Rob Mclennan's Blog, page 127

Nicole Markotić, After Beowulf

 

Behold:
      gruesome Grendel, pride in handiwork,
      enacts his hall-watching hate
            through sleet and slush-stones.

Behold:
      Grendel the Underlord
                  plosive petard-hoister
      one against the many, heel-goaded
      nobody’s king, nobody’s persona
      grata.

Behold:
      the Grendel
                  pride in pride

Windsor, Ontario-based poet, editor, writer and critic Nicole Markotić’s latest full-length poetry title is After Beowulf (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2022), a book of simultaneous translation, transelation (as Moure coined it, via her 2001 Anansi title, Sheep’s Vigil by a Fervent Person ) and reimagining of the classic Old English poem Beowulf (c. 700-1000 AD), rifling through a myriad of forms as a way through her own reading of an ancient poem imagined, interpreted and reimagined from Seamus Heaney’s translation to an episode of Star Trek: Voyageur. Reworking one of the earliest of epic poems through English and Danish traditions, there is a swagger to Markotić’s lyric, one propelled by both character and the language, writing a collage of sound and meaning, gymnastic in its application and collision. As is well-known, the old stories adapt themselves to our requirements, and update to meet and suit us [see also: my review of Helen Hajnoczky’s Frost & Pollen, which includes a reworking of The Green Knight], and Markotić works her assembling of language, lyric and permeations of English into a kind of Frankenstein’s Monster, stitching together scraps from a variety of prior adaptations, and a language-hybrid that blends contemporary banter with Old English. “Herewith trespasses / Grendel – no introduction – breaks into / the Introduction,” she writes, early on in the collection, “foul foundling, heaping with narrative potential / (contrast: that ‘one good king’ / repeating line, colossus-driven) / his celebmentia gains real estate / then fades to black, fades / into macabre backstory.”

 

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Garrett Caples

Garrett Caples is the author of several poetry collections, most recently Lovers of Today (Wave Books, 2021), and a book of essays, Retrievals (Wave, 2014). He is an editor at City Lights Publishers, where he curates the Spotlight poetry series. He has edited or co-edited books by poets such as Philip Lamantia, Frank Lima, Stephen Jonas, Samuel Greenberg, Michael McClure, etc. He lives in San Francisco.

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, The Garrett Caples Reader, came out in 1999. I don’t know that my life changed because of it, simply because that’s what I was trying to do with my life, be a poet, be a writer. But there was obviously a great deal of psychological satisfaction in having a book under those circumstances, and I was grateful to have friends like Jeff Clark, who made it happen. I would say the poems in that book are more purely form-driven than the poetry in my current book, Lovers of Today. I never think about form anymore; the form just naturally imposes itself as the poem goes along. But there are things in my first couple books I look back on now and think, how the fuck did I do that?

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

I would say I came to poetry last; I tried to write fiction in high school and college, but I wasn’t any good at it, even though I was already a good writer in a technical sense. A lot of becoming a poet for me was realizing that what I was actually responding to in literature, textures and tones, was more suited to poetry. I write fiction now, but it’s a result of being a poet, establishing a kind of voice to manipulate, rather than actual storytelling.

3 – How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

I’m not saying this is true for everyone, but for me, “copious notes” are the death of writing. If I have everything mapped out, writing is a grind. Especially poetry. The poems are strongly improvisatory. The prose is often dictated by length; I have so many words, and have this many things I want to say about the matter at hand, so it’s a question of how to flow the piece so I can touch all of those things I want to say. Otherwise there are no answers to these questions. Some pieces are fast, some are slow, and there’s no rhyme or reason to it.

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?

A poem usually begins as a few lines in a notebook or on a piece of paper, or ugh, my phone if it’s the middle of the night and I don’t want to wake my wife up. If it gets serious at all, it transfer to my desktop or laptop pretty quickly. With poetry, I never work on a book until it’s time to assemble one. I write poems and when there are enough poems and an opportunity to publish, I gather them up.

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

Neither part of nor counter; they’re not really part of my creative process. At most I can glean if a poem doesn’t come across, but sometimes even then, it’s just the wrong room for it. If I stumble over something, it might mean there’s something wrong with a line that needs to be fixed. I don’t mind reading; I’ve given some good ones. But hardly think of myself as performing artist.

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?

Is this a good poem?

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

I don’t really think there’s “a role” for the writer; different writers do different things for different reasons. For myself, as an arts journalist, I tend to be most useful when I’m drawing attention to something or someone who deserves to be better known. As a poet, I try to be entertaining, as I think that’s a neglected area of endeavor in today’s poetic discourse.

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

I’m a bad person to ask, as I’m much more frequently the outside editor rather than the author. I tend to do a lot of what an outside editor would do on my own behalf as a result. At the same time, I’ve enjoyed working with Joshua Beckman at Wave immensely, and I definitely sought and incorporated his input more this time around with Lovers of Today than with my previous book of poems, Power Ballads. Also Heidi Broadhead was fantastic to work with when we putting together my book of essays, Retrievals, and the amount of fact-checking and quote-checking they did was astonishing. Wave in general is a deluxe accommodation for a poet.

