Rob Mclennan's Blog, page 350

Cody-Rose Clevidence, Beast Feast

/biomimicryexuberant harmoniaa state of naturea natural State
\ “For the animal is in relation to his circle of food, prey, and other animals of its own kind, and it is so in a way essentially different from the way the stone is related to the earth upon which it lies.  In the circle of the living things characterized as plant or animal we find the peculiar stirring of a motility by which the living being is “stimulated,” i.e., excited to an emerging into a circle of excitability on the basis of which it includes other things in the circle of its stirring.”


/ in the depths of the forest you can hear the low moans & grunts & quickened panting of numbers propagating in the dark. (“A state of nature / a natural State”)
Perhaps a little late to catch what others might already know, I’m fascinated by the concordance of sound, space, language and punctuation in Cody-Rose Clevidence’s seemingly first full-length poetry collection, Beast Feast (Ahsahta Press, 2014). Very much constructed as a book-length engagement with nature, beasts, decay, language and etymology, Beast Feast is moss-thick and lively, animalistic and articulate, filled with a vibrancy and an expansiveness that runs and rushes the length and breath of the entire work. As Clevidence writes in the poem “{THEFT}”: “I is a single decomposure in the intermittent language.” Beast Feast is explosive in form, incredibly playful and serious in heft, displaying both an incredible precision and wild openness in a poetry book that, on first glance, appears to be structurally wild, and even unformed. The author even attempts to prepare the reader through the opening poem, a preface piece, set just before the table of contents, titled “BE PREPARED FOR MANY FORMS.”
Beast for loneliness beast of distance.   coppiced beast is a garden in the forest.   beast of occasional grimace beast of multiplicity beast claims a exigent thrust in all directions.   unlawful beast is the utterance by which a necessary flower groans. (“[BEAST IN SUNLIGHT BEAST OF RELINQUISH”)
There is something reminiscent of California poet Michelle Detorie’s After-Cave (Boise ID: Ahsahta Press, 2014) [see my review of such here], with both titles paired in their ecological concerns, writing critically on the human occupation of the planet, and their adherence to complex, engaged and playful poetic structure. Being that I’m so late finally getting to this book, have I already missed out on what Clevidence has already done next? As part of the online press release at the Ahsahta website, Clevidence’s statement for the book reads:
The project for this book involved tearing apart an idea of “the natural” in favor of the unnatural real weirdness of the “natural” (including artificial and imaginary) world, which is I think a necessary project of queerness and of others to whom the existing structures don’t make any sense bodily (that’s all of us). It’s also a project of phenomenology in general and a preoccupation with the sensation of being as an unnatural beast in this place. Also just the project of delight in language, and delight in language as a creatural-thing we humans do.  I’m mostly interested in the turning of phrase, in prosody, in the inbuilt structure that conveys the structure, the “instress, stress,” and also ideas, the created ideas of what it is to be in the world, and how those are structures we are also building with our ideas in the world, which is a real world full of real history and knowledge and sensations and real things like rocks and commodities and trees and real imaginary things like laws and genders and selves.  To embody a language in awe of nature and fervent in its frenzy is a legacy from the romantics, and to have a language that can both be the hypothesis and the experiment (and maybe complete its own answer) is a legacy from the language poets, and I’m grateful that the way is plowed, so I (we) can, now, build in (an) open field.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Andrea Baker

