Rob Mclennan's Blog, page 356

Sheri Benning, The Season’s Vagrant Light

Slaughter
I thought there’d always be a lustre of time,rich and slick like the animal’s oiled hide. I shot one
for its leather, another for the tender meat of its spine.One more for the fetor of estrus in fur, for its tree-rubbed horns,
the spice of cedar and pine. One for its muscled gallop,the crack and the echo, the arc of the bullet shattering prairie night.
For the shocked silence after the last streamed snort and cry. I stoodhigh on a pile of bones, sun-sucked skulls, rifle erect at my side.
From a thicket of poplar and birch, the coyotes’ keen rose,cut through industry’s metallic reek, shroud of gunsmoke.
Drunk and gutted, sweet grease on my lips, I never thoughtthat my careless slaughter would lead to such hunger –
thin hospital flannel wrapped around my shouldersby some kind nurse – that I’d be here,
trying to atone for that wasted flesh,keeping vigil at your bedside.
I’m intrigued at the selected poems appearing in the UK by Canadian (or more specifically, one might say, Saskatchewan) poets, from Karen Solie’s The Living Option: Selected Poems(Northumberland UK: Bloodaxe Books, 2013) [see my review of such here] to Sheri Benning’s recent The Season’s Vagrant Light (Manchester UK: Carcanet, 2015). Offering selections from her two published poetry collections— Earth After Rain (Saskatoon SK: Thistledown Press, 2001) and Thin Moon Psalm (London ON: Brick Books, 2007)— The Season’s Vagrant Light also includes twenty-three pages of “new poems.” Benning’s poetry is vibrantly fixed to geographic spaces, much in the way that Solie’s work is, and the new poems offer a broadening geography, heading out from Saskatchewan specifically and Canada generally, from New Brunswick and the Saskatchewan River to Glasgow, Russia and New Mexico, expanding her reach while holding to her prairie roots. There is such a narrative precision to Benning’s lines, descriptively thick and evocative, writing intimately of numerous geographic, familial and personal spaces. Listen, as she opens the poem “Vigil,” writing: “I am no longer young. I know / what we love we will lose. / Your head resting in my lap / as you hold your newborn / to your open breasts, milk scent, / mown hay. Snow falls / beneath the street lamp’s glow, / flutter of her eyelashes as you nurse / her into dreams of light and shadow.”

Sarah Manguso, Ongoingness: The End of a Diary

I started keeping a diary twenty-five years ago. It’s eight hundred thousand words long.
I didn’t want to lose anything. That was my main problem. I couldn’t face the end of a day without a record of everything that had ever happened.
I wrote about myself so I wouldn’t become paralyzed by rumination—so I could stop thinking about what had happened and be done with it.
More than that, I wrote so I could say I was truly paying attention. Experience in itself wasn’t enough. The diary was my defense against waking up at the end of my life and realizing I’d missed it.
Imagining life without the diary, even one week without it, spurred a panic that I might as well be dead.
And so opens American writer Sarah Manguso’s new Ongoingness: The End of a Diary (Graywolf Press, 2015). Manguso has long been one of my favourite writers, and her writing is, quite simply, remarkable. I had already been an admirer of her poetry, but her move into non-fiction/memoir has really opened up the possibilities of the form. A short essay-book on memory, Ongoingness: The End of a Diary is built as a slow accumulation of self-contained sections, and begins by describing how she has composed a daily diary for most of her life. She quickly describes the realization that having a child both opened up the impossibility of daily work on her memory-project, and allowed her the permission to not have to record every single moment. As with much of Manguso’s prose, the writing in Ongoingness: The End of a Diary is elegant and incredibly straightforward, and deeply intimate while allowing herself, seemingly, to guard a variety of personal details that would, quite honestly, distract away from the purpose of the essay. Her writing is also extremely difficult to excerpt, and must be seen as an entire, singular whole. She writes:


Living in a dream of the future is considered a character flaw. Living in the past, bathed in nostalgia, is also considered a character flaw. Living in the present moment is hailed as spiritually admirable, but truly ignoring the lessons of history or failing to plan for tomorrow are considered character flaws.
I still needed to record the present moment before I could enter the next one, but I wanted to know how to inhabit time in a way that wasn’t a character flaw.
Remember the lessons of the past. Imagine the possibilities of the future. And attend to the present, the only part of time that doesn’t require the use of memory.

