Poetry Unbound in Conversation — Don McKay

Summary

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Poetry Unbound in Conversation: Don McKay

Poetry Unbound – May 15, 2026
Host: Pádraig Ó Tuama | Guest: Don McKay

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Episode Overview

This episode of Poetry Unbound in Conversation features a deep and lively conversation between host Pádraig Ó Tuama and acclaimed Canadian poet Don McKay, recipient of the 2024 Griffin Poetry Prize Lifetime Achievement Award. The discussion centers on McKay’s decades-spanning body of work, which explores poetry at the intersection of perception, the natural sciences, and particularly geology and the living world. Here, McKay shares insights on the formative influences in his life, the ethics and metaphors of translation, the importance of birds and geology in his writing, ecological consciousness, and the role of poetry in fostering wonder and integration across disciplines.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Early Life, “Pseudo-Jock” Identity, and Discovering Poetry

• Teenage “Disguise” and Books:
  McKay describes growing up in Cornwall, Ontario, as a “pseudo-jock” — emphasizing the "pseudo"—and practicing basketball to fit in socially.

  “The consequence of this is that I still have the best 3-point shot of any Canadian poet born before 1943.” (02:26, Don McKay)

• Secretly Drawn to Books and Poetry:
  Reading books was a private joy to McKay in an environment where intellectualism was often hidden:

  “I was kind of developing a disguise… I loved [basketball]… but people were getting picked on… brains and intellectuals… So I was kind of developing a disguise. Really.” (03:24, Don McKay)

• Poetry in Public Life:
  Discovering poetry readings at university during the 1950s and 60s, amid the rise of the Beat poets and Dylan Thomas, reshaped his sense of the “oral dimension” of poetry.

  “When people actually started reading poetry in public… it was hugely stressful. And now I kind of actually enjoy it.” (04:19, Don McKay)

The Influence of Place & Geology

• Migration Across Canada:
  McKay reflects on the effect of living in regions as diverse as Ontario, Vancouver Island, and Newfoundland, highlighting the different ecosystems and geological features that inspired his poetry.

  “Living in BC, you have a wholly different ecosystem… I spent a lot of that time following a fault line... It’s the last bit to be added to North America 45 million years ago as the Pacific plate is varying across.” (07:36, Don McKay)

• Geological Curiosity:
  He became intensely involved in studying local geology, letting it inform books such as Strike/Slip:

  “What’s a fault to start with?… That’s inspired a lot of the poems…” (08:30, Don McKay)

• Newfoundland’s Geologic Richness:
  The visible, eloquent rocks of Newfoundland offer “way more access to that temporal deep time than other places.”

  “Newfoundland is like opera for geologists… the rock is extremely visible, eloquent… way more access to that temporal deep time.” (08:57, Don McKay)

Metaphor, Deep Time, and the Limits of Language

• Metaphor as Necessity for Deep Time:
  McKay references paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould’s assertion that contemplating geological time demands metaphor, not just mathematics.

  “When you're trying to contemplate deep time, you can't just do it mathematically… you have to do it metaphorically.” (09:54, Don McKay)

• Humility and Wonder:
  The vastness of geological time is humbling and important for ecological awareness.

  “It’s a place where language obviously fails. And I think that failure is very important… for ecological awareness.” (11:15, Don McKay)

Translation & the Ethics of Knowledge

• Problems in Translation:
  McKay’s poetry sequence “Problems in Translation” deals with translating not just language, but phenomena like rivers, birds, and the microwave background.

  “It seems to me that… you’re picking up… the idea of what does it mean to translate time into something of art and translate rock as well, and our relationship with it.” (12:21, Patrick) "It all is translation. And these phenomena have vibrant, astonishing reality in and of themselves, which language is trying to reach through these poetic means." (12:53, Don McKay)

• Knowledge and Possession:
  He critiques the Western habit of equating knowledge with ownership, an impulse both linguistic and ecological.

  "The idea of knowledge as possession, I think, is one of our besetting perils... And that's one of the lessons that we get maybe from indigenous peoples..." (14:01, Don McKay) “Love being reduced to possession… our habits of speech...” (15:32, Don McKay)

Wonder, Uncertainty, and the Value of Questions

• The Question “Why Is There Not Nothing?”
  McKay addresses the philosophical question echoed in his poem “Mother Carries Chickens.”

  "It is the question of... wonder itself. It means that we should be just amazed at all aspects of the planet and not just the spectacular things..." (16:18, Don McKay)

• From Mastery to Membership:
  Central to McKay’s moral and poetic philosophy is inhabiting the world as a “member” rather than a "master" in relation to nature.

Birds, Attention, and the Observer in Nature Poetry

• Birds as Artistic and Moral Turning Point:
  McKay describes encountering birds as a "conversion":

  "I friend says you just get a geology because the rocks don't move around like the birds... but yes, I think the birds... it was like a thunderclap." (18:08, Don McKay) He recounts a formative moment at Hawk Cliff: “Somebody standing in the back of a pickup truck… open[s] the orange juice can and there would be a kestrel or a sharp shinned hawk… there was this suddenly, you know, it’s like there was Hopkins windhobber right there incarnated.” (18:17, Don McKay)

• From Spectacle to Study:
  He distinguishes “listing” birds (just ticking off species) from true engagement, valuing the habits and economies of birds’ lives.

  “That’s becoming more of a student of it rather than just sort of like taking it in as a kind of spectacle… Why is the bird right here, right now?” (21:57, Don McKay)

• Nature Poetry Beyond Data:
  The observer’s presence brings wonder, emotion, and a refusal to be merely “controllers or masters” of the ecosystem.

