Rob Mclennan's Blog, page 130

Madhur Anand, Parasitic Oscillations

  

The turn, the names, the marsh, the charge, the cells, and Gandhi
march on. Shall it be restored? My mother will die soon.

Last time she fell they spent weeks adding salt to her blood.
It is dripping from the roofs of castles, from IVs.

It is going where it is needed most. A.O. Hume
made a customs line from a hedge. I am reading it

Now as the biergartenempties down the street. There is
a tax so large it becomes a cavern. We ride through

On a boat at a rate precipitated by stone.
The water there is the purest. I can taste it with

one finger. The German word for sea is meer and more
is mehr. Residue, residual, knowing difference. (“SATYAGRAHA IN TÜBINGEN”)

The second trade poetry collection and third book by Guelph, Ontario writer Madhur Anand, following the poetry debut A New Index for Predicting Catastrophes (Toronto ON: McClelland and Stewart, 2015) and the Governor General’s Award-winning experimental memoir, This Red Line Goes Straight to Your Heart (McClelland and Stewart, 2020), is Parasitic Oscillations (McClelland and Stewart, 2022). There are echoes of structure and concern throughout the spring 2022 quartet of McClelland and Stewart poetry titles, from the ecological drift through colonial land and colonial time of Laurie D. Graham’s simultaneously-published Fast Commute [see my review of such here] and Phoebe Wang’s Waking Occupations, and the ecological birdsong of Tolu Oloruntoba’s Each One A Furnace. Anand offers the beauty of birdsong and ecological concern among and through a veil of scientific inquiry, shades of family detail and poetic language. “Human speech is a subsong of trachea / and beak.” she writes, as part of the short poem “A SIMPLE NOTE.” “It is illustrated in this letter how // pressure will control not only strength but also sound. / It is expected there be some overlap, tension // while mimicking lexicon, emphasis on power.” Writing a collage of image, sound, research and speech, hers is a book of counterpoints, compassions and compressions, moving between and amid terminologies and alternate viewpoints, museum pieces and historical artifacts. “Every line of thought / is an oscillation we must enter / into arbitrarily,” she writes, to open the poem “MIND COMPRESSION,” “Only this small amount / of work in a vacuum / and it all makes sense // We are bound to equating / contradictions of experience / with experience [.]” Structured in seven sections, Parasitic Oscillations offers a layering of inquiry, seeking to wrap her mind around the world. She writes the bodies of birds and of human response, writing her mother and her father and herself, through memory and Partition and of her own three children; how the mind moves, and the body reacts, and back again. Anand writes of poetic and scientific inquiry as two sides of the same coin, and how her mind landed on that particular path, such as through the ninth part of the twelve-poem sequence “PARAMETRIC OSCILLATION,” a poem that makes up the whole of part five of the seven part collection:

Truth is, I stole Father’s copy of Notes to Myself

without thinking. Wanting it all, the lie in itself.

His dog ears were my ethics tests: It is not always

necessary to think words. Thinking and wanting: two

poplar leaves, one real, one shadowed, on the cover

and subtitled My Struggle to Become a Person.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Laura Kolbe

Laura Kolbe is a writer as well as a doctor and medical ethicist. Her debut poetry collection,  Little Pharma , won this year’s Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize and was published in the Pitt Poetry Series in October 2021. She studied English and American literature at Harvard and the University of Cambridge before receiving her M.D. from the University of Virginia. She has published poetry, fiction, personal essays, and criticism in publications including The New York Review of Books, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Nation, and Poetry. Her medical work was highlighted in The New Yorker’s coverage of COVID-19, on LitHub’s Thresholds podcast with Jordan Kisner, and in the Yale University Press anthology A World Out of Reach: Dispatches from Life Under Lockdown. She lives in Brooklyn with her partner Andrew and their dog Bonnie. More of her work can be found at www.laura-kolbe.com or by following @laurakolbemd on Twitter.

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 book Little Pharma is my first book. Years ago when my partner got a short story accepted by the magazine he most admired, our friend John called it the “Velveteen Rabbit moment,” after the (very dark!) children’s book by Margery Williams, about certain toys becoming live animals by the force of a child’s love. It’s the moment when someone’s loving regard for you (or your work) turn you from a crumple of cloth and stuffing into “the real thing,” whatever that is. I want not to believe in this – I want, rather, to believe that I would be just as “real” a poet even if no one ever offered me the chance to publish a book – but being a social animal, having a book that can circulate in society has felt like a personal metamorphosis.

Most recently I’ve been working on a hybrid memoir in prose that uses my own development as a medical trainee and a poet to cut a rambling path through the history and philosophy of medicine and art. I’ve always been a magpie of art and history, and sometimes of autobiography. But as a poet, I’m somewhat unused to making arguments that need to stick. It’s a different rhetorical muscle.

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

A shallow and a somewhat deeper answer. My first college crushes were all poets, and I wanted very badly to have a chance with them. Longing does wonders for work ethic. But in fact, even as a much younger child I immediately grasped and loved the uselessness of poetry, that it could communicate unstably and without necessarily teaching, that it could say several things at once.

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’ve tried to keep a notebook, but I often get too self-conscious about whether it’s becoming a “good” notebook, whether the contents are smart enough or interesting enough. It’s colossally disorganized, but I actually do much better when I’m jotting passages and observations in twenty different places – email, different apps on my phone, the backs of grocery receipts and utility bills. I don’t want any reverence or self-consciousness about what’s happening when I’m first starting out on a new project – it freezes me up. The informality of making a huge mess works much better for me.