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

“If a poem isn’t written in THE ZONE, then forget it.” —Philip Lamantia

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?

Unfortunately, I have to have a full-time proofreading job to survive, on top of my part-time job as an editor for City Lights, so I don’t have the luxury of a writing routine. I do it when I can for as long as I can. I’m sort of always working, which doesn’t feel great, but it’s the only way I’ve been able to get anywhere as a writer/editor. In March 2019, I published pieces in the Paris Review and the New York Times and I literally ended up in the hospital. I’ve since been trying to find a way to maintain my productivity without killing myself and I still don’t feel like I’ve figured it out yet. But even with the job, I feel like I’m doing what I want to do with my life, so I feel extremely fortunate.

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

As Tom Waits once said, I usually end up taking advantage of myself.

12 – What fragrance reminds you of home?

I’m not prepared to disclose this.

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?

Music definitely. I learned a lot about how poetry works from song lyrics, if I’m being candid. I’m thinking a song like David Bowie’s “Panic in Detroit,” that seems to flirt with a narrative as it moves from line to line, but there actually is no narrative you could articulate from the lyrics. There’s a lesson in that song about how to write a poem, or at least there was for me. I’ve taken some things from rap, in terms of working a syntax against a rhyme, or how to off-rhyme, or switch from one rhyme to another through free association. I picked up a lot from a song like “Light Sleeper” by Saafir and Hobo Junction.

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

There’s a million really. Philip Lamantia. André Breton. Barbara Guest. Marcel Schwob. Frank Lima. Andrew Joron. Brian Lucas. Will Alexander. Kit Schluter. Micah Ballard. Leonora Carrington. Margaret Randall. John Wieners. Diane di Prima. David Meltzer. Samuel Greenberg. Alden Van Buskirk. Djuna Barnes. Norma Cole. Nicholas Breton. A ridiculous question.

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

I’d settle for writing a few more prose books I’d like to write. I feel like I’m on the brink of a book of poet’s fiction, but it’s not long enough yet. Sorta fables in the Oscar Wilde sense.

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?

Urologist to the stars.

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

I was good at it. I would have liked to be a musician, but I sucked at it.

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

Taxi Nightby Cliff Fyman. Holy Motors by Leos Carax.

19 – What are you currently working on?

I’m currently working on an interview with rob mclennan, but I’m almost finished.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Chaudiere Books : National Poetry Month 2022

In case you missed it : Chaudiere Books posted a poem a day across National Poetry Month for the ninth year running!

2022: rob mclennan ; Julie Carr : Ryanne Kap ; Sarah Hilton ; Bruce Whiteman ; ryan fitzpatrick ; Bronwen Tate ; Armand Garnet Ruffo ; Juliane Okot Bitek ; Susie Campbell ; N.W. Lea ; Monica Mody ; Adele Graf ; Liz Howard ; Shaindel Beers ; Conyer Clayton ; Christian McPherson ; katie o'brien ; Dale Martin Smith ; Sarah Mangold ; Helen Robertson ; Sacha Archer ; Saba Pakdel ; Gregory Betts ; Sarah MacDonell ; Margo LaPierre ; Blaine Marchand ; em kniefel ; Andy Verboom ; Michelle Desbarats ;

See the full list of nine years here, as well as links to all the poems;

Brenda Coultas, The Writing of an Hour

  

A day of abandonment. I abandon the page. I abandon the summer, the sun, the hammock: regrets as plentiful as grains of rice spill on the countertop.

Reading Unica Zürn and thinking of The House of Illnesses, her architecture. Wondering if I have the courage to feel the edges of my practice.

Yesterday, ate like a mad woman. Buttery grilled cheese. Potato with sour cream, burger, two beers. Mad cow eating … Long fast then devouring fat and sugar. My fear of having everything and nothing to say. At mid-life never to live in the abode above, my glance is at earth level on the earth plain.

Yesterday, unveiling of a Sojourner Truth marker on Route 9. A historian said, “This is the path, this is the tavern site, and this is the house of refuge.”