  “It restores the personal and brings back… the sense of wonder.... you behave more like members of that ecosystem.” (23:08, Don McKay)

Ecological Crisis, Despair, and the Need for Celebration

• Balancing Lament with Celebration:
  McKay notes the risks of focusing exclusively on crisis and extinction in nature poetry.

  “Just listening to [apocalyptic news] leads to a kind of depression in which we don’t do anything... If we don’t celebrate and we don’t celebrate our presence there as well, then we’re less likely to be... it's Bad for our mental health... and for the possibilities of action.” (24:42, Don McKay)

Evolution of Craft & Influence in Canadian Poetry

• Changes Over 50 Years:
  Reflecting on his published works since 1973, McKay mentions his book Another Gravity as especially formative due to its intertwining metaphors of home, gravity, and flight.

  “I simultaneously think something about homing home and homing and gravity and flight… I realized there was something going on with that and I enjoy that quite a bit…” (27:33, Don McKay)

• Role in the Community:
  He values participating in informal poetry groups and supporting emerging voices like Maggie Burton while hoping that ecological themes persist amidst growing focus on identity and decolonization in Canadian poetry.

  “Poetry... is a very good vehicle [for identity]… At the same time, I hope that the environment is not getting etched out entirely by these other very important… preoccupations.” (28:49, Don McKay)

Community and Creative Integration

• Community Garden as Gathering Place:
  McKay shares the story behind the communal garden at his house in St. John’s—a hub for local connection.

  “I asked my neighbors… if I got this place, would you be interested in having a garden plot?… Now it’s pretty much a growing concern.” (30:41, Don McKay)

• Boreal Poetry Garden:
  His partner, Marlene Creates, organizes site-specific poetry, science, and arts gatherings at her property, embodying the integration of arts and sciences.

  “We'd have a certain very, very general theme…and then we'd have musicians. So we had. And dancers… I could just feel the silos collapsing...” (32:54, Don McKay)

Integration, Dichotomies, and the Role of Art

• Integration as Lifelong Thread:
  McKay sees his lifetime work as one of integration—blending arts and sciences, crossing boundaries.

  “The spirit of the ecological sciences… can’t be siloed inside your sciences... dichotomization is happening… perhaps that’s an intellectual pursuit I should pursue further.” (35:17, Don McKay)

• Poetry’s Role in Moral and Ecological Change:
  He hopes asking questions through poetry can “push away” mastery and foster “membership” in the world.

  “From moving from mastery to membership... It's a whole mindset... we're there with that impulse of wonder that's checking, holding in check our impulse of control...” (37:11, Don McKay)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Deep Time & Metaphor:

  “When you're trying to contemplate deep time… you have to do it metaphorically. And I thought coming from a geologist, that was a real strong inducement to be a poet of geological process.” (09:54, Don McKay)

• On the Possessiveness of Language:

  “The idea of knowledge as possession… is one of our besetting perils... I go to university and acquire degree, and I acquire degree and I own that...” (14:01, Don McKay)

• On Membership vs. Mastery:

  “Our amazement should make… us become members rather than masters… That’s my kind of ethical slash moral imperative at the moment.” (16:18, Don McKay)

• On Birds as Conversion:

  “Birds, when I got into birds, I was teaching in London, Ontario… going to Hawk Cliff was great… it was like a thunderclap.” (18:17, Don McKay)

• On Nature Poetry’s Evolving Role:

  “It restores the personal and it brings back… the sense of wonder… you behave more like members of that ecosystem unless like just, well, controllers or masters of it.” (23:08, Don McKay)

• On the Importance of Celebration:

  “If we don't celebrate… we’re less likely to be… Bad for our mental health… and for the possibilities of action.” (24:42, Don McKay)

• On Integration:

  “I could just feel the silos collapsing… moving from the departments, between the arts and the sciences… The spirit of the ecological sciences… can’t be siloed.” (32:54, 35:17, Don McKay)

• On Negative Capability:

  “Maybe that’s where we need the negative capability of poetry and all that empty space.”
  “Keats hadn’t said that, somebody would have had to come along and invent it. But it’s been there so a long time. We have to have the negative capability.” (38:54, 38:59, Patrick & Don McKay)

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Important Segments (Timestamps)

• 02:07 – McKay’s “pseudo-jock” teenage years and love for books
• 04:19 – The influence of 50s/60s poetry readings on his sense of the oral dimension
• 07:36 – Migration across Canada and connection to regional geology/ecosystems
• 09:54 – Metaphor, geology, and failing language
• 12:21 – Translation, art, and the “Problems in Translation” sequence
• 14:01 – Knowledge, possession, and the critique of Western epistemology
• 16:18 – The question “Why is there not nothing?” and wonder
• 18:17 – The conversion moment with birds at Hawk Cliff
• 21:57 – Studying bird behavior vs. “listing” species
• 23:08 – Nature poetry and the presence of the observer
• 24:42 – Ecological crisis, the necessity of celebration
• 27:33 – Another Gravity and integrating multiple metaphorical threads
• 28:49 – Contemporary themes in Canadian poetry and writerly community
• 30:41 – The story of McKay’s community garden in St. John’s
• 32:54 – Boreal Poetry Garden and integrating arts & sciences
• 35:17 – McKay’s lifelong interest in integration vs. dichotomization
• 37:11 – Poetry’s potential to effect moral/ecological change
• 39:16 – Reading: “Before the Moon was a Moon,” from Another Gravity
• 41:52 – Reflection on the moon, darkness, imagination, and poetry’s place
• 42:34 – Closing congratulations and McKay’s “3-point shot” quip

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Featured Poem

“Before the Moon was a Moon” (Another Gravity)

Read by Don McKay at (39:16–41:52)

• A speculative meditation on primordial Earth before the moon existed, exploring themes of longing, gravity, imagination, and otherness:

  “Before the moon was a moon, before it fitted itself into otherness inside the body of the earth… There was no second gravity and no dark art of reflection… No sweet tug toward a manic possibilities, no wistful sidelong inner sly…”

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Final Reflections

Through humor, poetic insight, and philosophical depth, Don McKay opens wide the doors to thinking about language, belonging, ecological humility, and wonder. His integration of scientific curiosity with lyric attention models a vivid, ethical poetics for our times. The episode is rich with personal stories, memorable metaphors, and restless questioning—embodying poetry’s negative capability and lifelong devotion to attention, celebration, and the world’s inexpressible more-than-human presence.

