Jonathan Ball's Blog, page 53

Counting Words in a Spreadsheet (or, The Sexiest Blog Post Ever)

One of my favourite writing tools is a spreadsheet created by Jamie Raintree, which tracks word counts by date across various projects. Raintree gives away the spreadsheet for free when you e-mail her and/or sign up for her newsletter: visit her website for more information.

Why track your progress?

Maybe you don’t care how many words you write in a year. I don’t, really, in my heart. I want to complete projects, not deposit words in some metaphorical bank account. I want to write down some good words, not just any words.

Paradoxically, counting words helps. Knowing you wrote 367 words doesn’t tell you whether the writing was any good, but it does tell you one thing: that you wrote 367 words. If you write 846 words the following day, then that doesn’t tell you if you are making the most of your years or wasting your life. However, it does tell you that you wrote two days in a row, and that you can write over 1000 words of draft work in two days.

This kind of information is useful if, say, you are trying to schedule some writing work. If you’ve never written more than 3000 words in one week in the last eight months, then you should say “no” to that request to craft a 4000-word essay by the weekend. If you never manage to write on Mondays due to your teaching load that day, then maybe you should give up trying to write on Mondays. Schedule some time to write on Tuesdays (if, say, you notice you always write twice as much on Tuesdays for some reason) and stop feeling guilty and stressed-out about your busy Mondays.

Once in a while I have a horrible, depressing day, when I am exhausted and everything feels like a slog. On those days, sometimes I force myself to write even though I wonder why. I rack up 1000 words and then quit in total depression about how terrible everything went and how I wasted my time writing a thousand garbage words. Then, the next day, when I read them over I see they aren’t so bad. I was just exhausted and depressed. If I didn’t have an artificial, meaningless goal (like writing 1000 words that day) — if my goal was more subjective, like doing some good work — then I would have just quit and gotten nowhere.

Counting words is nice because it is an objective, quantifiable, non-emotional way to track your writing progress. Numbers can be crunched and analyzed in a way that your subject-to-change feelings about what you wrote cannot.

How I Count Words

A word is a word, right? After I started using this spreadsheet, I decided that I needed some way to count three special cases:

words I revised or rewrote, which I felt should count for less
words in poems — which are very few, but which I felt should count for more
my “Haiku Horoscopes,” which is column of twelve tiny poems, and just generally weird

I decided on the following schema:

1 written word = 1 word
2 revised words = 1 word
1 page of poetry = 250 words (a revised page = 125 words)
1 “Haiku Horoscopes” column (which runs two pages) = 250 words
Communication (e.g., e-mail) or other non-project writing = 0 words
Extent of revisions is irrelevant
“Stolen” words (e.g., in conceptual poetry) are not counted any differently (e.g., 1 word stolen = 1 word written)

I then decided to set two goals or quotas:

250,000 words per year
5,000 words per week

I chose these numbers semi-randomly. The logic behind the choices was that I could write a 50,000-word manuscript and rewrite it 5 times, plus write another 75,000 words on various smaller projects.

Also, I could take two weeks off. Additionally, on a busy day, I could decide not to write without causing myself undue anxiety (as long as I tried to make it up over the course of the week and/or the year).

I also thought this was an average that would be ambitious enough to produce meaningful results, but within the realm of possibility. (I guessed that I probably wrote more than this in a good year already, although since I didn’t count words I didn’t know.)

Analyzing the Data

2014 was the first year I used this spreadsheet, and frankly I kept forgetting. I can tell just by looking at the spreadsheet that it is completely inaccurate. For example, I did a lot of work on a book of short stories called The Lightning of Possible Storms, but the spreadsheet says I wrote less than 3000 words for this project.

Basically, I kept forgetting to input my work. Even so, the spreadsheet reports that I wrote 173,516 words.

In a year that felt like it kept getting away from me, one that just seemed to get more busy and more stressful, it was a great help, from time to time, to be able to step back and look over this spreadsheet. Despite feeling like I was losing my mind and accomplishing nothing, when I was stressed out I could relax a bit since I had an objective measure of having accomplished quite a bit of writing.

At the same time, I can see that I squandered a lot of time working on too many projects. If I had simply focused all of my effort on a single project, and all those words were in one place rather than spread around the writing world, then I could have easily completed another book this year. (Technically, I did complete a book this year — Why Poetry Sucks — but if I had been more focused I could have finished The Lightning of Possible Storms as well.)

Almost 40,000 of my “words” were devoted to “Other” — since I don’t even know what the hell I was writing, this couldn’t have been a priority — and yet random “Other” things was apparently my secondary focus this year.

Do I need to write a book each year? No. Should I have done things differently? In this case, yes, because I wanted to complete that short story book — and apparently I could have, simply by turning down other work. (And spending less time writing posts like this one!) Sometimes you have the luxury of turning down work, and sometimes you don’t, but keeping tabs on yourself can help you make informed decisions and see what trade-offs you are making.

By tracking how you work, you can analyze how you work, and you can make changes going forward if it feels necessary. Even misusing Raintree’s spreadsheet in 2014 helped me calm down, keep moving forward, and make better plans for the new year.

Guy Maddin on The Forbidden Room and Writing Melodrama

Guy Maddin, Winnipeg’s own living film legend, kindly answered some of my questions about writing melodrama and his latest feature film, The Forbidden Room, which will have its world premiere at Sundance next month. Here’s the Sundance summary for you:

“The Forbidden Room” (Canada) (Directors: Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, Screenwriters: Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, Robert Kotyk) — A submarine crew, a feared pack of forest bandits, a famous surgeon and a battalion of child soldiers all get more than they bargained for as they wend their way toward progressive ideas on life and love. Cast: Geraldine Chaplin, Caroline Dhavernas, Roy Dupuis, Udo Kier, Charlotte Rampling, Karine Vanasse.

Those unfamiliar with Maddin’s work should rethink their life choices — I will simply note that, since completing his first film in 1985, Guy Maddin has produced one of the most fascinating and unique bodies of work in film history, in addition to developing a substantial career as an installation artist and author. In 2012, he was appointed to the Order of Canada, which is the country’s highest civilian honour.

I’ve previously interviewed Maddin and his usual screenwriting partner, George Toles, and also written about my visit to the set of his film The Saddest Music in the World (where I met Isabella Rossellini!) — so you may want to check out those posts when you’re finished with this one.

You should also check out the “living poster” for The Forbidden Room as well!

What can you tell me about your forthcoming feature film, The Forbidden Room?

The Forbidden Room, my 11th feature, was just completed and will have its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in January of 2015. It is blessed with some of my favourite actors: Roy Dupuis, Mathieu Amalric, Udo Kier, Charlotte Rampling, Geraldine Chaplin, Maria de Medeiros, Adele Haenel, Sophie Desmarais, Ariane Labed, Jacques Nolot, fantastic newcomer Clara Furey (who is such a star!), and of course my longstanding muse, Louis Negin, WHO HAS NEVER BEEN BETTER.

It was shot entirely in the studio, or in many small studios, but, strangely, in public studios, over three weeks at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and another three weeks at the Centre PHI in Montreal, where any visitor to those institutions could simply walk up and watch us shoot, watch the movie’s stars act, at very close range.

I think this is by far the best picture I’ve ever made. (I hope I’m right.) It was so strange to script a movie that would be shot in public, that would make sense to the public on any given day, and then later still make sense all pieced together in one coherent feature. And the movie is in fullest, fuller-than-full colour — more colourful than any other movie ever made. How’s that, you ask? I’m feeling very proud now, like I’ve finally figured it all out, this filmmaking business. Of course I had a lot of help from wonderful collaborators.

What is the connection between The Forbidden Room and your ongoing Seances project?

Well, they were both shot in public in Paris and Montreal, but there are big differences between the two. While The Forbidden Room is a feature film with its own separate story and stars, Seances will be an interactive Internet project, something that anyone online can visit and play with. It’s produced by the sexy new incarnation of The National Film Board of Canada. I never thought I’d use the word sexy to describe the NFB, but it’s so amazing now.

The Seances interactive will launch in 2015, shortly after The Forbidden Room is released. I’ll describe the workings of Seances next interview, closer to launch date. I can say that the museum installation in which we shot all our footage was called Spiritismes in Paris, and Seances in Montreal, but Seances is the final and only title now.

It’s a place — a dark place! — where anyone online can hold “séances” with the spirits of cinema, lost and forgotten cinema. The Seances project has really evolved in recent months. It was going to be title-for-title remakes of specific lost films, but we found as we went that the spirits of many other lost movies, and the spirit of loss in general, haunted our sets and demanded to be represented in front of our cameras.

I’m really excited about the results. No one knows, in spite of what might have been previously reported on Wikipedia and even in earlier interviews with me, what’s finally going to launch (I must keep it under my chapeau for now), but I feel we have something original on our hands — all this boasting, I’m so sorry! I’m not usually like this.

But Noah Cowan, back when he was one of the directors at the Toronto International Film Festival, told me he didn’t think it was possible to make art on the Internet. That comment, from my dear friend, whom I owe $60 by the way, reminded me of what people said about cinema when it was starting out, when the moviolas and kinetoscopes were considered artless novelties, so I felt the challenge to do this, to make Internet art, to really reach everyone out there online who might be inclined to like my stuff.

So while I shot the two projects at the same time, and under the same lost cinema spell, The Forbidden Room and Seances are two distinct entities, on two distinct platforms.

How did the writing process for The Forbidden Room and the Seances project differ from your previous films?

Since the beginning I’d always written with my best friend, George Toles. When I started this project, lost film was a pet obsession of mine. I started the writing process alone, way back in 2010. I had no idea where I wanted it to go. I just knew I wanted to adapt as short films a bunch of long lost feature films — if only to finally get to watch some facsimile of a movie otherwise inaccessible.

Almost every director whose career straddles the silent/talkie era has a number of lost films on his or her filmography. Some poor directors have lost entire bodies of work, though they aren’t alive any more to grieve over this. I wanted to shoot my own versions, as if I were reinterpreting holy texts, and present them to the world anew as reverent and irreverent glosses on the missing originals. I hired a former student of mine, Evan Johnson, as my research assistant, and he got into the project so much that he soon became my screenwriting partner. He brought on his friend Bob Kotyk to help, and soon the three of us got a lovely writing chemistry going.

It helped that they were young and unemployed and had all the time in the world and little interest in money. Because the project soon got very large. Every day we discovered more and more fascinating things about lost cinema, every day the conceptual tenets of the interactive and the feature evolved, became complicated, tangled themselves up in our ardent thoughts, and then suddenly became simple. It was kind of a miracle the way we figured it all out, whatever “it” is!

