Valerie Harms: James Strecker has reviewed and posted articles on the arts in this column since 2010. Having been a recent subject, I thought it would be of interest to switch sides and ask him questions. After all, he has written ten poetry collections, edited many books, been a college professor in the arts for 30 years, and founded a small press. His own creativity deserves the spotlight. So let’s begin…
Valerie Harms: Have you lived in Hamilton or Ontario your whole life? How has place affected your creativity?
James Strecker: I was born in St. Boniface Manitoba, lived on a farm in Beausejour for four years, and at one point almost died from swallowing a piece of metal. We then came east for some months in Washington D. C., and then to Hamilton ever since. And, yes, place has always affected my creativity, since one’s location either feeds you or starves you, and Hamilton did both. Until recently, Hamilton has been an industrial town, but having Toronto nearby allowed me exposure to international figures in the arts. I also went looking, as a teen, for every artistically hip individual in Hamilton’s coffee houses, where I distributed the folk music periodical I produced, hung out there with Peter, Paul and Mary, learned flat-picking by meeting Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, and Buffy Sainte-Marie sang me a new Dylan song from Greenwich in her dressing room. We once had Sonny Terry over for supper and I also met Pete Seeger with whom I then corresponded many years until he died a while back.
VH: Since you too are experienced as a consultant and user of Ira Progoff’s Intensive Journal Method, let’s touch on five major stepping stones in the formation of your existence.
JS: Okay, but as you know one’s life has many such steppingstones and these are off the top of my greying head.
1.Born into a working class and second generation from Europe family, had something of an unsettled life in which I had to create my own world. But my dad did get me drawing and, because he played the accordion, interested in folk and country music. Meanwhile, my mother took me to filmed operas from Italy, especially those with Beniamino Gigli and Tito Gobbi, and I did fall in love with soprano Alda Noni in Traviata. I finally found a recording of hers in Milan many years later.
2. Married to Margaret and marriage, when one is ready and able, helps one to grow and to grow up in many subtle ways. We’ve been deeply connected since, when in university, we met at an evening of scenes from Greek tragedy. Since then we have laughed a lot together. And she got me to go to Europe the first time and I’ve never stopped since.
3. My first cat, Pee Wee, and through her I developed a deep bond with other than human animals. This connection with all living beings is essential to who I am and determines how I see the world and how I behave in it.
4.When Sir Ernest MacMillan conducted Sheherezade in Hamilton and I, on a school trip, heard the enchanting violin solo and saw the light reflecting magically on its surface and had unique feelings of wonder that are impossible to express adequately.
5. My first published poem, and in a prestigious journal, was about my mother’s uncle who had died. He was a man I had loved. It made me see the need for honesty and truth in creation, both of which every creator struggles to find.
VH: Is writing poetry your highest calling? In what way do your poems come to you?
JS.I don’t have a hierarchy of callings and am subject to the perpetual process of making sense of being alive in this world. Often one bleeds in some way and the blood coagulates into a poem. Sometimes life sings and then takes expression in a page of stanzas. Parts of poems commute through my brain every minute of every day, and whole poems arise because I look at humanity being petty, very cruel, and smugly stupid, and have to say something. Often enough, humans are beautiful as well, but it’s not enough to balance the sadistic things that too many people do. How can it be?
VH: Your book of poems Beside the Hemlock Garden: On Lives and Rights shows deep sadness about human’s treatment of each other and other animals. What prompted this collection?
JS: It continues a previous book on animal rights, Recipes for Flesh, and because the publisher made a mess of Hemlock, I now have gathered all my animal and human rights poems into a “selected” book for which I am seeking a publisher. Ingrid Newkirk and Gretchen Wyler have endorsed this book. Recipes began in Paris where, one evening, I walked past all the restaurants with carcasses in their windows and I walked down Rue St. Denis where groups of men were staring with both hunger and contempt at the prostitutes, and I had recently read a book by Hans Ruesch on experiments on animals which really pulled me down into despair. I stood on a bridge to watch the sun descend behind Ile de la Cite and to gather my thoughts and once back at the hotel began to write poems which kept coming for three solid weeks when I got back home. It was just me, my typewriter, several cartons of Gauloises and Gitanes, and my despair.
VH: Some of your poems inspired compositions by classical composers and a jazz singer. Is it gratifying to see your work taken on by others?
