David Zieroth's latest publication is a chapbook, Hay Day Canticle (Leaf Press, 2010). The Fly in Autumn (Harbour, 2009) won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry in that year and was nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and the Acorn-Plantos Award for People's Poetry in 2010. He has also published The Village of Sliding Time (Harbour, 2006), a long poem; Crows Do Not Have Retirement (Harbour, 2001), poems; and The Education of Mr. Whippoorwill: A Country Boyhood (Macfarlane Walter & Ross, 2002), a memoir. He won the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize for How I Joined Humanity at Last (Harbour, 1998); his work has been shortlisted for a National Magazine Award, and his poems have appeared in over thirty-five anthologies, including A Matter of Spirit: Recovery of the Sacred in Contemporary Canadian Poetry (Ekstasis, 1998). He has also published four chapbooks: The Tangled Bed (Reference West, 2000), Palominos and other poems (Gaspereau Press, 2000), Dust in the Brocade (The Alfred Gustav Press, 2008) and Berlin Album (Rubicon Press, 2009). He was born in Neepawa, Manitoba, and now lives in North Vancouver, B.C.

Luck, Persistence, and Rewrites—An Author Profile

"A poem begins with some particular idea or image," says North Vancouver poet and teacher David Zieroth. "Something comes to me." It is late December and school's officially out for the holidays. In the lobby of the Language, Literature, and Performing Arts department of the almost-deserted Douglas College in New Westminster, B.C., Zieroth takes a break from planning the next term’s course syllabus to chat about being a poet.
-- Zieroth has been writing poetry since he was in the eighth grade. His first poems focussed on life in rural southwestern Manitoba: the northern lights, the month of October. "There was something about that time and those situations that made me want to write it down," he says. "I don't really know why I started writing. I just did."
-- An avid reader as a child, Zieroth has always been interested in language, words, pictures, and content. But poetry, first introduced to him through the big, fat, elementary-school readers of the 1950s, "just caught my fancy," he says.
-- His first published poem appeared in the The Western Producer's Youth Pages, a section that once featured the poetry of young Canadian poets. "It was rewarding; it was fulfilling; it was sustaining—it was all those things," Zieroth says of seeing his work in print, even though no one outside his family knew that Mr. Whippoorwill, a pseudonym under which the poem was published, was young David Zieroth.
-- Of his earlier work, Zieroth says, "The poems were pretty awful, but they were a step towards something—to what I didn't know."
-- The nostalgia evoked by a rare letter from his father detailing a pending hunting trip provided a turning point for Zieroth when he was in his 20s and living in Toronto. "All that stuff I'd left behind just shifted into a different focus," he says. "Not only could I write about it, but it was waiting for me." This new focus inspired Zieroth to continue writing about other subjects and feelings. Following that, a major change took place. "As a writer, you have to believe in inspiration," he says, "that you do make breakthroughs. For me, that was when I found my writer's voice."
-- Writing poetry is a three-part process for Zieroth. The first stage involves a version of a poem that is often "gushy, sentimental—goofy, even," he says.
-- The next stage, which usually occurs the same day as the original draft, is a bit more polished. "You have to mine it, dig it out," says Zieroth of the process of extracting the valuable gems from "a bunch of words."
-- The third stage often occurs the following day, when he can objectively look at the product and find what takes the poem further, to the next step. "You're never really sure you're going to get there,” he says. "There is the anxiety in writing. You just have to live with the anxiety and hope for the best." Much of creating a poem is luck, he notes; much is persistence. After that, it's rewrites. "You hope that when everything is done, you’re happy with what's there. Sometimes poems are little watercolours as opposed to big oil canvasses."
-- Before submitting poems for publication, Zieroth also requests feedback from several friends, many of whom are fellow poets. While publishing is an important part of the process for Zieroth, he doesn't write with the sole purpose of publication. Zieroth, who has seven published books—six of poetry and one autobiography—behind him, emphatically states, "The thrill of publication has been muted; the thrill of writing has not." He writes because he wants to, and he writes poetry because it allows him to speak to others in a way fiction does not.
-- As an instructor of poetry, Zieroth has quite a bit of advice for young poets. "Read a lot and read widely," he says. "Read beyond the area you are presently reading in. Read not just poetry, but novels, short stories, and non-fiction."
He is also quick to stress the importance of grammar, likening a lack of grammatical knowledge to playing hockey without a blue line. "You need to know what the rules are," he says.
-- But his most important piece of advice to poets shoots straight to the heart: "Always protect what it is that got you going in the first place. Be careful that you don't lose it to somebody's criticism. It's a very private, precious thing."

--—Barbara K. Adamski (originally appeared at youngpoets.ca)