Rob Mclennan's Blog, page 343

U of Alberta writers-in-residence interviews: Tim Bowling (2010-11)

For the sake of the fortieth anniversary of the writer-in-residence program (the longest lasting of its kind in Canada) at the University of Alberta, I have taken it upon myself to interview as many former University of Alberta writers-in-residence as possible [see the ongoing list of writers here]. Seethe link to the entire series of interviews (updating weekly) here.
Tim Bowling’s 13th collection of poems, The Duende of Tetherball , will appear in the fall of 2016, and his 5thnovel, The Heavy Bear, will appear in the spring of 2017.
He was writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta during the 2010-11 academic year.
Q: When you began your residency, you’d been publishing books for about fifteen years. Where did you feel you were in your writing? What did the opportunity mean to you?
A: Time. Time to think, to write, to feel validated as a working author (and a big part of the validation, of course, was the cold, hard cash). At the time, I had a number of projects on the go, was highly motivated creatively, but also highly stressed financially. So the opportunity was an absolute godsend.
Q: Were you solely working to further and complete various projects, or did you see your time as more of an opportunity to expand your repertoire?
A: Both, really. I’m usually finishing projects while others are incubating. That’s been my process from the start, but it’s intensified over the past decade. During the U of A residency, I was completing a book of poems and writing the draft of a novel (mostly, though, I was working with other writers on their work – that’s usually what a WIR does, as you know).
Q: How did you engage with students and the community during your residency?
A: Invitations to classrooms (including at a high school), but mostly writers with manuscripts contacted me by e-mail to arrange a meeting in my office.
Q: Was this your first residency?
A: My third, but my first of such length.
Q: How does your experience there compare to other residencies you’ve done?
Q: What do you see as your biggest accomplishment while there? What had you been hoping to achieve?
A: A great deal more money. Otherwise similar.
Q: Looking back on the experience now, how do you think it impacted on your work?
A: It bought me time to write without the usual level of financial anxiety.
Q: The bulk of writers-in-residence at the University of Alberta have been writers from outside the province. As an Edmonton-based writer, how did it feel to be acknowledged locally through the position?
A: Yeah, that was a fantastic part of it. But, to be really clear, Edmonton has been incredibly welcoming and supportive of me as a writer right from the beginning. And the U of A is a big part of that. I owe this city and its institutions a great deal.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Douglas Piccinnini

Douglas Piccinnini’s debut collection of poems, Blood Oboe, was published by Omnidawn in 2015 and earlier that year, Story Book : a novella appeared with The Cultural Society. His writing has been featured by The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day, Antioch Review, Lana Turner, The Poetry Project Newsletter, The Seattle Review, Verse, and The Volta—among other journals. He lives in Lambertville, NJ.
1 - How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?My first book(s) Blood Oboe (Omnidawn) and Story Book (The Cultural Society) appeared within months of one another. They have been an extension of my life in a very practical way: the poems in Blood Oboe are, in some sense, the document of my life for the past decade: moving to New York, living in New York, leaving New York and all the parentheticals in between. As a novella, Story Book is in many ways a companion text to the poems in Blood Oboe.
At its best, I hope that this work has the potential to change the thinking lives of people around me (and distant to me) more than my own life.
It might be foolish to think that my own book would change my life, though the making of these books was a way of getting to know the world.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction? Poetry first came to me in the form of Religion. I was raised Roman Catholic. When I was young I prayed. A prayer is a kind of poem. I prayed in poems. And, I often thought in terms of a spiritual language, a language that reached for insight.
That part of my life is in the past now, but I think I approach poetry with a spirituality that tries to set the days in their place—:  A poetry concerned with the passing time and the coming time. To remember is to travel back in time and to dream is to travel forward in time. But time is a warped thing and each minute asks new questions and confronts what you thought you thought you knew in different ways.
At present, I am interested in a poetics that confronts the idea of linear time.
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 like to work on writing in multiples. I mean: to approach a subject or subjects from a number of different angles, like a painter might make a series of studies that hang together.
A feeling arrives in a pattern or, a pattern arrives like a feeling and I begin writing.
The poems are the notes: they communicate with other poems and other writing.  Instead of attempting to break down my impulses and make the poem confess something it didn’t do or doesn’t know, I’ll move on to another poem and retain some of the energy involved in the making of the previous poem.  
4 - Where does a poem or work of fiction usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning? A poem begins with the compulsion to begin and ends with compulsion to begin something else. 
I don’t know yet. I’d like to be able to slip either way in terms of process.  A book is the fetish of the poem and the fetish of a life in poems. 
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?Public readings are fun but feed into the cult of the author. I’d like to hire people to read my poems—people that don’t think of themselves as poets and people who do—to put the words in their mouths, to have them live the words a little.
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?The only question is the question of time. From there: the horrors and joys of life are revealed. The question of time lived in resistance—in a reality of conflict and contradiction.
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?The current role of the writer in public and in private is to think globally and act locally. To be an action of peace and engaged in an active inquiry toward justice and peace.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?The physical act of writing is mostly a solitary effort but its intended effect suggestions a broader physical and intellectual connection in and of the world. To make writing is to admit to yourself the possibility that what you do or what you mean may become part of someone else’s life—a good editor understands this.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?It’s important to have a good pair of shoes and, something to wear to a funeral.
10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?It’s more difficult for other people to understand when the work changes direction. It feels OK for me to follow an impulse.
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 like to drink coffee and work in a café.  I like to read over what I’ve made. After, I like to have a drink and read what I’ve made and feel the floor building under my feet. Though this doesn’t always happen.
I’d prefer not to write where I live but I do. I like to travel. Being in other spaces, places that aren’t clear to me.
12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?I’m a very private person that likes to live in public. I’ll go for a walk in the town I live in. I’ll sit in a bar or a café beyond a comfortable amount of time—waiting for something to happen. I’ll wait past when it’s OK. And then, when nothing happens I’ll wait longer.
When I lived in Brooklyn, I would walk for miles over bridges and back home. A couple of months ago I was in New York for a reading. The night before, I stayed at my friend Aaron Hodges’s place in Greenpoint. We used to play music together. He plays in a band called “Longshoreman.” On a bright fall morning, we walked from his apartment over the Pulaski Bridge into Queens and then, over the Queensboro Bridge and into Manhattan—went to Central Park, etc. He had an appointment and had split off around lunchtime. I walked around the park for a while then walked to Chelsea. It’s not that far of a walk but you can go through a lot of different parts of the city just by walking a few miles. A subway ride can hide the neighborhoods.
13 - What fragrance reminds you of home? Which home? My home has been and will always be wherever my body is while I am alive. I like the smell of my body. I don’t like cologne or perfume because it conceals this.
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?The culture of books begets books. Wouldn’t it be nice if a strong oral tradition existed, returned? Music is very important to me, probably more important than books. Often when I am working on something at home, I’ll stop and sit down at the piano for a while and play something. I’ll play something I don’t know or something I do and that is refreshing. Then I can usually go back to writing again. When I write poems, I often listen to very repetitive music; music that is like a landscape of rocks on a desert. I am listening to “A Brown Lung Hollering” by Vincent Gallo right now.
15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?This list is incomplete: John Ashbery, Cassandra Wilson, Bob Dylan, Virginia Woolf, David Bowie, Lightnin’ Hopkins, John Cage, 16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?  I’d like to go to Antarctica; there’s lots of poetry there but not a lot of people get there.
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 deeply about cinema and about putting people and objects into a space: in a scene and in an image; trapped in time, in a timing.
For me, film is the most powerful, complete medium of all art.
18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else? It’s an easy medium to travel with. It’s a lonely medium too. You can write in transit but you can’t always play guitar or piano—writing is an accessory for me and, it is accessible in that sense. I can finish a poem with only a few inexpensive tools.
19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?A few books that have recently been on my mind: Claudia Rankine’s Citizen; Amiri Baraka’s Blues People; Ernst Meister’s Of Entirety Say the Sentence; Wallless Space; In Time’s Rift translated by GrahamFoust and Samuel Frederick. I am reading Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, right now.
A few recent films that have been on my mind: Tangerine (dir.) Sean S. Baker and written by Baker and Chris Bergoch; Beasts of No Nation (dir.) Cary Fukunaga.
I find myself returning and turning to (in no specific order) Rae Armantrout, Paul Celan, Emily Dickinson and Paul Éluard. I keep a copy of Leaves of Grass in the bathroom. What’s not to like about Walt Whitman except that so much of contemporary American poetry is full of poets doing impressions of Walt Whitman taking chances.
20 - What are you currently working on?I am finishing a manuscript of poems called Grave Year Soul and working into a novel called The End Of My Life So Far.
12 or 20 (second series) questions;

new from above/ground press: mclennan, Bolster, Smith, Tate, timewell, Saklikar + Mangold,