JS: It proves the poems can be singable. In fact, I’m almost now finished a collection of my new and old song lyrics I’ve written, so a bug has indeed been planted. But my reactions to these words set to music vary -and usually they are positive- because one hears one’s work living a different if somewhat foreign life. It does help if the composer makes it so one can understand the words.
VH: Given how you have interviewed so many artists and musicians, you must get a special inspiration from them? Can you describe how other creative people spark a flame in you?
JS: I’ve been interviewing major players in the arts since high school, I think Brownie McGhee was the first, and for the book on creativity which I’ve just finished writing, I interviewed 244 creators in many art forms from 47 countries. We spoke the same language, one of creativity, so let’s say they kept my flame burning, each in a different way.
VH: You compiled at least one book of poems inspired by other creators — Chasing the Muse: Poems on Creators — ranging from Oscar Petersen and Julian Bream to Neil Young and Pete Seeger. Are you glad that you can write your own poems in addition to reviewing performances?
JS: I usually make notes of some kind at a performance or exhibition and feel almost naked without a pen in my hand at such times. But making notes does offer a kind of intimacy with a given art, a doorway to imagination, a gathering of raw material for later use, although I recently went to several performances and just swam in the music. I was forced to simply be and to let the art work me over. And it really did.
VH: You seem equally sensitive to classical as well as jazz and blues music. When did this passion begin?
JS: Classical when as a kid I saw filmed operas and later on discovering Beethoven and Bach and Dowland and and and. When I was five, I think, my dad brought home a gramophone which we couldn’t afford in those tough times, but I then heard records of Wilf Carter and tons of polkas. When my older brother brought home recordings of people like Louis Armstrong, Bobby Hackett or Jelly Roll Morton, I discovered jazz. I have also sought out musicians from around the world and their music in concerts and on records, so Mikis Theodorakis and Ali Akbar Khan, for examples, are now a vital part of my life.
VH: I am jealous….B.B. King wrote an Introduction to your book of poems Routes. Oscar Petersen wrote in his Introduction to Black that you can “carry the reader further into the jazz player’s soul.” Was that a thrill?
JS: Yes, it was. In part it meant that I had written about blues and jazz in a way that the absolute masters in those musical forms could connect with what I had written. But it also got into another dimension beyond thrill and into connection, all of which it’s hard to describe. With B.B. and Oscar –with Dizzy Gillespie as well- we talked about personal things too, you see. I did get personal with many people I interviewed. But I did love having B. B. spontaneously read my poems on ballet to me and I loved having Oscar write on my record jacket “to a critical voice that I respect.” Hell, talk about validation!
VH: You seem able to bring your life experiences together as themes in your poetry books. Corkscrew combines people with places. What do you want us to take away from this book?
JS: I want the reader to feel and think deeply as a result of reading anything I write. If they are causing damage to people and other kinds of animals I want them to stop. If I can waken their joy in life, I hope I can bring out more joy, more insight. If they are cruel fuck-heads, I want the writing to punch them in their pointless, damn faces.
VH: A lot of your poems are laments for animal abuse, vivisectionists, and consumers of meat products. At what point did you become a vegan? What’s your response when out at a restaurant with other people?
JS: My wife and I backpacked in Europe for five months in ’69-’70 and lived often on cheese on baguette sandwiches, so the switch to being a vegetarian was a natural path when we returned to Canada. I became a vegan maybe 35 years ago for the same reason that I didn’t want animals to suffer or die so needlessly because of me. And I try not to sit at a table where dead animals or animal products are being eaten. One of the great ironies of my life is that some of the people I trust most are not vegetarian –at least not yet- and they are otherwise certainly decent and giving people.
VH: You pursued an M.A. in drama. Did you act or did the experience mainly give you a special perspective on theatre?
JS: After my M.A. in Drama, I never got to use it, except as a reviewer and writer about the arts. At one point, I did some acting, even a little Chekhov, and ran the lighting for several productions. Of course, I do all my acting in day to day life, like everyone else, no? That M. A. year, I did have an elective course with Marshall McLuhan and got to know him a bit later when I attended his Monday night sessions at his Centre for Culture and Technology. I think he wrote a letter of reference for my first teaching job.
VH: You are equally adept at talking on a sophisticated level with musicians, singers, actors, directors, and writers. How does that accomplishment make you feel?
