Rob Mclennan's Blog, page 390

Ewa Chrusciel, Contraband of Hoopoe

The hedgehog collects the apples of my mother tongue. He is a dormant god. I take him as my wealth. The hedgehog hunts serpents and hidden thoughts. He protects against evil. Parcels eternity into spiny planets. Each mystery rolls into itself, a thorny crown rolled into a lotus. Leaving, I do not go with empty hands. I carry needles. Violins, stigmas, mulberry seeds. Each thorn a voice of an ancestor. I wear him as a brooch on my shawl. Thorny sun, a fire. For he is the god of suffering under spines. God blessed him with autism. For he is a Kipod, a beast of tricks. Defender against serpents and Isidore of Seville. He carries packed eternities into the dusk. As I pass through Customs, it is the hedgehog that smuggles me. My brooch bristles.
I’m absolutely fascinated by Polish American poet and translator Ewa Chrusciel’sfourth poetry collection, Contraband of Hoopoe (Richmond CA: Omnidawn, 2014). The author of two poetry collections in Polish— Furkot (Studium Press, 2003) and Sopitki (Fraza Press, 2009)—and one previous book in English— Strata (Emergency Press, 2011)—her Contraband of Hoopoe writes out a collage of poems as lyric segments of a single, extended poem sketched out as lyric journal entries. The poems in Contraband of Hoopoe are composed around growing up in Poland during the Communist Regime and emigrating to the United States, and her variety of experiences and widsoms that came from watching the collision of languages and cultures, both from within and beyond European borders, and of what was required to be hidden while travelling across numerous boundaries. Throughout the collection, she utilizes the term “contraband” to reference far beyond the expected, from gummi bears to candles and to language itself, to “the Jewish people […] during the Holocaust,” and to the abstract possibilities of ideas, culture and what is bred in the bone. As she writes:





Smuggling is translation. Between a subject and an object. Between an idea and reality. Between reality and a shadow. Between a pronoun and an imperative. It is—for those who are unable to let go—nesting in two places at once. It is a yearning for bilocation. Some Christians were adept at it. St. Anthony of Padua, St. Ambrose of Milan, St. Severus of Ravenna, and Padre Pio of Italy. Both translation and smuggling come from longing for presence. From a loss. They speak of insufficiency of one life, one language. Yet insufficiency to express what is ineffable saves us from idolatry.
Contraband of Hoopoe utilizes, as “one of its guiding totems,” the hoopoe, described in the press release as “that bird of exile and return, which King Solomon sent to the Queen of Sheba to convert her to his faith. Under the aegis of this mythical bird, Chrusciel tracks a series of historical objects, undeclared beliefs and secret messages that immigrants throughout history have been sneaking through customs, past border checkpoints, and across the seas.” Constructed as equal parts poetry collection, historical essay, thesis and travel journal, this is a complex and thoughtful collection, and one I am very much impressed with.

On Writing -- guest post,

I recently wrote an "On Writing" guest post/essay for Catina Noble, which she has posted. See?

"lary timewell: two new poems," Jacket2

My fifteenth 'commentary,' "lary timewell: two new poems," is now online at Jacket2.

12 or 20 (second series) questions for Joshua Corey

Joshua Corey [photo credit: Joanna Kramer] is the author most recently of The Barons (Omindawn Publishing, 2014), a poetry collection, and Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy (Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2014), a novel. With G.C. Waldrep he edited The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral (Ahsahta Press, 2012). He lives in Evanston, Illinois and is an associate professor of English at Lake Forest College.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
Selah came out in 2003, emerging from the volatile mixture of my addiction to sheer language with acute grief and nostalgia. Twelve years later, I’m still throwing words into the black hole of irretrievable losses. But I’m conscious now of a more organized and experienced approach to fundamental questions about how to resist inhumanity, how to live with others and myself, and the temptations of the vertical in a thoroughly horizontal world.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
My mother wrote poems, and made poetry seem like a natural thing to have as part of one’s life. I showed my earliest poems to her, and she praised them—simple as that! I was hooked on her love and her love for language became mine. I wrote and continue to write other kinds of things—criticism, essays, and lately fiction. But poetry remains home base.