Andrea Baker is the author of Each Thing Unblurred is Broken (Omnidawn, 2015), Famous Rapes , a paper and packing tape constructed not-quite-graphic-novel about the depiction of sexual assault from Mesopotamia to the present day (forthcoming, Water Street Press), and Like Wind Loves a Window (Slope Editions, 2005).  Her recent work has appeared in Denver Quarterly, Fence, Pleiades, The Rumpus, Tin House, and Typo. It has also been anthologized in Family Resemblance: An Anthology of Eight Hybrid Literary Genres (Rose Metal Press, 2015), Verse Daily, and Broken Land: Poems of Brooklyn (New York University Press, 2007). In addition to her work on the page, she is a subject in the documentary, A Rubberband is an Unlikely Instrument . She works as an appraiser of arts and antiques in New York City.
1 - How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?My first book, Like Wind Loves a Window gave me community.  I got to know Jennifer Bartlett and Matt Hendrickson and the circles of people around them.  And I found my way onto the mom-poet listserv, which was a lifesaver for me.
I had been living a very marginal, Bohemian life, which was comforting and it’s own sort of shelter from world, but I was extremely isolated, crushingly poor, and in a restrictive relationship.     
I didn’t do it all at once, and I didn’t always do it gracefully, but having the book provided with me with a trail of breadcrumbs to follow out into the world beyond the walls of my apartment and my role as a wife. 
My second book, Each Thing Unblurred Is Broken is the inner life of following that trail.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?True story.  I was at a reading for the first journal to accepted my work (which I considered minimalist fiction) when I learned that they only publish poetry, and that they thought I was writing poetry.  Then the poetry editor from a larger journal called 3rd Bed happened to see my work in the first journal and she asked me for work to consider for 3rd Bed.  The next issue they asked me on as associate poetry editor.  Soon after I began to employ line breaks. 
3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?Poetry is meditation.  I record my wandering mind and build things from the fragments.  But I don’t think I’ve written a single poem in the last year. 
For the last couple years I’ve been working on a hybrid not-quite-graphic-novel/art/non-fiction book called Famous Rapes, which keeps getting pushed back, but is now due out Spring 2016.  It’s about the depiction of sexual assault from Mesopotamia to the current day.  Most of the writing there looked like researching.  Actually, in poetry most of the writing looks like researching too, but it’s research into own my being. 
So, yeah, I’m a slow writer.  A very slow writer.
4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?It’s too overwhelming to think of writing a book.  I just do something then keep shaping and shaping and shaping.  I’m shaping little pieces, and then I’m shaping little pieces together.  Then I’m shaping bigger-than-little pieces together.  Then I turn my head, and there’s a book.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?I don’t enjoy attempting to hustle up an audience—that is counter to my creative process.  And I don’t love tiny readings, or travel.  But giving readings with at least twenty or thirty people, and where it isn’t on me to get people there bring me closer to my own work.
6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?I have some spiritual questions that approach theory—matters of immanence and the nature of the material world, and the nature of absence as its own sort of presence—but coming to terms with the fickleness of perception and making it through the day—how to be—are what interest me most.  I’m more about navigating than I am about questions or answers. 
7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?I don’t think in these terms.  I know that we all help one another through speaking and through reflecting and through recording the authenticity of acts of play, and writing is an act of play, but I’m not interested in roles. 
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?Essential.  I love to be edited.  I’m much more of a reviser than I am a writer, and I appreciate thoughtful editors to no end.  They bring me further than I can get on my own. 
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?Once I was sitting in on a figure drawing class.  The professor came in and drew a big sine wave on the blackboard.  He told the students that it was at the lower peaks of the wave that the work was being done—the times of difficulty, when things aren’t going right.  Then he put his chalk on the top of the wave and said that the upper peak is great, but it’s just the reward.  It isn’t the work. 
His voice was cracking with angst.  Personally, I know that a more even-keeled and thoroughly creative life is possible, but twenty years have passed and I’m still reflecting and extracting meaning, even if some of my own meaning entails a rejection of his premise... so I’ll say that was the best advice.
10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to visual works)? What do you see as the appeal?In my late teens I was more or less obsessed with figuring out what unities all the arts—there was a spirit I could feel below all of them, and I had no idea what it was.  In college I designed a major for myself called Comparative Arts.  My goal was to understand each of the arts as articulate bodies of work and to understand what held them together. 
My interests have always been really broad.  I was a girl obsessed with dance class, and then I was teenager at an art school majoring in cello.  Then I found the world of writing, and was glad to have found a way to explore and play around that was outside the competitive world of music performance, where I knew I didn’t stand a shot at getting a job in a major city. 
All the arts are really the same thing to me.  They’re all just messing around—play—and expressions of/records of humanity, or spirituality, or the human spirit, or however you want to say it. 
I don’t have a lot of intent involved in moving between genres.  I just play around however I want to play around.
11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?The dog gets fed, a cup of coffee is had, and, often, I go to work.  I’m an appraiser of fine and decorative art and do a lot of consulting in the mid-market auction world.  Writing isn’t an element of structure in my life.
12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?Rilke, Roethke, and Wallace Stevens.  
13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?That question almost successfully plants in my mind that idea that some fragrance reminds me of home.  That isn’t the case.
14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?Eastern philosophy and contemporary choreography are fairly direct influences, but it isn’t an exaggeration to say the entire material world influences me.  As an appraiser I am very engaged with “stuff,” and with the way stuff moves through the world.  I spend a much higher than average amount of time in dead people’s homes.
Lately, I’ve been interested in hip-hop and rap, and in the significance of banality.  ......though, at the end of the day, I might agree with McFadden.  Reading is what makes me write.
15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?I’m not sure I have an inside and an outside, in relation to my work, but I love the compressed and precise language of auction catalogs.
16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?I don’t like talking about things before I do them. 
17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?I don’t conceive of writing, especially writing poetry, as an occupation.  Many writers are academics, and being an academic is occupation.  If I had been born into any particular religion I might have made engagement with that religion my occupation.  And in some alternate plane of the life I was born into, I might be very fulfilled living as a Buddhist nun. 
.......but I am very happy with the life I have.  I worked my ass off to get it.  And I did the work because I was engaged and wanted to do it; I never would have believed that the things I have accomplished were possible for me.
18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?“Something else” here means, to me, working in another art form.  I’m not very interested in anything other the arts, though I am voraciously interested in the arts, and interested ideas (philosophy and psychology) as expressed in material forms and play-things. 
Maybe I would have been a visual artist, if that hadn’t been my mother’s space.  Classical music is too hard, and the culture of bars doesn’t appeal to me, which eliminates most other forms.  Dance is too hard, and the career is too short.  Acting never appealed to me. 
19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?Maggie Nelson’s Argonauts was great.  I don’t love movies—when I watch something I prefer to enter a familiar world, and live in that world for an extended period of time.  But the Netflix series Longmireis great.  It’s very Terrence Malick-y.  After a few episodes I started wondering how it could be so good, so I googled and there’s a poet involved—Tony Tost. 
20 - What are you currently working on?This makes me happy.  I get to make a companion adult coloring book for Famous Rapes.  A handful of test images are at the printer’s now.  After I assess line quality, I’ll dig in further. 
12 or 20 (second series) questions;

University of Alberta writers-in-residence event(s): Edmonton report,

Recently, Christine and I were in Edmonton as part of my participation in the fortieth anniversary of the writer-in-residence program at the University of Alberta (I was writer-in-residence during the 2007-2008 academic year), with numerous readings, panels and gatherings both formal and informal, organized by a small group led by U of A prof Thomas Wharton (who did a stellar job).

Thanks to father-in-law, we were gifted passes to the Air Canada Lounge, which we enjoyed in Toronto in both directions. Oh my.

[to the left: on the right of the photo is Sheila Watson's desk, held in the FM Salter Room in U of Alberta's English and Film Studies Department] The list of attendees was impressive: Gary Geddes, Tom Wayman, Daphne Marlatt, Leona Gom, Fred Wah, Kristjana Gunnars, Di Brandt, Marilyn Dumont, Caterina Edwards, Curtis Gillespie, Merna Summers, Trevor Ferguson, Thomas Wharton, Catherine Bush, Tim Bowling, Tim Lilburn, myself, Richard van Camp, Marina Endicott, Don McKay and Erín Moure (and you are reading, of course, my ongoing series of interviews with as many of this list as have agreed?). Originally Fred Stenson was scheduled to participate as well, but, unfortunately, illness managed to knock him out for the exact few days of the event.

Awaiting our second flight to Edmonton during an hour or so in Toronto, we even managed to share the flight with Catherine Bush and Don McKay (who had already been travelling for many hours, given he came in from Newfoundland), able to have some lovely conversation at our shared gate.

Once we arrived, the events were incredible: spread out over a few days, which allowed for breathing space between, without having to pack every author into a marathon event, which apparently they did at the prior gathering of such, a decade earlier (can you imagine they do this every decade? I am totally going back to Alberta every decade from now on...). Opening night, for example, there was a group reading by more than half a dozen of the list, including Kristjana Gunnars, launching her brand-new above/ground press chapbook (I also produced a new item co-translated by Moure, as well as a chapbook of my short fiction); she was easily the best reader in the set. I'd only heard her read once before, during the year she was writer-in-residence at the University of Ottawa, somewhere around 1992 (back then, I was immersed in her novels; had I understood then what a writer-in-residence did, I really should have attempted to send her some of my writing...).

My participation included a panel conversation, the second of a two-panel conversation on what it means to be "engaged." Our panel (moderated by Erín Moure, with myself, Di Brandt, Marilyn Dumont and Fred Wah) responded, in part, to the first panel (moderated by Gary Geddes, with Richard van Camp, Daphne Marlatt and Kristjana Gunnars). What does it mean to be engaged?

Further highlights included: being able to spend time with Marilyn Dumont (brilliant and quite funny), finally meet Richard van Camp (a whirlwind of energy), and generous conversations with Catherine Bush, Tim Lilburn, Don McKay, Di Brandt, Gary Geddes and Tim Bowling; again see Edmonton poets Christine Stewart and Douglas Barbour, and Cathie Crooks and Peter Midgley from the University of Alberta Press, among so many others in and around Edmonton that I haven't seen in moons and moons and moons.

