Rob Mclennan's Blog, page 107

Otoniya J. Okot Bitek, A Is for Acholi

 

I’ve been thinking diaspora is & is not
the us of home & how & where we’re enough&
how this nation demands &
that nation extracts &
that other nation seeks but does not want us

to say hello ki leb Acholi
one might ask quite literally i tye
are you there
       do you exist
               are you

in response we might say   a tye
a tye ma ber
       I’m here I exist I’m good I’m fine I exist well

these poems are about that

Award-winning Kingston, Ontario-based poet and critic Otoniya J. Okot Bitek’s second full-length collection, after 100 Days (Edmonton AB: University of Alberta Press, 2016) [see my review of such here] is A Is for Acholi (Hamilton ON: Wolsak & Wynn, 2022), a book-length poetic that works to articulate, dismantle and reconstruct an alphabet of being, seeking and belonging. “A is for Acholi Achol the Black one & the black one,” she writes, to open “An Ancholi alphabet,” “A is for the apple that was lobbed at us from a garden far away & exploded in our compound / A is for me [.]” A Is for Acholi is an expansive poetic through the archive, offering history, story and histiography, writing of diaspora and colonialism and dismantling racist depictions, all held together through such thoughtful and delicate construction. Bitek writes of homeland and of home; she writes of loss and of song and of standing firm on the present ground. “these days like loose threads like untied laces like / frayed edges like tenuous connections,” she writes, to open the single stanza (and punctuation-less) prose-block “An alphabet / for the unsettled,” “days like remembrances days like bits we can only access / if we’re to survive days that are untenable / palpable days pulsating through that prominent / vein on your temple days like memories you can’t / hold onto like last tuesday which means nothing at / all except that there was a tuesday last week [.]” Or, as the poem “Salt,” within the suite-section “If/once we were” offers:

this is land to salt         to blood to red dust
land to map stories      land to salt stories

Structured in two sections prefaced by a kind of lyric introduction (above), the opening section presents a twenty-six poem/page abecedarian “An Acholi alphabet,” before launching into a second section, the umbrella “A dictionary for un/settling,” which is itself broken down into six poem/poem-suites—“If/once we were,” “Excavating Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,” “Settled/unsettled,” “There’s something about,” “The lock poems” and “Jacob’s breath.” The section “Excavating Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,” for example, that opens with the poem “Three letters at a time,” is simply stunning, both visually and conceptually, and offers, as well, the footnote: “With gratitude to M. NourbeSe Philip for the teaching about the profane in the text & the work required for cleansing. To Jordan Abel for illustrating the poison through excavating the archive.” As this opening poem to the section begins: “Dark h    n sh    s c    d be made out in the dis   ce, fl   ing in   tinctly [.]” Her responses throughout this particular section are stunning, and delight in their deconstruction of Conrad’s novel, allowing for the physicality of the text itself to be torn down and, thusly, rebuilt in a form and manner both concrete and ephemeral. She makes the words and text characters he utilized purely hers, reordered and imagined into something other, else.

The book also includes a “Postscriptum” at the end, which exists simultaneously beyond and within the bounds of her book-length lyric, straddling that line between poem and postscript, possibly as a conclusion to her expansive lyric thesis. “& in / these days of this thing we might remember that we’re still here we’re still / here we’re still here & our tongues will carry the rhythm of how we came / through,” she writes, to end her two-page (and heavily footnoted) “Postscriptum,” “all those past apocalypses & how we will learn to draw maps again / & how history can & will be challenged with more of our own stories in our / own languages because because because we now know a world without empire [.]” Her notes-as-poems, or poems-as-notes, provide added layers of consideration upon a sequence of already complex lines and links as she writes history and lineage, linkages cultural and complicated.

Robert Hogg (March 26, 1942 – November 13, 2022)

As the family announced on Friday, Ottawa-area poet of Vancouver’s infamous TISHera, retired organic farmer and Carleton University English Professor Bob Hoggdied “surrounded by family at the Ottawa General Hospital” on Sunday, November 13 after a further and extended bout of cancer. Echoing Cameron Anstee’s own wonderfully-elegant reminiscence, Bob was generous, kind and quiet, although a particular kind of self-effacement that often managed to get him and his work overlooked, and not taken nearly as seriously as it should have been. His was an unassuming kind of intensity, standing aside or even within with his usual quiet yet chipper glum demeanor. Following school-stints in Vancouver and Buffalo, the Edmonton-born and BC-interior raised Bob landed in Ottawa (soon picking up farmland an hour south, near Mountain) in the late 1960s for a job at Carleton University, and helped quietly shape more than a couple of generations of poets and thinkers around town, whether from inside or beyond the boundaries of his classroom.

I met Bob during my final year of high school in May 1989, attending his week-long poetry mini course at Carleton University. I don’t remember a single other attendee during that week (did any of the rest of them go on to do any other writing/publishing?), but Bob had us writing poems, and introduced us to the work of multiple Canadian poets. He showed us a video of Earle Birney’s infamous poem “David,” and had us all purchase a copy of Gary Geddes’ anthology 15 Canadian Poets x2 (Oxford University Press, 1988), a book I carried around like a bible for at least a decade (my copy is now in fairly rough shape, but includes numerous signatures). In hindsight, I’m frustrated he didn’t speak to (or even acknowledge) his own writing career, allowing us that knowledge, at least, that he could speak to the experience of writing from the inside, instead of purely speaking of and around the work of others. I do recall, at least, Rob Manery (one of his students at the time) coming in and talking about small publishing (others of his students during that period included Louis Cabri and Christian Bök). Was Manery the one, during that particular class, who introduced me to The Carleton Literary Review? Bob was encouraging of our attempts, but mainly left us to our own devices; spending his time offering us different examples of how it was done, as well as time for us to go off to write on our own (numerous of us would choose to write down by the banks of the Rideau River). It would be a couple of years wandering through Ottawa literary circles before I even knew that Bob wrote poems himself, with the publication of what would be his final trade collection before he died, There Is No Falling (ECW Press, 1993). I think I might even have attended the launch of that, possibly even via The TREE Reading Series, just shy of my tenure as co-director. When Rob Manery and I founded the WHIPlash poetry festival in 1996 (I would organize two further annual fests solo before it fell apart), I began to solicit new work from him for a chapbook, a question that became, gently, repeated over the years. It would be sixteen years before he would offer me anything. He was caught up in farming, and the literary life, it would seem, had been temporarily set aside.