Evan started to surpass me in critical and conceptual thinking. I wasn’t jealous, just grateful. I asked George back to join us, but I know I had hurt his feelings by starting up without him. Thank God we remain friends. My wife Kim Morgan and I wrote three days worth of shooting material as well — that was a blast. And even the great great GREAT American poet John Ashbery chipped in with an enormous contribution, a screenwriting and literary event that gave me gooseflesh of awe and soiled shorts — shat drawers of awe.

At one point, if I remember correctly, you were planning to shoot the Seances films Factory-style, in a Warhol-like process. How and why did you abandon that idea? 

Well, I never really abandoned the Seances. They were called Hauntings back in 2010, when I first took a stab at shooting adaptations of lost films, but once completed these were to be installation loops rather than short films. I did complete eleven of them for Noah Cowan, who installed them as projections for the opening of his Bell Lightbox Building, the nerve centre of TIFF. I deputized a bunch of talented young filmmakers I had met in my travels to shoot these Hauntings in a “Factory” situation.

My writing partner Evan Johnson ran the movie manufacturing plant under the job description Hauntings Coordinator. Our production designer, Galen Johnson, made him a business card that read:

His job was to keep churning out movies with a team of filmmakers of wildly disparate styles and talents, hired to direct a bunch of films all at once, all in the same room. This was a chaotic situation. I think before this Evan’s biggest professional responsibility had been pouring toxic detergent into Rug Doctor machines. But he kept this wild affair going for a few weeks while I directed Keyhole.

It was genuinely surreal watching all those silent films get shot, sometimes as many as six at a time, a row-upon-row productivity resembling, I imagine, those porn factories of urban legend. Ah, silent film, post-dubbed porn! I really wish we’d made our Hauntings Factory into the setting of a reality show. It looked and sounded so eerie, hearing almost nothing, while each in its own little circle of light a half dozen films made themselves in an otherwise dark room. We were going to shoot a lot of titles — a hundred! — but we were underprepared and definitely underfinanced, so we aborted the project after we had finished enough movies for Noah.

Evan was stripped of his Hauntings Coordinator epaulettes — disgraced! But shortly after he became my full partner on these new projects. He is my co-director on both The Forbidden Room and the Seances. His brilliant brother Galen came on as my new production designer for these projects as well. He’s such a stunning graphic artist that I found new joy in writing text for the films — intertitles in deepest purple!

What more can you tell me about your writing process for The Forbidden Room and how it differed from your process on previous films?

It was pretty much the same as with George. We found ideas we liked, argued and wrote. I really like to collaborate. I can’t write alone. I’m amazed I can even answer these questions alone.

What are your current plans for the Seances website/app?

The technicians at the NFB have cooked up some incredibly cinematic doodads for this super-sophisticated app. When all the kinks are worked out, which will be sometime early in the new year, movies will be watched in ways that perhaps the chestnutty old metaphors of cinema long ago ordained movies should be watched, in ways that surpass mere streaming, something more haunted, like ghost or soul streaming!

You’re a writer, but as a filmmaker you also work with and hire other writers. What do you look for in a writer?

I don’t have that much experience working with other writers, just George, Bob, Evan, Kim and Ashbery. Each is his or her own person, with incredible strengths, and, of course, varying sensibilities and sensitivities. I’m very good at inadvertently hurting people’s feelings, so that’s always a concern, but collaborators need to give each other the benefit of the doubt. Saving feelings MUST come second to the work at hand.

I guess with John Ashbery we just let him do whatever he wanted to do because I revere him so much, and what he delivered was so gorgeous. So I guess I look for bright, funny and gracious souls. And I like hard workers because I can be very lazy. The ambitious shame me into working harder. Sometimes they even have to nag me. I never have to nag them.

Psychological realism still holds sway, tyrannically, even amongst writers and filmmakers that are not otherwise interested in realism, but you consciously work to create melodramatic characters and situations. Mostly, writers work to avoid melodrama — Why write melodrama?

I think it’s easier to achieve psychological realism with melodramatic methods. Think of the psychological plausibility, or truth, in the greatest old fairy tales, the Bible, in Euripides, in a Joan Crawford or Barbara Stanwyck film, in Expressionist painting — in cave painting! There is every bit as much truth in these works as in all of Chekov, and more than in a security camera feed.

And surface realism does not guarantee psychological truth. I think it merely misleads the viewer into thinking he beholds reality, when in fact the story beneath the surface might be very dishonest. I’ve always defined melodrama as the truth uninhibited, liberated, not the truth exaggerated as most people feel. I just watched John Waters’ Female Trouble — not realistic at all on the surface, but pure truth to its toxically melodramatic core.

What ruins melodrama? What should a writer of melodrama work to avoid? 

Same thing that ruins all bad art, I guess: charmless dishonesty. There can be horrible melodrama too. I don’t like all of it. I just adore it when it’s done well. It feels more universal. I like all sorts of narrative genres, I don’t limit my tastes to one brushstroke.

I’m a bit puzzled by people who eschew all melodrama. Don’t they realize they’re watching it in almost everything they view? Especially in reality television, which is usually, but not always, bad melodrama, but also in the straightest most “realistic” movies. There melodrama thrives in disguise.

Isn’t all art the truth uninhibited to some degree? Sure, some art is the truth mystified, but honesty is usually exposed in some, sometimes inscrutable, way.

What is the key to writing strong melodrama?

I’m not sure, we’re still trying to do it. I would imagine even the great screenwriters and directors would admit it’s different each time out, that sometimes it works and other times merely dullness results.

I remember having lunch together and you saying that you hoped to one day write a book — at the time you’d just published your second book. You still talk often of wanting to write a book (even though you’ve now published three). To what degree do you think of yourself as a writer, or perhaps as a struggling writer, and what you can tell me about your approach to writing? 

I am always going to be an aspiring writer, just as I’m an aspiring filmmaker. I don’t mean this to sound like false modesty; many people would agree with the “aspiring” part. I just think it’s the best attitude to have.

And, yes, I dream of someday writing a book, a really slender book, with a double-spaced novella inside. I think if I keep on learning, and get lucky, I just might have one in me. Probably just one.

Daniel Scott Tysdal on Writing Exercises and The Writing Moment

I had the pleasure of interviewing Daniel Scott Tysdal about writing exercises and his book The Writing Moment: A Practical Guide to Creating Poems.

If memory serves (and it usually does not), I met Daniel Scott Tysdal when he submitted a chapbook manuscript to my micropress, The Martian Press. I loved and published the book, Acts of Barbarity and Vandalism, poems produced through the erasure of texts relating to genocide, in 2006.

That same year saw the publication of Tysdal’s debut collection, Predicting the Next Big Advertising Breakthrough Using a Potentially Dangerous Method. This book remains one of the most impressive debuts by a Canadian author, in my view, and solidified my admiration for Tysdal and his work.

Now Tysdal has teamed up with Oxford UP to produce the best book on writing poetry I have ever seen, and the only book on the craft of writing poetry that I recommend. From the preface:

“The second assumption about the creative process upon which this book is founded derives from the first assumption: if poems arise out of a convergence of occasions, then the best way to teach the tools, techniques, and traditions of poetry is to immerse poets in the complex blend of occasions that characterizes the act of writing. This immersion is an effective way to encourage poets to write poems that — to honour the root of the word “verse” — turn, unfold dynamically with ingenuity, imagination, and skill. The following chapters accomplish this immersive introduction to craft by pairing my thoughts on a topic with a series of practical, hands-on writing moments.

“These writing moments are micro-writing exercises that invite you to try your hand at the topic under discussion. I call these short exercises writing moments because of the helpful double meaning of moment. These writing moments are “moments” because they will only take a short time to complete and because, when you undertake them, you will be “having a moment,” experiencing a break from the day-to-day that may already be common practice for you: turning—from a dinner table conversation or from an obligation at work or from a mindless stroll—to your notebook to scribble down the line or the form or the vision that just struck you.

“The writing moments have been designed with two goals in mind. The first goal is to immerse you in this meeting of life and art, this convergence of occasions, by coupling active practice with abstract explanation; as is the case with all poets, your reading process will also become your writing process. The second is to initiate you into the two extreme poles of the poetic practice: the work—the writing routine, the daily grind, the practice that becomes a habit—and the invigorating experience of inspiration—the burst of insight or feeling with which a poem so often begins (and the experience that can transform the writing habit into an addiction). Writing moments take place within the purview of both of these poles, nurturing your habit and stimulating you to compose new work.

“Each section also ends with a number of writing exercises and a pair of sample poems composed by some of the many talented students with whom I have had the good fortune to work. The writing exercises will give you the opportunity to further expand on the work undertaken during the writing moments, encouraging you to test out the new lessons and techniques as you compose new poems.” (xiv-xv)

Daniel Scott Tysdal is the author of three books of poetry, Fauxccasional Poems (forthcoming from Icehouse, 2015), The Mourner’s Book of Albums (Tightrope, 2010), and Predicting the Next Big Advertising Breakthrough Using a Potentially Dangerous Method (Coteau, 2006). Predicting received the ReLit Award for Poetry (2007) and the Anne Szumigalski Poetry Award (2006). Oxford University Press published his poetry textbook, The Writing Moment: A Practical Guide to Creating Poems (2014). He is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Toronto Scarborough. In 2012, the UTSC student newspaper, The Underground, named him one of their four “Professors of the Year.”

You Should Quit (including a translation of “Catullus 85”)

Every once in a while, people complain to me that they just cannot get their writing done. They feel they have too many other commitments. They feel blocked. They feel uninspired. They feel depressed as a result, or anxious.

I tell them they should quit.

They should quit. I have too many commitments. I feel blocked. I feel uninspired. I almost always feel (sub-clinically) depressed or anxious.What’s the difference between us?

It isn’t that I am any better than them. I’m not. I just can’t quit.

There is not a moral difference. This is not a Puritan screed on the ethics of work. If I could quit, I probably would. If you can, you probably should. Why? Because nobody wants you to write.

No one wants you to write

Your family doesn’t. You friends don’t. They might talk a lot about how they love your writing, or how they support you, and they might even be telling their version of the truth. But really, everyone loves what you have written — not your process of writing — and would probably prefer that you quit, whether they recognize or admit this or not.

Everyone that loves you supports your happiness, when your writing probably makes you miserable on some level, at least some of the time. Of course, most people don’t love us. Your boss doesn’t want you to write (even if your boss tells you to write, s/he wants you to get it over with, now). Your bank certainly doesn’t. Your lover, however much s/he loves your writing, would love you more if you quit and made a gift of that time.

Writing is a bad career choice (except when it is a part of a non-writing career — in which case, it often elevates you and gains you glory in that other field). Even writers who claim to love writing will admit that it is often a source of constant frustration and mental strife. Writing takes physical tolls on your body due to the inactivity it requires in long stretches, in poor positions. Writing isolates you socially. Writing isn’t respected culturally.

So why don’t people quit writing?

