VIU’s Gustafson poetry lecture is happening in-person after going virtual in 2021 due to COVID-19 and this year’s topic is the relationship between oral and written poetry.
Prolific, award-winning poet and current Toronto poet laureate A.F. Moritz has been named this year’s Vancouver Island University Ralph Gustafson Distinguished Poet. On March 2 he’ll hold a reading and Q-and-A at the school and on March 3 he’ll deliver the 2022 Gustafson Lecture. This is his first time presenting his work in Nanaimo.
“Preparing [the lecture] has led me back through my poems and I’ve been very interested in the quite early ones and so … I’m going to create a reading that is all poems from long ago but that I haven’t read for a long time and in many cases haven’t ever read out loud at all,” he said.
Moritz’s talk is titled Poetry: Future Present of the Past. He said it will touch on the relationship between oral and written poetry, as well as the relationship between cultures that are oral-only and those that have writing and “all the things that develop out of writing, like science with its artificial languages.”
He said that led him to thinking about “the relationship inside of us” and how children are without language at “the most important” and “foundational” time of their lives, but are now having literacy imposed on them at younger and younger ages.
“One of the main reasons why poetry is the best thing in human existence except for human beings is that it incarnates this history and this tension with the greatest fullness and intensity of any human endeavour,” Moritz said. “And this crux is an absolutely central thing that nobody but the poet really totally grasps and works on, and yet if our society does not solve the way it ignores and turns on its basic origins, it will die.”
Moritz will also discuss how the written poem isn’t totally against the oral poem, as it serves a similar function as a musical score. He said just as a singer will contemplate and practise a song before singing it, a reader should do the same when presenting poetry. He said, “It’s not just a matter of sloppily reading it as if you’re gobbling down the typical type of information that you get from a position paper.”
“You read it because you like the composer and respect the composer and you try hard to grasp what the composer’s trying to say and to honour it and even repeat it and respond to it by your own respectful but creative interpretation of it,” Moritz said. “So one part of the lecture talks about this idea of the written poem really is partly at war with but basically wishing to be an ally and a preserver and a re-creator of the oral poem and the early dawn-time and life-source of childhood and even what lies before childhood.”
WHAT’S ON … A.F. Moritz reading and Q-and-A in VIU Bldg. 108, Room 105 on March 2 at 4 p.m. Gustafson Lecture in VIU Bldg. 355 on March 3 at 7 p.m. Masks and proof of vaccination required. To register for the event live stream, click here.
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