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For further exploration:
Pick up Don McKay’s Another Gravity, Lurch, or his Collected Poems, and explore the Poetry Unbound Substack and gatherings for more conversations at the crossroad of poetry, science, and wonder.

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Transcript

[Padre Go Toma]

Hi, friends. Padre Go Toma here. Thanks very much for listening to Poetry Unbound in between Poetry Unbound Seasons. And we have season 11 that'll start later in 2026. We have a whole host of interviews that I've done with poets over the last two years. Poetry Unbound in Conversation we call them. I've loved the opportunity to talk to poets about their craft, how they see the world through the lens of poetry, and what this art form does for them. These Poetry Unbound in Conversation episodes deepened my curiosity about language and art. I trust they will for you too. Today you'll hear from the acclaimed Canadian poet Don MacKay. We'll be discussing his career spanning more than four decades, dedicated to poetry at the intersection of perception and the natural sciences, especially geology and the living world. This episode comes from a virtual interview held on the occasion of Don MacKay receiving the 2020 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Griffin Poetry Prizes. A special thanks to everyone at Griffin Poetry Prices for organizing and hosting this event. And a huge thanks to Don's neighbor who allowed him to use her home and computer for the interview, and of course his publishers at Penguin Books. So, friends, welcome to Poetry Unbound in Conversation. Here I am in conversation with Don Mackay.

[Don McKay]

Foreign

[Patrick (Interviewer)]

hello, my name is Padre Go Toma and I am delighted to be with Don McKay who has been awarded the 2024 Lifetime Achievement Award from Griffin Poetry Prizes. Don, congratulations on your success and this lifetime achievement award.

[Don McKay]

Thank you very much, Patrick. It's been a great honor and a privilege to be so connected.

[Patrick (Interviewer)]

Yeah, I wonder if I could start with you as a teenager. I. I saw an interview where you described yourself as a teenager as a pseudo jock, which made me surprised that you went on then to study English.

[Don McKay]

Well, emphasis on the pseudo part of that. Patrick, when I grew up in. It's an industrial town in Cornwall in Ontario called Cornwall. And I realized when I went to high school I was going to have to have some kind of sport or another in order to survive. And so I practiced basketball at a hoop in my backyard. Obsessively. Obsessively. So the consequence of this is that I still have the best 3 point shot of any Canadian poet born before 1943. So

[Patrick (Interviewer)]

congratulations.

[Don McKay]

Thank you. Thank you.

[Patrick (Interviewer)]

That can be next year's award.

[Don McKay]

I wonder if there's any. Somewhere in the deep recesses the whole poetry viz. There's an award for poetry, sporting poets, etc. On that. Anyway, that can be something that's the remnants of my. My athletic career. So. Yeah, so.

[Patrick (Interviewer)]

So pseudo. Did that mean that you were reading poetry and spending a lot of time in books, but felt they need to hide that.

[Don McKay]

Books, for sure. Yeah. And it was. It was kind of like. I didn't want to admit it. That's right. People were getting picked on, so on. And they were all sort of brains and intellectuals and so on. So I was kind of developing a disguise. Really. Yeah. I loved. Actually, when I got there, I did play basketball and I. I loved the sport. It was great. I still do. Yeah. Most I like, you know, not the NBA so much, but more like at the level, lower levels where you're. You're actually watching mortals play rather than, you know, people with some kind of, you know, they're all giants to start with. Yeah.

[Patrick (Interviewer)]

Who did you see reading in your life when you were young?

[Don McKay]

When I was very young. Yeah. Like reading in. In public. I was. I probably.

[Patrick (Interviewer)]

Or even somebody at home or anybody. I don't know.

[Don McKay]

Poetry was not their readers. Yeah. I don't. I. I came across poetry mostly when I got to. To university, you know, and then, you know, this is in the 50s, so I was at the advent of the reading becoming popular, at least in North America. That was before that. So I, I mostly read poetry as a, you know, I mostly read. Wrote poetry as a, you know, private enterprise. And that when people actually started reading poetry in public, thought, oh, my word, what is this? And. And it would. It was hugely stressful. And now I kind of actually enjoy it, you know, but at that point, it was, it was. And I think that that whole thing, this is like the area of Dylan Thomas coming to America, of the beat poets reading with jazz in the background and our jazz accompaniment, that kind of thing. There was a huge surge of that in the, in the 50s, and then, and then that continued in the 60s. And I think that probably. It's probably safe to say that it affected the way people were writing way more with a sense of the oral dimension in hand rather than just writing for the page. You know, your audience was not somebody, some other introvert somewhere in the world poem, crouch in a corner reading it or in a corner of the library where nobody else went reading, reading the poem. But it might actually be somebody, a member of an audience. And it probably did affect. Not. Not consciously, I don't think, but I guess, you know, when you, you know, you're pushing on this. I'd say, why would a person do a degree on Dylan Thomas if he wasn't interested in the moral dimension of poetry? Anyway, whether you want to admit it or not, I did that so. So yeah, you did. And that was. That was quite fascinating to me. And I think, you know, I was writing in a way more operatically floral, poetic way than I would ever attempt to. I was more like based in a kind of colloquial. Colloquial speech. But it had a valuing of that, which probably somebody who is a Welsh writer or an Irish writer would have more sense of just from their ordinary language, from what's happening in public than a Canadian would. Canadians are embarrassed to be talking at all and then to be talking in a way as if you were enjoying it. That's very uncommon where I live now in Newfoundland. It's not right, Lynette. It's not like Newfoundland action is kind of like, kind of can be fine to somebody who is speaking and is actually enjoying the act of speaking or admitting to enjoying the act of speaking. And that would not be the case for people growing up in southern Ontario, as I did.

