Sharon Thesen reads from The Beginning of the Long Dash ms in ENGL 205 (1986)

Sharon Thesen class visit, reading from The Beginning of the Long Dash ms, Nov 14 86, ENGL 205 (full recording).

On 14 November 1986, Sharon Thesen reads from the manuscript version of what will later be published as The Beginning of the Long Dash (1987), at the time, titled The Landlord’s Flowerbeds. The context is a class visit to Warren Tallman’s ENGL 205 students at UBC in Vancouver and the sound of Thesen writing with chalk on the blackboard is occasionally audible, situating the event clearly in a pedagogical space. She reads the following poems: “Over the Holidays”; “Lady’s Advice”; “New Years”; “The Same Trophy”; “Woman Reading”; “Tangling the Day”; “Nucleus Vibrating”; “Raid”; “Chrysanthenum Perfume”; “Marine Life 1970”; “The Moon, trembling in a light haze a few feet over the east end”; and “Hi ho.”

Thesen intersperses her readings with light introductions to most of the poems, shedding light on her compositional process and offering insights about the ways she defines poetry. A few particularly salient quotations include her stating that “this is what poetry does. Poetry is the only place where all the disparate things of the world, of the universe, and of the cosmos can come together in this way. They can’t come together that way in prose, only in poetry and that’s why poetry is about the soul, always.” About her process, she describes that “experience doesn’t trigger the poem, [it is] my feeling about the experience […] When I sit down to write, I’m just kind of in a mood.”

This is a generous reading, both in terms of Thesen sharing in-progress work with students and in terms of providing insights into how she writes.

—Klara du Plessis