One Question Interview: John Nyman
John Nyman is a poet, critic and book artist. He is the author of Players, shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Award among other works, but his most recent title is A Devil Every Day, new from Palimpsest Press.
Aside from the many startlingly good lines in your book, there’s a mix of styles: some poems are in different voices so that you’re in the book as the writer in a refreshingly indirect way, while others are more direct. I particularly liked the advice “celebrate stillness,” which I’d say is desperately needed in North America. Could you talk a bit about the different themes and how the book came together?
Many thanks for your kind words about A Devil Every Day—and particularly for noticing the mix of styles and voices in the book, since complicating the idea of voice has been one of my central poetic concerns since my first collection, Players. As a student of postmodern critical theory (I have a PhD in the field), I don’t really believe in a single, unified voice or identity. Instead, I would argue that what we say and do stems from a multiplicity of dialects, rhetorical styles, and personal and cultural experiences, which blend together in unique and contextually specific ways. Likewise, I don’t write poetry that tries to capture “my” voice or perspective, as if that were something consistent or straightforward. When I write, my goal is to braid together different strands of experience and expression—sometimes from my own life, but other times from the media or broader social and cultural milieus—to reveal unique combinations that can help us understand our shared world in different ways.
The two predominant subjects of A Devil Every Day are houseplants and the Devil—and even though these two themes seem very different, each one responds to my postmodernist outlook in its own way. I’m fascinated by plants because of how their lifestyles challenge our basic understandings of identity: it’s often not clear where a plant’s identity begins or ends (for example, several of the houseplants I care for at home were once all cuttings from the same individual), or whether a plant possesses what we know as consciousness or a mind—let alone rights and responsibilities. On the other side of the coin, the Devil is meant to personify evil in a pure and unadulterated sense, yet he has been characterized in so many different ways, and we can never seem to agree on what exactly evil is or where to find it in our society. As they say, “the Devil is in the details.”
Even though evil is so amorphous, our culture has a strong (and growing, I think) tendency to judge what kinds of speech and behaviour are right or good. In my opinion, this tendency is gravely complicated by the complexity of our identities and interactions with the modern world. As a settler Canadian—and particularly as a white, straight, cis-male settler Canadian—my speech, actions, and values are saturated with evil, since they draw from and reinforce many of the ideological systems that foster marginalization and inequality in our society. Nonetheless, deciding to do good or “do better” is no simple task, since it would mean transforming some of the fundamental aspects that make me who I am. In other words, if the Devil wakes up tomorrow and decides to be a better person, is he still the Devil? And if not, who is? I hope that A Devil Every Day gives readers opportunities to identify with and further explore this dilemma, which I believe is fundamental to life in the contemporary West.
