With Riding the Pig, the third volume in the author’s autobiographical “notes on poetics” series, Mike Doyle celebrates his 70th year in literature. Doyle’s taste, rooted in the twin pillars of Yeats and Williams, has always been eclectic, his interests ranging from East European masters to French symbolists to Latin American poetry. Doyle has always hewn his own path, however, and in this volume, he renders sharp consideration of his contemporaries such as Robin Skelton, P.K. Page, and others, as well as a balanced assessment of writers who resonate deeply, such as Katherine Mansfield, Richard Aldington, H.D., Karl Stead and Basil Bunting. Riding the Pig is a personal book — challenging, often contrarian, but sustaining a firm commitment to poetry.

Like most poets whose work began so far back, my earlier poems are more obviously formal than later ones. Although I took pains at a certain stage to loosen these forms and even escape from them, as I look back I rejoice in them, glad I was there for it to happen. Then, many later poems are formal in a more covert fashion, and that too I rejoice in. It took me a long while to ‘grow up’ as a poet, but since that happened, and gratifyingly often before it happened, what tends to characterize my poems is momentum, a kind of momentum in which the experience of the poem is very present even though its material and/or subject may be memory. An earlier poet saw the poem as ‘a slice of life seen through a temperament’. That seems right, if one adds that surprisingly often there is a mysterious element in the perception. From the Foreword by Mike DoyleMike Doyle is a poet, critic, biographer and editor. His other work includes William Carlos Williams and the American Poem (1982), Richard Aldington: A Biography (1989), Paper Trombones (2007), a journal of his life as a poet in Canada, and Intimate Absences (1993), a “Selected Poems” from work up to that date. He has also published critical essays on Williams, Wallace Stevens, H.D., Irving Layton, Al Purdy and others. He has received a UNESCO Creative Artist’s Fellowship, an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, a Jessie Mackay (PEN) Award for Poetry. He wrote his book on Williams while a Research Fellow of American Studies at Yale University.

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