Rob Mclennan's Blog, page 91

Ongoing notes, early May 2023: Vera Hadzic + Cindy Juyoung Ok,

Mayalready? God sakes. But you saw the daily poems posted on the Chaudiere Books blog for National Poetry Month, yes? Our tenth annual list! If you go here, you can even see the full list with links of all the poems posted so far in the series, which is pretty cool. I mean, it is an awful lot.

Ottawa ON: It was good to finally see Ottawa poet Vera Hadzic’s [see my “six questions” interview with her here] debut chapbook, Fossils You Can Swallow (Proper Tales Press, 2023), published recently throughStuart Ross’ Proper Tales Press. There’s such a lovely clarity and unselfconsciousnessto Hadzic’s lines, enough that one might end up following those lines to some unexpectedand even dark places through a thread of surrealism. “The sound of your name onmy tongue / is sweet and secret and swollen with / the crackling of syllables,”she writes, to open the poem “Your Name on My Tongue.” Offering poems as narrative-thesesthat accumulate from one point to another, there’s an interesting sense ofHadzic carefully feeling her way through form, with some poems feeling a bit ofhesitation, while others, a kind of confident, subtle, stride. “The Atlantic isdtoo deep and salty / to drink, lady.” the poem “Atlantic Drainage” begins, “Youare going / to hurt yourself. I am always hurting / myself.”

soup chicken

my sky is an overturnedbowl
bowling is something I dowhen I’m desperate
desperate birds tuck inwings, torpedo windows
windows that haven’t beencleaned in ages
ages are numbers paintedover in grease
grease gathers in thecurve of the pan
pan, god of wilderness,sings into moss
moss grows like furacross the backs of my hands
hands I once dug with,unlike now
now I feel the slownessin my pulse
pulse, that’s what thesky does when it turns red
red like onions and warmorange soup
soup would be good rightabout now
now I’m hungry for a nicefull bowl
a bowl of sky soup, maybe
maybe just chicken soup

Brooklyn NY: I recently received a copy of Cindy Juyoung Ok’s chapbook House Work (ugly duckling presse, 2023). I hadn’t heard hername prior, but a quick online search offers that she “is a writer, an editor,and an educator. Her debut poetry collection, Ward Toward, won the 2023 Yale Younger Poets Prize.” There’s a really propulsive and lovely flow to herlyrics, one that rolls along long threads through line breaks and commas and flow.As the opening poem “The Five Room Dance,” begins: “In our search for aproportionate address we leak / out of bed as you stretch your books and I mine/ the frozen language for olding hands day by week. / I account for each sirenand you count the hips to sigh // for with the seam of open borders.” Her linearityis anything but straightforward, through a wordplay that aims straight but turnsand twists in delightful ways, offered as tweaks and tics, presenting suchwonderful, subtle movement. “Tracing the yard,” the poem continues, “the laceof leaves as why I write. Why I, right, frown / your side affects, the cadenceof the fact that stars: / a woman is a thing that absorbs.”

Herlines are searing, slippery; and her narratives offer a quickness that suggestsphrases working to simply fly by until one meets you, as is her purpose,deliberately head-on. “My country is broken,” she offers, to open “Moss andMarigold,” “is estranged, is trying, we write, / as though there is such amaterial as a country, as / though the landlord doesn’t charge rent for lifelived / outside the house. When it comes to survival there is no right // waybut there’s no wrong way either. The country is / a construction, with eachwriting becomes more made.” Her poems have such an ease to them but strike withsuch incredible force. Oh, I think I am very much looking forward to seeingthis full-length debut.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Tawahum Bige

Tawahum Bige [photo credit: Megan Naito] is a Łutselkʼe Dene, Plains Cree poet and spoken word artist from unceded Musqueam, Squamish & Tsleil-waututh Territory (cka Vancouver). Their Scorpio-moon-ass poems expose growth, resistance & persistence as a hopeless Two Spirit Nonbinary sadboy on occupied Turtle Island. In typical Aries-sun fashion, Tawahum completed the first-ever Indigenous Spoken Word residency at the Banff Centre in 2018 while completing their BA in Creative Writing from KPU in 2019.

Tawahum’s long-awaited debut album, Bottled Lightning , emerges May 5th. His single, Connect2Spirit charted #1 on Indigenous Music Countdown in June 2022. He’s performed at Talking Stick Festival, Verses Festival of Spoken Word, Canadian Festival of Spoken Word, and at over 50 different venues from Victoria to Toronto with his mixture of poetry & hip-hop. Past the stage and onto the page, Tawahum has been published in over a dozen different lit journals & magazines including Red Rising Magazine, Prairie Fire, CV2, Arc Poetry Magazine and in the anthology, Beyond Earth’s Edge: the poetry of spaceflight! A prolific word-artist, Tawahum has three self-published chapbooks with poetry collections on the way including a collection-in-progress funded by the Canada Council for the Arts. Nightwood Editions published Tawahum’s debut collection of poetry, Cut to Fortress , in 2022.

Beyond the page, Tawahum has battled the (in)justice system of BC and was eventually incarcerated for a 28-day sentence after a 2-year battle for his land protection work against Kinder Morgan/Trans Mountain’s pipeline expansion. Of course, this doesn’t stop him from grabbing a boom mic to amplify his words of resistance & resurgence at front-line rallies, street performances and more. Follow Tawahum on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook: @Tawahum.

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?

Chapbook: it gave me the agency to just make my fucking art and know it can be out there. To price it myself, front it, print it, get to know the editing cycle, give folks a taste of my best poetry at the time (2018) and a treat for those who had heard me live since some were those poems also.

