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Country living inspires local poet in his writing adventures

January 6, 2022   ·   0 Comments

By Constance Scrafield

“My wife is a country girl; she was raised in the Beaver Valley. She had bought a place in Caledon. When we met in the city, she was living in the country and I followed her here. Love brought me to the country,” poet, Harry Posner told the Citizen in a telephone interview earlier this week. 

As he said, “I grew up in Toronto. My current wife is the one who got me out of the city. I moved as a city boy to a country boy [where] I connected to nature; learned what it means to live on the land.”

It has been here that Mr. Posner discovered his real niche in his writing life as a poet.

Wordbirds was his first poetry book. He found himself fascinated by the birds, writing poems about how they moved, how they sounded, what their lives were like.

He said, “Because of that move from the city to the country, that inspired me to write poetry. Now I’m more concentrated on poetry.”

Having said which, he did win the Ken Klonsky Novella Award for his Peggy Lee’s Delicious Lips. He has published a list of his books of prose and poetry.

Mr. Posner really began our conversation with a bang about the recently reinstated closures: “It’s going to be up to us to say, ‘This is over.’ One day will come when we will go about our business. I think we’re in a good place. If enough people say no [to closures], then it will have to happen; the government will have to be responsive. “

He cited the example of the Ford government declaring that police would have the right to stop people at random for ID checks, which met with huge public backlash and the police themselves refusing to do this, that Doug Ford had to back off.

“We have to keep our elected politicians accountable. I feel strongly about it and I wrote Kyle [Seeback, Conservative MP for Dufferin-Caledon] a long letter.”

Named as the first Poet Laureate for Dufferin County in June 2017, Mr. Posner dove into bringing poetry to the centre of attention with Poetry Days in Orangeville. Shop fronts on Broadway displayed works from local poets and there were many public readings. He held a further series of readings at the library and conducted many other events focussed on the love of writing and reading poetry to audiences.

However, he retired as Poet Laureate this year, saying, “With all the restrictions, the library was closed [nor could we] gather in large groups. We had held Days of the Poets for two years until Covid ended that and I couldn’t hold anymore events. 

“As a writer you need that direct contact with people and when that’s taken away, I stopped being Poet Laureate.”

His most recent news is that he has finished and self-published his novella trilogy.

Mr. Posner outlined the process, “I finished the last two of the three novella trilogy last year and I wrote the first one in the previous year. These are pandemic books, available now at BookLore.”

Praising Nancy Frater, co-founder and owner of BookLore, “I think all the local writers owe her thanks for all her support. She gives local writers exposure, which they need.”

His trilogy titles are Malware, Dux Dispar and Here is Betty.

He explained, “They’re three interrelated books and the four characters are shared through the three books. They show malware’s influence on medicine, politics and sociological malware. I used a stream of consciousness writing, the formats are different; I bolded several words; played around with the way books are shaped – start, goes, ends. Some of my stories are more circular. The books demand a bit more work from the reader. Luckily, there’s a core of diehard fans.”

He has been teaching writing workshops and has taught Autism Spectrum writers with another writer/columnist, Anthony Carnovale, here in Orangeville.

“We really enjoy doing those workshops. It’s very fulfilling,” he commented.

Mr. Posner postulated, “The job of the poet is to bounce back the feelings of society. This is the time when human beings are re-evaluating all the things they thought they valued. We’ve reflected on life and death and poets can’t help but respond to what happened to us as human beings. I feel we are truly at a turning point as human beings. The choices we make are going to make a huge difference to how society will work in general. That’s [a] big statement but I truly believe it.

“The world is bigger than Covid – there is the world of the animals that don’t care about the virus or how we cope about the virus. Some of the poetry I’ve written is about what’s beyond the virus.”

To live longer and produce good work, Mr. Posner, at 70 years old, would like to write his master novel; to teach as many poets as well since he retired from working for the LCBO in Orangeville, around when the pandemic started. 

When he was living in Toronto, he was writing short stories and playwriting.

“As a young writer, you try all different genres,” he said. “My writing life really took off when my wife and I ran a tea shop up in Collingwood and I ran that for six years. I did a lot of writing there too.
Also, he promises: “I’ll get back to organizing events in the town too – I am chomping at the bit to get back into the community and I’m looking forward to doing it all again.”

“There are voices and questions

In the wilderness of us 

The tilted head of the feral kitten

And the banshee cry of the newly born

All of life given without condition

Playful and terrifying in its innocence

Demands nothing less than truth

Nothing more than breath 

And the answer to the question 

Who am I?” H. Posner www.posnerbooks.com

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