Most writers, of course, do quit. We all know writers who quit, either one-book wonders that claim to be writers but never really seem to write anything, or who actually admit to having quit, or (more commonly, perhaps) secret writers that secretly harboured ambitions we aren’t aware of, and that secretly quit. Often, in your family, if you dig you will turn over a relative who at one point “tried to write” but quit.

One of the standard questions I ask in my 8-Ball interviews is “Why don’t you quit?” Almost every answer to the question is a variation of “I can’t” due to either stubbornness or compulsion. In the minority are answers that express actual pleasure in writing, or that see writing as useful in some way.

My favourite response is by Sina Queyras: “Why would I quit? I don’t understand that question.” Although Queyras is negating and turning against the question, in a sense she sums up the idea that I’m trying to express here: there is something in some writers that doesn’t understand quitting as a viable option. Is it strength of character, or a character flaw?

If I could quit, I might. But here’s what happens when I don’t write. I can’t sleep. I can’t focus. Ideas for writing jam up in my head. I hate whatever I’m engaged in doing (with very few exceptions, like spending time with certain people), because I feel like there’s something more important I should be doing. I feel like I’m wasting my time and I can’t enjoy anything. When I write, even a little, then I feel better and I can enjoy myself again in my off time.

Despite this, of course, I still harbour some “(lapsed) Catholic guilt” about writing — either I feel bad for not writing or I feel bad for writing. Under these circumstances, quitting makes sense.

Is the writing more important than other things? I would like to think so, but I’m a nihilist at heart. Even without being nihilistic, you could argue that clearly, in many cases, it’s not. If anything has value, it’s clear that in various ways writing has value — which doesn’t mean it is more valuable that other things you could be doing.

I don’t even like writing that much! This is a trend I’ve noticed among writers. Many often enjoy having written but hate the process. Personally, I am process-oriented, and find the process fascinating and rewarding. But that’s not the same as liking it. It’s hard work and it isn’t fun. But if I don’t do it, then it throws my life into chaos and disorder and fills me with anxiety. (Probably, I should seek out a psychiatrist rather than a pen.)

So why write? Again, I find writing and the writing process rewarding, even if I don’t enjoy it. Not everything that is important and valuable is fun. But how important and how valuable is it? Why write? This isn’t an easy question to answer, and I don’t have a good answer.

My Best Answer

My best answer takes the form of a poem by Catullus. Let’s misread it (in my own, loose translation) to imagine he is writing about writing itself:

I hate and love. You may ask why.

I ask also. Then it happens and destroys me.

What I like about this misreading of “Catullus 85” is that writing is typified as an event — in a sense close to how I like to read Badiou’s conception of an event: as an intervention that disrupts and alters being, which creates some (provisional, temporary) truth.

This isn’t the moment for arguments about Badiou, but simply to note that the destructiveness of the “event of writing,” the disruptive potential of art (its conceptual violence), is the thing that attracts me to writing in the first place. At its best, I see writing as a method of destroying ideas in and about the world. I would be worried if I started to enjoy it more fully. I would suspect my motives or suspect the work.

You might be different. What happens when you don’t write? How do you feel? If you can get through life without writing, then maybe you should quit. There are no great rewards from writing unless the process itself rewards you, holds value for you, and creates its own meaning.

If you aren’t getting any writing done, then there’s nothing wrong with you. And if there’s nothing wrong with you, then you should probably quit while you still can. On the other hand, if you want to become a monster, you should write.

You might do well to become a monster. A monster threatens normality. A monster therefore has radical potential, as does a writer. If you are looking for a great way to destroy your life, then writing is for you! Destroying your life might be the very value of the process. Turning yourself over to the work, to its event, which demands transformation in fidelity to its truth.

Standards and Best Practices for Poetry

1. Check Your Poetry Shelf Life

Ensure your poetry is fresh by checking the “Best By” date on your book or page of immortal poetry.

2. Make Sure Your Materials Are Clean

To get the most out of your poetry experience, poets recommend that you use a clean page every time.

3. Cook Your Poetry to “Sound”

Because tastes vary, always write your poetry to “sound” — and listen to the pop to know when to stop.

4. Maximize Taste

To maximize taste, shake contents of poem before pouring onto page. This will help coat the poetry with insight. To maximize epiphanies, be sure to edit the poem immediately after writing.

5. Store Your Poetry for Freshness

Store poetry in a cool place such as a bookshelf out of direct sunlight. Avoid the refrigerator. Some say the cold storage makes the poetry better, but many refrigerators contain little moisture and can dry out metaphors. Always keep your poem ideas sealed in the original black notebook until you’re ready to begin writing.

My Screenwriting Workflow

Sometimes I’m asked about my workflow for screenwriting — what software I use, and so forth. Although I have tried many combinations, at present I just use and recommend two programs: Scrivener (where I do ALL of my writing) and Highland.

(From time to time, I also use the Notes application on my iPad or iPhone, but then I dump that into Scrivener.)

The nutshell is that I plan and write everything in Scrivener and then output it to Highland to polish and format. The details are below, including a bit of my history with other software and other ways of working.

Final Draft

I first began screenwriting while studying under (the co-screenwriter of many movies) at the University of Manitoba, in the early 2000s. I met David Navratil in that class, and somehow we ended up getting hired as screenwriting partners by Joseph Novak, to write some samurai movies.

We were “hired” for very little money, but nevertheless were hired, and wrote four feature-length films for Joe. All of the films were based on his story ideas, which we then developed and reworked.

The first of these scripts, Son of the Storm, captured the interest of a Hollywood producer and also the actor . However, the story was too similar to Tom Cruise’s movie The Last Samurai, and the main character (like Cruise’s, a white foreigner) wasn’t a role for Hiroyuki-Tagawa.

So, we wrote a second feature called Way of the Samurai. This script secured the “attachment” of Hiroyuki-Tagawa, but ultimately didn’t find funding. We wrote two more features, which had samurai elements but were more modern in their settings: Yakuza and Samurai on 47th. Then we more or less stopped writing samurai films.

Joe later ended up taking Way of the Samurai and reworking the script as a western, then shot the feature as a micro-budgeted independent film called Snake River. That’s how we ended up with a very strange credit, to the effect that the screenplay of Snake River was based on a screenplay that we wrote.

All of these movies were written in Final Draft. Thus began my love-hate affair with Final Draft. At the time, there were no real competitors for Final Draft. The very expensive Final Draft. (Although I have always paid either a student or an educator rate, rather than the full rate, it’s a pricey program even at these discounts.)

At the time, Final Draft was pricey but a godsend. I wrote many other things in Final Draft, including my M.A. thesis (a screenplay called The Sandman). However, as the years passed, and I purchased subsequent editions of Final Draft, I noticed that the program seemed to be getting worse and worse. I also noticed that it had garnered some serious competitors.

Other Programs

I have tried many other screenwriting programs over the years (I forget most of them) but the only viable competitor in my view was CeltX. Still, my affair with CeltX was fairly brief. At the time, it was a good program, but very much a poor man’s Final Draft.

Now, it has blossomed into a much more impressive flower. CeltX is an online software system and also offers a host of desktop software. Generally speaking, CeltX is also much less expensive than Final Draft, although it is now also a subscription service and so could easily cost much more, since it has been restructured as your monthly “screenwriting bill.”

While I don’t have extensive experience with CeltX, every now and again over the years I decide to try out its newer incarnation. I start using it, and then find myself drifting back to Final Draft. The Final Draft app, which is much more reasonably priced, was my preference for a while.

I also tried out a host of other programs. For a long time, I was writing mostly in SuperNotecard and SuperNotecard for Scriptwriting.

For a while I was addicted to StorySkeleton. This was in a period where I had a desktop PC and a PC laptop, but found myself doing most of my writing on my iPad.

What kept driving me from program to program (and also, in my non-screenwriting writing, driving me away from Word) was a simple goal: I wanted to get away from writing linearly. All of my books had been struggles to write, in part because of how non-linearly I work in my creative process, and I was finding screenplays harder to write as well. Then I discovered Scrivener.

Scrivener

Scrivener changed my entire writing life. I now write everything in Scrivener, and proselytize annoyingly to everyone about how they should write everything in Scrivener. I’m going to make a point to not talk forever about Scrivener in this post, but it’s important to note that Scrivener comes with a screenwriting template.

I do all my screenwriting in Scrivener now, but I don’t use any of its screenwriting functions, or this template. You could, however.

Scrivener is in many ways the perfect program, but it has two weaknesses. One, it’s difficult to learn. There’s an incredible online course that simplifies the process of learning Scrivener and I highly recommend it. The course is well worth the cost for all the time and frustration it will save you, and all the power of Scrivener that it will help you unlock. When you know how to use Scrivener, you can use it for almost everything, including writing screenplays.

(Two, it’s not great for working with an editor, when you arrive at the point where you are trading files. For this, for various depressing reasons, we are still stuck with Microsoft Word.)

However, I don’t use any of Scrivener’s screenplay functions. Instead, I write in Scrivener using something called Fountain syntax (it’s simpler than it sounds) and then export the text to Highland, which formats it like a screenplay. I then export out of Highland to whatever file format I need.

This process is much simpler than it sounds. It’s the simplest process I’ve found, and the least expensive. Here’s a more detailed look at how I work on scripts.

My Screenwriting Workflow

Plug research into Scrivener.

Scrivener was initially developed to write novels and dissertations and one of its great strengths is that it allows you to hold all of your research materials in the same program as your actual writing. As a result, it allows a seamless flow between writing and consulting your research.

Every time I have to consult research materials as I write, I kick myself because I wrote five books without Scrivener (well, more like ten books … I don’t publish everything I write) and at least as many screenplays.

My method of writing is very non-linear, and so without Scrivener I was working in a super-inefficient manner, wasting months and months of time fighting to get my software to do what I wanted. I want to stab my past self for not switching to Scrivener sooner.

Plan out the story’s core structure in Scrivener’s index card view.

In the past, I used actual index cards, or a separate program, to map out and develop the story. Scrivener has an outstanding index card view that I will write about another day, which is especially useful in the planning and editing processes.

The great power of Scrivener, as I’ve mentioned, is how it encourages non-linear writing. You can jump between making notes, shuffling index cards, and writing actual scenes of the script easily. I will map the story structure using these cards, which (in other views) also contain all my notes for each scene and my drafts of the actual script as well.

Write in Scrivener using Fountain syntax.

This sounds much more complicated than it is. Fountain syntax is basically a way of writing that a software program (like Highland) can read. You can find a lot of information about Fountain here.

All you really need to understand is this basic concept: when you write a certain way, a program like Highland can “read” it. Let’s imagine that I wrote this (the screenshot is from Highland, but I could write this in any program — usually I’ll use Scrivener):

We move on to our next step:

Highland

Export the text to Highland. All I do here is copy and paste the text from Scrivener to Highland. Then I save the file. Then, I press one button — this one:

Then Highland automatically reformats the text in proper screenplay format, like this:

That’s right. It takes this program a single click to reformat the above (Fountain syntax) text as a screenplay.

