Rob Mclennan's Blog, page 102

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Jude Neale

Jude Neale is a master educator, a Canadian poet, vocalist, spoken word performer, workshop facilitator, and mentor. Jude has written eleven books, to date. Her book, A Quiet Coming of Light, A Poetic Memoir (Leaf Press) was a finalist for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, which is in a national recognition of Canadian female poets. One of Jude's poems from her book, Splendid in its Silence, was chosen by Britain's Poet Laureate, Sir Andrew Motion,  to ride with other winners around the Channel Islands on public transit for a year, and she was a featured reader at the Guernsey International Literary Festival. This book was an SPM Prize winner and was published in the UK.

Some of these poems can be heard on Jude’s collaborative (viola/spoken word) EP, Places Beyond with the renowned composer and viola player, Thomas Beckman, Jude and Thomas completed a successful collaboration for the world premiere of their St. Roch Suite, with the Prince George Symphony Orchestra.

Jude and Bonnie Nish started an online collaboration which lead them to write Cantata in Two Voices (Ekstasis Editions), A Blooming, (Ekstasis Editions) and We Sing Ourselves Back, which were published in 2019.

Impromptu, launched in Spring 2020, The River Answers, was published in the winter 2021. As was Inside the Pearl (Guernica Editions). The Flaw (Ekstasis Editions) is her most articulate collection, she believes. Her vocal and poetry CDs will be launched in Spring 2023, a distillation spanning over 50 years.

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, The Perfect Word Collapses, allowed me entrance to readings which gave  me the opportunity to connect deeply with each other, which is my main goal in writing. This eleventh book is a Legacy book, meaning I think it will be read long after I’m dead. It is a collection of 125 pages ranging from form poetry to haiku, a couple of rhyming poems  and mainly free verse. The one from last year, Inside the Pearl (Guernica Editions) was written while in residence at Joy Kogawa House and told of this controversial house in both photos and haiku.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I’ve always written poetry. So did my grandfather. He memorized and orated all of Robert Service to me before I was five. I won my first poetry contest at eight with BC CBC contest for young people.

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?
It takes me two months to write a book. I deliberately write for two months using my own prompts so I can complete a manuscript of 100 poems. I learned how to edit for two years at Humber college with the acclaimed writer Elisabeth Harvor. She always sits on my shoulder when I write so I never have to go back and edit. I have written 8 books on my phone.

4 - Where does a poem or work of fiction 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 am working on a book from the very beginning, usually having already chosen the title and cover. One or two poems a day for two months and I have a completed manuscript.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I am an opera singer who loves to perform, so readings are an extension of that. I’m not happy until someone is in tears!

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 write about the news a lot. In this book I have genocide poems, political poems and societal reflection poems. I feel very strongly it’s my job to lay bare what is going on. I’m very concerned with the Canadian perpetration of injustice visited on our First Nations people. My last book dealt with the Japanese internment 1942-1946 of which my book reflected upon. I think in these wildly spinning global and national times it is a writer’s duty to address the issues facing us all.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
See last answer

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
No one has ever edited my books but me. I am pretty firm on each word choice or line break. Each book is a product of my mind only.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
When Rachel Rose, ex Vancouver Poet Laureate told me “to find the golden thread” when ordering my many poems into a book. I totally understood her meaning which has always helped me since. Elisabeth Harvor told me to never be sentimental and maudlin—which I stick to.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to short/flash fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?
I write flash fiction as well, which has been well received in the UK and Canada.

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 write on my phone between midnight and 4:00 am. I like the stillness and this otherworldly way it feels then.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I am one of the lucky ones who has never had writer’s block! It all comes pouring out of me like a conduit.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Baking bread because my mom baked it everyday and passed it on to me!

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 is my biggest influence, both lyrically and cadence wise. I always read each poem out loud as I write so I can feel the silence and internal rhythm.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
I’m a huge fan of the American writer Mark Doty, particularly for his beautiful use of imagery and visceral but tender subject matters.

Since I’ve become a grandmother this has opened up my vast capacity to reflect on them, my daughter and my own mothering.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I’ve written a long piece of poetic narrative prose in a collaboration with Thomas Beckmann when we created a three movement suite based on the St Roch's navigation through the Northwest Passage. It was performed by the Prince George Symphony. I’ve also written songs, but my secret desire would be to write an opera!