U of Alberta writers-in-residence interviews: Ray Smith (1986-87)

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.
Ray Smith (b. 1941) [photo with his dear friend, Jessica Grenier] is from Mabou, Cape Breton, and largely grew up in Halifax. After graduating from Dalhousie University (BA ‘64) he lived a few years in Toronto, but from 1968 lived in Montreal where he taught English at Dawson College. After the Spring 2007 term, he retired and moved home to Mabou, where he lives in the house his grandfather built.
He has two sons, Nicholas (30) and Alexander (26). Nick, a fine mathematician, is married to Emily and lives in Richmond, VA. Zander is doing an MA in linguistics at the Frei Universetät in Berlin; he is fluent in English, French, German, and Dutch.
“A brilliant stylist” (Ox Comp to Can Lit), Ray nonetheless has no Smith style: each of his seven books is unique. Somewhat over half the work is comic, often hilariously so. Although largely set in Canada with Canadian characters, the books reflect his extensive travel and international perspective. Important sections of his work are set in Iceland, Venice, Edinburgh, Paris, Zurich, and Munich, and other languages appear often.
A dramatic performer, Smith has done over 250 readings of his work in North America and Europe.
He was writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta during the 1986-87 academic year.
Q: When you began your residency, you’d published a small handful of books over the previous decade and a half. Where did you feel you were in your writing? What did the opportunity mean to you?
A: I’d come to accept that I am not a fast writer. I had only CB and LNT published, and the Jack Bottomly book written but which no one would touch with a barge pole. But when I arrived in Edmonton I was anticipating the imminent appearance of Century in October, so I was excited about that as it seemed to some extent to legitimize my appointment at U of A.
Q: Given the fact that you aren’t an Alberta writer, were you influenced at all by the landscape, or the writing or writers you interacted with while in Edmonton? What was your sense of the literary community?
A: I can’t say that I was influenced in my writing by the landscape or by the people I met at U of A.  However, I certainly found the landscape ravishingly beautiful, and the people I met, almost entirely members of the English department, I found vibrant and well above average in intelligence, wit, and attainments. I don’t consciously think about things in this way, but I suspect I sensed that the U of A was very well funded, and thus could afford to hire only the very best.
Q: What do you feel your time as writer-in-residence at University of Alberta allowed you to explore in your work? Were you working on anything specific while there, or was it more of an opportunity to expand your repertoire?
A: Mainly I got to enjoy a year away from teaching, a real blessing. With Century appearing in October, I had no wish to start a new novel, so I did a long critical article for Metcalf’s anthology Carry on Bumping(ECW, 1988) entitled “A Refusal to Mourn the Death by Bullshit of Literature in the Eighties.” It’s an appalled survey of modern critical theory – semiotics, structuralism, deconstruction, etc. I was also doing perhaps a reading a week from Lethbridge to Fort MacMurray, and caring for son Nick who turned two that winter and indeed first walked without help in the big English Dept office. His mother (my then wife) Anja is a flight attendant who continued working out of Montreal that year and joined us when she could, generally a few days every week or three. I had a number or reliable baby-sitters.
Q: How did you engage with students and the community during your residency? Were there any encounters that stood out?
A: It has been 39 years so my memory of such is a bit dim. I do recall that very few if any students came to see me. I doubt they thought me aloof or irrelevant, but were too busy with courses to waste time with me. I sat in on a creative writing seminar or two, but don’t recall any follow-up. My remit also included advice to any non-university writers from Red Deer to the Nunavut border. I was required to read at least, but perhaps only, twenty pages. A few stood out. One was a man who wrote a novel about Alberta; it began before the Rockies were formed and the first human appeared at about page 125. Some I saw in person. One was a radio journalist who told anecdotes about life in private radio. Another was a timid high school girl and her mother. The girl wanted to take a BA, while her mother wanted her to do a BEd so she could get a job. I expect the mother won.