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 wish I naturally had book-sized thoughts, but most of my attention and planning happens at the level of the individual poem (or short piece of prose). Within that unit, I have a hard time breaking the silence properly, and try a large number of false beginnings to see where they go.

I watched an internet video recently of wolf pups learning to howl, first by making a lot of grunts and squeals and coughs, and it reminded me a lot of my own process.

But sometimes even a false beginning is a useful way to get to a true central passage, and then the job later is to find a more interesting and apt way to have gotten there than the bad opening lines I wrote.

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

I do deeply enjoy giving and attending readings, but maybe it’s an innocent excitement that I’ve preserved because it doesn’t happen much – I’m often found in the evenings at the hospital where I work.

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

I really don’t think reading or writing has intrinsic moral value, but I’m very interested in the widespread persistence of the belief that it does. What are we hoping for, or what are we trying to avert?

I’m also interested in questions like, what do I owe you? How can I write different flavors of silence and pause? What’s happening to me when I’m not thinking? Who am I aside from the knowledge I’ve acquired?

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 think when writers pursue their private obsessions, scratch their itches on the page, we all benefit by that honesty and the discomfort and surprise it engenders.

It’s also terrific, of course, when someone says something like, “I want to know what ‘justice’ is, and I’m going to keep writing until I figure out what I think I mean,” or “I want the world to know my theory about debt, so I’ve written it down” – thank God for these people! – but I think that’s often a slightly different endeavor than the unabashed disregard for utility that often gets writers to the most exquisite (and sometimes even useful!) places.

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

My understanding is that many editors of literary magazines and small presses are poorly paid, overworked, may indeed hold additional jobs, and likely don’t have the time to engage in painstaking collaboration at the line level. In such cases, I’m grateful for their existence and perseverance, and for the occasional gracious suggestion about a better word choice or piece of punctuation. The few times I’ve had a poem rigorously edited tip to stern, it’s a little frightening and painful, but also exhilarating. I only wish it happened more often.

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

I live with a really exquisite dog. I think a lot about her consciousness, her feelings, her hopes. It’s also extremely helpful to me when my friends and family remind me, “She’s a dog.” There’s a lot of implied advice in that statement.

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

They are different cities, a few hundred miles apart, and I like them all. I can’t run back and forth between them in the same day – I waste a lot of time just trying to exit one and enter the other, and then I’m tired and irritable when I arrive. But I love being privileged enough to spend a season or a year in poetry, then have a question that I don’t know how to answer in poetry but I think I can answer in essays, so I move house for a while.

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?

Days when I’m working at the hospital, I just do that to the best of my ability, and feel pleased and grateful if I jot a few lines down or do some good reading on the commute that leaves me wiser or less complacent than I was before. Days that I don’t see patients, I try to put in a solid half-day of writing, spend a few hours outdoors, see a friend, read with greater intentness.

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

When I feel stuck, just leafing through Wallace Stevens or Marianne Moore can unlock something for me. The breadth of the lexicon, the variety of the syntax, the vast gap between the rather narrow life and the wild roaming of their imagery.

I hold a lot of other writers dear for the particular things they can teach me when I’m stymied by something particular – from formal problems like ways of incorporating documentary information, to maybe what we might call “moral communication” problems, like accounting for one’s own bad behavior or unsavory thoughts without being either flippant or self-involved.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Incense (the church-y kind) is the smell that most connects me with my childhood, being bound up in some of my first experiences of the sublime at the Catholic church I grew up attending. I’m not at all a connoisseur of scent or of luxury products, but somehow have come to own and hoard two perfumes (Penhaligon’s Elixir and Aedes de Venustas’s Copal Azur) that plunk me right back in the mystery of being twelve years old.

Also cooked apples – my family lived on an apple orchard when I was young. My mother hates waste and loves ritual, and so made endless vats of applesauce every fall despite not being able to stand the stuff herself.

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?

I am entranced by the vocabulary and syntax of medicine, my other profession, as well as the other life sciences. I love classical music for being about delay and inevitability.

A lot of my spare time is spent encountering or attempting to encounter visual art, so allusions to that life experience sometimes come up in my work in a more diaristic way, but I haven’t yet figured out how to let the visual art influence the poetry without getting autobiography caught in the middle.

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

My partner Andrew Martin is often my first reader and is, excuse my bias, a brilliant fiction writer and critic in his own right. He’s always telling me that it’s okay to be funnier, less serious, which can be particularly helpful when I get into one of my funks of solemnity.

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

I would love to collaborate with artists working in other media. I have a pretty ignorant but ardent love of opera, for example. And I’m interested in nonverbal visual languages.

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 like my life as a doctor and a writer, but it’s very hard to get the proportions right. I anticipate spending the rest of my life trying to solve that riddle.

I have boundless awe for primary care and family doctors, particularly those in rural or otherwise isolating circumstances. I’m not sure I could hack it, but in some ways I think it’s the utmost a person could be.

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

Well, I did do something else – become a doctor and medical ethicist – and my next book is about whether that was the right choice, and more fundamentally whether that’s a useful or honest question.

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

I just read an incredible, slim pseudo-ekphrastic novel, The Eleven by Pierre Michon (translated beautifully for Archipelago by Jody Gladding and Elizabeth Deshays). The speaker is ever more vehement in exhorting you to look closely at a painting that’s the crown jewel of the Louvre: a group portrait of the eleven members of the Committee of Public Safety, architects of the French Revolution’s so-called Reign of Terror. The painting and the painter don’t actually exist, to my glum disappointment. The canvas is so sturdily and relentlessly imagined, though, as to support a gorgeous intertwining of narrative biography, philosophy of history, and a jolt of just unabashed voluptuous love of what color and light can accomplish. At under a hundred pages, it has the pace and precision of an outstanding poetry collection, which it almost is.