[Patrick (Interviewer)]

I was going to ask you about place. I mean, I know you're born in Ontario and you've spent time on Vancouver island and in Wales as well as you mentioned New Brunswick and since 2007 in Newfoundland. How has moving around the Canada and overseas as well, how has that influenced your own writing and your own language?

[Don McKay]

Well, partly because I'm a nature poet. So living in bc, you have a wholly different ecosystem there, you know, west of the Rockies and mountainous. And. And that was hugely important for me because I became very, very interested in connecting with that ecosystem and not in a touristic way. So I lived in bc. I spent a lot of that time following a fault line which is a major fault. It's called the Lost Creek beach of revault in B.C. and it's kind of inaccessible because it's in western forest products country. So you can't. Can't get in there. You can't get in there except on the weekends or after, after 5 o' clock or else you sneak in. So it was a nice challenge so I could follow this fault. It's the last bit to be added To North America 45 million years ago as the Pacific plate is varying across. So I took up that as a project, Patrick and I said, I'm going to learn everything about this by walking it and then by when I don't know, something I go learn. Took me a lot of time, spent a lot of time learning. So I had to learn about geology. What's a fault to start with, and, and how does this one have to be here? And so on. And that's inspired a lot of the poems that we grew out of that in Strike Slip, that's another volume and other volumes too. I've not let go of this. And then when I moved from B.C. to here in Newfoundland. Newfoundland is like opera for geologists. It's like fantastic. Partly because thanks to the glaciers which. The ice age which is scraped all the topsoil. Topsoil off and put it deposited in the ocean as the Grand Banks. So the rock is here is extremely visible, extremely, oh, eloquent. And so you have way more access to that temporal deep time than other places. I know once I get started into rocks, you have to shut me up. So

[Patrick (Interviewer)]

I mean, I'm actually going to do the dangerous thing, which is to keep you on the same topic, but ask you the question about metaphor. I mean, obviously rocks and geology are not metaphor. They are, they are themselves. But for you, in writing, what are some of the layers of metaphor in looking at geology?

[Don McKay]

Well, that is interesting you point that out because, you know, Stephen Jay Gould was a early paleontologist and one who was popularized geology. He was, you know, doing this things on the Burgess shale, West coast, etc. He says in his book, I think it's time cycle times arrow. He says that when you're trying to contemplate deep time, you can't just do it mathematically. Just have this, you know, if you say that's, that's 2,000 years ago and then say, oh no, I meant 20,000 years. Yeah, so that's it. 20. I thought I went 20. 20 million. No, 200. Now if I say all those things are the same space in my head, they're all just lots and lots of times. But he says you have to do it metaphorically. You have to do it metaphorically. And I thought coming from a geologist, that was a real strong inducement to be, to be a poet of geological process. And that's. And plus the fact I've just found myself gripped by it. You're into, as a nature poet, you're suddenly, you're actually adding the spatial development to that, to this huge temporal development aspect. And it's, I mean, what Stephen Jay Gould says is partly, it's very humbling because we realize that not only are recent, are we recent inhabitants of the planet, but we have a hard time even contemplating that, you know, so it's, it's a place where language obviously fails. And I think that that failure is very important linguistic element. I think that's very important for ecological awareness to realize that reduction to language Is not the point. Language has to go. Has to go kind of beyond itself, and that's where metaphor comes in. Wow. And other processes, obviously. Sure. But I think that. Yeah, I was. I was. Because I was having a hard time sort of thinking, what's the difference between 20,000 years ago, 200,000 years ago, you know, and separate. And then you get to half a billion years ago, which. Some of the rocks around here, the fossils around here, half a billion. That's 500 million years ago. Holy Moses. So this. I was having a hard time just contemplating that myself. And when Stephen Jay Wilson said that, okay, it's not just me, it's just me.

[Patrick (Interviewer)]

Gave permission. Yeah. And it gave a place for the arts as well and the imagination. You have a sequence in your most recent book, Lurch, called Problems in Translation, and it is in translation from. From other human languages. You know, you're talking about translating a river or lichens or a dragon or the microwave background. Yeah. It seems to me that one of the things that you're. You're picking up is the idea of what does it mean to translate time into something of art and translate rock as well, and our relationship with it.

[Don McKay]

Yes, exactly, exactly. And partially, I think one of the dangers with. One of the dangers with scientific language, which, of course is important, but one of the dangers is that we translate into language and then the language. Once we do that, it's like the colonial impulse. Once we do that, we think we own it, or we just. We don't think we own it. We just sort of assume we own it. Not going to say something like Ediacaran period, say, oh, yeah, that's. And the. The. The translation business reminds us that. That it all is translation. It all is translation. And. And that. And. And these phenomena have vibrant, astonishing reality in and of themselves, which language is trying to reach through these poetic means, you know. Yeah.