Of course I had envelopes of chapbooks etcetera for every participant, and was pleasantly surprised when a couple of the writers kindly gifted me their books in return: new titles by Di Brandt and Gary Geddes, and Leona Gom's The Collected Poems (Sono Nis Press, 1991).

And of course, while there, I took full advantage of the University of Alberta print-shop, with a far larger array of colour options than my local Staples; I produced the covers for the next three issues of Touch the Donkey (but really need to figure out some further options locally).

You don't even want to think about how much I spent, or how much more it cost to mail it all home...

Given the rarity of childcare in our household (mother-in-law was generous enough to watch our wee Rose while we were away), we snuck off to the West Edmonton Mall during our one and only window with which to catch the new Deadpool movie, 11am on Saturday morning (IT WAS COMPLETELY AWESOME!). It also meant that this was our first (apart from a Toronto funeral in January) solo trip since Rose was born, as well as our final trip before the new one appears in a few weeks time. We enjoyed the breath (although, at this point, Christine isn't really sleeping well either way). We wandered the Mall for a bit, a venue Christine hadn't actually experienced prior to this; and an expensive day: twenty-five dollar cab each way. Ugh. But oh so worth it.

I don't even want to talk about how my laptop disappeared from the airplane upon landing (mistakenly picked up by another; it was delivered safe to the hotel by the time we returned from the first evening's events). And it was, somehow, warmer in Edmonton during our time there than it was back in Ottawa (minus sixteen at home, and barely zero in Edmonton; it was like a little spring).

It was very strange to be back in Edmonton after a decade. So much has changed since then, and the whole experience seems so very, very long ago, and yet, I was entirely reshaped by the experience. My time in Edmonton was incredibly productive [see my piece on Sheila Watson's White Pelican, for example], and changed the direction of my thoughts on a multitude of things, from writing to living to simply being in the world. It changed just about everything, and I am enormously grateful.

And oh, our view from the hotel breakfast nook, where we had all but one breakfast (we went next door for our final morning, to see what the Fairmont Macdonald had to offer...). The University of Alberta would be across the river valley, but to the far right, just out of the frame...

It was a whirlwind: I wasn't able to show Christine where I'd lived during my year, or introduce her to the HUB Mall or the incredible view from the seventh-floor Grad Lounge in the Student Union Building. I wasn't able to show her The Garneau Pub, where I spent nearly every evening with a mound of books and paper, furiously working. Or even where my office was located. There was always another event we had to get to, or a brief window in which to gather food before the next event. Perhaps in ten years time.

And and: on our Toronto-Ottawa flight, seeing Stephen Brockwell and Gwendolyn Guth, returning from a week-plus of rest in some sunny, southern clime...

Juliane Okot Bitek, 100 Days

The poems in 100 Days pose incisive questions that deepen our resolve to witness. Striking through official discourse, the poetry is multiscalar and delicately local in its attentiveness. The one hundred days recounted here, “should be days to think / to consider / to see / to witness.” With these poems we learn about the impossibility of persisting, and yet persisting, through everyday horror. In her writing, Okot Bitek shows how ripening markets, colonialism, caste and class division, austerity, war and political turmoil contribute to violence, gendered violence and to the conditions for genocide the world over. With a generous familiarity, Okot Bitek engages and transmutes an African and East-African sense of community, aspects of diaspora, and transitory belonging within North American systems and experience. Her poetry compels us to do our own work to account, relate and strengthen. We remain determined to create and therefore to act. Although the poems specify land and people closer to her Ugandan homeland, Okot Bitek’s insights resonate in relation to the genocide of Indigenous peoples in Canada and elsewhere arund the world. However at home we may be in the traditional and ancestral territories of Indigenous Peoples, this poetic project is aware of ongoing disjuncture. It question the rote offerings of an insincere, immaterial and governmental “reconciliation.”(Cecily Nicholson, “Foreword”)
The latest title in the University of Alberta Press’ “Robert Kroetsch Series” is Juliane Okot Bitek’s 100 Days (Edmonton AB: University of Alberta Press, 2016), a collection of one hundred poems through one hundred days of the 1994 Rwanda Genocide, counting down through poems beginning with “Day 100,” living the narrative out in reverse. As the book is described on Bitek’s website, 100 Days is “a poetic response to the twentieth anniversary of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. Inspired by the photographs of Wangechi Mutu, [as] Juliane wrote a poem a day for a hundred days and posted them on this website and on social media — Facebook, Twitter, Instagram.” To open her “Author’s Note” at the end of the collection, she describes the project in more detail:
AT THE BEGINNING OF APRIL 2014, Wangechi Mutu, a Kenyan American artist, posted daily photographs tagged #Kwibuka20 #100Days on Facebook and Twitter. I knew immediately that they presented an opportunity for me to engage with the 1994 Rwanda Genocide, a period that I’ve thought about for the last twenty years. I contacted her and we began a collaboration of sorts; I wrote a poem and she posted a photograph for all the hundred daysthat has come to symbolize the worst days of the genocide in Rwanda. One hundred days of killing, one hundred days of witnessing, one hundred days of everything else that seemed to matter and then it didn’t, it couldn’t. And just lke that, twenty years has passed and there was a need to remember.
Bitek’s poems are fierce, directly straightforward and unrelenting, composing her poems in an unadorned manner that increase in tension through the accumulation. As she writes in “Day 88”: “someday we will grasp / the emptiness / inside one hundred days [.]” There is a proclaiming element to her lines that give the impression that this is a collection to be heard in performance as much as read on the page, and an honesty and comprehension of her subject matter that allows her to speak, openly and directly:
Day 57
We were halfway to dead when we were remindedthat we were halfway to dead
we were hovering suspecting trippingor tiptoeing over the terrainlest any semblance of confidence betrayed us again
ghosts flitted aboutattentive to our progressChrissie knewChrissie could seehaving never left ourselveswe were never going to arrive
Part of what makes the collection so engaging is in the way she focuses on intimate spaces and details, refusing to utilize the form for a simple re-telling of history (which, frustratingly, so many poets tend to do) but engaging the smaller moments. The witness here is personal and deeply felt, even when she writes on large abstracts, proclaiming in broad gestures, exploring through the lyric a human tragedy so brutal and extensive that it becomes unfathomable. “[E]ven time measured in machete strokes” she writes, at the end of “Day 91,” “can never be accurate [.]”
Day 59
So I must talk about what happenedtalk that you may understand
because you want to understandbecause you sayyou want to make a differencebecause all of itbegins with my telling of it
you want me to talk about what happenedyou want me to tellwhat was never mine to tell