Cut to Fortress: This book is the culmination of my best poems I wrote both in classes and in the community between 2016-2018. It was an arduous process that required finding a second publisher after things fell thru with the first. I almost quit. But I sent it out and found nightwood. I needed to have some of my family's story and my late brother Emeri Julian Elan Bige's story codified to continue long past my own existence. It's finally out as of 2022 and I feel like I can finally bury some of that experience as seeds to become beautiful art in the future also.

My recent work is still trauma-healing poetry. I rap now too, under the name Tawahum, and that's from a poetic place. But past the stuff I've completed and yet to release- I have been creating things that are more gently vulnerable and eschewing much of what I learned in the classroom to get to the core of who I am as a poet, a rapper. I used to yell a lot. Not so much in what I've been experimenting with lately.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
 
Storytelling. The potency and urgency of being triggered and how that could be crystallized into a container for a lot of my trauma. Instead of a giant essay or a 2 hour ramble, I have assortments of poems from 1 minute or 1 page to just a few minutes or pages. Helps me put constraint on it. Then process it from that dissected place. Also being able to share it on the stage was fundamental in me believing my own story and accepting it, to have it heard by such a great group of humans.

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?

Pass on first part, too variable. Yo this whole question tbh. It wildly varies. Fast sometimes, slow others. The only thing I can say more certainly is that only few rare poems or songs come out looking like they're almost fully done on a first draft. The rest is arduous but again varies so wildly!

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?

Angst. The visceral need to tell some story. Reading someone else's work and feeling the former two things mentioned. Cut to Fortress is short into combination. Then, I've been trying to write books from concepts, but I think more recently we're back to stockpiling. It's such a fun process.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
 
Fantastically important. I need readings and performances for a good portion of my work to understand how it literally lands with my audience. Seeing their faces, reactions, feedback. I am addicted to the stage. Even karaoke. Just please I love it.

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?

Pass

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

Poets and writers and the larger umbrella: artists are integral to the social structure of any society. Ask almost any Indigenous culture whether here or elsewhere. Artists are prophets. They're lawmakers. Critics of law. Guides to next generations. Instigator of social change and revolution. There is no vacuum in which art is wholly separate from these things and I consider it a conspiracy by colonialism to keep artists as dispossessed and delineated from their true purpose as they are the greatest threat to that system.

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

Both. Gonna pass on this one too, or else I'll get too boringly academic.

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

Saul williams, when I asked him in a masterclass, "how do you develop voice," he replied,"I don't think about that. But since you asked, I will." He paused."Write everyday. Your voice will come from that." Anyone could've told me it but from him?? He's incredibly profound in his way.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (text-based works to performance works)? What do you see as the appeal?

Text is so quiet sometimes. I need quiet, to read, to study, cultivate a gentle routine in order to write purely page poetry. Performance works whether poetry or music, it's a much louder process. Listening to music. Writing and then speaking or rapping. Going to shows. Exhilaration. It's difficult to balance the two. Sometimes you're tired and desire that quiet. Sometimes you wanna party and bring the vibes. It's all beautiful. Sometimes they mix. Nothing is absolute.

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?

Writing at some point in a day. After pandemic that means I've missed some days, lost to vices and other distractions. But when I'm on my game, I write every day at some point. This year? I wake at Noon-1pm and take care of the business side of my full-time poet/artist career and then stay up til 4am and write at some point between 10pm and then. Never used to. Had to be in the first half of the day when I was making it a routine. Now, I lean into my love of the calm and dark of the night and it makes me so fucking happy.

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

I just read poetry. I'd say listen to music but that doesn't necessarily, enjoy it too much. But poetry is dangerous. Hard to read it and not want to write it.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Musty is the best word for it. Just old smelling things. Clothes sitting there for years. Musty.

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?

Already mentioned but also yes I missed talking about the land- the land loves us and we love the land. How can you see the mountains the ocean the river the forest the desert the volcanoes the clouds the blue sky the fucking lightning and not want to fucking write!

Science can, you learn about how shit works and while being too stupid to truly comprehend it, just encode it back into poems as best you can. It's a funny experience. Scientist poets are something else entirely.

Visual arts goes with poetry well also! To see images and codify them, ekphrastic as it were. Fucking cool. My brothers Brandon Gabriel and Jonas Bige are really inspirational that way, their visual art. They just put up a 2 story piece honouring Kat Norris at KPU Surrey Library and it is PHENOMENAL.

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

Saul Williams, Kae Tempest, Zack de la Rocha, Janet Rogers, Zaccheus Jackson, Jillian Christmas, RC Weslowski, Julian Randall, Saba, Kimmortal, Lee Maracle, lately, Patrick Lane. Sure there's more.

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

Travel. All around the world. Obviously it'll spark writing but whatever, I just need to experience things in different places, different people, different landscapes. Have my braveheart growing up moment.

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?

Stunt actor/movement artist or actor that does their own stunts. Fucking love action movies and fight choreography. It inspires me so much! Or an animator of the same type of deal. Just encoding my visions of movement, conflict and battle into something tangible. Fuck ya.

Was almost in IT, that'd have been stable. But it made me feel disconnected from the real world to learn about computer world the more I got into my IT degree so I needed to find the opposite.

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

Necessity. Connection. You write and connect with the world around you thru that. It's beautiful. Connects with above reply abt IT.

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

Hope Matters by Lee Maracle, Columpa Bobb and Tania Carter. A firecracker Indigenous mother and her daughters collabing on a poetry book? Are you fucking kidding me?

John Wick 4 . I fucking love action. Stylized battles. Hero journey you can get behind. Just gorgeous.

20 - What are you currently working on?

About to release my debut music album, Bottled Lightning on May 5 with a huge launch show at The Fox Cabaret Vancouver with all my collaborators from the album May 30. Includes Ḱesugwilakw, Kimmortal, HK, Khingz, Adrian Avendaño, Dani Lion, and David Tallarico. Album concept is telling the story of my land protection work from 2018 that got me arrested and the 2 year arduous fucking court process that led to me being incarcerated for a month in 2020. It's gorgeous.

