Jonathan Ball's Blog, page 57

September Poetry Column reviews Rachel Lebowitz, Ann Shin, Katherena Vermette, and Tanis Rideout

My monthly poetry review column is online at the Winnipeg Free Press, featuring:

Cottonopolis by Rachel Lebowitz
The Family China by Ann Shin
North End Love Songs by Katherena Vermette
Arguments with the Lake by Tanis Rideout

Misreading Yann Martel on Lemon Hound

Let’s imagine that Yann Martel’s much-admired and much-maligned novel Life of Pi is, in secret fact, a horror novel.

Why Poetry Sucks

Ryan Fitzpatrick and Jonathan Ball desire your suggestions for a forthcoming anthology planned for 2014. Please copy and distribute the call below, and send your own suggestions by Nov. 15. Thanks!

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CALL FOR SUGGESTIONS

Why Poetry Sucks: Humorous Avant-Garde and Post-Avant English Canadian Poetry

Edited by Jonathan Ball and Ryan Fitzpatrick

“Poets are cute but, let’s face it, they can disrupt a household.”

— Susan Holbrook, Joy is So Exhausting

“Can you parody something you are a part of?”

— Jeff Derksen, Transnational Muscle Cars

Is “experimental poetry” a failed experiment, a turgid mass of theoretical jargon, overcomposed and unreadable blocks of nonsense words and ugly platitudes? Well, sure — but so is the national anthem, and people still sing that!

We are currently assembling an anthology of Canadian poetry from the past fifty years (1960-present) that tracks and traces the major poets of the period who use humour as a key technique in their work. Focusing on the various experimental traditions from that period, we are seeking suggestions for work we might consider for inclusion.

Suggestions could be in the form of individual writers, books, or even poems. We are particularly interested in the diversity of this field, so suggestions from any and all communities, groups, and geographies are both welcome and encouraged.

Why Poetry Sucks will be a readable anthology designed for the public sphere, while maintaining an academic framework that will allow the anthology to appeal to both the general reader and the student reader — a fun anthology of Canadian poetry for classroom and personal use.

Who or what are your funny favorites? Which poets bend language in surprisingly hilarious ways? Please don’t say yourself (it’s not funny).

Send your suggestions to whypoetrysucks@gmail.com by Nov. 15, 2013.

August Poetry Column reviews Jon Paul Fiorentino, Kenneth Goldsmith, Dina Del Bucchia, and Morten Søndergaard

My monthly poetry review column is online at the Winnipeg Free Press, featuring:

Needs Improvement by Jon Paul Fiorentino
Seven American Deaths and Disasters by Kenneth Goldsmith
Coping with Emotions and Otters by Dina Del Bucchia
Wordpharmacy by Morten Søndergaard

Chadwick Ginther on Practical Matters

Chadwick Ginther is the author of Thunder Road (Ravenstone Books), a fantasy in which the larger-than-life personalities and monsters of Norse mythology lurk hidden in Manitoba. A sequel, Tombstone Blues, is set for Fall 2013. His short stories have found a home in On Spec, Tesseracts and the Fungi anthology from Innsmouth Free Press; his reviews and interviews have appeared in Quill and Quire, The Winnipeg Review and Prairie Books NOW. A bookseller for over ten years, when he’s not writing his own stories, he’s selling everyone else’s. He lives and writes in Winnipeg.

How do you decide what you’ll work on, when you sit down to write?

I’m a total pantser (as in, by the seat of) when it comes to writing, so the short answer is a simple one: whatever I feel like. If I’m in the middle of a project, or chasing a deadline, what I feel like gets narrowed down somewhat by necessity.

Do you keep a writing schedule, with any sort of quotas?

I do have a writing schedule, which is still somewhat in flux as I try to build up a new routine following a change in my day job. I aim for between 500-1000 handwritten words per day divided between my bus ride to and from work and my lunch break, and 2000 new words a day on my weekends. While I used to spend my mornings before work trying to sneak out an extra page or two, now I use them to transcribe the previous day’s work. I don’t have a hard and fast goal for weekly or monthy word counts, but every month I write up a blog post about my goals for that month, and if I set a target for myself, I name it there. It keeps me honest, and because forcing myself to hit those self-set goals helps build the discipline to make your paying deadlines.