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 work like a crab: while my eyes are fixed on what looks on some unreachable horizon, I sidle up to accomplishment. I’m always working on multiple projects and get my best work done when I’m procrastinating one of them. Poems especially tend to come when I’m focused on other things like a novel or a critical essay or teaching or the round of domestic life. So there will be a great deal of circling, mentally, and the accretion of urgent and illegible notes in my notebook, and when the writing actually happens it happens suddenly. It comes in a gush or it doesn’t come at all. I do much less revision than I once did—or rather, the revision process is happening before the poem is actually written, if that makes sense.

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?
My most recent book, The Barons, is more of a “collection” than any of my other books—it doesn’t have a single theme or through-line, or if it does (disaster capitalism?) it’s something that emerges from how I arranged the poems instead of any plan. My first novel, Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy, also accreted from independent sections that grew together. I love the idea of a book that’s just one continuous rush—the “flight forward” technique of the Argentine writer César Aira, who claims not to revise his works, fascinates me. But that doesn’t seem to be how I operate; like Joyce, I’m a scissors and paste man.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
Like many poets I’m used to hearing people who don’t normally read poetry exclaim that they “got it” only after hearing me read poems aloud. I’m not entirely sure what that’s about but sometimes I myself “get” my work differently after presenting it to an audience. There’s something about the act of offering a poem or story to an audience, live, that changes my sense of what that writing is about, or has the potential to be about. It can bring something that felt dead to life, or it can confirm for me that something that felt particularly strange and out there when I wrote it feels that way because it’s touching something real, something in the unconscious. Audiences will respond to that if you give it to them.

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?
Political theory, ecopoetics, vital materialism, speculative ontology—broadly speaking, my writing engages with and is engaged by thinkers and writers in these areas. Some names: Lucretius, Spinoza, Emerson, Thoreau, Darwin, Whitman, Nietzsche, William and Henry James, Proust, Bergson, Whitehead, Heidegger, Ponge (I’m working on a new translation of Le parti pris des choses), Merleau-Ponty, Perec, Deleuze, Olson, Duncan, Arendt, Burroughs, Beckett, Karen Barad, Jane Bennett. I’m interested in the liveliness of materialist approaches to writing and thought—materialist in the dialectical-historical sense and also the “new” (really very old) “vitalist” materialism. And I’m interested in overcoming what I see as the dead-end of received postmodernist practice and into contact with a poetics that revives the power of the voice and of myth.

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 the role of writers—that is, the artists whose medium is language and not the “storytellers” who represent capital—is to operate from the margins, working both to conserve culture (that is, quite simply, to remember—since memory, both cultural and personal, has been all but obliterated by the twenty-four-hour news cycle and universal access to Google) and to oppose it (in the forms in which it is given to us and reproduced by us and for us by all of these machines with human bodies and minds for moving parts). Disrupt the machine, throw pop bottles from the bleachers, stand up for Apollo (light, beauty, harmony) AND Dionysus (energy, feeling, ecstasy), and do it all with words words words. So many forms of connection have, paradoxically, been lost in our connected age. I think there’s something potentially radical in reading: one mind to another, from solitude to solitude. As writers, we need to fight for that radical possibility, which could very easily vanish without our vigilance.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Most of the editors I’ve worked with, for better or worse, have brought a very light hand to the task. I sometimes wonder what it would be like to have an old-fashioned Maxwell Perkins-style editor to work with, who could help me shape a mess of pages into something deathless. Or a Gordon Lish-type who might radically and painfully transform my writing into something unrecognizably great. I’d probably hate it, but it would be worth maybe sacrificing one book to such a process, just for the experience.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Friendly advice is rarely useful, and vice-versa.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?
For years I felt a kind of disgust for fiction, an almost physical nausea at the subservience of every other pleasure writing can offer—sonic pleasure, image pleasure, the dynamic tension between generals and particulars that we might name “the virtual”—to the demands of either plot (in genre fiction) or psychology (in “literary” fiction). It wasn’t until I discovered Roberto Bolaño’s work that fiction began to seem possible for me: there a kind of derangement of genre (in Bolaño most frequently this takes the form of the detective story or noir) becomes a kind of grid upon which those other, poetic pleasures can be arranged. There’s also not a lot of psychology in Bolaño’s work: his characters’ motivations are a kind of void or pressure point that make significant social and natural forces manifest. If a Bolaño character commits an act of violence, for example, it’s never explained away by his individual psychology: some complex of exterior and interior forces has operated upon that character and forced him to act in that way—call it fate if you like. That seems to me like a poetic way of understanding the world. Bolaño also practices a kind of transformed winking autobiography—he’s a character or observer in many of his fictions—and I’m fascinated with the blurred line between fiction and nonfiction in many of the most compelling and vital writers of the past thirty years or so—W.G. Sebald, Ali Smith, J.M. Coetzee, Enrique Vila-Matas, Rachel Cusk, and Karl Ove Knausgaard are just the first names that come to mind. Their work straddles fiction and nonfiction and the infrathin border between them is poetry.

