Richard Harrison: Poetry is both high art and intimate confession

Richard Harrison is the author of seven books of poetry, including On Not Losing My Father’s Ashes in the Flood, which won the Governor General’s Award for Poetry in 2017.

Canadian poet Richard Harrison

His new collection of poetry, My Mother Joins the Resistance from Wolsak and Wynn, is released in April, 2026. Richard’s poems have been translated into French, Portuguese, Italian, Arabic, and Farsi. A professor emeritus in the Department of English, Languages, and Cultures at Mount Royal University in Calgary, where he also publishes essays and reviews as well working as an editor and writing workshop leader. In 2025 the Writers Guild of Alberta honoured Richard with its Golden Pen award for lifetime achievement. In this interview, Richard discusses his influences, the threat of gen AI, how he edits, and how he learned that poetry is both high art and intimate confession.

Poetry is both high art and intimate confession

OCW: What life experiences have shaped your writing style?

RH: There are a lot, but I’ll tell you two. The first is my father reciting poetry when I was a child. Dad was born in Leeds and schooled in the old way of having students memorize poems in order truly to know them, so he had Dylan Thomas and W. B. Yeats and Robert Browning and of course, Shakespeare by heart. Among these were his favourite and often repeated verses of the King James Bible. These poems often became the words he reached for in his most emotionally rich, sometimes overwhelming, moments, and from him I learned that poetry was both high art and intimate confession.

My Mother Joins the Resistance, by Richard Harrison

When I test my poems out loud, I look for that same feeling. The other is Patrick Lane. He was the first Canadian poet I heard read whose poems got to me as deeply as my father’s recitations. Only instead of being born in a British sensibility, Patrick was about Canadian stories, his own life written in his own life’s language. Patrick knocked down the wall between wonderful-sounding poetry about things foreign to me and how poetry could speak for me personally. And though my life was nothing like Patrick’s, still, that his poetry grew from his own experiences turned my eyes on my own experience as the ground for the poems I would start to write after hearing him.

'Reading is essential to change'

OCW: Has your writing evolved over the years? If so, how? Through writing experience? Reading a lot? Writing courses or communities? A combination, or something else?

RH: From book to book, if not poem to poem, I hope the answer to that question is always yes, though I’d be the first to admit that that evolution has happened at varying speeds. In terms of what propels it, the list you’ve given is right. Continuing to write changes the writing if only because you can’t cross the same river twice.

Reading is essential to change. The work of poets like Sharon Olds and di brandt and Pier Giorgio di Cicco and Robert Hass, and many more, has expanded my mind as person as well as my skills as a poet. And poets don’t learn poetry only from poets. Delving into the novels that compel me to read them also finds affects my poetry; great prose broadens a writer’s repertoire of inspiring sentences. I love the awe I feel in other writers’ work of any kind. At first, I just admire it, then, like a young magician seeing one of the masters of the art on stage, I set about trying to figure out how they made the trick work.

Yes to writing courses, too. I took a lot of those, and I offer them myself in part because of how much they gave me. Yes to the writing community I have around me. And Yes to the “something else”: the editors it’s been my pleasure and honour to work with. Of these, Paul Vermeersch at Wolsak and Wynn has been the most influential.

OCW: Can you trace any common themes across your writing?

RH: I don’t know if this is true for anyone else, but when I get asked this sort of question, I’ve answered that poets spend their lives figuring out what a dozen words mean in their art. I still don’t know what all those words are for me – part of the reason I write poetry is to find them. So far, I know that among them for me are Father, Son, Hero, Family, Hockey, Learn, Language, and Now. My latest book adds Mother to that list. Three more to go.

Consciousness and the threat of the algorithm

OCW: Do you see generative AI as a threat or benefit to writers?

RH: I see it as a threat to writers and readers alike. Generative AI would only be a danger to writers if it produces texts that readers accept. Which they do, and that acceptance says to me that the way in which we’ve taught reading and writing has left a great number of people thinking that the only value of writing lies in the information it transmits. At bottom, generative AI is the extension of the argument that all writing is simply the rearrangement of language; originality is a question of mathematically describable and replicable combinations of words. I disagree. We read and write to connect our minds with the minds of others. But if each of us is, as we believe, an irreproducible individual, as unique in our consciousness as the prints on our fingertips, then we can’t also say that an algorithm that recycles past writing to give us a text is giving us what we look for when we communicate who we are to another human being.

Consciousness is not just a matter of intellect – which is the only function in the mind AI can puppet for us. It is also the way in which each of us chooses to say what we need to say, or write what needs to be written, because of the way the words feel. AI tempts us to skip the work and thus the reward of writing. Its results deny that reading is as an interaction and thus increases our isolation from one another. AI’s effluence is the erasure of every gift writing has to offer.

Rewriting as a journey of discovery

OCW: Do you edit as you write, or write and edit later?

RH: In terms of the question, I write and move to editing later. But I don’t see the process as having only those two phases. In between that first rush of a poem or a paragraph and the final moves to make what I’ve written publishable, there’s a lengthy period of re-writing that is one of the greatest pleasures I experience as a writer. The move from one draft to another isn’t the move from start to finish, but a series of steps, a wandering in the forest, a journey to a dead end and back, a glimpse of gold in the bottom of a stream. Sometimes the original writing disappears, like the surface earth at an archaeological site; sometimes it stays and grows like the seed of an unknown flower. At the start, I never know which, but I know the rewriting is done when I feel the piece is along the way enough for me to work with an editor to get it ready for you.