KING KONG
rob mclennan
$4
See link here for more information

Three Bloody Words : 20th anniversary edition w/ a new afterword by the author
Stephanie Bolster
$5
See link here for more information

A New Love/ An Aching Stone
Pete Smith
$4
See link here for more information

Vesper Vigil
Bronwen Tate
$4
See link here for more information

Odds Are
lary timewell
$4
See link here for more information

After the Battle of Kingsway, the bees—
Renée Sarojini Saklikar
$4
See link here for more information

A Copyist, an Astronomer, and a Calendar Expert
Sarah Mangold
$4
See link here for more information

keep an eye on the above/ground press blog for author interviews, new writing, reviews, upcoming readings and tons of other material ; including the recent backlist/rarities lists of some twenty-three years of titles!

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
March-May 2016
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy of each

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; outside Canada, add $2) to: rob mclennan, 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9 or paypal (above). Scroll down here to see various backlist titles (many, many things are still in print).

Review copies of any title (while supplies last) also available, upon request.

Forthcoming chapbooks by Stephen Collis, Lesley Yalen, Geoffrey Young, John Barton, Neil Flowers and Braydon Beaulieu, as well as issue #10 of Touch the Donkey!

Rosmarie Waldrop, Gap Gardening: selected poems

Throughout Waldrop’s connected careers as poet, translator, and publisher, the world is established, tentatively, via a constant negotiation between languages, texts, cultures, histories, between forms and grammars, between familiarity and strangeness, self and other, word and silence, just as, also, it is a negotiation of those more knotty fissures between home and refuge, life and writing, matter and transcendence, tradition and innovation. Waldrop’s is a poetry of betweens, of crossings, of differences and relations. Metonymy takes precedence over metaphor; differences become contiguous rather than equivalent. “I enter at a skewed angle,” Waldrop writes in the notebook, “The Ground is the Only Figure,” “through the fissures, the slight difference.” “Gap gardening,” Waldrop calls it, “the unbedding of the always.” (Nikolai Duffy, “INTRODUCTION”)
It’s difficult to overstate the excitement of a new poetry title by Providence, Rhode Island poet, editor, translator and publisher Rosmarie Waldrop, and even more for the two hundred pages-plus of her Gap Gardening: selected poems (New York NY: New Directions, 2016). Edited by Nikolai Duffy and the author, Gap Gardening selects work from seventeen of Waldrop’s collections produced over a forty-year span: The Aggressive Ways of the Casual Stranger (1972), The Road Is Everywhere, or Stop This Body (1978), When They Have Senses (1980), Nothing Has Changed (1981), Differences for Four Hands (1984), Streets Enough to Welcome Snow (1986), The Reproduction of Profiles (1987), Lawn of Excluded Middle (1993), Reluctant Gravities (1999), Shorter American Memory(1988), Peculiar Motions (1990), A Form / Of Taking / It All (1990), A Key into the Language of America (1994), Split Infinites (1998), Blindsight (2003), Love, like Pronouns (2003), Splitting Image (2005) and Driven to Abstraction (2010). Waldrop’s poetry, predominantly shaped via the prose poem, is constructed out of incredibly dense phrases and sentences; a poetry that punches from point to point, ideas and narratives that quilt in unusual shapes and contortions.











Looking at a picture of the landscape is easier than looking at the landscape. The past, upon scrutiny. Not just postwar focus, but deep and fetid. Interval eclipsed. By fog misunderstood as bird and egg, shadow by shadow. Once father and mother dissolve: dragonflies, mosquitos, missing ribs? The sign for hand in the upper right corner perhaps indicates ownership. Culture gives us these ideas. Depending on the number of chambers in the heart, trepidations of the flesh. (“Split Infinites”)
Waldrop’s poetry is constructed out of a sequence of sentences, tangentially direct and fiercely intelligent, engaged in a philosophy of meditations, writing and politics, as well as the ways in which language can accumulate and twist towards alternate meanings. As she writes to open the poem “from Hölderlin Hybrids,” from Blindsight: “The world was galaxies imagined flesh. Mortal. What to think now?” In his introduction to the collection, Duffy situates the uniqueness of Waldrop’s place in American writing: “Born in Germany in 1935, but resident in the United States since 1958, Waldrop is both an American poet with a continental European accent, and a European poet whose foreignness is one of her principally American characteristics. It is also for this reason that it is difficult to know quite where to place Waldrop: her work shares and develops many of the concerns of the post-second World War American avant-garde but at the same time it does not quite fit neatly into any of the critical molds or theoretical pronouncements of American experimental poetics. Similarly, Waldrop is closely connected to innovative poetries in French and German, but she comes at them, despite her own German roots, at a cultural and linguistic divide.”
THIS TIME OF DAY, hesitation can mean tottering on the edge, just before the water breaks into the steep rush and spray of the fall. What could I do but turn with the current and get choked by my inner speed? You tried to breathe against the acceleration, waiting for the air to consent. All the while, we behaved as if this search for a pace were useful, like reaching for a plank or wearing rain coats. I was afraid we would die before we could make a statement, but you said that language presupposed meaning, which would be swallowed by the roar of the waterfall.

TOWARD MORNING, WALKING along the river, you tossed simple objects into the air which was indifferent around us, though it moved off a little, and again as you put your hand back in your pocket to test the degree of hardness. Everything else remained the same. This is why, you said, there was no fiction. (“Feverish Propositions”)

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Jeff Bien

Jeff Bien is an internationally acclaimed poet whose work has been published, translated and performed in more than forty countries. He is the author of numerous books which have received critical acclaim in Canada and abroad. His newest collection, In a Time of No Song , with an introduction by A.F. Moritz was released in the fall of 2015, by Exile Editions.

His work was recently celebrated by some of Canada’s foremost musicians and writers, and was be released in 2016, as both a CD and video compilation entitled, “Song in a time of No Song”.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
I could write an anecdotal response but it would invite an autobiographical self, of a remotely auspicious young man, and in all honesty it’s a work, as a species of literature, I'd rather not recall.  What began as that book, seeking in language, a seeker that would become immolated in the sought, the consciousness that bookends a single silent letter, burning the effigy of itself, in essence the eulogy of what was the life of those early words. 

The query is akin to asking how does the nascency of a first love, or conversely the inaugural experience of the death of that love, change a life, but for the awakening itself.  Many lifetimes later, in this life, there abides a deep nostalgia, from which the apparent and transparent nature of this journeying arises. Something of the rending of that garment is echoed in my most recent work, In a time of No Song, the same conch of that first thread of light.