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?
At the moment I’m on sabbatical, so I am fortunate indeed to be able to maintain a writing routine! After seeing my daughter off to school, I typically head to my neighborhood coffee shop with my laptop and a few carefully or randomly selected books in my bag. I work all morning, sometimes on whatever I conceive to be the big project of the moment (at the moment it’s a new novel), sometimes on a side project which can at any moment mutate into the big project. After lunch I mostly read, and then it’s family time, and in the evening I’ll probably read some more and maybe work on something that’s even farther to the side of my main projects. Like this interview.

When I’m teaching, it’s entirely a different affair: writing becomes a catch-as-catch can affair. I write poems when they come to me, on the train to or from work, or during office hours when I’m supposed to be grading papers. More sustained work has to happen in the evenings, or in the summer. But somehow the writing gets done. It’s like they say: if you want something done, ask a busy person.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I am overcome by staleness and horror at my own lack of talent on a regular basis, and when that happens, and I’m conscious enough to recognize that it’s happening, I try to give myself permission to stop writing altogether and to go do something else. Watch movies or old detective shows, ride the El to a random Chicago neighborhood and walk around, visit an art museum, browse bookstores, study French, read biographies or letters or Proust.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Onions frying in olive oil.

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 a deeply literary creature so I couldn’t agree with McFadden more. But I do get a lot out of visual art—I’m not especially knowledgeable about it but the freedom that painters and sculptors and some filmmakers seem to enjoy from the constraints of narrative and language can be enormously inspiring. Or galling, it’s the same thing—“Goddamn it! Why can’t I do that??” I read a fair amount of philosophy and that can similarly feel liberating, though the language concepts can seduce me away from the earthly particulars that my work needs to thrive. Nature and science are increasingly important to how I approach writing as well, though again it can be hard to overcome a certain tendency toward Platonism.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
I seem to be especially fascinated by writers with a rage for order, who say with Blake, “I must Create a System. or be enslav’d by another Mans / I will not Reason & Compare: my business is to Create.” Writers walking the knife-edge of the Apollo-Dionysus dyad: analytic shamans, Cartesian drug-addicts, Lutheran lushes, Marxian mystics. Living the life by perfecting the work. George Oppen, Charles Olson. Woolf, Joyce. Beckett, Burroughs. Stevens.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Make a film, write an opera, travel in Asia, live in France, create a TV series, become fully bilingual, learn to sail.

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?
Filmmaker. DJ. Curator.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I never felt like there was any choice in the matter. My mother opened the door and I walked through it. I’m a pretty cerebral person, and if it wasn’t for writing, I’d be in danger of disappearing entirely into my mind.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I’m going to veer closer to the last than to the great. I had a hell of a lot of fun with Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice—in his sheer inventiveness, paranoid displacements, and sly humanism he’s the closest fiction comes to John Ashbery. In a funny way he’s the flip side of Henry James—another deeply elusive writer—whose The Ambassadors I finished recently and which uses utterly sui generis sentences to explore psychosocial phenomena that resist interpretation even as they invite it. The P.T. Anderson film version of Inherent Vice isn’t maybe “great,” but it does do a good job of capturing that effort of interpretation, mostly in close-ups on the incomparably puzzled face of Joaquin Phoenix. ( The Master is great. Punch-Drunk Love is great. If we’re talking greatness.)