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 taught writing in the schools for 25 years and sang. I think I’d be a singer if the pull towards writing had not been so great.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
It is how I’ve always expressed myself from a very early age. I wanted to do what my Grandfather had done. I recognized early the power of language.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Best book for me was The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver. She is my favourite author because she knows her subject so well and is able to write about it in a powerful and poetic manner.

20 - What are you currently working on?
I am working on my next book with well known artist, Nick Jens, about Bowen Island, called Home to Stay. Each painting has or will have my poetic response. It will be four line poems and will tell the story of this island today.

My poetic collaboration with renowned textile artist Jane Kenyon will open at CityScapes Gallery in February.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

David Dowker, Dissonance Engine

 

Social Interface Protocols

The iteration of evening once again anticipates intoxication. Quintessence essentially. The ineffable stuff of enough or too much. A semblance of some doing and another done gone. This is not a new sentence. The difference is in the repetition. Contrapuntal fundamental isolation divided against its/elf. The inevitable result of a revolving-door poetics. An indefinite allotment of illumination distributed each to each and alterwise. Quite brightly and above all hyperspherical.

Toronto poet and editor (and publisher of the late great Alterran Poetry Assemblage) David Dowker’s latest title is the poetry collection Dissonance Engine (Toronto ON: Book*hug, 2022), following Machine Language (BookThug, 2010), Virtualis: Topologies of the Unreal (with Christine Stewart; Toronto ON: BookThug, 2013) [see my review of such here] and Mantis (Chax, 2018). Set in four numbered sections—“Time-Sensitive Material,” “Chronotope, or Sorrow’s Echo,” “Glossation” and “Orders of Multitudes”—the collection opens with a section of prose poems; sentences set as bricks that work to layer, stagger into unusual narratives. Through fifteen short pieces, Dowker opens his collection through a structural conversation or argument on form via prose blocks, altered realities, love and grief. “Now there can be no realization.” he writes, to open the poem “Reversible Dispersal, or Slipped Infinitive,” “I gather shards of tense / from the abundant blue confusion.”

Moving through poetic form, one that is held firm through the sentence and sentence-fragment—from the prose poem to more traditional line breaks and staggering—Dowker’s is a poetics of abstract specifics, circling around and through a subject via language, offering a layering of fragments that move across, rather than in and out, of narrative thought and focus. “automatic word organism,” the seven page poem “Bit Iteration,” the first poem in the book’s third section, begins. “written continuous as / another channelled pattern / calibrated to cyclic entities / in auroral whorls / of attuned psyche [.]” Dowker circles specifics on language theory and grief and the mechanics of all of the above, even as his layerings combine to move in a straight trajectory. For example, there is the poem “Logical Depth,” a poem with a tone reminiscent of some of Stephen Brockwell’s work [see my review of his latest here]; as Dowker’s piece ends: “I beside / myself again and again with diminishing resolution. She who / must be accommodated arrives late to the occasion. Her / reciprocity is legendary. As for a continuous present, the key / would seem to be the logical depth of its virtuality.” Dowker’s language twists and parrys, settles and unsettles, bouncing across lines, and even plays off the language of Walt Kelly’s infamous daily Pogo (1948-1975), a newspaper comic strip that also gifted George Bowering the title of his Autobiology(Vancouver BC: Georgia Straight Writing Supplement, 1972). As Dowker opens his poem “Disjunction, or Pogo-logos”: “The argument is being. Things being as they are.”

Emmalea Russo, Confetti

 