Poetry requites an invitation of our many selves, which invites others, as other, and in that I too give thanks, remembering its beginner’s mind, long beyond that youthful stardust falling. The initial grandeur that is apparent in the preliminary journey, in its premonition, projects myriad adventure, but its splendor lies in a greater simplicity, a far more precious task and taskmaster, as sentience, not sentimentality, and thus a rarer achievement. Its simple magic is a gift of wonder, to wonder at.

It is better to let the poems speak for themselves; the silence between, above and within the word. A voice once desired, arrives, innocently, if ever at all, the poems burning effigies of themselves. It may be the mythic Babel but it shines by re-gilding the parable.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
A first love is itself a mystery that is spoken best in whatever form it manifests, as that mystery reveals itself. What we love, or find devotion in, has its own infinitude, imminent and manifest destiny, a prerogative of chance, the illusion that dissolves into the brick and mortar of happenstance.

I don’t presume to know what invited the form, though it is unspeakable, known and unknowable, a magnitude and equanimity beyond, I believe, any sophomoric argument of aesthetic or taste.

Memorable work arises in ubiquitous form. Better to let the form itself be the arbiter and/or argument of the formless. It is derivative to say that a poem is the abode of the most distilled form of language, save chant or the lamplighter of silence, of which it is both emissary and exemplar. If there is a mea culpa it would be that poetry is the silence that can be spoken, the miracle of awakening in one word, every other. This is perhaps why I came to it, or it to me, rather than fiction.

Of course, there is a revisionist version, when in rare moments I remember the raconteur, he in me, both of us in the Dionysian infancy recalled. At thirteen, on a solo train trip across the Canadian prairies, in what I now know to be the proverbial mystical hour (then it was simply the middle of the night), a pretty girl named Gwen, who just hours before had told me she was an atheist, placed her foot between my thighs, unsure still whether the former birthed my spiritual quest and the latter my incendiary past.

And again at fifteen, wandering the streets of Amsterdam, all night long, alone, lost in the labyrinthine cobblestone, I wandered half-unknowingly into a brothel, where a naked goddess (or so I thought then), with a cobra draped about her neck, sat on my lap and uncertain of which to be more frightened of, or prostrated to, pollinated the poet in my blood.

This may be the truer poetic birthright, or rebirth, and the elliptical eternal recurrence that brought me to poetry, the true insignia as seeker becoming the sought, not simply signifying,  exonerating and exonerated of the fiction of `I’, though here all journeying may, in different forms of the formless begin supernally the same.     

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 discourage the usury of the usual infatuation with the endgame that has become so common place; the contemporaneous beacon of a bereft identity, the false understanding that literature is a project, rather than the work of one’s life.

It is in this haloed middle class materialism of mind, the refracted ideation, as an ideology of notion appears, rather than the preciousness, of the fire that is immolated in the immolation of the poetry itself. And so in listening deeply, the inflections of an indigenous voice arise, polyphony of intonation, and intention, and a disinterested silence hulking about, its own ubiquity.

In the absence of irony, as artifice, and conceit, the usual liminal self reflection, so ever-present  in the dystopian view, abides the essential transformative and transcendental nature that is a gnosis of a poem, yet a rare bird, a flint of awakening, in both revelation and revolution.

The epigram of the child that shouts the emperor has no clothes is the garment that is nakedness itself. In the moment of inception, longevity is inconsequential. A poem is like a revelation – literally, that which is revealed – the apparition of which appears in the shadow play of an ineffable moment, and enduringly moves without movement, effortlessness born of effort, into the world.

I have always written longhand, ghost-woken by the phantom limb of the litmus of the word, and have been cursed and so blessed by the peripatetic and elliptical nature of its invitation. It would be better to ask instead the negative description of writer’s block, to look deeply into the blank quintessential apocalyptic white page, and see the mysterium trendum of suns, moon, stars, and the see-er, in the unseen, as scribe.

Writing is not the imprimatur of journaling, not the still life of the picture show of life, but the journey itself. The notion of writing as a project has in many ways maligned the reality of life as a writer; devotion, vocation, practice, a verdict of the righteous instrument of speech. The poem writes us, its greatest encomia most deeply inscribed when refused.

If one counts on the abacus, long enough, reciting thank you, there comes a supernal moment, when the beads count you. So too does the word write the one by whom it is written.

As an example, in my most recent work, a book on consciousness, Songs of Non-Separation, I have distilled a hundred pages, having written several thousand. The devotion, and dedication, is spontaneously gifted, by simply staying true to the invitation that is mysteriously given. I have been fortunate as my hands and heart have always been filled with the emptiness of that work, thankfully, though I've never thought of literature as a project.
 
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?
Just as there is no beginning nor end, in the ascendant consciousness, so too with the written word. What is about to be, has been born already, unborn and undying, the midwife perhaps being the water-bearer of language itself.

What moves the prime mover, is without movement, as in the mystical understanding of beginningless before beginning. How then can a poem find empiricism for the birth of a poem, and rationally be traced.

The project has always been praise, the nag of silence and melancholy magnifying in sadness, joy. You can hear the rough drafts unfold in the heart, the endlessly rumoured shooting star, the curriculum vitae of shadows. The refusal to give up the gift is the gift itself.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
Both can be a pilgrimage, to be reclusive can be to be inclusive, if seen in a mystical light -- anonymity as equanimity. In either incarnation it is a gift, know voiceless as voice, a world of appearance in the appearance of the world, each season the same

My last major reading/concert mirrored an overexposure of light on film, as I have led a relatively reclusive life.  Yet that has not always been the case. When I was travelling more and would read or speak at universities, or larger venues, I would encourage an attitude of refuge and sanctuary. The work, fidelity and accountability to a higher self holds the higher water mark of a travelling song.

Most recently, in the fall of 2015, I was honoured, and commensurately humbled, by a group of some of our finest writers and musicians who gracefully gathered together to celebrate the launch of my newest book and music, in an evening recorded and videotaped for a documentary and live CD, with the appropriate title “Song In a Time of No Song”, invoking the name of the collection.

I was not able to attend, but would have enjoyed the collaborative nature, and communion of both the music, and word, though in answer to the question, the readings, have little effect or affect, on the creative process, and in general I have chosen to participate in the occasion sparsely and most usually in conjunction with musicians, in concert with reading, speaking, and without the usual trilogy of poets.     

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?
To be a poet is to be a scribe of a beautiful illusion, a skiff of thought song joy-breaking the clipped wing of the secret language, the rivers of silence beneath that word in which every other appears, the mythic rainbow that is re-gilded in the least among us, the opus mundi of starlight itself; to say thank you to whatever invitation is gifted, the ordinary occasion of grace, the Braille of a lover’s touch that gifts a divine glance.

All poetry is departure -- seeking an essential self, the logos of language. A poem is the embodiment of message and messenger, best when the two become one, the riddle that is the answer without a question, the mind no longer in diaspora from the heart. It arises from emptiness in the realms of form, contoured by the earthly colours brought into the alchemical witness of presence. When the poet disappears into the poem, the intangible and tangible find innate union, the theoretical becomes an argument of the ad hominem itself.

I am less interested in the theoretical, discursive or didactic chat on poetry, than the truer witness of the word writing itself. It is this kind of market square bartering, where scholars horse trade silences, that the song is lost in the empiricism of mind. Examples of this abound, eternally recurrent, in every art form and are ubiquitous in all realms, as a caveat to the consciousness of both aesthetic and ascetic, not beauty in the eye of the beholder, but the beholder awakened in the eye of beauty.

I find much of contemporaneous poetry, in its reductionism, the dialectic of deconstructed architecture, the contagion of colloquial construct, the all too predictable litany of the last lines of irony, that even when they are well written lean into the vernacular, slipping too easily into the omnipresent gratuitous corner stamp conversation, and lower the water mark that is the luster and logos of language. Of course I understand what it is attempting, as in all poetic. Some of it magnificently succeeds. Yet it seems more often a casus belli, for stripping language from the garland of language, rather than magical and mystical silence which all poetry most deftly belies.