Sunrise with Sea Monsters : rob mclennan (poem)

I've a new poem posted as part of Paul Vermeersch's latest project, "Sunrise with Sea Monsters."

12 or 20 (second series) questions with James Lindsay

James Lindsay is co-owner of Pleasence Records. His first collection of poetry, Our Inland Sea , has recently been published by Wolsak & Wynn's Buckrider Books.
1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?Finishing my first book was proof to myself that I could do it. Now I feel that if I can do it once, I can do it again. The oldest poem in it was written around 12 years ago. I think it was the one of the first successful pieces I ever wrote, but obviously I’ve changed a lot since then. Most of Our Inland Sea was trying to find a style that worked for me. Moving forward, I’m trying to take what I did, push it further and strip away the old scaffolding I’ve come to rely on.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?My attraction to poetry started with, and still is, because I find it challenging. I remember looking at a poem and being mystified by the thing. Why these words? Why this form? Why not just say what you had to say as straightforward as possible? These are still the questions I ask myself when I read poetry. And once I started to write it myself, once I saw that I could do it as well I wanted to try to become better at it, and then I started to see it as a craft.
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’m constantly taking notes: words, sentences, quotes. At a certain point I begin to notice a theme of the recent note taking and then I sit down to really write. It’s not like I’m just putting the scraps together, but much of the tone and source material comes from my notes. There’s this initial blast of writing where I get much of the body of the thing done, then it’s revise, revise, revise for up to two weeks or so after. But I’m always revisiting them. They’re never really finished.
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 experience writing Our Inland Sea was much like writing a individual poem. I had all these pieces and began to see similarities in them. I used to be afraid to repeat myself, as if every new piece had to attempt to be completely original. But once I got over that, I embraced the repetition I was seeing and I steered it towards an overall theme for the book.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?I do enjoy readings. I’m nervous every time, but I enjoy it. A big part of writing Our Inland Sea came when I read at the Pivot series. I read a series of new poems I had been working on that were more humorous and socially focused than what I had previously been doing and I got a very positive reaction, laughs in all the right places. That affirmation helped me to realize where I wanted the collection to go.
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 want my poetry to be more concerned with general social aspects than uniquely individual ones. Or more specifically how people see themselves in larger groups, how we identify. I want to try to show personal psychology, but using the group’s language. I try to have a friction of nature rubbing up against culture, playing with ideas of what’s “natural.”
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 writers are necessarily different from other artists. Writing can be for pure entertainment; it can enlighten; it can be for personal reasons; for profit; it can be public and it can be privet. The difference is that writing is very practical and almost everyone does to some extent. Making a shopping list is writing, a different kind of writing, but its still writing. So, for writers at least, I think the role should be to try to take to push yourself, to make it stronger, something beyond the shopping list. No matter what you write.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?My editor, Paul Vermeersch, was a big part of the writing of Our Inland Sea. I’m an easy edit, I like to have criticism, it gives me something to work with. By the time Paul got to see much of the first draft manuscript, it was all over the place. But the more we talked about the poems, the more I began to see what this book was all about. It’s not that he wrote any of it, but he was great at pointing out problems. He always had suggestions, but never forced them. It was more like, “Here’s you problem, fix it.” And I’d go back full of energy, excited to try and find a solution. I love the editing process as much as I like the initial inspiration. At times like those, poems feel like privet riddles that need solving.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?“If you want to be a writer, write.”
10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?To be honest, I find all creative writing difficult. It rarely comes easy to me, but that’s also the appeal. That said, I find myself having to concentrate much harder with prose in order for what I want to say to be clear. I don’t often get the opportunity to write prose, but I welcome it when it comes along as I find the struggle tends to strengthen my writing overall.