HONEY IN TEA

no souvenir

In France California Texas or Pennsylvania

ground emptied

honey in tea

orange and pink Dunkin Donuts sign falling fast with the sun

alongside the simple exacting charm of a chest of draws, I be

triviality of travel of honey in tea

northern city calling a gaze thither

before disintegrating if you only

I walk to the top of the hill while you sleep

honey in tea

name the ambient violence that doesn’t cut

but makes a lozenge of what’s in the air

quiet fervency of a mouth honey in tea

echo swoop mouthing

slid the northern lights and the sun echo

we two creatures

in the bodega near the end

do you see the horizon

twinned in here’s greyer air

Simone or Saturn

bottom of an atmosphere

abnegation honey

in tea unmusically

stirring spoon scraping mug

along the edges of a winter

almost dissolved/born

The latest from New Jersey-based poet and editor Emmalea Russo, following G (Brooklyn NY: Futurepoem, 2018) [see my review of such here] and Wave Archive (Toronto ON: Book*hug, 2019) [see my review of such here] is Confetti (Hyperidean Press, 2022), a collection that deliberately bleeds together the language of film, visual art and daily life across a collage-accumulation of lyric, prose and fragment. “Consoled a glow.” she writes, as part of the poem “PILE,” “If you think the sun. The sun. If you think / sun. The heavy corner of levitation’s mineral unfastened. / Orange and pink. Blown out, cleated, whipped clean. A / mountain light’s vein of translucent fat like love come apart / then gathered into a pile.” Set in seven sections, there is something of the accumulated structure of her lines—descriptive theory as discrete points into a linked and staggered imagistic narrative—reminiscent of a particular strain of British experimental writing, a narrative disjuncture more overt here than in some of her prior work. “there in, here in,” she writes, as part of the four-page poem “MOVING IMAGE,” “U’s theorem of what’s tremendous // beheld what held us // a hexagram-shaped light between // electric pupil, repainted clip [.]” She offers little pinpoints, pinpricks of narrative; dots or even crumbs that form along a winding path, leading up or even away using threads of perception, film scores, photography and projection through layered and overlapping images. What forms across such a wide canvas, as much as a presence is a kind of visual absence, a chaos, a framing that appears moment by moment or even scattered, but is narrative across the length and breadth of this book-length structure. In certain ways, the stretches and staggers of lyric provide the impression of an experimental film, existing narratively between, perhaps, the structures of filmmakers such as Terrence Malick and Michael Snow. As she writes, mid-way through the collection:

On the train to Marseille I recall my winter spent stretching and priming canvasses with gesso in the freezing studio as you worked twice as fast and better. All surfaces glimmered until none until I was one. I sit beside a skinny man and move through a report on the progression of Guernica photographs taken by Dora Maar. Three point five sets of eyes on dirt, scratched mirror negatives and silver grain reversed and eventually, she says, it’s like you can only breathe the air of Picasso’s studio. Have you been there.

Staple the canvas to eyeshadow mountain as me and air inspissate chemical smell and pearl eye I roll across floor.

Steel train shakes last night’s lozenge stuck to mirrored bedside table near the muscular slab of paint and small change linoleum floor.

Here comes the metal bird.

If one follows Russo’s work at all, it would be hard not to admire the mutability of her writing projects, and the ways through which each book appears simultaneously self-contained and linked to the larger aesthetic of attempting to navigate language and the connections to genres and ideas beyond the straight lyric that her use of language make possible. As Russo writes to open her “NOTES” at the back of the collection: “The title of the book is inspired by a statement the artist Joëlle Tuerlinckx made about her work in Cahiers 2 in reference to a 1994 exhibition in Rotterdam. Confetti, she said, activated the space between spaces and allowed her ‘to do cinema, but in space.’” To work through the entirely of this work, one sees the book open with a sunrise and end with a sunset, with everything else set in-between. A structure couldn’t be much clearer than that. Or, as she writes to open the poem “FIGURE”:

is that which is contained by some boundary or boundaries.
When the figure escapes what then.

Huh.

Let it have been postulated. My spastic geometry pitched
from what escaped the shape at the edge of which, rhythm.

The U at the FIGURE’s center undid.

An event smoothed under particle translucence.

What rose above the U bloated.

What sunk.

Touch the Donkey supplement: new interviews with Caples, Coultas, Murphy, Turnbull/Gardiner + Ross,

Anticipating the release next week of the thirty-sixth of Touch the Donkey [a small poetry journal], why not check out the interviews that have appeared over the past few weeks with contributors to the thirty-fifth issue: Garrett Caples, Brenda Coultas, Sheila Murphy, Chris Turnbull and Elee Kraljii Gardiner, and Stuart Ross.