During lockdown I saw Claudia Weill’s 1978 film Girlfriends for the first time. I couldn’t believe that here I am, trying to live in New York City as an artist and a woman, and all these years I had been missing this wise and funny document that would have been such a challenge and a prickle and a comfort if I had encountered it at 22. It’s like your older sister or aunt left you this hugely informative and engrossing voicemail that you forgot to listen to.

20 - What are you currently working on?

I’m still writing poems, but mainly I’m trying to finish a memoir of my medical training and my concurrent development as a writer and a reader. I think doctor-memoirs can sometimes be a bit pious or self-bowdlerizing, so I’m trying to introduce more chaos, more irreverence, more of the squalor of real life than generally makes it into the subgenre. Poetry has also taught me a few techniques for the artful (I hope) digression, so there are lots of intertextual leaps and forays into the history of medicine and medical ethics as well.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Susan Nguyen, Dear Diaspora

 

What did you leave when crossing the bridge? From what materials was the
  bridge constructed?

        When did you first recoil

               from your mouth?          Do you feel safe wrecking language? 

What movie theatre did you travel through? What apple? (“The Body as a Series of Questions”)

American poet Susan Nguyen’s full-length poetry debut is Dear Diaspora (Lincoln NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2021), winner of The Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. As the back cover offers: “Through a collage of lyric, documentary, and epistolary poems, we follow Suzi as she untangles intergenerational grief and her father’s disappearance while climbing trees to stare at the color green and wishing that she wore Lucy Liu’s freckles.” Nguyen writes through the character Suzi, and the way through which Nguyen writes her main character (who may or may not be a stand-in for the author herself) is slightly reminiscent of Toronto poet Shannon Bramer writing through Vera, who sold scarves, through her collection scarf (Toronto ON: Exile Editions, 2001), or even how Robert Kroetsch wrote the fictional archivist Raymond, as he sought out, through her poems, the disappeared Rita Kleinhart via The Hornbooks of Rita K. (Edmonton AB: University of Alberta Press, 2001), composing a poetry within a fiction within a poetry. “no one told me grief could be so ordinary,” Nguyen offers, to close the poem “Grief as a Question:.” Composed as a collaged structure of descriptive power and nostalgia, Nguyen’s Suzi seeks a language for a situation she cannot fathom, and a distance she hasn’t manage to reconcile, writing the distance of a history of the Vietnamese diaspora from her character’s American upbringing, via parents who landed as new immigrants. As she writes as part of one of multiple poems underneath the title “Letter to the Diaspora”:

Language cannot express all memory, those that are not wholly present, that exist at the edges, so that you only recall in small moments of brilliance, when someone shows you a picture, a place where you were present and your body took up space, acted and moved and was acted upon and you realize you would never remember your body there if it weren’t for this other to unlock this small part living in you but separate from you. How can this be?

There is an interesting way she assembles the epistolary poems alongside more descriptive pieces, grouping almost as a call-and-response, writing the external against the internal; writing to the nebulous “diaspora” her character’s frustration around a collision of cultures, language and approach, racist responses to her very existence, and the eventual loss of a father who simply leaves and does not return. “Nothing existed during the war times or before or / now,” she writes, to close the poem “She Doesn’t Know about the War Times,” “in its aftermath: there is only her father. He is somewhere unknown.” She writes a distance, including one that increases the further she loses the ties to her parents’ language and culture, as she herself rests between two, and writing to others through the diaspora to ask how such distances need not be so distant. She seeks a language that might not exist, one that seeks to include the fractured elements of Suzi’s self and history, and family dynamics, layered upon the normal divide any child feels from parents and larger connections of family and culture. There is such an openness to these pieces, one that seeks to understand, connect and become part of something larger, reaching further into a complete unknown that refuses to not keep reaching further, and reaching out. To open a further “Letter to the Diaspora,” she offers:

Dear Diaspora,

every day I am impatient with language    how slowly it bends to my ear

     one day I hope to speak to my mother     my father

how will I tell them I am falling in love     I am happy     I am becoming someone

                   how to speak about language where there is no language

    they speak with their tongues

Alison Calder, Synaptic

 

CONNECTOMICS

The idea is
to render the brain
transparent enough to read through,
trickles of water washing away thought.

Deletions, insertions, translocations, inversions,
proofreaders’ symbols carve a straight line
to the minotaur. 

In the light of the laboratory,
thought’s skein unravels,
bumpy road smoothed. 

Lucent, pellucid, the brain wavers
like the glass in a display case,
minimum interference between eye and page. 

Like reading through a jellyfish.
The text, however, remains opaque.

