Hugh Thomas
Biography
Hugh Thomas is a poet and translator currently living in Fredericton, where he teaches mathematics at the University of New Brunswick. He is the author of Mutations (BookThug, 2004) and has poems in the anthology Shift & Switch: New Canadian Poetry (Mercury, 2005) and the magazines dig and This among others.
Poet's Statement
I vaulted over many heavy vices into the ruins, lost my skin for one or a dozen days. I followed the ruins of 1979 til 1991: there is no end to the ruins heavy enough for fiction. Many poets' heads were there, and sticks poked me into the territory of poets who specified being there. Not enough, those phased lectures of miasma given by a mime—I plugged myself directly into the electrical circuit, getting an immediate shock.
The stratagem that sold me the ruins offered drums and furniture, contact with poets leery of bestsellers, literary arms, or—sob!—restaurant meals. We made examinations down the strange mine of pork poetry, grew wings, became curious about the flowering shrub among the ruins of ten maps and the electricity of fish.
These days bauxite quilting is published automatically, while snake material drums squalidly underneath the fountain. I stand in a shower of free automatic books (bones of authors published in other luggage, bones now serving as editors). It's time to leave behind the fairy tale that authors deserve praise for MC-ing automatic publication like unconscious scholars.
I never pretend to be a jail of meaning. I don't worry about the garden path. The garden path is different for every letter, because every letter carries a different weight to the experience of the poem. The poem turns somersaults along the path, despite the tower of texts piled atop one another to deter diversions.
Down the official mines, the emphasis is on the rapid production of wedding poetry. If any poets approach me, I take away their exercises and give them limitations and regrets, so they cannot scream poems of feelings to the first person they meet. I make them get out of the city, discover different ways of concentrating time, then pass through the mines growing ghosts of wheat.
The older of two poems is a short life, like all our names. A poem written in vices, for an aunt, or a ghost of a bicycle, mesmerizing like an opera in falsetto, causes trouble for other poets. The last revision is a glass of water, as the poem leads an assault against the form of a book.
This is a translation of part of an interview Dani Couture conducted with Stuart Ross, which was published in Agulha: Revista de Cultura.
Sample Poem
"Exercise" (pdf)
External Links
Thomas's ENG 356 page
Thomas's University of New Brunswick page
a poem on the This Magazine website
Mutations
Test Recording
24 January 2007
Hugh Thomas (34:36, 33.2 MB, info.)