He has been professor of literature at Collège Montmorency for 15 years, and the author of four collections of poetry, Who arranged?, Domestic gestures, desert and desert fox at Roots and fiction. Winner of the Award for Innovation in Teaching Poetry from the Trois-Rivières International Poetry Festival, Hector Ruiz has been practicing literary wanderings with his students for 10 years.
Really. This word, no doubt, is what he answers when asked if he has noticed the growing interest in poetry among his students since he began teaching. When I started, there was a kind of resistance to reading poetry, because they were [les étudiants et étudiantes] did not feel used. I think now it’s pretty much present in social discourse and on social networks.
Determined, once he came to Cégep, to encourage young people to read and write poetry, he practiced a creative process learned during his master’s degree in literature, which helped him write his thesis, which became his first collection of poetry: the literary wanderer.
We left college and went down to Le Plateau-Mont-Royal, La Petite-Patrie, Mile End, Little Italy … I drew a quadrilateral where they had to disappear within 1h30 and take notes, photos, that help them write a poem. They will see beautiful things, things that will surprise them. When you walk, often, there are memories that emerge.
Exit class, go to town to pick up poetry writing materials, then rehearse the poem in class. Hector Ruiz is convinced that this method makes it possible to obtain additional tools for writing poetry.
If he changes his literary corpus every year because of the excellent production of Quebec poetry, he notices the continued enthusiasm for poets Maude Veilleux, Marie-Andrée Gill and Jonathan Lamy.
Learn French through poetry
By reading the cursed poets at CEGEP Hector Ruiz became interested in poetry. It really hit my imagination. They are able to do something very beautiful in their suffering.
Pastiche sonnets, he began to play with words, a way for him to deepen his study of the French language. At university he discovered Quebec poetry, especially Denis Vanier – who had long been his “god” in poetry -, René Lapierre and Carole David.
As a Poetry Prize judge, he insists that voice is very important, and we hear it from the first line. When you open a suite, you will already hear the voice of the poem or of the poet. Then the rhythm, the speed, and this is also the sequence of images. These are the things that separate a great poem from a great poem.
A real springboard for Canadian writers, the Prix de la création Radio-Canada is open to anyone writing, whether novice or professional. Each year, they award the best stories (story experiences), short stories and unpublished poems submitted to the competition.
Did you write poems? Send us your unpublished texts before May 31, 2022!
Source: Radio-Canada