Interviews with contributors to the first thirty-four issues (more than two hundred and thirty interviews to date) remain online, including: Leah Sandals, Tamara Best, Nathan Austin, Jade Wallace, Monica Mody, Barry McKinnon, Katie Naughton, Cecilia Stuart, Benjamin Niespodziany, Jérôme Melançon, Margo LaPierre, Sarah Pinder, Genevieve Kaplan, Maw Shein Win, Carrie Hunter, Lillian Nećakov, Nate Logan, Hugh Thomas, Emily Brandt, David Buuck, Jessi MacEachern, Sue Bracken, Melissa Eleftherion, Valerie Witte, Brandon Brown, Yoyo Comay, Stephen Brockwell, Jack Jung, Amanda Auerbach, IAN MARTIN, Paige Carabello, Emma Tilley, Dana Teen Lomax, Cat Tyc, Michael Turner, Sarah Alcaide-Escue, Colby Clair Stolson, Tom Prime, Bill Carty, Christina Vega-Westhoff, Robert Hogg, Simina Banu, MLA Chernoff, Geoffrey Olsen, Douglas Barbour, Hamish Ballantyne, JoAnna Novak, Allyson Paty, Lisa Fishman, Kate Feld, Isabel Sobral Campos, Jay MillAr, Lisa Samuels, Prathna Lor, George Bowering, natalie hanna, Jill Magi, Amelia Does, Orchid Tierney, katie o’brien, Lily Brown, Tessa Bolsover, émilie kneifel, Hasan Namir, Khashayar Mohammadi, Naomi Cohn, Tom Snarsky, Guy Birchard, Mark Cunningham, Lydia Unsworth, Zane Koss, Nicole Raziya Fong, Ben Robinson, Asher Ghaffar, Clara Daneri, Ava Hofmann, Robert R. Thurman, Alyse Knorr, Denise Newman, Shelly Harder, Franco Cortese, Dale Tracy, Biswamit Dwibedy, Emily Izsak, Aja Couchois Duncan, José Felipe Alvergue, Conyer Clayton, Roxanna Bennett, Julia Drescher, Michael Cavuto, Michael Sikkema, Bronwen Tate, Emilia Nielsen, Hailey Higdon, Trish Salah, Adam Strauss, Katy Lederer, Taryn Hubbard, Michael Boughn, David Dowker, Marie Larson, Lauren Haldeman, Kate Siklosi, robert majzels, Michael Robins, Rae Armantrout, Stephanie Strickland, Ken Hunt, Rob Manery, Ryan Eckes, Stephen Cain, Dani Spinosa, Samuel Ace, Howie Good, Rusty Morrison, Allison Cardon, Jon Boisvert, Laura Theobald, Suzanne Wise, Sean Braune, Dale Smith, Valerie Coulton, Phil Hall, Sarah MacDonell, Janet Kaplan, Kyle Flemmer, Julia Polyck-O’Neill, A.M. O’Malley, Catriona Strang, Anthony Etherin, Claire Lacey, Sacha Archer, Michael e. Casteels, Harold Abramowitz, Cindy Savett, Tessy Ward, Christine Stewart, David James Miller, Jonathan Ball, Cody-Rose Clevidence, mwpm, Andrew McEwan, Brynne Rebele-Henry, Joseph Mosconi, Douglas Barbour and Sheila Murphy, Oliver Cusimano, Sue Landers, Marthe Reed, Colin Smith, Nathaniel G. Moore, David Buuck, Kate Greenstreet, Kate Hargreaves, Shazia Hafiz Ramji, Erín Moure, Sarah Swan, Buck Downs, Kemeny Babineau, Ryan Murphy, Norma Cole, Lea Graham, kevin mcpherson eckhoff, Oana Avasilichioaei, Meredith Quartermain, Amanda Earl, Luke Kennard, Shane Rhodes, Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Sarah Cook, François Turcot, Gregory Betts, Eric Schmaltz, Paul Zits, Laura Sims, Stephen Collis, Mary Kasimor, Billy Mavreas, damian lopes, Pete Smith, Sonnet L’Abbé, Katie L. Price, a rawlings, Suzanne Zelazo, Helen Hajnoczky, Kathryn MacLeod, Shannon Maguire, Sarah Mangold, Amish Trivedi, Lola Lemire Tostevin, Aaron Tucker, Kayla Czaga, Jason Christie, Jennifer Kronovet, Jordan Abel, Deborah Poe, Edward Smallfield, ryan fitzpatrick, Elizabeth Robinson, nathan dueck, Paige Taggart, Christine McNair, Stan Rogal, Jessica Smith, Nikki Sheppy, Kirsten Kaschock, Lise Downe, Lisa Jarnot, Chris Turnbull, Gary Barwin, Susan Briante, derek beaulieu, Megan Kaminski, Roland Prevost, Emily Ursuliak, j/j hastain, Catherine Wagner, Susanne Dyckman, Susan Holbrook, Julie Carr, David Peter Clark, Pearl Pirie, Eric Baus, Pattie McCarthy, Camille Martin and Gil McElroy.