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Lynn Marie Houston

Lynn Marie Houston is the author of The Clever Dream of Man (Aldrich Press), a book of poems about relationships between men and women. Her poetry has garnered the following: a Pushcart Prize nomination, two Best of the Net Award nominations, second place in the National Federation of State Poetry Societies 2015 competition, and an honorable mention in the Whispering Prairie 2015 Poetry Contest. In addition to being a poet, she is the founding editor of Five Oaks Press. She holds a B.A. from Hartwick College, a Ph.D. in English from Arizona State University, and is currently pursuing her M.F.A. degree at Southern Connecticut State University. Visit her writer's website at https://lynnmhouston.wordpress.com or contact her at lynnmhouston@gmail.com.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
My first poetry book has become like a calling card that has gained me entrance into some circles of writers. When you have a book, people will ask you to do readings. In other ways, too (like doing this interview!), you become part of the community of writers in a more meaningful way than before you had a book.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I began my career as a writer of academic prose, which is often dry and boring, and sounds like a bad translation from the French (sentences are passive and noun-phrase heavy). After realizing that I had more to offer in terms of my writing skills, I felt compelled to explore more creative forms of writing. I turned first to literary nonfiction (which I still pursue as a second genre) but realized my favorite nonfiction pieces were more like poetry. I wrote (bad) poetry as a teen, so when I finally made a commitment to poetry writing it was like a homecoming.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
I write almost every day, usually just jotting down quick notes that I keep in a file and come back to when I can clear a block of time. I am capable of producing a full-formed poem straight out of the gate about once every month or two, but most of what I write requires the magic of revision. I find that those times when I produce something ready-to-go are the times when I am most tapped into a sense of voice. But honestly, I love the wrestling process of revision. That’s what feels like real writing to me. Tapping into a voice feels more like channeling than the real work of writing.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
My poetry mentor, Vivian Shipley, has often showed me how my first drafts are really two poems that I’ve shoved into one. We call them “two-fers.” Just last month, I produced my first “three-fer” (a three part poem whose parts weren’t working well together and which has since become three separate poems). I have a tendency to overwrite in drafts, so my revision process involves cutting back quite a bit. Most of my poems begin with one key phrase that comes to me. And for most of my poems, I end up having to “kill that darling,” as they say, by deleting the line that produced the whole poem. About 75% of the time, that initial phrase doesn’t survive the decisions made in the revision process.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
My poems are made to read aloud. I love doing readings even of my newest stuff. I enjoy learning from audiences’ reactions and from other poets when they perform their work with passion and integrity.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
I am always interested in questions about gender differences and the problems that result from the different ways our society views men and women. I’m interested in the ethics of self versus other and how we might reconceive of that (false) dichotomy. I’m very interested in the material conditions of daily life that shape or are shaped by the fact that humans have bodies, mortal ones.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
Recent American political regimes have dismantled arts education (dismantled education altogether). It’s easier to get citizens to respond from a position of knee-jerk, base emotion when they are not educated. This benefits a certain U.S. political party whose platform only works when they can elicit fear and hatred, and when their constituents don’t understand the rules of logical argument or how to properly research facts. Given all of the above, I think a writer’s role in culture is similar to that of an educator’s. But the tools and context are different.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
For me, writing is always some part collaborative. The feedback I receive on my work is essential.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
“Do you want to be right? Or do you want to be heard?” This advice is about considering audience, but it’s also about so much more.

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
I teach, I run a press, and I’m currently pursuing an M.F.A degree at Southern Connecticut State University. The poetry workshops I take as part of my program have writing assignments and critiques built in, but on university breaks I try to clear large blocks of time to just sit with my files of ideas for poems. I can write all day for about five days before I start to flag. I’ve signed up for the Tupelo Press 30/30 for the month of January, so I will be writing a poem every day for 30 days. It will be a test of my writing endurance.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I have more ideas for writing than I have time to write so I don’t really get “stalled” in the sense of getting writer’s block. Sometimes my craft stales and I’m not able to achieve the effects I want with my skills. I just keep at it. I have a poem coming out in Blue Lyra Review (“Jealousy”)—it was one that came out fully formed after I’d been writing crap for about three hours. Sometimes you just have to be fully warmed up before the good stuff comes out.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
When afternoon sunlight warms decaying leaves. (I'm from NY's Hudson Valley region, where the fall season in the Southern Catskills is a spectacular show; I don't know why this came out so Faulknerian).

13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
Nature is my biggest inspiration. I’m looking more to science for how I include natural themes in my writing. Sometimes a song I hear puts a rhythm in my head that later produces a poem, but I can’t write with music on; I need silence. Also, I’m trying to write more from my body, which I think holds a kind of record of thoughts, feelings, and impressions about the world.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
The poets who are involved with the Connecticut Poetry Society have been very generous in reaching out to me and creating a sense of community for their members. The poets my press has published (Five Oaks Press) have also shaped me and often remain in touch as friends. Of course, my mentor Vivian Shipley is a near-daily positive influence on me.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Be in a long-term romantic relationship with a man who loves me.

16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
I would have liked to be a woodworker. I own a table saw, a router, a miter trimmer, clamps, etc. What I like making the most are picture frames. There’s something so satisfying about a good corner join, something so harmonious about ninety-degree angles. These same tools were what I used to renovate a 1968 Airstream camper. I was living in the Airstream (with a composting toilet I built myself and a solar-powered 12-volt light system) when I wrote my first poetry book, The Clever Dream of Man.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
When I was a child, literature was a great comfort to me, a safe space. I want to help create that space for others to enjoy.

18 - What was the last great book you read?
Fear and What Follows: a memoir by Tim Parrish, who teaches in the program at Southern Connecticut State University. It’s about being indoctrinated into racism while growing up in the South. This book is beautifully written with complex character development and is a brilliant illustration of the concept that a writer functions as a public intellectual and educator.

19 - What are you currently working on?
I’m currently working on a project within “postpastoral poetry.” It’s a camping-themed book of poetry, and I’m trying to write about human interaction with nature in a way that doesn’t make nature merely a reflection of human emotion. In other words, I’m trying to tackle environmental crises through the human values that promote them without committing the pathetic fallacy.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Pattie McCarthy, Quiet Book