I remember a post-reading drink somewhere in the 1990s or even beyond at The Manx Pub with Bob, following a George Bowering reading somewhere: George waving his arms and yelling, “Twenty bucks says my buddy Bob can take anyone here.” Bob smiling, head down, both chuffed and embarrassed. My buddy Bob. He was around, but not that often, until he suddenly was. Having retired early from Carleton to focus on organic farming, his presence in Ottawa literary circles dwindled for a stretch, until he began to wind down the business, and then it almost appeared he had exploded and was immediately everywhere simultaneously, with a flurry of chapbooks and poems online, whether directly posted to facebook or in journals online and print. He returned full-force. Why hadn’t anyone published a selected poems of Robert Hogg? It is one of my frustrations of having shuttered Chaudiere Books when we did: Bob was long overdue a selected poems, something that would provide both a context and an acknowledgement of his published work-do-date (something I said moons back, for The Capilano Review), even before the realization that, according to his lengthy bio, he was actively working on at least a half-dozen full-length collections over the past few years. He was around, and I managed to produce three chapbooks by him in total (including a second, which was simply an updated “one more poem” of the first one); he read as part of The Peter F. Yacht Club Christmas/holiday gatherings, including in 2019, or last year’s online version (catch his video as part of such here). He even has further poems forthcoming in an upcoming issue of Touch the Donkey.

Not that long ago, I attempted to write a bit of an overview of his recent work via a review of his Apt. 9 Press chapbook, seeing the shifts in his writing since his “re-emergence,” watching as he deliberately worked and re-worked poems finished and half-finished from his own archive. Part of what made these experiments interesting was through the way in which his poems moved through prior stories and structures, but wasn’t a poetry stuck in the past: it was a poetics that strived to move ever forward. His work was attempting to push ahead as best as possible, but with a foundation he’d long-established as a young writer, influenced by the likes of Robert Duncan and Edward Dorn, almost in a way that set aside other explorations via structures influenced by numerous of his contemporaries. The work since There Is No Falling attempted a structure set simultaneously in an immediate present and that distant past, working to tether the two points across such thin, unbreakable lines of staggered lyric.

The last time I saw Bob in person was at a book launch this past summer for Michael Blouin, held at a brew-pub I hadn’t been aware of, within walking distance of our wee house. He’d had another surgery, and his throat sounded rough, but he was in good spirits. As I went to leave, the bartender told me he’d paid for my drink. When I sent Bob an email to thank him, we realized that the bartender had simply conflated “Bob” and “rob” in their tabs. I didn’t mean to buy you a drink! he wrote. Unbeknownst to Bob, I’d been working on the Report from the Hogg Society festschrift for a few months, attempting to cohere a series of loose threads. He sent along an email on Wednesday, November 9ththat he was heading home for the sake of palliative care the following day, asking me to let everyone know that he couldn’t make it out on Saturday to the ottawa small press book fair. It would be the following day when Theresa Smalec sent out a group email to inform us that we should be sending Bob emails immediately, offering our support and good wishes. If you’ve anything to say to him, now’s the time. By Friday, I had a nearly-complete draft of the festschrift, which I sent along as a pdf (normally the subjects are completely unaware of the publications until finished copies land on their doorsteps), to which he responded, by Saturday afternoon: “Oh, how glorious to see this at such a time.  Thanks and of course for so much support over the years!  Looking forward to it!” I mailed them off by Wednesday as an overnight, but he’d already passed.

I shall miss his quiet and even uncertain certainty, his measure of anxious and uncomfortable calm, always there until he isn’t, and now no longer, perhaps having already taken everything in.

To further your reading of Bob’s work, I’d recommend the lengthy interview we did for Touch the Donkey, the “Six Questions” interview we did, or the even lengthier interview Ken Norris conducted with him for periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics. He had a lot going on, and I’m gratified, at least, that he supposedly has three full-length volumes forthcoming: one from Chax Press, and two further from Ekstasis Editions. I just hope someone takes up the work of attempting to see where some of those other poems might land.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Brandan Griffin

Brandan Griffin is the author of the book Impastoral (Omnidawn, 2022). He has also written a chapbook called Four Concretures (Theaphora Editions), and his poems have been published in Tagvverk, Chicago Review, and Word For/Word.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
Impastoral, my first book, is where I learned to type—I mean really type, not just write. I started exploring new ways of spelling words and combining them and creating new ones. I began to actively acknowledge the expressivity of keystrokes and the peculiar visuality of text. Somehow, this brought a new focus, clarity, and range to the questions I had already been asking myself. I could see text as a living thing, or a collection of living things. Suddenly all these worlds opened up through and beyond my own "human" existence.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
Well, I think plots are hard, so fiction was out. At the same time, I felt driven to create new minds and worlds, rather than write about existing ones, so non-fiction was out as well.

I first started writing poetry in high school, after I took a three-week workshop/fellowship in Boston through Grub Street . You had to apply for the workshop, and if you got it they also gave you a $300 stipend. I had already been writing bad, out-of-joint fiction, but this got me thinking about poetry too, and established the false expectation that you could make money by being a 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?
Definitely a slow process involving copious notes. I want the poems to be like a machine in the way an organism is like a machine—unpredictable, open to the world, an explosive onslaught of improvisation and decay and phenomena contained by many intricate levels of construction. To at least begin approaching this goal means letting a lot of disparate intuitions accumulate in my head, while also hacking away at the word doc trying to find the right voices and look of letters. It's a slow process that involves research and even literally sketching out the shapes of stanza. Also, my poems keep getting longer and longer. More and more, I'm interested in bringing in as much metaphysical and empirical rigor as I can. I want to connect all the dots, or at least for the dots to be connectable, or for the dots to seem like they could be connected as a world just to the left of ours.

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?
Thinking of each poem as its own lifeform means I want to try something radically new with each one, which at the same time means taking what I've already done/learned, and deepening it or making it more extreme. At least that's my goal! With Impastoral, I reached a juncture where I could sense that all these poem-entities could come together to form an ecosystem, while the next poems were moving in a new direction, becoming more massive and a lot more visual. It was a fold or inflection point that seemed to close off Impastoral and open up the next manuscript.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I haven't done too many readings, but they were fun and I also got really nervous. A lot of the poems I've written that I care most about aren't very easy to read aloud. I feel like I would need to be some sort of creature with 100 mouths all over my body, all reading at the same time but pronouncing words slightly differently. Some of my poems could even veer into sound poetry, but I’m too shy for that, and it’s not really where I think the hearts of these poems lie—though I am inspired by what a lot of sound poets have done with their work on the page. That said, it's fun to try to bring some of these poems to life through my voice, since these poems are all about the excessive vitality and phenomenality of the universe, but I think the poems are just as—if not more—alive on the page, when read privately.