What stops you from writing?

The business of writing is what usually stops me from putting down new words these days. Updating my website, blogging, attending conferences, having to stop in the middle of a new story because the edits from the previous story have arrived, that sort of thing. I also freelance as a reviewer and interviewer, and I find it hard to work on my own fiction when one of those articles comes up. I am definitely a creature of momentum and inertia. and when I’m flying on a project, it’s all I want to do. Unfortunately, once I’ve been interrupted, I find it hard to avoid the siren call of social media and get started again.

What is the worst advice about writing you’ve ever heard or received?

There’s so much of it! To narrow all of my bad advice down to a generality, I’d say generalities. Anytime advice sounds like “the way I succeeded as a writer is the only way that you can” is terrible advice. Every writer is different and the only constant in the industry is that it keeps changing.

A Haiku and an Interview at Toronto Review of Books

John Wisniewski was kind enough to interview me recently, which reminded me of a haiku of mine that is also online in the same publication. (Best interview title ever? Well, I’ve had some good ones….) He had to edit for space, so I am posting the complete interview below in case you are interested.

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Could you tell us about your earliest poems and other writings — were they experimental in nature?

My earliest writings were poems that resulted from failed transcriptions of song lyrics. I used to write out songs I had taped from friends who had gone into the city recently, since where I grew up there was no radio station that played modern music and no music stores. Anyway, when I became able to purchase CDs through the mail and look up lyrics online, I noticed a host of deviations between what I thought they were singing and what they were really singing — probably because I listened to mostly grunge and heavy metal and it’s harder to make out the vocals in those genres due to the singers having a tendency to mumble or scream. In every instance, I preferred my misheard deviations to the original lyrics. After discovering this, I began to write my own lyrics and poems.

Now, reflecting upon these early “writings,” it’s stunning how close this accidental composition was to experimental processes of copying, reframing, corrupting, or remixing texts — even though the stuff I was writing had very little experimentation to it, ultimately. However, after discovering Radiohead and Nirvana, I quickly began working with fragmentary and surrealistic images. Then I discovered Salman Rushdie and Stephen King around the same time, and became interested in architectural book forms and aggressive, assaultive imagery.

Ex Machina explores man’s relationship with machines — could you tell us about this?

The title effectively summarizes my core idea: that once one removes ‘God’ (Deus) from the cosmic picture, one ends up in a universe without a guarantor of humanity’s place near the top of some hierarchy of being. At that point, it’s easy to see yourself as an evolutionary step towards the rise of technology. Related to this is the idea that technology actually alters humanity in some essential way, now that we have no guarantor of any sort of permanence/essence, so that the category of the human begins to break down, even during what we might otherwise view as ‘normal’ uses of technology.

Since these are well-worn science-fiction themes, I grafted them onto what is probably my real interest: the way that artworks like Ex Machina might be considered a species of technology, and also something that we exist simply to create and service. I’m interested in the cultural anxiety produced by postmodern ideas — so, the modernist vaulting of art into something that might take the place of religion, which develops into a postmodernist devaluing of both art and religion for their metanarrative force, is something I’m transmuting as a nightmarish situation of conceptual violence.

The Politics of Knives explores words and violence. Is there violence in words?

In his book Violence, Slavoj Žižek wonders “What if, however, humans exceed animals in their capacity for violence precisely because they speak?” and notes that “there is something violent in the very symbolization of a thing, which equals its mortification … When we name gold ‘gold,’ we violently extract a metal from its natural texture, investing into it our dreams of wealth, power, spiritual purity, and so on, which have nothing whatsoever to do with the immediate reality of gold.”

