When I first met Patrick Lane at a poetry retreat in Sooke, B.C. in 2006, he said of dead people: Write them back into the world. And that is what we’ll do.

Since Patrick Lane died on March 7, 2019, people have been sharing their many memories of him on Facebook; BC Bookworld published an obituary online; CBC Radio did a rebroadcast of his 2012 interview with Shelagh Rogers (along with several other tributes); and one of his publishers, Harbour Publishing, who calls him one of their “foundational writers,” published an obituary.

The photograph of Patrick was Chris Hancock-Donaldson’s first professional portrait. She attended poetry retreats with Patrick and this photograph of him has been used far and wide as people share memories of him.

Quill & Quire published an article online in which his wife Lorna Crozier is quoted as saying: “He always so firmly believed that you write out of who you are and what you are and where you live. He firmly believed you put your bare feet on the earth and you write about that earth that’s underneath them.”

That sounds like the Patrick I got to know over the last thirteen years. I was able to see the benefits of Facebook following Patrick’s passing as people were sharing their memories of him including poems and photographs and links to his acceptance speeches for the honorary doctorates he received from UBC, McGill, UVic and VIU.

In 2006, poet Wendy Morton was organizing Patrick Lane’s poetry retreats in Sooke where she lives. We gathered at Glenairley, an old farmhouse then owned by the Sisters of St. Ann. Wendy cooked the meals with some help from Patrick in the kitchen. (See photos of Patrick helping and playing in the kitchen!)

We all took turns setting the table and clearing up after meals. Rather than use the big dining hall, we crowded in around the corner table in the kitchen. The dining hall was used for writing as the bedrooms were shared. I was fortunate though as I had a very small bedroom to myself at the top of the stairs. I think there was only one washroom in the house or maybe two. To have a shower, we’d go to a bathroom accessible from the outside of the house.

Most important, we gathered in the living room to write poems together and listen to Patrick. He gave us what he called meditations which have been such a gift to look at during these days of remembering Patrick and his teaching. In them he told of us of his life, saving himself through poetry, and introduced us to so many poets he had studied. At all the retreats I attended I was amazed at the number of teachers and professors who were there to learn from him so that they became the attentive students.

At the retreat in 2006, Patrick had us counting syllables and stresses as we listened to the “beat” of our poems. He wanted us to realize that a poem “isn’t just prose broken up into pieces, but an artful rendering of a cadenced speech.”

He wrote in a typed assignment that he would have typed with one finger: “I aspired to be a good poet, not merely one who wrote a casual verse. I wanted some formality in what I did, a cadence, a higher form than those practiced by my contemporaries. My masters were Yeats and Auden from England, Williams and Pound from America, and Layton from Canada. All used formal devices in their verse. I could count their syllables, could hear their rhymes and repetitions, could measure their pacing.”

In an assignment on the “Refrain” with Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Recuerdo” as an example, Patrick wrote: “Memory is a powerful force in our lives. It governs all our actions, is the repository of guilt and shame as well as joy and ecstasy. What we are is what we recollect and the older we get the more we arrange what we remember until it forms itself into a kind of narrative, a story we tell ourselves, edited and revised to reflect what and who we say we are.”

I first met Nanaimo poet Leanne McIntosh at that 2006 retreat along with Susan Gee, Pam Porter, Barbara Pelman, Joan Shillington, Heidi Garnett, Susan Stenson, Ray McGinnis, Grace Cockburn, and Dvora Levin. I continued to see them through the years at poetry retreats and readings. We were part of a chapbook of poems that came out of the retreat: Witch in White.

In Patrick’s introduction to the chapbook published by Ursula Vaira at Leaf Press, he wrote: “Dvora Levin speaks of the muse and says, ‘Ah, in she comes, the witch in white, / sweet slutty smile in barefoot shoes.’ We greet her as we may.”