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?
One of my biggest interests is the so-called "emergence" of consciousness. From the beginning, I've always been interested in how art can deform and re-mold human consciousness into modes that open up beyond the norm, beyond human experience, and perhaps even beyond earth. I'm also interested in science, probably for similar reasons. I find that this combination of interests—science, the non-human, and the full range of metaphysical possibility—have continued to push my thinking. I think that poetry has the resources to model emergences of consciousness from networks of interacting agents, in the same way that words emerge from letters. In fact, I'm interested in how beings emerge from other beings, so that consciousness (simply defined as the presence of phenomena) can be seen as existing at every scale of reality. I want to develop a mode of typing that mirrors the ways that beings combine to form larger beings. A poetry that maximally engages with the richness and vitality of its textual medium could model the vitality of a universe composed solely of interacting experiencing agents, similar, for instance, to the cosmos that Whitehead envisions. One possible reason for making poems like this would be to help imagine new ways of relating to our planet, other species, our means of organizing ourselves, and our cosmos.

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?
For me, it's the creation of worlds/beings at the furthest limits of connection with our world. Closing the loop between conjunction and disjunction, between the imaginable and the (im?)possible. But writers have as many roles as they assign themselves, and every writer should assign themself a different role. That way we each have a job. Poets in particular have complete unfettered license to engage with whatever disciplines and experiences they choose. For me, the whole point is creations of universes that exist in a questionable, intolerable, and beautiful relation to our own, helping us to reassess and reimagine what "we" consider to be "our" "universe"—similar to the use of toy models in physics and philosophy, with the difference that there is no pre-established discipline to impose any rules on that model other than those the poet chooses to engage with. I personally think poets should engage rigorously with science and philosophy so that a close reading of a poem could be just as valuable for a physicist, theoretical biologist, or process philosopher as it is for a literary critic. The limit case, of course, would be poems that are literally testable, so long as they don't consume infinite energy, or poems that are proven to be actual universes appended to our own, or poems that can convince us they are persons.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Since school, I haven't had too much experience with editors, besides giving them an incredibly hard time when we sit down to lay out my poems. I actually love getting into the weeds about character spacing and page layout, and I appreciate their patience and care tremendously. Otherwise, I tend my poems in secrecy and emerge with a mostly finished elephantine poem that is probably overly long but also un-editable.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
"You spelled your name wrong."

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?
It's varied over time, but often it involves slumping into the couch first thing in the morning with a cup of coffee, and cracking open my laptop. Mornings are hard, I have a tough time getting up, but my mind is also less cluttered. I try to write or work on my writing in some way every day. I've always been pretty disciplined about that. But the last year has made that discipline almost impossible because of some really tough events in my personal life, and I think it's important to remember that there is no productivity schedule when it comes to poetry. No one cares how much you write. You can't get fired from poetry. I'm holding my next project very close to my heart and working on it when I can.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Scientific articles, theoretical biology, philosophy, animal videos, perhaps even going outside. The internet. Nothing is better than trolling the internet looking for the weird new thing or the weird old thing, like when I first discovered Gauss PDF or Troll Thread or any number of online zines or any poet from the past 100 years or 800 years whose book I ordered from McNally Jackson or frantically read on Project Gutenberg on my lunch break.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Warm sweet swamp smell.

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?
Sure—experimental metal, electronic minimalism, jazz, sample-heavy rap with indistinct mumbling, noise music. Science fiction. Video games! (Like Everything, or Proteus, but lots of others too. Sometimes I even find myself imagining a game I’d like to make, and then say well I can’t make a video game, but how could that become a poem?) And then other forms of writing like analytic philosophy of mind that makes me want to bang my head against a wall. Deleuze, Whitehead, Harraway, Barad. Certain contemporary monists lesser known in the poetry world like Gregg Rosenberg, Chris Fields, Karl Friston. Neuroscience, theoretical biology. Anything anyone has ever written about panpsychism. The writings of the saints and theologians. Depictions of angels and bodhisattvas. Any death-positive, afterlife-forward writings.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
In my conversation with Anastasios Karnazes (up at Blue Arrangements) I made a list of most of the writers I’ve encountered so far who use spelling in an interesting way. But for now I just want to say that Leslie Scalapino has been huge for me. This is for a lot of reasons. One is just that she writes really good images. She collages them and isolates certain surface effects that make things appear in your mind with a kind of glistening clarity. More abstractly, she is interested in getting into deep, specific analysis of time and space in order to create sympathy among people and creatures, while also undermining normalized social relations. She talks openly about her theoretical goals within her poems, without simplifying or compromising, while at the same time reinventing syntax to embody those goals. She weds intuition and reason. A lot of times, writing can be broken down into writing about (i.e. discursive writing that says exactly what it means), and writing as (i.e. “slant” writing that embodies its topic rather than actually saying it). Scalapino’s writing is both as and about, which makes it difficult but also wonderful.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Make a pop-up book. Make a video game. Understand fonts.

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?
Retired physicist writing about consciousness.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I think 1) writing has always felt like it has the most capacity to express ideas, or at least to provide the most direct contact with ideas, 2) books, kind of like video games, directly use your mind to create their world. Writing seems to rely more heavily on actively structuring your phenomena in order to exist, as compared to movies or images, which go on playing or hanging on the wall regardless of your attention. I say writing is also similar to video games because games are static until you enter them and start moving and doing things. They are about what you can do once you’re in them, and I think poetry is somewhat similar. What do you do with the poem while you’re in it? 3) Writing is the easiest art form to get up and running! You don’t need a whole crew or a lot of supplies, just a word doc.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Book - Courtship of Lapwings by Maggie O'Sullivan

Movie - After Life by Hirokazu Koreeda

19 - What are you currently working on?
I lost my brother last year. He was 18 and his death has devastated my family. I want to think beyond death as annihilation and poetry as an emotional reaction to that annihilation. I want to write something that sees the world as an ecology of souls, where souls are the world and what holds the world together. Individuality, memory, and personal connection are—at some reductive physical level of explanation—temporary phenomena, they are thermodynamically lossy and eventually unsustainable, but I want to write towards some further level where those things are recovered, where that which emerges (say, your love for the loved one) is just as real as that which it emerges from (say, a series of events in which repeated interactions between two organisms lead to resonant brain functions), where the dead and living and the yet-to-be born coexist—where unity, multiplicity, individuality, and the impersonal phase into and out of one another, and the afterlife and reincarnation, nothingness and everythingness, devastating loss and eternal presence, are all thinkable in the same breath. I see this as widening the kind of typing and thinking I talked about in some of the earlier questions. I’m not ready to talk about exactly what sort of poem/book this all amounts to, but this is where I’m trying to go, as huge and vague as it sounds.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

happy ninth birthday, dear rose!