& to & such a pretty bird. this isthe first sonnet for the third baby. ifI sound prepared for that, I am not.let me know you’re all right in there, would you?Kevin says : I dreamt it was a boy.my brother says : your favorite presidentscannot be F D R & Jefferson—that’s illogical. Emmett says : when Iwas pregnant with you, that was a tough week too.Asher says : seashell, voilà.          & the third(having outgrown a perfect, fragile world)baby (       bird from brid OE from unknownorigin)                                 “because he was cryingI like him most of all,” says my son. (“x y z & &”)
Philadelphia poet Pattie McCarthy’s sixth trade collection is Quiet Book (Berkeley CA: Apogee Press, 2016), a collection focused on domestic patter and patterns, writing on home and children, mothering and everything in-between. Constructed out of three sections—“x y z & &,” “notes for clothespin” and “genre scenes”—the poems in Quiet Book follow McCarthy’s previous poetry books— bk of (h)rs (Apogee Press, 2002), Verso (Apogee Press, 2004), Table Alphabetical of Hard Words (Apogee Press, 2010), Marybones (Apogee Press, 2013) [see my review of such here] and Nulls (horse less press, 2014) [see my review of such here]—for their formal invention and innovation, focus on women, mothering and the body, and themes of Medieval artworks and archives, armed with her fierce and fiery intelligence and an evocative musical cadence that sings through every line. As she writes in the short sequence that sits in the centre of the collection, “clothespin”: “the kiss is domestic is / domestic is kiss monumental // breech upon which / so much pinch [.]”
Originally produced as a chapbook in 2015 through Ahshata Press, “x y z & &” is a suite of thirty-three poems that explore and extend her work in collage and accumulation, stitching together scattered notes on parenting, language, nursing, childbirth and babies. McCarthy magnificently articulates the anxiety, distraction, exhaustion and bliss of parenting small children, as she writes: “I had four hours in a row alone / to work & I looked at photos of them / & remembered the limitless mistakes / it was possible to make with the piano.” And the structure of untitled poems composed as a suite also means it is possible to begin on any page, and read in either direction. In a 2014 interview at Touch the Donkey, she briefly discussed the suite:
I have a chapbook called ‘x y z &&’ coming out in the fall (Ahsahta Press)—it’s a sonnet sequence I wrote after my third child was born (I wrote a sonnet sequence after each child was born). One of the epigraphs is from Anselm Berrigan’s poem “Looking through a slant of light” : “Sending his mother to the typewriter / To type a poem that would embarrass him / Years later.” That’s my preemptive action on this front.
There are things related to the children that I do not write about because they are invasions of privacy, sure. It was harder when they were infants/toddlers because it doesn’t seem as though they have privacy when they are so little – it doesn’t feel like I have privacy during that phase either.
[…]
Obviously, I think they are brilliant & funny & clever—it would be impossible to resist them getting in the text.
The third section, “genre scenes,” explores the depictions of women in a variety of domestic situations and labours throughout Medieval artwork. A selection of fifteen pieces appearing previously as fifteen genre scenes (eth press, 2014), the twenty-four poems that make up “genre scenes” study historical depictions such as “woman nursing an infant with a child feeding a dog,” “& child, with apple tree & bread & doll” and “a woman scraping parnsips, with a child standing by,” that riffs off Nicholaes Maes’ 1655 painting “A Woman Scraping Parsnips, with a Child Standing by Her,”as she writes:
bring the knife toward the body toward the bodywatch now watch me bring the knife towardplane the woody surface a sharp parallel knifekeywords         food people vegetables child woman youngvegetable kid person adult female lady two people twotwo two persons indoor domestic scene scenes homely insideindoors interior interiors vertical preparing sitting sit sits seateddomestic parsnips parsnip scraping basket knife house hometags      woman child cap basket knife jug skirt apron ewer bodice some thingswomen do with their hands working by a windowthe girl is beautifully grumpy & learning something            boil the parsnips until tender            boil the eggs very hard
In a recent interview conducted by Christy Davids for The Conversant (posted December 2015), McCarthy writes:
So—with Quiet Book and thinking about the domestic—the poems in “genre scenes,” I mean I didn’t know very much at all about seventieth century Dutch painting, but I was a little bit in love with the idea of writing about those paintings while I was writing these poems about being pregnant and giving birth and having a newborn. Genre paintings—you know in the ranking of the French Academy of Fine Arts—it’s the middling genre, right. It’s: history paintings, and portraiture, and then genre paintings and the domestic—and they are small and not serious. So there was something perhaps perversely attractive to me about these paintings of people plucking ducks and deboning fish and nursing babies, and doing all this work inside the house. While I was writing these poems, I kept thinking about how we are sort of instructed not to take that seriously—‘mommy poems.’
There have been quite a stretch of poets writing on and around the domestic in intriguing ways over the past few years, allowing the small and smaller details of home and children as material for more language-centred writing, from Canadian poet Margaret Christakos to American poets such as Dan Thomas-Glass, Julie Carr, Rachel Zucker, Chris Martin and Farid Matuk, who’s chapbook My Daughter La Chola (2013) also appeared with Ahsahta Press. Given that home and children are so much a part of the days of certain writers, it seems almost impossible to not wonder why more poets don’t include such details in their own work. As McCarthy herself says in the interview, it was important to write “mommy poems” in such a way, despite knowing that the genre itself repeatedly gets a bad rap (despite so much evidence to the contrary). McCarthy provides material beyond the ends of the standard alphabet and into every parents’ movement into new and unfamiliar territory, writing the confusion, exploration and small and large discoveries beautifully, including two poems on the sometimes exhaustive and all-encompassing stretches of nursing: “milk fever cluster feeding witching hour / cluster feeding milk fever witching hour / witching hour milk fever cluster feeding / witching hour cluster feeding milk fever.” (“x y z & &”). Anyone with a small child or two, who is also interested in the language of great poetry, should be reading this. Or should I say: everyone.
suppose the clothespin    spring-loaded for clouds       see
also & seethrough
weathering       its backbendsbellies attractive          domestic                                    practical &
monument       I want to walkaround & around & around it untilWilliam Penn fits in its pinch
genre : commonartifacts & its significance (ifany) is unknown
the gaze of the clothespinfalls on itself (“notes for clothespin”)

U of Alberta writers-in-residence interviews: Don McKay (1993-94)

For the sake of the fortieth anniversary of the writer-in-residence program (the longest lasting of its kind in Canada) at the University of Alberta, I have taken it upon myself to interview as many former University of Alberta writers-in-residence as possible [see the ongoing list of writers here]. See the link to the entire series of interviews (updating weekly) here.

Don McKay has published numerous books of poetry and several books of essays. The poetry has been recognized with a number of awards, including two Governor General's Awards and the Griffin Poetry Prize. His most recent book of essays, The Shell of the Tortoise , received the BMO Winterset Award for Excellence in Newfoundland and Labrador Writing for 2011. Paradoxides , his most recent book of poems, includes meditations on geology and deep time, while pursuing ongoing obsessions with birds and tools. His collected poems, Angular Unconformity , appeared in 2014, while a chapbook, Larix , appeared in 2015. He lives in St. John's, Newfoundland.

He was writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta during the 1993-94 academic year.