Two collection series about the development of my voice from a baby all the way til now. Whether how I learned to use it, or not, develop it, what it looks like. A lot of beautiful storytelling of my life's journey in more than just traumatic terms. It's called Stages of Tanning Words and Remembering Spells. Nightwood will release the first part in 2024!

After my album, more poems, more singles, just creating and also traveling to the UK to scout and learn about where our gross ass "country" and empire came from and chat with the locals about it.

Thanks for reminding me this was fun to do during my plane ride.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Evan Kennedy, METAMORPHOSIS

 

 

TREE OF LIFE

In the tree of life I losemy way
upper branches tangledvines self-reflected creation
it’s not my intention toforget my origin
a sunbeam illuminates me
my descendants inferiorsin branches below
my own face bloomingsmiling cawing
I was birthed raised frombelow
lifted onto a branch thenfell into gravity’s biomass
The tree of life calls tome inscribes my lineage
ears enclose a sonicglobe
beside me mycontemporaries
close relations withintouch while
I jump swing fly toothers farther away I resemble less
Hold onto that imagerecite it
I wait for these branchesto be canceled
entire history existentwithin me
my identity compriseslife nothing more
my appearance is its alteration

Thelatest from San Francisco-based “poet and bicyclist” Evan Kennedy is METAMORPHOSIS (San Francisco CA: City Lights Books, 2023), published as the twenty-secondtitle in the “City Lights Spotlight” series. Kennedy is also the author of ahandful of prior titltes that I seem to have (frustratingly) missed, including Shoo-Insto Ruin (Gold Wake Press, 2011), Terra Firmament (Krupskaya, 2013), The Sissies (Futurepoem, 2016), Jerusalem Notebook (O’clock Press, 2017)and I am, am I, to trust the joy that joy is no more or less there now than before (Roof Books, 2020). The lyrics that make up Kennedy’s METAMORPHOSISslant and slash, each composed as monologues exploring voice, through Ovid, oraclesand Apollo to the very nature and possibility of change. Kennedy threads threepoems with the same title, “Tree of Life,” through the collection as a kind oftether, threading a prompt led by Ovid himself. “I’m not pursuing / you exactlybut resemblance through subjectless tissue / and muscle,” Kennedy writes, toclose the poem “TO OVID,” “expanding grim tradition to keep leopards happy /lounging in mossy temples long after belief.”

METAMORPHOSIS is a southern California poem of temporalshifts, and ghosts both new and old, offering a lyric examination of transformation,queerness, collapsing empires, the ecological present and a range of popculture references to anchor each moment. Kennedy digs his layers deep intoantiquity, simultaneously overlapping a contemporary San Francisco throughwriting the minotaur, Phaethon, Keats and Judy Garland, Roman household godsand Madonna. There is a great deal of play here, blended with an anxiety forthe future while slipping through and across identity and possibility. Through Kennedy’sdeft hand, this book length poem is already more than it already is.

 

new from above/ground press: ten new (March-April) titles,

What started / this mess , Samuel Ace $5 ; BIRD SNOW ON HARD TRACKS, Stuart Ross $5 ; Apogee/Perigee, Leesa Dean $5 ; Report from the (Nikki) Reimer Society, Vol 1. No. 1, edited by rob mclennan $7 ; When a Folk, When a Sprawl, Jessi MacEachern $5 ; Touch the Donkey [a small poetry journal] #37, with new poems by Micah Ballard, Robert Hogg, Ben Meyerson, Leigh Chadwick, Junie Désil, Devon Rae, kevin mcpherson eckhoff and Kimberly Dyck, Benjamin Niespodziany and Barbara Tomash $7 ; G U E S T [a journal of guest editors] #26, guest-edited by Adam Katz, with new work by alex benedict, Marc E. Christmas, Adam Katz and Ron Silliman $7 ; NOISE, Jordan Davis $5 ; Report from the (Jessica) Smith Society, Vol 1. No. 1, edited by rob mclennan $7 ; LEARNING HOW TO TALK, Nick Chhoeun $5 ;

keep an eye on the above/ground press blog for author interviews, new writing, reviews, upcoming readings and tons of other material; and what exciting plans might be afoot for this summer's exciting thirtieth anniversary event?

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
March-April 2023
as part of above/ground press’ thirtieth anniversary
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy of each

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; in US, add $2; outside North America, add $5) to: rob mclennan, 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9. E-transfer or PayPal at at rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com or the PayPal button (above). Scroll down here to see various backlist titles, or click on any of the extensive list of names on the sidebar (many, many things are still in print).

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

Forthcoming chapooks by Jérôme Melançon, Russell Carisse, Micah Ballard, Cary Fagan, Jennifer Baker, Amanda Deutch, Kevin Stebner, Kyla Houbolt, Gary Barwin, Adriana Oniță, Noah Berlatsky, Heather Cadsby, Blunt Research Group, Phil Hall + Steven Ross Smith, Zane Koss, Peter Myers, Gil McElroy, Ben Robinson, Miranda Mellis, MLA Chernoff, Terri Witek, Geoffrey Olsen, Pete Smith, Julia Drescher, Robert van Vliet, Brad Vogler, Joseph Donato, Andrew Gorin, Marita Dachsel, Angela Caporaso and Isabella Wang! And probably a whole bunch of stuff I haven't even thought up yet. And there’s totally still time to subscribe for 2023, by the way (backdating to January 1st, obviously).

