An Interview with P. W. Bridgman

Verse Novellas, Dialogue, Infatuation, Marriage

Interview with P. W. Bridgman by Carla Sarett

P.W. Bridgman’s poems and short fiction have appeared in numerous print and online journals and anthologies. His poem “At the Bakery After the Pathology Report Arrives” was selected as one of ten poems displayed on buses in British Columbia as part of Translink and BC Transit’s Poetry in Transit Program. The World You Now Own (Ekstasis Editions, 2024) is his fifth collection of poetry. Bridgman also writes academic articles about legal issues. He lives in Vancouver, B.C.

CS: Many of the poems in The World You Now Own have narrative arcs. “It Wasn’t Enough,” for example, tells the (rather sad) story (perhaps your own?) of a father and son and an inheritance.

PWB: I have always had a preference for the narrative form. This is probably because I was a writer of fiction before I turned my hand to poetry. I hasten to say that I don’t consider narrative poetry to be superior—I enjoy poetry that does not follow a narrative arc every bit as much as I enjoy poetry that does. But the urge to tell a story, however cryptic, seems to be a difficult urge to resist.

To be clear; “It Wasn’t Enough” is in no way autobiographical. The loving, supportive relationship I shared with my father could not have been more different from the father/son relationship portrayed in “It Wasn’t Enough.” All of the characters who live inside that poem were conjured from my imagination.

CS: I was intrigued by your use of dialogue in some of the poems in The World You Now Own. Can you expand on some of the decisions in using longer lines of dialogue?

PWB: Again, the fact that I first found my footing by writing fiction explains my affinity for dialogue. I find that what I wish to get across about a character’s outlook, thoughts, fears, beliefs, prejudices—about a character’s character even—can be conveyed most economically by words that I am able to coax directly from his or her mouth (a variant of the “picture is worth a thousand words” cliché).

If you’ll forgive a homespun illustration: I heard a radio interview just today in which a man was asked about U.S. tariff disruptions to the Canadian economy. He answered “The wife and I were going to go moose hunting in the Yukon this fall to celebrate our anniversary, eh? But, Jeez! With the economy going the way it’s going now—not happening!” That clip of dialogue (which made me chuckle), beginning with the reference to “the wife” and moving forward from there, conveys more about the speaker, his linguistic community, his primary relationship, his habits and preferences and his outlook overall than one could get across in several paragraphs. My point is that dialogue can be a direct and economical way to express a great deal when laboring over the small canvas that poetry and short fiction usually give us.

I think longer lines of dialogue more closely mirror the way people speak. I tend generally to write longer lines than do many poets. Ciaran Carson’s influence can probably be seen; his atmospheric, long-lined poems that have captivated me.

CS: The novella-in-verse, “Deliverance: 1961” has a definite (and to me, complex) rhyme scheme/s. Can you describe why you chose that particular scheme/s, and what you think it does for the sequence.

PWB: The decision to create a complex rhyme scheme and stanza structure for the cantos that comprise “Deliverance, 1961…” was a considered one. These structural features specify particular configurations, some of which repeat and some of which change slightly (in a prescribed way), depending upon where the cantos fall within the 32-canto sequence. This is explained in the introduction that precedes “Deliverance, 1961…”

The rhyme schemes produce assonance patterns—reflecting the places where the rhyming words appear in the narrative. These choices reveal my individual preferences. They guide the assonance patterns in ways that, for me, add a certain musicality and cadence to complement the content. When it works, combining these features can make the whole greater than the sum of its parts. Whether readers hear the sonorities and cadences the way I intend is something I cannot know. But I know that the chances that these effects will be discerned are improved when “Deliverance, 1961…” is read aloud.