Dusk. After a swim. Microwaved a bowl of mud from the Dead Sea. (“August 4-5, 2015 / Hudson Valley, Southern Indiana,” “JOURNAL OF PLACES”)

The latest from New York City poet Brenda Coultas is The Writing of an Hour (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2022), a collection that frames itself, at least in the opening section, as following composition across a temporal structure. As the second poem, “Hour II,” begins: “This is the hour of writing, raining and dark days of winter.” She writes through the hours, echoing structures done by plenty over the years, including bpNichol as part of The Martyrology, or even Cole Swensen’s Such Rich Hour (University of Iowa, 2001), which wrote around a fifteenth-century book of hours, the Trés Riches Heures du Duc de Berry. In Christianity, to compose a “Book of Hours” was to compose a sequence of praise around the structure of daily, liturgical and unchanging time: one day much like any other, but for those Holy Days, which itself echoes the unchanging and uncertain temporal movement of these pandemic times. There is the hint that this collection was shaped during the pandemic-era, which would to a growing list of books written in seeming-isolation, and the isolations she writes through are vast, from meditations on travel, domestic hours writing or moving through compositional space during time spent travelling to Iceland. “Pushing face against the portal to look for human habitation,” she writes, as part of the poem “INSIDE THE CABIN,” “for / buildings and traffic. Seatmates, a young couple, maybe lovers; I had / the sense that once on land they would split up, and perhaps they / had never seen snow [.]” Through the framing of the hour, Coultas utilizes the mark of the passing of an hour as the only difference between time, offering a tether to replace an existence that might have been marked by other, external structures, whether social engagements, erranding or work-related schedules. As “Hour II” continues:

My husband follows me from room to room. And I wonder if my domestic dust is more like “The Story of an Hour” or more like “The Yellow Wallpaper”?

I cannot distinguish fact from fiction.
Houses from accessories
Bowls from pitchers
Armoires from wardrobes
Carriages from shopping carts

Working through five sections—“THE WRITING OF AN HOUR,” “A CHANNEL OF SOFT EARTH,” “JOURNAL OF PLACES,” “INSIDE THE CABIN” and “MORTAL BEAUTY,” Coultas writes of attention, of the foundation of shifting days and geographies; a book of isolations, from writing alone in a room to the self-aware tourist in colonial spaces. Through her hours, her days, she seeks her own relationship to temporal matters, to the movement of time itself, as well as her relationship, as an American, to the spaces of other geographies. “I gave myself permission to fail and to say anything on / the page and after all my loud self-talk,” she writes, to close the poem “Beginning of An Hour,” included in the first section of the collection, “I fell silent.” She opens her collection as a book of hours and expands that into a book of days, looping her temporal markers further out, writing the differences and the unchanging nature of days and days and writing days. “How many days in close quarters?” she asks, as part of the poem “UN-WRITTEN,” “Did Noah smell like // Horse sweat or hay? / More than one flood made this world [.]” Or, as part of the entry dated “August 20, 2015” as part of the prose-sequence “JOURNAL OF PLACES,” a section that very much echoes prior works including Robert Creeley’s infamous A Day Book (1972) or even Sawako Nakayasu’s Texture Notes (Letter Machine Editions, 2010):

At La Casa Azul when the guard left the room I leaned over the velvet rope to glimpse myself in that mirror but set off an alarm instead. Like the woman in Amherst caught trying on Emily Dickinson’s white dress, I would  have tried too. Could I wear Emily’s dress or lie in Frida’s bed? Like typing in a poem that you love and hoping that poem’s glory becomes yours. You’re a tourist in local drag, but there could be a transfer of genius or a blessing if you touch that cloth that touched them.

reading in the margins: Ernest Hemingway

Across three consecutive evenings we watch Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s 2021 documentary Hemingway, on the life and work of that most American of twentieth century authors. It is a great task to take on such an overwhelming figure, and I’ve long found Hemingway himself fascinating, even if his writing hadn’t any direct influence upon my own. That could easily be a rather naïve take, I suppose. When I think on some of my own early prose influences—Michael Ondaatje, Margaret Atwood, Timothy Findley, Milan Kundera, Sheila Watson and Elizabeth Smart—were they influenced by Hemingway? I’m sure, even if to do something other, they must have been. Offhand, I don’t directly know.

There were works of Hemingway’s I studied during my eastern Ontario high school days: The Sun Also Rises and the short story “Hills Like White Elephants.” Works that I realize, upon watching this documentary, I clearly didn’t understand at all. Perhaps I was too young, or too inexperienced a reader. Perhaps I felt too temporally removed, distracted by the period from which Hemingway wrote, that half century between publication and my then-teenaged self. Either way, I don’t remember any particular effect his works had on me, apart from his name. His name and biography. The weight of it.

In Ernest Hemingway: Dateline: Toronto, Hemingway’s Complete Toronto Star Dispatches 1920-1924, you can see articles such as “Trout Fishing in Spain” and “Trout Fishing in Europe.” I suspect one of these might have been a direct influence, years later, upon Richard Brautigan, in the pacific northwest. Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America is an American classic, but as far from Hemingway as possible, and yet, the influence is obvious. Brautigan’s short, American sentences. His life-long interest in fly fishing and guns. One could say he was downstream, stepping into that same river. Even Heraclitus might have to admit to that one.

Have we one good Canadian sentence? Hard to know, given we don’t identify in the same way. Our sense of self is not as reliant on that same foundation of rugged individualism. Our storytelling, our mythmaking, is different. A Métis nation, as John Ralston Saul argued in A Fair Country: Telling Truths About Canada: our founding ideas a perfect blend of French, English and Indigenous, even as our policies perpetrated the ongoing thefts and genocides of colonialism.