JS: As a writer about the arts, it’s my job to explore people and creativity with skill and I have worked hard to be worthy of my subject. Other than the fact that I have to know what I am talking about when I do my interviews, it is a real buzz to have great artists say they had never before thought of what we were discussing. So they too are learning, running with the ball of new discovery. But when I interview someone like Judi Dench or John Banville or Steve Reich or Ravi Shankar or Terry Gilliam or Jeremy Irons or Jonathan Miller, I know I have to be as close to their level -in several ways- as I can. It really was an encouraging inspiration when, after just my first interview, Marcel Marceau told me that my book on creativity was going to be “a very important book.” He thus raised the bar and I had to keep leaping high. He also sent me a letter or two in which he made all sorts of his drawings. One fave story is that an award-winning actress once told me, when I gave her an analysis of her performance, that I was better than her coach. I do plan to coach creative people when these writing projects I’m now finishing are done.
VH: Tell us about your sculpture?
JS: I went through a period of making large welded metal sculptures and of these I created a memorial sculpture to Marshall McLuhan and a memorial sculpture to Glenn Gould. A photo of the latter one can be found on the site of the National Library of Canada.
VH: What was most rewarding about your long career as a college professor?
JS: Education is a big subject and I have strong feelings about the destruction of curiosity and spirit and imagination that we advocate and allow in our schools. One relevant thing, Marshall did tell me once that “the content is the user” and that became my premise in offering a class situation. I leaned more toward students learning than teachers teaching. Students who were into introspection had an interesting time while those who weren’t sometimes hated my class and sometimes hated me, I suspect.
VH: You have received many honors for your contributions to the arts. Which have been the most satisfying and why?
JS: Well, I received the City of Hamilton Arts Award in ’93 when they awarded only one a year, and of course I do note that in my blurbs. But, like many, I find awards of any kind distasteful in how they depict one work as better than another. Apples and oranges, you know. I’ve interviewed hundreds of creative people for three of my books and many of these also hold that awards are arbitrary, driven by chance as much as anything else including ignorance, and ridiculous in how they are determined by tunnel-visioned individuals or irrelevant factors.
VH: I know that your life has seen an uncommon number of deaths. How has that fact affected you?
JS: Each death made me deal with it. Once, when I was interviewed by Peter Gzowski about my book Black, I remember saying that each meaningful death was a test of one’s ‘spiritual knowledge’, and so it is. When my mother died I spent five hours with her open-mouthed corpse in her room, gathering her stuff, writing her obit for the daily paper, feeling numbed out, and that whole experience stays with me. So does sobbing my guts out over cats I’ve loved so much who have died or a friend who won’t be physically present in my life any more. I’ve certainly sobbed while writing obituary poems on a number of occasions. But I didn’t realize, until Peter pointed it out, that I wrote so much about death, even in a book about jazz musicians. Come to think of it, Dexter Gordon’s wife shared a poem I wrote about him when he died with a lot of people, I am told, and I heard she had it read at his memorial. When my friend and collaborator Harold Town died, I read my tribute poem to him on Peter Gzowski’s program and over a hundred people wrote requesting a copy, so that felt comforting to share our loss through a poem. So when you have a death and write about it, you can’t accept bullshit as much as before in writing and, yes, in people.
VH: Care to talk about dealing with long-term illness?
JS: I’ve had daily pain of fibromyalgia for eighteen years and that was an existential experience at the most fundamental level until I learned to choreograph my energies. I’ve covered all this in an article in this blog titled Fibromyalgia and Living with Pain: A Writer’s Account and it can be found at http://jamesstrecker.com/words/?tag=fibromyalgia . Living with pain certainly cut into my productivity as a writer, for a time, and until I learned to control or live with the pain, I had very bad periods just trying to do day to day things. I also went through a period of depression –maybe four years- and often my judgment was preoccupied with pain, which got me into undesirable situations which I should have, as they say, avoided like the plague. But I did learn again to really dive into a book and once again get it to the level I desired. I learned so much, sometimes unpleasant stuff, about myself and others, so thank you pain, you have taught me well. I now try to work out at the gym twice a week and that really lifts my spirits, even if my body then aches for two days. I’ve also enjoyed giving workshops, consulting, and being interviewed again.
VH: What do you do when you get discouraged? And by contrast, what does a good day look like?
JS: Although I have thought seriously about what euthanasia and suicide mean to oneself and the few people who actually do care whether one lives or dies, I also have a strong desire not to fall into any degrees of discouragement and I do have parts of my life that immediately make me happier. I often, when facing a no, find another route that says yes. I’m also learning, finally, not to undermine myself in so many possible ways. Therefore, a good day is the one I’m living. Life interests me and I treat each encounter with another person as a potential for improvisation. Unfortunately, this doesn’t mean that we aren’t part of a really fucked up and destructive species. Some people are obsessed with getting you if you don’t watch out, no matter what all those best-selling life-affirming books say. The truth is that I love living and some people for no reason don’t want me to.