The forthcoming thirty-sixth issue features new writing by: Pam Brown, Kathy Lou Schultz, Shane Kowalski, Hilary Clark and Ted Byrne.

And of course, copies of the first thirty-four issues are still very much available. Why not subscribe? Included, as well, as part of the above/ground press annual subscription! (did you know that above/ground press turns thirty years old this year?) We even have our own Facebook group. It’s remarkably easy.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Nick Flynn

Nick Flynn (writer, playwright, poet) has published twelve books, most recently This Is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire (2020), a hybrid memoir; and Stay: threads, collaborations, and conversations (2020), which documents twenty-five years of his collaborations with artists, filmmakers, and composers. He is also the author of five collections of poetry, including I Will Destroy You (2019). He has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Library of Congress, and is on the creative writing faculty at the University of Houston. His acclaimed memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (2004), was made into a film starring Robert DeNiro, and has been translated into fifteen languages.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

A: the first book, some ether, took me ten years to write, and the things I had to do to become the person who could write that book (get sober, get grounded, become part of a community) is really what changed me.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

A: I first tried writing fiction, when I was twelve, because that was what I was reading (sherlock holmes)….I assumed that would be what I would write when I went to college, and I did try. But I took a poetry course with james tate, and poetry seemed more suited to the way my mind worked.

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?

A: each project announces when it will begin. I don’t really control that. I write a lot, and at some point the project rises up out of that.

4 - Where does a poem or work of prose 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?

A: usually more of a collage process—short pieces that then begin to reveal a pattern.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

A: I use readings to try out new work, to see if what I think works when alone in my room is actually any good.

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?

A: I always try to write toward compassion, toward understanding whatever it is I am engaged with.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

A: I think there is room for a range of writers, and to prescribe any role would be limiting.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

A: it is essential, at some point, but not too early in the process.

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

A: still the two words grace paley would give to young writers: “low overhead”

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to fiction to plays to memoir to hybrid work)? What do you see as the appeal?

A: the appeal of moving between genres? It’s more how my mind works….maybe I’m restless.

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?

A: I used to write first thing in the morning, but since I became a father each day begins with my daughter & getting her ready for her day.

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

A: I have a million ways to not write, which then lead me back to the writing.
 
13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

A: musty cellar.

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?

A: I am friends with a lot of artists and scientists and collaborate with many of them…they inspire me.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

A: the world is vast, and writing is a small but important part of it, for me.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

A: I’d like to build tiny houses in unused office buildings and offering them for free to anyone who needs them. Then I’d ask even used office spaces to set aside 1000 sq feet to be used as tiny houses.  

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?

A: I was many things on the way to becoming a writer…writing was just the one that seemed the hardest, that would take me a lifetime to figure out.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

A: I couldn’t figure out how it was done…still can’t.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

A: Book: Charles D’Ambrosio, Loitering.

Film: Truly Madly Deeply

20 - What are you currently working on?

A: A book called LOW (Graywolf, 2023)

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

A ‘best of’ list of 2022 Canadian poetry books

Once more, I offer my annual list of the seemingly-arbitrary “worth repeating” (given ‘best’ is such an inconclusive, imprecise designation), constructed from the list of Canadian poetry titles I’ve managed to review throughout the past year. This is my twelfth annual list [see also: 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011] since dusie-maven Susana Gardner originally suggested various dusie-esque poets write up their own versions of same, and I thank her both for the ongoing opportunity, and her original prompt.

I can’t get to everything (and the fact that I keep trying is seeming to be increasingly ridiculous), which means there are multiple titles this year I haven’t managed to properly respond to, including Lisa Robertson’s Boat (Coach House Books, 2022), Dale Tracy’s Derelict Bicycles (Anvil Press, 2022) or Manahil Bandukwala’s MONUMENT (Brick Books, 2022) (among others, I’m sure). And didn’t Kasia Van Schaik’s short story collection We Have Never Lived On Earth (University of Alberta Press, 2022) just land on my doorstep as I was compiling this very list? And Stuart Ross’ I Am Claude François and You Are A Bathtub (Anvil Press, 2022)! There’s been some remarkable non-fiction by Canadian writers that I’ve managed to get to this year: Stuart Ross’ The Book of Grief and Hamburgers (ECW Press, 2022)[see my review of such here], Sina Queyras’ Rooms: Women, Writing, Woolf (Coach House Books, 2022) [see my review of such here], Emma Healey’s Best Young Woman Job Book: A Memoir (Random House Canada, 2022) [see my review of such here] and Tree Abraham’s Cyclettes (Book*hug, 2022) [see my review of such here]. Otherwise, between my own blog and what I’ve managed via periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics, I’ve posted more than one hundred and fifty book reviews this past year, and managed more than one hundred and fifty posted interviews as well, between my ’12 or 20 (second series) questions’ series, the bibliography series and via Touch the Donkey. And did you see I’ve started a substack for the sake of prompting a book-length essay I’ve had in my head recently? Or that my chapbook press, above/ground press, turns THIRTY YEARS OLD THIS YEAR? Oh, and that I’ve published two books this past year: the book of smaller (University of Calgary Press) and essays in the face of uncertainties (Mansfield Press)? So many things!