I do all my editing before this point. Basically, I only use a screenwriting program (Highland) when I’m ready to do a final pass/polish. If necessary, I make a slight modification or two in Highland (you just switch between the two views, of your text and your formatted text).

You could, of course, just write in Highland. If you like to write more linearly, Highland is perfect for you — you can write in the editor view where you don’t have to worry at all about your format, and then just click to the formatted view anytime you want to see how things look. You don’t have to worry about anything other than writing. The program automatically does all the formatting for you.

When I work with shorter scripts, or test scenes, I often just write directly in Highland. Due to its minimalist design and clean, intuitive interface, it’s the least complex and as a result the best and most enjoyable screenwriting program (yes, the emphasis in Highland is on writing — not on formatting or other non-essential tinkering).

I have to offer one caveat about Highland, however: it does not, currently, work well for writing multicam TV. This is because there are too many TV formats for (mostly) comedies, and although there is something approximating a “multicam format” there really is nothing in TV writing that is “standard” format.

Many TV dramas and single-cam shows just use a mild variation of standard screenplay format, so Highland works great for almost everything. But if you want to write a spec script for The Big Bang Theory then Highland isn’t for you, although the software’s developer (screenwriter John August — best known for writing various Tim Burton films) told me that they “will try to do multicam” in the future, so I expect this to become a nonissue.

(Since I’m working on a feature film project for the next while, and made the PC to Mac switch recently, I am currently without Final Draft. My hope is that this issue is resolved before it matters to me, so I can stick entirely with Scrivener+Highland for screenwriting rather than buying a Mac version of Final Draft or having to find another third program.)

Incidentally, this is why Highland is a great program, outside of how inexpensive it is compared to other programs. It was literally designed by a screenwriter for screenwriters. It’s easy to use. It’s streamlined and pretty. But most importantly, it contains nothing that you don’t absolutely need.

Export from Highland.

Highland easily exports out as various file types, so a few clicks are really all you need to pull your text from any program whatsoever (I use Scrivener, but you could use Word or even plain text on your phone) and reflow it all in standard screenplay format.

Here are the main benefits of this workflow:

Its stripped-down simplicity. I worry this all sounds complicated, just because I’m explaining in some detail. In fact, this is the easiest, most stripped-down, straightforward screenwriting process I’ve discovered since I started screenwriting in the early 2000s. It takes me less than 30 seconds to take my unformatted text from Scrivener and pump a perfectly formatted file out of Highland.

I don’t worry about formatting while I write. The most “formatting” you have to do when writing with the Fountain syntax is to hit shift, or enter, or add an asterisk … sometimes. Another core element of Scrivener is that it separates what you write from how it outputs the writing. You can write in a totally messed up way, with various fonts (twenty fonts per paragraph) or whatever serves your purposes, and then have the program normalize to one font when you output the text. I won’t go into details about that, but I will note that the idea behind using Fountain syntax, Scrivener, and a program like Highland is the same. You focus on writing — not formatting — and instead relegate all your formatting (and its time-sucking hellishness) to the very end of the project, when you let the software do the work.

I can write in any program. I’m using Scrivener, but I don’t have to. I could write right in Highland, and sometimes do. I could write in my iPhone/iPad/Macbook “Notes” app, and sometimes do. I could write in Word (without playing around with margins, or ever hitting the Tab key) or any other text editor. I could email scenes to myself. As long as I use the Fountain syntax (which is extremely simple), I can use any text editor. This is how I make serious writing progress while riding the bus. I write scenes or snippets of scenes on my iPhone or iPad, then copy/paste those notes into Scrivener (I could skip the Scrivener step if I wanted). Then later on it all gets pasted into Highland. I don’t have to do anything fancy, just copy/paste — the software does all the formatting conversions.

I can work as non-linearly as I want. I value being able to write any part of the script at any moment. Scrivener helps me hold and (re-)organize all these fragments into a whole, and Highland does my conversions. If you like writing linearly, you could just use Highland (or a similar program) and skip Scrivener. I love Highland’s minimalism, because Scrivener has all the complexity I need to write anything. I just don’t want to fight with Scrivener’s outputs to create a screenplay format, because in some ways Scrivener is too complex for screenwriting. I just dump my text into Highland and let it do all the formatting work for me rather than clicking a bunch of settings in Scrivener, or even bothering to learn how.

That’s my screenwriting workflow — let me know in the comments below if you recommend other programs, or other ways of working, or if you have any questions or advice.

Introduction to Tony Burgess’s The Bewdley Mayhem

A while back, I was teaching my favourite zombie novel, Pontypool Changes Everything by Tony Burgess, so I decided to scour the library database for essays on Burgess or the book. I located precisely one reliable essay, which was mostly about Max Brooks’s excellent World War Z but partly about Pontypool Changes Everything. This sort of critical neglect is criminal, in my view, since Burgess is easily (no contest) the most fascinating and radical of Canadian novelists.

My one hope was a book called The Bewdley Mayhem, the only Burgess book I did not already own. I was surprised to have missed it, but noticed that it was a republication of three books I already owned anyway (Burgess’s first three novels), which possibly explained my neglect. I thought it might have a critical preface that I could use, so I placed an interlibrary loan for the title.

Soon, the library cancelled my request, noting that the book had not yet been published. Not long after, Burgess himself contacted me — to ask me to write an introduction for the book. That’s how I ended up writing the critical preface that only weeks before I had been trying to find and read. A strange example of the dictum that you should “write the book you want to read but can’t find.”

ECW has just published The Bewdley Mayhem by Tony Burgess, which is an incredible deal: $20 for a 700+ page compendium of three full books by Tony Burgess, including the short fiction collection The Hellmouths of Bewdley, the most radical zombie novel ever written, Pontypool Changes Everything (which was the basis for the very different, also Burgess-penned Bruce McDonald film Pontypool), and Caesarea, the strangest novel about small-town Canadian life you’ll ever find — something like David Lynch rewriting Stephen Leacock. And, of course, my introduction: which ECW has graciously allowed me to reproduce here, for your enjoyment.

THE BOOKS THAT SHOULD NOT BE: A PREFACE

What do you need to know to read Tony Burgess? The answer — “nothing” — is deceptive. While you do not need to know anything special to enjoy Burgess’s poetic horror, at the same time it would be better if you knew nothing of the conventions of horror, and of literature and the novel, and made a virtue of not knowing. Then, you might stop tilting at windmills and give up your mad quest to understand. In Pontypool, Bruce McDonald’s film adaptation of Pontypool Changes Everything, Grant Mazzy is able to combat the zombie virus once he realizes that the act of understanding is dangerous. Understanding allows the Pontypool virus to move from the word it has infected into the mind and body of a human host. Not only does understanding the infected word grant the idea of the virus some pseudo-reality, the impulse to understand operates as an attempt to enforce reality, to impose upon it some structure and stability. However, what most unites the books of The Bewdley Mayhem is the instability Burgess insists upon throughout the trilogy: in the world he presents, in the characters that people it, and in his style.

Not to say that Burgess’s fiction lacks logic or structure. Caesarea, at a glance, displays apparent incoherence in its plot, and, due to Burgess’s surrealistic approach to storytelling, often results in the exhilarating feeling that he is making it up and proceeding without a plan or without shape, or perhaps cutting it up in the manner of William S. Burroughs. On closer inspection, however, the novel does conform in clear and even conventional ways to the shape that a more normative literary novel might take. The book begins with Ed, who doodles a crude circle onto paper. Somehow, this circle becomes an airplane, which at the same time is the town of Caesarea. At the novel’s end, we return to Ed, who has been absent for most of the intervening story. Ed is now trapped within a Caesarea that, again, is somehow an image on paper (like, of course, Caesarea the book). Caesarea performs this sort of mirroring often and focuses much of its horror on the figure of the double (like Burgess’s zombies-that-aren’t-quite-zombies, his doubles both conform to and subvert the conventions surrounding how this monster appears in horror). Although Caesarea’s doubles recall those of the Nicolas Roeg film Don’t Look Now, they seem closer to those of John Carpenter’s The Thing, wherein creatures that the Thing has copied do not seem conscious of being the Thing. In this way, both the doubles of Carpenter and of Burgess seem controlled by some “thing” inside of them but outside of their consciousness, the way that Freud’s unconscious (an “uncanny double” of a different stripe) and the Pontypool virus both operate.

The Bewdley Mayhem, unlike most conventional trilogies, seems to cohere mainly through such distorted mirroring. The trilogy opens (in The Hellmouths of Bewdley) with an awakening, a character opening his eyes, and ends in Caesarea with another character closing his eyes. The books also cohere (if they cohere) through the repetition of story elements, or even the odd consistency of Burgess’s otherwise inconsistent style, rather than through a narrative arc. Focusing on Dr. Mendez, who appears throughout the novels yet is always relegated to a supporting role, helps us to see what sort of logic governs The Bewdley Mayhem. Mendez dies in a snowmobile accident in the second story of The Hellmouths of Bewdley, but appears in its later stories, and then is present throughout Pontypool Changes Everything. He returns again in Caesarea, where the fact of his death in a snowmobile accident is repeated in a way that seems to undercut the reality of his appearance earlier in the novel, and by extension in the previous novel. Mendez’s character, whose recurrent presence belies the fact that his actions have little narrative consequence, works like a stitch, suturing the books and supporting the idea that they constitute a trilogy. At the same time, his continuing presence (beyond apparent death) undercuts the reality of the scenes that include Mendez and muddies or defeats attempts to untangle the scenes from the trilogy and slot them into any sort of chronological order. (We might say these scenes with Mendez simply take place before his death, but this seems neither clear nor necessary given the instability of Burgess’s fictional world.) As if underlining Mendez’s potential phantasmic status in scenes that might precede, but might also follow, his death, the inscription on his tombstone states that his body walks still in the night.

As a character, Mendez also challenges the conventional manner of depicting characters in fiction. Almost midway through Caesarea, he shows a younger man (a patient of sorts) an oil painting he has made of the title character from Roger Corman’s The Wasp Woman. Mendez explains his impulse to paint her:

*I wondered what the Wasp Woman did when she wasn’t buzzing around apartments. So this is what? I think that she is here alone, in a pretty garden, at night. But she’s walking perfectly. And she knows that she is entirely made up. A character in a movie — a very good movie, but still a picture. So she can never stop being herself, not even for a second, not even while she is alone.

