Q & A with Enos Watts

1. If you could live during any time period and in any place, when and where would you choose?

Even if I could make the choice, imaginatively and reasonably offered, my response would be the Island on which I was born, have lived for more than 68 years, and on which I’ll die.

2. What kind of music do you listen to?

Except for rap, about which I’m unapologetically dismissive, my tastes in music are catholic. I enjoy Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, Mozart’s Don Giovanni and Requiem, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, Chopin’s Concerto No. 1 in E-Minor with his many etudes, preludes, nocturnes, etc., and Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelungs.

I take pleasure in listening to old and new country and favour the lawless four, Ole Willie, Kristofferson, Waylon, and Cash. I’m partial to all vocalists with what I call “husk” (“gravel,” “tobacco”) such as sweet Janis, Bonnie Tyler, Stevie Nicks, Etheridge, Rod Stewart, and our Bryan. Groups like ABBA, Fleetwood Mac, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and The Eagles made great, lasting contributions and Simon and Garfunkel wrote great poetry with incomparable melodic power. I’m partial to lead guitar stylists like Richie Sambora, Eddie Van Halen, Santana, and the late Jimi Hendrix. There’s no end to what I enjoy: the three great tenors, Maria Callas, Elvis, Orbison, violin virtuosos Perlman and Sterne, the late great Oscar Peterson’s jazz. And I heard Abbey Lane, our boys, sing Beetles stuff awhile ago. Watch them go!

3. What city/country would you most like to visit and why?

Spain has everything to offer me. It’s a poor country, but with its history of wars lost and won, the Prado with its masterpieces, the cave art (Paleolithic) at Altamira, the Escorial (monastery, church and royal residence built by Philip II in the 16th century about 30 miles from Madrid), Goya’s house with its walls crowded with horrific great art that flowed from his raging silent world, Velázquez’s largest canvas “Las Meninas” (the “Ladies-in-waiting”) and Titian’s “Danae” at the Prado, the works of El Greco at Toledo.

I would find some ordinary people reciting the immortal Lorca’s words by heart. (Franco’s thugs tortured and murdered him, while Chilean Neruda waited for him, to attend a boxing match.) I should be honoured to visit his grave if it has been found. Ah, the Cathedral at Toledo with its late Gothic wood-carvings; I would drive down to Barcelona on the Mediterranean, see the Cathedral whose construction began in the 13th century and is still unfinished, today. And the Cathedral at Seville is one of Europe’s largest.

Attend a bullfight? Can you imagine an old poet running with the bulls at Pamplona? Surely a romantic way to die.

With Leona Boyd I would enter the revered habitation of Segovia, who extended old boundaries for the guitar.

I shall dream of this feast and much more. Visions are for the young, but “old men shall dream.”

4. Who is your favourite author(s)?

I have read too little—and I’m not alone in this—of the three greatest writers of the twentieth century: Kafka, Proust, and Joyce. Some of my favourite authors are the Bard of Avon (the tragedies), St. Paul and his disciples, Harold Bloom, Conrad, Melville, the Russian greats, Woolf, Faulkner, Hazlitt, Keats (the Odes and letters), Martin Amis (literary commentary), Jorge Luis Borges, T.S. Eliot (The Quartets), Auden, Tennesee Williams, Canadian writers of the Purdy/Layton era, Atwood (poetry), Ondaatje, and Kierkegaard among the philosophers. Indeed, starting with Nietzsche in my youth, I have read more philosophy than fiction.

5. What was your favourite book(s) when you were a child?

My parents were Salvation Army Officers and I lived mainly in the outports where there were no libraries. When we visited Rocky Harbour, I sated my desire for reading in the home of Edward Dike where I found back and current issues of such magazines as Time and National Geographic. Perhaps this early global view has influenced the nature of my poetry. 

6. What are you reading now?

I’m reading The Philosophy of Physics and will move to A Survey of Physics, both by Max Planck, the formulator of quantum theory. I constantly return to the poetry of my beloved Rilke.

7. When do you like to write (time of day, day of week)? Where do you do your writing (location)?

In the (now) dark quiet of early morning and sometimes late at night, I am most productive in writing. I have no stationary work-place, no study, no structured pattern of creation as a poet. What constitutes a poet’s immediate environment becomes a study the instant she writes a line—or the early lines—of a piece of verse.

8. What other jobs have you had besides being a writer?

For more than twenty years I was a teacher/administrator mainly in the Stephenville school system. As well, I was a member of the Newfoundland team of the corporately funded Canada Studies Foundation, whose mandate was to develop a curriculum that reflected our diverse national identity; I authored or co-authored a number of pilot publications. I’ve written columns for the regional the Georgian, and produced a few book reviews for TickleAce before it folded. I’ve edited manuscripts for a number of NL authors, and Master’s theses for many people during the past forty years.

9. What was your first piece in print (book, review, or article, etc)?

As a small boy, I wrote a nature poem that was published in the Salvation Army The Young Soldier and had immediate intimations of greatness to come. In my early twenties the S.A. The War Cry published a page-long article (!) ponderously titled by me “Pseudo-Sanctuaries of the Soul,” which appeared as “Man’s Search for Security.”

10. Make a question of your own and then answer it.

Much of your poetry reflects a more than casual interest in global events and/or issues, historical and current. Provide illustrations of three concerns that might provide the spark for a poem.

1) I weep for the innocent who suffer and die at the hands of wild-eyed, religio-political extremists.

2) I revere patriotism, but despise nationalism, for it is inherently self-interested, exclusionary and inevitably expansionist.

3) I’ll share with you an event that occurred in the bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War. A German Heinkel pilot was pursuing civilians who had run from their homes to find shelter in the trees. He machine-gunned a pregnant Basque woman as she ran through a field. She struggled to her feet, faced the plane, raised a bloody fist and cried, “You bastards, you’re killing innocent people!” Seeing her gesture, he directed another burst that silenced her forever.

Before taking a bow, I’d like to write a poem about that.