This year’s list includes full-length poetry titles by R. Kolewe, Kate Siklosi, Gary Barwin and Tom Prime, Sylvia Legris, Michael Trussler, Chantal Gibson, Ellie Sawatzky, Zane Koss, Sarah de Leeuw, Daniel Sarah Karasik, Mikko Harvey, Laurie D. Graham, Phoebe Wang, Jim Johnstone, Matthew James Weigel, Madhur Anand, Andrew Faulkner, Gillian Sze, Nancy Holmes, Ayaz Pirani, Catriona Strang, Nicole Markotić, Arleen Paré, Prathna Lor, Annharte, Nanci Lee, kevin mcpherson eckhoff, Gary Barwin and Gregory Betts, Ivan Drury, Alisha Kaplan, Stephen Brockwell, Tasnuva Hayden, Michael Goodfellow, Michael Crummey, Luke Hathaway, Victoria Mbabazi, Annick MacAskill, Conyer Clayton, Rhiannon Ng Cheng Hin, Derek Beaulieu, Nicole Brossard, Kristjana Gunnars, Gary Barwin, Natalie Wee, Sarah Ens, Kate Hargreaves, Sophie Crocker, River Halen, Daniel Scott Tysdal, Cameron Anstee, Cecily Nicholson, Otoniya J. Okot Bitek, Phil Hall, Edward Byrne and Amy Dennis. I mean, that’s a lot, right?

Make sure to catch this year's entire list here!

Manahil Bandukwala, Monument

 

Wed

You slipped away from the ring of golden torches
encircling you and Khurram. The flames burned on
without you. You slipped away to the silent rooftop,

shed the peacock feather headdress and pressed
your blazing cheek against a hallway mirror. Flames
have a habit of spreading; your old life

consumed. Watching your wedding from a vantage
point, your body intertwined with his, ready to make

a promise. Your spirit hovered
silver
                                                            your voice faded

to night. He whispered the namesake
that would entwine you with mausoleum—

Mumtaz Mahal, exalted one of the palace

—a promise
to one day take for himself
                                    and you
            a throne.

There is a curious framing around Manahil Bandukwala’s full-length debut, Monument (Kingston ON: Brick Books, 2022), a title deliberately designed on the cover with crumbling letters “n” and “u,” offering a sly dual title of “Monuments” and “Moments,” an idea reinforced through the book’s opening quote by British Columbia poet Phyllis Webb, from the opening of her poem “MOMENTS ARE MONUMENTS,” a poem first included in the second section of her Even Your Right Eye (1956) that reads: “Moments are monuments / if caught / carved into stone [.]” Of course, Saskatchewan poet John Newlove famously tweaked that particular phrasing nearly a decade later, through his poem “Then, If I Cease Desiring” from Moving in Alone (1965): “You may allow me moments, / not monuments, I being / content. It is little, / but it is little enough.” Through her use of paired titling, Bandukwala writes of and around the life (and the moments) of Mumtaz Mahal (b. c. 1593—d. June 17, 1631, Burhanpur, India), wife of Shah Jahān, Mughal emperor of India (1628–58). It was this historical figure who died but a few years into her husband’s reign, a loss that prompted him to construct the infamous Taj Mahal in her memory, where she is also entombed. “In this moment,” Bandukwala writes, as part of the poem “Ask,” early on in the collection, “I saw his love start // and end with your beauty.” There is little known of Mumtaz Mahal beyond the facts of this particular memorialization, and before this book has even begun, Bandukwala offers not only the tension of the collection, but her goal to explore the human figure out of a fixed point in stone: a moment or two, perhaps, pulled out of the monument. As the back cover of the collection informs, “Manahil Bandukwala’s debut upturns notions of love, monumentalisation, and empire by exploring buried facets of Mughal Empress Mumtaz Mahal’s life, moving her story beyond the Taj Mahal.”