Brian Teare, The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven

Not to know, but to go on.

white underpaintingfloats up through               milky as wringingdarker colors it carries       just-washed glue                                          brushes over the sink            as water floats paper            before saturation    waiting is the color            reveals its inks       of what draws nearer                                          without touching
The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven (Boise ID: Ahsahta Press, 2015) is Philadelphia poet and publisher Brian Teare’s fifth trade poetry collection, after The Room Where I Was Born (University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), Sight Map (University of California Press, 2009), Pleasure (Ahsahta Press, 2010) and Companion Grasses (Richmond CA: Omnidawn, 2013) [see my review of such here]. As Teare describes in the preface to the collection, The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven is a poetry book constructed from the onset of his own illness, which prompted his discovery of the infamously reclusive American (born and raised in Canada) abstract expressionist painter Agnes Martin (1912-2004). He writes: “When in 2009 I began writing the poems in this book, I knew nothing about Agnes Martin. Early during the onset of a chronic illness, I opened her Writings and found ‘The Untroubled Mind’ to be a comfort. But as the illness deepened I began to ‘seek her out’ when I could through research in museums, libraries, and archives. These poems set my life in relation to my long encounter with her painting, drawing, writing, and the metaphysics she argued was implicit in them.” Known for her use of lines, grids and fields of subtle colour, Teare’s poems employ an intriguing structural influence from Martin’s artwork, stretching her colour field into a series of texts stretched across the field of the page (and the book is 8 inches by 9.5 inches, in case you are wondering the size and scope of his physical field). Certainly, Teare’s use of empty space and the length and breadth of the page isn’t new, as evidenced from his Companion Grasses, but the influence of the grid structure from Agnes Martin allow for a curious exploration of how words are shaped, and even read, playing off each other in nearly-overlapping lines. In a recent interview with Christy Davids on the new collection, posted at The Conversant, he writes:
In both Sight Map (University of California 2009) and Companion Grasses (Omnidawn 2013), I was working off of my own kind of personal reading of Olson’s “Projective Verse”—I think that’s not surprising for anyone who knows my work—and in Companion Grasses that was particularly true in terms of thinking about prosody, and also thinking about poems on the page as being a scoring of an encounter with a place or a species. Because so many of those poems—all of them, really—were written on foot, were written in the field, I was really trying to use prosody and typography as a musical registration of an encounter, and combining Olson’s belief in the page as a kind of musical score with the ways in which breath and ear change in relation to whatever you’re in relation to. I was interested in the phenomenology of prosody—that it could, theoretically, capture or register relation differently between each encounter with place, with species, with a particular day or meteorology or whatever.
As well, unlike Martin’s reluctance, if not refusal, to release biographical detail, Teare’s The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven directly engages his illness, as he writes to open the poem “We are not the instruments of fate nor are we the pawns of fate we are the materials of fate.”: “I leave each doctor’s appointment ashamed to be ill // the philosopher argues the verbal expression of pain // undiagnosed my body so illegible no one can read it // replaces pain without offering a description of it [.]” As part of his author biography at the Ahsahta Press website, Teare offers:
I hate that a biography like this largely leaves out the formative details: a difficult family life, the disaster of coming out in the rural South, my first love dead of AIDS, falling in love again in California, years of chronic illness, my discovery of meditation. True to my early schooling in Confessional writing, these narratives are in my books. But more importantly, my books understand autobiography to be as much intellectual as physical, as aesthetic as it is emotional. I’ve striven to fashion a poetics that can inscribe experience on all the registers on which it occurs: high to low, abstract to literal, philosophy to pornography. Similarly, I’ve striven to render the poem’s form flexible and sensitive enough to register the myriad shifts native to experience. Inspired in equal parts by Charles Olson’s essay on projective verse and my training as a letterpress and digital typesetter, I’ve recently come to believe that design is both proprioceptive and plastic, capable of carrying embodied knowledge and visual information that exceeds the semantic. The poems of The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven are the direct expression of this belief.
The poems in The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven are structured in three untitled sections, with poems floating through direct and indirect reference and response to, and influence from, Martin’s artwork and writing, as well as his own ongoing illness. As the poem “Defeated you will stand at the door of your house and welcome the unknown.” begins: “chronic nausea / chronic non // narrative even / the public health /                                  eventually the surface gets interesting [.]” The introduction of a further abstraction into his work is quite compelling, compared to the more direct lines and lineages of Companion Grasses, and allow for a far more visual and meditative flow, expanding his repertoire to extend into a deeper use of the fragment, collision and critical intelligence. His utterly fascinating author statement on the Ahsahta Press website (I find myself quite taken with the clarity and ease of his prose) ends with:
I worked on the poems for six years. Keenly aware that Martin herself avoided autobiographical narrative in her writing and representation in her visual work, I couldn’t help but think that chronic illness seemed the perfect fusion of autobiography and formal abstraction. Pain was largely wordless, but it was also my life—a somatic texture in which illness became a chronic duration and duration (time) became texture (form). And things anyways happened. Over those six years, I got access to public health care and exhausted my treatment options without getting a diagnosis, I started seeing a Chinese medical practitioner for herbs and acupuncture (which helped), and I also started a meditation practice (which helped). But I remained ill. And I kept returning to Martin and her work, even going to museums, libraries, and archives to get “closer” to her, the way young curators and artists had once sought her out in the desert of New Mexico.
Eventually I realized I’d been looking for someone or something to help me change my life. I’d been seeking healers and teachers, some of whom did in fact help, some of whom didn’t. Eventually I ended up in the hospital (again) and realized help might not be coming, at least not in the form I’d wanted. Lying on the gurney, I asked: What’s the right attitude toward suffering? An answer came: It neither lies to you nor makes you suffer more. And more than my own suffering I heard the man in the room next to me weeping as a doctor drained his wound. When I stopped wanting a teacher, when I stopped waiting for an end to suffering, my life did change. I did in fact suffer less. When I gave up the illusion of salvation, I found a modicum of rest and some room for the experience of joy. When I stopped needing Martin to help me, I could finally look at her work in companionable awe.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Katherine Leyton

Katherine Leyton's first poetry collection, All the Gold Hurts My Mouth , was released by Goose Lane Editions in March 2016. A native of Toronto, she recently moved to Ottawa.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
I don’t know that my first book has changed my life. I think my first book draws together a lot of the experiences I had in my 20s and early 30s (alongside totally fictional elements, of course), and almost feels like some sort of review of my initial chapter of existence, which is bizarre to behold now, in book form. This book-object also symbolizes the accomplishment of a life-long goal: wanting to publish a book of my work, so when the realization of that settles I might feel differently. For now it is a reminder that I am passionate about an art form that very few people read, and that I’ve achieved a goal the “outside” world regards as highly curious.

I can’t tell you how my recent work feels compared to my previous, because I am writing in a very unserious way. I haven’t really tried to shape my new work for consumption by others yet, so it’s hard to say. The process feels as hard and frustrating and wonderful as ever.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I actually came to fiction first. I wrote fiction furiously until grade 7, when I discovered poetry through a unit at school and instantly fell in love. There was something there for me that fiction didn’t offer— a way of capturing moods or memories that I was finding difficult to capture in fiction. I was very attracted to its musicality as well. I still occasionally write fiction though, and I’ve been writing non-fiction for publication since my early 20s. 

