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Poetry & D&D: Patrick Grace interviews Craig Francis Power

Congratulations on winning the 2024 Far Horizons Award for Poetry! I was pleased to select “Walking My Three-Year-Old to Nanny’s Place, Easter Sunday 2017” as this year’s winner. Paraphrasing from my celebratory statement, form and content weave together effortlessly in the poem, a symbiosis of parent and child in tune with the semi-rhyming couplets that propel the poem forward. Can you talk about your process for writing this poem? How often do structures of metre and rhyme fit into your work?

Thank you! I’ve admired The Malahat Review for so long it sort of feels surreal to have won the award.

The poem came about indeed through walking with my daughter along a river trail in St. John’s—I should say here, for my mom’s sake, that I do not think she lives in a “dump” but only that I needed a rhyme for “up”—and sprung from my mishearing or misinterpreting something Audrey was saying. A rather common occurrence when she was a toddler, but it continues with some frequency, even today.

I do a great deal of my writing while walking—it’s all right there in my head. And though I think a poem can be whatever it needs to be, I’m drawn to structure—if only to hear it break.

The poem begins with the daughter repeating the words “dank ooze” four times, like a mantra to cope with “banks of filthy snow and shit thawing.” The parent is equally dismayed with trudging through town to Nanny’s place. What would you say to readers who wonder if the daughter is influenced by the parent here, or if the parent is influenced by the daughter?

At the risk of ruining the tension of the poem, the daughter is saying “Thank you” with each step she takes, but such is the parent’s misery—having only partly to do with them being hungover—that they are unable to understand that right away, or to see—as the daughter demonstrates—that there is so much for which to be thankful. It only becomes apparent (no pun intended) to the speaker near the end of the poem—at the same time (hopefully) as it does to the reader.

In this way, ultimately, it’s the parent who’s influenced by the child, who begins to see their lives in a more hopeful way than previous.

The street names in the poem are all located in St. John’s, Newfoundland—Cashin Avenue, Blackmarsh Road, Blackshire Courts. There’s also a fair number of places mentioned: “…the penitentiary, the brewery, the cathedral…,” lending an industrial feel to the piece. Why are locations and places important in this poem?

Those streets are all in poor and/or working-class neighbourhoods in St. John’s—which is my background—and it’s important to me to show the difficulty and beauty of these places.

The long list of sites mentioned that you allude to above can be seen as a kind of map that charts the entire trajectory of one’s life in poverty: high school, work, jail, drinking, finding religion, a stint in a psychiatric hospital, and then death. A grim outlook, to be sure, but in my own experience (and that of the people I’ve hung out with over the years), not entirely without evidence to its factual reality.

Your debut collection of poems, Total Party Kill, was very recently released with Breakwater Books, and made CBC’s list of 44 Canadian poetry collections to watch for in fall 2024. How did you choose to use Dungeons & Dragons imagery as a way to explore addiction and recovery in the book?

Quite by accident. I had begun composing these little monologues in the voice of one of my D&D characters to amuse the friends with whom I’ve played the game the past thirty or so years—it’s shocking to see that time-period in print—and they just sort of took on the tenor of things I had been dealing with in my personal life.

I sent some of them to my friend Mark Callanan (the current Poet Laureate of St. John’s) who plays the game in my group, and unfortunately for us all, he encouraged me to pursue writing the collection and guided me throughout the whole thing. The worlds of Dungeons & Dragons are extremely rich in their imagery and lore—often quite nightmarish in many ways—and it seemed very suitable in describing the difficult things I found myself writing about, while remaining somewhat removed from the subject matter at the same time. The speaker of those poems is sometimes me, sometimes a D&D character, and sometimes a combination thereof, though I confess the boundaries around their voices has remained nebulous from the start.

Christina Parker Gallery in St. John’s is hosting an exhibition of your textile works, called Wild Life, for most of November 2024. The gallery website states that you “make hooked rugs that draw from the history and iconography of Folk Art to interrogate notions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ taste.” Can you talk a bit more about this, and how you got into making hooked rugs?

Making hooked rugs happened for me after I returned to St. John’s from art school at NSCAD. I was trying to quit smoking and had been told keeping one’s hands busy (by the repetitive drudgery of textile work, for instance) might be a useful strategy. It didn’t work for the smoking, but I began to see how craft-hobbyist forms such as rug-hooking could be used in a wider critique of how we, societally, determine artistic value, and what such determinations say about our society.

That I grew up and live in a community whose identity—rugged, hard-scrabble, honest, innocent, quaint, salt-of-the-earth etc.—is more or less determined by the cultural tourism industry only made hooked rugs a more appealing, and in some ways, more contradictory vehicle through which to explore these things. I admire things that are easily dismissed or appear to have little value, aesthetic or otherwise.

 

 

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