Its omnipresence eclipses, temporally I believe, the music, and the breath and breadth of language, that can both communicate and find communion, in another’s heart, (dare I say, even, truth, not as ideation, but as reality).

Of course in every poetic, form there is contiguous reply, even as it is evolves, of the voiceless that each can hear in the conch of posterity that canonizes posthumously the mantle that creates the creator, of that canon. It is a dialectically discursive discourse. I too have earlier work, where I am shouting epithets and silence from the rooftops. You wouldn’t know it was authored by, the same scribe, in the ellipsis of autobiographical self.

Poetry would not be poetry were these kinds of descriptions not subtle and sublime, a wand waving over a wand. Thankfully they are no paradigms, algorithms, scriptural or doctrinal blueprints, and so all forms of poetry arise and rise, each in their own seed and season. The questions are what they have always been, the imprimatur of the eternities, imminent and manifest, simply in the matter and form of the contemporaneous. There is in each form, to plagiarize an old bard, plenty of room at the top.

It is the common mood to equivocate upon taste to suit the most present incarnation of the approbation and propriety that have become the currency of the conceit of the apparent creative freedom, canon as creed. (This, as curator of a more substantial audience, remains an assignation, a blind security, the blood sport of charming contradictions).

This lack of lacking a truer absence, takes guise as presence, having fallen prey to the semiotic conceit of a hegemonic selfhood which conflates no narrative and narrator, forsaking the fiction as a meritorious metafiction  as by forsaking  that which is neither, narrator nor narrative, proudly coronating the fragment for the whole. The intention of the work is contingent upon the attention, antiquity as modernity,  antiquated as avant-garde, for the latter births the former. This is as true for the text as for the reader, in the duality of all subject and object relationship. 

Art may imitate life, the ellipsis of art imitating life imitating art, and the best of it, distills what cannot be said, wondrously, in the language of disinterested silence, and more alchemically, to bestill silence itself. If it is true a picture can be worth a thousand words, then it is yet more true that one word may speak a thousand pictures.

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?
As in the picture show of Plato’s Republic where poets are perennially banished, its utter insignificance is its significance; an interlocutor of the numina. Equally it is sacred vocation in its ability to speak the silence of the social contract, (shouting silence from the rooftops) the poetic of the omnibus of virtue or moral imperative and is a sentinel of speech in the realpolitik of self. 

The poet has always been a heretic in the pursuit of essence, freedom over knowledge. Though no longer largely in vogue, poetry yet remains the vanguard of the prophetic, visionary or romantic, the milk and honey of the promised land. circling dry wells. To be a scribe is to witness and be witness of witness, of whatever invitation is gifted, the sacred circle, that circles dry wells, filled with the emptiness of the ordinary occasion of grace, the splendour of brokenness as unbroken.

The world is large enough, for the smallest of voices, and small enough for the largest of voices, to emerge and merge, the mirage as oasis, the miracle of awakening in one word. The divine irony -- perhaps the only irony worth speaking of in this culture – is that work must be known through the work itself; to wake Lazarus from the grave, to give life to death, not merely to provoke, or to outrage, but to pre-emptively awake.

In the epigram of literature, “it is best to show not tell”, lies a simple yet profound truth, though rarely telling can be showing. To invite the darkness in its negative description, the illusion shines light. As I’ve said in the title poem of a forthcoming collection, The Poet Sings, `literature is hope that is earned’. 

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Rarely, over the years, have I had another eye, arrogating upon the work of the ‘I’. Though, I have always been open to criticism when it is earned, and well intended, rather than the serendipity of the retributive, apologetic, or simply whimsical, I have rarely worked with editors, and even those few have dwindled, though more recently, a few trusted pairs of eyes, and hearts, have gifted a deepened glance, to polish the stone.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
“Forgive them they know not what they do” (and so the Buddha’s teaching on ignorance). Or “Come, even if you have broken your vow, a thousand times Come, yet again, come, come.” 

In both, the grandiosity of the curiosity is put to rest when the seeker becomes the sought, in that sublime silence. 

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to songwriting)? What do you see as the appeal?
In its former incarnation as an arts channel `Bravo’, in the not so distant past, asked me this same  question, as did Emile Martel in Paris years ago, as well as many other interlocutors and intermediaries of various media.

The cognitive answer cannot but defeat itself.  Seen with a different eye they are the same, seen with the same eye they may be different. Songs I think are more like a postcard from above, perhaps a belated letter in a bottle, to whomever finds it washed up on a shore… maps to maps. Cut the tether of sail and kite strings, and they are each other, song as poem as song… sea, ship and sailor without the shore.

Poetry is the perennial solitary endeavour. It does not afford the collaborative joy that music so often gifts. All the hyphenated genres, and the purist traditions, classical to blues to African, are in essence, some way, poetry by their very nature, as are the song of the Bhagavad Gita, the song of Shams and Shamans, in the fire as the fire, the song of the Tao Te Ching,  and the Song of Songs.  They are all poem song, gifting the extasis that is the divine heart of silence requiting the silence of the divine heart.  The heartbeat of metre and movement, breath and stride: rhythm conjugating the music that is conjugal in the union.

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 have been nocturnal, and have had a deep meditative practice. When the veils are lifted, the day has no beginning or end, as with creator as creation, itself, the ellipsis of the hour hand, chasing the minute hand, chasing the second hand. To live awake in a moment, is enough, to know the changelessness and change in each moment, the sacred thread, of the supernal, the celestial and quantum, the snowflake and fingerprint, in their difference, the same.

I write every day, and have always been prostrate to that fidelity: from hospitals, lovers beds, incendiary street corners, and now a deeper refuge, the sanctuary of the higher (not hierarchal) self, where there is no distance or time, but only to live moment by moment. Though it is true everything has already been written, it is commensurately true that in the un-writing of it, it is forever born.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I haven’t ever had that affliction, if anything the antithesis, inflicted by the inverse – spontaneous and calm urgency both prolific and prescient. What is truly inspired, cannot be expired, but for the immemorial mnemonic, the eternal recurrence of eternality.

There are hills of stars, far and near enough away, arrowheads flaming the passion that kindles compassion. Both shine like the moon and sun, shadows of the proverbial candle that shadow light the universe.  There seems to be much talk --  talking heads of talking points, talking of writer’s block as it were some kind of endemic pandemic, the vagrancy of a mime or mimicry of writer’s block, as if it were itself the volition of hypochondria, wilfully self imposed.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
First and foremost, the fragrance of our own heart, in the absence of duality, and separation, most eminently in our own essential nature, the fragrance of awakedness and love – non-separation, the house becoming a home, a pilgrimage wherever two stranger meet.

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?
As an epigram, it sounds profound, or at least instructive, at first glance, in its rudimentary understanding that a writer must read, in order to write. The ellipsis of the song becoming the singer, the dancer singing, the singer painting, the poet a painter of words, each unveiled, as  other, in the confluence of all consciousness. From this multiplicity of singularity, the plurality of Oneness is borne.

If you realize this in its truest incarnation, then books arise out of the proverbial book of life. This does not mean that we are absolved of the requisite apprenticeship. The former ends where the latter begins.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
I have some five thousand books, but the most important, is the one that cannot be written. Sometimes it is good to forget all that we have learned, a philanthropic understanding, that births the most lasting work of all, forever present. 

In its idiosyncratic, and synchronistic union there is no separation between the exterior and interior. The work of life, is the life of the work, however trumped up and as much of a contortionist greeting card this may sound like. It is a truism that work is its own best encomia, and a euphemism that in the many lives in this one, could name that namelessness.

