The Never-Ending Present by Michael Barclay

Author:Michael Barclay
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Tragically Hip, Music, Gord Downie
Publisher: ECW Press
Published: 2018-04-03T04:00:00+00:00

Coke Machine Glow shared a title and a cover design with the book of the same name, which made it appear to be mere merchandising. It did include some lyrics from the album, but also some lyrics that would appear in later songs, and a lot of material from his sketchbooks that he sculpted into poems, with the help of editor Susan Roxborough. Downie wanted to be challenged; he encouraged her to question every line. He admitted that he had to consciously stop hearing musical phrases while looking over his notes. “That can be done by just pulling out a well-placed rhyme,” he said. “Once you do that, the whole thing comes tumbling down and you can reconstruct it.”

Downie had always carried a notebook with him, since he was a kid. “I really do like collecting words, lines, sentences, billboards—it’s happening all the time,” he said. “If you’re listening to conversations, people are doing it all the time: the language they select for the choices they make. It’s fascinating and it’s all kind of beautiful. That’s how you can make the ordinary ecstatic—and the other way around, I suppose.” His bandmates would often say they recognized their own conversations and road observations in Hip lyrics.

Some of the poems in the book Coke Machine Glow, like his lyrics, were written on the road. But he also craved a more disciplined writing practice, working from 10 p.m. to two a.m. every night after his kids went to bed and the house was quiet. “I went to bed grumbling some nights, reluctant other nights,” he said. “I would go over in my mind what constituted a good night or a bad night. I wouldn’t know a seminal moment if it pissed on me, but it became interesting because I’d never really thought about how to feed your head properly.”

His wife and children are present in Coke Machine Glow in ways they are often not in Hip songs. One poem, “L. vs. Al,” finds Downie reading Purdy’s Cariboo Horses while cradling his infant son. Downie often quoted Tess Gallagher, the poet and widow to one of his favourite writers, Raymond Carver; in the introduction to a posthumous Carver collection, she said that poetry was a chance to be ample and grateful to those people dearest to your heart. “I use that as words to live by,” said Downie.

Hugh MacLennan would agree. The author argued that a writer “must feel that he is writing for friends if what he writes is to be good. If he pretends to write only for himself, he lies, or lets his pride deceive him. He must convince himself that a personal relationship exists between himself and individual members of his audience. He must think of those individuals as valuable personally, each a person whose soul is inviolate . . . The greater [literary art] is, the more intimate it is. The more universally it comes to be loved, the more local has been its origin.” That would be advice

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