So, this young lady, my brilliant middle daughter, turned nine today. How did that happen? 

Yesterday, a small birthday party gathering held at an escape room junior something-something in Barrhaven, before we landed at Build-a-Bear at Bayshore (for her requested Birthday Bear), which led to a sidebar of photos with Santa Claus, so that was a whole big day of birthday and adventuring. And I think the young ladies are off for a show today with Gran'pa and Teri?

She's enormously clever and confident, our young lady, with a great combination of ridiculous/sassy and poise, which might just make her more than a wee bit dangerous (which we are completely okay with, by the by). Fiercely loyal with a heart that feels everything, just be careful never to cross her (not recommended).

Rebecca Wolff, Slight Return

 

experiment in voice and character #3

 

and that’s a feeling you can only have alone

and that’s a feeling you can only have alone

 

 

and that’s a feeling you can only have alone

 

I’m going home to see my Jesus

That boy is dead and gone.

The latest from Hudson, New York poet, fiction writer, editor and FENCE magazine/Fence Books/The Constant Critic founder Rebecca Wolff is the poetry collection Slight Return (Seattle WA/New York NY: Wave Books, 2022). The author of four previous collections of poetry— Manderley (University of Illinois Press, 2001), Figment (W.W. Norton, 2004), The King (W.W. Norton, 2009) [see my review of such here] and One Morning—. (Wave Books, 2015) [see my review of such here]—she is also the author of “one novel, and numerous pieces of occasional prose,” Wolff’s Slight Return suggests a cheeky reference to a potential “return,” possibly to writing itself, after having stepped back from spearheading the journal she founded back in 1998. Or, as she writes, to open the poem “Corrective: A Companion”: “The demands of art / upon my art [.]” Wolff is a sly commentator, so the possibility is simultaneously there and potentially not, perhaps entirely speculative through my own reading of her slant first-person narratives. Either way, the title poem, set to close the second of her six numbered sections, speaks of personal renewal and the possibility of renewed growth: “But / I have been given the opportunity to begin again / to start over, moving forwards // bereft, stripped bare, bereaved, the old // personality wasn’t working and nothing meant anything anymore [.]” A bit further on, she offers: “I’m going to have to look for something else / to give my life meaning // to give meaning to my life; as for continuing, one must // or is it possible to decide to continue no matter what, vessel?”

Wolff’s is a staggered, halted lyric, set entirely within the present moment, and propelled by fits and starts and meditative exposition. There is such a sense of pause and pacing, line and line-break, along with her examination of attempting to reorient both the self and the writing through the writing; reworking a foundation, and keeping to small: the short phrase and the deft turn, quick and precise. “And how I wield a cliché,” she writes, near the opening of “Peak Experience,” “tells you a lot about a person // appetite for husbands/ other women’s husbands // I can see other women’s husbands // a mile away. This one’s a grown man. // He can like my shit on Instagram.” Keeping to small to rebuild, slowly, surely and certainly. Where was she before, I might wonder, that her poems speak to such a transition, especially one that sits with such discomfort, steely-eyed and headstrong?

The two-page poem “Ant Life,” set near the end of the collection, is a master study in pacing, held and held and pivot, turn, as she writes: “A host // inviolate keeps / that beast in the castle / who hides // his yonder / ugliness // politely. When I have need // dig in / drink deep.” The poem steps, pauses, turns and steps in stunning ways, demanding the eye take note of a rhythm etched in Wolff’s unique lyric stone. This is a powerful and subtle collection, always holding back a bit, to keep the line from breaking entirely apart. There are ways in which this collection exists as an announcement of itself, writing through and about change from the inside; of an attempt to write through a new series of perspectives, and ways of building, searching and rebuilding. “I need to get home,” she writes, to close the poem “Hallowe’en,” “lie down, close my eyes. When I try to see / myself with love through someone who loves me’s eyes / it makes me weep. So lit, / unchained and undead.” Or, as the final half of the poem “rock heart” writes:

as with this forge Emily Dickinson spoke of there is no
    distinction to be made here

between the literal and the symbolic, it’s all one all the time
    all one here now in your head and mine

you took my heart I’ll never stop saying it
it’s on your property with you

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Katherine Lawrence

Katherine Lawrence [photo credit: Saskatoon Public Library] is the author of the young adult novel-in-verse Stay , and three poetry collections: Never Mind , Ring Finger, Left Hand , and Black Umbrella . Stay received the North American Gold Moonbeam Award for Children’s Poetry and was nominated for two Saskatchewan Book Awards: Poetry, and Children’s Literature. Never Mind was nominated for the Saskatchewan Book of the Year, and the City of Saskatoon Book Award.  Lying to Our Mothers was nominated for the Saskatchewan Book Award for Poetry. Ring Finger, Left Hand won the Saskatchewan Book Awards’ Brenda Macdonald Riches Best First Book Award.

Katherine was born in Hamilton, Ontario. She has lived in Saskatoon for over thirty-five years with her husband and their two daughters. 

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 book, Ring Finger, Left Hand (2001, Coteau Books) won the Saskatchewan Book Award for Best First Book.

My fifth book, Black Umbrella (2022, Turnstone Press) has just been published and I continue to explore the same terrain: family dynamics. My new book is poetic memoir. The first book used a variety of voices to examine marriage and divorce through the lens of the major players.

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

 I was influenced by the poets who visited my high school in Burlington, Ontario during the early 70s. Writers such as Irving Layton and Milton Acorn stepped into my classroom and read poetry that seemed to speak directly to me. Canada was establishing its own assured voice in literature in those days and I heard those same echoes. I thought, I can write poetry.