20 - What are you currently working on?
I’ve got three manuscripts in progress. One is poetry, an attempt to fulfill the promise of what I once called “visionary materialism” ( http://joshcorey.blogspot.com/2011/02/theses-on-visionary-materialism.html ); the next is a kind of SF riff on the love affair between Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger, reimagined as replicants in the age of global climate disruption. It’s a hybrid of poetry and prose. The third is a novel, a mélange of personal history, travel writing, essays, and anything else I can plausibly or implausibly cram into it. Translating Ponge. A scholarly article or two. What time is it, anyway? I’d better get back to work.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

"Sex at Forty-Five," at Jacket2

My fourteenth 'commentary,' "Sex at Forty-Five," is now online at Jacket2.

Stan Dragland: The Bricoleur & His Sentences

How to read a person? “Personalities are charted by naming objects,” says Michael Ondaatje. “That is, if you speak of a couple who have a John Boyle postcard taped to their fridge you are saying more about the couple and what they probably think than what might be said in five paragraphs on their political thought.” No reflection on what that Boyle card might be saying. John Boyle, ultranationalist visual artist, Hamilton, Ontario.            For Mary Oliver, “dawn is a gift. Much is revealed about a person by his or her passion, or indifference, to this opening of the door of day. No one who loves dawn, and is abroad to see it, could be a stranger to me.” Duncan Campbell Scott says of his friend Archibald Lampman, though he wrote a couple of decent dawn poems, that he “saw mighty few sunrises.” His best sunrise poem, “A Morning on the Lievre,” came out of a camping trip with Scott, who I seem to hear banging on the fry pan and hollering “wakey, wakey! Rise and shine!” to rouse the bleary-eyed poet who is sullen with resentment until, parting the canvas flap with a testy remark on the tip of his tongue, he suddenly…! Mary Oliver is not dismissing the slugabed outright. I realize that. But suppose she and Archie had known each other. He would have been up at the crack far too seldom to share the gift she values so.            Once in my youth I sat in the Oyen, Alberta barbershop, waiting for my brush cut beside a dog whose voluble owner declared from the chair that he could tell everything he needed to know about a person by the way that person and his dog related to each other. The dog regarded me, assessing. No way was I going to reach out and attempt a pat, as I would normally have done. If that dog bit me, or even if it growled, my nogoodness would have been patent. Of course not reaching out will also have spoken. No doubt the man in the chair had my number. Two point six.            Even casual reflection shows that the business of character, biography or autobiography, is a lot more complicated than a person might think. I got to thinking about this when Michael Ondaatje asked me to send him my bundle of sentences, because it’s personal and quirky and not meant to be shared without commentary. I began to think of it as a kind of postcard taped to the fridge. What would Michael and Mary Oliver and the barbershop dog make of it? I foresaw scratching of the dead. Then I began to think about the word “bricoleur” as regularly applied to me by Don McKay. Might it fit not only my gathering and making of odd things, but also my puddle-jumping mind? Does it describe me all too well? This is not modesty. I think better sideways or in circles than straight on, so I hand my best attempts to others then do what I can to fix the flaws they spot. Do not imagine that this comes direct from me to you.
I’ve always envied Stan Dragland’s ease with literary criticism; how he articulates the interconnectivity of reading, thinking, literature and living in the world in terms deceptively simple, deeply complex, and incredibly precise. I’ve envied his sentences, and how he connects seemingly unconnected thoughts, ideas and passages into highly complex and intelligent arguments that read with an almost folksy and deceptive ease (something his critical prose shares with the work of Dragland’s friend and colleague, the poet Phil Hall). For years, one of my favourite books has been his Journeys Through Bookland and Other Passages (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1984), a title I’ve probably read at least half a dozen times, even taking to travelling with it on extended tours. In Dragland’s new The Bricoleur & His Sentences (Pedlar Press, 2014), he provides an argument, including numerous examples, for better sentences through exploring a series of ideas and thoughts-to-conclusion, as he marks, remarks and works his way through varying degrees of Emily Dickinson, Walter Benjamin, Margaret Avison, Michael Ondaatje, Phil Hall, Northrup Frye, Elizabeth Hay, Bobbie Louise Hawkins, Lisa Moore and Colleen Thibaudeau, all of which falls into his own argument of “thinking-in-progress.”