Winnipeg poet, editor and critic Alison Calder’s third full-length poetry collection, after Wolf Tree (Regina SK: Coteau Books, 2009) and Tiger Park (Coteau Books, 2014), is Synaptic (Regina SK: University of Regina Press, 2022), a curious assemblage of narrative theses whittled and shaped through the lyric. Comprised of two sections of shorter poems (only one piece throughout is longer than a single page, and not by much, while a further poem sits in three short sections)—“Connectomics” and “Other Fires”—it is the longer, opening section that shapes the core of the collection. Synaptic is a collection of poems through which she (according to the back cover blurb) “ruminates on the inner workings of the brain, language, and the state of human curiosity in the age of information,” although the descriptor seems more specific to the first section than the book as a whole. Through the framework of the lyric narrative, Calder works a sequence of studies, and there are elements of Calder’s approach that echo the work of Saskatchewan poet Sylvia Legris [see my review of Legris’ latest here], through their shared observation and unfolding of a particular question, idea or thought. “A road, a network, consciousness / is a computer,” Calder writes, to open the poem “SCIENCE,” “a map. / It’s a vehicle on a road, it’s not the road. / It’s a stream. / A neuron’s like a tree. Consciousness / is a load the vehicle’s hauling.” Through the poems of the first section, Calder explores brain function, from the language of genomes and synapses to anti-depressants. “A synapse is two friends talking on the phone.” she writes, to close the same poem, “The skull’s a box of books you move / from house to house to house.” Through the thirty-two poems of the first section, she seeks to articulate a map of her findings on brain activity, writing further points along a lengthy progression of ongoing study, processing data on the very idea of processing data. “Beneath the squares,” she writes, to close the poem “PYCORTEX,” “the seams are full / of hidden fabric. If you ripped apart / the sutures, laid the fragments side by side, / you could assemble the resemblance / of a blanket, see where it might hold a body. / Pulled back to rags, it won’t keep anybody warm.”

Comparatively, the second section (twenty-six poems) is constructed as an assemblage of more self-contained studies on a variety of subjects, including the weather, marriage, the 1970s, turning fifty, eating lobster, various holes in the ground (this does come up more than once), selkies, arguments on form and two poems for Saskatchewan-born American painter Agnes Martin (1912-2004), an artist covered recently, and in very different ways, through American poet and editor Lawrence Giffin’s Untitled, 2004 (New York/Kingston NY: After Hours Editions, 2020) [see my review of such here] and Regina poet, fiction writer and critic Michael Trussler’s Rare Sighting of a Guillotine on the Savannah (Toronto ON: Mansfield Press, 2021) [see my review of such here]. It makes me wonder: is there a resurgence happening of Martin’s work that I should be aware of (and have otherwise missed)? Calder’s paired poems on Martin open the second section, and both pieces share the title “ARGUMENT WITH AGNES MARTIN.” The first poem is subtitled “(Siberia/Saskatoon),” and the second, “(Taos),” both of which offer a perspective upon Martin’s work through the lens of prairie geography. “What you’re facing is where you’re from.” the second poem ends. Or, as the first poem offers, in its final three lines: “Similarity, difference, the same shapes punched out over and over. / Scrape away white: pink, green, cream, thin blue / of powdered milk. The minimal aesthetic. Plain.” At the end of the collection, Calder offers a note on Martin and her work, writing that “Her best-known works are large, luminous, and sometimes almost colourless canvasses marked by lines and grids.” One could easily see how such patterns could line up with elements of prairie geography and landscape, especially elements of Martin’s home-province of Saskatchewan.

There is something interesting in the way Calder looks at Martin’s work through the lens of a prairie landscape that is reminiscent of an earlier poem of hers, “SEXING THE PRAIRIE; or, Why I Am/Not a Prairie Poet,” a piece that originally appeared in Open Letter, and later, in Calder’s first collection; a poem that responded directly, and at length, to Robert Kroetsch, situating her own thinking and writing in relation (and opposition) to elements of his. There is something of Calder’s response that seems a way of her placing and articulating her own thoughts, her own mapping, by seeking out and responding to an already-established reference point. In that earlier poem, she writes how she isn’t a prairie poet by responding directly to Kroetsch, subsequently situating herself in the prairie landscape through responding to the work of Agnes Martin. Through her lyric, she seeks a signpost, and writes her way around it. Or, as she writes to open the poem “AT 50,” offering (along with what could be seen as a sly reference to an earlier collection by Sharon Thesen): “At 50, my body says fuck it, / I’m not following rules anymore. / One foot on the dock, one foot in a canoe, / a tipping point, two halves of a pill capsule broken open. / This is it: the beginning of the long dash.”

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Lindsay Zier-Vogel

Lindsay Zier-Vogel is a Toronto-based writer, arts educator and the creator of the internationally-acclaimed Love Lettering Project. After studying contemporary dance, she received her MA in Creative Writing from the University of Toronto. Her writing has been widely published in Canada and the U.K. Since 2001, she has been teaching creative writing workshops in schools and communities. Her hand-bound books are housed in the permanent collection at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library in Toronto. As the creator of the Love Lettering Project, Lindsay has asked people all over the world to write love letters to their communities and hide them for strangers to find, spreading place-based love. Lindsay also writes children’s books. Because of The Love Lettering Project, CBC Radio has deemed Lindsay a “national treasure.” Letters to Amelia is her first book.

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

Letters to Amelia is my first book, though I did get a two-book kids’ book deal before signing my “Letters to Amelia” contract (kids’ books just take longer to get out in the world). But I found the self-confidence of having a book deal has made me feel like less of an imposter.

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

I can’t remember if I started writing poetry first, or started dancing first—contemporary dance and poetry were so intertwined for me. Though, I will admit, it has been years since I’ve written a 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?

I generate a lot of material (like, A LOT), and Letters to Amelia was no exception. It took a lot of writing and revising and more writing before I uncovered the narrative, the point of view, and the form. My process definitely involves writing terrible drafts, and then I edit and edit and edit before they’re even readable. Even after that, I still have years of editing ahead.

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?

Letters to Amelia began as a series of poems from many years ago that then shifted into a novel-in-letters in 2017, that then shifted into its current form shortly thereafter. But my next project, “The Fun Times Brigade”, arrived as a novel from the get-go.

