12 or 20 (second series) questions with Clint Burnham
Clint Burnham
has lived in Vancouver since 1995.1- How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your mostrecent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
Myfirst chapbooks were published by Lillian Necakov’s Surrealist Poets Gardening Assoc and Daniel Jones’ Streetcar editions – Lillian published The And thatCain Forgot and Jones did The Toronto Small Press Scene – both in1990, the first was minimalist fiction, which I’ve continued to do up to myrecent White Lie book from Anvil (2021) & the book of mine you justdid (The Old Man: New Stories – 2024) and the second a critical accountof local publishing. So there is a certain thru line – I continue to writefiction/poetry, mostly published with small(ish) presses like Coach House (back20 years ago), Arsenal, Anvil, Book*hug; and I write criticism, mostlypublished by Canadian or international presses (in anthologies fromMcGill-Queen’s University Press, but also Routledge, Bloomsbury, Palgrave).
2- How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
Again,poetry/fiction AND criticism – at the same time, in the late 80s. For me, someof the poets that came out of TISH and the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E and from mygeneration, the KSW, emulated that “impossible” non-relation (as we say inLacan-speak) between criticism and creativity, a scholar and a poet (but not ascholar-poet). A scholar-poet, in my reckoning, means either just a bougielyric poet employed by the uni, OR the poems full of obvious or encodedversions of, say, one’s research on TS Eliot or Donne or The Iliad (or,just as bad, theory code words like “grammatology” or “affect”). But my originstory is that when I was in high school in Regina, Sask., in the late 1970s, Icame across a bill bissett poem in an anthology, (“th wundrfulness uv th mountees our secret police”?), I started writing lower-case, phonetic poems,submitted a wack of them to a Sask. arts board manuscript service, can’tremember the response. My high school teacher at the time, Ruth Robillard, wasamazing, also had me reading Camus & Ondaatje. John Newlove came to read –he was writer in residence at the Regina public library (78? 79?). I moved toVictoria in 1980, at military college for a year before getting the boot, thenfell in with writers in the city and around the university, including Gail Harris, Clint Hutzulak, and the poet Stephen Scobie who also taught. ThenToronto, to go to grad school, in the late 1980s, when again, fell into thesmall press community there, which led to a few chapbooks already mentioned.After that it’s book books, in Toronto and then Vancouver.
3- How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does yourwriting initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appearlooking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copiousnotes?
Istart in the Notes app, usually. (I’m very ADHD so keep getting distracted,copy down things, forget to finish this question., come back to it monthslater):
Certainly for The Old Man: NewStories, the project of mine you just published (thanks rob!), but also TheGoldberg Variations, my poetry collection due out this spring (2024) fromNew Star, that was the origin. Cutting & pasting from other texts tofriends & vice versa (when some of the stories in Old Man firstoccurred/were written, I’d send them to friends by WhatsApp or Signal etc. For TheGoldberg I took what were written in bold heading font for the Notes app,and then dropped them all into a Word file and kept the line breaks from theapp (so, in media studies lingo, the “affordances,” what’s SOP), then startedmoving them around, first into sonnet like things of 7+7 12+2 or 8+6 blocks,which became strings for the first three poems (“No to a harm rinse,” “Weddinghi viz,” and “Passion waged” – this was being put together in Berlin in thesummer of 2022 so “Wedding” refers to that neighborhood), then strings of7x2line couplets (“History b’y” – or Newfie for History boy). “5.2 cop crows”was then just single lines separated, and the next two poems “Back-out drink”and “Looks aren’t” were written as one line per page, compressed for reasons ofpolitical economy. “No to Nato,” the next poem (title taken from Weddinggraffiti) then had two 7 line columns: you can read across or down. This wasroughly half-way thru the manuscript so then I started fucking shit up. “B.A.”(named for a character in the great social democratic 80s tv show The A-Team)was structured like that vile contribution of Vancouverism, the podium and tower condo – so thin lines interspersedwith fatter ones, indented (with a few that ran over the end, which I alwayslike, so you get:
forced feeding scene, orderly flickingcigarette ash onto food
in funnel in hose in
nostril serves me right just took thedamned documentary
film course
which takes a memory of revulsionwatching Frederick Wiseman’s Titicut Follies in a film course in the1980s, and exceeds the page just as the visual described in the poem exceededboth the patient’s and my own bodies.
The poems that follow, “QUELNSEN”(historic centre of the Kòmoks people) strings up the various sonnet forms (7+712+2 or 8+6 blocks etc), “More likely a stroller” and “Cherry” are one-offs,“Coq. (pron. coke)” (as in Coquitlam or kwikwetlam) and “Frownlines get Marx-y”are working with the double columns (which, again, had much moving textaround). Followed by “Naum Gabo!” both a gnarly Russian futurist whosecardboard structure I saw (still preserved, 100 years later, isn’t that crazy)and a song by Vancouver art-punks U-J3RKS, more futzing around with Vancouvercondo-types, and finally “stéyəs LOSER” (the formeran island in the Salish Sea, in the W̱SÁNEĆ language, the lattera 90s grunge ref., natch), where it all falls apart/comes together, take yourpick.
NB re working from Notes app, that’sembedded in “5.2 cop crows”:
why if Nate
Mackey writes his poems in
his iPhone notes app is that
cool? and who remembers
Ho Tak Kai? but if I do it
just looks like thud? I mean this?
6- Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds ofquestions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think thecurrent questions are?
Iwas asked about this but, continuing what I said above, don’t be too knowing.Or when you are too knowing, make that its own thing, so you’re not too knowingabout being knowing. You never know what you’re doing in a work. Or when youthink you do, you become one of those bloviators, telling you what their workmeans.
7– What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Dothey even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
Thisis a tough one, because I don’t like directly political writing or art, but Ido think writing and art has a politics. For me, when it shows up in the work,it may be content, or it may be form. The use of quick commentaries orobservations via my phone to the collection you published, that process, seemsto me to be the politics of The Old Man. I find if I “intend” or “try”to write a political text, it fails. It has to nominate me, not the other wayaround. Or: the unconscious.
8- Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult oressential (or both)?
Ilove being edited. It’s very carnal.
9- What is the best piece of advice you've heard given to others?
Irarely send to places I don’t have a relationship with.
19- What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Ireally like Simon King’s TikTok on Northern Alberta. Lydia Davis’ Strangers.Jonathan Glazer’s film Zone of Interest. Just finishing EmilyWilson’s translation of The Iliad.
20- What are you currently working on?
A continuation of/sequel to WhiteLie, more super short stories. Now published by you!