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
I don’t think of writing poetry as a project – unless I have been commissioned to do a specific project. I just write and write and write and edit and edit and edit. With my book, I decided at some point I felt ready to shape some of that work into a collection, a process which took years.

My writing comes quickly initially – but in waves. I have periods where I am writing copiously and periods where I am producing very little. In the periods I am producing little, I am editing. I edit for an incredibly long time. I have both poems that change very little from the first draft—although those small changes are significant and essential to making it a decent poem—and poems that are completely unrecognizable from the first draft.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
I’m really not concept-driven, not that I am opposed to starting with a concept and working from there, but I think the same handful of concerns drive my work, so I feel in a way that I am always starting with a base concept.

Poems begin as ideas and images and lines that force their way into my head almost violently, often when I am out in the world, and I follow them by allowing myself to ‘write’ the poem in my head over and over, memorizing it in a way, until I have the chance to get to a computer or a notebook.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I feel immensely guilty saying this, but I do not particularly enjoy readings. My relationship to poetry is on the page, and that is how I prefer consuming poetry—I need to see it there to fully absorb it, to fully appreciate it. Readings are a whole different art form – one where the poet is interpreting the work for you. I do think readings can be wonderful, and I have – as an audience member—had moments of intense pleasure listening to poets read, but they are very rare.

I suppose that I don’t understand why someone would want to see me read, as I have never claimed to be a performer, to be compelling in person—I strive for my writing to do that on the page. Nevertheless, I understand people do like readings, and I feel incredibly lucky and grateful any time someone wants to see me read, so I have been trying to figure out for the past few years how to be a good reader, how I can enrich my poetry when I am reading it. I keep asking myself: what can I add to the audience’s experience of my work? I am wary of acting my poems, or putting on a ‘Poetry’ voice, but I am also wary of reading in a monotonous way that puts my audience to sleep. It has been a struggle and I am not quite sure I’ve figured out what’s right for me, but I try to learn from the readers I really admire, such as Aisha Sasha John and Phil Hall. Having said all this, I am not sure if public readings are part or counter to the creative process; it’s interesting to see how people react to my work when I read it aloud—it can be surprising, and that helps me learn about the effectiveness of my poems. However, their reaction also comes partly from how I read my work, so it confuses things. Otherwise, readings are a distraction to the creative process that really interests me. But hey, it is another creative skill to learn, and I am always interested and up for the challenge of learning another creative skill.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
I largely write about my concerns with how women are treated and represented in North America (and abroad, as I lived abroad for several years, but when I do that, I clearly state that these observations are through my highly-biased ‘Western’ filter). From a very young age I often found the treatment I received as a girl, and then woman—and that I saw other women receiving—disturbing, but I observed that other people accepted this treatment and representation as normal. I wanted to challenge that, or at least express how infuriating I found it, and poetry seemed like one of the most effective ways to do so. I’m often attempting to show the dark underbelly of the normal, the damaging effects of what most people have decided is okay or ‘no big deal.’ I’m particularly interested in the hyper-sexualization of women, which I think has damaging consequences for both men and women, but particularly women; the constant threat of sexual violence women face; and the general devaluing of the feminine. I write from the perspective of a woman who feels she has internalized some very harmful misogynistic views and constantly has to battle that internal misogynist, who is sometimes (but rarely) tempted to turn ‘his’ views on other women, but mainly interested in turning those views on herself. There’s a poem in All the Gold Hurts My Mouth called “The Misogynist” that is all about a woman simultaneously allowing herself to think of other women with violent contempt, while herself fearing the threat of sexual violence from men. 

I’m often trying to answer the question of how to live richly as a woman in our society without participating in behaviours and patterns of thought that are damaging to myself and other women.  How can I free myself from the internal misogynist? And how can I express my sexuality in a way that feels powerful and ‘authentic’ (whatever authentic means) instead of in a way that feels scripted and packaged and limited?

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
I don’t feel comfortable saying what I feel writers should be. I know what I want to do and be, but I think different writers serve different purposes, and they are all valuable. I definitely think writers have a role in the larger culture: I think they still dictate, inform and shape culture, even if a lot of people no longer realize it. The majority of movies in the cinema were once books, whether they are trivial garbage or moving statements on existence. I think writers express ideas that can affect generations of people, maybe because it affects one politician or scientist or whomever, who then implements that idea or spreads it to a larger audience. And I think writers can give voice to experience and emotion that make people feel less alone, that validate their anger or fear, and that provide them relief from their grief, and I think that will always be an invaluable role.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I think it’s essential. When I find an editor that really understands what I’m trying to do with my work, and is excited about it, I find working with him or her incredibly easy, no matter how hard that person is on my writing. When I’m working with an editor that has a very different aesthetic or has a different view about what the function of poetry is, I find the collaboration challenging, but still useful, even if it is just to take a long hard looks at my own motives and aesthetics and come back and feel reaffirmed in my choices. Often though, those editors can be wonderful at spotting the technical and logical flaws in my work, which is viatl.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Oh god. What a difficult question. I hear amazing advice all the time. Then I forget it. 

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to non-fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?
Poetry, fiction and non-fiction are all very different things and getting good at each one of them takes sustained effort. I find poetry and non-fiction more intuitive and easier for me than fiction. I’m not sure I’ve ever written a decent piece of fiction. Each form is appealing for different reasons. Poetry appeals to me because it allows me to express ideas and feelings and moods that are almost impossible to grasp or capture, that require some combination of rhythm and space and emptiness, that can only be suggested rather than explained. Non-fiction appeals to me when there is a political or social issue I feel I can write about in a clear and direct manner, and that I want a wider audience to be aware of. Fiction is appealing for its ability to create a compelling world through sustained narrative, as well as the possibility for vivid and powerful characters that can help the reader empathize for a longer period of time.  

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
My routine changes based on what job I have, where I’m living and what sort of pressing drive to create I have at any particular time. My life circumstances have been wildly different from year to year, and so have my working patterns.  However, I definitely always work better at night, when my mind seems to open and function on some different level of consciousness. 