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

I love public readings! I love the energy of an audience and I love experiencing feedback in real time.

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 very interested in exploring the various ways we connect, and long for connection. I’m also interested in exploring the underwritten realities of mothers and new mothers in my work.

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?

Writers are, and have always been, so vital in reflecting back the culture we live in, and that is more important now more than ever.

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

Oh, I LOVE IT! I just love it. I love getting feedback on my work, and honing a narrative, and further developing characters. Having that first conversation about my imaginary world with my brilliant editor, Meg Storey was truly one of my highlights of writing “Letters to Amelia”.

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

I heard an interview with Sarah Selecky a few years ago and she spoke about approaching writing with joy—not that it’s always fun, or that it’s not work, but bringing joy into the writing process. That was really transformative for me and I’ve carried with me ever since.

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

I love having different media through which to tell different stories. I can’t write poetry when I’m writing fiction—the lens through which I see the world is too narrative-focused—but I love bouncing back and forth between novels and kids’ books. Alternating between the length of a novel, and the brevity and conciseness of kids’ books is so refreshing.

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 in the early mornings, always. Never quite as early as I intend, but always first thing with a cup of coffee in my sunroom. The mornings are only time in my days as a freelance grant writer, arts educator, prof at Humber College, and parent of two young kids that is truly mine, and I am such a better teacher, parent, and human if I’ve done the thing that fills me up the most first thing each day.

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

I swim.

Being in the water, length after length, is how I solve narrative problems, how I figure out characters’ responses, where I find my voice.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

The smell of lake water and sun on summer shoulders.

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?

Contemporary dance is hugely influential for me—the lack of narrative, the varying structure, the physicality—transport me from the world of words in such a powerful way.

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

I have a writing group with Samantha Garner, Teri Vlassopoulos, and Julia Zarankin, who are all exceptional writers. We call ourselves the Semi-Retired Hens, from a quote from Julia’s memoir. These three writers are so influential, so crucial to my writing process. Reading their in-process work, and giving feedback, and workshopping my work, and ideas before they’re even on the page in such a generous forum has improved my writing beyond measure. Working with the Hens has helped me understand the mechanics of writing in ways that I had not yet fully realized before. Having the time and space to experiment with ideas with such a supportive and generous team of fellow writers is such a gift.

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

I’d like to visit Londonderry, where Amelia Earhart landed her red Vega when she crossed the Atlantic solo for the first time. I’ve visited the airfield she took off from for that flight in Harbour Grace, Newfoundland, and I’ve visited her plane in Washington, D.C., and I’d like to see where she landed after that harrowing flight.

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 think I would be a professional day camp counsellor. I think at my most essential self, I am singing songs, and making up games and doing crafts with kids.

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

I always wrote, but as I was finishing high school, I decided to train as a contemporary dancer, so I started my creative career as a dancer. Throughout my dance training, I was writing poetry and making books, but I really thought that dance going to be my creative path. After three years of professional training, and a few short months as a professional dancer, my hips were having none of it. It was devastating at the time, but after realizing that I was too injured to ever have a sustainable career as a dancer, I leaned on writing, and realized my voice was so much stronger as a writer than it ever could’ve been as a dancer.

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

I just finished reading The Final Revival of Opal & Nev by Dawnie Walton, and it was truly unputdownable.

I do not watch a lot of films, though I just watched Space Jam 2 with my kids. It got panned by the critics and is just beloved by my basketball-obsessed-6-year-old and I loved every second of it.

20 - What are you currently working on?

A novel titled “The Fun Times Brigade” about a failed-singer songwriter turned kids’ musician who has a child, and has to reckon with the reality, and potential impossibility, of being a touring musician and a new mother.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Mikko Harvey, Let The World Have You

 

WET FUR

We like to describe the heart as heavy
when it’s more like an old wolf
gone hungry, wondering
why bother restarting the hunt?
Then a rabbit emerges from a hole in the dirt
and everything forgives itself for just
continuing to exist. What’s your moon
sign? What’s your Myers-Briggs
personality type? Never mind, doesn’t matter.
Or, okay – does matter, but matters less when we nap
side-by-side in this grass, the whole field
so American, all of our kings
somewhere else recovering
from microdermabrasion,
our personal wolves
playing around in the brook together under
our imprecise supervision.

The latest from poet Mikko Harvey, following the full-length debut, Unstable Neighbourhood Rabbit (Toronto ON: House of Anansi, 2018) [see my review of such here] and collaborative chapbooks Idaho Falls (with Jake Bauer; SurVision Books, 2019) and SkyMall (with Ashley Yang-Thompson; above/ground press, 2020), is the full-length Let The World Have You (House of Anansi, 2022). A Canadian poet living in Western Massachusetts, Harvey predominantly composes poems in first person lyric narratives that float across the boundaries of concrete image. “Wherever you are is a country.” he writes, at the mid-point of “Wind-Related Ripple in the Wheatfield,” “Touch it softly / to make it stand still. Your hair getting caught / in my mouth all the time, like a tiny piece / of you calling – like a tree trying to speak / to a rock by dropping a pinecone on it. / It is my intention to listen, but my hands / keep giggling while reminding me / I don’t get to be a human being / for very long, as if this were the punchline to a joke / whose first half I missed. I arrived too late.” There is an odd melancholy throughout, and Harvey’s is a lyric of held breath, and structurally echo a loose thread of lyric narratives I’ve seen over the past few years from American poets including Bianca Stone, Hailey Higdon, Hillary Gravendyk, Emily Kendal Freyand Emily Pettit: sharing a consideration for long, single stanzas, and their subversion of the short phrase. “I don’t / want you / to be / nervous.” He writes, to open the poem “For M,” “Maybe / thinking of / a walrus / would help.”

