Some time has passed since the last poem on this blog. I've always wanted to present Ruth reading live this one poem but I had filmed several poems then and not being a media expert I hesitated. Finally, a very fine friend cut and modified the video and I am finally able to present Ruth, live on stage.
Ruth was with a group of Canadian poets in Scotland and we met by chance at the EdBookFest. She presented me a copy of her latest publication and I was immediately struck by the one poem. Coincidently, it reminded me of a personal episode and I grew curious.
Ruth Roach Pierson actually started late in her life writing and publishing poems. She had been busy teaching as professor at the OISE at the University of Toronto. Though Ruth was born and raised in Seattle, USA, read history at the University of Washington and obtained her PhD at Yale University, she immigrated to Canada with her first fulltime academic position. Until 2001 she taught women's history and feminist studies, offering one of the first women's history courses in Canada. Her teaching also brought her back to Germany where she had lived for a year as an exchange student in 1955/56. In 1997/98 she held a Guest Professorship in Gender Studies at the Ruhruniversität Bochum. She was also vice president to the International Federation for Research in Women's History and published numerous acclaimed academic works and journals.
Poetry wasn't really on her list but the seed has already been planted during her time as an M.A. student at the University of Washington where students were to take one 'elective': Ruth's choice fell on Theodore Roethke's course on Reading Poetry. She was very much impressed then and honoured him belated with a poem in her latest publication ("The Best God-damned Poet in the USA"). But only in 1993 did Ruth start to write poems 'officially' by enrolling in a poetry writing course. It was after her retirement from academe that she also started publishing her work of poetry: in 2002 her first book Where No Window Was and in 2007 Aide-Mémoire which was a finalist for the Governor General's Award in 2008. And lately, her collection Contrary in 2011. In the meantime her praised and prized poems were and are published extensively in anthologies and journals.
Her style is mainly realistic, reflecting on events and incidents, playing with words and rhythm not so much images and not at all limited to a feminist point of view. I was more than delighted to have met her and her fellow Canadian poets as Jim Nason and Maureen Hynes and happy to have been present at their reading. Especially as Canadian authors, let alone poets, are unfortunately not extensively reviewed in Europe. The more the reason to spread the news...