Žižek’s connection of language to violence, and of symbolization as a form of death, is hardly original — however, what I find interesting is how language and narrative both get viewed as having a violent potential in postmodern thought, and yet the abandonment of language and narrative is seen as creating what is possibly a more nightmarish situation than their maintenance. So you end up with all of these attempts in experimental art to undermine narrative and the communicative qualities of language (which are seen as having negative political implications), alongside an acknowledgement of the impossibility of this, and sometimes even the undesirability of this. That space of anxiety is the space I want to occupy — and possibly escape, but without retreating towards some sort of conservative position.

Whom are some authors and artists that influence you — do you like the work of Artaud? 

I used a quotation from Artaud’s letters as the epigraph for my book Clockfire — “… the pool of energies which constitute Myths, which man no longer embodies, is embodied by the theatre’ —although I find Artaud’s actual theatre less interesting than his ideas about the theatre. What Artaud missed, and what I try to suggest with Clockfire, is that a true theatre of cruelty would present the audience with horrors on the Lovecraftian scale, pushing forth a cosmic or conceptual horror rather than confining itself to the artistic and social situation.

My influences range widely, and depend on the project, since I read and research in relation to specific projects — so, for example, with Clockfire the major influences were Artaud, Lovecraft, Italo Calvino, and Yoko Ono.

Probably the largest luminaries in my artistic life have been (in no order) Guy Maddin, George Toles, Solomon Nagler, Dennis Cooley, Robert Kroetsch, Christian Bök, Natalee Caple, Derek Beaulieu, Ryan Fitzpatrick, Maurice Mierau, Robert Majzels, and Suzette Mayr. David Bergen made some very powerful comments to me early in my writing career although he doesn’t remember it (I’ve re-met him since).

In a more general and less personal sense (i.e., people I don’t know), my largest influences (again, in no order) would include a host of musicians, and the aforementioned Lovecraft, King, and Rushdie, alongside David Lynch, Franz Kafka, Lisa Robertson, Shirley Jackson, Tony Burgess, and the Freud/Lacan/Žižek trinity. I just wrote a book on John Paizs, which should be coming out probably in January 2014, so he looms large as well.

I consider myself a horror author, and I think of myself as a novelist. So my longer list of influences would no doubt surprise someone who doesn’t think of me that way, since people generally consider me an experimental poet.

Could you tell us about writing Clockfire — are these glimpses or sketches of possible stageplays?

It would be more accurate to call them glimpses or sketches if impossible stageplays — one requires the destruction of the sun, another requires you to burn down the theatre with the audience inside, and so forth. I have always been ambivalent about the theatre. I love the theatre in theory, but I always feel disappointed when I see actual plays.

Writing Clockfire required me to think about what kind of theatre we might produce if we weren’t shackled by morality, mortality, and physics. Also, I’m interested in books that make demands on the reader and require reader engagement, and with Clockfire readers are ultimately responsible for “staging” the plays in the theatres of their imagination. This pulls the book closer to Fluxus art and its scripts for “happenings” than conventional poetry, which is why I decided to write in a prose-poem form, although I remained attentive to the language and its rhythms.

This desire for reader engagement is also why I released the book under a Creative Commons license, which allows and encourages “remixes.” My other two books have been released under the same license. Gary Barwin did a great series where he reversed a number of the plays, so that instead of unfolding into horror (as mine often do) they progress toward states of grace.

Your writing requires the reader to actually create, in that he can use your images to build on his own. Do you find this to be true, that your writing challenges the reader?

I would like to think that I challenge the reader, in a way that is engaging rather than frustrating. I pay a lot of attention to how I think the writing is possible to receive, and try to both anticipate and subvert or upset reader expectations. For me, what’s exciting in literature is the way that it disturbs your ideas of what a book is or should be.