I took notes as we watched the documentary, prompted by some of the conversation around Hemingway and his work; his insecurities, which snowballed into everything else. His drinking, his bravado and tall tales, his treatment of others, particularly women. My dear wife Christine found it difficult, and had little sympathy or patience either for Hemingway or for his seeming apologist, Edna O’Brien. At the end of the third episode, clips of the late John McCain, who had been interviewed on For Whom The Bell Tolls, almost seem to present Hemingway’s shortcomings as wistful, and not of an insecure man who lapsed from self-absorbed into self-destructive.

There’s a quote by Orhan Pamuk I read recently: “I read a book one day and my whole life was changed.” It is a straightforward enough quote, repeated for the sake of showing an example of the power of reading, the power of ideas and of story. And yet, what I’d wish to know from Pamuk: what was that book?

From the notes composed during the days watching the documentary, I crafted a new two page short story, “The snows of Mount Yamnuska,” attempting to play with some of the structures of Hemingway’s straightforward sentences, snow-capped peaks and human disconnection, although foregoing dialogue for density, as is my way. The story was completed that same week, with the voice of Jeff Daniels in my head, narrating throughout. If only.

 

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Amanda Monti

Amanda Monti is a cross-disciplinary poet and translator based on Lenape land / NYC. Their projects alternate between books and printed matter, performance, soundworks and accidental dance, always using playful research methodologies to explore ecology, language and desire. Amanda's poetry collection Mycelial Person (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press, 2021) has been adapted for radio as Spore Radical at Montez Press Radio.

Amanda has been published through the Institute of Contemporary Arts London, The Poetry Project, McSweeney’s, ExBerliner, Cuntemporary and Radiophrenia, amongst others. They are currently working on a series of soundworks with the MisFits Theatre Company.

Find Amanda cruising at Ridgewood Reservoir or on the internet: https://softie.space

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 outpourings of writing were a handful of DIY zines and a chapbook, “in me everything is already flowing” that I clandestinely produced with the printing resources of my day job at the time. I had had no training in poetry and mostly wrote as a way to seduce my crushes and document the ephemeral squat spaces I occupied at the time. I learned to use whatever was around me, materially as well as formally.  Mycelial Person is my first book and similarly site specific and hybrid. There’s polaroids and performance documentation and poems and stories. I did, however, struggle with how long the publishing process took since I have been distributing my work instantaneously up until then. It’s teaching me about the importance of keeping friendly relations to past selves (and crushes).

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

I have always been spell bound by good poetry readings. Quite literally! It’s the closest thing we have to magic.

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 am both erratic and painfully slow. I need a long time of not doing anything at all until poems arrive in quick slow bursts like mushrooms after rain.

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?

Obsessions are important. Usually my obsessions will generate a lot of indiscernible material to exist in the primordial broth of my notebooks and clouds until there is an invitation or impulse to activate/recycle the work in sound pieces, a collaboration, the bones of a book, a research project.

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

Readings are essential! I used to do a lot of performance work so I feel very at home with readings. One of my performance personas was a nostalgic, lesbian squid. She would squirt all over the place with her tentacles, it was so much fun. I miss her. With poetry I don’t consider a piece finished until I haven’t heard it in a room. Reading out loud makes me feel tethered. Readings are my second favorite way of sharing sociality after going to the laundromat. I love to be alone or flirty or awkward at a reading but I am obsessed with the soundscape of the laundromat.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

I am thinking about pop singer Hadaway and theorist Haraway. In 1993 Hadaway asked “What is Love?” and I am still sitting with that. I am writing to learn new things and answer that question. I am writing because/with love and failure (Jack Halberstam’s Queer Art of Failure) and am weaving narratives beyond the capitalist nuclear family, a story that is looking around itself to distribute eros into friendships, fleeting moments, more-than-humans, the shared and the distinct bodies of organic life. I am thinking with Donna Haraway’s call “make kin, not population” and the need for language to explode gender. But I am also thinking about tenderness, asking: what is it that I tend to? Attention is political and I want poetry to slow/expand my processes of (not) noticing.

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 about the writer as a community weaver, a friend. Someone who sends obscure chapbooks in the mail because they know that you needed a poem that day to make you less lonely.

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

Not having editors is like driving without mirrors. I need someone to tell me about my blind spots.

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

Begin by describing what is right in front of you

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

A lot of my poetry follows a narrative structure and my prose doesn’t always contain sentences. I enjoy not having to choose!

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 love my little morning routines and quickly disintegrate without them. I usually have to do money work in the morning but sometimes I steal them back for poems and meanderings. Nights are strange and electric. I like to write in weird sport bars or at the botanic garden when it gets dark.

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

the Aquarium

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

salty warmth, mum’s antibacterial air spray,

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?

Mycelial Person is like a gay, incoherent biology book. A lot of my writing comes from trying to learn and decolonize “natural sciences” through the poetic lens. I am also deeply in love with contemporary dance and movement practices, which are teaching me that there is always a body behind the writing.