According to the governing stanza structure for “Deliverance, 1961…”, every fifth canto in the novella in verse consists of four quatrains (not three like the others) and, it being an odd-numbered canto, Canto XV’s rhyme scheme is:

          ABCB
          ABCB
          ABCB
          ABCA

The first two quatrains address one of the protagonists’ (Ashe’s) ultimately star-crossed marriage. They read as follows:

          Elena made him wait. This, especially, Ashe’s friends could 
             not abide about his soon-to-be bride. 
          They were all virgins too, of course, though to hear their 
             swaggering talk, you’d never guess it. 
          In his guileless way, Ashe couldn’t but tell them the truth. 
             Chastity was vital to Elena, he said; to her father 
          In the old country and her culture. If they’d got up to anything 
             at the drive-in, they’d have had to confess it
 
          To the priest who she’d asked to wed them. And wed them, 
             Fr. Torso reluctantly did, at St. Leopold’s. 
          Two unstained white lilies, they stood at the altar. His friends, 
             awkward as hockey players in their suits; 
          Hers: stylish, lissome, alluring and virginal. Congratulatory 
             words were read from a telegram, 
          Without translation, by a gruff man with a bushy moustache, 
             wearing polished work boots…

I also embedded internal rhymes throughout “Deliverance, 1961…”. I enjoy coming upon such hidden gems when I read poetry. My approach to internal rhymes was entirely opportunistic and not determined in advance as was the novella’s rhyme scheme and structure. In the above extract the neighboring words “abide” and “bride” rhyme (despite not being prescribed by the rhyme scheme per se). The same might be said of the slant rhyme of “father” and “culture.”

CS: You write both free verse and formal poetry. What do you think formal constraints offer to the poetic process?

PWB: Paul Muldoon has said, “Form is a straitjacket in the way that a straitjacket was a straitjacket for Houdini.” I did find it satisfying to manage to wriggle out of the locks and chains I had self-imposed and emerge, Houdini-like, with a piece of writing to show for my efforts that was faithful to the limitations I had set.

My decision to box myself in, as it were, with the parameters of a strict stanza structure and rhyme scheme made writing “Deliverance, 1961…” a difficult undertaking. But working within strict limits allowed me to achieve certain prosodic effects (the assonance patterns) that would otherwise have been absent.

The limits defined by a poetic form can be freeing. Having to accommodate one’s writing to limits leads to many discoveries. The discovery of a word that fulfills a rhyming requirement may suggest a new idea that can commandeer a poem’s narrative and send it off in a different direction. It is thrilling when that happens! The lesson is that a rigid structure can produce its own delicious unpredictability.

CS: Did you outline the plot of the novella in the way fiction writers sometimes do?

PWB: I am one of those writers who never prepares outlines. My writerly brain recoils at the thought of them. All I knew when I began “Deliverance, 1961…” was that two characters, each burdened with figurative baggage and each seeking to escape relationship problems, would meet each other on a Vancouver-to-Toronto train in the early Sixties. I knew that neither would have any real plan as to what they would do when they arrived. I’d decided to use flashbacks as the main narrative device to flesh out the back stories. And I had determined that both characters would be somewhat sympathetic, but also somewhat flawed. Very skeletal. The rest came into focus after the writing began.

My fictional pieces and narrative poems unspool this way: that is, they emerge and evolve in the course of the writing. Something like a quotation from another writer’s work, or a snippet of overheard conversation, will set things in motion. From there, as content finds its way onto the page, it suggests further content which, in turn, points the way forward. My writing depends on the act of writing itself to sustain it and call to mind the ideas that end up being the building blocks of the final text.

CS: The view of marriage in “Deliverance: 1961” is somewhat gloomy. In your intro, you attribute this to history — do you really feel 1960s marriages were all that unhappy compared to today?

PWB: The characters in “Deliverance, 1961…” are, for separate reasons, fleeing doomed relationships. Those relationships were troubled not only because of interpersonal conflicts, but because of the cultural baggage. No surprises there.

I believe that the social mores of the 1960s tolerated and encouraged inequities between men and women that were corrosive to spousal relationships (and held women back.) In the early 1960s, the song “Wives and Lovers” reached number 14 on Billboard’s Hot 100 with these lyrics:

          Hey, little girl
          Comb your hair, fix your make-up
          Soon he will open the door.
          Don't think because
          There's a ring on your finger
          You needn't try any more.

I think that such retrograde attitudes increased the likelihood that relationships would be “gloomy” (as you say) and more at risk of discord. Contemporary, egalitarian relationships have better prospects for meeting the needs of both parties than was possible in the 1960s.

CS: In poems like “Annie’s Had a Bit of a Spell,” you show a satirical side. It’s a tricky balance in poems like this to maintain humor, but not overtly mocking.