H. P. Lovecraft on Experimental Fiction (and the Creative Writing Workshop)

“Popular authors do not and apparently cannot appreciate the fact that true art is obtainable only by rejecting normality and conventionality in toto, and approaching a theme purged utterly of any usual or preconceived point of view. Wild and “different” as they may consider their quasi-weird products, it remains a fact that the bizarrerie is on the surface alone; and that basically they reiterate the same old conventional values and motives and perspectives. Good and evil, teleological illusion, sugary sentiment, anthropocentric psychology — the usual superficial stock in trade, and all shot through with the eternal and inescapable commonplace . . . Who ever wrote a story from the point of view that man is a blemish on the cosmos, who ought to be eradicated? As an example — a young man I know lately told me that he means to write a story about a scientist who wishes to dominate the earth, and who to accomplish his ends trains and overdevelops germs . . . and leads armies of them in the manner of the Egyptian plagues. I told him that although this theme has promise, it is made utterly commonplace by assigning the scientist a normal motive. There is nothing outré about wanting to conquer the earth; Alexander, Napoleon, and Wilhelm II wanted to do that. Instead, I told my friend, he should conceive a man with a morbid, frantic, shuddering hatred of the life-principle itself, who wishes to extirpate from the planet every trace of biological organism, animal and vegetable alike, including himself. That would be tolerably original. But after all, originality lies with the author. One can’t write a weird story of real power without perfect psychological detachment from the human scene, and a magic prism of imagination which suffuses theme and style alike with that grotesquerie and disquieting distortion characteristic of morbid vision. Only a cynic can create horror — for behind every masterpiece of the sort must reside a driving demonic force that despises the human race and its illusions, and longs to pull them to pieces and mock them.”

— Lovecraft, in a letter to Edwin Baird (the first editor of Weird Tales), quoted from Thomas Ligotti’s incredible The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror

Spencer Gordon on Practical Matters

Spencer Gordon is the author of Cosmo, a collection of short fiction from Coach House Books. He is the co-editor/co-founder of Ferno House, the micro-press, and of The Puritan, the online literary journal. His poetry chapbook Feel Good! Look Great! Have a Blast! was nominated for the 2012 bpNichol Award. Spencer Gordon’s fiction, poetry, and non-fiction can be found in numerous literary journals and anthologies, such as Riddle Fence, Event,The Windsor Review, dead(g)end(er), The Maple Tree Literary Supplement, subTerrain, The Barnstormer, Broken Pencil Magazine, The Mansfield Revue, Existere, Contemporary Verse 2, echolocation, Joyland, a hub of short fiction, Soliloquies,Weijia Quarterly, Dinosaur Porn (Ferno House, 2010), Gulch: An Assemblage of Poetry and Prose (Tightrope Books, 2009),ottawater, Bywords Quarterly Journal, The Danforth Review,The Puritan, experiment-o (AngelHousePress, 2008),Departures (above/ground press, 2008), and zaum.

How do you decide what you’ll work on, when you sit down to write?

I’m not sure if I understand this question correctly. When I sit down to write I know what I’m working on, or what I’m about to work on. I don’t decide to shift activities after dragging myself to work. The decision to fiddle with something particular trumps any decision that sends me to my desk to write in general. Sure, I may change my mind and walk away (or do something else) after writing gets too scary or sad or frustrating, and I suppose some creepy fairy may belch in my ear and make me suddenly want to write something completely different. But I know what I need to do ahead of time, for the most part

Or, whoa—are you asking how I decide what part of the piece I’m working on to work on when I sit down to write? ’Cause that’s a whole other question, and one that has no answer. I generally know where I’m stuck and in which direction the story or chunk needs to shuffle. Sometimes unexpected things happen and I end up working on a section that I thought was finished, or I have a bleak epiphany that some component I thought golden is actually dull and worthless. Such is the usual back-and-forth between making and editing, forging and tinkering that fiction and poetry demand.

Or, whoa—

Do you keep a writing schedule, with any sort of quotas?

In an interview with rob mclennan earlier this year, I was asked the same question (albeit with more lowercase letters and semicolons). I’ll quote myself and then try to elaborate on what I meant, and mean:

“I do not have a writing routine. I abhor routine, as my life is already filled with mechanical routines. [Note: I was teaching full-time at Humber College and OCAD University. I have since quit and had a marked reduction in grey hair discoveries.] Writing releases me, provides a blank and glorious rift in schedule and shame. If I scheduled writing and stuck to some demanding ledger, it would feel like forced, dry, and unwanted intercourse, and I already receive enough of that.”