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

Ursula K. le Guin, Laura Elrick, TC Tolbert, Samuel Ace, Audre Lorde, Eileen Myles, bell hooks, Lisa Robertson

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

clown school

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 talk show host, but it still might happen, fingers crossed.

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

I usually get myself fired from most other jobs.

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

I am finally reading Octavia Butler’s Patternist Series and can already tell that it has changed my life.

I recently also watched the 80ies japanese film Tampopo and am now obsessed with the “ramen western” genre

20 - What are you currently working on?

A Radio Play, Love it Did Love and some smutty poems

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Solmaz Sharif, Customs

 
 

I think I will translate
Forough.
I am urged to translate
Forough

as soon as possible.
In my
hours, I find it is
very

private. It is very
private
to be in another’s
syntax. (“Into English”)

The latest from American poet Solmaz Sharif, following her Look (Minneapolis MN: Graywolf Press, 2016) [see my review of such here], is Customs (Graywolf Press, 2022), a collection of poems that masterfully examine one’s ongoing relationship with an adopted country and culture that requires constant adaptation, an America that seems to be built on the very foundation of reminding citizens that they don’t, or shouldn’t, belong. Sharif examines that painful space of absence, especially through the extended poem “Without which,” “A without which / I have learned to be.” Or:

Of which I am without
or away from.
I am without the kingdom

  

            ]]

and thus of it.

Her poems spool, and loop, return to movements monumental and jarring. Hers is a careful, considered lyric, one that slowly places one thought beyond another, composing her pauses and silences as carefully as her lines. Hers is a lyric of phrases, expositions and first-person narratives; a book of boundaries and borders, cultures and collisions, and of lines occasionally drawn in the sand. “Upon my return to the U.S.,” she writes, to open the poem “He, Too,” “he / asks my occupation. Teacher. // What do you teach? / Poetry. // I hate poetry, the officer says, / I only like writing / where you can make an argument. // Anything he asks, I must answer. / This, too, he likes.” Hers is a lyric of phrases and short turns, accumulations, pauses and open spaces. Sharif writes around the spaces left from and through absence, of belonging, exile, colonialism and othering. She writes of her mother as a young girl, opening the poem “An Otherwise,” writing:

Downwind from a British Petroleum refinery, my mother is removing the books she was ordered to remove from the school library. Russians, mostly. Gorky’s Mother among them. The Shah is coming to tour the school. It is winter.

In the cold, the schoolgirls line up along the front of the main building and wait for his motorcycle. Knee-highs and pleated skirts. Shivering in the refined air.

Wave, girls, the teacher says.

My mother, waving.

 

Ayaz Pirani, How Beautiful People Are: a pothi

 

The Door’s Not Talking

When has the bookshelf
been so quiet?

It’s the sofa’s choice
whether to abstain.

Even from its interrogation posture
the chair won’t budge.

The lamp is cornered.
Who will light the room?

Back to the wallpaper
and on the rug’s schedule

the mirror’s got nothing
to offer.

Ayaz Pirani’s third full-length poetry title, following Happy You Are Here (Washington DC: The Word Works, 2016) and Kabir’s Jacket Has a Thousand Pockets (Toronto ON: Mawenzi House, 2019) is How Beautiful People Are: a pothi (Guelph ON: Gordon Hill Press, 2022), a collection of lyric poems structured across four titled sections, three of which are predominantly built out of shorter poems—“BELOVED INFIDEL,” “DEATH TO AMERICA,” the sequence “(WHITE) CITY | KID (TROPIC” and “KABIR’S LONELINESS.” As to his subtitle, “a pothi,” SikhiWiki defies Pothi as “a popular Punjabi word derived from the Sanskrit – pustaka (book), from the root – pust (to bind) via the Pali – potlhaka and Prakrit – puttha. Besides Punjabi, the word pothi meaning a book is current in Maithili, Bhojpuri and Marathi languages as well. Among the Sikhs, however, pothi signifies a sacred book, especially one containing gurbani or scriptural texts and of a moderate size, generally larger than a gutka but smaller than the Adi Granth, although the word is used even for the latter in the index of the original recension prepared by Guru Arjan which is now preserved at Kartarpur, near Jalandhar.” The back cover offers that Pirani, through this new collection, “continues to write his people’s pothi: a trans-national, inter-generational poetry of post-colonial love and loss animated by the syncretizing figure of Kabir and drawn from the extraordinary diwan of ginan and granth literature.” From my own limited experience around poetries in languages beyond English, Pirani’s poems seem echoes of what I’ve seen of the English-language adaptation of the ghazal, bouncing from moment to moment underneath an umbrella of narrative, and not through the overt, linear thread. His is a lyric predominantly constructed through couplets, but one that allows for the mutability and durability of the lyric; an exploration that understands the simplicity and the complexity of the first-person narrative line, and the underlying song that the lyric itself requires.

