SOURCE: Birney, Earle with Caroline Bayard and Jack David. “An Interview with Earle Birney.” In Out-Posts, Caroline Bayard and Jack David, pp. 108-21. Don Mills, Ontario, Canada: Press Porcépic Ltd., 1978.

In the following interview from 1976, Birney talks with Bayard and David about the development of his experimental and visual approach to the writing of poetry.

Earle Birney was born in Calgary in 1904 and grew up on farms in the Rockies. For two years after high school, he worked at a variety of jobs before enrolling at the University of British Columbia in 1922. Encouraged by Garnett Sedgewick to pursue literary studies, Birney paid his academic dues with an M.A. (1927) and Ph.D. (1936), concluding with a long thesis on “Chaucer's Irony.” Although Birney had written poetry since he was a teenager, it was not until 1942 that his first collection was published, David and Other Poems. He has spent...