Robert Bringhurst on science, poetry, the ridge where he lives and much more

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - On Saturday Robert Bringhurst (RB) brings his own brand of literature, local history, science and humour to the stage of the Quadra Community Centre. He just gave Cortes Currents a taste in a rambling conversation that at one point went off topic to include remarks about Cortes Island, Campbell River and Whistler. Bringhurst started out by describing his intentions in the epic description of ‘the Ridge’ on Quadra Island where he lives.    

RB: “I wanted to make good poetry out of, among other things, good science. I wanted  to walk the ridge and relish it as one does without any thought of scientific measurement or accuracy, but I also wanted to think about it as a real place in historical time and to look at the species in relation to other species on the planet, and at the rocks in relation to other rocks. I began to wonder how much biology, geology, astronomy and climatology I could put in this poem without sinking it. The answer turned out to be quite a bit.” 

“So unlike most poems, there could be a corrected second edition. There could be mistakes. It's like a research paper. An interesting thing about science is that it purports to have the real answers to things, but the answers are always changing. The facts are changing. There could be numbers in the poem that need to be changed or updated,  that's a curious thought.”

“Anyway, I worked on this thing for probably eight years, this one poem, and in that time I learned a great deal, and some of what I learned kept changing. The climatological facts change rapidly it seems, the geological facts change more slowly.”

“It sort of restored my childhood faith  in the possibility of science and the arts, science and literature coexisting happily.  I hope other people might find some pleasure in that as well.” 

“It's also a meditation on the end of the world, and there's very little pleasure to be found in that except the pleasure of admitting that things are as they are, not hiding from it.”