There is something fascinating in the distances he manages through the use of the single word, “Long,” to open two different poems, allowing the single, opening word to remain solo in the opening space of the poem, before the piece continues on the following page. There is a pause, and a length he manages through this quite effectively, echoing a pause in the opening of the poem “Historical Disadvantage,” the second poem of the first section, to the poem “Saith the Missionary,” set as the second poem of the second section. As the first of this pair of echoing-poems continues: “have I lived among / white people. // Tell me I’m the lucky one / while I weep // at the Xerox / or curl up // with the other grains of sand. / I’d like to think // I’m living on the edge. / On a dog-eared page.”

“Not stitched to this place or any place.” he writes, to close the seven-part sequence that makes up the third section in the collection, “There’s no road to my village.” Pirani’s poems are constructed as meditations on origins, home, belonging, location and dislocation, and as a continuation of what might be seen as a disjointed path to where he has landed. “From a touch / you were born.” he writes, as part of the Creeleyesque “Origins,” “Grain of sand rubbed / grain of sand.” He composes home as a sequence of cultural and geographic spaces, each of which he carries, offering through the space of the lyric. He speaks of origins, and dislocation, writing out his lyric almost mythically, and as a kind of connective tissue across the whole of his life. It is through these poems of disconnection that the connections, thusly, reveal themselves. “At the party I’d like to be a person of interest,” he offers, to open the poem “POC RSVP,” “but will end up a person of colour. / Instead of agency I’ll get stuck with adjacency.” I’m particularly fond of the paired poems for his grandparents, the second of which, “Kilimanjaro,” begins by offering “My grandmother was a child of Empire.” He writes of Empire, colonialism and effects both tangible and intangible, and stretches a tether across great temporal and geographic distances, offering an intimacy to even the most distant shores of his subject matter. The short prose poem ends: “The whole story / takes place between my mother tongue and my grandmother’s / tongue. Even if all I have left is the faintest idea.” The poem for his grandfather, on the preceding page:

Ngorongoro

My grandfather was a man of other people’s words. He had the face of a dictionary. Born in Gujarat, he died after four continents and five languages. He’s been dead so long he’s come alive in my dreams. When you’re alone with your thoughts, you wish you had better thoughts. You wish you had somebody else’s thoughts. I’m glad to be on Earth but it hasn’t been a pleasure being myself. Too far from the source, a man who walked forward like his back was against the wall. Now that he’s gone I’ve fallen into the crater. There’s no good fortune in historical disadvantage. It’s so hard for one grain of sand to fall in love with another grain of sand.

 

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Geoffrey Inverarity

Geoffrey Inverarity was one of the original founders of the Gulf Islands Film and Television School, and is currently the President of the Galiano Island Literary festival. He's won awards for his screenwriting, poetry, and non-fiction prose. He writes poetry for people who don't like poetry (and those who do). His first collection, All the Broken Things , is now available from Anvil Press.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
Now that All the Broken Things is published, doors are opened, people are asking me questions, and I’m being invited to give readings.  When people ask me where they can find my work, finally I can tell them, but now I have to start thinking about the next collection.

My recent work deals with the experience of aging, obviously something I couldn’t draw on earlier.  I find myself thinking more about family, although as I write this, I’m realizing that my subjects haven’t changed much over the years. I suppose I find life more and more absurd these days.  As a result I still find humour everywhere, and I’m still convinced that you don’t have to be solemn to be serious.  

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I was having some success as an academic writer, but feeling more and more constrained by the rigours of the genre and the need to get everything exactly right.  I was always drawn to the creative, and while scholarly work has its own form of creativity, it’s limiting.  Poetry allowed me to expand my imagination without a limit, so to speak.  I took pleasure in writing exactly what I wanted, and the pleasure was delicious.  The form seemed to suit me; I could write self-contained miniatures, and understanding what Yeats meant, I think, when he wrote that the corrections of prose are endless (and I would definitely add scholarly writing to that observation) while "a poem comes right with a click like a closing box.”  For me, there’s nothing so satisfying as that click. I find I can’t leave a poem until I hear it.  If the click doesn’t work, I’ll probably abandon the poem.

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?
Getting to a writing project always means clearing up all the current detritus of life.  At the moment, I’m on the boards of three non-profit societies, and there I’m meeting deadlines for grant proposals and board work.  I hate to say it, but it cramps my imagination.  I’m looking forward to finishing up a slate of grant writing; creative writing is a huge pleasure, and I tend to feel almost guilty for pursuing it.  

First drafts are almost always awful, so I rewrite like crazy.  I was still changing words in the final pass on the proofs of All the Broken Things.  As much as anything, I discover the poem in the writing of it.  I think of artists carving a piece of stone, and finding the object within it.  I carve away at the words until the poem is exposed.

