A.F. Moritz*

A.F. Moritz is one of Canada’s leading poets. He was born in Ohio, and teaches at Victoria College, University of Toronto. He has lived in Toronto since just before his first collection Here (1975) appeared. Since that time he has published 21 further poetry books, including his most recent collection, Great Silent Ballad (2024, Anansi). Three times he has been a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for poetry, and in 2009 he was awarded the Griffin Prize.

In October, I attended a reading Al Moritz shared at King W. Books in Hamilton (along with John Terpsta and Brian Bartlett) where he read exclusively from this new book. Moritz opened with “Dead Skunk in the Road”, a poem reviewer Colin Carberry says, “makes it clear that he knows that life does not end at death, and those who believe that it does are forced to bear the burden of their erroneous belief.”

In an interview, from the time when Sparrow: Selected Poems appeared, Moritz spoke of his interactions with various poets, particularly Gerard Manley Hopkins and John Ashbury, in fine-tuning his world view and his expression of it. He said:
----“In dark times, poetry has to be under the sign of hope. And with
----hope, thinking is really from the end, not the beginning. It's
----realizing that the always possible beginning is the permanent,
----if hidden, presence of the good end in every moment. 'Origin'
----really means not so much any past but the fact that, in a time
----of evil and hope, the structure of existence is this: a beginning
----toward the good that is always possible and always needing to be
----made possible again.”

He underlined these thoughts with lines from Hopkins’s poem “God’s Grandeur” — which he says he always keeps before him — a poem of hope that acknowledges “man’s smudge” but declares “nature is never spent”.

The following poem is from Great Silent Ballad.

The Gift

I’ve long given up the dream
of having something to do
with the coming of the good kingdom.
Just let it be coming and let me live
over to one side
and then when it arrives let me live
in one of its rooms off one of its alleys.
It will be plenty simply finally
not to fear my own filth, the puzzle
of the whereabouts of food, the rain
of muddy plaster spheres always falling
a little late, mirroring beneath my ceiling
the pure rain after it starts hitting
the porous tar above. It will be plenty
not to meet, whenever I go out, the random
knives into my eye on the sidewalks,
the random onset of blindness, the lying
waiting to be scraped up. Plenty
not to feel the noise of the sirens
screeching nearer as relief. It will be plenty
and undeserved just to be alone
and the least known beneficiary.

Posted with permission of the poet.

*This is the second Kingdom Poets post about A.F. Moritz: first post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of five poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Cascade) ― a book of poems written from the point-of-view of angels. His books are available through Wipf & Stock.

A.F. Moritz

A.F. Moritz has authored more than twenty poetry collections, including Rest on the Flight into Egypt (1999, Brick Books), The Sparrow: Selected Poems (2018, Ananasi) and As Far As You Know (2020, Anansi). From March 2019 until May of 2023 he served as Poet Laureate of Toronto. He teaches Creative Writing at the University of Toronto, and in 2009 he received the Griffin Poetry Prize.

When CBC Radio asked him why he writes poetry, and why it is significant, he spoke of his childhood journey with poetry, and continued,
-----"As I got a little older, I realized and prized that I’d been
-----fascinated by poetry from much earlier, from well before I could
-----read. I connected Poe and the other poetry I soon was reading to
-----the poetry I had heard, from nursery rhymes adults read me out of
-----books, to children’s traditional street and play rhymes, to the
-----Catholic liturgy which, of course, contains some of the world’s
-----great poetry. For instance, I can remember clearly that the
-----suffering servant song of Isaiah was both searing and dear to me
-----from before my ability to read, probably from a couple of years
-----before, although times are impossible to recall precisely in that
-----period of life just emerging from the childhood amnesia. Anyway,
-----this poem has always remained as a chief basis of my work, as
-----something that I remember constantly, and probably don’t have to
-----'remember': by now it simply is me. So too with the psalms, passages
-----of Paul, and the like."

The following poem is from his collection The New Measures (2012, Anansi).

The Grand Narrative

The waters of the pool were troubled
each day, but only at the certain hour,
evening, when the angel entered―
when light, newly reaching
the beginning of its fading,
was most powerful, least dazzling, wholly
absorbed in colors. The water
cured every sickness in the first who touched it
and the blind man stretched out close by
and no one ever told him
the turbulence had come and the city
was darkened, the end had passed
but not yet fallen. No one
so much as kicked him so he tipped
into the boiling, into the seeming
the flat dusty pond was about to be
a fountain. Teacher, he shouted once,
when he heard the teacher had come,
there’s no one to carry me to the pool,
and the man answered him: Here
Here is an inexhaustible
troubling. It’s yours now. You can
see and walk. Remember me
next time you’re lame, blind, gnarled,
stuck in anemia or filth. Enter
the memory and see
the world shine
hating you, filling you
with beasts and birds, trees and flowers,
the growing distant
gabble of many friends, and walk
to unjust death in this city, this
happiness of living and moving again.

Posted with permission of the poet.

This post was suggested by my friend Burl Horniachek.

This is the first Kingdom Poets post about A.F. Moritz: second post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of five poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Cascade) ― a book of poems written from the point-of-view of angels. His books are available through Wipf & Stock.