Nicholas Power performs in wild places with the River Poets. He’s been published by Teksteditions (Melancholy Scientist), Underwhich Editions (wells), The Writing Space (a modest device), and Battered Press (No Poems) as well as in Bywords, Descant, Ottawater, Rampike, wildculture.com and many other journals and anthologies.
He read with other Ontario poets at the 2017 International Festival of Authors at Harbourfront in Toronto and at the Ottawa International Writers Festival as a member of the sound poetry group Alexander’s Dark Band.
He is the publisher of Gesture Press where a selection of his poetry and appreciations of other poets can be found at: https://gesturepress.com
1] Q: How long were you in Ottawa, and what first brought you here? What took you away?
I was born on the west coast, but I think of Ottawa as home. I lived in Ottawa from the age of 2 to 10 on Clearview and the Cowley Avenues in the Champlain Park area. There’s a swamp near Clearview Avenue that I write about in Melancholy Scientist. I could hear the milk train coming into town on tracks that are now a Transitway. The woods between Clearview and the River were my playground until they started clearing a route for the Parkway. Blaine Marchand lived nearby and went to the same Catholic school; I delivered the Ottawa Citizen. My Dad was in the Navy, so we moved to Halifax then came back to Ottawa where I went to grades 12 and 13 at St. Joseph’s High School. We lived near Maitland and the Queensway. I left to go to college in Toronto. I worked at the ‘Silly Centre’ and other locations for the Defense Department, and at the Rideau-Carleton Raceway in the summers. I practice taught at Nepean High School and substitute taught at St. Joe’s.
2] Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here?
Sitting in the back of Sister Genevieve’s English class in Grade 12, looking out the windows to the Gatineau Hills and, conversely, looking intently through Dennis Lee’s Oxford anthology of poetry for high schools - that’s the beginning of writing for me. The writing community in Ottawa in the late sixties for me was music: folk at Le Hibou, local bands, and friends who had a group called The Windhovers. A friend of mine was writing poetry and he was friends with Bill Hawkins.
My first stories were memories of my childhood exploring the woods along the Ottawa River that I collected into a series called The Path. I told them as stories for children in libraries. I developed The Wordweavers with another writer and later joined Jabberwock and Sons Full Theatre Company. We collaboratively developed work that played at Harbourfront, Art Gallery of Ontario as well as schools and festivals.
I was part of an expansive writers’ circle in Toronto through the 70’s and 80’s beginning for me with bpNichol and jwcurry. I read at open mics and group readings. I was part of what magazine where I wrote a column about readings.
I began publishing in Ottawa with Bywords and followed the Ottawa scene marginally from Toronto. I read in a couple of Ottawa reading series. I performed sound poetry with Alexander’s Dark Band at the Ottawa Writer’s Festival and, as an honorary mention, I was part of a John Newlove Award reading. The poem I read was for John Lavery, a writer I admired and got to know briefly. rob mclennan invited me to read at the Carleton Tavern the night before one of the Ottawa Small Press Book Fairs. I enjoyed being an out-of-towner with Ottawa cred! I sold Gesture Press and Underwhich Editions and Teksteditions books at the Ottawa fair and in a bookstore in the Market.
Ottawater has been a welcoming online venue for publishing individual and series poems.
Q: How did being in such a community of writers shift your thinking about writing, if at all? Have there been subsequent shifts due to where you have lived since?
I think the small press book fairs and the interaction among small press writers and publishers has been formative for me. Through writing workshops and being a poetry book buyer, I’ve been affected by what individual Ottawa writers are doing. Individually, or in anthologies, writers like Stephen Brockwell, Marilyn Irwin, Archibald Lampman, Blaine Marchand, rob mclennan, Una McDonnell, Colin Morton, John Newlove, David O’Meara, Pearl Pirie, Sandra Ridley, and Tom Walmsley are all on my shelves. I’ve gotten to know other writers through workshops, readings, journals and anthologies.
4] Q: What did you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What did Ottawa provide, or allow?
I like the way there’s a reading scheduled before the Ottawa Small Press Book Fair. The Ottawa Fair has an ecology distinct from our Meet the Presses in Toronto. I think the Ottawa Writer’s Festival has done some interesting programming that I haven’t seen in Toronto. I was fortunate to be part of a unique sound poetry performance and receive an invitation to travel, to rehearse and join in on the Festival with other writers.
I haven’t been part of what I imagine as a coherent writing community here in Ottawa, but I’ve run into rob mclennan on Bank Street and joined him and other locals for a beer. Amanda Earl and Bywords and National Poetry Month have been very receptive and her energy over the years has been meaningful to me. jwcurry and Cameron Anstee have been inspirational publishers. I don’t see Toronto as the centre; I’m a magpie and I seek out writing that I can learn from and be challenged by.
5] Q: Have any of your projects responded directly to your engagements here? How had the city and its community, if at all, changed the way you approached your work?
Memories and experiences with Ottawa are ongoing prompts for me. Many individual poems come from my idea of Ottawa (Ottawa, or The Trace of a Metaphor, Altered Vistas). Head in the Clouds is about a talented high school classmate, the writer among us, who was often teased and who later committed suicide. I’ve included references in poems and fictions to Coach Frank Clair and the Roughriders, The Experimental Farm, Britannia Beach, The Point, Lac Phillippe, and Pink’s Lake.
The swamp in the still ‘vacant,’ wild area near Island Park Drive may be dried up but is still there and shows up in several poems. Recently, in Reconnaissance, a fictional constellation of events in my life and that of a distant relative in the Northwest Mounted Police, I’m writing about my childhood belief in the presence of Indigenous Peoples in those woods along the Ottawa River.
I’ve done research in Ottawa for what became Tickling the Dragon’s Tail, a short novel about a scientist from Chalk River, who, with the help of a poet and a journalist, hides out in the Ottawa area from American operatives who want to kidnap him for the Star Wars program in the 80s.
I grew up learning French in Ottawa schools which led to bilingual poems and a whole children’s show in both French and English (La Magie Bleu/ Blue Magic). My interest in books was supported by a wonderful librarian in a small library at the old Westgate Mall who had us tell her the stories of the books we’d read as part of a summer reading contest.
6] Q: What are you working on now?
I just put out a Gesture Press book called ordinary clothes: a Tao in a Time of Covid, writing in response to Lao Tzu’s 81 short texts. I’ve finished a manuscript of narrative prose called Reconnaissance. I’ve been collecting material and fleshing out ideas for a related series of short fictions.
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