VH: What’s your favorite comfort food?
JS: I’m a vegan and I find brief comfort knowing that my meal hasn’t required a death or abuse of another life.
VH: What are seven essential things that you have learned to be of most value over your lifetime?
JS: Oh, Valerie, you are making me work! Okay…
-To try to be open emotionally, physically, intellectually, and spiritually, but, at the same time –and this is hard- to be discerning.
-To take people for what they are and not for what I want or need them to be. Once, as a guest lecturer, I told a class of journalists the following: “People are full of shit. You are full of shit and I am full of shit and once you understand what that means, you’ll be fine.” At the break, half the class left and half stayed.
-To live in the world but also to live in my heart at the same time. Hard to do.
-Hang out with cats and learn from them until I am, at least briefly, more than just a limited human.
-Buy my wife chocolates or some favorite dessert at the right time.
-Don’t look to others to understand me since what they see is projection.
-Avoid assholes at any cost, although being an asshole has become de rigueur nowadays it seems.
VH: Who have been the five most influential people in your life — and why?
JS:-My wife because through her I find that love can grow richer and wiser over time and she has helped even a tight-ass like yours truly to lighten up a bit
-my parents because, although they came from either a very hard poverty and slave-like working conditions or, on the other hand, emotional abuse, they kept on going with instinctive determination…and they did expose me to much
– Ira Progoff because his Intensive Journal Method gave me a place to articulate and negotiate my way through my inner world…because Ira leaned to evocative and intuitive psychology and not analysis, he helped me to accept life as process with which we had to learn to live
-Marshall McLuhan because, as I said in my tribute poem to him when he died, he “riffed on academia” and thus gave me new dynamic ways of experiencing so many fields of study that other academics made lifeless and restricted….I read most of Marshall’s long, long reading list on so many subjects and some of those books are still with me in some meaningful way
-finally, the next person I meet
VH: Tell us about your cats. Any favorites?
JS. I love our cats and love to look into their eyes face to face and have that profound communication or connection when it happens……Favorites? All of them, of course. Each is an individual with a personal life and a unique inherent value. I talk to them every day and learn from them. I’ve just noticed that our cat Charlie is drinking from my glass of water, by the way.
VH: You once said that your wife, Margaret, takes them in. How long has she been doing that?
JS: Since she took in a stray cat in our first months of marriage and called him Simon. She is now the chairperson of our SPCA board and rescues dozens of cats herself each year, and works with Trap-Neuter-Return to decrease the number of feral cats who freeze outside in winter.
VH: What is the secret for your long marriage?
JS; We want to be together, we care deeply about each other, we try to give each other space, we enjoy each other a lot, we respect each other, we have lived through very difficult periods and got through them, and, I suspect, because in recent years I’m the one who does most of the cooking.
VH: As you age, do you have an urgency to catch up with your projects? Tell us about the creativity book you’ve been working on.
JS: That’s what I’m doing right now. My book on creativity with its 244 persons interviewed is done, my book about learning to write is well into a final edit, my selected poems on animal rights are ready to go, and I am now into a major edit of my collection of new poems and my collection of song lyrics. And get this: I have two ideas for projects as a spinoff from the book on creativity. I want to know what all these projects will finally be, yes.
VH: When I’m gone, what do you hope people remember?
JS: I’m not sure, but I don’t know if I really care. Let’s face it, once you commit to animal rights and to human rights, to human potential as a route to enlightened beings and to the arts as a manifestation of our exquisite creative potential, you realize how deeply ugly in attitude to others some people are, how willfully shallow they are, how indifferent they are as a matter of course to things that matter profoundly to other living beings of any species. Very few people have even the smallest inkling of what another human or any being is about, so if they remember you, you have often become a fiction, too often a self-serving one. Moreover, too many humans just blindly want to win, whatever that means and whatever the cost, and don’t want to be disturbed on their route to that end. Thus, we are now facing extinction because we do not want to know what in sum we really are, we don’t want to change. Meanwhile, the floods and plagues and starvation and heat are lining up to have a word with us, and they certainly have no interest in our illusions of prolonged consequence.
Photo by Pawel Kopczynski