4 - Where does a poem or short film script usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
I’m definitely not working on a “ book” when I begin a poem.  Poems usually come quickly, and unexpectedly.  I remember hearing Stephen Spender talk about the “given line,” which is where my poems usually start, rather than with a subject.  I’ll find a sentence or phrase in my endless mental chatter that stands out for its rhythm and metaphoric possibilities, and I’ll toss it around in my mind for a while to see if it has legs.  I won’t start to write until I think it’s solid.  I particularly remember the line that began “My Mother’s Haunting.”  I’d been asked to contribute to Crank, a project of Marcus Youssef’s, and he gave me the word “Clean” to work with. And I found myself thinking “My Mother kept a clean house," and then, out of nowhere, the end of the sentence: "even after she died.”  And the rest came easily and quite logically from that given line.  Same thing with “The Woman Who Talks To Her Dog At The Beach.”  I trust those given lines, and they seem to bear out my trust because they’ll always lead to a click.  Having said all that, I do find that I’ll sometimes write one poem and then see the subject from a different angle, and write another; often it will take three poems to get to a larger “click.”  With “Mars Variations” it went on for an unusually long time. There’s more to say, and you have to say it, or else things don’t feel finished.  

The same sort of process is true of short film scripts.  When our daughter was little, we’d play hide and seek under the bed covers, as one does.  Pull the covers over Mum’s head and ask “Where’s Mummy?".  And one day I thought, what if a little girl pulls back the covers and her Mum is gone?  So that became the short film “Hide."

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I love giving readings.  In the past I’ve described myself as a “stand-up poet,” although I’ve never found the discipline to go entirely off book.  You write alone, in the shadows, turning words around, aiming for a particular effect, hoping that the micro changes work.  You can’t really tell until you hear an audience responding in a way that tells you, yes, I did get it right.  They got it.  Frisson!
 
6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
I have no spiritual beliefs, and I’m deeply suspicious of all religion — all religions seem like an avoidance to me — but I’m fascinated by contemplations of time and infinity. If there’s a question I’m trying to answer, it’s really along the lines of finding ways to express the infinite in a finite medium. I honestly don’t think I answer any questions, and I don’t know what the current questions are, other than puzzling over the precipitous global slide into irrationality, the loss of civility, the opposition to science, the rise of lying.  I don’t remember seeing the media using the word “lies” in print to describe a politician’s words until The Worst President Ever opened his mouth.  Don’t get me started.  I blame it on the Interweb. And I’m still asking the same question about Brexit: What the FUCK?

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
Speak truth to power, always. Make people laugh. Utter the things that terrify you.  Stare into the abyss until you start to laugh.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
With poetry, I don’t find it difficult to work with an editor, but in script writing, it’s a lot more difficult.  It's because I’m working with a much larger piece, and every change will pull all sorts of strings and demand all sorts of realignment; often the people who want you to change your work have no idea what the consequences of a change will be.  And in film you’re dealing with a budget; all you need for a poem is a piece of paper and something to write with.  I once wrote a script in which a man is forced to carry his dead father on his shoulders, forced to find the burial place his dead father is looking for. The father has died, but he’s come back to a sort of zombie existence and will not rest until his son has performed his duty. So I was given a note about the dead father (who almost all men eventually carry on their shoulders) — the controlling metaphor that the whole feature depended on — and the note was “Does the father have to be dead?"

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
When I was an undergraduate at Aberdeen University, we had to read our essays aloud in tutorials.  Since then, I read everything I write (more or less) aloud before I let anybody else see it.  This is absolutely true with all my poems.  Until I hear it out loud, I have no idea if I’m getting it right. So there’s that. Every writer should do the same.  Also, George McWhirter has said that a poem should have an idea and a thing.  I think that’s great advice.  And in scripts, it’s different, because there is a narrative to consider, and you have to keep that engine running the whole time.  There’s a film by John Sayles called Honeydripper. The main character has just solved one problem when a car draws up outside. He says “Now what?” And that’s the perfect way to describe how that narrative machine has to work.  You’re always trying to make the audience, as well as your characters ask that question: “Now what?"

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to film scripts)? What do you see as the appeal?
I found that there’s a real similarity to the way you have to use language in poetry and in scripts: you need to say as much as possible with the fewest words, so your word choice is crucial.  Every word, every piece of punctuation has to do some very heavy lifting.  In that sense, my process is similar.  Where there are enormous differences is in the demands of narrative and, as I mentioned earlier, the damn budget.  I wrote a short script based on a poem.  Cost of writing the poem: zero.  A ten minute film based on the poem cost $30,000.  And that wasn’t anything like enough.  On the other hand I was paid well for the script — not the whole $30K, you understand!  Thank you BC Film and the CBC.

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 don’t have a routine, but when I do get to writing, I often find that first I have to deal with the ideas that have piled up since the last time I sat down.  If there’s a “given line” involved, and it feels as if it has legs, I’ll sit down wherever/whenever and get it down before I forget.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I look for distractions so as not to get trapped in the stall.  Since I’m usually working on several projects simultaneously, I’ll pull out one of those.  Changing direction helps — going back over a text rather than trying to make forward progress.  Often I’ll discover a word of phrase that I’ve somehow missed in terms of its potential.  See above: the statue thing.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
I’ve had a lot of different homes in different places.  There’s no one fragrance. Sevilla in southern Spain was our home for a year. In spring, the streets are filled with the scent of orange blossoms.  