[Patrick (Interviewer)]

There's knowledge and then the limitations of knowledge throughout your work. And it seems to me that you have become more fluent in speaking about the limitations of knowledge and as the collections of poetry have gone by, that

[Don McKay]

would be very heartening to hear, because I think that's the idea of knowledge as possession, I think, is one of our besetting perils of where we at. Where we find ourselves at ecologically in terms of the environment. And I think it's part of a whole wider problem of. Of the instinct to possess. It's either an instinct or it's an. Or. It's been so read into us that it's become kind of Second nature or people in Western cultures. And that's one of the lessons that we get maybe from indigenous peoples. You know, I believe I'm right in saying it was Sitting Bull that who said of us, of. Of white people, their desire to possess things is a disease amongst them. And I thought that's. That's partly embedded in our linguistic. Our attitudes to language. You know, I go to university and acquire degree, and I acquire degree and I own that. I have. I had. And. And I can own it, and I can turn into money was. And get more possession and so on. Yeah.

[Patrick (Interviewer)]

I've even heard people be described with an ontology to say that, you know, she is a PhD. So to say.

[Don McKay]

Yeah.

[Patrick (Interviewer)]

You know, she has. She or he or they have become the very thing that they have studied.

[Don McKay]

Yeah. That habit of speech is kind of indicative, isn't it? Those. Those sorts of habits of speech, you know, like Valentine's Day, you know, I'm yours, be mine, you know, love being reduced to possession, you know, and we can say, well, that's not the sense of it, but it's still there. And it's sort of the implications of the. Our. Our habits of speech. Yeah. Yeah.

[Patrick (Interviewer)]

There are so many questions throughout your work, Don. In the most recent book, in a poem called Mother Carries Chickens, you echo the old phenomenological question, which is, why is there not nothing?

[Don McKay]

Yeah.

[Patrick (Interviewer)]

Have you come up with any ways of living with that contrast and that unanswerable question?

[Don McKay]

I was for a while in the middle of trying to write a long essay with that is the title, and try to go back. Well, in a very superficial. Go back to how many philosophers have asked that question? I think both Parmenides and Heraclitus both asked that question. Bittenstein asked it, Leibniz asked it. And these are very different philosophers. They come up to this, you know, wiser. Something rather than nothing. And. And it is. It is the question of like, of. Of wonder itself. It means that we should be just amazed at all aspects of the planet and not just as spectacular things, you know, And. And we are. And our amazement should make. It should let us become members rather than masters of that. Of that in that environment. That's. That's my. That's my kind of ethical slash moral imperative at the moment. Yeah. I tried writing this. I didn't. I was not happy with my writing at all. It's like in this essay. But since you mention it, you're probably. Probably me to go back to it, come at it from another direction, you know, probably less Philosophy.

[Patrick (Interviewer)]

Two of the huge concerns of your work are geology, which we've been speaking about, and, and birds and like, I'm struck by the enormity of geology and as you mentioned, things like half a billion years and then the relative fleeting nature of birds, both in terms of their lifespan, which is shorter than ours usually, but also the way within which you can't spend too much time looking at a bird in the wild before it moves away. Could you talk a little bit about the way within which that experience of paying attention to birds happened for you? Because you speak about it as something like a conversion almost.

[Don McKay]

Well, early on it was that I, you know, I don't. That wouldn't be too much of an exaggeration, you know, I mean, only a

[Patrick (Interviewer)]

bit of an exaggeration.

[Don McKay]

When I get into geology, I friend says you just get a geology because the rocks don't move around like the birds. Like if you're going to go see a particular rock formation, it's going to be there. But if I'm going to go to see the habitat, say, well, you know, whooping cranes come through this area of the prairie. So I'll just go there and hope, you know, you might be disappointed. You know, you might see lots of other things. Might not see the whooping crane. It's quite rare. So there was that aspect to it. But yes, I think the birds, when I got into birds, I was teaching in London, Ontario Western University and near there there's a place called Hockey Cliff, which is called Hawk Cliff because migrating hawks coming down south through Ontario get funneled because they don't want to, they don't want to hunt across locks. So the Great Lakes kind of funnels them into a natural corridor down towards base of Lake Erie at point, at Point Pele. And so going to Hawk Cliff was great. And I think that was with that it was like a thunderclap. Somebody, they're banding them there. So there's ornithologist banning birds. They catch them and then they bring them out to watch all this bird watchers and stand. Somebody's standing in the back of a pickup truck with an orange juice can this hand and open the orange juice can and there would be a kestrel or a sharp shin hawk. Oh my God. And, and they would just be looking right through us. You know, there was this suddenly, you know, it's like there was Hopkins windhobber right there incarnated.

[Patrick (Interviewer)]

You know, did you know when this happened that something was happening to you that was going to shape your, your artistic Life as well as your. As you described it, your moral life.

[Don McKay]

I wouldn't be. I wouldn't credit myself with that amount of insight. I went back to Hartcliffe whenever I could, you know, and I remember what time I was teaching a class and it was like late September, just exactly when the hawks are migrating. And the weather there, the weather was great, but there was a cold air coming down from the north. This is going to flush them down there. I got to get down to some mistake, but I remember I actually looked out the window and said, well, I think that's probably enough for us today. You know, you could read the next week. Dressed up to my car and went down the hot cliff and there was just. They call them a. It's called a kettle, a cuddle of broad winged hawks. And there were like thousands of these broadwind hawks in this kettle, like a little whirlwind of hawks going up in the air. When I passed, I drove down the lane behind and there's a guy looking down like this and I stopped and said, you should be looking up at the hawks. He said, I know, I know. He'd been there all day and his eyes were kind of bleeding. He was taking. He was taking a break, giving his eyes a break from staring in the break. But it has that kind of effect. You're without being actually out of near a volcano or something like that, where you actually have huge earth processes, you know.