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Katherine Indermaur

Katherine Indermaur is the author of I|I (Seneca Review Books), winner of the 2022 Deborah Tall LyricEssay Book Prize, and two chapbooks. She serves as an editor for Sugar House Review and is the winner ofthe Black Warrior Review 2019 PoetryContest and the 2018 Academy of American Poets Prize. Her writing has appearedor is forthcoming in Coast|noCoast, Ecotone,Electric Literature, New Delta Review, Ninth Letter, the Normal School, and elsewhere. She lives with her family in FortCollins, Colorado.

1 - How did yourfirst book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compareto your previous? How does it feel different?

My first book, I|I,came out on November 15, 2022 from Seneca Review Books. It changed my life inso many ways, but perhaps the most interesting to you and your readers is theway it made a certain kind of thinking possible for me. I|I is abook-length work, a serial lyric essay, so while it is fragmented, there is alsoendurance present. And with endurance comes a kind of rigor not achieved in thetypical single-page, social media-friendly poem form we’re used to seeing thesedays. I was able to see for the first time the way my brain wrestles with the subjectmatter of I|I—vision, self-perception, mirrors, mental health—and comesto a new understanding with it through that very endurance.

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

I came to poetrythe way one comes to a crush—I was totally enamored. Poetry felt like magicbecause it wasn’t obvious or even really explicable how what was on the pagemade me feel. I wanted to be a part of its magic, to write into that place thatseemed the truest to human experience, the place of revelation as in toliterally reveal.

To be clear, I|Ilives in the space between poetry and nonfiction, but I think of myself asa poet first, and of I|I often through that lens. (To me, betweennessfeels like a space poetry inhabits.)

3 - How longdoes it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writinginitially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear lookingclose to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

I just gave birthto my first baby last June, so I’m struck by how different all my answers arenow compared to what they were back when I was writing I|I, or workingon other projects before she arrived. From start to submission of the finalversion, I|I took about four years. At first I didn’t realize I waswriting a book, but my MFA workshop cohort and professors insisted there wasmore for me to uncover, more work for me to do on the topic than just a fewshort poems or pages.

I think my writinginitially comes quickly, but then revisiting the drafts is a much slowerprocess. For lengthy projects, I tend to chase an initial spark of interest,then realize I have to follow that up with reading or researching or otherwiseexperimenting off the page in order to come back to it and make something meaningful.

Since I’ve been amom, I definitely take copious notes, mostly in my phone between tasks or whilebreastfeeding. So far I’ve been able to sit down and look at those notes and writesomething resembling a poem from them exactly once!

4 - Where does apoem or work of prose usually begin for you? Are you an author of short piecesthat end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a"book" from the very beginning?

It depends on theproject! With I|I and one in-progress manuscript, I realized prettyearly on that the subject matter demanded a full-length form. I have recentlytended toward writing longer, multi-page poems, but one of mymanuscripts-in-progress consists (currently) solely of very brief lyric poems,mostly fewer than a dozen lines each. I feel like that only works for mebecause it’s in the context of a much broader project, though.

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

I can’t say I enjoythe act of reading publicly, but what I truly enjoy is being in a room withother people who are there to think about the same kinds of things I’m there tothink about. The community we form together at a reading is invaluable to mebecause writing can feel pretty lonely, even though I’m often thinking aboutthe reader while I’m doing it. Readings seem to lie outside my creativeprocess, but they feel essential to the part of writing that is being a writer.

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

Light and distanceand the implications that these facts of our universe have on divinity come upin my writing over and over again, even when I’m ostensibly writing about, say,environmental collapse. I guess there’s an element of hope inherent in thosephenomena for me in the same way that there’s an element of despair, too. I’mobsessed with the nexus of those opposites, and why hope is so beautiful whenit is necessitated by absence—of a solution, of a god, of answers.

7 – What do you seethe current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one?What do you think the role of the writer should be?

As much as Ibristle at claiming to know what the role of a writer in our culture should be,I do have a few guiding principles for myself. The main one is that I shouldgive back to our community by supporting other writers, whether through reading,teaching, writing reviews, or sharing their work. I’m thinking of Ross Gay’sparaphrasing of Fred Moten in Inciting Joy, which I’m currently reading:“We’ve got to get together to figure out how to get together.” Putting my workout there into the world is really, I think, an attempt to get us together.

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

Both! I have theexperience of being both an editor and a writer, and as an editor, it can feelso nerve-wracking to have to lightly say to the author, “Hey, so I fact-checkedthis, and you’re wrong.” As a writer, I’ve also been on the receiving end ofthat very statement. Ultimately if you as a writer care about your reader,that’s something that can unite your efforts with your editor’s, and you canthink about your editor as a reader, too—albeit a very vocal one.

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

I had a poetryprofessor in college, Alan Shapiro, who I remember told us to follow ourdiscomfort while writing—to trust it, in a way. I have found that to be sotrue. If I’m nervous about including something in my writing, if it feelsrisky, there’s often a lot of energy there, what some of my poet friends havecalled “the white-hot center of a poem,” or “the central anxiety of a poem.” That’soften where you’re being the most vulnerable, and what I’ve found to be themost meaningful and rewarding about my own work is to trust thatvulnerability—in myself and others. Vulnerability is where we connect.

10 - How easy hasit been for you to move between genres (poetry to prose)? What do you see asthe appeal?

When reading, Igravitate most to nonfiction writers who are also poets (Maggie Nelson, Ross Gay, Anne Carson, Mary Ruefle, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Terry Tempest Williams,Robin Wall Kimmerer, Claudia Rankine, Kylan Rice) or who otherwise have verystrong poetic sensibilities (Brian Doyle, Eliot Weinberger, Ellen Meloy,Rebecca Solnit) because what I like most is nonfiction that movesassociatively, the way poetry does. To me, the mind is the driving force of theessay, whereas in poetry it doesn’t have to be. Poetry is often moreinstinctual; nonfiction has to back up its instincts, justify them. Movingbetween nonfiction and poetry has been thus at the whim of the subject matterfor me. If it needs to be more about my mind, about investigating the mind,then nonfiction it is—or has been, so far.

