I think in general that he’s wrong. You do need a set-up (as my description of the basics of root cellars does in this poem). But you need to keep it interesting. I’m also cognizant of the warning that Mark Wunderlich gave us at Bennington College – you need to draw your reader in in the first few lines or he/she will just move on. So here, I divide the poem into pieces: the factual set up (root cellar science); the imaginative leap (that bodies might be stored); and finally, the philosophical conclusion. I think the most important thing in this structure is the conclusion. I’ve always firmly believed that the poet shouldn’t be telling the reader how to think. And I’d like to think I avoid that here by having my narrator talking in a genuine and idiosyncratic way – then the statement becomes not a philosophical argument, but the perspective of a real human being, put out there as something to be looked at by the reader, who can then form his or her own view.
Barb: I confess I appreciate a poem, almost any narrative in fact, that leaves me something to ponder and invites me to draw my own debatable conclusions. I suspect that is why “The Root Cellars of Ellison” lingers in my consciousness and entices me to return for more readings.
Your “short” bio is delightfully intimidating: a corporate lawyer with degrees in Engineering and Law and a more recent MFA in Poetry from Bennington College. How have each of your professions informed your poetry? What drew you to writing poetry? Who are your favourite poets? What are you writing now?
Richard: I’ve already answered a few of these. I guess to summarize, my poetry is fact-based and generally narrative in form. I’m not a believer in obscurity. Readers should spend their time formulating their own views on the facts and images the poet conveys, not trying to make sense of the work. Starting to write poetry, rather than fiction or creative nonfiction, was a pretty random choice. But a good one for me, I think. I generally enjoy the process of plotting the overall architecture of a work, then populating it with the right poems, fragments, etc. To an extent, I also enjoy crafting and revising the line, but only to an extent. When you write mostly long poems, as I do, that’s a dangerous trap you need to avoid. I’m also conscious that my start in poetry was very late in life – I don’t have a lot of time to spare for the niceties.
My first three poetry collections were very much groupings of individual poems. The structure of my MFA program really forced that on me – the creative requirement was 5 new poems and two revisions per month, the critical part required reading 6 to 8 books per month and writing about them, and then there were major essays too. So, it was a bit of a scramble to create enough poems to submit. I found I had to write about whatever came to hand.
Now that I’m free of that, I’m tending to pick subject matters for a book length work and then write all the poems to fit the plan. It’s important when I do that to pick a subject where I can inject some personal elements. My first advisor at Bennington, Carmen Gimenez, was quite direct with me in our first meeting. I told her what I thought I needed to work on (metre, the use of figurative language, …) but she just dismissed my suggestions out of hand. “Not important,” she said. She told me that my poetry was too much of a chronicle – I needed to work in an “emotional thread.” I came to agree with that assessment and generally the best way for me to accomplish that is to work in my personal experiences and things I care about. Of course, poetry is fiction, so I don’t feel tied to the facts, just their spirit.
Of the five collections I’ve “finished,” the last two follow that subject matter approach – one imagines that the Virgilian lottery (the concept of using random passages from Virgil’s Aeneid as a source of prophecy) becomes a popular element in bingo halls around the world; the other, titled “Strangers in Strange Lands,” highlights the dichotomy of Labrador by portraying the lives of its indigenous peoples (particularly those taken to Europe and put on display) and also the activities of the “strangers” who came to Labrador to exploit its natural resources. As for work-in-progress, I have two topics right now. The first is a collection entitled “The Ends of History” – poems that explore Francis Fukuyama’s notion (now looking rather shaky) that the global triumph of liberal democracy would follow the collapse of the Soviet Union. The second is a modern retelling of The Canterbury Tales with elements of the Domesday Book, trial by ordeal, and the unknown fate of Thomas Becket’s bones.
When I’m picking a theme for a collection, I’m always reminded from my science and engineering days of what the academically inclined would take as their direction: “what are the hard problems?” or “what are the great questions?”. It’s a little less direct with poetry – I try to pick a subject matter that can allow reflection on something deeper than just the story or the words. In the Canterbury Tales case, for example, the nature of pilgrimage and the people who are seeking some meaning for their lives, the nature of idolatry, and the way medieval societies ordered themselves and what we might learn from that.
As to favourite poets, I’m a great fan of Alice Oswald – her first book, The Thing in the Gap Stone Stile, remains a huge favourite, and her poem Dart – a single long poem about a river – represents a model for me of what a long poem, or a project book of poetry, should look like. But I think several of the Irish poets – MacNeice, Yeats, Heaney, Muldoon, Mahon, and Ciaran Carson are my biggest influences. Among these MacNeice’s Autumn Journal and Carson’s Still Life are the works I keep coming back to. And I can’t forget the great lines from Yeats – collectively his “rag and bone shop of the heart.” In fact, in my latest collection I’ve used two of his poems – “The Second Coming” and “A Prayer for my Daughter” as the basic superstructure for a large section of the work. Copyright has expired in both poems, so I feel a wonderful sense of freedom to do as I please with them.
Finally, I need to give some credit to the profession I’ve been practicing for the last 45 years. I’ve never considered myself a natural writer, but lawyering forces you constantly into close reading, and structuring and writing thoughtful and precise prose. I don’t think there’s a better calling for being exposed to new vocabulary, new phrases, countless different ways to structure an argument … . When you have a love of words as I do, these just become one great big data lake that you can draw from when you want to write something. Whether you’re an engineer or a lawyer, or even a writer, the most important thing is to innovate, to find a new and better way. But innovation doesn’t come from the ether, it comes from a big storehouse of prior achievements and ideas and uses these to take things one step further. My time as a lawyer helped me build that storehouse. And, as I like to say, all innovation is really “found” innovation.