Poet, musician, and multiple-time Pushcart Award Nominee, Bruce McRae, discusses his favorite part about writing, inspirations, and his two poems, “And Other Matters” and “Great Minds and I,” selected for publication in our first issue, Paremphasis.
Jessica York
Take a moment and think about all of the places you’ve lived, the color of the paint on the walls, the size of the windows and rooms, your favorite and least favorite part of that space. Now, think about doing that one hundred times. That is the well-travelled experience of author, poet, and musician Bruce McRae.
McRae is a multiple-year nominee for the Pushcart award and has written over 12,000 poems, of which 2,000 are published both by himself and through other publications. As a musician, McRae has also had his poems set to instrumental music that has been played in the UK, Canada, Australia, and America.
McRae said, “I believe these two disciplines [music and poetry] employ different parts of the brain in different ways at different times.”
McRae said his favorite part about writing is doing so in the early morning with that first cup of coffee. He writes seven days a week, every morning, regardless of whether the work gets published or ends up being what he calls a “throwaway.”
McRae draws inspiration from a variety of sources, like other poets, poems, books he is reading, people he knows, memories, news, dreams, science, history, and more. His poem,“And Other Matters,” selected for publication in Paremphasis, draws on the concept of death.
McRae said, “Not to be flip, but life after death, what else is there? I’m 71, so yeah, Death! I know a lot of dead people, and the list is getting longer every day.”
In “And Other Matters,” McRae said it is about the narrator being stuck in a rut and his beloved being encouraging. In the poem, she works to help him diversify his approach to writing, stay away from the morbidity of life, and focus on something hopeful and joyful when the narrator’s mindset is limiting his field of view.
His other selected poem, “Great Minds and I,” on the other hand, talks about a narrator too wrapped up in his seemingly ordinary life to take to any of the wisdom of ancient philosophers. McRae said that he “loves quotations, epigrams, and pithy sayings…” and that the quotations he chose for this poem are for their wry wisdom, especially Archimedes: “Give me a place to stand and I will move the Earth.”
In this poem, the narrator goes on to talk about a compass and a straight edge and how with the two, he will move the world. For him, McRae said:
“[his] compass is a draughtsman’s compass, not the North/South kind, and the straight edge is a ruler, more a take on Archimedes’ quote about ‘give me a lever and I can move the world’. At my age, sticking to basics and leaving people to get on with it is my philosophy, however brief. I rule over ‘me’, and that’s about the long and short of it.”
McRae’s recent publication, Boxing in the Bone Orchard, was published by Frontenac House and is a collection of poems written over the span of 20 years: https://www.frontenachouse.com/product/boxing-in-the-bone-orchard/
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