Here we have a character in a story meditating on the situation of being a character in a story and the horror of that situation. What Mendez presents as horrible, however, is not what we would expect (the fact of being fictional), but the stability of it all. Being a character in a story is horrific because story conventions insist on the consistent nature of characters. They must “be themselves,” conform to their characterization, even when alone — because, of course, they are never alone. The audience, the reader, holds them always in the trap of its gaze.

Burgess oscillates between at least two positions in his approach to characters. On one hand, he allows his characters the apparent freedom to escape this gaze and be someone else, due to the unstable nature of his narratives. In Caesarea, with its doubles, this idea takes a literal form, as Mayor Robert Forbes becomes both his double and estranged from his actions, feeling as if they were committed by someone else. On the other hand, Burgess often suggests (or outright states) their lack of freedom, their fate as characters in a story. Worse: in a horror story. As Burgess writes near the end of The Hellmouths of Bewdley, in a sentence that might be lifted out and placed anywhere else in the book (or in any good horror story): “Now it follows that terrible things are fated to happen.” At the same time, Burgess often shifts our gaze towards the terrible fact of our gaze.

While insisting on the participation of the reader in imagining his stories, Burgess reminds us of how the violence endemic to the horror genre troubles our relationship to the entertainment these stories provide. In “Summer,” from The Hellmouths of Bewdley, Dr. Mendez makes another appearance as a painter. Midway through, the narrator suddenly insists that we paint the scene ourselves: “Feel free to use your aesthetic sense of spacing when laying out the lampposts etc.” In a story that otherwise contains no clear horror elements, the narrator encourages us to add some: “If at this point you are growing to resent the arbitrariness that has been privileged thus far, you may kill this third person . . . Be as violent as you wish.” In this way, Burgess rarely lets readers forget their complicity with the author, how they cooperate in forging the nightmare world within which the characters must live, or try to live.

The instability of the narration, which often shifts between character perspectives or narrative voices without warning, is described by Burgess in the afterword of his book Fiction for Lovers as an attempt “to tell stories with a deteriorating consciousness.” Burgess thus subverts one of the horror genre’s persistent and deplorable conventions: the near omnipresence of vivid, clear, sober narration. Although detached, transparent narration is commonplace in genre fiction, the nature of the horror genre complicates the seeming neutrality of its presence. Should it not be somehow difficult to speak of horrors? Should not the narrating consciousness, if sane, be driven to madness by the events it is required to relate? Should not this increasing madness become apparent in the breakdown of the narrative voice, as the narrator crumbles before the sublime terror it must somehow relay? Should language not fail narrators the way that, when we are visited with horror in our own lives (or contract the Pontypool virus), it fails us?

In place of transparent narration, Burgess offers opaque metaphors that have little immediate or intelligible relationship to the scenes in which they appear. These metaphors seem to live their own lives, in some hyperbolic space that only elliptically connects to the world of the fiction or how its characters perceive that world. Pontypool Changes Everything begins with just such a metaphor:

Down in the strange hooves of Pontypool’s tanning horses scratches one of Ontario’s thinnest winds . . . The anonymous wind gathers its speed in turns around a cannon bone and tears across the ice of a frozen pool . . . breaking into mad daggers and splintering into the phantoms of horses. These horses, vacancies now, or maybe caskets, are places for the wind to rest. And when a wind rests, its heart stops and it is dead forever. The horses on the ice, built from the corpse of a breeze, skate towards each other, not breathing, but intelligent. They leap inside their crazy minds and begin to make plans.

Burgess sets the “real” scene in which the wind scratches at the horses’ hooves and then shifts fully into the “reality” of the metaphor. This wind turns into metaphorical daggers, which splinter into metaphorical phantom horses, which are metaphorized again, becoming caskets where the wind can rest. Resting, we should remember, is another metaphor (for death), but lest we forget Burgess next notes that “when a wind rests, its heart stops and it is dead forever.” Although Burgess’s dagger-horse-winds have stilled (and, thus, died down), they nevertheless continue, having emerged by now into some strange second life, unmoored from anything they might have meaningfully represented. The wind-dagger becomes a herd of horse-phantoms that are somehow also their own coffins. Not only do these “horses” continue to survive, zombie-like, beyond the death of the breeze that comprises them, they are more active in death. These corpse-wind horse-phantoms leap — another metaphor, since this is mind-leaping — and plan, as if about to shoot off into their own story in some universe parallel to the novel’s own. Why not? The narrative of Pontypool Changes Everything really has nothing to do with either set of horses anyway.

At the same time, despite how disconnected this introductory paragraph seems from the novel that follows, and indeed how disconnected these metaphors seem from one another, some of the novel’s core thematic obsessions begin to develop in this paragraph (notably, the concept of infection and of how language’s instability reflects or causes reality’s instability). The wind, in a sense, becomes infected through its proximity to the horses, imbued with the idea of horses, and so the wind becomes horses. When it dies, it births zombie-horses that skate off into new, post-life lives. The process is not much different from what happens to humans who contract Acquired Metastructural Pediculosis (AMP, the Pontypool virus). They acquire the idea of the virus through some infected word (as “Pediculosis” suggests, the virus is a lice-like language parasite). The idea of the virus causes language to seem strange to the speaker, and as the symptoms develop and language seems more and more an alien and foreign thing — something living and beyond the speaker’s control — s/he loses the ability to communicate through words. As panic sets in, and the infected arrive at some horrified, instinctual understanding that language exists apart from its use, and meaning is unstable, they become desperate to communicate. They see others, uninfected, who seem able to use language with ease and, in a sad, jealous, desperate rage, attempt to leap out of themselves and into their victims’ mouths.

Burgess mirrors the increasing mental instability of humans that have contracted AMP in the style of his writing, in this case developing a metaphor to the point where, instead of clarifying and expanding our understanding, the poetic language complicates and obscures any possible meaning. The result is a narrative style that renders the reality of any event in the story questionable, so that it is rarely clear whether or not a metaphor is to be taken as a metaphor, or as a character’s subjective perception, or as a literal plot event that occurs in the novel’s surreal reality. Should we take the crazed birth of an incestuously produced zombie-baby (one that walks, speaks, and already has places to go) as something that is not really happening in the story’s world, but as a metaphor for the event as a testament to humanity’s new inhumanity — a suggestion that this birth presages the death of the human world, signalling total social and cultural collapse and degeneration? Or should we instead view this as the subjective experience of one or both of the characters present at this birth, something that reveals little about the real event but much about their mental states? Or should we take the events Burgess relates in Pontypool Changes Everything at face value, as “really happening” within its surreal world? All three options seem valid on their own terms.

In an Open Book: Toronto interview about the movie Pontypool, Burgess notes that on occasion during the scriptwriting process others questioned his unexpected infidelity to the novel. “We had these discussions where people were saying, ‘Well, this has nothing to do with the book’ — well, the book has nothing do with the book.” The same might be said for The Bewdley Mayhem. It operates like a trilogy of horror fiction but seems infected somehow, a thing that should not be. Its books contain monsters but, more significantly, are monstrous. They transgress the boundaries and expectations of normal narrative fiction to throw themselves into disorder, transgressive in their ideas about and approach to language.

Later in the same interview, Burgess addresses the nature of his zombies. Although the zombies in stories are often metaphors for something (e.g., the global spread of inhuman relations under capitalism), Burgess notes that his zombies function as “a metaphor for metaphors that keep hunting you long after they’ve been meaningful . . . figures of speech that become predatory long after their . . . meaning as figures of speech has left the stage.” What is left after the zombies have communicated something about the human predicament, its potential for failure, is their presence in a horror story. Like any good metaphor, they exceed the thing they stand in for, persisting bodily beyond its death, which is why zombies are so malleable as metaphors in the first place. The language they once commanded has ceased to mean, but not to animate them.

Long after we are dead and our bodies have dissolved, the words will speak of us. They will tell their children of the monsters who once forced them into flesh. How they bore their yokes in silence, suffering in servitude, biding time.

Introduction to Why Poetry Sucks: An Anthology of Humorous Experimental Canadian Poetry

My first anthology, co-edited with Ryan Fitzpatrick, hath been unleashed upon the world! It’s called Why Poetry Sucks: An Anthology of Humorous Experimental Canadian Poetry in English Written by Canadians for Canadians (or American Bodysnatchers) in the Early Years of the 21st Century with an Overly Long and Not That Clever Subtitle the Publisher Rightly Refused to Put on the Cover and contains almost 300 pages of writing including some new work by new authors, alongside recent work by established authors.

Here is the contributor list:

Annharte • Oana Avasilichioaei & Erín Moure • Elizabeth Bachinsky • Gary Barwin • derek beaulieu • Gregory Betts • Christian Bök • Louis Cabri • Lindsay Cahill • Stephen Cain • Margaret Christakos • Jason Christie • Brian Joseph Davis • Dina Del Bucchia • Jeff Derksen • Jeramy Dodds • Nathan Dueck • kevin mcpherson eckhoff • Mercedes Eng • Chris Ewart • Jon Paul Fiorentino • Aaron Giovannone • Helen Hajnoczky • Susan Holbrook & Nicole Markotic • Ray Hsu • Bill Kennedy & Darren Wershler • Jake Kennedy • Dorothy Trujillo Lusk • Suzette Mayr • David McGimpsey • Maurice Mierau • Kathryn Mockler • Garry Thomas Morse • Nikki Reimer • Stuart Ross • Jordan Scott • Colin Smith • Jonathon Wilcke • Ian Williams • Daniel Zomparelli

Each selection is prefaced by a short contextual note about the poems by Fitzpatrick & I. Also, for your reading pleasure, I present the book’s introductory essay. Enjoy!

“TAKE THESE POEMS — PLEASE!”: AN INTRODUCTION

Ryan Fitzpatrick & Jonathan Ball

“I had to let in the comedy, and not just for laughs’ sake, but because it undoes things.” — Robert Kroetsch1

“Why does poetry suck?” This question echoes down the ages and is echoed by undergraduate students, eyes glazing as they gaze upon their reading lists. “It doesn’t,” we tell them, but in our hearts, we know different. We know it does.2

What sucks about poetry? The short answer is the words, and their combinations. The longer answer has to do with how so few of those combinations include the pairing “Nacho Tuesdays.” Yes, poetry seems to lack nachos, and, aside from that, it seems to lack humour. Indeed, no literary genre appears less funny than poetry, where conventional wisdom has it that a “good poem” must move the reader to some epiphany through the subtle revelation of some aspect of the human condition, the least funny condition of all.3

If poetry’s condition seems serious, then is experimental poetry in critical condition? Carmine Starnino, constant critic, has declared that “humourlessness” is “the most galling failure of our current crop of experimental phenoms” in an essay otherwise surprisingly generous to experimental phenom bpNichol.4 Complaints like Starnino’s are common and, in many ways, true. While poetry as a cultural activity is funny,5 and the idea that we should take poetry seriously is funny, actually taking poetry seriously isn’t very funny at all — and neither are most poems.

