Pondering the Ephemeral: An Interview Between Poet Terence Young and Consulting Editor Barbara Carter

Barbera Carter, Consulting Editor, in conversation with Terence Young on his poem “May Day Coronation, 1929” the runner-up of The Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse Contest for 2025. The poem appears in Issue 176 of The New Quarterly.

Barb: I have an insatiable curiosity about back story.  What prompted the writing of this poem? Each time I read it, I picture you looking  at a cherished black and white photograph. Your poem becomes a written photograph encouraging the listener/reader to form their own picture of the individual who inspired its writing.

Terence: You were quite right about the photograph, which happens to be of my mother in full May Queen regalia. I’ve known about her selection as queen since I was young, but I’d never really thought about how significant it must have been to a girl of thirteen. 

Barb: The former teacher of English in me wonders if the poem is an elegy. I am drawn in completely by the poem’s tone and its well crafted enjambment that seduce many readings. I begin to form my own impressions of this unique personality. My imagination stirs. How would you describe the poem’s tone? Is there intention behind the tone?

 Terence: There is a certain elegiac quality to the poem, I think, because it encompasses her whole life, a kind of looking back while also looking forward. It also invites the readers to imagine a moment in their lives where they were ignorant, perhaps happily, of the immense changes that were to come. The narrator is somewhat god-like in that regard, then, a figure that sees the whole spectrum of this person’s life. I might have made it a personal reflection, but I felt it worked better with a voice that was not necessarily indifferent but benevolently removed. 

Barb: “Bennevolently removed” how well put. Another aspect of the poem’s appeal is the clever juxtaposition of what she knows and what at thirteen she does not know will befall her. The speaker in the poem knows and taunts the listener/reader with this knowledge. The opening lines of the poem: She knows she’s been elected over the other girls/ because of her industry in class, her many social graces. suggest that at thirteen the subject possesses a certain confidence.  In stanzas 2 to 4, the startling juxtaposition begins. We learn She knows, too, that her father died seven years ago, /yet there he stands each night at the foot of her bed/to wish her well before she falls asleep. She doesn’t know/ he will stop doing this the day she weds, that her husband/lives in a house nearby and is already in his twenties. So much for the reader/listener to ponder between those lines. So much to tempt me to form my own portrait of this endearing girl and the woman she becomes. Can you speak to me about the clever juxtaposition in the poem?

Terence: Of course, I am using the details of my mother’s life, the hardscrabble days that followed upon her father’s untimely death and her continued love of him until the day she herself marries. I think the power of such imagery lies in its connection to our own lives: if we only knew then what we know now, the shifts in course we will take, the sudden changes in fortune. But of course we can’t know these things, and when we look back on them, we see ourselves as I portray my mother in this poem, as brave, admirable and very vulnerable. Our lives are a constant comparison between what we once were and what we are now. For some, that comparison evokes regret, but I think mostly it asks for our understanding and our sympathy, feelings that should temper our view of our children and grandchildren as they make their way in this world. 

Barb: It is not only the juxtaposition that engages but also the Intriguing details and the order in which the speaker reveals them as the poem unfolds. She doesn’t know a war is coming, as are her children,/ or that her love of tennis will ruin her knees. What governed the order of the details? With each reading of the poem, the portrait of the subject becomes sharper, much like looking at a painting again and again and finding new suggestions.

Terence: That of course is hard to say, but looking at it now, I can see that I move from the dark to the light, and perhaps that is the structure of the poem overall: to acknowledge the heartbreaking episodes of her life but also to elevate those aspects that made her time here poignant and worthwhile. My mother was a fiend on the tennis court. And she was a good parent. The war years were hard, as her letters to my father attest. But ultimately the clouds parted, they found a life in the town they grew up in, and they gave me and my sister free rein to explore the world, a freedom that has largely vanished for what are probably very good reasons.

Barb: I also find the echo of “One day” intriguing. One day/she will speak French and play the piano by ear. One day/in a forest cabin at the bottom of a wooden post, she will/ write her name to mark her graduation from college./ One day she will leave her church and never return.

I suspect there was method to your madness in this repetition. Am I right?

Terence: Somebody once told me that change is the driving force of all great music, and I believe it is true of all great art as well. So, in a poem, I like to shift keys, introduce anaphora to change the rhythm, and this phrase suited my needs perfectly. It also allowed me to select details that were radically different from one another, details that contribute to a more complex portrait of my mother and that show her growth. She was a talented musician and an excellent student – she ultimately became a teacher, as I did – and she had the good sense to judge an institution on how it treated the marginalised in our society.

Barb: Terence, thank you for the poignancy in this poem.  You capture so well the ephemeral in a moment in time.  When you take us back so cleverly at the end of the poem to its beginning,  But today… she is the people’s choice/for Queen, a thirteen-year old girl in robes and coronet, seated/on her throne for the Victoria Day Pageant, no fewer than fifteen/princesses arrayed at her feet./, we are reminded of innocence.  But the poem doesn’t end there. The Graf Zeppelin is on its way/ to America. Countries will crash into poverty six months from now./  A new world order is rising, but for now the weather is picture perfect. The final line of the poem is on its own and deservedly so. May I ask you to comment on the intention of this last line?

Terence: I did not realize until I started to write this poem what a huge moment this must have been in my mother’s young life. To be seated on a throne in a park where thousands of people are watching her and the princesses at her feet. To be chosen both for her beauty as well as for her character as the embodiment of the vitality of spring, of life itself. It must have been overwhelming. But it was also fleeting. Time moves on. Things change. If anything, we must learn to savour the moment, allow ourselves to fully appreciate what we have, and I like to believe that my mother did exactly that.

Barb: I cannot end this interview without asking what we may look forward to from Terence Young. What are you writing now?

Terence: A very timely question. This fall, Signature Editions is publishing my third collection of short fiction, Give Us This Day, and currently I am working on another collection of poetry in which this poem will find a place.

You can explore Terence Young’s poem, published in Issue 176: Waiting For the New today.