Writing Life

The first thing Katherine ever wrote was a poem in the manner of Marjorie Pickthall’s “Père Lalement,” at the age of 13. It was frightful. But it opened the floodgates. Her first publication was in the Catholic periodical The Prairie Messenger at age 17, and that poem too was frightful. However, none of this juvenile frightfulness deterred her from teaching herself to write in particular, to write poetry.

She has published three collections of poetry, While You Were Out, Turnstone Press (Winnipeg) 1981, Heart and Stone, Turnstone, 1989 and Singing Bone, Muses’ Company (Montreal) 1997.

A fourth collection “Walking Through Fire” is currently under construction.

While You Were Out

“While You Were Out” is a tough-minded and wide-ranging collection of poems distinguished by its original and often disturbing imagery.”
(Canadian Literature #94, 1982)

“While You Were Out” is a good introduction to a strong new talent.” (NeWest Review, April 1982)

Heart and Stone

“This is a striking book in every way, from the unusual cover designed by David Morrow to the cosmic tone of the poetry – a book that can be read repeatedly for something new.”
(Sheila Martindale, Canadian Book Review Annual, 1989)

“Bitney’s poems seem like fresh breezes directing us to look beyond science for answers.”
(Dorothy I. Court, Freelance, Dec-Jan 1989-90)

“She has a knack for parking the unexpected in spaces reserved for the expected.”
(Grant Buday, Calgary Sun, July 13, 1989)

“It is refreshing to find a cosmic lyricist out in the prairies …Ms. Bitney is a sure winner on the playing fields of the muse.”
(Joe Rosenblatt, back cover, Heart and Stone)

Singing Bone

“Bitney returns to the poet’s role as shaman, as maker: she is a fashioner of myths, an explorer of cosmologies. It’s easy to trust a voice like that: it holds your hand and takes you down those garden paths. The sights Bitney shows along the way are well worth the trip.”
(NeWest Review, April-May, 1999)

“Singing Bone” reminds us that the creative use of language can itself offer ways of seeing and imagining our relationship with the world.”
(Canadian Literature 161-162, Summer/Autumn, 1999)

“In Katharine Bitney’s work, it is more than ‘art,’ it is the universe itself which ‘aspires to the condition of music.’ Hers is not a poetry of mere surfaces, but of ‘inner geometry,’ ‘old fugues equations’ in a mathematics of beauty. Hers is a visionary poetry where to gather around the women’s fire is not to stop at the hearth, but to rise to the holy.”
(Mary Di Michele, back cover, Singing Bone)

Philosophy of Writing and Learning to Write

Katherine learned to write by reading and mimicking other poets’ styles. Someone gave her a Palgrave’s Golden Treasury when she was in her late teens, and she practiced every poetic form she found there, especially sonnets. This taught her how to make language work in confined spaces, how to be economical with words.

It also taught her that we learn, gratefully, from those who have gone before us. To this day she advises would-be writers to read deeply in the genre they wish to write in. All writing is of course derivative. But it is also unique to the individual, in language and imagery, shape and content, insight and perspective.

One never stops learning to write. The conjunction of language and the world in the imagination of the writer is perpetually in creative motion. It is always expanding and reconfiguring, always in a process of discovery and expression.

Writing can be about anything. What makes a piece noticeable is a uniqueness of insight, or a turn of phrase that makes one’s heart leap.

Katherine believes that a felicitous convergence of form and substance is what makes good writing. Language is a sort of partner in this enterprise of writing, albeit one which is always itself evolving, in part because the writer is working with it. Language does not stand still, any more than the minds of writers stand still.

People often ask her how she writes. Does she write every day? Where do her ideas come from? How do poems start? No she doesn’t write poems everyday. No she doesn’t write at any particular time of day.

Poems can start anywhere: in a chunk of “stream of consciousness” writing, a phrase that pops into her head, admiration of beauty, experience of pain, an anecdote. A movie. Music. Tarot cards. An internal philosophical argument. Science. All these can find their way to the place of passionate poetic engagement, and out comes language in poetic form. Writing does not start “nowhere,” it starts everywhere, and it is, always, about something.