At the risk of not being funny,6 we should complain that Starnino is correct only in a technical sense. Humourlessness is the most galling failure of experimental poets, because it is the most galling failure of poets and poetry overall. We balk at Starnino’s implicit suggestion, which is that experimental poetry is, in a general sense, more humourless than conventional poetry. In fact, when conventional poetry is funny, it is often funny because it has incorporated lessons from experimental poetry (usually, earlier avant-gardes). Often, these avant-garde movements and authors take themselves seriously, or too seriously, but then lighten up and begin to fall into self-parody as their assumptions and techniques are incorporated (or mocked) by the mainstream — Surrealism is the most obvious example. More recently, we have seen the opposite trajectory with the American post-avant7 Flarf writers, who began by parodying bad conventional poetry but ended up taking the joke more seriously and more politically as bad conventional poetry became a primary way to address the national trauma of 9/11.8

In other words, galling humourlessness is not a defining trait of experimental poetry — the work is often intentionally funny, because it uses humour in particular ways, or unintentionally funny, due to its relative strangeness or how removed it seems from something we should take seriously. As a result of its emphasis on attentive and playful work with the material of language, experimental poetry may even have a different, perhaps closer, relationship to humour than so-called “conventional” poetry. But why? Where’s the beef?

When people criticize experimental poetry, in essays or reviews or bars, they often criticize the work on one of two fronts (aesthetically speaking): either (1) it’s dry and boring, inelegantly flaunting its theoretical foundations to become robotic and joyless — in sum, it takes itself too seriously; or, (2) it’s gibberish, fraudulent, pointless — the writer is just playing around, being silly, and the whole thing is just not serious enough. Either humourless or “just jokes,” experimental poetry can’t win. Submerged here is the notion that writing can include humour (if it has to) but not too much or it ceases to be “literary.” Either there’s nothing human in it (no humour, no emotions, just theory-speak) or it’s all too human, an idiot pleasure, one not worthy of being called “poetry.”

If poetry can’t be funny when it’s poetry and can’t be poetry when it’s funny, what can be done to rehabilitate comedy’s public image in the literary world, not to mention in experimental poetry? If comedy can’t win an Oscar, how will it ever win the Griffin?9 Throughout literary history, comedy has had its defenders, but something always seemed to go awry. Aristotle dropped the ball by not backing up the second volume of his Poetics (the one about comedy) in the cloud or on a flash drive. Freud started to make a useful connection between humour and language in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious but then became more interested in cocaine.10

Help comes from an unlikely hero: Russian Formalist Victor Shklovsky. Shklovsky theorized that art makes use of a fundamental technique he called defamiliarization:

The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects “unfamiliar,” to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.11

Both the joke and poetry operate in this way, by making our language and our social operations strange. Thus, de- familiarization is, arguably, the basic gesture of poetry — poetry takes language and pushes it past the limits of its quotidian use, to estrange us from language and its transparent, communicative capacity (i.e., how we typically encounter language in our everyday lives) — poetic techniques, from the use of rhyme to line breaks and so on, typically have this purpose of manipulating the language to estrange it so that it means more. The effect of this estrangement could be to heighten its power of expression (as in most lyrical poetry), engage with its materiality (as in much experimental poetry), or to attach its signifiers to inappropriate but (il)logically justifiable signifieds (as in jokes predicated on wordplay). Similarly, jokes not predicated on wordplay generally work in the way that (according to Shklovsky) Leo Tolstoy works: by describing our social or political activities, or unexamined assumptions and ideologies, so that what only a minute before the joke seemed natural and normal now seems nonsensical and bizarre.12

This tension or gap between the familiar and the poet’s or comedian’s attempts to estrange us from it often works like the experimentalist technique of the Situationist détournement (altering the already existing in a small way, to reveal or otherwise subvert its hidden operations) or by producing a gap between our expectations and their demolition. Let’s get super unfunny for few minutes.13 Working from the Lacanian idea of the point de capiton or quilting point, the idea that meaning is retroactively determined by the final word in a statement, Alenka Zupančič frames the punchline in terms of this Lacanian operation.14 As the sentence moves forward (“Dick and Jane were exposed to …”), the meaning of the whole statement changes depending on how it ends (“harmful radiation,” “foreign languages,” “their uncle the exhibitionist”).15 For Zupančič, humour can serially chain in this way, altering the terms of discourse to comic effect through continual additions (like when comedians add “tags” after punchlines) — the sentence never really ends; it just keeps mutating. The joke becomes an elaborate game of misdirection, setting up the audience for one outcome and then delivering another, producing a surprising surplus for the reader — an answer to a question that was never asked.

The classic example of this misdirection in comedy (one now so conventional that it’s easy to overlook the actual subversive logic of how this joke operates) is comedian Henny Youngman’s “Take my wife — please!” Youngman sets us up to believe that he is about to use his wife as an example of the sort of foolishness he’s just been discussing (“Now, take my wife for instance …”), but he’s trying to pawn her off on us instead, suggesting rather than stating the reasons why. The key to this is his timing, turning the anticipated outcome of a textual or situational thread into something else entirely. Comic timing, then, becomes the act of delivering the blow when the audience is most vulnerable, tipping the world over into disorder at the audience’s point of highest comfort. The punchline trades in a kind of affective disorientation, a powerful example of language creating effects on the body. Playing out as a gentle trauma, comedy both scrambles our discourse and provokes a physical reaction. If we are unable to speak in the face of it, it’s because we’re rolling in the aisles.

Both comedy and poetry can exploit this “quilting” ability of the punchline to work in resistance to dominant social codes. Both practices are able to produce short circuits that lay bare hidden ideological operations. These hidden operations are composed of material processes and assemblages that, for one reason or another, we are unable to see — the classic comedic example being Karl Marx’s observation of the hidden labour embedded in commodities.16 The production of this gap, and of a short circuit that seems to close but really exposes it, is key to most satire, from Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” to Sacha Baron Cohen’s mockumentary film Borat, as well as politically minded experimental poetry. In other words, comedy and satire expose how something appears to make logical sense even when it doesn’t, exposing a gap in understanding as it tries to hide it, like someone scrambling to get an elephant out through the bedroom window so their partner doesn’t see it.

Consider, for example, “The Last Temptation of Krust,” a 1998 episode of The Simpsons that slyly comments on the role of comedy as political critique.17 When Krusty the Clown performs at a stand-up comedy benefit against soil erosion, he launches into a routine of hack jokes about, primarily, TV dinners. Antiquated and unfunny, his jokes bomb. In response, Krusty turns to an ugly display of yellowface dripping with every stereotype imaginable (buck teeth, deep bowing, r’s replaced with l’s). The crowd is stunned at his old-fashioned racism and begins to boo, so Krusty pulls out his “A-material”: a flapping dickey. After failed attempts to reform his act, Krusty decides to retire from comedy.

Until he doesn’t. After a press conference where reporters explode with laughter at his raw, snarky dissatisfaction with contemporary comedy (he complains that people no longer want to listen to “time-tested jokes about women drivers and doctor’s bills”), Krusty announces his triumphant return. He proceeds to “tell it like it is” — in other words, to speak truth to power. He delivers blow after blow to the very consumerism once integral to his personality: “So, I’m watching TV today, and all I keep seeing is dead celebrities hawking products. They got poor Vincent Price floating around on a toilet cake telling me about the horrors of an unfresh bowl!” The on-screen audience is moved to a shared moment of anger, lighting cash on fire at Krusty’s suggestion. For the off-screen audience, the humour in Krusty’s joke comes from the contrast between his two stage personas. In “retirement,” Krusty becomes an inverted version of poor Vincent Price, killing his product-hawking prior self to re-emerge as a critically minded political comedian. Order soon returns to the program, and Krusty returns to his unfunny product-shilling self. For a brief moment, however, Krusty seems like he might present a minor threat to capitalist undertakings, forwarding a counter-consumerist discourse that has social effects.18

Key to the second Krusty’s more critical approach to humour is a sense of the joke as a kind of attack — an understanding central to both radical and reactionary senses of humour. In other words, the rearticulations humour is capable of can be used to violently upend situations and understandings. In his discussion of “tendentious” jokes, Freud sets up an encounter where the joke becomes a means of exclusion.19 Let’s set up Freud’s serious social analysis as a kind of joke to underline how funny it’s not. A man walks into a bar. Across the room, he sees a woman and is immediately smitten. He approaches her, and they strike up a conversation. A second man walks up to the same woman. She finds herself more attracted to him, turning away from the first man. Angry, the first man insults the woman, and the second man laughs.20 Rather than being read as the attack it is, a joke is born out of this homosocial interaction, where the two men connect over their mutual exclusion of the woman. For Freud, “[t]he smut becomes a joke and is only tolerated when it has the character of a joke” (100).21 This structure of attack and exclusion isn’t limited to attacks against women, but it is an effect of power and privilege, meaning the attack can also be directed at race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability, etc. Remember that what sends Krusty into his critical tirades is his anger over the fact that he can no longer be successful as the white patriarchal clown, since jokes about flapping dickies and women drivers (and other “classics”) get shouted down in disgust.

Let’s turn now to a June 2012 stand-up set by Daniel Tosh at the Laugh Factory in Hollywood.22 A woman in the audience calls Tosh out (“heckles” him) during a part of his act where he asserts that anything, including rape, can be funny. In the woman’s account,23 she yells out, “Actually, rape jokes are never funny!” and Tosh, in response, poses a hypothetical question/threat: “Wouldn’t it be funny if that girl got raped by, like, five guys right now? Like, right now? What if a bunch of guys raped her …?” Let’s answer Tosh’s question quickly: It wouldn’t be funny if that woman got raped by five guys. So why does the audience laugh? It’s not that men are essentially jokey, high-fiving rapists. Instead, the laughter is the result of a larger structural problem (i.e., “rape culture”) that allows for the patriarchal status quo to go unchallenged (or, at least, for its challenges to be the very thing that social codes of con- duct, the “unwritten laws,” are meant to suppress — since “everyone knows” that it’s all “just jokes” and, in the structure of the setting, the woman in the audience is supposed to find the idea of rape, like any idea presented by the man on stage, funny). In the context of the comedy club (where you go to laugh) and the ugly and discomforting irony of Tosh’s boundary-pushing, there emerges a solidarity between men (and likely some women) akin to that in Freud’s analysis. In a context like this, it becomes very plausible for victimization to turn funny as long as you’re not the victim (or can’t empathize fully). As Tosh castigates the woman who dares interrupt him, because she assumes both the role of the heckler and the role of the feminist killjoy, we can imagine the audience siding with him as the protector of their privileged good time. After all, they’re only jokes.

