George McWhirter: The people's poet

Vancouver’s first Poet Laureate has a twinkle in his eye and a lilt to his tongue. Born in Belfast in 1939, George McWhirter speaks with a gentle Irish brogue that often breaks down into a soft chuckle. Although the list of his publications and awards is as long as the couch he’s sitting on, his demeanor is unassuming, the chuckle an invitation to pause and share in the joke—whether at the wondrous silliness of the world or the wondrous possibilities in words.

As Laureate, McWhirter’s mandate is to George McWhirter sees poetry everywhere
(Eydis Einarsdottir)“raise the status of poetry” in Vancouver—a task to which he is well-suited. As well as being the author of 16 books (and counting), he is also a much-loved professor emeritus of UBC’s Creative Writing Department where he was twice-honoured with prestigious Killam teaching awards during his 35-year career.

McWhirter is a man who sees poetry everywhere and in everyone. “There’s the poetry that calls itself poetry, and then there’s poetry that’s practised everywhere, every day, every time anybody opens their mouth. People just love getting a good phrase, it’s just like a good dirty joke, right? If they hit on a good line, they’ll remember it and use it again and again.”

McWhirter has planned several projects, all participatory, and all centred around the theme of Vancouver streets. People who know McWhirter will recognize the concept as typical of the poet and teacher: a neat and simple hinge linking the role of Laureate to the role of poetry: “simply to identify the nature of things, the same as science does, but in such a way that it recreates the thing itself.”

One of the major projects, which McWhirter describes as a “verse map of the city,” will be an anthology called Streets Vancouver Front & Back. The book will include map illustrations and poems—some pre-existing, some to be solicited—that McWhirter hopes will reflect both the “gorgeously ugly and the gorgeously gorgeous” in Vancouver streets. In addition to the text, CBC radio is looking into creating a number of plug-in points at street corners where people could listen to recordings of the poems.

A website called “Vancouver Verse” will include a featured poet every “issue”, the history of poetry in Vancouver, sidebars on all the city’s various poetry constituencies, and a moderated forum of street poems. Beginning in September, a series of participatory readings will broaden the invitation of the forum, so that people can bring their short poems to read.

Inaugurated at a ceremony in March, McWhirter will be Vancouver’s Laureate for two years. Although writing poems for special occasions isn’t part of his mandate, he has already written two—one to thank Dr. Yosef Wosk for his $100,000 donation to establish the city Laureate and one about the Maritime Museum’s St. Roch. Above is a stanza from his poem for Wosk featuring some of Vancouver’s gorgeous streets.