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Tributaries: Lloyd Ratzlaff + Walking Upstream
For Tributaries, we chat with Lloyd Ratzlaff about his debut collection Walking Upstream (Thistledown Press) about overcoming a harsh evangelical upbringing and seeking consolation from the beauty of the natural world.
We sat down with Lloyd to talk about embracing poetry later in life and the ways grief reshapes language. Lloyd tells us about his poem “Rain” written in the quiet aftermath of his mother’s death when a poem arrived instead of an obituary.
Read “Rain” from
Walking Upstream (Thistledown Press)
Rain
Rain falling so hard, Mother,
the drops on the pavement stand vertical
to the thunder’s attention.
A windstorm lashes them sideways.
The elements settle,
the drops become street dancers
as the last thunder cracks and rolls
to God knows where.
Mother, you taught me to pay attention,
fight the good fight,
finish the course,
stand up till I couldn’t.
In the care home
you often remembered yesterday
but not the day before,
nor the long labours of childbearing and rearing,
and I can’t say if this was tragedy or mercy.
In your dying you have become a new mother
and I a new child,
which only makes it harder to let you go.
An interview with Lloyd Ratzlaff
All Lit Up: Can you tell us a bit about your book and how it came to be? How did you come to write “Rain” and how is it representative of your collection?
Lloyd Ratzlaff: Around the age of 50 and following careers as a minister, counsellor, and university lecturer, I began writing full-time and over the next 20 years published three literary nonfiction books, The Crow Who Tampered With Time, Backwater Mystic Blues, and Bindy’s Moon. Several writers I had learned to respect said some of my work seemed to want to become poetry, and though I considered poets the upper class among writers (fictioneers middle class and us nonfictioneers a bunch of distant third cousins), I gingerly began writing poems. Walking Upstream is a debut collection, which for at least this near-octogenarian counts as a miracle.
“Rain” was written the day after my mother’s death. Our relationship had been stormy for most of our lives, but when she was crippled by meningitis and spent her last eight years in a care home, this headstrong woman became the tender-hearted, grateful mother my siblings and I had always wished for. My own resentment dwindled and vanished, and when she died at 93, I felt more bereft than I could have imagined. That rainy afternoon I sat on my patio trying to write an obituary, and this poem intruded.
ALU: Has your idea of poetry changed since you began writing?
LR: Poetry condenses what prose expands.
ALU: If your collection had a theme song, what would it be?
LR: I imagine an ideal reader of Walking Upstream listening to Paul Desmond live in Edmonton while reading; and on re-reading, Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons.
Lloyd recommends…
“Gabriel Dumont Overture, the first movement”
from Rita Bouvier’s papîyâhtak (Goose Lane Editions)
ALU: Why did you choose Rita Bouvier’s poem “Gabriel Dumont Overture, the first movement” from her collection papîyâhtak? What do you love most about this particular poem?
LR: While my mother lay for a week in a coma, I took Rita Bouvier’s papîyâhtak to read in my bedside vigils. It was powerful medicine. I re read it several times sitting beside my mother’s inert body, bewildered at the comings and goings of a medical hierarchy who didn’t yet know what was happening.
It might be easy to think that a Metis girl and a fundamentalist Mennonite boy had nothing in common growing up, but to me Rita’s poetry felt like a homecoming—fish fries on a northern lakeshore, kids hiding all day in a bush—where even very bitter things are described with a tenderness that underlies the entire book, and indeed all of Rita’s poetry. The title poem itself is a gem, but I’ve chosen her “Gabriel Dumont Overture, the first movement” (in papîyâhtak) for the way it conveys the numinosity it seeks to express. After many readings, it still can raise the hair on my neck.
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Lloyd Ratzlaff is a former minister, counsellor, and university lecturer who has authored three books of literary nonfiction and edited an anthology of seniors’ writings and a children’s book. He was a finalist for three Saskatchewan Books Awards, won two Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild literary nonfiction awards, and served on the boards of several writing organizations. He was a columnist for Prairie Messenger Catholic Journal through its last nineteen years of publication, and taught writing classes for READ Saskatoon, the Western Development Museum, and the University of Saskatchewan Certificate of Art and Design program. He lives in Saskatoon.
Photo of Lloyd Ratzlaff by Larraine Ratzlaff.
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Thanks to Lloyd for answering our questions, and to Thistledown Press for the text of “Rain” from Walking Upstream, which is available to order now (and get 15% off with the code TRIBUTARIES until April 30!). And for the text of “Gabriel Dumont Overture, the first movement” from Rita Bouvier’s papiyahtak.
Follow our NPM series all month long to discover new poetry or connect with old favourites, and visit our poetry shop here.
