Don McKay > Quotes

“Sometimes a voice—have you heard this?—
wants not to be voice any longer, wants something
whispering between the words, some
rumour of its former life. Sometimes, even
in the midst of making sense or conversation, it will
hearken back to breath, or even farther,
to the wind, and recognize itself
as troubled air, a flight path still
looking for its bird.”
― Don Mckay, Angular Unconformity: Collected Poems 1970-2014

“I think that Harry Hess, who coined the term geopoetry, like Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, or any other creative scientist, enters a mental space beyond ordinary analysis, where conjecture and imaginative play are needed and legitimate, and that this is a mental space shared with poets. But even more than this poetic license, I would say, the practice of geopoetry promotes astonishment as part of the acceptable perceptual frame. Geopoetry makes it legitimate for the natural historian or scientist to speculate and gawk, and equally legitimate for the poet to benefit from close observation, and from some of the amazing facts that science turns up. It provides a crossing point, a bridge over the infamous gulf separating scientific from poetic frames of mind, a gulf which has not served us well, nor the planet we inhabit with so little reverence or grace.”
― Don McKay

“What do you call
the muscle we long with? Spirit?
I don’t think so. Spirit is a far cry. This
is a casting outward which
unwinds inside the chest. A hole
which complements the heart.
The ghost of a chance.

— Don McKay, from “Twinflower,” Field Marks: The Poetry of Don McKay, intro. Méira Cook (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2006)”
― Don Mckay, Field Marks: The Poetry of Don McKay