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There’s a Poem for That: Marc Plourde + Summer in Furnished Rooms
We talk to seasoned poet and translator Marc Plourde about his new book Summer in Furnished Rooms (Cormorant Books), a collection that spans fifty-five years of life. He tells us how the locations in the poems holds special significance, and shares the poem “A Nighttime Walk in Carnival Week.”
An interview with poet Marc Plourde
All Lit Up: Can you tell us a bit about Summer in Furnished Rooms and how it came to be?
Marc Plourde: When I started this collection, I wanted to make poems that were both lyrical and narrative. I looked over the decades of my life and places appeared in my mind’s eye. In these places I saw people, loved ones or else figures I’d noticed perhaps once in the distant past before they vanished in time. But all were alive now, just as they had once been. Then, the stories of Summer in Furnished Rooms began to unfold.
Every place in this collection — whether it be the old red-brick Empire Movie Theatre on Ogilvy Street or the Mel Sarah motel in south Florida in 1966 — is a place intensely felt as memory tends to intensify and sharpen our perception of places and the people who inhabited them. As I worked on the poems, the phrases “I remember” and “Something happened here” became the keys to unlock the door to the past. They are a storyteller’s charms. They opened the door and led me through the composition of Summer in Furnished Rooms.
ALU: What has been your most unlikely source of writing inspiration?
MP: The discovery of a connection between the dogs at a city pound and the effigy of a dog I’d once seen in a museum in Pompeii, Italy, was both a shock and a source of inspiration for me. Seeing that connection, I knew a poem had to come of it.
ALU: What sparked your initial love of poetry?
MP: It was probably the lyrics of folk songs that taught me to love poetry in childhood. I remember listening to the ballad, “Peggy-O,” and Pete Seeger’s “If I Had a Hammer” and Solomon Linda’s “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” sung acapella, and feeling moved by the words and voices in a way that music had not moved me before.
ALU: Has your idea of poetry changed since you began writing?
MP: At first, poetry was for me a means to escape to a dream world inhabited by fantastical creatures. Then, the more I wrote the more I wanted to know the world around me through poetry and to hold the real people I knew and had known in poems.
ALU: Are there poetry collections you can’t get out of your head years later?
MP: The poetry collections that have stayed with me over the years are: William Carlos Williams’ Journey to Love; Robert Lowell’s Life Studies; Randall Jarrell’s The Lost World; James Wright’s To a Blossoming Pear Tree; Philip Levine’s What Work Is; John Newlove’s Black Night Window; Alden Nowlan’s collections, Bread, Wine and Salt and The Mysterious Naked Man; and Robyn Sarah’s A Day’s Grace. Just read these books to see what is special about them.
There’s a poem for time…
“A Nighttime Walk in Carnival Week” from
Summer in Furnished Rooms
(February 1966)
Toboggan in tow, I walked home in the small hours
of a winter night in Carnival Week.
The boy I was then is now removed in time,
thinned to a shadow on a deserted street
as he trudges down Côte-des-Neiges,
holding onto a rope.
At the corners he hears the lights blink,
sees their reflections on black ice
and the red-to-green flashes streaming north,
block after block toward Jean Talon.
He doesn’t care if he’s in a bind:
he imagines the flashes are a secret code
and feels like The Spy Who Came in from the Cold,
the one done in by bad luck or lack of nerve.
As I passed Ristorante Paesano and Le Crazy Horse Saloon,
I felt numbness in my fingers holding the rope
and saw the after-business-hours windows
were opaque, turned inward as if under a spell.
Minutes before, I’d passed St. Peter carved in the stone
Art Deco facade of the Wax Museum,
guarding the door to heaven impassively
while a scroll of names unfurled from his hands to his feet —
names of the elect, which I couldn’t read in the dark.
That night I thought I’d found an ambience
or the glow of some mystery I could follow like a beacon at sea,
but was a fool for taking a cross-city walk in the deep freeze
only because I wouldn’t call home and wake the dead,
the angry sour dead that would have been Pa
pulled like the Old Testament God
from the depths of sleep at two a.m.
to come to Notre Dame as the school bus had got back
from Mont Tremblant late.
I watched the line of boys at the pay phones
and knew I’d cut my throat
before paying the price of hearing his voice.
Then, I could exaggerate my plight
and still believe myself.
Now it’s too late to wake the dead.
.
I last saw my father on a winter night years later
when I was middle-aged and he had fallen
into a deep old age from which he couldn’t rise.
When the priest arrived, he smiled at the mirage
of filial piety — a father on a hospital bed
and a son at his side. Was he deceived?
He performed the last rites and left.
Then guardedness settled between father and son again,
only this time father turned:
I saw white hair and a frightened look
above the bedsheet pulled up to his neck
and heard him say he loved me.
I was stopped in my tracks like The Spy Who Was Caught
with Nothing to Say;
I adjusted the oxygen mask on his face
and left him to sleep.
Sometimes a call is made, but no one answers.
Now I’ll say the boy holding onto a rope in the cold
put himself there, not knowing the length of his stay
or how long time can stand in one place.
And as for things like luck and making the cut
for St. Peter’s list, it was never about luck, it’s nerve.
* * *
Marc Plourde established himself both as a poet and as a translator at a young age; poems he wrote before he was twenty were included in The Penguin Book of Canadian Verse, in 1975. He is the author of three collections of poetry—Touchings, The White Magnet, and Borrowed Days—and a short story collection called The Spark Plug Thief. Plourde has translated works by Victor-Lévy Beaulieu, Gaston Miron, and Gilbert Langevin. He lives in Montréal, Québec
.
* * *
Thanks to Marc for answering our questions, and to Cormorant Books for the text of “A Nighttime Walk in Carnival Week” from Summer in Furnished Rooms, which is available to order now (and get 15% off with the code THERESAPROMO4THAT until April 30!).
For more poetry month, catch up on our “there’s a poem for that” series here, and visit our poetry shop here.
