Memorial University’s book club is holding a special event as part of Memorial’s 100th anniversary celebrations on Saturday, April 26, at the Emera Innovation Exchange at Signal Hill Campus.
Coast Lines and Coffee will pay special tribute to the 40th anniversary of the Department of English’s creative writing program.
Professor Emerita Mary Dalton (MA’75) will discuss the evolution of the program, along with fellow faculty members Prof. Lisa Moore and Dr. Aaron Tucker.
Prof. Dalton is the author of six books of poetry, among them Merrybegot, Red Ledger, Hooking and Interrobang (2024), as well as a prose miscellany, Edge: Essays, Reviews, Interviews from Palimpsest Press, and several chapbooks.
Her poetry has been widely anthologized in Canada and has appeared in anthologies in the U.S., Ireland, England, and Belgium.
The book version of her 2020 Pratt Lecture, The Vernacular Strain in Newfoundland Poetry, was released by Breakwater in 2022.
Prof. Dalton served as poet laureate of the City of St. John’s from 2019-22.
She lives in St. John’s, N.L.
Read a conversation with Prof. Dalton below, where she talks about the start of her academic career at Memorial in the late 1970s, the role of locality in poetry, now more than ever, and answers questions about a review-essay in The Walrus magazine where she is called “a major Canadian poet.”
Janet Harron: Where did your interest in poetry come from/when did it begin?
Mary Dalton: Hard to say, really. I grew up surrounded by people who played music, the violin and mandolin in my own house, the accordion in the house directly across the road, and who sang, people who relished the telling of a story, the puzzle of a riddle, the gnomic wisdom of proverbs, folk-sayings.
Rhythm and word-play were all around, including in the rosary, litanies and Latin chants of the Catholic Church.
“It became part of my body. Other poems elicited similar responses.”
I had the good fortune of having some very good teachers of English in high school, folks who encouraged us to read poems aloud and made space for our own responses. I remember reading “The ’Twa Corbies” when I was in Grade 10 and knowing it by heart after that one reading.
It became part of my body. Other poems elicited similar responses. For whatever reason, I seem to have always been attuned to the music of words.
JH: In addition to being a professor emerita at Memorial, you are also an alumna, having completed an MA degree here in 1975. Did your studies during that period have a significant influence on you?
MD: My plan from the outset was to write my thesis on the plays of Samuel Beckett.
I took graduate courses in 20th-century drama with Alan Hall, who became my thesis supervisor, and I attended many excellent theatre productions both at the university and in the community.
During that period, I believe that my sense of the possibilities of the human voice was strengthened — as well as of the possibility of contributing to the ferment all around.
It was generally a time of great confidence and energy in (what was then known as) the Arts Faculty; aspects of Newfoundland culture and society were being explored in major projects in English, in folklore, in history.
Later when I returned to Memorial, I began to write regular theatre reviews for the Newfoundland Herald when it was under the editorship of Neil Murray, one of the university’s Rhodes scholars who returned to Newfoundland and made many contributions to the developing arts scene.
I began to review books regularly as well, and to co-edit and co-publish our literary journal, TickleAce. I began writing poems then too, but I didn’t submit them for publication until nearly a decade later; I was preoccupied with editing, teaching, reviewing, writing literary criticism.
JH: You began to teach in the English Department in the late ’70s, upon your return from doctoral study in England. What sort of memories do you have of your colleagues?
MD: At that time, there was great interest at Memorial in the written and oral culture of the milieu in which it existed.
William Kirwin and George Storey, with John Widdowson, created the monumental Dictionary of Newfoundland English, a work with an international reputation.
Pat Byrne was one of the group that created Breakwater Books, the publishing house that has for half a century now been publishing all genres of Newfoundland writing, and providing a forum for scholarship and the arts focused on the province. His songwriting and music were another contribution to the tradition of folk music.
“The American poet Randall Jarrell once observed . . . that the corner into which no one looks is always dark.”
The colleague I knew best, and who fostered the study of Newfoundland literature as well as the writing of that literature, was Patrick O’Flaherty, himself a novelist, short-story writer and author of substantial volumes on the history of the place as well as a definitive study of the writing up to 1975, The Rock Observed.
As department head, he created courses in Newfoundland literature, worked to establish the Pratt Lecture, the oldest public lecture at the university, and introduced the first courses in creative writing.
Patrick O’Flaherty was a one-man powerhouse, someone who strove to create a university that empowered its students and that rejected colonialist attitudes, whether emanating from across the Atlantic or across the Gulf of St. Lawrence.
JH: As a poet whose most recent work, Interrobang, looks at distinctive speech, can you comment on the role of locality in poetry and how this might relate to our recent emphasis on national pride and what we, as Canadians or as Newfoundlanders and Labradorians are, as opposed to are not?
MD: What I’ve come to recognize over the years and what I think, with the current threat to Canada, we’re all now coming to recognize is that every province and territory of this huge country has its own distinctiveness in the areas of language, culture and landscape.
The American poet Randall Jarrell once observed, in writing about the relative invisibility of poetry in America in his time, that the corner into which no one looks is always dark.
What this current crisis may help us to do is to look — to look both at the ways in which we are part of a commonality and the ways in which we all have our own particular stories, our own particular strengths.
JH: In a recent Walrus magazine profile, you are described as being “radical in the literal sense of the word: she is connected to the roots of place and language and committed to the paradox that, in art, everything old can be made new.” Can you comment on this?
MD: Well, it’s fair to say that all my books are in one way or another preoccupied with the energies of language and place. And any art worth its salt makes something new.
The first two sections of Interrobang focus respectively on the small corner shops, as distinct from the larger stores run by merchants, that flourished in the parish of Harbour Main in the 1950s and, in a much larger time-frame, on the shebeens, taverns, beer parlours and clubs of the area from Holyrood to Brigus.
Other sections of the book draw on the lively Newfoundland tradition of riddling to dramatize the intricacies of weather, landscape and vegetation.
The substantial review-essay by Nicholas Bradley, which you quote from, considers these subjects in some detail, since he sets out to give an overview of my work.
And in speaking of the old being made new, he is thinking, I believe, about my drawing on the Celtic form of the triad and of the Anglo-Saxon riddle form to comment on contemporary aspects of culture and nature.
I’d add that what I see as a new strategy in Interrobang is the voice of Alba; in the final section of the book, The Alba Poems, I have created a persona.
Alba is a kind of Everywoman, a parallel to the figure of Everyman in medieval morality plays. More precisely, she is Everyolderwoman, who gives voice in the poems to various experiences and emotions of older women.
The device of the persona, like those of the triad and riddle, has venerable antecedents in poetry. Among many, I think just now of Yeats’s Crazy Jane, one of several of his.
JH: What is your next project?
MD: Just now I’m editing a selection of poems published in Canadian literary journals in 2024 for the yearly compilation Best Canadian Poetry, which will be released by Biblioasis in the coming fall.
Then I’ll be fleshing out several poetry sequences currently languishing in a drawer, part of a work-in-progress tentatively titled The Sideways Nod.
JH: What is your Newfoundland and Labrador hidden gem?
MD: A certain green valley near Brigus. A Shangri-La.
A Coast Lines Conversation
Prof. Mary Dalton (MA’75) will appear with faculty members Lisa Moore and Aaron Tucker to discuss the intersections of Memorial University, Newfoundland and Labrador’s writing and publishing community and the 40th anniversary of the creative writing program, in conversation with writer, broadcaster and Coast Lines alumnus William Ping (BA ’18, MA ’20).