He writes on small intimacies, from a butterfly landing once on someone’s nose, to visits to a doctor (this comes up more than once), writing subplots, movements and reactions, and seeking patterns out of what otherwise one might never think to connect. Writing of guinea pigs enduring scientific progress in the poem “Autumn,” he offers: “I was at / the café the other day / with my friend Lexi / when she mentioned, offhand,  /she wished she could be held / by a lover the way time / itself held her. What / would you make of that, / dear pigs, if you could think? / I myself didn’t think to ask / because I was nervous and / over-caffeinated, but I think / she was referring / to gentleness, and possibly / acceptance, which are states / humans tend to crave, / believe it or not, / though we are not so good / at actually attaining them.” Throughout, Harvey’s poems exude a softer shade of surrealism than, say, the work of Gary Barwin or Stuart Ross, and one more fluid, offering a shimmering edge to an otherwise lyric of narratives that ease from straightforward into liquid, writing a document of uncertain times. “How best to commemorate / my role as witness of this moment?” he writes, as part of “MEAN BUTTERFLY.” “I could take a picture.” There is a melancholy, as well as an unease, threading through short scenes and quiet intimacies, as Harvey’s poems occasionally suggest an experience that is hard-won, with small wisdoms offered as lessons, prompts or even warnings. Later, in the same poem, ending: “There is not a single path forward / that’s painless.”

newly posted at periodicities: twenty-eight short takes on the prose poem

folio : twenty-eight short takes on the prose poem:

Mixed Signals : A Discussion Between Jonathan Ball and ryan fitzpatrick : Derek Beaulieu : Sarah Burgoyne : Michael e. Casteels : Sharmila Cohen : Conyer Clayton : S. Brook Corfman : Carrie Etter : Kate Feld : Howie Good : MC Hyland : Eve Joseph : emilie kniefel : Adam Lawrence : Nice Furniture, Idiot: Some Wandering Thoughts on the Prose Poem : Sara Lefsyk : Sylvia Legris : Amelia Martens : rob mclennan : in defence of prose poems : émilie kneifel and rob mclennan in conversation : Sawako Nakayasu : Evan Nicholls : Benjamin Niespodziany : Sandra Ridley : Ian Seed : Marcus Slease : Edward Smallfield : Lydia Unsworth : Lindsey Webb : lovingly edited and compiled by rob mclennan,


other folios from periodicities include:

Melanie Dennis Unrau : energy stories : folio

folio : Mark Goldstein : Paul Celan/100

SJ Fowler : a small folio of poets : engerland

Kyle Flemmer : Contemporary Haiku

folio : Peter Ganick (1946-2020)

RM Vaughan : Marsh Blue Violet: Queer Poetry from New Brunswick

folio : Ken Belford (1946-2020)

Jim Johnstone, Infinity Network

 

Two Sleep Through

the night, the lowering
balloon that stills
the chop and spill
of the lake, one awake,
or awake enough
in dream to follow
the stink of a fox
through the trees,
two asleep where the last
of a bonfire burns
the beach, balloons
into thought
without articulation,
without speech,
one awake, brightening
behind the bathroom
door while the other
waits, listens to the tap
foam foam foaming
at the mouth, white noise
drowning out the fox,
the fire, the balloon
inflating until it pops.

Toronto poet, editor and publisher Jim Johnstone’s sixth full-length poetry title is Infinity Network (Montreal QC: Signal Editions/Vehicule Press, 2022), a book that works to articulate elements of violence that ripple beneath the skin of culture; the ways in which infinity turns on itself and consumes its own tail, writing the ouroboros of deleted scenes, dehumanizing corporate culture and the echo chambers of social media, amid strains of isolation, self-harm and truthiness. “The problem is permission,” he writes, to open the poem “Trompe L’Oeil,” “and I told you / I don’t like to be touched. // The problem is / self-harm— // knuckles aligned to read: / HATE / LOVE.”

There are ways in which I hear echoes of Halifax poet Matt Robinson’s work [see my review of his latest here] in Johnstone’s poems, as though the two are sides of a similar coin, akin to a period of the 1960s, when John Newlove and Patrick Lane were crafting lyrics that held similar counter-echoes—a roughneck, intellectual lyric that saw Newlove leaning further into the intellectual, and Lane leaning further into the roughneck, and the conversational. Both Johnstone and Robinson, it would appear, craft portraits of inhabited space—of communal, community and individual narratives—carving their individual poems articulating intimate thinking, cultural moods and dark impulses. Leaning more meditational than Robinson’s physicality, Johnstone offers a collection of poems on how we relate to each other. “If you cut / through my line of sight,” he writes, as part of “Speaking Distance,” a poem subtitled “Queen’s Park, Toronto,” “the pages between us will fall / like artillery, like the spears that frame the southern wall / of the Assembly.”

There are long threads being composed by Johnstone through this collection, with his individual pieces and longer stretches feeling akin to a narrative shorthand, able to see the trees for the forest, but also the larger picture of how each of these different elements cohere into something larger, connecting the world to all that live within it. “Sober again. Don’t listen to me,” he writes, as part of the fifth in the ten-poem sequence “Deleted Scenes,” “in this state. // Conscious enough to develop / fever, blister from sheer depravity.” He writes as a pragmatist, or even an optimist, but one who aims to shine a light in dark places. Or, as he writes to end the poem “Identity as a Wormhole in a Hotel Window,” “One day everyone / who rents a room in this town will be different.”