Later on, I say this:

“I like to forget about my writing completely from time to time. All claims that writing is about daily labour and constant suffering is weird protestant work-ethic stuff, and I’m not buying it! Sure—one must write and read a whole lot to get good at it. But people sometimes forget the most important thing: writing is pleasure. It’s about magical worlds and insane fantasies. It’s where you get to indulge the delusions of the heart and hold people enthralled in worlds of your own dastardly creation. Isn’t that beautiful? And given the fact that most writers must work at some other gig just to make rent and sew up their hideous shoes, that beautiful thing that you love [so often] gets knocked down your list of urgent, worldly priorities. So why are you making it so hard?”

Although Henry Miller liked his lists and commandments, he also said, “Don’t be a draught-horse! Work with pleasure only!” I am chasing whatever pleasure, personal vindication, expression, and existential yawps I can channel. I would absolutely hate myself if I had a real, workmanlike ‘quota.’ The work completed to fill such a bastard would be mostly soulless and I would be in a constant state of self-flagellation when I failed to meet it.

I’m just trying to write as much as possible without sacrificing too many other obligations, and without losing all my money and hair, and without completely alienating and vilifying myself in the eyes of my loved ones and peers, who naturally request that I be a social creature and share my time, as we all must (although I am exceptionally attractive and the life of any party, so it’s particularly difficult for me to withdraw completely).

What stops you from writing?

Trivial, mundane matters, from chores to errands to boring acts of self-preservation. Attending to other people’s needs (see above). Other literary investments—editing, running a magazine, working with a micro-press, planning launches, meetings, and so forth—so that I can return favours and stay connected and make other people happy. Making money, finding work, and all those other horrible demands of capitalism.

But all of this is to cover up the real blocker, the real inhibitor: and that’s Deep Terror & Anxiety. I am absolutely terrified that the awesome story or image or devastating emotional turn in my imagination will transform to lifeless, sodden shit on the page—so terrified that it’s easier to daydream and forget about writing entirely than risk such a failure. The spectre of bad writing (I’m certain) has prevented the production of more fantastic novels, short stories, and poems than almost any other inhibiting factor, including poverty and madness.

Add to this my personal spectre, who whispers a continuous, midnight litany of you are a fraud, an imposter, a bad artist. You are no artist at all! In the world of The Simpsons, it would be a more brash admonishment: “They’re all gonna laugh at you!”

Which leads me to the morose question: what if all this is in pursuit of something never to be grasped, a fruitless endeavor, and all those other, ignored paths would have led to real happiness, fulfillment, love, comfort, joy?

What is the worst advice about writing you’ve ever heard or received?

It’s rare that I get truly bad advice from anybody. I can think of some exceptionally misguided notions, though, that I’ve tried to avoid.

The first is the feeling that there’s always more time. I am happiest when I’m most ant-like and at work on something writing-related, no matter how far this gets me from my writing itself. We are not going to be around forever, duh! I need to read, write harder, with more awareness of my impending disappearance—how awful.

Another bad piece of advice would be to insist upon one ‘right’ way, or school, or method, or period, or whatever. My Twitter and Facebook and blog feeds are usually jammed up with very smart writers righteously claiming that disputing ways (or schools) of writing—always antithetical to their own—are wrong, or unethical, or not hitting the bull’s-eye of art (which changes according to camp, obviously). I may not like a piece of writing at any given time, but I am training myself to see work I’m not instantly keen on from other people’s perspectives, to see why someone else might celebrate the things I find stinky. I think it’s bad advice to get caught up in any camp war, period, because everybody’s wrong, and what a waste of time! Why be snarky and angry when you could be reading stuff you love! And god, how are you so secure in your own opinions?

Now can I turn this question around and talk about good advice? Advice that emboldens and empowers me and makes me want to be a better artist? I think there’s a real ethical framework behind the writing life, but it takes a lot of guts (often what I lack the most—if I had real guts I probably wouldn’t be a writer).