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 start with a line or a phrase that I have either read elsewhere, heard in a dream, or pulled from my head. I play, I listen, I follow my nose. I write many drafts, share it with both of my writing groups, edit, read it aloud, keep tinkering until the piece can stand alone.

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?

I write and let the poems accumulate. After a year or longer I look at everything and usually start to see themes emerge. I like the long, narrative thrust of a full story told through poetry.

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

I love readings. I’ve got a theatrical streak in me. I love the challenge of entertaining an audience of any size. I love making connections with readers and listeners.

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?

My theoretical concerns are purely my own. I’m all about the family. What makes some families thrive and others fail? What is the function and purpose of family? How is the concept of family evolving, adapting to shifts in our culture?

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 feel compelled to write and therefore it’s my job to write what I feel and observe and somehow bring a universality to my specific point of view. Readers will do what they like with my material. My job is done once I send the work into the world.

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

Working with an editor is the best part of the production process. My editor for Black Umbrella was Winnipeg writer, Di Brandt. She was a joy to work with. Sharp, brilliant, fun. My previous editors were Elizabeth Philips of Saskatoon and Alice Major of Edmonton. I’ve learned from each of these generous writers.

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

“No one is asking you to write so you might as well have a good time while you’re writing.”

 Not sure who gave me that piece of advice but I agree. In other words, stop whining and write.

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

My novel-in-verse for middle-grade/young adult readers, Stay, took me the better part of a decade to write. I wrote two other books while I was trying to figure out the verse novel. It was a tremendous challenge, a huge puzzle, but I felt determined to bring the subject of divorce into the world of the younger reader.

The appeal continues to be the readings that I do in schools. The feedback is always fun and surprising. Every kid has either direct or indirect experience with family breakdown. Stay provides them with language, a way to talk about the challenges of living between two households while always hoping, wishing, praying that parents will get back together. I’m grateful to see the book re-released in a new edition by Shadowpaw Press.

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 a few pages in my messy journal, read some poetry or whatever novel I have on the go. Once I’ve had breakfast I move into my office and pick up where I left off.

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

I go for a walk or a swim. I cook a pot of soup. I read a good book. I let myself wander physically and mentally.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

 Lilacs. Lilacs were my mother’s favourite flower and she associated them with her mother.

And yes, lilacs are present in Black Umbrella.

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?

Visual art is often a source. Mary Pratt’s work, for example. Black Umbrella includes a poem that references her paintings and uses some of her quotes. My greatest influence is a fabulous phrase or line. I was reading Micheline Maylor today. Here’s a line that I’ve tucked away: Out out brief candle. Out. And take all your stuff. (From The Bad Wife, University of Alberta Press, 2021). I don’t know (yet) how I’ll use those words of hers but they do something for me.  I feel a pulse in those words.

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

I’m a promiscuous reader. I read poetry, fiction, non-fiction, a lot of cookbooks, three newspapers most days. My current influence is American writer Jhumpa Lahiri. I’ve recently read everything she’s written, conducted my own private master class with a master of domestic fiction.

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

Write a sequel to Stay, move into long form fiction, and live in St. John’s for one dramatic winter.  

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 would have become an actor for the stage, not the screen. 

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

I needed to untangle my messy family when I was a teenager. Later, I needed to untangle my messy self. I’ve been on a lifelong quest to figure myself out and I know of no better way to learn about who we are than to engage in some form of self-expression. For me, it’s writing.

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

Book: Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart. It won the 2020 Booker Prize.

Film: West Side Story by Steven Spielberg

20 - What are you currently working on?

A long prose poem about ambivalent motherhood. It needs a new opening stanza but I love where it’s taking me. Straight back to the mystery of my parents’ doomed marriage.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Clare Latremouille (July 4, 1964 – November 16, 2022)

2022My friend, the writer, gardener and early childhood educator Clare Latremouille, otherwise known as Olivia McDonell, or Olivia Clare Latremouille-McDonell, has died, after an extended and repeated battle with cancer. Clare had multiple names over the years, born as Olivia Clare Latremouille, known as Clare Van Berkom by the time we met her in high school, a few years older than the rest of us, with four-year-old son Noah in tow. She was already writing by the time we met her, which further encouraged some of those early attempts by the rest of our small group. It was her fifth time in high school, and even her second in ours, Glengarry District High School in Alexandria, Ontario, as she lived with and then near her aunt and uncle in town. At the time, we even joked that of course she was co-valedictorian when she graduated; she’d had so much more experience being in high school than the rest of us. By the end, she’d had some of the highest marks in the province. She was older, smarter and bolder than the rest of us, with experience we couldn’t even imagine. She was smart, fearless and revelled in silliness; she was brilliantly talented, and seemingly all over the place, expertly moving from one expertise to another. She was even a winner of Carleton University’s high school writing competition during her final high school year, part of a long run of winners from our school, nurtured by our endlessly-patient English teacher, Mr. Robert MacLeod (I won the following year for fiction). She loved children, even running a home daycare for a few years during their time living in Ottawa’s Hintonburg neighbourhood, before attending further school to be able to work as a Registered Early Childhood Educator through the Ottawa Carleton School Board. She lived in such a state of joyful openness. Of care. She was always the first to make sure everyone in the group was taken care of, attended. Made sure you had some food. A beer, maybe. The door was always open. You could always drop by.

2009She had multiple names, even to the point of, eventually, multiple library cards, whether under her maiden name, or either of her married names. So she could borrow seemingly unlimited stacks of simultaneous books. During their years in Ottawa, she always knew the best thrift stores, and visited them daily. If you were seeking out Clare, there was a run of years that you could just go to the St. Vincent’s on Wellington Street West, any day of the week. There was thrift store where the owner would always provide Clare with baked goods, hidden under the counter. Another, she always knew which staff member would give her the better deals. She knew the schedules of new clothing, new staff, new furniture deliveries. She had trunks filled with toys, costumes, musical instruments, library books and just about anything else you could think of, only some of which related to their running the daycare. She was always collecting, adding or repairing. Once they moved out to the farm, she and Bryan managed and maintained a seemingly-endless garden, and even had a pair of horses, which delighted our young ladies.