All of the canon, is forever being reconfigured, triangulated, constructed, deconstructed, reconstructed. All of literature is yet in mind, the best of it at the end of mind, where the heart and so divine imagination begins. Art imitates life as life imitates art, and so to outrage the mind, is enrage the heart, by engaging their apriori union.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I drove seven hundred miles in the night to Casablanca for a Gauloises cigarette, (though  I didn’t smoke), when I was in my early twenties, only to see a stone grinder whose face mirrors still, the difference between adventure and the deeper travelling inside.

I have experienced, both, an incendiary and ecstatic journey, lovers and the beloved, commensurate with deep sacrifice and austerity, borne of a deep attrition with health that has radically transformed both the work, and the consciousness that informs it. Nothing is left undone in the quintessential sacred circle, the prosperity that is poverty and the poverty of prosperity, the privilege of birth right and right of birth, the mystical revelation that we are already on both sides of the battle, and of the river, and so of the word.

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?
The verdant nature of self, is itself the verdict, and the chattel of that knowledge is the aperture of our essential freedom. Only in mind, is writing different than any other activity or vocation, though the supernal irony, is in that very divine imagination, and departure, lies its own dharma, forever polishing the same stone.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
If I could answer that question, you wouldn’t be asking it of me, for I would be doing that very something else. But for the sake of the straw man, I could say a revolutionary, from the loci of this moment, were I to have been borne in a different locus, and gifted a different spiritus. Perhaps it is a projection, but for the bibliography of the bloodline, that encouraged the word as an abode.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
The Gita , Wilde’s De Profundis, Kazantzakis’ The Saviors of God, excerpts from The Book of Splendour, and the commensurate splendour of far too many books to be rendered here. I can’t recall a great film, as with Yogananda, finding myself watching the light that blooms on the screen. That celestial aurora is the closest I understand now to a great film, though I recognize the worth and sacrifice of the form, in its higher water mark, imaginatively as a visual diary, documentary etc.

20 - What are you currently working on?
I am just now completing a new book, Songs of Non-Separation, culled from a clutch of many thousands of pages, (most illegible), a life’s work on consciousness teachings, which includes chapters, which I call songs, on everything from philosophy to geopolitics, meditation and the breath of the mystical traditions, a talk on Love and lovers, atheism as theism, quantum physics (observer as observed) etc. I am also completing two new poetry collections A Koan of Love and a collection of prose poems, The Poet Sings.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Phil Hall, Conjugation

  Orange chair    blue porch    white Stetsonam re-reading      Cold Mountain   translated by Red Pine
  woke to fog    a cremation dream    it is garbage day
Olson:     words made to taste    like accuracy    pincers  the king birds are back    an osprey shrieks
in the wooded swamp    ice reigns yet    first the school bus
  no motor    no driver   passes    only one child so far    up frontthen the Trueloves    would it hurt them to signal    bastards
  despair is elitist    do not count pages   forget    the work
w & k    both built   from 2 Vs   or 3   end up with only    or  deface the cartoon    until the joke    is fearful
Perth, Ontario poet Phil Hall’s latest collection is Conjugation (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2016), a complex, engaged and expansive collection that continues his meditative explorations into the lyric fragment, collage, poetics and the deep self. “Conjugation,” according to one online source, is “the modification of a verb from its basic form,” and Hall’s poetry manages a deep and serious play in the way words are constructed, pulling apart the mechanics of language and how it interacts with ideas (a play that has, it would appear, deeply influenced the work of Ottawa poet Pearl Pirie). As he writes: “but there’s a fee / a fee that sees    & hears wonky // fe-ces   we’re were   subtler/fugues   etc [.]” Similar to Dennis Cooley, Hall engages the mis-heard word, the mis-step, and runs with it, managing to make connections where there otherwise might not have been.
Over the past few poetry collections, Hall has shifted from his more overt engagements with Ontario gothic/rural, including his own childhood and history of abuse, to a more overt engagement of multiples—poetics, “the prison of metaphor,” pulling apart the minutae of language, personal history, direct observations and his immediate environment (including the Ontario wilds of his Perth homestead)—each holding similar weight throughout, woven together as a precise, dense and thorough series of ongoing threads.
Constructed out of an opening poem, seven suite-sections and a coda, the short poem-fragments in Conjugation follow a similar tone and structure set in a number of Hall’s poetry collections (a recent example being the “selected poem” published by WLU Press; see my essay on ‘editing’ the selected here), and, as with much of his work, the poems within could be presented in a variety of orders. It becomes curious how an order built so carefully, with such precision, is also constructed to be opened at any page, and read in either direction. His poems are less narratives than a series of accumulations, and the order in which you interact with them might even bring you to an entirely different conclusion.
Hall has become known for his shuffling, reworking and reprising his work, giving the sense that his poems might be less “finished” than simply set in a particular way for a particular temporal, whether temporary or permanent, reason, including poems shuffled and re-set for the sake of a chapbook, a public performance or a trade collection. “Early versions,” as Hall himself writes in the acknowledgments, of elements of the first section, “Gap & Hum,” appear previously in his X(Thee Hellbox Press, 2013) [see my review of such here] and My Banjo & Tiny Drawings (Flat Singles Press, 2015) [see my review of such here]. The fifth section, “Essay on Legend,” was originally produced as a 2014 chapbook through Mark Goldstein’sBeautiful Outlaw Press (Goldstein is also designer of this current volume, as well as many of Hall’s recent trade collections). Cobbled and stitched together from a variety of threads, found and salvaged lines and objects, his “Essay on Legend” begins with an anecdote about a dog, utilizing such as a starting-point for a sequence of observations on poetry, anecdote and violence, each circling around the very idea of “legend.” The chapbook version was produced in an edition of 52 copies “in commemoration of the second annual Purdy Picnic at the A-frame, Roblin Lake, Ameliasburgh, July 26, 2014,” acknowledging the late poet Al Purdy as one of Phil Hall’s long-standing touchstones. At the Ottawa launch of the chapbook in 2014, Hall spoke of starting out as a good Ontario “son of Al Purdy” poet that slowly began shifting towards Louis Zukofsky’s 80 Flowers (1978); from stories and the anecdote to “that purse sound of the vowel.”