Part of a good writer’s ethics comes from cultivating self-honesty. Don’t lie about bad work, and don’t make time for bad work, and don’t make time for mean-spirited or power-hungry or trivial people (but forgive them ’cause they’re just like you!). Don’t kiss anyone’s ass, especially in shallow and obvious ways that are just as much a part of literature as they are in the corporate world—refuse this almost irresistible urge. Don’t jump to the first conclusion, don’t lump people/writing styles together unfairly, and don’t dismiss anyone’s work as inferior just ’cause it re-secures your position or stake in the field of cultural production.

Serve only your own artistic impulses; do not try to write for or emulate anyone but your own hard-won, struggle-discovered idols/models; retreat, if necessary, into the unfashionable and the out-of-date. But keep your writing dangerous by writing against whatever you can imagine is the fashion (which may get you hated) or against real power/money/laziness (which may get you disliked). Remember that all the ills of power have shadowy, mirror manifestations in your own personality, even if you’re (seemingly) powerless, poor, and hardworking. Everything evil in a community or an institutional sense exists in some form in your own mind and heart; be like Gandhi and be the change you want to see. I guess we do this by being kind and forgiving; we don’t allow ourselves to get bored; we challenge ourselves to be better. In that way we write what needs to be written.

Does Writing Get Easier?

When I talk to beginning writers, they often say something that makes it clear that they think writing gets easier. Sometimes they flat-out ask me if it gets easier. I don’t know what to say.

On one level, it gets easier. I have been publishing articles, reviews, stories, and poems fairly regularly since 2000. I have published three books since 2009, one of which recently won a Manitoba Book Award, and I have a fourth book under contract for 2014. It has gotten easier in the sense that I know I can publish. I’ve published, and I could do it again. Barring stroke or injury, I will always be able to write publishable work.

It also gets easier in the sense that people start asking you things. They ask you to submit to their journal. They ask you to teach a course. They ask you to give a reading. You get invited to do a lot of things for which you earlier spent time begging. I don’t really have that big of a reputation, and I imagine that things will get even easier in this regard as my reputation grows (assuming it grows!) and things will get a good deal easier if I have any large success.

On the other hand, it doesn’t get easier. I still get rejections – even after I’ve been invited to submit. The other day I was watching an interview with Stephen King. He was talking about how he sent the short story “N.” to The New Yorker and they considered it but ultimately turned it down for reasons of length. Think about that for a moment. Stephen King is still getting rejections.

Recently, I moved my three published books onto my computer desk. I put them right beneath the screen, spine-out. My name facing me. I did this because I observed that when I was writing, I felt as if I had never written anything before. Sometimes you just forget that you’ve done it before. Now when I feel that way, I just look down. Oh, look! Books with my name on them! I’ve already published some books! It doesn’t get easier.

David Annandale on Practical Matters

For a new feature, “Practical Matters,” I ask a handful of practically minded questions to a group of writers (then later, ask a new group a set of new questions).

David Annandale writes fiction in a variety of genres, including SF/fantasy, horror, and thrillers, and non-fiction about film and video games. He teaches courses on film, games, literature and creative writing at the University of Manitoba. You can find him online at www.DavidAnnandale.com

How do you decide what you’ll work on, when you sit down to write?

Deadlines determine that for me. Whatever is due first, is what gets first attention.

Do you keep a writing schedule, with any sort of quotas?

I find it difficult to maintain a regular schedule, and so go with the quotas instead. During the summer, I try to keep to 2000 words a day. During the university year, 1000 words a day.

What stops you from writing?

Apart from the normal, healthy demands of a day job and family life? Letting myself get distracted by that combination resource and time-waster, the Internet.

What is the worst advice about writing you’ve ever heard or received?

Though it was presented more as indirect advice (what one particular writer, whose name I now cannot recall advocated), the worst idea I’ve every heard was to discard any story ending thought of before actually arriving at that ending. If I don’t know how a story ends before I begin, I might as well issue an open invitation to writer’s block to make itself at home. In the genres I write in, not having the ending in place from the start is, I think, fatal.