We had numerous adventures, more than I could ever recall. Clare and I once climbed up a hill in Kamloops, as I was nearly struck by lightning. We sat up all night with Tom Snyders and Gerry Gilbert in Tom’s Vancouver warehouse, as Gerry danced a jig on the rooftop watching the sun rise over the mountains. That same trip, July 1997, Clare and I landed on George Bowering’s doorstep with a song in our hearts and a handful of six-packs. George ordered pizza; Clare made a salad. We started an informal writers group gathering in the late 1990s, a gathering that evolved into The Peter F Yacht Club, which originally met over drinks to discuss the possibilities of writing, and what we’d been working on (although a lot of those early sessions lapsed into silliness). She gifted me a bowling ball for one of my thirtysomething birthdays, and we repeatedly rolled it down the length of the Carleton Tavern (at least, until the staff stopped us). We sang “To Sir, With Love” loudly over the phone from the Atlantic Hotel Tavern in spring 1989 to Mr. MacLeod, having called him, both collect and anonymously. He knew it was us. We sang songs loudly off Ottawa International Writers Festival hospitality suite balconies at all hours (once convincing Paul Quarrington to join in our singing of Saturday morning cartoon theme songs), inadvertently causing the festival to be barred from multiple downtown hotels. As one of the organizers overheard an elderly couple complain to the front desk about the noise the next morning, they added: “But they were such good singers.”

1988The Monty Python albums she would play loudly and repeatedly in her apartment in Alexandria, ever prompting Noah to sing along. I remember Noah’s fifth birthday party, and the Creedence Clearwater Revival cover band she wanted to follow around that summer. I remember her fortieth birthday party on Armstrong Avenue, when Noah was twenty-two. Or the party that centred in their front room, having convinced AJ Dolman to play Clare’s accordion, given their admission of lessons as a child. Clare had more musical instruments than just about anyone. We had our guitars, but still picked up her trumpet, her bongo drums, a ukulele. When they drove from Kamloops to Ottawa in the 1990s, having left the café they’d established there, Magpies, not everything they owned could make its way east, but Clare’s mannequin, naturally, was carefully strapped onto the U-haul.

“The last of the living Latremouilles,” she called herself. Except for that distant cousin, the long-time Vancouver radio dj (but we didn’t talk about him). I’ve a stack of photographs from when Clare and I ran through our high school, attempting to convince various of our teachers to pose with the nose glasses we provided (most said yes; at least one sternly but politely refused). I once borrowed her jean jacket so I could look cool, as a group of us made for Montreal for a Peace Concert at the Montreal Forum in 1987. The illustration she made of our pre-concert group in the park, drinking beer and playing guitar with a few dozen others, made its way onto the cover of the zine we invented as part of our high school “writer’s craft” class: assembling poems, stories, drawings. All of it published anonymously, of course. She could fall helpless into fits of giggles, including when dancing at the Carleton Tavern somewhere in the 00s, realizing her friend Joy’s dancing had caused Joy’s pants to fall off, without them noticing. There was an element to our pairing that rendered chaos, a joyous silliness that not everyone else had patience for, akin to six-year-old twins: each encouraging the other.

I published some of her poems in the first issue of my long poem magazine, STANZAS, in 1993, and in a chapbook, not that much later. She’d been working on a poetry manuscript she’d titled “Naked,” some of which sits in a file on my computer. The poems from STANZAS, her “Garden” series, that later fell into her novel, The Desmond Road Book of the Dead (Chaudiere Books, 2006). As the first of the series, “Garden,” reads:

I can make the garden grow, the sun fall up and down in the sky, a man full grown from passion in my tissue, in secret places I hide my fat and wait for rain for rain for rain

In August 2019, the last time I saw them, not long before Covid: an afternoon visiting Clare and Bryan on their farm in North Glengarry, a few miles east of the McLennan homestead, as my young ladies admired their two horses, and later accidentally stomped on a hive of bees at the end of the yard. At least we discovered neither young lady allergic, once they both stung. Clare offered them colouring, toys. They played a football game on the porch, and she delighted in them both.

How am I supposed to experience a world that Clare Latremouille no longer occupies? I shall have to be attentive enough for the both of us, I suppose. I shall have to be silly enough. An image in my head of the remaining members of Monty Python at Graham Chapman’s graveside, the first of the troupe to die: every one of them standing with pants at their ankles.

Condolences to her husband Bryan, sons Noah and Sam, her whirlwind of cousins and anyone else who was fortunate enough to fall into her orbit. I look forward to the stories still to come. I suspect they are many.

Keith Jones, Echo’s Errand

  

IN A FIELD OF FALSE TIME

no cure, ornery,
first language,
           then not  then nothing
wrists elaborately bound,
           dissolves, little
by little, she says
           a field of false time
it’s not worth explaining
          what ritual does not preserve
my voice
          scribbles it

The stunning and staggering full-length poetry debut by Boston poet and critic Keith Jones, following the chapbooks blue lake of tensile fire (Projective Industries), shorn ellipses (Morning House), the lucid upward ladder(Verse), Fugue Meadow (Ricochet Editions), and Surface to Air, Residuals of Basquiat (Pressed Wafer), is Echo’s Errand (Boston MA: Black Ocean, 2022), a collection of really striking poems of delicate, tensile, rhythmic and intellectual strength. His poems offer a lightness of line and breath akin to a spider’s web, but one that can hold the weight of an elephant. “how long here,” he begins, to open the first page of the five-page “THROWN BEYOND MEASURE,” “dwelling / in yr striations, / some far here I see / in you / intervals. // the motion is upwards, / thrown beyond / measure. / a land leashing you / to its seasons, [.]” Structured into two numbered sections, nearly in half, there is something of the long thread, the long thought, to his accumulated fragments, one that furthers and keeps furthering, especially in poems constructed out of one more line, one more stanza, one more section added and then another, and yet, remain entirely, utterly complete. Simultaneously elliptical and direct, I agree with Fanny Howe’s back cover blurb that says he writes with “velocity”; the word is entirely appropriate, as there is such a propulsion to Jones’ lyrics and rhythms, neither halted nor halting, but one step simply following another, akin to dominos landing, one against the other, click click click click, seemingly continuous until it quietly stops. He writes of time through pacing, pause and continuous flow; perhaps his entire poetic is one built up around the articulation and movement of time itself, as he writes to close a stanza of the poem “SHADE OF, BOUND TO YOU”: “let it sink    back in    to earth    to burn bright / alone    among roots    quiet grubs & clusters [.]” Jones writes around philosophy, and directly to the heart. “cruel mounds / where the heart-wrench / is,” he writes, to end the two-page poem “BLOWN RAKE OF TEARS,” “where wrong / is, where wrong / lies in fields / & seas, un- / buried [.]”There is something of his lyric that suggests his poems could hold a philosophical debate with the more formally-structured poems of Ottawa poet Stephen Brockwell[see my review of his latest here] and not only hold their own, but both poets might emerge aglow.