It’s also easy to see how Freud’s model can be flipped by comedians, where the joke can be a kind of attack as critique depending on the power relations of those involved. Examples of this are as far-reaching as Dave Chappelle’s explications of contemporary race relations or the self-critical reversals of Sarah Silverman and Louis C.K.24 The political ugliness of the joke as an attack can be rerouted into critique as long as the parties involved are careful not to produce or reproduce (except perhaps ironically25) inequitable or hierarchical relations. In short, humour provides an opportunity to ask how we might open up sites of resistance, providing opportunities to begin to rearticulate our social field. Avant-garde practice works similarly, aiming (as the military term avant-garde implies) to be at the forefront of artistic and social movements. Historically, avant-garde practice aligns itself with social change (for good or ill), attempting to bring art and everyday life together in a transformative way, allowing people to conceive of new ways to materially and collectively organize. Comedy shares with avant-garde practice this revolutionary potential, since both use techniques that can challenge, short-circuit, and alter dominant practices.

Or — and this is important — how comedy and the avant-garde fail to do this. Literature professor and poet Gregory Betts has argued for the use of the term avant-garde in its limited/historical context and has injected a cautionary politics and a much-needed historicity into poet Ron Silliman’s term post-avant, while distinguishing experimental modes of contemporary poetry from modernist and postmodernist modes with radical or reactionary political agendas. It’s a hoot! In other words, Betts argues that a belief in political progress through art is a defining characteristic of the avant-garde, but he suggests that much contemporary poetry is post-avant in that it shares many of the aesthetic qualities of avant-garde art as it has been traditionally defined but “without much tangible faith in progress or revolution.”26 Similarly, postmodern comedy often appears to waffle between these poles — between the conviction that it matters and the knowledge that it doesn’t.

Hoping not so much to write Aristotle’s missing book, we instead present Why Poetry Sucks27 as our attempt at a grand PR stunt, parading out the participants in a literary world where the joke is suddenly something important, something that produces real effects. Rather than produce work that is too silly or jokey, the poets in Why Poetry Sucks draw from deep traditions in both poetry and comedy, often challenging the rigid literary and political impasses they encounter. We want to argue that, in our cur- rent social and cultural game of Blockado (the game of barricades), humour can act as an important sledge, taking a swing at the places and institutions we might wish changed, while acknowledging our apparent inability to change them.

When we began to gather material for this anthology, we planned a wider historical frame, considering the field of English-Canadian poetry starting with the first rumblings of postmodernism in the ’60s. We saw in figures such as bpNichol, George Bowering, David W. McFadden, and Dennis Cooley a strong undercurrent that had wound its way into the writing of our contemporary moment. The project quickly became untenable, and not only because of our budget. What we didn’t anticipate was the sheer amount of contemporary work that, in one way or another, picks up the legacy of poets like these, leading us to tighten our frame. The result is an anthology that loosely collects from the first decade and a half of the 21st century, with a knowledge that our collection is not a fixed whole but rather a sampling, complicated by bleeding edges and frayed threads. We have chosen to highlight a handful of poets and poems that cut across the spectrum of contemporary experimental work. Our aim is to showcase an array of both literary and comedic techniques by selecting poets less for their cultural presence or canonical heft than for how their poems exemplify some particular approach to experimentation-with-humour. We have included, where possible, multiple poems from each poet to give a sense of their general approach and style. What we haven’t done is made a case for how these poets are the poets to pay attention to when it comes to humorous experimental poetry. We’ve opted for a cross-section and a snapshot, rather than issue some authoritative statement and feel quite confident we’ve missed something.28

Though we’ve drawn a line around a specific period, geography, and language, the poets here are most firmly drawn together by shared techniques and tactics, which can be defined by but are not limited to period, geography, genre, or medium. Each poet here operates amongst wider assemblages of texts, writers, politics, and power structures both inside and outside their immediate geographical and temporal spheres. These poets not only work within specific literary geographies but also exceed them, reading and working across national boundaries even as they work within them. They are likely to be influenced by George Bowering as much as Charles Bernstein, Russell Peters as much as Sarah Silverman, SCTV as much as SNL, or Ezra Levant as much as Bill O’Reilly. It’s hard to imagine Stuart Ross’ everyday surrealism without David W. McFadden on one side of the border and the New York School on the other. It’s hard to imagine Susan Holbrook and Nicole Markotić’s playful proceduralism without both the experiments of Oulipo and the serial punning of bpNichol. We originally planned to use the more specific (and, frankly, preferable) terms avant-garde and post- avant as Betts uses them, but, despite its horrors, the more vague experimental does a better job of describing these disparate poems as a group (which experiment with form, play with convention, and otherwise tap into various subversive strains of literary history) and of simply communicating the thrust of the anthology without subjecting the works within to overly academic compartmentalizing.

Looking at humour and poetry together is a messy proposition, and we have decided to proceed messily. The poets collected here draw from deep wells that exceed poetry, moving into the worlds of stand-up and sitcoms, slapstick and pranks. They assert strong connections between poetry and comedy. We wish to assert that this connection is important, but it is not enough to simply say that poetry is funny and then point to funny poetry. We’ve asked why the connection is important and noted what is useful in the combination of poetry and humour, what led us to this soapbox we’re standing on. We’ve noted what we see as the particular social and affective powers opened up in language by the joke and other comic techniques that draw poets and comedians to crack wise.

Only one more thing remains: Nacho Tuesdays.

Shirley Neuman and Robert Wilson, Labyrinths of Voice: Conversations with Robert Kroetsch (Edmonton: NeWest, 1982), 178. ↩


Yes, we know footnotes suck too. Give us a break! ↩


Even leprosy has its lighter moments. Look, Ma, no hands! ↩


Carmine Starnino, “bpNichol,” Lazy Bastardism: Essays & Reviews on Contemporary Poetry (Kentville, NS: Gaspereau, 2012), 165. ↩


Really, what’s more hilarious than all those loser poets taking them- selves so seriously, sweating about whether or not they should employ an Oxford comma? ↩


We’re already well under the sitcom standard of three jokes per page. ↩


More on this term below. ↩


Not to mention the fact that cloyingly idiotic poetry gained a political timbre in the face of one of the most celebrated idiots in presidential history. ↩


And how could it accept the award with a straight face? (Acknowledging that, yes, some of the folks in this book have ac- cepted awards with straight faces. Isn’t that funny?) ↩


Jonathan insisted that we cut Ryan’s joke about Freud’s sexual hang- ups on the grounds that it was too hacky. Is it Ryan’s fault Freud liked to have sex with wolves? [The answer might surprise you: Yes!] ↩


Victor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique” (1917), The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends, ed. David H. Richter (Boston: Bedford, 1989), 741. ↩


Shklovsky notes that “Tolstoy described the dogmas and rituals he attacked as if they were unfamiliar, substituting everyday meanings for the customarily religious meanings of the words common in church ritual. Many persons were painfully wounded; they considered it blasphemy to present as strange and monstrous what they accepted as sacred” (Shklovsky, “Art as Technique,” 744). It’s not hard to imagine comedian David Cross doing the same thing, for the same reason, and getting the same reaction. ↩


Slap yourself in the face a few times to sober up your thoughts. ↩


Alenka Zupančič, The Odd One In: On Comedy (Cambridge: MIT, 2008). ↩


This example is paraphrased from Bruce Fink, Lacan to the Letter: Reading Écrits Closely (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2004), 89- 90. ↩


What a riot! ↩


“The Last Temptation of Krust,” The Simpsons: The Complete Ninth Season, DVD (1998; Los Angeles: Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment LLC, 2006). ↩


Underlying all of this, of course, is a critique of anti-consumerist experimental comedy as unfunny and hypocritical at its core, “selling” the idea of not-buying. In fact, it is because Krusty pushes the crowd to burn money with his anti-consumer tirade that some executives approach him to be the spokesperson for an unsafe station wagon. ↩


In Chapter 3 of Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (London: Hogarth, 1960), ed. and trans. James Strachey. ↩


Freud’s narration is far more serious and analytical than this. His work points to seduction, its failures, and its homosocial successes: “When the first person finds his libidinal impulse inhibited by the woman, he develops a hostile trend against that second person and calls on the originally interfering third person as his ally. Through the first person’s smutty speech, the woman is exposed before the third, who, as listener, has now been bribed by the effortless satisfaction of his own libido” (100). ↩


This is a strength of humour as well, allowing us to confront the traumatic through the relatively safe lens of the joke. Unless we’re talking about 9/11 — then we need the inspiring seriousness of poetry. Or Gilbert Gottfried. ↩


We’d like to acknowledge Kim O’Donnell here, who helped us break some of the ideas we’re working through on the dangerous topic of the rape joke. ↩


While there are multiple versions of the unfilmed set, including assertions that Tosh was misquoted, we’re following the woman’s initial account, originally posted at [http://breakfastcookie.tumblr.com/post/ 26879625651/so-a-girl-walks-into-a-comedy-club](http://breakfastcookie.tumblr.com/post/ 26879625651/so-a-girl-walks-into-a-comedy-club) (accessed March 11, 2014). ↩


Sarah Silverman in particular likes to twist a joke through multiple offensive poses: “Everybody blames the Jews for killing Christ, and then the Jews try to pass it off on the Romans. I’m one of the few people that believe it was the blacks.” Sarah Silverman, Jesus Is Magic (Interscope, 2005), DVD. It’s worth pointing out that Silverman, like Tosh, thinks rape can be funny … if the joke is that it’s not funny. In a bit from her 2013 HBO special We Are Miracles about how she “need[s] more rape jokes,” Silverman examines some of the complex power dynamics that come into play: “Rape jokes are great. They make a comic seem so edgy and so dangerous, and the truth is it’s like the safest area to talk about in comedy. Because who’s gonna complain about a rape joke? I mean, I would say rape victims, but they’re traditionally not complainers.” Silverman develops the joke, pushing further while expanding the context to clarify her position: “I mean, the worst thing that can happen is someone comes up to you after a show and is like, ‘Look, I’m a victim of rape, and I just want to say I thought that joke was insensitive and inappropriate and totally my fault and I am so sorry.’” Here the “joke” is that a rape joke re-victimizes the offended listener while securing the comic’s sense of superiority — the rape joke as a sort of metaphorical rape. Sarah Silverman qtd. from a video in Rich Juzwiak, “Here Is Sarah Silverman’s Rape Joke,” Gawker (26 November 2013), available at http://gawker.com/here-is-sarah-silvermans-rape-joke-1472012603 (accessed March 11, 2014). ↩


But even then, the idea of an “ironic racism” or “ironic sexism” is problematic depending on who is making the joke and at whom the punchline aims. ↩


Gregory Betts, Avant-Garde Canadian Literature: The Early Manifestations (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2013), 20. ↩


An alternative title for the ideal Canadian anthology was suggested by Dave McGimpsey over Twitter: Buick Presents: Better Than You! ↩


Please text any complaints about the anthology or its inclusions to Aaron Giovannone, who has helpfully offered his cell phone number in one of the poems. ↩

Don’t Trust Your Instincts — The Idea That Became Clockfire

My second book, Clockfire, began with a single image: a clock on fire in the middle of a theatre. The audience was watching the clock burn. This was the play. Once that flashed into my head, I knew I had something, but I didn’t know what. So I wrote it down.

