Harold Rhenisch

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Burnaby, B.C., 1975

 
 
Inglewood, Upper Keremeos, 1970

Harold Rhenisch lives in the Cariboo country, the high volcanic plateau between the Thompson and Fraser rivers that drain theBritish Columbia Interior. Rhenisch's poetry explores the land on which he lives and where he grew up in an immigrant culture developing orchards and vineyards in the fertile Okanagan Valley. In the juxtaposition of new European cultures and an ancient land, Rhenisch sees again the Kenya of the 1920s portrayed by Karen Blixen in Out of Africa. After waiting in vain for a V.S. Naipaul to write of the colonial plantation cultures of the Okanagan, Rhenisch turned his sense of the land into a vehicle capable of speaking for a complex contemporary world: the autobiographical fiction of Out of the Interior: The Lost Country.

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For nearly
   thirty years, Rhenisch has striven to create an authentic
   literature for the silent rural parts of Canada, to place their
   images and dialects on an equal footing with those of the modern
   urban world. At the same time, he has been a student of Ezra
   Pound, post-modern German literature and trickster mythology. His
   prose work, Tom Thomson's Shack, re-envisions Canada from
   the viewpoint of life on the land. For Rhenisch, the work of
   starting a new literature is paramount, centred in the workings of
   consciousness and mythology.













   

      
         
Harold
            Rhenisch was born three months early, in a blizzard, on
            January 5, 1958, and grew up on an orchard in Cawston, in
            B.C.'s Similkameen Valley, the second son of German
            immigrant Hans Rhenisch and second generation Canadian
            Dorothy Leipe. He started writing poetry when he was 15,
            under the dramatist Bill Greenland. He attended the
            University of Victoria Creative Writing Department from
            1976-1980, where he studied with Charles Lillard, Derk
            Wynand, P.K. Page, W.D. Valgardson, Dave Godfrey, and
            Robin Skelton. He married Diane Dalgaard in 1981. They
            have two daughters (Anassa, b. 1985, and Leandra, b.
            1991). From 1981-1992 Rhenisch worked in the vineyards
            and orchards of the Okanagan and the Similkameen,
            eventually running his own pruning, grafting, and nursery
            business. In 1992 he moved to the Cariboo plateau where
            there is no pruning, grafting, or nursery business at
            all. In 1984 Rhenisch learned classical Greek. In 1987 he
            learned German. Since 1986, has travelled four times to
            Germany and Western Europe. His discovery there of
            family, language, and history has had a profound effect
            on his writing, moving him from poetry about the land
            into poetry opening that land-sense into history and
            imagination. He has passions for new music, concrete
            verse, satyric verse, mythology, gnosticism, trickster
            mythology, the theatre, and poetics. He currently lives
            in 150 Mile House.

      		
      
         

         
         
150 Mile
         House, December 2004

      		
   



 




   
   

   
   

      

         
            

            
            
150 Mile
            House, 2004

         		
         
            
Rhenisch
            has been an arts columnist for the 100 Mile Free Press
            and in 1996 won the B.C. and Yukon Community Newspaper
            Association Award for Best Arts and Culture Writing. In
            1980, the University of Victoria awarded him the Rosalind
            Hewlett Petch Memorial Prize in Creative Writing, and he
            won Arc Magazine's first (1991) Confederation Poetry
            Prize, as well as their 2003 prizes for best long review
            of poetry and for poem of the year. He has given many
            lectures on poetry at the University of British Columbia
            and Simon Fraser University, and has conducted workshops
            for teachers and elementary and secondary school students
            throughout the British Columbia Interior. In 1996 he was
            writer in residence at Douglas College in New
            Westminster, and in 2003 and 2004 taught at the Victoria
            School of Writing. He has been the education chair and
            communication chair of the League of Canadian Poets and
            has worked as a member of the B.C. Ministry of Education
            Fine Arts Curriculum Overview Team. He actively mentors
            writers from across North America.

         		
      

   

    



 



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