Ongoing notes: late May, 2016

Further to our baby distractions, I thought I should add a second entry of brief reviews, acknowledging the books over the past two years-plus that I started to review, but, for whatever child-related reason, I wasn’t able to complete as a longer, full-sized review. Here are some notes, if not even regrets (I’m surprised at how many scraps there are, and how long they’ve been sitting, unfinished, upon my computer), on a couple more books that I wish I’d more time and attention to properly discuss (as they each, obviously, deserve).
The Belladonna* Elders Series 6: M. NourbeSe Philip, Gail Scott, Kate Eichhorn (2009): In many ways, the most interesting element of this all-Canadian volume of The Belladonna Elders Series is Kate Eichhorn herself, composing works that build upon what her two chosen elders, M. NourbeSe Philip and Gail Scott, have been working on for years. In two interviews, later included in longer versions in the anthology Prismatic Publics: Innovative Canadian Women's Poetry and Poetics (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2009) [see my review of such here].
NB: Because for me when I work in English, I always feel as if I am working in a foreign language.
KE: Even with your mastery?
NP: I never ever take it for granted. The course of the foreignness is the awareness that this is not my tongue. Mind you, I think that all writers and poets have this sense. As you write your poem, you have this idea of perfection, but of course, what I am talking about is slightly different from that. I'm talking about this sense of utter foreignness in what is supposed to be my mother tongue. When I was working on the poem, I remember sitting in this room on St. Clair Avenue in Toronto that I rented from a doctor, my doctor in fact. I had a room at the back of his office, and there were some days when I felt that I could actually taste the foreignness of these words. I can't apply profound theoretical language to it. I can only go to the body and tell you what it felt like. There was this awareness of that and all I could do was weep and weep. Maybe it was some sort of collective memory.
In her “Preface: The Elder Function,” Eichhorn writes:
The Belladonna Elders Series has proven far more controversial than anticipated. Some critics have charged that the term “elder” is inherently ageist. Others have suggested that the structure of the series reifies problematic notions of artistic lineage. A few detractors have even implied that the Elders Series is symptomatic of a generation of writers unable to invent anew, choosing instead to linger indefinitely as a parasitic presence on their “host” (an older and apparently more vital generation of writers). These objections have arrived from critics speaking across generations and genders. But as Belladonna* curators Rachel Levitsky and Erica Kaufman have repeatedly explained, running counter to prevailing definitions in our culture, the term “elder” is neither synonymous with “old” nor does it signify a stable identitary position.
I came to appreciate the complexity of the elder function during one of my first interviews with a writer in the early 1990s. Maria Campbell, a Métis writer and storyteller, had been invited to speak at a Native elders conference hosted by my university. She graciously offered to spare a few minutes of her time but explained that this wasan elder's conference, so I would have to conduct the interview in the presence of her elders, and because they would potentially be better positioned to respond, she might not speak at all. In the end, this was not an interview with an author but rather an encounter with a writer/storyteller speaking amongst others. I had arrived well prepared, or so I thought, to navigate the complexities of power and appropriation this encounter was bound to raise. I left perplexed, wondering whether I had carried out an interview at all (I don't recall asking any questions). This, of course, is precisely the kind of productive trouble wrought by elders, and for this reason, adopting the category for an avant-garde reading and book series may be surprising, but it is by no means antithetical to the work of a project such as Belladonna*.
Modern Canadian Poets: An Anthology, eds. Evan Jones and Todd Swift: Evan Jones and Todd Swift’s Modern Canadian Poets: An Anthology (Manchester UK: Carcanet Press, 2010) certainly lives up to its initial hype, despite the inclusion of poets David McGimpsey, Lisa Robertson and Anne Carson, in being an anthology of “Modern” Poets from Canada (those exceptions, I’d note, are also poets possibly known and read better outside Canadian borders than from within). Going through the list of authors—W.W.E. Ross (1894-1966)? Alfred Bailey (1905-1997)?—I initially wondered if this was an anthology aimed at what they saw of the British poetry audience, once that doesn’t necessarily jibe with what little I’m aware of such, from way across the pond, mind you. As the editors write in their introduction: “It is now more than fifty years since an anthology of Canadian poetry was edited for a British audience. As editors, and as Canadian poets living in a foreign clime on a new shore, it has appeared to us that there is little or no groundwork on which to build, no models towards whom we could reach. In Britain, there is scant knowledge of Canadian poetry.”
Despite an awareness of British poetry favouring formal models over experimentation, my original question was this: is this an anthology for those interested in contemporary poetry titles by Carcanet, Bloodaxe Books and Faber over, say, titles by Stride, Shearsman, Salt or Reality Street Editions? Instead, I’m realizing this an anthology directed to the classroom, given its historical swath across a century and a half of Canadian writing, working to produce an anthology that exactly pushes the mandate of the “modern” period. But then, how do McGimpsey, Robertson and Carson fit in?

U of Alberta writers-in-residence interviews: Richard Van Camp (2011-12)

For the sake of the fortieth anniversary of the writer-in-residence program (the longest lasting of its kind in Canada) at the University of Alberta, I have taken it upon myself to interview as many former University of Alberta writers-in-residence as possible [see the ongoing list of writers here]. See the link to the entire series of interviews (updating weekly) here.
Richard Van Camp is a proud member of the Dogrib (Tlicho) Nation from Fort Smith, Northwest Territories. He is the author of two children’s books with the Cree artist George Littlechild: A Man Called Raven and What’s the Most Beautiful Thing You Know About Horses? He has published a novel, The Lesser Blessed, which is now a feature film with First Generation Films; his collections of short fiction include Angel Wing Splash Pattern, The Moon of Letting Go and Other Stories, Godless but Loyal to Heaven and Night Moves. He is the author of three baby books: Welcome Song for Baby: A Lullaby for Newborns; Nighty Night: A Bedtime Song for Babies and Little You (now translated into Cree, Dene and South Slavey!), and he has two comic books out with the Healthy Aboriginal Network: Kiss Me Deadlyand Path of the Warrior. His graphic novel, Three Feathers, is about restorative justice; his new novel, Whistle, is about mental health and asking for forgiveness and his graphic novel, The Blue Raven, is about mental health. His latest graphic novel is A Blanket of Butterflies and it’s about peacemaking where a grandmother is the hero of the story. Cinematic adaptations of his work include “Mohawk Midnight Runners”, by Zoe Hopkins based on Richard’s short story, “Dogrib Midnight Runners” from The Moon of Letting Go and “Hickey Gone Wrong”, based on his comic book by Chris Auchter.
You can visit Richard on Facebook, Twitter or at his website: www.richardvancamp.com
He was writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta during the 2011-12 academic year.
Q: When you began your residency, you’d been publishing books for nearly two decades. Where did you feel you were in your writing? What did the opportunity mean to you?
A: At the time, I was new to Edmonton and it was my perfect welcome into the rich writing community here in the city. I had the opportunity to work with writers who’d been showing their work to the last dozen U of A Writers in Residence. This is an incredible resource for anyone who is looking for support. I also made friends during this time, one of whom is Leif Gregersen who astonishes me to this day with his dedication to the craft of writing.
I also took the job because I write so early in the morning that my day is basically free and it’s important to get out of the house and out of your head every once in a while.
I’m also mid-career and feel that I’ve been so blessed to work with such fearless publishers, editors and artists that it's time to give back and help nurture artists, the same way I was at the En’owkin Centre, The University of Victoria and UBC, where I received my Master’s Degree in Creative Writing.
I love Edmonton and we are so proud to call this city—which is really like a big town to me—our home.
I want to take this opportunity to thank the English Department for all the support they gave me at the time. To have an office with a brand new computer and printer was delicious to my soul! :)
Q: What do you feel your time as writer-in-residence at University of Alberta allowed you to explore in your work? Were you working on anything specific while there, or was it more of an opportunity to expand your repertoire?
A: At the time, I was working on Godless but Loyal to Heaven, my third short story collection, and my graphic novel, Three Feathers, which are both out now and doing well.
I was just so amazed at all the great writers out there. Edmonton has world class writers and I am so very proud to have been included in the U of A Writer in Residence tradition.
Invite me back! I’d say, “Yes!” in a heartbeat.
Q: How did you engage with students and the community during your residency?
A: I was given a very cool office where students booked their time with me; I also did a few class visits.
We did a screening of our movie Mohawk Midnight Runners when we were there and that was so fantastic.
Q: What do you see as your biggest accomplishment while there? What had you been hoping to achieve?
A: The manuscripts that I was working on then are all now out or are coming out: Whistle, The Blue Raven, Wheetago War, Three Feathers, A Blanket of Butterflies and Night Moves, my new collection.
I would love to come back as Writer in Residence. Grant MacEwan has so much going for it and I love the energy there.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Amanda Nadelberg

Amanda Nadelberg is the author of
1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
However sad (or not) to say, I don’t think it did. Though writing has certainly made life different, as it means the day jobs I’ve held become a little more sacred to keep room for poems. This book feels like a continuation of the others in the ways being a person is a continuing. I’ve been writing longer poems though, as the cut off for me used to be the end of the page.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
Got pulled out of a third-grade classroom for a one-day poetry workshop. (For being sensitive.)

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?
Some and some. Methods change of course and editing is a much more important part of the process now than it was for me before—sometimes it even feels like editing is the writing. Writing feels both like a quick thing (lightning) and something that takes several eternities (patience). The forming of this book took about 5 years, which is at least twice the time it took for previous installments. Seeing how poems hang out in that uncertainty called time is a good exercise.