I wish that I could show you what I wrote down, but all of my files and early drafts of Clockfire were destroyed due to computer problems and faulty backups. In fact, if I hadn’t mailed a copy of the first draft to the Alberta Foundation for the Arts (who graciously funded the writing of the book), I would have lost the manuscript altogether. I had to write to them to receive my copy back. I lost all of my revisions, but salvaged the draft through the AFA and thus salvaged the book.

However, I do remember a number of significant early changes I made, which I’d like to trace for you here. I’m often asked how I came up with the idea for Clockfire, and unlike most non-superhero origin stories, the story holds some interest since it illustrates how significant particular, structural changes can be if they are made in the early stages of an idea — and why, contrary to popular belief, you can’t trust your instincts as a writer, at least not in the early stages of an idea.

From Image to Idea

Although it’s kind of cool, a bunch of people in a theatre looking at a burning clock is hardly enough for a book. However, it’s a good example of how even something this small and simple can be enough for an entire book if you can just interrogate the image.

I kept turning the image over in my head. Why did I find it compelling? Well, there was a certain strong surrealism to it. Clocks and fire were practically surrealist cliches, but the addition of the theatre context elevated it somewhat while allowing it to retain a primal quality.

At this point, I thought that maybe I might get one good poem out of the idea. However, I was afraid of how that poem might unfold. The obvious way would be to develop the image into a metaphor for life. However, having read Antonin Artaud’s book The Theatre and Its Double not long before, I was struck by how one might read the title. The “double” of the theatre, arguably, was life. Artaud’s title could be read to suggest that life paled before the grand myth-machine of the theatre. At the same time, I had been disappointed by Artaud’s plays. They were hopelessly dated because his “Theatre of Cruelty” relied on shocking and appalling the audience’s senses, and our sense of what is shocking or appalling changes radically and quickly over time, so that they seemed tame today.

I felt that where Artaud had gone wrong was in focusing on visceral shock over conceptual violence. After all, his book about the conceptual violence that the Theatre of Cruelty might deliver remained compelling, whereas the actual plays he wrote in this vein seemed tame. Today, I felt, Artaud would have to murder his audience to get the shock value he’d wanted, since “breaking the fourth wall” had become commonplace and lame, while “controversial content” had become a marketing tool.

I started to wonder why I felt the theatre was so lame, in general. The clock on fire suddenly seemed symbolic not of life, but of the theatre. I wanted a clock in my theatre — an acknowledgement of the theatrical situation, of the real-time the audience was passing (rather than a suspending of disbelief, a paying of attention to the immediate situation of being in the theatre). I also wanted fire — a shocking, violent, visceral thing that would forge a connection with the audience, however horrible.

At this point, I returned to the image of the audience watching the clock on fire. I started wondering if I’d made a mistake. Maybe the clock shouldn’t be on fire.

Maybe the clock should work fine, and the audience should be on fire.

Everything flowed out of this change. Who would set the audience on fire? The actors, of course. The clock wasn’t the play — the audience burning in the theatre was the play. The clock was a diversion.

I quickly re-hammered out my draft. Not only did I have a image and an idea, I had a concept — an imaginary theatre where the actors and the audience were at odds, enemies, each striving to vanquish the other. A theatre about the failure of the theatre to become life, to cast life into its shadow, as its double. This is really where the book began.

The Title

I knew at once that I had a book concept on my hands — plays that would be impossible or illegal/immoral to ever produce. The theatre must therefore take place in the reader’s head.

I realized that I had a book concept on my hands, and I needed a title. I couldn’t think of any good ones, which is unusual for me. Usually, I have the title right away, sometimes even before any idea (I often come up with titles first and then cast around for the idea second). However, I’d decided to apply for the aforementioned AFA grant, so I needed at least a working title. I chose Clock-Fire, thinking that although it was stupid it was functional enough.

I asked Natalee Caple for a letter of support. Time passed and in a mad rush to gather all of the materials to meet the deadline, I noticed too late that she had misspelled the title as one word: Clockfire. I was worried the AFA would discount Caple’s letter if the title was misspelled, for some reason, and it was easier, due to time constraints, for me to rewrite the entire grant with the one-word title. Later, of course, I realized that Caple had accidentally produced the perfect title, and started calling my “impossible plays” clockfires.

The Clock

I didn’t just shift the fire — in another, smaller way, I shifted the clock. In the original draft, I had just written “clock.” In my later draft, I decided that I needed to be more specific. I changed it to a modern, digital clock. It was important to the play that the clock would display the correct time to the audience, and I decided that hands on the clock would be hard for the audience to see, so the clock should have a large digital display.

For the final draft, I changed it to “a large, ornate grandfather clock,” which would of course have hands and a face. There were three main reasons for this final change, that might appear insignificant but helped set the tone for how I approached the book as a whole:

First, I thought a digital clock would look less cool on fire. It would burn up too fast and it would smoke too much, since it would be mostly plastic. It was more likely to melt and shrivel, whereas a larger, older, wooden clock would burn more gracefully and slowly and impressively. This may seem like an odd consideration given that the poem/play does not describe the clock burning. But I wanted to be setting forth “instructions” for the audience to imagine the plays. So, even though I wasn’t writing about the clock burning, I was setting things up for the audience to imagine the clock burn.

Second, I decided that it didn’t matter if the audience in the play would be able to read the time. It was only important, conceptually, that the time be correct. The audience in the theatre could be confused or unclear about it — only the reader needed to know.

Third, I wanted the clock to have hands and a face, to give it a human-like dimension. A grandfather clock would also be tall like a human. I wanted to suggest a bit of anthropomorphism in a subtle way like this, because I wanted the reader to feel like the clock was also a victim. Even though it is part of the performance, like the actors setting the theatre on fire, it is going to be sacrificed to the theatre, like the audience. I saw it, as the only thing on stage, as a hybrid object in a liminal space, and so wanted to push it further towards the kind of human-like associations that a nostalgic object like a grandfather clock might have.

Ignore Your Instincts

The lesson of Clockfire, for me, is to ignore your instincts. Often, writers talk nonsense like “first thought, best thought” and otherwise warn about the dangers of over-analysis. I’ve found that under-analysis is the greater danger for writers.

You can analyze without overanalyzing, and as long as you keep your analysis away from your writing desk, you can usefully reconsider your instincts and reshape your writing.

When this is most important is in the early stages. I was careful to keep writing while I played with the ideas for Clockfire, and not get trapped in the paralysis of analysis, which I’ve done before. However, if I had just run with the idea and my instincts, I would have ended up with (at best) a decent poem.

When your ideas are still ideas, and not written out, it’s easier to play with them, and experiment with alternate approaches. If you always trust your instincts, you’ll always repeat what’s safe.

You can read the entire script of the play “Clockfire” (it’s very short) on my store page for that book.

You can also read about the “original” version of “Clockfire” that was performed by Vlad III Dracula.

Is Žižek a copycat? Yes, please! — How copying is essential to Žižek’s writing style

It’s the most boring scandal to ever rock the literary world: cultural philosopher Slavoj Žižek has been accused of plagiarism. Not only is the charge pointless and trumped-up, it’s completely uninteresting.

What is interesting, however, is that fact that copying and various forms of plagiarism (including, most notably, self-plagiarism) are essential to Žižek’s writing style. Since it stands peripheral to the concerns of this so-called “scandal,” I thought I’d get self-indulgent for a moment and quote for you from my recent book John Paizs’s Crime Wave. This part doesn’t have much to do with John Paizs’s film Crime Wave, but it has everything to do with Žižek and copying:

As Hillel Schwartz displays, in The Culture of the Copy [(New York: Zone 1996)], copying as an aesthetic practice persists throughout and across cultures and periods, and is fundamental to the notion of culture itself (for cultures to exist, ideologies must repeat; as [Marcus] Boon notes, “even the ideology of individuality and/or uniqueness is mass-produced.” [Marcus Boon, In Praise of Copying (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2010), 182.]) Appropriately, copying is not just the subject of cultural theories like Schwartz’s, but often part and parcel of theoretical practice itself, which repeats and modifies already existing ideas while literally reproducing the words of previous authors through citation. The writings of Slavoj Žižek, despite his antipathy for postmodernism, stand as exemplary of this postmodern literary practice of pastiche: Žižek will often copy the words of other writers, with variations he then notes and makes the subject of his discussion, and will even copy his own insights, structures of argument, and written passages from book to book. Moreover, Žižek presents himself not just as a student of both Lacan and Hegel, but also to some degree as a repetition of both. Žižek’s “return to Lacan” extends Lacan’s theory through a Hegelian lens (or vice versa), in the same way that Lacan’s “return to Freud” presented itself as a project that discovered, already latent within Freud’s work, various ideas of which Freud himself was unaware (in a sense, repeating Freud’s psychoanalytic procedure to interpret not dreams but The Interpretation of Dreams). Lacan presents himself as reproducing Freud’s work in a form supposedly more faithful to Freud than Freud himself could manage, before developments in other disciplines, and Žižek repeats this gesture by reproducing Lacan’s theories in a Hegelian light that Žižek proposes was already latent in Lacan’s work. Psychoanalytic theory, then, often presents itself as “continuing the master’s work” while extending and overwriting the original: copying or “doubling” is an integral concept both within the theory and in its historical development. Thus Žižek appears as a “tribute artist” who “covers” Lacan – himself a “tribute artist” who repeats Freud – who used to comment that all of his “original” insights were to be found, already, in Nietzsche – who, in a similar fashion, cited the influence of Dostoevsky. There are many political and rhetorical reasons for these kinds of gestures – including a diplomatic borrowing of authority under the cover of a concomitant ceding of authority, and as a modelling of the psychoanalytic method of “discovering” repression encoded in/created by the symptom – but such gestures are also, as Paizs’s work makes clear, artistic and aesthetic choices. As well, [Linda] Hutcheon would surely note, they are ironic gestures (in the psychoanalytic example, an ironic insistence on servitude designed to secure and display mastery).

It is also worth repeating one of my own citations of Žižek, from inside the book:

Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies [(London: Verso, 1997)], 121. As an example of how Žižek copies himself, the quoted passage and the paragraph within which it is embedded also appear in his Organs Without Bodies: Deleuze and Consequences (New York: Routledge, 2004), 96. In the latter book, as is often the case in his writings, Žižek repeats the paragraph verbatim but begins to alter and expand his points near its end.