11 - What kind ofwriting routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does atypical day (for you) begin?

I wish! Before mybaby was born, I would often write in the mornings before I went to work (Iwork a typical office job, 8-to-5 situation). Now all that is in flux. The mostI can do is read while breastfeeding and type notes toward writing in mysmartphone in the stolen moments between caretaking. So a typical day beginswith being woken up by a hungry baby, feeding her, and getting ready for work.Not very glamorous but certainly essential and lifegiving.

12 - When yourwriting gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a betterword) inspiration?

I feel mostinspired to write when I’m reading excellent writing whose thinking I admire.Second-best is observing art in other media, or spending time in nature. Mybrain is often at its most creative when I’m taking a walk outside, but I needto be immersed in texts to actually come up with something worth saying on thepage myself.

13 - What fragrancereminds you of home?

Sagebrush after asummer rainstorm reminds me of my home in the Rocky Mountain West, but bloomingazaleas and daffodils are what remind me of growing up in North Carolina.

14 - David W.McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other formsthat influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

I love listening topodcasts like Radiolab or watching PBS documentary series like Natureand Nova for how they spark curiosity and are accessible to people whodidn’t major in STEM, like me. Spending time outside is also really importantto me and the main reason why I live where I do. I like recreating outdoors,but I also love just sitting in a camp chair and looking up at a mesa in NewMexico or a granite cliff in Wyoming or a red canyon in Utah or a snowy peak inColorado. I love learning about the native plants and animals here; I use theapp iNaturalist to identify what I observe. I also love keeping my ownvegetable garden. But I think the influence that all this time spent outsidehas on my writing can be somewhat subtle; it’s more an overwhelming love forthe world. As Pam Houston writes, “the Earth doesn’t know how not to bebeautiful.”

15 - What otherwriters or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside ofyour work?

I’m looking up atmy bookshelves while I type a response to this question, because I am easilystumped when some well-meaning stranger at some benign get-together asks me,“Who are your favorite poets?” Every time! I feel like I need to carry around anotecard in my wallet. So here is what my bookshelves (and library history) aresaying: all works by Rainer Maria Rilke, H. D., Christian Wiman, Jack Gilbert,Linda Gregg, Simone Weil, Terry Tempest Williams, and W. S. Merwin; themagazine Orion; Rosmarie Waldrop’s Blindsight; Paisley Rekdal’s “Nightingale: A Gloss”; Natalie Diaz’s Postcolonial Love Poem; AlfredLord Tennyson’s In Memoriam; Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass; AliceNotley’s The Descent of Alette; Natasha Trethewey’s Native Guard;Anne Carson’s The Autobiography of Red; Dan Beachy-Quick’s Variationson Dawn and Dusk; Mary Rakow’s incredible Biblical novel This Is Why ICame; Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain for the beauty of a lifelived in the mountains; and Maggie Nelson’s Bluets.

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

I want to float theRio Grande in Big Bend National Park. I want to do a hut-to-hut backpackingtrip through the Swiss Alps. I want to see Alaska. I want to become proficientat trad climbing. I want to kayak the mangrove swamp in Congaree National Park.I want to ice skate on an alpine lake in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains.

When it comes towriting, I don’t have as many specific goals. I’d love to publish a collectionof shorter poems, as my first book was a book-length work, but really I justwant to keep making things I’m proud of and excited to share with the world.

17 - If you couldpick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, whatdo you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

I can’t imagine I’dbe some other kind of artist, as I’m not really good enough at any other craft!When I was young, I thought alternately about being a spy (thanks, Harriet), avolcanologist, a Navy SEAL, or one of those scientists who climbs redwoodtrees—apparently anything involving risk and adventure. Let’s go withvolcanologist!

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

As soon as I couldread, I loved books. I loved the worlds they created, the characters you got toknow, the stories they shared. I was also raised to revere the Bible, so textreally was magical. I wrote stories in grade school—most of which I abandonedpart of the way through, then lyrics to little songs, and then poetry in highschool.

Aside from a lovefor books and language, I have teachers to thank for making me write. From elementaryto graduate school, I had incredible teachers who taught me how to lovewriting. What more could you ask from education, to learn how to love somethingfor the rest of your life?

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

The last great bookI read was Geoffrey Babbitt’s Appendices Pulled from a Study on Light(Spuyten Duyvil, 2018), which is a beautiful and confounding exploration ofilluminated manuscripts and spiritual identity. Appendices isever-so-aware of its being a text, and takes full advantage of its form, whichI love. I don’t watch a lot of movies, but I’ve found myself thinking andtalking a lot about White Noise, the new Netflix adaptation of DonDeLillo’s 1985 novel. The way the American family is portrayed and in the80’s—this era of great excess and self-absorption and apocalyptic fear—feelsdeeply true, but also weird as fuck. And I like the new LCD Soundsystem songthat plays as the end credits roll, “new body rhumba.”

20 - What are youcurrently working on?

I’m slowly workingon and thinking about two projects. The first is a series of poems on andsometimes in the voice of Egeria, a female Christian pilgrim from the fourthcentury who was the first known woman to summit several peaks like Mount Sinai,and whose writings from her travels have partly survived to today.

The second projectis a long poem-kind-of-thing about the process of my baby’s acquisition oflanguage. I’m adding to it every so often as new things occur to me, happen tome, teach me.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Natalie Eilbert, Overland

My review of Natalie Eilbert's Overland (Copper Canyon, 2023) [see my review of her prior book here] is now online at periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics.

Camille Martin, R

Light is not
inevitable. Overshot it
or not yet there.
Nothing, for that
matter. In any case,
not arrived. Anything
could have been
otherwise.