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?
(D) All of the above. Too, it seems like good news to let both the ways happen, to not assume we are always the same kind of writer. I like the effects of the forms of curious accumulation and also sometimes it’s nice to have some more flashlights along the way.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
A few years ago I imagined how nice it would be to read from the inside of a cardboard box. But yes I like to do readings. They can be honest and embarrassing. But often doing them is costly and poets have no monies.

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?
What’s for breakfast. Will people stop using the word poetry to compliment works of other genres and just start reading more poetry for god’s sake. Can I have a vacation (not yet).

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?
Imaginary Fact Seeker / Comedian / Good Listener. My nephew when he grows up wants to be a comedian who is also an architect. I think that’s classy.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
There is that moment you snap into realizing no one has seen what you’ve been doing and it’s then that I tend to send work to a few friends in particular. One of the best things I learned about editorial feedback (both as one who dishes it out and receives it) is that things that sound familiar should be taken seriously and things that sound far off/unrecognizable are probably just not the right advice for you /send it on to Jesus.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Don’t write the same book twice.

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?
With coffee and water and sometimes walking. I’ve never had so much of a writing routine; I’m not a person with an everyday practice. But I like to get up early.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Books. Movies. Home movies. Television. Song. Walking in the neighborhood. Speaking with my sister’s children. Pizza. Only kind of kidding.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
The house I grew up in? Dank Basement. My apartment? I don’t know. Coffee? Lavender? The smell of purses my mom has handed me down.

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?
Louis C.K., Parks and Rec, memories of watching Seinfeld with my parents. Commuting has been significant in the past three years. And I’ve written several poems while watching the movies of
14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Working outside of Academia and publishing has been helpful. Some of my favorite writers that I always return to are Robert Creeley, C.D. Wright, Ron Padgett, Alice Notley. Lately I’ve been reading more fiction. I am excited for the 5th installment of Karl Ove Knausgaard. I read The Argonauts twice last spring.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
My answer is not bungee jumping.

16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
I wonder this every day and I’m not sure.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
Mishearing the world.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I just finished Paul Beatty’s The Sellout. It’s amazing. The last good movie was Mistress America . God bless Noah Baumbach.

19 - What are you currently working on?
A maybe book length poem that I began in October. Today I’m on page 35. It’s nice to have something to return to and write into.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