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?I wish I could say I wrote everyday, but I don’t. I read everyday, and like I said, I’m constantly jotting down fragments for later use, but I don’t always have the time to seriously get down to it. But when I do, I start early in the morning, read a bit first while drinking coffee, look at recent notes and jots then start going at it. If I’m revising, that can happen any time of day, but often at night.
12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?When things slow down, when I’m not a fan of what I’m producing, I just keep going and try to put any anxiety about it aside. I think to myself, “OK, today is going to be about quantity, not quality.” This helps me explore things I might not have if I was working on something specific, so the next time I’ll have some more stuff to start with.
13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?Cooking. Something roasting in the oven. Curry, cumin, garlic, rosemary. My wife’s pies or banana bread.
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?Music and visual art both play a part in my poetry, but not necessarily in a direct way. I tend not to write as much about what the piece of music or art means as what was behind the making of it and how it effects. For example, at the moment I’m trying to write about a Goya painting called “The Duchess of Alba and La Beata” that depicts his muse, María Cayetana de Silva, lurching out of the darkness at one of her maids, scaring the crap out of her, as a prank. What really connected with me was that they would have had to plan this in advance, Goya and the Duchess lurking in the shadows and waiting for the maid to walk by. I suppose I liked the implied twisted intimacy between the two rumored lovers more than I actually liked the painting itself.
15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?That’s a tough one. I feel like my influences are constantly changing. I’ve worked in bookstores for the last ten years, so I’m very privileged to have had a constant stream of new writers exposed to me. I tend to fall for particular writers and read as much as can of them before moving on to something new and rarely revisiting them after, or feeling less excited about them if I do. But, at various times, I’ve been highly influenced by Gordon Lish, Louise Gluck, Donald Antrim, Dean Young, Tony Hoagland, John Ashbery, and Jack Spicer.
16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?I want to say write a novel, but I also feel superstitious that if I do, it’ll never happen. It’s kind of like saying you want to climb Everest because you enjoy hiking.  It’s also one of those clichés people say, “I’m working on my novel.” But I love novels and what they’re capable of. And maybe, like poetry, it’s worth trying to do just for the sake of doing it.
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?If not for writing, if I didn’t have that motivation, I’d probably still be working jobs that took all of my energy and left me with no time to focus on writing. (I’ve always been enamored by writers who have a full time job, a family, and still are able to find time and energy for creativity.) I’d like to think I’d still be reading a lot, as I did then, but I also think that it was my drive to write, and my involvement in the Toronto literary community that kept me hungry to read as much as possible.
18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?I’ve always been interested in books, music and art, but I have distinct memories of being praised for writing at a very young age. So I’ve always thought writing as something that I could do, a realistic possibility, opposed to, say, taking up an instrument, which I’ve never had much inclination towards.  
19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?I loved Mary Jo Bang’s liberal translation of The Inferno. She embraces the comedy and updates it to a semi-modern farce. Eric Cartman, Saddam Hussein and Dick Cheney all make appearances in hell and at the end of each canto there are meticulous notes on the changes she made and the historical significance of Dante’s references. I tend to love anything that can simultaneously be that silly and serious.
I watch a lot of horror movies, but few are ever able to extend past the restrictions of the genre. The Dutch film Borgman , while still having good scares and creepiness, was also not afraid to be intelligent and psychological, but so subtlety that you never notice that all of the sudden you’re watching an art house movie. Much like It Follows and The Babadook , which I also adored, the evil in it is not something I’ve ever seen before, which was refreshing considering most of horror’s reliance on the old vampire-werewolf-ghost-zombie-murderer bad guys. All three also resist the easy plot device of the origin story, which always drains the mystery of the film.
20 - What are you currently working on?After being very busy for the last two and a half months or so, I finally have some time to start writing again and I want to take full advantage of it. When I look back at my first book now I see parts that interest me more than others. I want to start exploring those parts more, seeing where I can push them to.
12or 20 (second series) questions;