Jennifer Givhan, Belly to the Brutal

 

 

THE NOPAL

Afterward, after each death, still the question
What did it mean to be alive?

I carried a nopal into the confessional, sickly
potted & dying. I loved it

with my salt. My daughter asks if I’ll plant
a tree beside all the lonely

trees growing alone. The cells she & I passed
through the blood barrier, flashes of bright pink

bulbs at the tips of our organs as she grew
inside me—cells we still share, planting traces

of ourselves within each other through the migration—
cells whose premise induces the conclusion

Someday one of us will carry a ghost. 

In heaven, I asked what became of the nopal—
then the pads of my hands greened & spindled

into a cathedral of cacti.

Mexican-American Latina and indigenous poet and novelist Jennifer Givhan’s latest poetry collection, following Landscape with Headless Mama (2016), Protection Spell (2017), Girl with Death Mask (2019) and Rosa’s Einstein (2019), is Belly to the Brutal (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2022), a book on motherhood and daughters, including the echoes of one’s own childhood that inevitably emerge. “Adulting, I’ve heard,” she writes, as part of “GIRLCHILD   PROPHETESS,” “is understanding our / mother’s anger when we forget to take the chicken out of the / freezer. I’m not a grownup mother. I never let anything thaw.” Givhan works a sequence of short monologues on lyric form that lean into the mystic, mythical and abstract, even while articulating the concrete specifics of domestic fear and hope around parenting and children, from faith and failures and dislodged hope to labour, self-care and domestic abuse. She writes of the complications of mothering a daughter through the dark terrain of familial patterns, external racism and generations of misogyny, all held as delicately as song. As the back cover offers, this collection “sings a corrido of the love between mothers and daughters, confronting the learned complicity with patriarchal violence passed down from generation to generation.” “My daughter / is a graveyard by which I mean ripe // for rebirthing.” she writes, as part of the poem “THE EXCAVATION.” Later on, the three page piece ending: “I’ve borne / from daughter, from the un- / mothered loam.”

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Michael Fraser

Michael Fraser is published in Best Canadian Poetry in English2013 and 2018. He has won numerous awards, including Freefall Magazine’s 2014 and 2015 poetry contests, the 2016 CBC Poetry Prize, and the 2018 Gwendolyn Macewen Poetry Competition. The Day-Breakers (Biblioasis 2022) is his third poetry collection.

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

There was the natural sense of immense accomplishment which immeasurably boosts one’s confidence to the stratosphere! It’s essentially impossible to truly describe that raw visceral and unprecedented glow you have when you see your name on the cover of your first book. It changed my life because it fully affirmed my place among the poetry community. Family, friends, and work colleagues also began to respect my writing endeavours if they hadn’t previously. My most recent book, The Day-Breakers, explores the experiences of African-Canadians who fought in the American Civil War which is vastly different from my first book, The Serenity of Stone, which was an amalgamation of my various life experiences up to that point. My most recent poems (that aren’t it book form) range from gauging the zeitgeist of current African-Canadian media representations to a series of ekphrastic poems, to travel poems, to current life experiences. My current poems are stylistically different from earlier work! I eschewed punctuation, capital letters, and upper case “I” in my first book, The Serenity of Stone. Punctuation emerged in my second book, To Greet Yourself Arriving, and has remained. I explore a wide range of subject matter, but at my core, I consider myself more Confessional than anything else.

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

My journey to poetry is quite a remarkably unlikely one. I was born in Grenada. My mom had an opportunity to work as a domestic in Canada and left me with my godmother when I was one. I came to Toronto when I was five. I grew up in an abusive environment and subsequently was a violent child in a rough neighbourhood. I knew how to open doors with a credit card when I was six and constantly stole chips and chocolate bars from variety stores until I was caught. I was placed in a “special” class at school and was proud of my fighting skills. Luckily, we moved to Edmonton when I was seven. I was supposed to start grade two at Our Lady of Mount Carmel but was illiterate and combative. They literally moved my desk from the grade two class into the grade one class. Thus, I failed grade one. It was Catholic school and I spent roughly an hour each day learning to read with nuns! Yes, nuns saved my life! We returned to Toronto when I was 14. I started writing poems for my crushes, completely unrequited of course. My high school English teacher suggested I join James Deahl’s poetry workshop at the public library, and that’s how my poetic journey commenced.

I remember showing up with photocopies of my poems which were summarily ripped to shreds during the workshopping process. It took every ounce of courage and fortitude to return the following week, but I did, and that’s when I truly took my first incipient steps towards become a poet. Poets Judith Stuart and Jennifer Footman were also workshop members and their workshop suggests quickly advanced my knowledge and poetic skills. James Deahl was my first mentor and he literally introduced me to the contemporary poetry world. I learned about literary journals, quarterlies, contests, and how to submit to journals. I attended my first poetry readings and was introduced to the likes of: Allan Briesmaster, Heather Cadsby, Maria Jacobs, Beverley Daurio, Donna Langevin, Pam Oxendine, Roo Borson, Kim Maltman, Libby Scheier, and so many others. In retrospect, I was ridiculously lucky to have James Deahl as my guide and sagacious poetic guru. He had lived with Milton Acorn and Gwendolyn Macewen when he was younger. Talk about being surrounded by genius! I must confess it took me a few months before I attended Deahl’s library workshop. I was 17 and foolish. I arrived just prior to the last few sessions. My poetic journey would have been drastically different or nonexistent without Deahl’s library workshop!

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 doesn’t take long to commence a planned writing project. I’ll usually begin once the notion is conceived. Some writing projects are accidental in nature. For example, I initially wrote four Civil War poems before I conceived of an actual writing project of Civil War poems. My writing pace is contingent on the specific poem I’m writing. Some poems magically appear as if gifted by the Muse and others are laborious. I find I’ve become naturally more efficient at editing while I compose initial drafts. Thus, I require less drafts than when I was younger.

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?

Again, it’s all contingent on the poem. Some are derived from ideas, images, experiences, news stories, poetry prompts, etc. Even when composing a book, the individual poems will have their own unique origins.

