12/3 2010

Exile on Markham Road

Contributed by Christopher Jones

I wonder if everyone who meets Rosemary Sullivan for the first time feels like they’ve known her for years. That’s certainly how I felt yesterday when I visited her at her home in Riverdale to talk about being the first poet to be honoured as part of the Poetry is Public is Poetry project. On Monday, three lines of Sullivan’s poem Exile, set in bronze, will be unveiled at the entrance of the newly renovated Cedarbrae Public Library on Markham Road in Scarborough.

a man packed a country
in a suitcase with his shoes
and left

The snippet was chosen by Toronto’s Poet Laureate Dionne Brand with input from an advisory committee; Poetry is Public is Poetry will be Brand’s legacy project, the goal of which is to help transform Toronto’s public realm into an illuminating forum for the written word. The initiative is being realized by City of Toronto’s Cultural Services and Transportation Services working in close co-operation with the Toronto Public Library and the Toronto Public Library Foundation.

Sullivan is delighted with Brand’s choice: “I think they’re exactly the right words,” she said. “I think it’s particularly appropriate for the neighbourhood. The line encapsulates exile and immigration, and for it to be there on Markham Road, I think is great.”

The newly renovated Cedarbrae Library in Scarborough

The poem was written in 1985 after a trip to Pinochet’s Chile. ‘It’s about what it’s like to lose your country, to be forced into exile,” explained the writer. “It moved me to think that not only did Dionne read the sequence but she remembered those lines. Is it my favourite poem? No. Am I thrilled to have it enshrined at the library? Yes.”

Sullivan fondly remembers her own childhood library, a beacon in an otherwise bleak housing development in the suburbs of Montreal. “That’s where my imagination found a home,” she recalled, “there was no other place.”

In fact, she loved learning so much she pursued post-secondary degree after degree, not as part of some grand, strategic plan but “because I loved being in school.”

Today, the author, who has written short stories, novels and biographies, as well as poetry, teaches creative writing as part of the Masters degree program at University of Toronto. It’s a fallback vocation she encourages her students to also pursue.

“I try to make them pragmatic,” she stressed. “I encourage them to get their Ph.Ds so at least they can teach at University when the jobs start coming up.”

Sullivan noted that being a writer was not a choice but “a compulsion, an obsession, you just have to do it, you find a way to do it.”

The writer’s warmth and openness made me comfortable enough to share details about my own life and as I prepared to trade her warm foyer for the chilly sidewalk she recommended a poem she thought would resonate, One Art by Elizabeth Bishop. She recited a few lines from memory.

“Poetry helps,” she said with conviction. “That’s why you write poems, they give you solace.”