Todd Colby, Splash State

Sit Still
What morning does is trick youinto thinking someone’s just leftto go to the bathroom, or is drinkingtea at the big table in the living room,or is simply thinking of you while theystand in front of a full-length mirror and twerk.You think someone is there, but they’re gone.Morning makes you think you can solve problems,do math, send thoughts, and changeyour clothes. Morning is as light and creamyas an instrument of hypnotism or cuisine. Perhapsyour heart was put in your chest simply to pump sludgearound your body until it hits your brain,and you stumble around like a dork.
Endorsed, no less, by American poet John Ashbery, is Brooklyn poet Todd Colby’s sixth poetry collection, Splash State (Brooklyn NY: The Song Cave, 2015). Composed as a series of lyric monologues, the poems in Splash State are composed via a relatively straight narrative utilizing a variety of quirks, turns and non-sequiturs that combine into oddly compelling, and occasionally wise, poems. “I miss you like Goddess Dressing,” the poem “My Dream of Everything” opens, “like Swiss Miss Hot Chocolate.” The poems work to unsettle meaning and expectation, forcing a reader’s attention as it leaps between the unexpected, subversive, surreal and even somewhat banal. These are highly crafted poems, each composed with a purpose and meaning that Colby deliberately subverts even as he moves ever closer to meaning. As the poem “Let Us Know You’re Here” opens: “I stuffed my silver spacesuit / full of cashews. I wanted to explain / about how when I’m out there, and physics, / and the food they give me, well, I’m rambling.” Some of these poems might appear hastily written and odd for the sake of odd, but that is very much on purpose; they are anything but.





The Ship
A ship we all know about is still shipping or floating. The people work on it, or entertain themselves on it, or drink the milk of various animals on it. They have conversations about stuff, and then they listen back to the tapes of what they just talked about; so they’re always catching up with what they just said. They scoot around on the ship and play these little fuck and frolic games on it. I know a lot about it, so if you need to know more about it, please feel free to ask me all about it.

fwd: Harriet’s Legacies: Race, Historical Memory and Futures in Canada : CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS:

Harriet’s Legacies: Race, Historical Memory and Futures in Canada.
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS:

Following an interdisciplinary conference at Brock University in October 2015, we invite submissions for a publication that would expand and continue conversations about Black historical presence in Canada, African Canadian production, legacies and praxis in areas of the arts, literature, performance, politics, research and pedagogy as well as writing which explore questions of community and futures.

Papers may consider the recovery, popularization, and the mobilization of local, provincial and national stories of Black experiences in Canada, especially more local community concerns and future opportunities; Blackness in suburban and rural spaces; Gender and Sexuality; Blackface in Canada; Black Canadian artistic production; Gospel music and radio in Ontario; cross-cultural collaborations; Black youth movements; Race, Borders and Movement; Public Memory and Monuments; Intimate Archives of Blackness; The history and legacies of Black Feminisms including contributions to or conflicts with other feminisms and or other human interest groups; Africville; digital archives; Development pressures and Black heritage sites; Blackness and Indigenous Relations.

We welcome works from all disciplines, as well as interdisciplinary and comparative approaches. We are also interested in creative essays which explore the limits and possibilities of the essay as a genre (critical-creative works such as Claudia Rankine’s Citizen and M.Nourbese Philip’s essays in A Genealogy of Resistance, might serve as models)

Deadline: 20 March, 2016

Word Count: 4000-6000 words

Format: Essays must be typed and double-spaced. Please include your address, phone number, email address, and a short bio on the last page of the manuscript. No simultaneous submissions. Previously published essays will not be considered.

Submitting: Finished works may be sent to Ronald Cummings, Department of English Language & Literature, Brock University (by email: rcummings@brocku.ca) before 20 March 2016.

Andrea Baker, Each Thing Unblurred is Broken

Routine Is Not a Cradle
Ships seamed the ocean, overusedand sick on consolationthey warmed themselves with harm.
I will lay me down on the tablein the cabin of a boat.
I will glowlike a screen,
thirstat my seam.

Write muscle on my legs.
I’m a doll sleepingon the table.
Mend me with a needleand hold me where I’m worn.
In the interview included in the press release to her new poetry title, Each Thing Unblurred is Broken (Oakland CA: Omnidawn, 2015), New York City poet and arts and antiques appraiser Andrea Baker writes that “My writing practice consists of crafting something out of resonate bits of image and thought. It isn’t linear. I have globs, and the reason to bring them together is to sculpt a frame to hold the globs. And once it’s held, I get to see what shape was made. I can only know the shape by making the shape. And I need to know the shape, so I write.” Referring to the book’s title, she adds: “I can’t even imagine the book without the title. It’s the book’s process, while also being its realization.” The author of the forthcoming Famous Rapes (Water Street Press, 2016), “a paper and packing tape constructed not-quite-graphic-novel about the depiction of sexual assault from Mesopotamia to the present day,” and Like Wind Loves a Window (Slope, 2005), Baker’s Each Thing Unblurred is Broken is a book composed of short lyrics that occasionally feel collaged from smaller fragments (as she suggests in her interview), constructed into seven sections: “Disciples of Another Will,” “Gilda,” “Theology,” “True Poems about the River Go like This,” “Theology,” “Gilda” and “Experience is Nature.” Unlike the remaining sections, the second, fourth and sixth sections are built of short sequences, and the character “Gilda,” a holdover, Baker says in the interview, of her Like Wind Loves a Window, who battles everyone (including herself) against her own erosion (“she’s picking her flesh apart // muttering, ripen small birds to large”). The second of the “Gilda” section-poems include:
A forest of ash in her womb