[Patrick (Interviewer)]

Yeah. You ask a question about birds, which I found fascinating and initially I was startled by it because you were talking about looking at a bird and going beyond the aesthetic and asking the question of how does a bird make a living? And initially I thought I found myself making the relationship between that question make a living and salary. But of course I looked at it again and thought, of course this bird makes a living because it's living. I was so interested in the economics of that as well as the observation and going beyond the esthetics and that. Could you talk about what it is about all of those levels? You want to go deeper into the. The way a bird makes a living?

[Don McKay]

Yes, yes. That's becoming more of a student of it rather than just sort of like taking it in as a kind of a spectacle or phenomenon. You know, how. Why is it here right. How is it. Why is the bird right here, right now? And what, you know, what, what's its nesting behavior? All those questions which not. Not by no means an orthologist, but that's questions which. That leads you into this is opposed to sort of. There's a phenomenon, birding among birders, called listening. Right. Where you just see it, then you tick it off the list and then you go on to the next thing. So this is like, you know, go deeper into that check mark and ask about the habits of the bird.

[Patrick (Interviewer)]

And when you write about a bird, I mean, clearly you're not just putting details, deeply researched details about, about bird life into poetic form. You're. You're also engaging with it through metaphor and through questions about the human condition. The observer is present in your poems, even if you're trying to kind of just put the observer, the speaking voice is just one voice amongst, amongst many living things. What is it that makes a nature poem a poem beyond just the recitation of, of data about, about what's being observed?

[Don McKay]

Yeah, I think that's partly where the, the, the poetry can be of a benefit to the scientific thing. It restores the personal and it brings back, well, the sense of wonder, of course, you know, and that's from dry analytic accounts of any scientific phenomenon that can be kind of lost. Well, it can actually be kind of, especially in the old days, not so much now, I think. I think with the burgeoning of the ecological sciences, there's way more crossing into that emotional and our human relation to that because of the nature of ecology itself. So putting it, having the observer there being me, as well as the avenue for that whole right brain side of things, you know, it's not just, ah, I saw the bird and it's this, it's a Magnolia Warburg. I check that one off my list. You become more engaged and also in the, in the act of finding things out, I think you behave more like members of that ecosystem unless like just, well, controllers or masters of it, so on. We don't want to be repeating that whole error again. Yeah, sure, yeah.

[Patrick (Interviewer)]

You're no stranger to writing about ecological crisis, but I've also heard you insist in the. The need to celebrate nature, not just mourn it. Could you talk a bit about that in terms of contemporary trends in writing and your own interest in celebrating nature?

[Don McKay]

God knows there's enough apocalyptic environmental news that can just dismay us. I think for me personally, why I would do that is that just listening to that, which is the airways are full of it and depress, just listening to that leads to a kind of depression in which we don't do anything. So if we don't celebrate and we don't celebrate our presence there as well, then we're less likely to be. Well, first of all, it's Bad for our mental health despairs. But secondly, I think it's probably in the long run, bad for the possibilities of action to be constantly. I do have a bunch of extinction poems in Lurch, and I was involved in a collaboration on, you know, the extinction. And so I focus on that a lot. So. But try not to let that be the whole burden of the peace. The whole burden of. We don't want to ignore that, you know, and the lamentable distinctions have already occurred now that we're in the sixth extinction. But. But if we just. If we let ourselves just get burdened by that, well, we'll just bog down in despair. I think at least I'll just get bogged down in despair. I wouldn't assume that everybody else would, but. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Patrick (Interviewer)]

What would you say is, over the course of this lifetime of writing, 50 years of publishing, what are some of the ways that you notice that you've changed in terms of what it is that you're doing in your writing from 1973, when you published Area Occupies Space, up until lurch, then in 2021.

[Don McKay]

Wow. Yeah, that's. That's. I mean, do I have enough self knowledge to even be able to answer that question? But I think certainly one of the main things that we just touched on was, like, the phenomena birds. Instead of just being, you know, involved with nature in a kind of superficial way, birds made me realize how important that was. I want to get past that and engage in a different way with it. And well, outside this spectacular. Know, that was a major surge as well, you know.

[Patrick (Interviewer)]

Yeah.

[Don McKay]

I think for me, a lot of these things, I'm not so conscious of the poetic processes that are happening with me, except when something in the phenomena out in the external world seems to call for some other. Some other resource of language, if you like. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Patrick (Interviewer)]

With this lifetime achievement award, it might be that folks would turn to the most recent book, Lurch, or perhaps the Collected Poems. But are there earlier poems that you think are important as you think of your own career in writing?

[Don McKay]

Yes, I still have an affection for quite a lot of the earlier poems. Yeah, right. Okay. Yeah. I was thinking back to

[Patrick (Interviewer)]

a book

[Don McKay]

I really enjoyed writing was another Gravity, which has kind of three foci. I was moved to sort of like, I simultaneously think something about homing home and homing and gravity and flight. So I opened three notebooks, I started writing three things. And when I was writing one, that all the metaphors, images came from. The other two I was writing about gravity, home and flight were There I write about flight, gravity, so I realized there was something going on with that and I enjoy that quite a bit, you know. Yeah. Yeah.

[Patrick (Interviewer)]

You're thanked at the. You know, the. One of the other winners of Griffin Prize this year is Maggie Burton, who thanks you as Law as well as Mary Dalton in the acknowledgments in the back of her book. I'm curious what you see your role as a Canadian poet. You're renowned internationally and amongst Canadian letters for your influence, your teaching, your support of other writing. Where do you see Canadian writing to be at these days? What themes do you see emerging?