My writing day : Tuesday, May 24, 2016

Inspired by this, I decided to write up my own.
7:30am: Awake, to toddler footfalls; the length of hallway. Newborn squeaks.
7:45am: As Christine dresses toddler, newborn assists as I prepare cereal for toddler, put coffee on. Check email. Collect newspaper from the front step.
Send out mass email for the new “Tuesday poem” piece posted on the dusie blog today, a series I’ve been curating for more than one hundred and sixty weeks now. Endi Bogue Hartigan. I post to twitter.
Dress newborn. Collect toddler socks and shoes and convince her to wear them.
Finish reading yesterday’s newspaper. I don’t get into today’s paper at all. I set it aside for tomorrow.
8:15am: Normally I would walk toddler to her twice-a-week ‘school’ at 8:45am, but today I head downtown with newborn for the sake of Staples, to correct a chapbook order. I was ready to fold, staple and mail a new above/ground press item on Sunday night, but only realized upon arriving home that the copies had been messed up, and long weekend throws off timing. A secret project I’ve been working on at the prompting of derek beaulieu.  
Christine does a rare toddler drop-off, which might improve toddler’s recent mood (thrown off the past little bit, for shifted attentions and schedules due to our now five-week-old). Newborn sleeps the entire trip. Lucy at the photocopy counter at Staples is thrilled I brought newborn out for the errand. Copies are quickly made.
9:35am: Arrive home with new copies. Relocate laptop and refilled coffee mug from kitchen island to desk in office. This mug, an official mug gifted a decade or so back from the Guinness factory in Dublin, has long faded. From Guinness-dark to dusty white. I might have to request Jennifer Mulligan return to Ireland for the sake of a new one.
I receive an e-notice that the first of a monthly series I’m curating at Drunken Boat has posted. I forward to Amanda Earl, the author, and feed to Facebook, twitter. Post to Chaudiere Books blog and Chaudiere Books twitter feed.
The past month or so, I’ve been listening to Tycho’s album Dive on permanent repeat. I don’t mind music in the background, but I don’t care for most radio, and don’t want the distraction of having to find new music every hour or so. Pushing ‘replay’ keeps me in my head. Replay, replay, replay. After a few weeks (or more), I might get sick of it and put on something else. Or I might get distracted by something and be sent off in an entirely new direction. If only Grant Lawrence still did the CBC Radio 3 podcasts (which were amazing, but far too infrequent). I don’t want talk; it distracts. Just music.
After completing a very short story yesterday and a number of reviews over the past week, I attempt to return to the short story manuscript I’ve been attempting to complete this year (something I’ve been saying, “this year,” for the past three years, but I actually think that this year might be possible). For The Litter I See Project , I spent the entirety of my prior writing day carving and crafting a very short story that accidentally sets in the space somewhere between my novel missing persons (The Mercury Press, 2009) and one of the short stories in the current manuscript, “On Beauty.” I’d originally composed a story around the main character of the novel after the prompting of Amanda Earl, who had wondered what might have become of her, so I wrote the teenaged “Alberta” some fifteen (or more) years later. Now the manuscript has three stories that include her (and another, unfinished, that attempts to further the story of her mother).
I could attempt to complete the half-completed review of Laura Walker’s story (Apogee Press, 2016), but I can catch up with that later.
I print out three stories-in-progress from the manuscript to scribble upon. I completed a further a week or so back (this makes twenty-four completed stories, of which fourteen have already appeared in journals, both print and online); after a week of working on little else, before a week of working on a series of poetry book reviews. I spend an hour or so scratching out lines, adding new ones, carving and carving and carving. Each of these stories are composed of a sequence of short bursts, akin to pivot-points; each story no longer than three or four pages, but often take months to complete. How does a character, or even an idea, move from one point to another?
Working four-and-a-half years on this particular manuscript: another dozen or so stories in various states of completion. I expect I will eventually finish some, and abandon others; so far, none have been abandoned. Yet. I can only really work on a couple at a time, hence my preference to print three and work on each daily for a week or so, depending on what else is going on. It always takes a day or two to re-enter. It always takes a few days to actually accomplish anything. Small, steady accumulations.
The three stories vary in subject and thread: one focuses on an woman attempting a university creative writing class, another focuses on a recently-married woman who realizes she’s pregnant, a decade beyond giving birth to the child she gave up for adoption (with the mess of emotions that come through such), and the third, part of an extended series of stories around a couple with young children. I seem to have two sets of loosely-grouped (threaded?) stories in this manuscript, from the progression of three stories that centre around the woman named Alberta, to another sequence of three or four, some of which centre around a married woman, and the rest around her husband. Given the first couple of stories in this sequence focus on her, I’m tempted to see how far I can take the story of the husband. The stories each exist at different points in their lives, and I’ve been toying with furthering his story through a novella (an idea that is down the road; I have much to complete first).
In my fiction, I work hard to suggest connections without making them too overt; I want the stories to exist as self-contained units that might broaden once you discover the connections. But I want nothing lost if the connections between stories aren’t made.
This is the first I’ve named the male character, also: Malcolm. Had we a boy instead of a girl this time around, that was the name at the top of our list. Once our girl emerged, I had thought of how to utilize the name, and added it to him. His wife and daughter (and now, new child) have been named in the stories for some time now.
Malcolm: I am curious as to where else he might go. But first, I’ve to complete this one particular story. One idea at a time (he says, working on three short stories at once).
I’ve been seeing a relation to my stories to those of Lorrie Moore (hubris, I admit), especially upon reading Bark (2014); mine might be shorter, and attempt a particular level of density, but I think there is an emotional trajectory that our stories share. Or perhaps I see connections where none lie. I see so little fiction that actually excites me.
10:00am: The notice for Stephanie Bolster’s new above/ground press chapbook, Three Bloody Words, a twentieth anniversary edition, posts. I send out mass email and post to twitter. Now that the announcement for the chapbook has posted, I submit the interview I did with Bolster recently to Queen Mob’s Teahouse. Return to short stories.
10:45am: Christine heads out for an appointment with newborn. I assist by securing newborn in car seat and tucking her in. Check diaper bag. Once they’re out the door, I refill my coffee mug, and return to desk.
11:17am: I leave to collect toddler from school. Worry how this routine ends in a couple of weeks. What might the summer bring? She picks half the dandelions en route for her mother, depositing the mound on the living room floor. “Because I need to.” Once home, I prepare her lunch, and mine also.
Fold and staple throughout. I want to get at least fifty copies in the mail by Wednesday morning, given it needs to be in Calgary by Friday. Sixty copies fit into a box. She slowly ingests peanut butter sandwiches, and fresh strawberries. We sit in the sunroom; a rare luxury. It also means displacing the sleeping cat from his chair; he seems less impressed.
Ask toddler about her morning. Apparently she painted, and played with her two best friends. She played outside. White glue covers her arms; flecks of blue/green paint on her face. Details with a two-and-a-half year old are usually brief and/or sketchy.
Clean toddler, post-lunch.
12:25pm: Christine and newborn return home. Quick sweep and rinse of kitchen floor as Christine answers doorbell (one of her friends appears to borrow baby-wrap).
Prepare lunch for Christine. She takes both children downstairs.
Fold a brief amount of laundry. I am behind on this.
I’m not wearing a clean shirt. Should I put on a clean shirt?
12:41pm: Return to desk. Check email. Hit ‘replay’ on music. Scratch yet again at printed draft of short story. Wonder: should I even be looking at poems? I’ve a file open with a series of poems-in-progress, but a single piece I’ve been working on over the past five weeks. The CBC Poetry Prize deadline is less than a week away. I haven’t given up on such, but I’m not working on that today.
Perhaps a decision made by working on fiction, instead.
The story concerning “Malcolm” is currently two pages long, with six sections. The first section reads:
Soon after they married, he glimpsed an article via his Facebook feed that included a list of realities associated with a long-term marriage. “There will be times when you feel unfulfilled,” the list read: “There will be times when you hate your spouse.” The list was not created to frighten, but to allow for a successful marriage; to prevent married couples from falling prey to the myth of constant magic. The honeymoon, as poet Michael Redhill once wrote, “the time life pays you for in advance.”
Malcolm considered the article a relief. More than he might have guessed. It became important later, as they had a moment that could easily have broken them, deciding instead on fixing instead of allowing the rift to widen. They wished to remain together. They remained together.
1:10pm: Attempt to put the toddler down for nap (with stories). More involved than it sounds.
1:45pm:With toddler out, I return to desk, intermittently checking the mailbox at the front door. Any sudden noise or shift of air is enough to prompt another mailbox check, and, until 1:55pm, there is nothing.
1:56pm: Attempt to re-settle toddler.
2:06pm: Return to desk. Open mail. New titles by Nathaniel G. Moore (Frog Hollow Press) and the late Anselm Hollo (Coffee House Press). Hollo’s The Tortoise of History opens with this “Foreword” by Jane Dalrymple-Hollo:
Could Anselm have possibly foretoldthat The Tortoise of History, this particular compilation of old and newmusings, revisitations, letters to past and future, love notes      to friends—and to me
was an inevitable foreshadowing of this day, when I, his Janeywould stop the endless fuss, unplug the phone, sit quietly      for 20 minutes,
and then settle into his chair, in our kitchenand read thisbook—aloud, in his cadenceand reallytake in
this “message in a bottle”?
2:18pm: Realize Christine and I still owe annual dues to The League of Canadian Poets, so I call to pay such via credit card. They don’t pick up the phone.
2:28pm:I send interview questions from the “12 or 20 questions” series to Cynthia Arrieu-King. Why hadn’t I asked her prior?
2:31pm:Apparently there is someone in The League of Canadian Poets office now.
3:10pm: Prepare last of package for Calgary. Salvage toddler from nap and prepare newborn for outing. Toddler remains with Christine. Head out for errands with newborn.
4:14pm:Return to desk, with newborn settled downstairs with Christine and toddler, and groceries in fridge. Post Richard Van Camp interview to the blog for Friday. Query some half-dozen outstanding interviews to see where they’re at.
4:30pm:Return to fiction, just as I hear toddler saunter down the hallway. She requests more milk in her sippy-cup, which I collect. She insists I bring it downstairs for her (she does not wish to do such herself). Return to desk to an “On Writing” submission in my email from Bruce Whiteman, which I set aside to read for later. Also, Douglas Piccinnini is concerned about one of his answers in his forthcoming “12 or 20 questions” interview. I respond to an email about a contest I’m judging, named for the late American poet Hillary Gravendyk, and quickly return to fiction.
Wonder: should I do a summer run of poetry workshops? Or should I wait until Autumn? What might that mean for our potential travel, or even, Christine attempting bedtime for two wee girls?
4:45pm: I abandon desk and head downstairs for the sake of organizing the chapbook room. Laptop lands in basement alongside. Christine requests a shower; I collect newborn and distract the toddler.
5:11pm: Christine reappears, and toddler swoons. I return to the dozens of boxes that fill our downstairs spare room, filled with some, if not most, of the eight hundred publications produced by above/ground press over the past twenty-three years. Over the past six or seven weeks, I’ve spent a few hundred hours opening boxes and organizing publications, discovering dozens of above/ground press items I thought long gone, and even further that weren’t completely put together. It means there are nearly two hundred items that I’d long thought out-of-print, some more than twenty years old, that I now have a small handful of copies of. It also means that, over the past month or so, I’ve sorted thousands upon thousands of slips of paper.
I spent three days a week prior, for example, folding and stapling one hundred and fifty copies of a Stan Rogal chapbook I produced back in 1997. I discovered twenty copies of a jwcurry item from 1998 I hadn’t finished stapling. Other items by Gregory Betts, Susanne Dyckman, Max Middle.
5:45pm:Dinner-prep, quick shower. Dinner.
6:21pm: Return to folding/stapling, including the remainder of the chapbooks I sent derek, and a mound of unbound copies of my 4 glengarry poems (2002).
7:00pm: I begin to prepare bath for the toddler. Bathe toddler. Fold another random assortment of laundry.
7:25pm:Return downstairs for further folding/stapling (as we all, also, have ice cream) while watching a bedtime episode or two of her Pajanimals.
Dig some more through the chapbook room: at least a dozen titles that need only one more item to complete a stack of copies. Fifty covers here, one hundred colophons there. Digging further for originals, I collect a couple required pieces, but far from all. There is so much more work to be done. Anne Le Dressay. Jason Le Heup. Marilyn Irwin. Rae Armantrout. Peter Norman. Douglas Barbour.
8:02pm: Collect toddler and attempt to settle her for bedtime: brushing teeth and stories.
8:57pm: Toddler asleep, head downstairs again. DVR of The Flash, etcetera. Son of Batman. Wine.
I post a variety of “12 or 20 questions” interviews for June, including Malcolm Sutton, Rahat Kurd, Douglas Piccinnini and Mia You.
11:04pm: Assist Christine and newborn to bed. Return downstairs to watch recent unseen episodes of The Daily Show on DVR. Crash.