All summer long, our columnists set out to meet personalities who inspire them. To discuss what, in life, motivates us, gives us wings, pushes us to create or act. During a walk on Mount Royal, Chantal Guy talks with the poet Hélène Dorion, a celebrated “monument” in France.
Even after talking to hundreds of writers in my life, that magic has never faded: I retain a deep admiration for those who devote their lives to writing, which is certainly one of the most solitary forms of creation.
Especially women, who have long been forbidden an intellectual and inner life – reread A room of one’s own by Virginia Woolf to remind us of this – without forgetting that in Quebec, it is not easy to make a living from your pen, even less so if you choose the path of poetry.
“I don’t think you choose poetry,” says Hélène Dorion, as we walk the trails of Mount Royal. “My relationship with language was poetic from the start, and that’s what made me start writing poetry. What I liked was feeling that words were something other than a corridor of meaning, that this material had an opacity that poetry keeps moving, even in the simplest of poems. Either we experience it in discomfort, or we experience it in wonder or curiosity, and that’s where the reader enters or resists. Yes, there is a beautiful opacity in poetry that, when it doesn’t scare us, reveals the intimate nature of words.”
PHOTO ROBERT SKINNER, THE PRESS
The work of the poet Hélène Dorion includes around thirty books.
Hélène Dorion met me at her small studio that she rents in downtown Montreal, where she hangs out when she is not in her favorite place, her writing studio in Orford, surrounded by forest. Here, she has a breathtaking view of the teeming city. We then went for a walk on the mountain, her favorite place in Montreal.
Although she is very associated with nature, which she celebrates in her work, she emphasizes that she also needs urbanity, and must sometimes remind people that she is not a follower of Thoreau, like a hermit in the woods. “I am as much at home in the city as in the forest,” she emphasizes. “From my first books, I felt that we were beings stretched between extremes, and that we should not choose, but embrace.”
How do we make extremes coexist? For me, that’s the big question of life and of being human. For example, how do we make kindness coexist with, at the same time, all the relational violence that exists?
Helen Dorion
Hélène Dorion has published some thirty books in 40 years of writing, which have earned her an impressive number of awards and honours in Quebec, France and elsewhere. Most recently, she received the Grand Prix de poésie de l’Académie française, after having just received the insignia of the Ordre des arts et des lettres du Québec. The cherry on the cake: she is one of the personalities who will enter the Little Illustrated Larousse.
But what is most talked about is the fact that she is the first living poet whose book, My forestspublished in 2021, is included in the French baccalaureate. It’s huge, and it required him to go on a long three-month tour of France, where his latest novel was released at the same time, Not even the sound of a river. She finds it a bit funny that she is presented in French classes as a monument. “You have to understand their relationship to that, their parents all studied dead writers!”
PHOTO ROBERT SKINNER, THE PRESS
His collection My forests is now registered for the French baccalaureate.
In truth, I have never seen a poet have a prime minister’s schedule like Hélène Dorion, who spends a lot of time between France and Quebec. How does she herself experience the admiration she arouses?
“First, there is a lot of gratitude because I know how many artists there are on Earth. But I don’t lose sight of the little human being that I am. It hasn’t changed anything inside me, maybe because it happens at a time when it doesn’t change anything, which is great. I wouldn’t like it to change anything, I don’t think it’s healthy, but it’s certain that this recognition gives momentum.”
And this momentum was born in 1983 with the publication of his first collection, The extended interval. “As soon as I opened the box of books and saw my name on the cover, I knew this was going to be my life,” she recalls.
I really had the shock of words as a living material, which linked us to the world, like the body. My two bridges are the body and language.
Helen Dorion
Hélène Dorion could have become a philosopher, because it was in philosophy that she first studied, but for her, knowledge comes more through the senses than through concepts, and it is in art that she found the foundation of her existence, a bit like the narrator in Not even the sound of a river. “When I discovered literature, it gave my life added meaning, a foundation and a connection that I quickly felt were indestructible. Literature gave me that from the start.”
And not just literature, but all forms of art, because her inspirations, and her admirations, are innumerable – did she not write a four-handed opera with her friend Marie-Claire Blais in homage to Marguerite Yourcenar? Nevertheless, her very first admiration as a child was for astronauts, because her father had bought the film of Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the Moon, which he watched over and over again. “That’s when I discovered that there was a world outside our world.”
In the margins of his collection My forestsshe suggests a list of pieces of music and I highly recommend this experience of entering into Dorion’s words with this soundtrack (I loved it).
Listen to the soundtrack
“I think that when you are a writer, musician or painter, you are a creator. I define myself as a creator,” she sums up.
Of course, as a creator, she admires other writers and artists, but can one have a similar feeling of admiration for nature? “I really admire it,” she replies, convinced. “Since I left Quebec a long time ago to go and live with nature – I prefer to say “with” rather than “in”. It’s really a learning process. It’s as if reading nature is really reading life, it will tell me what I have to do, how to clear my own path.”
What do I admire in trees? Time. The patience of trees. They are the greatest confines of the Earth. What does the tree have to teach me that I do not yet know? Everything can be a reason for inspiration or even admiration.
Helen Dorion
PHOTO ROBERT SKINNER, THE PRESS
Hélène Dorion defines herself as a creator.
Perhaps it is because we no longer admire nature, our noses glued to our phones in the hustle and bustle of cities, that we allow it to be ravaged and destroyed. Out of sight, out of mind. “I completely agree. I think we protect what we love and we love what we are connected to, necessarily. To know is to be amazed, and to be amazed is to love.”
When people ask what we can do to protect nature, I deeply believe that art, literature and poetry have something to say about it. I feel like the world is not doing very well because this link, to time, to nature, is cut.
Helen Dorion
Poetry is perhaps wanting to patiently sew together a world in tatters, ultimately, word by word.
Sources of inspiration
“I was probably drawn to the philosophers and writers who were closest to my questions,” says Hélène Dorion. “The pre-Socratics and then Aristotle, for example. The work of Hermann Hesse was very important to me. Saint-Denys Garneau and Anne Hébert. I think the books that shaped me are the books that contain initiatory stories. What is it to live? That was the question I entered philosophy with and it’s probably the question I entered literature with.”
What do you think? Express your opinion