[Don McKay]

Well, I, I hope I see a lot more nature poetry being written, etc. But there obviously are other huge. There's a huge impact from various forms of identity needed, both gender identity, but also identity from. AS in relation to the colonial versus Indigenous context. All these things are. These things are. Are present. And poetry in a lot of ways is a very good vehicle for those, I think. I think for someone personally involved in. In transition or personally involved in recovering Indigenous identities, so on and so forth, poetry is. Allows them a kind of more immediate response since they're having to write a novel about so on and so forth. So I think that's. I think it's. It's that at the same time I, I hope that the environment is not getting itched out entirely by these other very important, very important preoccupations. So Maggie's part of a. A very informal reading group. I actually was at. At a workshop what was like maybe 10 years, 14 years ago at a place here in Newfoundland. And it turned out that many of the members of the group were all, we're all from Saint. All in St. John's we thought, well, why stop? We just kept, kept going in a kind of informal way. And Maggie's a member of that group for a long time. So it's about, you know, getting your voice out there and getting some, some comment from, you know, sympathetic hearers, you know, as that. That can, that can work. I'm very happy that Maggie got some benefit from us. Yeah.

[Patrick (Interviewer)]

Did I recall correctly that you were at a community garden when you heard news of having won this lifetime achievement award?

[Don McKay]

Oh, gosh. We got your ear to the ground, don't you? Yeah, I was, I was in. It's a community garden that's attached to my house. I actually own a play, own a garden, but I. The property came out for sale and it. Here where the house, it's row housing, cheek by jowl housing. You know, I said and we thought what, what's going to happen to that? So I asked my neighbors, so if I got this place, would you be interested in having a garden plot in it? And we had lots of positive response. So that's what happened. Now it's pretty much a growing concern. So when Karen Soli wanted to talk to me, said what's well guessing 9 months ago something I said, well let's go out in there, take a glass of wine out and go to the community garden. So that's, that's where it was very nice.

[Patrick (Interviewer)]

What's happening in the community garden today? Have you been in it today?

[Don McKay]

Yeah. Yes. Well, the season's kind of delayed here. We had a very late spring which is not uncommon for, for Newfoundland. So we're just getting. People are coming in, bringing in of well fixing up their plots and also bringing in fresh, fresh compost, keep them up. We have to have little plots here because the soil in St. John's because it's an old, old city, the soil in St. John's is quite polluted. We have to bring in soil. Each person has a plot. You know, I'm a terrible gardener myself but I love having a garden. So this is very, very. It's very, very self interested in my part to have this. So I, I very much enjoy being out there. I do have a plot which I tend to grow. Garlic. Garlic and rhubarb. The rhubarb is going great. The other plants are growing very slowly. Coming along now. But the last few weeks has been quite good. Now we're actually seeing things coming up soils, you know, some of the early arugula and stuff like.

[Patrick (Interviewer)]

Yeah, yeah. Well I hear you have some gatherings in that garden too of dancers and artists and musicians and scientists all gathering there. What happens in these gatherings?

[Don McKay]

Well, you're now getting that garden confused with my partner's place. She has a place out of Portugal. So she has the poorer. Well that's all right. I mean it's a big influence on me. This boreal poetry garden. Marlene Cretes is the artist. She has, she has this six acres and she was doing poetry walks around her garden. Very, very site specific walks and then branched out into inviting other writers, musicians and then belnet scientists. This back to where we were talking about before in these really walked from one place to another. We'd have a certain very, very general theme, you know like water or air or so on and the sign. And we would go from one site a person would read a poem. Another site a person would be talking about, oh, common mammals that here in Newfoundland and relating exactly to what was happening in this season or. And then we'd have musicians. So we had. And dancers. Oh my God. It was just like one of the. I mean all this was fascinating just as individual things, but I realized stepping back from it that I could just feel the silos collapsing. I taught in University for 30 years and it was siloed boy from department, department, department. Moving from the. Between the arts and. Between the arts and the scientists and. And the sciences, you know, learning about. We have an ornithologist, we had a mycologist about the whole fungal network and another whole amazing area. And then afterwards, after that was all done, we'd go back to Marlin in the garage and have a garage party. Then maybe the garage party helped with the conviviality. Never, never hurt. Sure did.

[Patrick (Interviewer)]

As I thought about that. It's, you know, bringing those people together. It seemed to me that it demonstrated something of a deep lifetime interest that you've had in integration. Integrating the arts and sciences, integrating being part of the world and just being one of the beings alive in the world, integrating, paying attention to time through geology and time through the passing lives of birds. What else are you trying to integrate these days?

[Don McKay]

That's a very lovely thing to say, by the way. All that would be wonderful. I think that would be. I'd love to have somebody say that. I'm so ingrained in it. It's not. Obviously it's not always obvious to me what the overall shape of things might be. Integration. I think that's, you know, I'm lucky enough to have grown up whilst ecology became established when I think that's the kind of spirit of the ecological sciences, you know, very. They can't be siloed inside your sciences, you know. You know, it can't. A botanist can't ignore what's happening with the, the rocks around and, and, and. And all the other things. So that that whole. And I probably. I've benefited from being in that part of that, you know that just by the accidents of birth that, that, that's. Historically that's what's happened, you know. And probably I guess part of this is another hobby horse of mine is like question dichotomies or just the opposite of the integration thing. Like we love dichotomies. If we look at the political, political situation around the world. Now you're seeing, alas, dichotomization is happening farther, more and more and more either or etc. And that's another. Maybe that's an intellectual pursuit. I should pursue farther the whys of this human impulse. Or is it a human impulse? You know, I'm not sure. It's not just a Western civilization impulse. You know, we. There.

[Patrick (Interviewer)]

Do you hope that asking questions, whether through poetry or through other forms of public language, can question those impulses that damage us and damage the environment and damage the ecology that causes so much crisis? Do you hope for a moral change through language, through your work as well?