We stopped having chapbooks published following the retreats a few years ago as more poets had books published (and various other ways of publishing their work) and it was an added task for Patrick to look through our submitted poems, choose one or two from each of us, and write an introduction.

We poets are grateful to Patrick and to Ursula for the many years of beautifully crafted chapbooks. Linda Crosfield took the photo of me and Patrick at Glenairley in 2007. Linda is a poet and a creator of handmade books and chapbooks as well. (Patrick had been leading poetry retreats for ten years by then and that was his eighteenth one.)

“Accumulation” was another assignment my first year with Stanley Plumley’s “Four Appaloosas” as an example of an accumulation of images. Patrick said that “Plumley uses the commas as a stitching method” and I used that notion in the poem I wrote entitled “Unpacking” – not only the commas but the phrase “stitched together with commas.”

I told Patrick that the line was actually his and he said: “It’s yours now.”

My poem, “Unpacking,” won third prize in Literary Writes, a poetry contest sponsored by the Federation of BC Writers and was published in WordWorks Winter 2006-2007. My partner Sarah and I took a float plane over to Word on the Street in September 2006 so I could read my poem along with the other prize winners and receive my prize. It was a great beginning to life on Vancouver Island. (Sarah and I moved here in May, 2005.)

Patrick did a reading at Word on the Street as well from his memoir, There is a Season, (McClelland & Stewart, 2004) which had been chosen by the Vancouver Public Library for its “One Book, One Vancouver” city-wide book club.

I took a copy of Go Leaving Strange (Harbour Publishing, 2004) for Patrick to sign for me at the first retreat I attended with him. (No one was spelling “Glenairley” correctly that year!)

The last retreat I attended with Patrick was at Honeymoon Bay Lodge on Lake Cowichan in July, 2015. (The Sooke retreats at Glenairley and Ocean Wilderness eventually ended and Richard Osler began to arrange the retreats at Honeymoon Bay. Liz McNally took over the arrangements and registrations and now does so for retreats with Lorna Crozier.) The month was significant as I had had a biopsy before the retreat and after it learned the lump on my shin was Spindle Cell Sarcoma.

During the five weeks I spent in Victoria to have radiation treatments at the BC Cancer Agency, I would run into poets I knew near Royal Jubilee Hospital or on Oak Bay Avenue. I didn’t run into Patrick but appreciated his email following my surgery at Vancouver General in early 2016. He headed the email “good news” and said he had just heard and was pleased I was through the operation. “Let’s hope all is well now.” He signed his email: “My very best.”

I don’t have cancer anymore so that part is good. Patrick had been ill for the past couple of years with an autoimmune disease. Although reports say he died of a heart attack, Lorna Crozier says: “In some ways, I don’t think it was a heart attack. I think his heart just couldn’t keep going in that ill-fatigued state any longer, and just gave up.”

Patrick Lane would have been 80 years old on March 26, 2019 and I believe this year he also would have celebrated twenty years of sobriety since attending an addictions treatment program in Nanaimo in 1999.

I planned to send him a birthday card rather than an email as I sent him last year. To my birthday wishes of last year and congratulations to him on the publication of his second novel, Dark River Night, Patrick replied (still, with his one-finger typing):

Thank you Mary Ann, Ys, on [Yes, one] more and I’m 80. Ah well, all things come to those who wait, eh? I am not very well, but I continue on with the messed and the blind. You too, be well, my dear.
Patrick

Lorna Crozier and Patrick Lane at a reading in Fanny Bay, B.C. c 2013

I’ll be reading poems of Patrick’s on his 80th birthday and hope some others who knew him can join me.

The following excerpt is from “A Good Day to Start a Journal” by Lorna Crozier in The Blue Hours of the Day: Selected Poems (McClelland & Stewart, 2007).

. . . since I cannot say
it right, for you today I must try

to keep this journal. Write:
March 26, and a little cold.
Write: Overnight the plum tree
has become one blossom. Write:
The days are getting longer
because my lover in the garden
turns and turns the earth.