          Oh, we were right voung idealists then. Aye, we were.
          Only all-natural fibres on our backs
          and bio grains in our porridge bowls, we used to say.

PWB: Yes, there is humor here and there in the collection. (“Annie’s Had a Bit of a Spell” is overall a sad poem that presents a single-sided “dialogue” of reminiscence between an aging man and his wife who has suffered a stroke.) Humor exerts a leavening force when we write poetry which explores the darker corners of human experience. When well-situated, it can be effective in relieving tension. However, you correctly identify a risk. Mockery, especially of an individual or an individual’s beliefs, can be insensitive, even cruel. When it is, the leavening effects of the humor are undermined and the poet loses the reader.

CS: I loved your free verse poem “Gone” (excerpted below). I especially liked the playful way you put “toe” on its own line, and varied the line lengths:

          That hat, those skinny jeans, that sleeved hand 
          pressing the book flat, you looking up, pausing to think, 

          those skinny jeans, those cool boots laced 
          all the way down 
          to the 
          toe.

          That hat. Those eyes.

          I couldn't look away.

Can you tell me (a little bit) about this poem?

PWB: I have a good friend who describes those deliriously happy early months of infatuation in a new relationship as the “walking into walls phase.” The poem “Gone” is self-evidently a love poem to Lydia, my wife. This first-person piece is autobiographical (though small liberties have been taken) and it strives to capture the runaway pulses that accompanied the dizzying, initial attraction to Lydia I felt in those early days. Discovering aesthetic commonalities—her astute, edgy sense of style and our shared passion for jazz and certain authors, for example—served only to drive the needle further into the red.

CS: You mention Paul Muldoon as an influence. How would you describe that influence? Do you have other muses or (non-writerly) influences in your work?

PWB: I have ancestral ties to Ireland and the North of Ireland, and that aspect of my family history has been a fascination since young adulthood. This connection has led me to seek out and follow closely the writings of Irish writers—a rich vein that has given me endless inspiration.

The time I spent at the Summer Writing Program at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen’s University, Belfast, proved to be one of the formative periods of my writing life. My muses were thick on the ground there, too. Being able to study with poets the likes of Ciaran Carson, Doireann Ní Ghríofa, Stephen Sexton, Leontia Flynn, Gerald Dawe, Edna Longley…(I could go on) was a joyous privilege.

Paul Muldoon is the modern poet from the North of Ireland—perhaps the world—whose work has drawn me in most fully. He is serious, yet doesn’t shrink from being impish and playful. He is a master of the jarring juxtaposition—a technique that can simultaneously unsettle and amuse the reader by creating image collages that are entirely sui generis. Muldoon is Joycean in his invocation of history, myth, religion and other languages (ancient and modern). This makes each of his poems a rich cabinet of curiosities which, when unlocked, reveals hidden nuggets of erudition and wit.

CS: I know many of us are interested in long-form poetry. Do you have favorite long narrative sequences?

PWB: Indeed, I do. A few:

—Molly Bloom’s Soliloquy, which concludes Joyce’s Ulysses, is squarely in the pantheon. It is so beautifully articulate, unruly, sacred, profane and unhinged.

—Paul Lynch’s novel, Prophet Song, is full of oddly structured passages that perfectly serve the book’s subject matter. (I reviewed that novel a while ago for the Glasgow Review of Books.)

—Requiem (The Emma Press, 2020) is a twelve-poem sequence in which Síofra McSherry, the poet, documents her mother’s illness and death from ALS. It charts the course of one person’s coming to grips with the loss of her mother in searingly personal verse.

—A poem by Milton Acorn, Canada’s “People’s Poet.”— “I’ve Tasted My Blood” laments the poverty and depredations he and his mother endured in the aftermath of war. It does so in clear and unvarnished language. This narrative is as surely etched onto the Canadian landscape as the Canadian Shield itself.

P. W. Bridgman’s The World You Now Own is available for purchase via the Ekstasis Editions website.

Carla Sarett is a contributing editor at New Verse Review. She writes poetry, fiction and, occasionally, essays. She has been nominated for the Pushcart, Best American Essays, Best Microfictions, and Best of the Net. Her latest poetry chapbook, Any Excuse for a Party, is out from Bainbridge Island Press. Carla has a PhD from University of Pennsylvania and is based in San Francisco.