By the time she was asked to submit a collection of her writings to NeWest Press for its Writer as Critic Series, says Daphne Marlatt in her Preface, “many of the essays … had already been published and were being cited, even given back to me as dogma in interview questions. This ossifying of what had seemed very much in process was disturbing. For i thought of this writing not as a series of (position) papers in academic argument, but as essais, tries in the French sense of the word. Essaying even, to avoid the ossification of the noun.” I admire the book that became Readings from the Labyrinth for many reasons, one being that it manages to make a book enclosed within covers enact the fluidity of thinking-in-progress.
According to Wikipedia, “bricolage (French for ‘tinkering’) is the construction or creation of a work from a diverse range of things that happen to be available, or a work created by such a process.” I can’t imagine a better description for the literary criticism of Stan Dragland, a deeply committed reader, thinker and critic, and his opening essay, “Following the Brush” (from which the opening excerpt above is lifted), explores exactly the aspects of his criticism. As he writes further along in the same essay (providing such a self-description that might easily also be applied to Phil Hall): “Yes, I like to make things from found objects. I also like to find images and ideas. From the well of received knowledge come many such thoughts, because I’ve done some studying in my time and I’m no stranger to research, but also from happenstance. Starting out with an essay, I have no idea where it will take me, what it will gather in from which sources. Adventure!” I’ve always enjoyed how Dragland revels in the digression, and what compels about these pieces is in the meander, how Dragland manages to sway and ebb, traversing enormous distances in such short spaces, connecting everything to just about everything else, and impossibly cohering into a single argument about bricolage and sentences. The second two essays, “Anatomies” and “Rhetoric Revisited,” provide enlightening arguments on and around the work of Northrup Frye, including his influence on writing, thinking and teaching.
Northrup Frye was the eminence grise at Western when I arrived in 1970. First-year courses were all supposed to be based on Anatomy of Criticism . Stingle and Hair had been students of Frye (Dick once told me that not even Frye was spared that demoralizing undergraduate question, “will this be on the exam?”), as had James Reaney and other poets like Ronald Bates, George Johnston, Margaret Avison, Margaret Atwood, Dennis Lee and Jay Macpherson. Hugh Kenner also. At Reaney’s invitation, Frye once came to address another team-taught class of which I was a member, this one called Canadian Literature and Culture. After his interesting talk, the first question from the audience was, “Where were you educated?” It was hard to see where the questioner was coming from with that one, but Frye was ready. “At the University of Toronto and Oxford University,” he said, “which means that I’m fundamentally self-educated.” Laughter.
Dragland has obviously been accumulating sentences for some time, and the first half of the collection is made up of essays (three, to be exact), before sections containing dozens of sentences on sentences, before the book ends with notes, further reading and acknowledgments. Begun as a list of quotes that slowly morph into an argument, the sentences that make up the three sections of quoted material are excised from a variety of writers’ works, including George Orwell, Daphne Marlatt, Phil Hall, William H. Gass, Virginia Woolf, Charles Bernstein, Robert Bringhurst, Herman Melville and E.B. White, among others. He gives examples of different sentences that work, and placed together in structural groups, to help illustrate his argument on the how and the why of sentences, including this short excerpt from Ottawa writer Elizabeth Hay’s novel, Alone in the Classroom (McClelland and Stewart, 2011):
A sentence bears the weight of the world. The emotional girl set about baptizing her child. Tess took her dying baby from her bed in the middle of the night and christened him in the presence of her small and sleepy brothers and sisters. Words weigh nothing at all, yet they carry so much on their shoulders over and over and over again.

Suzanne Zelazo: two new poems, at Jacket2

My 13th 'commentary,' "Suzanne Zelazo: two new poems," is now online at Jacket2.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Maurice Mierau

Maurice Mierau’s [photo credit: Merrell-Ann Phare] latest book, Detachment: An Adoption Memoir , was published by Freehand in September; you can watch a video trailer for the book here. He is also the author of several books of poetry, including Fear Not , which won the ReLit Award in 2009. Born in Indiana, Maurice grew up in Nigeria, Manitoba, Jamaica, Kansas, and Saskatchewan. He now lives in Winnipeg.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
Your first book is always the most exciting to you because when it comes out you’re a book-virgin. I remember in 2002, driving to a warehouse on the edge of the city with my wife to pick up the first copies of Ending with Music , since the courier missed me during the work day. And yes, I held the book, smelled it, and just abased myself before the  tangible reality of its bookness. But that book did not change my life. Like most first-time authors I believed, naively, that it would. But then when you get out of your home town (Winnipeg, in my case), you realize that some people, especially poets you admire, have actually read your book, and that is a thrill.