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I turn to other writers. Or I go outside and live my life – that usually works.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Hmmm. Nothing in particular, really. Maybe the smell of cold –like the way wool mittens smell during the winter. And fresh cut grass maybe.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
Sure. Every one of those. I’ve been influenced by nature, music, science, photography, pop culture, the things I hear people say on the street, things I see in the subway, an advertisement on a billboard or on TV. Everything.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
So many, and they are constantly changing. Discovering Phyllis Webb, particularly her suites and anti-ghazals, was very important to how I thought about space on the page and the possibility of multiplicity of voice. Anne Carson has been hugely influential. So has Ted Hughes. Osip Mandelstam was once very important to me. Louise Glück teaches me about how to be brilliantly cynical without alienating the reader. An American poet named Michael Burkard, who is little known in Canada, has been very inspiring in demonstrating how to show a speaker’s interior dialogue in a poem, and how to be strange in a way that seems perfectly accessible and brilliantly easy to read. Tomaž Šalamun demonstrates how to do the surreal wonderfully without concern for the reader’s ability to follow along. I couldn’t live without Mary Ruefle. I lived in Italy for three years and I speak Italian fluently and an Italian poet named Patrizia Cavalli is just one of the most brilliant poets out there; she can do more in three lines of poetry than most poets can do with a whole book. She is delightfully playful with language and simultaneously incredibly complex, but without exposing that complexity to her reader in a painfully obvious manner. Sadly, I’ve never found a decent translation of her work into English. Karen Solie, Elizabeth Bishop, Eileen Myles and Olena Kalytiak Davis all thrill me. I have returned to Claudia Rankine’s Citizen and DG Jones Under the Thunder the Flowers Light up the Earth recently. I could go on. I won’t. 

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Write a book that’s cross-genre.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
Rock star? Astronaut? National Geographic Photographer?

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
My parents passed on a love for literature from a very young age. It was an immense comfort to have someone else give voice to the thoughts and feelings that I had, but that weren’t frequently discussed aloud. It made me feel connected to other humans in a way that very little else does. Also, I’m somewhat anti-social, and have always been an avid observer, and I suppose writing allows me to do something with all that observing. And then there is that thing I mentioned before: that observation of things I found highly disturbing that were accepted as normal, and the desire to challenge that. 

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I just read Ben Ladoucer’s Otter and was thrilled by it. What a remarkable debut. I’m in the midst of reading photographer Sally Mann’s memoir, Hold Still, and am completely enthralled; she is an incredible writer and it’s so inspiring to read about her single-mindedness and drive to create remarkable photographs, as well as the effect of place on her work. She sometimes wouldn’t leave the property she lived on for weeks, and yet she produced some of the most memorable images of the past fifty years—and I think that creativity within those confines is fascinating.

20 - What are you currently working on?
I’m actually trying to write fiction currently. I’m also writing a few poems here and there, but in a relaxed way; I don’t know what will happen with them. I need a break. Mostly, I’m working on making a living.

[Katherine Leyton launches All the Gold Hurts My Mouth on March 17 as part of VERSeFest 2016]

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

today is my forty-sixth birthday,

Another birthday party survived [see last year, here]. Saturday night at our usual location, the Carleton Tavern, where I’ve had birthday parties for well over a decade (I think since 2000 or so, most likely). The evening began with Rose and I attempting a dance party (as she does what she calls her “wiggle dance”). There were drinks, cake, lots of friends and family, and much joyous celebration.
Christine suggests I’m “late forties,” which I completely refuse; mid-forties, please. I don’t even begin that “late” until, what, forty-eight? Bah.
Most of my photos from the birthday gathering (which was, itself, magnificent) were terrible, so I’ve pilfered ones Christine took on her phone (the wiggle dance, for example), and others that Stephen Brockwell snapped with his super-camera.
I’ve now been full-time at home with Rose for a year and a half, with our new maternity leave scheduled to begin in another month. Given our Wednesdays at the new Comet Comics in Old Ottawa South, we’ve begun to seek out new options for post-comics muffins, and have found the Tim Hortons nearby to be quite nice. If the weather is good, we simply take the stroller and walk the half-hour. Rose and I stop each way on the bridge to look at the ducks below, collected along the shoreline and ice.
I work my two mornings a week while she is at ‘school,’ and afternoons as she naps (which I’m hoping she continues for a while, given the summer doesn’t have ‘school’ at all; but Christine hopes less nap means more nighttime/morning sleep…). I’ve been attempting to complete my manuscript of short stories [four of which appeared recently in a wee chapbook], especially given the five or six weeks remaining before the birth of our new bundle (Christine’s second; my third). Once the new baby comes, I fully expect a month or three of complete (joyous/exhaustive/hazy/confused) chaos, before things begin to settle down again.
Birth mother: two years-plus since we connected, communication occurs, albeit intermittently. She hints, she responds. She plays her cards incredibly close. But she does respond. This, I know, is good. Is, for now, good enough.
My Patreon page slowly sees attention, in dribs and drabs. I’ve even composed a small mound of blog posts on my patron-only blog, which, for some reason, given the dozen or so folk invited to read, almost no-one actually has. There is something oddly gratifying about writing into a blog that I know no one is actually reading. Does that even make sense? (Probably not.)
[photo credit: Stephen Brockwell] As part of a growing poetry manuscript titled “Cervantes’ bones” begun just over a year ago [other poems from the same manuscript-in-progress exist here and here and here], I’ve been well over a year poking at a suite of fragments underneath the title “Sex at Forty-five,” my further offering into the “Sex at” sequence begun way back in Prince George, British Columbia in the late 1970s [see my 2015 ‘commentary’ over at Jacket2 on the series, and an earlydraft of my “Sex at Forty-five,” here]. Given the year named is finally over (it’s okay, as Elvis Costello didn’t actually release “45” until he was actually forty-seven years old), I’ve been the past few weeks digging back into the five-page poem, and have found myself unsatisfied. As a result, I’ve done what I haven’t before: I erased the whole damned thing (okay, not erased erased, but set aside with a new file name, leaving my “Sex at Forty-five” file a blank page), and attempted to start again from scratch.
Over twenty-five years-plus of daily practice, my poetry composition process has become slower, and far more methodical. In my twenties and into my thirties, I would start writing a poem at the beginning, and write chronologically towards an end I rushed toward never finding, Robert Kroetsch’s “delay, delay, delay” as a mantra throughout. Now my poems tend to begin somewhere in the middle and expand outwards. I add words and phrases in the middle of lines; I introduce new line-breaks, stanza breaks and move lines and stanzas around. The poem is less chronological than a series of mixes, stirred and constantly re-set.
[photo credit: Stephen Brockwell] Really, the current dissatisfaction and erasure of what I’d composed up to this point follows a trajectory suggested in my Jacket2 piece; I am getting better at tossing lines, stanzas and entire poems. I am getting better, finally (one might say), at returning to pull apart what simply isn’t (yet) enough.
Begin again. Finnegan.








Retreat, into the body. Lexical. The back of my scaled tongue. Whatyou seek of. Formulated.
Interrupted, rupture.
The nightly juke-box of the baby’s breathing, intermittent cries. Wehold collective breath.

Each silence                an opportunity.

The body, like a theatre. Translated. Distance, is a chorus.
Earth and sky. A single hair that drips.