Thelatest from Toronto poet and collagist Camille Martin is the poetry title, R (Toronto ON: Rogue Embroyo Press, 2023), following a list of books andchapbooks over the years, including Plastic Heaven (New Orleans:single-author issue of Fell Swoop, 1996), Magnus Loop (Tucson,Arizona: Chax Press, 1999), Rogue Embryo (New Orleans: Lavender Ink,1999), Sesame Kiosk (Elmwood CT: Potes and Poets, 2001), Codes of Public Sleep (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2007), Sonnets (Shearsman Books,2010), If Leaf, Then Arpeggio (above/ground press, 2011), Looms (Shearsman Books, 2012), Sugar Beach (above/ground press, 2013) and Blueshift Road (Rogue Embryo Press, 2021) [see my review of such here]. It isinteresting that, after a period of relative silence, she has quietly reemergedthrough self-publication, offering a first (Blueshift Road) and now thissecond full-length collection (R), since the onset of Covid-19 lockdowns.Still, with pieces that originally appeared in a handful of journals andanthologies, as well as in the chapbooks Magnus Loop and Sugar Beach,it suggests that this particular manuscript has been gestating for some time. Theone hundred and fifty pages of this collection are predominantly articulated asa sequence of short, untitled, haiku-like bursts, each carved into the centreof the page. It is almost as though these meditative bursts are attempts toachieve and articulate balance, seeking a grounding effect through this sequenceof carved sketchworks. Each poem is thoughtful, observational; settling into short-formthought and speech via playful scraps. “plastic raspberries linked with safetypins,” she writes, mid-way through the collection, “dull flavour of stewed rubies// stoplight blinking in a junkyard [.]” Each poem offers sketch and pausethrough an effect of collage, suggesting a construction similar to the imagespresented on the front and back cover: a suggestion of simultaneous image andidea, carved, clipped, collected and formed into poem-shapes that retain theircollage-simultaneity through each tightly-packed singular effect. There is anenormous amount going on in these poems, clearly.

shadow concealing
colour, colour
shedding cells

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Meghan Kemp-Gee

Meghan Kemp-Gee's debut full-length poetry collection The Animal in the Room is forthcoming from Coach House Books in May 2023. She is also the author of two chapbooks ( What I Meant to Ask and The Bones & Eggs & Beets) and co-creator of Contested Strip, the world’s best comic about ultimate frisbee (and soon to be a graphic novel).

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?

Obviously, we poets have to be good at spending a lot of time and energy on our work with very little external validation. I've been so fortunate to have a few big successful milestones recently, including getting into an awesome poetry PhD program and my first book getting accepted for publication at a wonderful publisher. And to be honest, that external validation does work on me! It makes me feel like I KNOW what I'm doing, instead of just hoping I know.

So I feel like my work these days is more self-assured and ambitious. I don't know where that confidence boost is going to take me. We'll see.

More than anything, it means everything to me that other people are actually reading what I write and spending time with my work. That's why I write. It means everything.

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

The mediums I work in most often are poetry, comics, and screenwriting. I'm not sure exactly why, but it's very rare that I have an idea I want to explore through prose more than I want to explore it through a poem or a scene or a comic. The reasons for that are completely mysterious to me, because I really enjoy reading fiction and nonfiction! I just rarely have an impulse towards creating it.
 
3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

I am a pretty fast, hard writer once I get going! I fear and admire poets who carefully revise and slowly edit over months and months, but I don't work like that!

Whether we're talking about a single poem or a giant project, something tends to blindside me out of nowhere and whine at me until it gets finished. Whatever "it" is, it comes and looks for you. I'm a big believer that if a poem is talking to you, it needs to be written right away, as much as you can. It might not get finished that day, but I'm always grateful when I follow that voice or that whine.

Once I've drafted a poem, I often revise it as many times as I need to, once or twice or twenty times, within the first day or two. I don't need to finish it, but I need to finish it as much as I can. A few of my poems, about 10 percent, get stuck in the early stages, and those are the ones you just put away and wait until you know what to do with them, weeks or years later.

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?

I used to be a very poem-focused poet. I liked the idea of the self-contained unit, the little room -- neat and tidy and a world of its own.

I still like thinking about my poems like that! But ever since I finished writing Animal in the Room I've been increasingly interested in what I could do with sequences and interconnected series of poems, including my chapbooks and full-length book projects. Right now, I love playing with repetition, because it creates alternative realities, rhizomes, new connections. I'm fascinated by those branches, tensions, links, and ligaments between pages. In comics theory, they talk about "hyperlinks" or "arthrology" -- the study of connections between and across texts.

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

I don't have a huge amount of experience with readings yet, but I do enjoy them! I want to do more! I put a lot of care into how my work sounds, because I hope some readers will want to read the poems out loud.

I also really love the experience of reading with other poets and writers, firstly because I like meeting them, and also because of those wonderful, unexpected connections between poems that often spring up at public readings. I love those!

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?

Sometimes I'm concerned that I'm not intentional enough in formulating a theoretical framework for what I'm writing. My process is very form-based -- I like to pick one or more patterns or formal features and just see where they take me. Let the poem go where it wants to go.

But I also recognize that that's just a process, not a theory. If you write like me, one of the things you have to be concerned about, and responsible about, is that a form-first process doesn't absolve you of your authorship. You're still responsible for what the poem does.

So basically, my theoretical concerns, my process, and my questions all have to do with the same kind of thing: how meaning and structure work together, and create each other, again and again and every time we write. And every time we read, or try to understand the physical world, that's also what's happening: meaning versus structure. I guess Meaning/Structure and Theory/Practice map onto each other, to a certain extent.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

I think there are many necessary roles for all kinds of writers and artists in our culture. Personally, I think of myself as doing a craft -- my job is to create things that are useful or interesting or pleasing to someone. There's a good Dylan Thomas quote that says that a poem is a contribution to reality. I like to think about my work like that.

