(1967/gr. 12: ripe for major language acquisition, reading, literature, poetry, and Hamlet)
(likewise, ready for performing in public; first musical aggregation–operetta cast party)
Timing, especially good timing.
Coming into the new year having just read Thomas Hardy’s romantically tragic The Return of the Native.
A grade 12 poetry unit with a super anthology featuring many of the classic English poems: Keats’ big two odes and Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” with their flow of spirit, soulfulness, and consciousness of Beauty and the infinite in Nature.
Followed by a solid relevant immersion in a chaser of Hamlet.
There was simply no way back, what with my simultaneous awareness of great lyrics in folk and folk rock music: Dylan, Simon and Garfunkle, Lightfoot.
Simultaneously lining up with the height of my high-school writing (a memorable piece for the school newspaper on a hootenany) and two acting performances (the amusing butler in The Importance of Being Earnest, the ‘straight’ mayor in The Red Velvet Goat) and two musical performances (as the comic Usher in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Trial by Jury and playing reflective Simon and Garfunkle songs for an Alienation show at Manitoba Theatre Centre) co-written by two writer-friends.
Language, words, music, and drama had all bubbled up together in that memorable 6 month run.
I was marked from that point on to start a BA in English at the new University of Winnipeg, later training to become a high school English teacher at the University of Alberta.
And the musical public performances would continue up to 2002 with several groups which I organized and was the leader of.
And the poetry-writing, begun in 1967 at U of W would eventually find its way and bubble up in the 1980s, through many significant developments up to and including today.
(Down to today, 55 years later, still writing/publishing poems and blog entries)