she bathesfor her length to settle

while a flock of sheephold

            in the frame            of the doorshe is locking
she creates herselfmalignant



            wind teethingher broken hills
Baker’s poems are painstakingly precise, exploring the use of fragment, voice, character and allusion, and constructing something very specific out of the scattered parts. Is the clarity that Baker’s poems seek one that causes the breaks, or one that simply reveals it? Possibly either, sometimes neither and occasionally both. The narrator(s) in her poems also push fiercely against a vast array of dissenters, violent impulses and brutality, as she writes in the poem “An Ordinary Evening”: “O! Leather. / I hate and arm // and scream when the thing I planned to kill / someone kills / before / I can.” Further on in the same interview, she writes:
This book is about attempts at realizing vague images from the periphery, which it also enacts.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Stephanie Ford

Stephanie Ford is the author of All Pilgrim (Four Way Books, 2015). She is a recipient of the Hopwood Award as well as fellowships from Vermont Studio Center and the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Tin House, Boston Review, Harvard Review, Fence, and The Volta. She holds degrees in art from Grinnell College and writing from the University of Michigan. Originally from Boulder, Colorado, she lives in Los Angeles.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
Having a first book has relieved me of the internal pressures of writing a first book. It has given me a compelling reason to leave my home and family in order to be a poet out in the world and to meet other poets in other cities. Best of all, it has freed me to begin writing anew.

Though I worked full-time while writing All Pilgrim, my time is much more limited now that I have a 3-year-old. Now, if a poem doesn’t take flight right away, I have to move on. So: a more compressed syntax, shorter lines, development through quick pivoting rather than elaboration. And yet, I also feel more expansive in the connections I want to draw. If All Pilgrim is largely about the disorientations of place, I’m now more aware of simultaneities of time—of human and natural histories, and possible futures—making their imprints on the present.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
The poets of my early adolescence were William Blake, Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes, Osip Mandelstam, Adrienne Rich, Ntozake Shange, Sylvia Plath, ee cummings, and—thanks to my astonishing high school French teacher, Mme. Bosch—Baudelaire, Apollinaire, and Rimbaud. Then I detoured away from poetry. I studied art in college and labored at fiction for well over a decade, including in the MFA program at the University of Michigan, where I began a novel that I worked on steadily for five or six years after graduating.

Toward the end of this self-inflicted novel-writing period, I more or less accidentally attended readings by Eileen Myles and Cathy Park Hong. And, without realizing it at the time, I was learning a huge amount about what poems can be and do by watching my friend, the poet Darcie Dennigan, work on her first book during the years when we both lived in Los Angeles.

All I really remember, though, is that one morning, in the middle of my two-hour commute to work, I experienced the kind of epiphany we’d been taught to avoid in fiction school: Holy shit—I think I’m a poet. Which meant the huge freedom of not needing to bend every thought and turn of phrase to the demands of plot and character. It meant music, movement, and openness to forms of logic and connection beyond and outside of narrative. It also meant no expectation whatsoever of making a living off of my writing, which was also freeing.

At that point I was 35. Since then, I’ve been trying to make up for the fact that I’ll never get to be a 22-year-old poet.

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?
Usually a slow accumulation gives way, suddenly, to an unexpected final form. This probably goes for books as well as for individual poems.

