Features

June

2004

 

Barbara K. Adamski | features @otherpress.ca

 

 

 

 

Interview with Rhea Tregebov

Barbara K. Adamski
Features Editor

 

Faith and patience—qualities of charac-
ter, not talent—are essential to a poet,
according to Toronto's Rhea Tregebov.
She is sitting in a hotel room on the
bank of the Fraser River, the white cur-
tain billowing through the open window
with the cool early-March breeze.
Tregebov is in New Westminster, BC,
where she is spending a whirlwind week
as Writer-in-Residence at Douglas
College.

She elaborates on her theory, saying,
“Faith that the bad will lead to the good;

 

 

faith that the inarticulate will become
articulate. Patience to take the time to
gain the skills, techniques, and aspects of
the craft that you need. Patience to
accept the setbacks that inevitably come,
and to live with the successes, which in
themselves can be a challenge.”

To gain these essential skills, Tregebov
suggests writing, even if the result is
something that is not so great: “writing
things that you're going to have to be sat-
isfied with. It’s actually labour the way
any other skill is labour. You learn to
write good poems by writing not-so-
good poems. There's no way around it,
no matter how talented you are.”

She then recommends getting feed-
back and thinks one of the best ways to
obtain that is through workshopping,

whereby a group of writers get together
and exchange poetry and ideas and cri-
tique each other's work. “It’s not poetry
if it’s not shared,” she says. “The whole
purpose is communication.”

Tregebov, herself; wasn’t always open
to the idea of feedback and revision. “At
first it seemed like such an odd thing to
do,” she says of the revision process.
“Sort of like baking a cake and then un-
baking the cake.”

Winnipeg-raised Tregebov first
became interested in poetry when she
was in junior high school. She continued
writing through high school, “with the

notion that it’s something I like to do,

Douglas students, “because they seemed
so lofty and above us.” Reading William
Carlos Williams in her first year at the
University of Manitoba was a revelation.
“Tt was a big inspiration to realize that I
could use a language I was familiar with
to write poetry,” says Tregebov, who
wanted a language that was natural
rather than artificial or high-arts sound-
ing. She wanted to “get away from an
elevated diction.”

With several books of poetry and edit-
ed anthologies to her credit, Tregebov
has attained a certain level of success,
although she sometimes appears reluc-
tant to admit it. “I think I stumbled into

“It's not poetry if it’s not shared.

The whole purpose

is communication. ”

Rhea Tregebov

not as a career.” It wasn't until university
and her first creative writing workshop,
however, that she looked at writing poet-
ry as actual work, as a career path. The
workshop itself was a mix of poetry and
prose, but Tregebov had a preference for
poetry. “It was my natural bent,” she
says. “I was more interested in the lan-
guage than I was in the story, for the
longest time.”

Tregebov says that the very first poetic
influence for her was the Old Testament
in Hebrew. “Those rhythms, and that
sense of language—the shared mystery
and magic of language” appealed to her.

Other early influences were Eliot and
Yeats, although they seemed to be “more
of an impediment to writing than an
encouragement,” as she told a class of

it,” she says, adding that at one point her
career aspiration was “to grow up to be a
good person.” Admirable, perhaps, “but
it doesn’t necessarily pay the rent,” she
says. “Many, many good people can’t pay
the rent.”

Tregebov is very encouraged by the
young people she sees who know writing
poetry is what they want to do and pur-
sue that goal. “I kept sort of hoping that
if I kept writing, maybe things would be
good in kind of a big way,” she says,
adding that she doesn’t recommend her
particular method of achieving success.

She laughs, however, when she realizes
that, in the end, it has all worked out in
“kind of a big way, ” and says, “It took
me maybe a little bit longer than it

should have.”

 

 

 

 

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