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?
Books are only a minor part of it for me, despite a background which involved the standard canon of the whole of English Literature, Beowulf till the present, and that’s a lot of books. I have to admit I don’t read a lot of poetry. There are the blissfully disturbing films of Roy Andersson, and when it comes to music, I’m like Jenny in Lou Reed’s “Rock and Roll.”  I sometimes find subjects in science writing which appeal to me, often because the writers (and I’m talking about science writers explaining things for dummies like me) are forced to resort to metaphors when things get sticky.  That I can understand.  The photography of Cindy Sherman… I saw a riveting retrospective of the work of Paula Rego a couple of years ago… Writers who’ve influenced me? It’s more what I’m reading at the time.  I move on from writers, but some stay with me.  Eliot. Waugh (for me the funniest fiction writer in the English language), David Sedaris, Amy Sedaris, because she seems to have refreshingly little in the way of a filter, Eddie Izzard, J.G. Ballard, Ishiguru, Zadie Smith, McEwan, Amis… Don’t get me started.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Lately I’ve been reading the poetry of Miranda Pearson, Alex Oliver, Gary Geddes, and Hilary Peach, and bill bissett remains a major source of inspiration in life and art. I recommend the film work of Andrew Struthers to people at every opportunity.  The man’s a genius.  Galiano’s Michael Christie’s Greenwood is extraordinarily good.  As is Cedar Bowers’ Astra.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Meeting Roy Andersson would be high on the list. I’d love to get a feature to the screen. But mainly I’m content. There’s all the writing I haven’t done yet, though I’ve no idea what it will be. I’d like to be able to apologize to Loudon Wainwright, but that’s another story.

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 could have been a lawyer — I was on that path for a while.  And I could have stuck with teaching English Literature.  But poetry’s where the big bucks are, let’s face it.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
It’s what I think I can do best.  Not that I’m the best at it.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Klara and the Sun , which I just finished a few days ago. I’m still haunted by the final scene.  Ishiguru writes sadness so well, and yet he’s never depressing.  Poor Klara may be the most optimistic character in fiction. In film it’s a tie between Jonathan Glazer’s astonishing Under the Skin, the Coen Brothers’ A Serious Man, and Roy Andersson’s deeply moving You, the Living.  Nothing’s come close to those in the last few years, but there’s so much I haven’t seen. I’m half way through A Carnival of Snackery , which dragged my attention away from Colson Whitehead’s Harlem Shuffle.  I’ll get back to it, I promise.  But Sedaris is so seductive!  What to do?  What to do?

20 - What are you currently working on?
I’ve got two features I’m constantly revising, and there’s some poems bubbling.  But there's a few major grant applications for the Galiano Island Literary Festival and the Galiano Island Affordable Living Initiative Society I’d better get on with first.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Jos Charles, a Year & other poems

 

 

Rosemary
dead     Naomi at the clinic
            Leah in hospice in bed
            & debt   Throwing a book
            to the thresher a poet read
            So much less than our
            nakedness        a chorus
                                    a garland
                                    of changing names (“January”)

I was very excited to go through Long Beach, California poet and editor Jos Charles’ latest, a Year & other poems (Minneapolis MN: Milkweed Editions, 2022), following her remarkable debut safe space (Boise ID: Ahsahta Press, 2016) [see my review of such here] and follow-up, feeld (Milkweed Editions, 2018) [see my review of such here]. Writing the space of a calendar year through lyric suites of accumulated bursts, bookended by an assembly or shorter poems, there is such a precision to a Jos Charles lyric, one not condensed but carefully and deliberately set into the form of song. “Awaiting / not clarity,” she writes, as part of “January,” “but mineral a membrane [.]” There is such an enormous amount of space in her seemingly-spare lyric, writing out the way grief moves, and the space of a year, the space of grief itself: “me where the limit / begins reminded of proportion / the politics of proportion” (“June”).

The bulk of this collection is composed as a year’s worth of monthly-titled lyric fragments that accumulate into a larger shape of grief and loss. “Heard a pool deflate,” she writes, in part of the opening fragment of “February,” “Monday you would be / twenty-eight  Open //// door electric fan in it [.]” Jos Charles is easily one of the finest poets working the physical shape and sound of the lyric, and one of the back cover blurbs references an echo of the work of Lorine Niedecker, which seems entirely appropriate (although I would suggest, also, an echo of the physicality of works by CAConrad, including their latest, Amanda Paradise: Resurrect Extinct Vibrations [see my review of such here]); Charles has the ability to form a thin and angular lyric into such physical, earthen shapes, as though they have always existed, simply awaiting our ability to comprehend.