“Writers were dead and English, or else extremely elderly and American; they were not sixteen years old and Canadian.”
“I don’t think biographies of living people should be written. I am not dead yet. Oddly enough, you can’t stop anyone from writing a biography of you.”
“For a while there, you were made to feel that, if a poet and female, you could not really be serious about it unless you’d made at least one suicide attempt. So I felt I was running out of time.”
“This first book of poems was called The Circle Game; I designed the cover myself, using stick-on dots– we were very cost-effective in those days — and to everyone’s surprise, especially mine, it won a prize called The Governor General’s Award, which in Canada was the big one to win.”
“Being born at the beginning of the war gave me a substratum of anxiety and dread to draw on, which is very useful to a poet. It also meant that I was malnourished. This is why I am short. If it hadn’t been for food rationing, I would have been six feet tall.”