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Questions and Answers
What inspired “Watching Them”?
It was based on an actual incident as I was traveling on a city bus, which made me think about the idea of “them” and “us” and the notion of self-awareness.
What poetic techniques did you use in “Watching Them”?
I used a reaching-for-words technique, a sort of not-being-able to-quite-say-what-I-meant, as opposed to the more direct way of talking to each other that the girl in the mauve-flowered dress and Donnie use. They call out to each other—not worrying about what anyone else thinks, whereas the “we” of the poem, the other riders on the bus, sit “locked” in their separate skulls.
This poem “Watching Them” originally appeared in Background, Foreground. Spec. issue of Canadian Literature 127 (Winter 1990): 29-29.
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