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

Last summer I had the great honor of working with Coach House, and with Susan Holbrook to edit my poetry manuscript. I was really thrilled when my book was accepted for publication, but I'll never forget talking to Susan on the phone for the first time. She immediately summarized the whole book in this perfect, insightful, intellectual way, better than I ever could have. I was floored. I think it was the first moment in my life when I felt someone had really understood my work -- not just what an individual poem might mean, but my intentions, and everything I was trying to do on a larger scale. I'm so grateful to her for that moment. I'll never forget it.

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

When I met Phoebe Wang at UNB in 2021 she gave me some wonderful advice: to be patient. She told me that I could write quickly and impatiently, but then I had to be very patient about publishing, career, and everything that comes after. I'm not a patient writer, but I think that was good advice!

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to collaborating on a graphic novel)? What do you see as the appeal?

People have told me they find this weird, but it's always easy and fun for me to move between genres! I enjoy the variety: comics, poetry, screen. They're all very different in terms of skills, audience, collaboration, everything. But the more I work in multiple genres, the more I discover all these interesting connections and transferable skills & techniques. Anyway, the main appeal to me is that I'm just following my creative interests, and following opportunities to work with artists and projects I like.

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 would like to have a regular schedule, but between studying, teaching, writing, and sports, every day is a bit different! On my ideal day, I go to the gym first thing in the morning, then have two or three big blocks of serious work time after that. But the ideal day isn't a real day, is it?

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

I don't usually feel stalled. But I find I'm most productive and pleased with myself when I'm writing towards a project. I like that feeling of a target, where every little scrap of an idea or line seems pointed towards a larger thing.

If I'm not currently working on a project, I invent one, like writing a sonnet just because, or writing about the last TV show I watched, or whatever. If I'm really stuck, I just do some editing of my own poems, or just read someone else's poems. That always does the trick.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

My partner James is a brilliant baker! A pot of coffee brewing and something baking in the oven are the ultimate home-y smell for me.

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?

Movies, nature, and visual art are huge influences and frequent topics in my poems! Recently I'm experimenting with poems about sports and athletes, which is a new and unfamiliar influence.

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

This is such a difficult question because there are too many to narrow it down! I'm just going to throw out four writers who are at the tip of my tongue today because I've re-read them recently: Louise Gluck, Jack Kirby, James Baldwin, Gord Downie, Joy Harjo.

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

In poetry, one of my dreams is to work collaboratively with visual artists or musicians! I'd love to publish a poetry-comic hybrid text, or to write words for songs, operas, or live performances.

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've often considered becoming a yoga teacher! Maybe I'll still do that at some point?

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

Like a lot of us, I think I do this because I wouldn't be completely satisfied doing something else. Or at least I wouldn't be completely satisfied. I enjoy a lot of different types of work. Teaching makes me happy. Coaching sports and playing sports does too. I enjoyed working on movies and doing script consulting. But ultimately I think I need to write. Like your question says, something made me write.

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

Book: Haruki Murakami's What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

Film: Fire of Love

20 - What are you currently working on?

I am right on the exhilarating cusp between two big poetry projects!

I just hit "send" on a manuscript called Nebulas, which is about space, strawberries, and Walt Whitman. I think it's the best work that I've ever done and I can't wait to share it with everyone.

My next big thing is a series of lyric poems about dead and injured athletes. I don't want to say too much because it's still taking its shape! It's cooking!

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Joe Hall, Fugue and Strike

 

FUGUE 11 | HELLO, MYSLEEP

Hello, my sleep, my dawnthing
milk welling in the eyes     

of night—if you shouldlet me
if 6 am should slice this

cannister, carry the eggof this thought
in its mouth through thecolliding

fonts of sensoria—the eyesof night
open, it all leaks out

this sleep just a plane
on the polyhedron: sleep,our sleep

rising over the world (“FROMFUGUE & FUGUE”)

Thefourth full-length collection by Buffalo, New York “poet, critic and junkbookmaker” Joe Hall, following Pigafetta Is My Wife (Boston MA/ChicagoIL: Black Ocean, 2010), The Devotional Poems (Black Ocean, 2013) and Someone’s Utopia (Black Ocean, 2018) is Fugue and Strike: Poems by Joe Hall (BlackOcean, 2023). Fugue and Strike is constructed out of six poem-sections—“FromPeople Finder Buffalo,” “From Fugue & Strike,” “Garbage Strike,” “I HateThat You Died,” “The Wound” and “Polymer Meteor”—ranging from suites of shorterpoems to section-length single, extended lyrics. Hall’s poems are playful, savageand critical, composed as a book of lyric and archival fragments, cutting observations,testaments and testimonials. “[…] to become a poet / is to kill a poet,” hewrites, as part of the poem “FUGUE 6 | JACKED DADS OF CORNELL,” “cling to apoet / in the last hour, before slipping into the drift / atoms of talk bounce incylinders down Green St, predictive tongue / in the aleatory frame stream ofvaticides […].”