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?
As much as I tell myself I am only writing poems and not “books” as I work, at each point along the way I do imagine I’m writing a certain book—and then another and another, so that the final collection ends up being a fellowship of poems that were intended for a multitude of other, speculative books that never materialized.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
The poetic injunction against considering audience rings false for me. I’m a mess of nerves when it comes to asking for, promoting, and traveling to readings, but I love being able to embody my poems in the presence of others, almost as much as I love listening to other poets read their work. I also think it’s really important to write each poem with the conviction that it will be read publicly one day. This awareness helps me test my commitment to every word and turn, and it encourages my closer attention to voice, diction, and tone.

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?
Violence and power, particularly in relation to American-ness, feel like such strong determinants of who I am, how I live, and what and how I perceive, that I do constantly read and think and write about them in hopes of understanding myself and others as beings in, and of, history.

As a poet, though, I try to work with observable evidence, and I read and write poems to, if anything, question and complicate any overarching ideas I might have about how the world works. For example, theories of the human rarely seem to account for the animal part of us, which can be a no-brainer in a poem.

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?
A writer’s role is to write.

That said, based on my perspectives as a former adolescent and a former teacher of young readers and writers, I would also venture that one role of some writers is to provide wild, songful, and trustworthy company to—and thereby to liberate and embolden—those parts of the mind that might otherwise wither from loneliness and neglect.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I do appreciate the way outside feedback dovetails with my own need to question and tinker; the handful of suggestions I received on All Pilgrim from my editor, Ryan Murphy, resulted in my cutting some poems entirely, writing new ones, revising others beyond recognition, and reordering the book into its final form. In the absence of such input in my regular writing life, I try to be of as many different minds as possible about my work, all the time.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
“Pay attention.”

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?
My best chance of getting writing done is after 9pm, when my son goes to sleep. Otherwise, the vast majority of my work over the last three years has been written on my phone, at odd intervals between other responsibilities.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Life.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Boulder, Colorado: pine trees and second-hand incense.

Los Angeles: night-blooming jasmine and gasoline.

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?
For me, a poem is the meeting place and argument between other poems and the pharmacy/freeway/preschool/forest fire, etc. I want to say “yes” to nature because so often a bird or a cloud pulls me out of myself, provides a needed shift in perspective and scale as well as introducing other registers of language, but here, as in my poems, I become distracted by asking what part of me is able to perceive of myself as separate from nature in the first place.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Important books for me right now are those that compel me to imagine a productively resistant inner and outer life: Radical Love, a collection of Fanny Howe’s novels; James Baldwin’s collected essays; Eileen Myles’s Inferno.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Be fearless.

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 have had to do plenty of things other than/in addition to writing, so what I am always attempting is to find a better (less demoralizing, higher-paying, less disruptive to writing) way of making a living.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
A deep-rooted love of language as sound, structure, spell-casting—probably, in fact, an intuition that the conscious deployment of language is a form of power. Writing is my way of not feeling wholly consumed by everything else that I must do in life; it’s my way of listening, and it’s also my way of talking back.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Whatever I'm reading at the moment becomes necessary and primary, and the tensions and connections between books are as important as their individual effects. I’m currently reading and thinking through Amiri Baraka ( SOS ), Susan Howe ( Singularities ), Simon J. Ortiz ( From Sand Creek ), Joseph Massey ( Illocality ), and Myung Mi Kim ( Under Flag ).

I enjoy movies but rarely remember them. I think this is because they usually feel like they were made for someone else. The only film that has really stuck, and that I would gladly pause my life to watch again and again, is Jacques Rivette’s Celine and Julie Go Boating.

19 - What are you currently working on?
A poem that, for now, thinks it’s about dictionaries, getting lost in the woods, and the violence of American origins.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

U of Alberta writers-in-residence interviews: Daphne Marlatt (1985-86)

