Monty Reid is an Ottawa writer with 13 books to his credit. Most recent publications include Garden (Chaudiere) and Meditatio Placentae (Brick) and chapbooks from above/ground, post/ghost, Book*hug and elsewhere. Born in Saskatchewan and now living in Ontario, he was the Managing Editor of Arc Poetry Magazine for many years and the Director of VerseFest, Ottawa's international poetry festival, for almost a decade.
You can read Stop in the January 2024 issue.
Would you like to tell us a little bit more about your poem? For instance, how or why you wrote it, or perhaps provide some extra context?
It’s part of a longer series of poems called Aorta, which are mostly about a heart condition and its treatment. I had open heart surgery a couple of years ago. I was out for the duration of course, but knew the surgical team would saw open my chest, unhook my heart, replace and repair as necessary, and put everything back together again. A machine would keep me breathing while they worked. I’m alive now because of their skill and practice, but also because they could deal with my heart as a repairable muscle, without all the social and literary apparatus it usually comes with.
Why was the poetic form the best fit for this particular piece of work?
Have you seen me dance??
If you didn’t write poetry, how do you think you might access the same fulfillments that poetry offers in your life?
Music for sure. My mother was a piano teacher so I have some background, but little skill, on that instrument, but I’ve played guitar and mandolin in various groups over the years (and written many of the songs) and the emotional high after a good performance is more immediate than what poetry offers. Poetry is a slower, but more enduring, burn.
How do you revise your work?
Endlessly. I have a short ms of mistranslations that I try to redo every year – every version is different, some wildly so. Sometimes I revise to correct inaccuracies or to improve coherence, but often it’s driven by making the line sound better to my ear. And sometimes it just wants to re-make the work as something different.
What are you working on now?
Too many things. A long sequence of hospital poems is nearing completion. Old projects like the parasite poems of Host, and the spy-friendly work of Intelligence are still being fiddled. I’m dreaming up some videopoems. And there’s a garden to plan.
How do you make space for poetry in your daily routine?
I get up early, rarely later than 6am and have done for most of my adult life. That continues to be true. And for much of my life, I didn’t have a tv, although not true anymore.
Do you belong to a writer’s group? If not, where do you find poetry community and feedback?
I don’t belong to any formal group and haven’t ever, but that’s not to say that various writers and clusters of writers have never been important to me. Early on, I had a small role in the founding of the Writers Guild of Alberta, and the writers that came together to make that happen (Rudy Wiebe, Douglas Barbour, Stephen Scobie, Merna Summers, Myrna Kostash, George Melnyk, Jon Whyte and many others) shared a common goal and were tremendously supportive of each other. More recently, here in Ottawa, I was part of another cluster of writers that founded and built VerseFest, Ottawa’s international poetry festival. It was for a few years the largest single poetry event in the country and was a focal point for Ottawa’s energetic poetry community. We helped each other all the time.
In terms of poetic style or craft, is there a big question you are trying to find an answer for?
There are no big questions.