Throughoutthe first section, Hall offers fifty pages of lyric lullabies and mantras towardsa clarity, writing of sleep and machines, fugues and their possibilities. “eachpoem / an easter egg,” he writes, as part of “FUGUE 40 | DEBT AFTER DEBT,” “w/absence inside and inside absence / you are hunger, breathing this time andvalue / particularized into mist, you are there, at the end / of another shift[…].” The second section, “Garbage Strike,” subtitled “BUFFALO & ITHICA,NY, USA / JAN-MAY 2019,” responds to, obviously, a worker’s strike that theauthor witnessed, and one examined through a collage of lyric and archivalmaterials from the time. Echoing numerous poets over the years that haveresponded to issues of labour—including Philadelphia poet ryan eckes, Winnipegpoet Colin Brown, Vancouver poet Rob Manery and the early KSW work poetsincluding Tom Wayman and Kate Braid—Hall’s explorations sit somewhere betweenthe straight line and the experimental lyric, attempting to articulate a kindof overview via the collage of lyric, prose and archival materials. There issomething of the public thinker to Hall’s work, one that attempts to betterunderstand the point at which capitalism meets social movements and action, allof which attempts to get to the root of how it is we should live responsibly inthe world. There’s some hefty contemplation that sits at the foundation of Hall’swriting. Or, as he writes near the end, to open “POLYMER METEOR”:

George Oppen wrote in “DiscreetSeries,” “Rooms outlast you.” Pithy. And also indicative of a relation to timethat is modest, sobering. We die, apartments go on. Their floors get scratchedby someone else’s chairs. Their vents fill with the dust of someone else’slife. But those rooms also go, demolished to make way for some other, pricierstructure. Or those rooms are split open to moisture and creatures seekingshelter in a zone of divestment. A frame of time in which things live decades tocenturies.

Throughnotes on the poem/section included at the back of the collection, Hall writesthat “In terms of the content of Garbage Strike, the researcher must now sweepup after the poet. Garbage Strike is meant to be suggestive; it grew from asmall archive of peoples’ insurgent imagination in relation to waste. It’s notthorough historical scholarship, and I remain a student of the subject.”Further on, his note ends:

As recent scholars like CharisseBurden-Stelly have persuasively theorized the operations of racial capitalismin the modern US context, new directions for the work open up. For instance, toseek more on-the-ground facts about these struggles and to understand theirrelation to the operations of racial capitalism through the contexts thosefacts provide. To learn to recognize how particular individuals and institutionstranslate the dynamics of racial capitalism into distributions of waste,hierarchies of labor, and extraction of profits—and the multifarious ways peopleget together and fight back.

 

Gary Barwin and Lillian Nećakov, DUCK EATS YEAST, QUACKS, EXPLODES; MAN LOSES EYE: A Poem

 

1.

we fly but have not yetarrived
a suspended moment
the possible one
of the provinces of truth
it’s delightful

what you say, you say asa duck
you can say nothingoutside of this
let us now consider theother eye

Gary Barwin and Lillian Nećakov’s collaborative DUCK EATS YEAST, QUACKS,EXPLODES; MAN LOSES EYE: A Poem (Toronto ON: Guernica Editions, 2023), is aproject that takes its prompt from a story that ran through American newspapersacross January, 1910, about Des Moines, Iowa’s Silas Perkins, who was said tohave lost the sight in one eye after his prize-winning duck, Rhadamanthus(named for the wise demigod king of Crete from Greek mythology), ate a plate ofyeast and exploded (a check on Snopes suggests that this story might be apocryphal).Through one hundred and forty-four sequentially-numbered poem-sections, Hamiltonwriter, poet and composer Barwin and Toronto poet and editor Nećakov, friendswho first began to interact through a small group of self-declared surrealistpoets in Toronto during the 1980s, playfully pull and extend their narrative threadfrom that singular headline. They compose a collaborative riff of quickmovement and verbal gymnastics, akin to a variation on Fred Wah’s suggestion of“drunken tai chi,” allowing their individual writing skills to articulate whatis so clearly a gleefully-extended wordplay through and against dark humour,narrative expectation and strains of surrealism. This poem is very much a playfulexploration via a kind of ongoingness, working to see where the poem might gonext and how far, seemingly less concerned with where it might end up. “somethinghappened in Des Moines involving a duck,” part 11 writes, “some yeast, a man / hiseye // it’s still happening [.]” The poem exists in the present, allowing the storyof a century past remain as a kind of fixed point. Or, as they write, furtheron:

91.

we are always laughingwith
or for the dead
the burden livewires mustbear

the body begins tomultiply
a bag of laugh explosions
illuminate the wound

I’mfascinated with how Barwin has seemingly been working a multitude of simultaneousdirections over the past few years, from producing award-nominated novels tovisual poetry, musical composition, poetry collections [see my review of his latest here] and a slew of collaborative efforts, a thread in his work that hasreally ramped up over the past half-decade, including his full-lengthcollaboration with Gregory Betts, The Fabulous Op (Ireland: Beir BuaPress, 2022) [see my review of such here] and a second full-lengthcollaboration with Tom Prime, Bird Arsonist (Vancouver BC: New StarBooks, 2022) [see my review of such here], as well as multiple chapbook-lengthcollaborations with writers such as Amanda Earl and myself. How does he manageto keep track? jwcurry once offered that bpNichol was a great writer not purelybased on what he accomplished with his work, but that he was willing to fail,which provided such further possibilities in his writing, and this kind offearlessness is something that Barwin’s work employs as well. For her part, I’mless aware of Nećakov’s collaborative works [see my review of her latest collection here], although I know she’s worked a number of smaller,self-contained works for years, and a quick Google search provides that a further book-length collaboration she did with Scott Ferry and Lauren Scharhag,titled Midnight Glossolalia, appears later this year with Meat For Tea Press.

And,of course, the final poem in the collection does acknowledge their extended playon ongoingness, an echo of Robert Kroetsch’s poetics of perpetual delay,perhaps, or even the “say yes” structure of improv, offering: “to being andbegin and begin / in the middle of a sentence / after the final yes / ofyesness [.]” A few poems prior, number one hundred and thirty-seven, theywrite:

my grandfather’s town so small
if you said its name
as you walked in
you’d have walked out
before you’d finished

Mark Twain said
those who are inclined toworry
have the widest selectionin history

if the rich could hire
other people to die forthem
the poor could make
a wonderful living