My most recent book, Detachment , came out this fall. It is different in genre from my last one, Fear Not (Turnstone, 2008), which was a collection of poems organized as an elaborate parody of the 50 or so self-help topics and their associated verses in the Gideon Bible; the book uses King James language and a lot of traditional forms as a poetic carousel. Some of the themes of these two books do overlap: I was interested in my father’s traumatic, World War II childhood in Fear Not, and there’s a poem called “Alone” which is about that subject. Then in Detachment I revisit the same material in narrative form, moving from the adoption of my sons in Ukraine, and flashing back to my father’s flight from Soviet Ukraine in 1943.

Other than the obvious difference, i.e. working in book-length narrative form instead of the short poetic forms in Fear Not, the other big difference has been the public reception of this new book. Because of the subject matter, there has been media attention across the country, and a lot of strangers and non-poets have contacted me, often to tell their own intimate stories about adoption or war trauma. Since I think every reader (and perhaps especially every poet) dreams of having an audience, this has been a wonderful experience, for the most part (I blogged about it recently for the National Post here: http://arts.nationalpost.com/2014/12/05/maurice-mierau-dealing-with-the-response/ ).

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I started writing poems—extremely bad ones—in my teens, thanks to a remarkable high school English teacher in Herbert, Saskatchewan, named Alida Noble. Poetry is the genre that comes to me most naturally; my mind seems to work most easily in that form. I’ve got a new book coming out next year with Palimpsest Press, which will be my third book of poems, so it is also the genre I’ve published in the most.

However, I have always loved fiction and also memoir, and in fact studied the Victorian novel as my MA thesis years ago. And I’ve edited more than a dozen fiction titles for Enfield & Wizenty, plus I’ve edited an on-line journal of reviews of Canadian fiction called The Winnipeg Review for three years now. But I’ve published and written only a tiny amount of fiction.

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?
Although I’ve always been able to write quickly and fluidly to deadline for magazines and newspapers, my own book projects have been embarrassingly slow. First drafts are often drastically different from their final shape, and my work does come out of copious notes, often in the form of journal entries, scraps of paper, half-lost files on my laptop, etc. I’ve tried to solve this problem with technology and have so far failed completely, but the effort continues.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
A poem often begins with a fragment in my mind that I scribble on something or remember, usually because it sounds peculiar or striking. I tend to work on larger projects and then plug current fragments and drafts into that structure, so in that sense I’m always working on a book. That was perhaps more true of Fear Not than anything else I’ve written, but I’m a child of the concept album era, for better or whatever.

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 absolutely part of my creative process. I love doing them, and until someone contradicts me out loud will claim to be good in front of an audience, whether reading my poems or the new memoir. As with many Canadian poets, readings are one of the few places where people will actually buy my books, but just as important, they give me a sense of what resonates with an audience: for that reason I like to read new poems in front of an audience to see if I’m on the right track. Live feedback doesn’t always tell you what the best poem is, but it gives you an emotional connection you can never have alone in your study. It’s nothing like a Hollywood focus group, but it does give you some intuitive sense of what is working.

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?
When I was much younger I thought theoretical questions were fascinating, maybe because I wanted people to think of me as smart. Now that I don’t give much of a fuck about impressing others with my intelligence, since it has such obvious limitations, those concerns have been replaced by an abiding analytical obsession with craft that supersedes any so-called “theory”.

The questions in my work are not new. I think the American poet Franz Wright sums them up: “Why/ are we here?/ Is there anything to eat?/ Where are our dead friends?”

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?
Unfortunately the role of the writer in North American society is diminished, for many reasons: our society’s only shared value is the accumulation of wealth, the school system focuses on producing consumers rather than citizens or even workers, the book industry is in a state of crisis, etc.