[Don McKay]

I would almost. I mean, it seems like a. I want to articulate it at least for myself and maybe one or two readers. What I hope for there would actual change. Well, I think I better. We have to live in hope at this point. And something has to all change, you know, from moving from mastery to membership. That's. That is not just a simple, you know, glib change of terminology. It's. It's a whole. It's a whole mindset. And. Yeah, I would like to be able to push away a little of that sort of sense of the. What has become a kind of, you know, it's buried in kind of philosophical, like logic. Right. To. To. To establish. To establish. Come down to things as either A or B. It's not B, so therefore it must be A. And that kind of thinking, whilst very, very useful in an analytic setting, is not. When it comes to the ecological sciences. Instead of. Instead of thinking, it's a reductive down to one or two things. It's always more and more and more or what. Have you factored in the climactic issues? Have you factored in the pressure of the, the. The F. On the snowshoe hares, so on and so forth? There's always, always going to be more and, and that is always. It doesn't condense itself well down to a PhD thesis or any kind of thesis. It's always going to be. We're, we're there with that impulse of wonder that's checking. Holding in check our impulse of control, mastery, et cetera. Yeah.

[Patrick (Interviewer)]

Maybe that's where we need the negative capability of poetry and all that empty space.

[Don McKay]

Yeah, that was such an important. You know, Keats hadn't said that somebody would have had to come along and invent it. But it's been there so a long time. We have to have the negative capability. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah.

[Patrick (Interviewer)]

As we come to an end, I wonder, is there a poem you'd like to read?

[Don McKay]

I, I was just looking. This is from. This is from another gravity. And I was thinking of that. And I was thinking about the, the moon and Was part of my. Part of one of the elements in here as long as this home birds and stuff. And I contemplate about, you know, there was planet Earth existed before there was a moon, before we had a moon, way, way back, you know, so we're talking billions of years back. And I thought, well, what would life have been like at that point? And so I. This got me into sort of taking the moon outside the purely sort of romantic, you know, moon in June and etc. Lover's moon, etc. To the moon as an actual planetary object. So this is. This is speculating on what. What was be. What was life before the moon? Before the moon was a moon, before it fitted itself into otherness inside the body of the earth. Bulbs broke out on its own. There was no second gravity and no dark art of reflection. The sun owned all the media and it occurred to no one to resist its health and fitness propaganda. Whatever thing was, that was it. No ifs or airspace. Place was obese before the moon was moon so full of itself there was no leaving home and so no dwelling in it either. Longing was short and sedentary. Blues were red. No sweet tug toward a manic possibilities, no wistful sidelong inner sly. No alder branch hung above the smooth rush of the snow fed river like the stray wisp hovering against your cheek, which in a moment you will tuck back into tininess. No such stretched connection before moon was moon. No way to deflect the light away from photosynthesis and into alcohol and film. Each night was the same night and fell formlessly with no imagination and without you in it. My voice graduated more and more towards the Tom Waits style. I'm hoping this is the late stages of laryngitis rather than the early ones. But it's been late. Yeah, but I think it became more interesting as I went on.

[Patrick (Interviewer)]

There's such a praising of night and water and all the life that comes from water in that. And that you at the end of the poem is so moving.

[Don McKay]

Oh, thank you. Thank you. Yeah, I just thought that it's the moon as opposed to the sun's visual acuity leaves us with that way. The moon is the entry point for imagination and for us to enter into it rather than just be. That's that. It's the. It is the entry point for poetry for sure. Yeah.

[Patrick (Interviewer)]

Well, Don Mackay, I want to congratulate you for winning the 2024 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Griffin Poetry Prizes and also for being the current only member of the shortlist of the best three point shot of any poet born before 1943.

[Don McKay]

Maybe all kinds of people will be challenging me for this. Now that'd be cool.

[Patrick (Interviewer)]

I know. That's what I'm hoping.

[Don McKay]

Yeah.

[Patrick (Interviewer)]

Yeah.

[Don McKay]

Thank you so much. It's been a very great pleasure talking to you. Thanks for doing the work of reading up on my my my stuff for this. That's really nice.

[Patrick (Interviewer)]

It's a pleasure.

[Padre Go Toma]

Don MacKay has published 10 previous works of poetry. He has been shortlisted twice for the Griffin Poetry prize and in 2024 won the lifetime Achievement Award from the Griffin Poetry Prizes. He lives in Newfoundland. Deepest thanks to the Griffin Poetry Prizes for making this conversation possible. And thanks as well to Dawn's generous neighbour for the computer and space in her home. Later on this season you'll hear an interview with Karen Leader, whose translation of Doris Grunbine's poetry Psyche Running won the 2025 Griffin Prize for Poetry. Poetry Unbound is Andrea Prevot, Carla Zanoni, Daryl Chen, Sparrow Murray, Chris Heagle, Bill Siegmund and me, Padre Go Toma. Our music is composed and provided by Gautham Shriekersham and Blue Dog Sessions. These episodes were made in New York City on unceded Lenape land. Special thanks to Will Salwen, Adam Morell and Sam Girardi at Digital Island Studios in Manhattan. Thanks as well to Frederick Courtright of the Permissions company. Poetry Unbound is an independent non profit production of the On Being project, founded and led by the wonderful Krista Tippett. Poetry Unbound is made possible by a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation. Our other funding partners include the Liana foundation, the Bidale Foundation, Engaging the Senses foundation, and the listeners who give so generously via On Being and Substack. Poetry Unbound would be nothing without the listening community. Thanks to all who listen and those who engage with the weekly Substack newsletter. For links to that substack and to find out more about Poetry Unbound books and events, visit pudding poetryunbound.org.