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Michelle Berry

Michelle Berry is the author of three books of short stories and five previous novels. Her short story collection I Still Don’t Even Know You won the 2011 Mary Scorer Award for Best Book Published by a Manitoba Publisher and was shortlisted for a 2011 ReLit Award, and her novel This Book Will Not Save Your Life won the 2010 Colophon Award and was longlisted for the 2011 ReLit Award. her writing has been optioned for film and published in the UK.

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, a book of stories called, How to Get There from Here, changed my life because it made me suddenly feel like a real writer. I had published quite a few short stories before the actual book but holding a compilation of my stories in book form with my name on the cover was astonishing to me. I thought everyone would finally realize that I was a writer. I would be able to tell people what I do by referring to “the book.” And I thought that would give me more drive to write. I felt this way for quite a few of the next books that were published too – each book confirmed writer status, I guess-- but I would say that at this point the joy, the feeling of success, the wonder at the creation of a book is more about the process and less about the actual object. This book feels good because of the years I spent writing it, editing it, thinking about it. Because of the support of the background people -- the editors, publishers, publicists, etc.. Seeing it on publication day, in my hands, feels amazing, but it’s definitely not what defines my writing. What defines my writing and me as a writer is the process of actually writing.

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

Some people are extremely talented and can write in all different forms -- but I can’t. I’ve tried writing a kids’ book. I tried poetry when I was younger. And I realize I don’t have any talent when it comes to those things. I think that in order to write a novel or stories you have to be obsessed with novels and stories, you have to read them, study them, understand the techniques that go into writing them -- what works, what doesn’t work. I have spent all my adult life doing that for novels and stories -- I’m not sure how I would have the time to study poetry, non-fiction and kids’ books too. I would love to write some sort of memoir, but I realize that I would need a few years of studying the form of memoir before I could make a serious attempt at that. Maybe a fictional memoir would work?  

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?

The answer to this depends on what project you are talking about. Sometimes things start with a bang, sometimes things move slow as a slug. I usually start with a sentence and, actually, try not to start with an idea or theme. I just put one sentence down and see where it takes me. If that sentence works and creates a scene in my head, I might finish a book -- if it doesn’t, I move on. I usually get to about page 100 and then I do my outline. This is when I finally figure out what the book is about. I do outlines in different ways -- sometimes with sticky note timelines and a corkboard, sometimes just dot-notes on a sheet of paper beside me, sometimes a white board full of photographs and lines connecting everything, sometimes nothing if I can keep everything together in my head (which is usually not the case). First drafts are often close to their final shape (or final until an editor gets hold of it) because I edit copiously as I write. If I’m starting on chapter three one day, for example, I’ll start again at chapter one and continue until I get to chapter three and then move a bit forward from there. It’s a slow process.

4 - Where does a 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?

Again, it depends on what project I’m working on. Interference started as a bunch of short stories that I then pushed together with segues and it then morphed into a novel. But usually, I am either writing short stories or a novel, not both. And I tend to write in one long line and then during the editing process move things around and play with structure. I guess I think of my writing as some sort of pottery: start with a lump of clay and then pull that into something that looks a bit like the object it’s supposed to look like, and then shape it, twist it, mold it, score it, glaze it, fire it, etc.. and hope it comes out looking good. This is the same for stories and novels with me.

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

I enjoy doing readings when I’m actually doing them. But I tend to get nervous and stressed before I do them, so the lead up is horrible. And I do have to say that when I’m done doing public events, I always overthink what has happened and only notice the things I’ve said that didn’t make sense. Public events are counter to the creative process for me because they make me stressed, but they are also part of the creative process because when I talk to people who read my work it makes me both confident and humbled. Readers also make you understand your work, which is a fabulous thing. So, it’s a love/hate relationship, I guess.

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?

Hard question. I guess I’m trying to think about human relationships and how people communicate with each other and how we try to live. I guess I’m thinking of pain and sadness and happiness and love. The current questions in the world today are massive, I can’t even begin to tackle those, but I hope my characters are portraying ways of thinking and ways of living that make a reader think about and connect to the world I’ve created. I’m studying human life in my writing, I guess, and trying not to preach, just trying to show.

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

A writer should be open to things and should be watching the world around her. Our role should be to raise discussion, I guess. To make people think. To make readers empathetic to other ways of life.

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

Essential. Absolutely. An editor is the only one who knows your work as well as you do and can push you to make it the best possible creation. I’ve been very lucky with editors. They don’t seem to be pushy, which is amazing, they are like therapists -- the sounding board. They suggest changes that always make my work better. Jen Sookfong Leeand Paul Vermeersch at Wolsak and Wynn have been incredible. Paul fixed the opening for Prisoner and Chaplain, gave me suggestions to make it punchy and alive. Jen Sookfong Lee suggested so many things for Everything Turns Away – to tighten it, structure it better, give some characters more depth or loosen up on some characters. Editors are the gods of the publishing industry.

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

Funny, I would say the best writing advice I’ve been given has actually come from me – ha ha – I probably heard this somewhere but I can’t remember so I’m taking credit for it. When you are stuck somewhere in your novel, print the entire thing out and transcribe it from the beginning again – just type it all out again – and as you do that, edit it, add to it, delete parts of it, etc.. Physically write the novel again and again. This works for me, maybe not for others, and has helped me when I’m stuck and feeling like giving up. It’s the process of actually using your fingers, doing physical “labour” (typing) that helps you feel like you are working again and helps move you forward with your work.