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.
Daphne Marlatt’s many poetry titles include Steveston (2001), The Given (awarded the 2009 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize), and Liquidities: Vancouver Poems Then and Now (2013). House of Anansi recently published a new edition of her acclaimed novel Ana Historic , with foreword by Lynn Crosbie. Last year Wilfred Laurier University Press released a selection from 40 years of her work, Rivering: The Poetry of Daphne Marlatt , edited by Susan Knutson. She has taught and served as writer in residence at half a dozen universities, edited oral histories and several small literary journals, written essays, and a contemporary Canadian version of a Japanese Noh play ( The Gull ) as well as a libretto for a chamber opera, “Shadow Catch.” In 2006 she was appointed to the Order of Canada and in 2012 she was awarded the George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award. 
She was writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta during the 1985-86 academic year.
Q: When you began your residency, you’d been publishing books for more than a decade. Where did you feel you were in your writing? What did the opportunity mean to you?
A: That residency at U. of A. was my first full academic year residency, not my first residency but the first I could do for that long as my teenage son was by then living with his dad in Seattle. I was living with Betsy Warland in Kitsilano and we were in a sort of hiatus, recovering from the energy expended in organizing the national conference Women and Words, followed by a collective editing of its proceedings, and then organizing the West Word summer school that grew from that conference. The previous year, Longspoon Press in Alberta had published our companion collections of poetry. And incidentally, Touch to my Tongue, my suite of poems for Betsy, had begun on a long drive to Winnipeg for my 1982 fall residency at U. of M. I had also begun editing Tessera with Kathy Mezei, Barbara Godard, and Gail Scott. By 1985, having resumed work on my much-interrupted novel, I was beginning to re-immerse myself in historical (1870s) and period (1950s) Vancouver, so it was a curious time for a move to Edmonton, to a winter so cold the tears froze on my eyelashes just walking from parking lot to front door. I’d learned a bit about the residency from Phyllis Webb, who had been there some 5 years earlier, and I was glad to join a program that had already appointed a number of remarkable women writers, thanks no doubt to Shirley Neuman. The range of writers I worked with in my WIR room was very stimulating, as were the writers brought in for the reading series Doug Barbour (I think it was Doug then) organized. Personally, that time was a sort of watershed year for me. I discovered that I was so anemic I couldn’t walk more than a block or two so I went to see Edmonton’s wonderful Dr. Steven Aung who treated me with acupuncture and iron shots and told me to slow down, meditate. By the time the residency was over, I had enough energy to set off on a reading tour of Australia with Betsy – so the slowing-down didn’t happen right away.
Q: What do you see as your biggest accomplishment while there? What had you been hoping to achieve?
A: Well, trying to recall details from 30 years ago is a bit taxing for this not-so-reliable memory. The internal markers were probably writing the second poem, “character,” for Nicole Brossard to translate in our collaborative transformance project (Nouvelle barre du jour/Writing, 1986) and trying to finish Ana Historic which Coach House published in 1988. Also continuing to learn how to write about writing with both a poet’s approach to language and a feminist sensibility, which I did in a number of articles published that year.
However, there was an external marker too: learning how to work with a diversity of writers and the writing they brought to my little room in the English Department. They came from the University, some from town, some from farms a number of miles outside Edmonton – one I remember, the wife of a strictly observant Mormon – so, sensing what might be useful for someone who wrote outside the limits of my own experience and finding appropriate ways to convey it. That was, for me, always the challenge in such residencies and when some phrase or suggestion “clicked” with that writer so that her work could open in a way that felt right to her, then such a moment also felt like something to celebrate.
Q: Given the fact that you aren’t an Alberta writer, were you influenced at all by the landscape, or the writing or writers you interacted with while in Edmonton? What was your sense of the literary community?
A: During that winter in Edmonton, I suddenly understood, when salt tears froze to my eyelashes in the short walk from parking lot to building, that one could die of cold. I’d never seen snow before we immigrated to Canada and snow in North Vancouver was for me a rare rapture. But that winter, my first on the prairies, I understood its threat. I loved the North Saskatchewan river valley in Edmonton, the bridges over it, the trails running along it but the Fraser was still the river I fully responded to.
Having so little energy at the time meant I didn’t go out to as many literary events as I would have liked.  But the literary community there seemed cohesive (more so than in Vancouver), friendly, and active. Doug Barbour and Shirley Neuman were very active in connecting with other writers, both as faculty members in the English Department (and I believe Shirley was busy organizing a new Women’s Studies program then) and on the board of NeWest Press, Shirley also with Longspoon Press which I think she founded. Both were dynamos of energy and enthusiasm, however differently each played out that energy.