There is something compelling about the way Bandukwala approaches her subject, writing the tension between memorialization and a life lived, wishing to provide this historical figure some agency, beyond the exclusive associations and depictions around her husband. The approach is reminiscent, in certain ways, of how Montreal poet SueElmslie equally worked to reclaim André Breton’s surrealist muse Nadja through her I, Nadja, and Other Poems (London ON: Brick Books, 2006) [see my review of such here], or even Stephen Scobie’s The Ballad of Isabel Gunn(Kingston ON: Quarry Press, 1987). As she writes as part of the poem/section “Unravel”:

Your children were witness
to the grandest expressions of love,
the immortalization of memory.

                        twenty-thousand put labour
                        into love.

Fourteen children, and half of them
lost                  too young
                        to form lasting souls.

Structured with an opening poem (“Before, it was love”) and into seven suite-sections—“Braid,” “Love Letters,” “Threads,” “Offspring,” “Unravel,” “Last Words” and “Plait”—Bandukwala folds language and structure into her lyric, utilizing and weaving excerpts and prompts from Mohsin Hamid, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Phyllis Webb, Danez Smith and Sylvia Plath into a larger tapestry of biographical reclamation. “War elephants sway their tails in summer.” she writes, as part of the poem “1622,” “I fed them peanuts, rough skin of trunks / puffed out silk threads from my crown. Tended an empire // overgrown with hibiscus and sunflower. / Hoisted skirts and climbed up a stalk // to reach the yellow petals. I, a sun, a smile, // a swaying empire in the breeze. // You, a pollen grain, floating towards me.” There are layers and shimmerings of history and geography that ripple across this collection, offering her subject a long shadow across a country and a culture she held herself up to, and into the most human of simple moments. “Caught between the floor tiles of your quarter / in Khwabgah,” she writes, to open the poem “Flow,” “strands of hair. Yours and your daughters, // other wives and other daughters. So black, still carrying / whiffs of jasmine perfurme and pearls that looped / your curls across your cheekbones. The act // of braiding, woman to woman, of brushing the day / out of her hair, of her combing sleep and calm / dreams into yours. A moment / to be yours, where all the hair that fell // twisted into its own braid. This room // more than a monument.” This is, one might say, the moments of a life lived, however brief it may have been, with as few details as might have been recorded. Or, as Mumtaz Mahal speaks, further, through Bandukwala’s lyric, to close the poem “1631”:

Command was not
an inherited trait. Were it so,

I might have cast myself
in iron, sat atop a throne,

left radifs to rot in empty gardens.

            Untethered carbon over diamond.

I, unremembered in history books,
unalive in my own life.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Délani Valin

Délani Valin is neurodivergent and Métis with Nehiyaw, Saulteaux, French-Canadian and Czech ancestry. She studies for her master’s in professional communications at Royal Roads University, and has a Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing from Vancouver Island University. Her poetry has been awarded The Malahat Review’s Long Poem Prize and subTerrain’s Lush Triumphant Award. Her work has appeared in PRISM International, Adbusters, Room, and in the anthologies Those Who Make Us and Bawaajigan. She is on the editorial board of Room and The Malahat Review , and lives on traditional and unceded Snuneymuxw territory (Nanaimo, BC).

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I started writing small poems when I was still a child. I wrote stories too, but my favourite thing was plunging into the Thesaurus, picking out some obscure word and then mangling its use in a melodramatic poem.

Nowadays, I think poetry allows me to cut to the emotional core of an idea. Poetry is a container, but paradoxically I find a lot of freedom and space to experiment. It’s these kinds of constraints — form, line length, sound, metaphor — that create the conditions for, say, the ghazal about gendered body image stigma from the perspective of the Michelin Man in Shapeshifters.

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?
With poetry, I do very little to alter the first drafts, but I edit as I go along. I tend to use a combination of free-association writing and mind-maps when I’m generating ideas for a poem. The mind-maps work for me because I can relate seemingly disparate concepts in a big web, which is how I tend to see the world: everything is about everything. Once I’ve created this, I more or less have the shape of the poem and intuition usually guides me towards finding the specific words. I think the only downside to this process is that I can have a tendency to want to be exhaustive. Scope creep, in other words, can prevent me from moving on to the next step. It's a skill unto itself to know when to let the work breathe with its own lungs in the world!