But I’m old fashioned, and believe that writers have a role in society as public intellectuals, which these days means getting on-line, engaging with younger audiences, and working with the media to talk about our books, even when that is an uncomfortable experience. It also means working with younger writers in developmental roles such as editing, mentorship, and teaching.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
It’s essential. Productive writers learn to self-edit up to a point, and then you need a professional editor. An editor should never be your employee, so that they have some authority; still, when dealing with you as a writer they must wield their power using tact and grace. Barbara Scott edited my book for Freehand and she was a marvel of intelligence, tact, and hardheaded determination to improve my book. Thank god for editors like her, they shall inherit the earth.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Stop whining. Frequently said to me by my parents and later by my wife. Have never fully taken this advice.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to non-fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?
It was hard. I could function well at the level of the scene, but I struggled to create a narrative arc, and sustain tension even within scenes. My observational skills and ability to do research were already in the toolkit from writing poems, and I could make phrases, but I had to work hard at the storytelling. The appeal? Connecting with more readers.

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?
When I’m working on a project I like to write early in the morning before my conscious mind begins editing and undermining my confidence. Currently days begin with me supervising children, so I write at all different times.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I return to the books I love to read, sometimes new ones like Ben Lerner’s. See below for a list.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Bacon frying on the pan; Sunday morning brunch.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
Music more than anything else. I love jazz, and hack away at an upright bass with little skill. For years before that I hacked away at guitars. In Detachment I describe seeing Il Trovatore with my son Peter; I love opera, but also trad country, including Wilf Carter, and it is partly the structure and storytelling involved in these art forms. Plus they make me cry.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Some dead writers: Emily Dickinson, Poetic Meter and Poetic Form by Paul Fussell, Walt Whitman, John Berryman, Charles Dickens, Sylvia Plath, Robert Kroetsch’s essays and poems, George Johnston, Milton, Laurence Sterne, many dead Russians.

Some Canucks: Michael Crummey, P.K. Page, Patrick Friesen, Steven Heighton, Amanda Jernigan, Jason Guriel and all his works, Elise Partridge, Barbara Nickel, David O’Meara, Marc di Saverio, Jim Johnstone, Elizabeth Bachinsky, Mordecai Richler, David Bergen, Joan Thomas, Shane Neilson.

Some Yanks: Frederick Seidel, Sharon Olds, Kay Ryan, Gary Shteyngart, Jonathan Franzen, David Shields, Patricia Lockwood.

From the former empire: Don Paterson, Carol Ann Duffy, Simon Armitage, the younger Martin Amis, Zadie Smith and all her works.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Write a novel, or something that was hard to classify but resembled a novel in the somewhat chaotic sense the word had in the eighteenth century. Get my lost childhood German up to a literate level.

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?
If I’d had the talent, I would have been a musician. I wanted to be an electrical engineer in high school, and might have done that if not for an algebra and physics teacher, rightly named “Dick”, who really put me off those subjects; but I wasn’t going to be good at math anyway. Without the impulse to write, I might have become a lawyer.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
The greatest form of pleasure I’ve ever experienced is reading books, and that includes sex, food, and all the other good stuff we do with our bodies. As a writer, I want to create for other people the deep pleasure of reading something compelling. This is a quixotic mission, but it’s mine.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Karl Ove Knausgaard’s first “autobiographical novel,” which is really a memoir, A Death in the Family . Even though everyone is right and he can numb you with boredom, he can also rivet you with beauty and feeling too, so you just have to skim a little. The Norwegian landscapes sometimes reminded me of Canada. And the alcoholic relatives too.

Madmen season 7 is better than many movies, and also many novels. Just watching the first half on DVD this week.

20 - What are you currently working on?
I just finished editing a new book of poems called Autobiographical Fictions, out this fall with Palimpsest. It was truly a pleasure working with the editor, Jim Johnstone, who is also a fine poet.

A monograph on the work of Patrick Friesen commissioned by Frog Hollow Press in Victoria. Patrick was an early mentor of mine, and he’s one of those western poets who gets overlooked in Canada, where reputations are often determined in Toronto without much reference to the actual work.

I also want to write a book about an uncle who was in the SS in World War II. Not sure what form this story will take yet—maybe something hybrid, maybe something of a composite of him and several other relatives who had rich, sometimes horrifying experiences. Have notes, fragments, images.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Life Is Too Short For A Long Story: a new essay up at Numero Cinq

I've a new essay on composing short fiction up at Numero Cinq: "Life Is Too Short For A Long Story." You should totally read it.

"Amanda Earl: Excerpts from Saint Ursula’s Commonplace Book," at Jacket2

My 12th 'commentary,' "Amanda Earl: Excerpts from Saint Ursula’s Commonplace Book," is now online at Jacket2.