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

I can move between those genres quite easily. I feel that I know the structures of novels and stories so well now that I know when I’m writing one or the other. I can feel it in the arc of the piece I’m writing, in the character development, in the plot -- where is the climax? Are the characters slowly or quickly fleshed out? I don’t think I’ve ever been writing a short story that became a novel or a novel that became a short story. It’s one or the other once I’ve started.

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?

Because I was running my bookstore for 5 years and not writing, I had no routine for a while. But now I’m that I’m free of the store I try to write a bit every day. Usually I need peace and quiet in the house, maybe some low volume music on, and all my chores done (which never happens!). I also like to be alone in the house and, with COVID-19, that has been impossible. I used to have more of a routine when I was just teaching online and writing. I had days of the week that I would focus on writing. But everything has been so up in the air for 5 years now (and because of COVID-19) that my routine has gone out the window. I do a lot of creating in bed at night staring at the ceiling fan. I’m too lazy to write things down so I tend to forget most of what I’ve imagined, but probably some of it sticks.

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

Reading. Definitely. When I can’t write, I read. And when I find a book that inspires me and makes me remember why I want to write, then I start writing again. Lately this has been happening with good TV programs too -- limited serials that have brilliant writing and can make me jump up and start working again.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Coffee. My parents always have a cappuccino in the morning and an espresso in the afternoon and our house always smelled like coffee. It’s a lovely smell.

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?

I think books come from everything around me. Exercise, cooking, music (for sure!) and visual art. I think writing comes from moving your furniture around, from travelling, from drinking a beer. Books come from your pandemic puppy trying to catch a butterfly. The whole world is books and books are the whole world.

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

Way too many to count. I have been so lucky in my life to know many many writers. They all inspire and influence and encourage me in so many ways. Their writing has brought me pleasure and awe. My colleagues never cease to amaze me. And the writers I don’t know, the ones I only know through words on a page, have helped me find a reason for my work.

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

Everything. I haven’t done enough in the world, in my life. I’m constantly mad at myself for not taking advantage of my position in the world. I’d like to travel more. I’d like to help people. I’d like to listen more. I’d like to just be a better person.

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 can’t imagine picking anything else. I have tried retail (owning my bookstore) and there are parts of it I loved, but a lot of it was just not me and really put a damper on my creativity and my time. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a vet or a doctor -- but my brain is not very good at retaining scientific information so that didn’t work. I did temp work all through university and didn’t like it at all. I’ve taught for many years, of course.  I’m just glad that I can be a writer right now. I can’t imagine what else I could be.

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

I wasn’t good at anything else and once I started taking writing seriously, I realized that I wanted to do nothing else.

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

Book: The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, by Elisabeth Tova Bailey and Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro. Not film, but TV, The White Lotus, Somebody, Somewhere.

20 - What are you currently working on?

A new novel. And I’m messing around with stories that have a bit to do with the pandemic -- not sure where they are going, but we’ll see.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Isabelle Garron, BODY WAS: Suites & their variations (2006-2009), trans. Eléna Rivera

 

I don’t have words
but your gestures
abound 

amid the ads
demands
doors

chasms of each sta
tion the voice—
consistent 

also in the announcement
made about a delay
for 

. train ahead

Described by Cole Swensen in her cover blurb as a “massive work of tantalizing minimalism” is Parisian poet, critic, editor and associate professor Isabelle Garron’slatest work in English translation, BODY WAS: Suites & their variations (2006-2009) , translated by Eléna Rivera (Brooklyn NY: Litmus Press, 2021), following Garron’s collections Corps fut (Flammarion, 2011), Qu’il Faille (Flammarion, 2007) and Face event contre (2002), translated by Sarah Riggs as Face Before Against (Litmus Press, 2008). Produced as an expansive work, the nearly three hundred pages of BODY WAS is a book-length sequence of small moments, gestures and expressions stretched to incredible lengths; stretched not as a way of thinning, but as a way to articulate and pause, each moment fragmented into portions, and where lightning strikes in such slow-motion that every spark appears, if in the briefest sense, self-contained: brilliant, held and heard. “then a shadow / on bodies,” she writes, early on in the collection, “bore / ours in count / er // form naked // in the full / moo // n black [.]” This is an incredible collection of short bursts, a lyric of a single, extended thread or tether, segmented into line and word breaks, offering small points of thought, image and sound. The collection begins with an overheard death, and moves across domestic patter, conversations on the daily immediate, of arrival and being, and someone waiting to be born. “we arrive     .it is night    .you will be born this morning [.]” The fragmented sense of line and lyric, as well as the unexpected placements of punctuation, force the reading to simultaneously suggest a rush, but also a slowness, to catch every element as it stands. Segmented into suites and variations, BODY WAS exists not as an accumulation, but as a singular whole, writing segments that articulate the slippery movement of time itself, both immediate and immediately past-tense. There are elements of this collection that read as a set of improvisations, comparable to works by Robert Creeley, William Carlos Williams or Fred Wah, yet composed in a loose narrative structure that would even allow a reader to pick up at any point. As Rivera writes to open her short afterword, “Points in Time: Where the Body Was”:

It takes a certain amount of courage in this age of the internet, where a plethora of words abound, to let the stillness and blank page speak. What I admire in Isabelle Garron’s Body Was is its combination of lyricism and silence, the rhythm of the language and the way that she is able to let events, the overheard and experienced, move in and out of silence, into the body of the page. What remains of experience is stored in the body and what is written is already what was—the moment is gone. Time keeps moving. What was experienced is no longer the present. The experience is carried in the body. The body makes the text.