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?
With Shapeshifters, I had some ideas I knew I wanted to explore, such as embodying the (imagined) experiences of the capitalist mascots that permeated my childhood. Other poems surprised me, surfacing out of my lived experiences and out of an attempt to understand them. I kept faith that I was moving towards a manuscript, but I didn’t quite know at what I was chipping away until I’d amassed the majority of the poems in this book. Part of me would actually like to work according to a more stringent plan, but poetry, like life itself, has a lot to teach me about being flexible, patient and open to surprises.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I always forget how much I love public readings until the second I’m in front of an audience. Readings give me no small amount of anxiety, but there’s something really special about being able to share a poem and seeing whether it resonates with anyone in real time. It’s an incredibly rich experience that I will absolutely continue to coax myself into!

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?
With Shapeshifters , although I wasn’t always conscious of it, I was really driving at questions around authenticity. I think so many of us learn to sacrifice our authentic emotions, expressions and desires to get along and go along. There is a huge cost to this, as we can become alienated from ourselves. Neurodivergent people especially talk about having to wear a palatable “mask” in order to avoid persecution. This has been my experience, being so docile and disconnected from myself that I would often forget I even had a body. So, in Shapeshifters I try to find the perfect mask by donning a plethora of personae. As it turns out, there is no perfect mask, and authenticity can look like a lot of different things.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
I think different writers have different roles. Some cajole, shock, reflect, amuse, provide solace and enlighten. I think writing is a bit like medicine, and people can come and read the medicine they need. It doesn’t seem like it’s up to the writer to know which medicines they are providing.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I welcome the help of an outside editor because once I’ve worked the piece through the mind-map and into a solid draft, it becomes very difficult for me to see it in any other light. An editor also has the benefit of seeing a bigger picture, such as sequencing or seeing how the poems may relate to one another.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
I have some really great people in my life: my partner Joe reminds me to be self-compassionate and my friend Liam is fond of reminding me that, “it’s chill to let yourself off the hook.” In essence, life sings when I’m a friend to myself and I would love to see more people be easier on themselves, too.

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 don’t have a writing routine. I write when I feel like I’d be unwell if I put it off any longer! These days I’m busy trying to write a Masters thesis, so that’s been taking a lot of my mental energy. But the urge to write creatively is still there and I’m mindful to respect it.

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

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
There’s this pinecone potpourri my mom used to set in a bowl all winter. I would hide my socks in the bowl and they would come out reeking like holiday spice and that always felt comforting to me. So, cloves are a good sign something’s cooking for a long time and that we’re here to stay.

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 has become a strong influence for me. Every plant and rock and animal have their vocabularies. There’s so much to belong to. Even the reminder of these connections can spark an idea. I also have playlists that I like to write to, and I collect random factoids that make their ways into my work as well.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I want to go on a really long walk. I’d like to do the El Camino or a similarly long venture. I love walking and want to see more of the world that way.

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 become a counsellor.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
A deep inner nagging that’s made itself known since I was about 11 years old.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Three books I really enjoyed in the last year include Stuart Ross’s The Book of Grief and Hamburgers, Jónína Kirton’s Standing in a River of Time, and Céline Huyghebaert’s Remnants (translated from the French by Aleshia Jensen).

19 - What are you currently working on?
Apart from toiling on my thesis project, I’m also putting down the bones for a novel which will feature a neurodivergent Métis protagonist and her inner and outer quest for belonging.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Short poem for a long winter

 

 

This is why             we bundle: freezing rain, a loss of pitch. The accuracy
of this ink white sheet. Forecasts                     one might reach by water.

Schools closed, pajama days; suspension                              of a letter.
Our small children                      abide. This day, separated

by music, returns    to earth. Street branches, glisten  ; hibernating
local rabbits, squirrels. Where                birds, forestall                             . What shadows

echo   beyond this scene             of my fifty-third yule. Winter, mostly. That first

a snowfall record    , and here, barrage of wet snow             , squall
and deep freeze. Old stories, signal                  heaven, hearth, the proportion

of roaring fires. Certain locals                powerless. Sleet-frescoed glass, prosody
of what might come. We will not sleep. Each sentence here           a gift.

happy thirty-second birthday, kate!

Thirty-two? How did this happen? Happy birthday! Gadzooks!