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

This is a fascinating question. I’m always nervous prior to readings, however, I do enjoy them, and view them as necessary. I’ve actually developed a slight trepidation towards readings since the advent of Covid, online readings, and the taping of online readings. Anything can happen in the online environment. I even witnessed a an online reading that was unfortunately hacked in real-time. Also, blunders and pratfalls are there forever. I personally experienced this when introducing a poet once. We were both students in the same university workshop course over 30 years ago! Our memories of the instructor and the class were quite different. Lesson learned! I’ll always consult with someone prior to introducing them in the future. Thus, I’m not a huge fan of the virtual environment. I used to love readings once the nervousness and anxiety abated. I actually created a reading series with Charlie Petch, The Plasticine Poetry Series, which blossomed from our workshop group at the time. The series ran for roughly 7 years. So, I clearly like poetry readings. It’s the ultimate labour of love running a poetry series! I’m just more cautious now, especially with virtual readings.

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?

No, unfortunately I don’t have any theoretical concerns. I’ll leave academic concerns to the academics. Writing for me has always been visceral and steeped in the senses. I suppose it’s my way of exploring and making sense of life, but I’ve never viewed it as an intellectual endeavour.

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 the writer’s role is to turn a mirror on society, increase our societal awareness, and unearth life’s meaning in general. The writer’s role is to both ask and answer insightful questions. We should be able to express and explore life’s truths. We’re coupled with the philosophers in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and we’re trying to delve into the nature of the forms, the true essence of reality.

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

No, I defer to peoples’ expertise in a any given area and allow them to work their magic. The important aspect is selecting an editor one respects. I’ve always had editors I respect immensely.

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

There are four pieces of advice from Yusef Komunyakaa, Flannery O’Connor, Hemingway, and Dan Brown that I adhere to.

With regards to poetry, Yusef Komunyakaa says he never adds during the revising process. He often edits from the “bottom of the poem” aka the ending. He claims we often “write past the poem” in our zeal to provide the reader with everything. We often explain too much and write past the most provocative and essential part of the poem. Consequently, the same often applies at the outset of poems. We often preamble our way into the poems, again, giving the reader more than they need. This advice has helped me tighten poems immensely!

The line I love from Flannery O’Connor is “fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn’t try to write fiction. It’s not a grand enough job for you.” This always reminds me to write truthfully, even when dealing with confessional subject matter.

Hemingway believed in walking away from your writing and allowing the subconscious to work on it. He said, “always stop while you are going good and don’t think about it or worry about it until you start to write the next day. That way your subconscious will work on it all the time. But if you think about it consciously or worry about it you will  kill it and your brain will be tired before you start.” This advice has paid dividends for me and it’s definitely surreal, but my experience validates his notion of the subconscious working on your writing when you turn your focus to other matters and return to the poem or story the following day. 

Dan Brown says to write the ending first. I’m certain other people have probably said this, but I heard it first from him when I viewed Dan Brown’s Masterclass workshop. It definitely works with my fiction.

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 laughed when I read this question because I don’t have a writing routine, however, I find myself writing whenever there is a stray minute. I should institute a strict schedule, but there is barely enough time in the day. Thus, I’m often writing during staff meetings or in assemblies whenever I can.

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

Good question. Music seems to help. Also, rereading my favourite poems of all time unblocks me. These favourite poems are immeasurably magical and always seem to release thunderheads bursting with creativity. Also, I have to consistently remind myself it’s important to just write anything, regardless of its level of mediocrity, since I have to edit anyways.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

What a wonderful question. Since I immigrated from Grenada as a child, I’d definitely say the smell of curried chicken or rice and peas.

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?

I mentioned music previously, however, there are myriad subjects from history to pop culture that influence my work. I’m presently working on a series of ekphrastic poems based on the work of a particular photographer, so visual art is a current primary influence!

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

I would need multiple pages to list writers that are important to my work. Throughout my life I’ve had a “flavour of the month” pattern with poets and writers. I devour everything about them and then move on to my next literary crush. If I limit this topic to poets, there are still too many to name because I’ve adored poets and lyricists since I was 15. I have printed out roughly 30 poems that I view as near-perfection and marvel at their brilliance. I just need to read one or two of these poems to feel tingles of amazement. The poems are also from a wide range of poets, from Robert Lowell, Yusef Komunyakaa, Adelia Prado, Adonis, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Derek Walcott, to OceanVuong, Susan Elmslie and Alessandra Naccarato. See, it’s a ridiculously wide range of styles and subject matter.

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

Finish writing my YA novel and collection of short stories! I’d also like to write a poem for the ages such as Robert Lowell’s Epilogueand Skunk Hour.

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’d love to be President of the USA. That’d be a wonderful gig! Seriously though, I don’t make my living as a “writer” so I’ve never viewed it as my profession. It’s what I love doing the most, however, it doesn’t pay the bills.

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

Intriguing question! I’ve never pondered or contemplated what made me write. As I mentioned previously, it’s visceral and emanates from within. It’s compulsive on many levels and I can’t pinpoint a specific moment in my life that triggered its activation. Perhaps its intrinsic and as long as I was in the correct environment, it would manifest. It reminds me of something Bob Marley answered when a reporter asked him, “when did you become a musician?” He answered, and I’m paraphrasing, “when does a seed become a tree?” Actually, I think musicians are perfect examples to illustrate this point. Many of the best and most famous musicians can’t read music and never had a lesson! The list of amazing musicians who can’t read music is stunning: Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Wonder, Bob Dylan, The Beatles, Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson, Aretha Franklin, Prince, Eddie Van Halen, Noel Gallagher, etc. Many never had a music lesson in their lives. Jimi Hendrix and Elvis are self-taught. The compulsion to sit down and write poems and fiction fully cognizant one will probably never make a living at their craft illustrates how intrinsic this drive is to us poets and writers.

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

The last great book is Dancing After Ten by Vivian Chong and Georgia Webber. It’s a graphic memoir about the random and heartbreaking event that altered Vivian Chong’s life. I don’t want to ruin the book by revealing more, but if you haven’t read this book, definitely read it! It’s hands down one of the best books I have ever read! She’s also Canadian, so please support her.

Keeping with a Canadian theme here, the last great film was Michel Brault’s Between Salt and Sweet Water. I watched it with subtitles. Unfortunately, my grade 9 French from the 1980’s is insufficient. Actually, that’s another thing I’d like to accomplish, learn French!

19 - What are you currently working on?

I’m presently working on some ekphrastic poems, a new poetry collection, a YA novel, and a bunch of short stories.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;