| When Richard Harrison pops into the James Joyce pub on Stephen Avenue to talk about the new, 10th-anniversary edition of Hero of the Play, his book of poems on hockey, he has just come from playing pickup basketball at the Talisman Centre. And he’s on his way to meet his Thursday evening poetry group at the W.R. Castell Central Library. Obviously, for this writer, poetry and sport share a lot more than four letters.
You can see some of the links when you read Harrison’s poem about Gordie Howe, "A Lifetime of Moving the Body Just So." Both lyric poets and athletes practise small moves – a comma here, a weight-shift there – which add up to brief, effective acts that look easy. Until you try to do it.
In Hero of the Play, Harrison finds a way to write about the game that also lets him talk about fathers and sons, skill and emotion, youth and age, Canada and the world. The book’s enduring popularity testifies to the appeal of its subject, the tenacious faith in poetry shown by its publisher, Wolsak and Wynn, and to the artful but accessible qualities of what Harrison simply calls the "hockey poem."
"It’s a form that I developed over the first book and I actually have this huge theory about it," he says. His pint glass stops in mid-air as he considers – no, he won’t expound the whole theory. Instead he just takes a sip and says, "The proof is people like ’em, so there you go."
In their half-page, prose-poem paragraphs, the conversational yet precise poems get a handle on what Harrison describes as "the flavour of the hockey game, the movement of the puck over the ice, the kind of skittery, confined and yet erratic movement of image." The new edition adds 13 new poems, including "Ode to the Saddledome," which recalls Harrison’s reading there in the fall of 1995. That event marked the start of Harrison’s time as a Markin-Flanagan writer-in-residence and of his life in Calgary, where he now teaches at Mount Royal College. The book also features a new foreword by Roy MacGregor.
Since the original edition of Hero of the Play, Harrison’s writing has changed a lot, partly because he has had new things to write about, including his two children, and partly because the book put him into new situations. In the essay "10 Years with the Hero: On Hockey and Poetry," he describes how Nelson Saunders of the Calgary Booster Club invited him to write dedicatory poems for Gordie Howe, Bobby Hull, Jean Beliveau and Maurice Richard, when all four came to Calgary for a fundraising dinner. Now, Harrison writes, he would have to speak, not just on the page, but "in person, in public, and in their company" about these players at the dinner.
"I was really nervous about it," he recalls. "I would have dreams about it." Yet Harrison learned something from his meetings with his own hockey heroes. "What amazes me is that these guys really treat you with respect," he says. "People who are the real thing in their field know how to treat you like the real thing in your field. So once I approached them with ‘This is my job, this is what I do’ – bang, they’re all cool. They just approached me like they would another professional – their guard dropped down."
Readers of the hockey poems also taught him that there’s still a place for one of the poet’s most ancient roles, the celebrator of great deeds. "So many people in the sporting world still understand the value of the ‘legend well spoke,’" he says. "It’s that notion of the songs of the heroic act." Not only do players enjoy this, but Harrison also finds that high school kids like both the subject matter "because it’s about responding in that heroic way to things that they love," and the poetic form, which offers them "a connection to something that’s often presented in a way that’s only for educated people."
Expanding poetry’s audience, building bridges between sport and literature – that’s pretty good for one book. But get this: back in October 1997, a member of the Flames board got Harrison to sign a team set of the book’s original edition. And the following spring, Harrison points out,
"was the last time the Flames actually made the playoffs." Hmmm….
The new edition of Hero of the Play will be launched with a street hockey game pitting poets against prose writers, outside Pages Books on Kensington on Saturday, March 13 at 1:30 p.m. Players include Harrison, Raj Pal and Adrian Kelly, with Jeff Collins of CBC Radio One doing the play-by-play. A wine and cheese reception follows the game. |
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