Tuesday, May 13, 2008
12 or 20 questions: with Jan Conn
Jan Conn has written six books of poetry, most recently Jaguar Rain: the Margaret Mee poems, Brick Books, 2006. Born in Asbestos, Quebec, she received her Ph.D. in Genetics from the University of Toronto. She has lived in Guatemala, Venezuela, Florida, Vermont and Massachusetts, conducting research on insects that transmit pathogens. Currently she is a Research Scientist at the Wadsworth Center, Division of Infectious Diseases, New York State Department of Health in Albany NY. Jan was the recipient of a travel grant from the University of Vermont (2000) and a Canada Council Senior Writing Grant (2001), both in conjunction with the Margaret Mee Project. Her book South of the Tudo Bem Cafe, 1990, was shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Award. A suite of her poems, Amazonia, won 2nd prize in the CBC literary awards for 2003. She was recently awarded the inaugural (2006) P.K. Page Founders' Award for Poetry from The Malahat Review. Her seventh poetry manuscript, Botero's Beautiful Horses is forthcoming from Brick Books in the spring of 2009. Her poetry has been featured in many anthologies and literary journals. She was invited to read at the Ecological Society of America meeting in August, 2005, in Montreal and was the subject of Bentley College's Literary Portraits project, a 22-minute video titled, "Surviving the Darker Blue Inside," a reference to one of her poems. Her long poem “Belém” is one of the Vehicule Press Virtual Chapbook online series (since 2005). Her poems have been broadcast on CBC Radio One’s Between the Covers, The Arts Today, All in a Week-End, Art Talks, and on Richardson’s Round-up in 2004, on CFRC Radio at Queens’ University, Kingston, Ontario in 2004, on WAMC in Albany, New York in 2006, and on CHSR, Fredericton, New Brunswick, and on CKDU-Dalhousie, Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 2007. An extensive interview about biology, poetry and Jaguar Rain, was published in Contemporary Verse 2, Vol. 30, issue 3, 2008.
1 - How did your first book change your life?
Red Shoes in the Rain, by Fiddlehead Press, (poetry) was published in 1984 (http://www.magazine.utoronto.ca/05autumn/campus_stories.asp). It was a major personal creative event in my adult life. It demonstrated to me what might be possible, some concrete aspect of a writing life that I needed, and I was at the mid-point in my doctoral research at the University of Toronto (in cytogenetics on black flies that transmit a nematode parasite that causes river blindness in parts of Africa and Latin America), where many people get quite depressed, including me. The publication of an entire book helped me to refocus and remember that knowledge and mystery are both parts of poetry and biology.
2 - How long have you lived in Great Barrington, and how does geography, if at ll, impact on your writing? Does race or gender make any impact on your work?
My husband, Carl Schlichting (http://www.eeb.uconn.edu/people/schlichting/), the Evolutionary Biologist, and I moved to Great Barrington, in western Massachusetts, in an area called the Berkshires, in May of 2002. I took a job in Albany, at the Wadsworth Center (http://www.wadsworth.org/resnres/bios/conn.htm) New York State Department of Health, and Carl has one at the University of Connecticut-Storres. Geography and topography exert a profound influence on my poetry. But, quite often, it’s not the geography of where I am living that works its way into the bones of my poems, but the geography of places I travel to, particularly in Latin America, and, more recently, Spain. They fire my imagination more. I suspect this is related to having grown-up in a mining town, Asbestos, that was bleak and ugly and diminished in many ways, so the lure of “away” was ever-present. My father’s frequent international travel, augmented by his wonderfully descriptive postcards and small evocative gifts, also contributed.
Being a woman I have had some kinds of violent experiences that I might not have had as a man. Poems about these experiences are difficult to consider. Are they too confessional, too raw? Sometimes, some of them, but they can also be amazingly powerful witness poems. Certainly my poems that have their inception in sexual abuse, even as they are creating a persona (because all memory is creative), have been difficult to write, to publish and to read aloud. But I think they are important in that they contribute to a particular body of literature, and they can sometimes help other women who have been similarly traumatized to find and recognize their voice(s).
The focus of my book Jaguar Rain (Brick Books, 2006)(http://www.brickbooks.ca/BL-Conn.htm) as the brilliant naturalist, explorer and botanical illustrator Margaret Mee (http://huntbot.andrew.cmu.edu/HIBD/Departments/Art/Mee.shtml) She was inspirational in every way—scientifically, artistically—she was courageous, a leader in her artistic field, she spend long days, weeks, months living with the people, flora and fauna of the Amazon. Also, she was a fine writer. She fed nearly all the hungers I had at the time (roughly 2000-2004, while I worked on the manuscript).
Some of the poems in Botero’s Beautiful Horses (Brick Books, forthcoming 2009) have as their inception the lives, paintings and writings of the striking Mexican surrealist painters Remedios Varo (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remedios_Varo) and Leonora Carrington (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonora_Carrington) They both endured very difficult times getting from Spain to Mexico in the 1940’s. Their work led me to explore a wide array of surrealist painters, photographers and writers who arrived in Mexico during this time period.
3 - 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 usually carry a notebook (while traveling, visiting museums, at concerts, hiking), and anything that catches my eye or ear or antennae, can begin a poem.
1 - How did your first book change your life?
Red Shoes in the Rain, by Fiddlehead Press, (poetry) was published in 1984 (http://www.magazine.utoronto.ca/05autumn/campus_stories.asp). It was a major personal creative event in my adult life. It demonstrated to me what might be possible, some concrete aspect of a writing life that I needed, and I was at the mid-point in my doctoral research at the University of Toronto (in cytogenetics on black flies that transmit a nematode parasite that causes river blindness in parts of Africa and Latin America), where many people get quite depressed, including me. The publication of an entire book helped me to refocus and remember that knowledge and mystery are both parts of poetry and biology.
2 - How long have you lived in Great Barrington, and how does geography, if at ll, impact on your writing? Does race or gender make any impact on your work?
My husband, Carl Schlichting (http://www.eeb.uconn.edu/people/schlichting/), the Evolutionary Biologist, and I moved to Great Barrington, in western Massachusetts, in an area called the Berkshires, in May of 2002. I took a job in Albany, at the Wadsworth Center (http://www.wadsworth.org/resnres/bios/conn.htm) New York State Department of Health, and Carl has one at the University of Connecticut-Storres. Geography and topography exert a profound influence on my poetry. But, quite often, it’s not the geography of where I am living that works its way into the bones of my poems, but the geography of places I travel to, particularly in Latin America, and, more recently, Spain. They fire my imagination more. I suspect this is related to having grown-up in a mining town, Asbestos, that was bleak and ugly and diminished in many ways, so the lure of “away” was ever-present. My father’s frequent international travel, augmented by his wonderfully descriptive postcards and small evocative gifts, also contributed.
Being a woman I have had some kinds of violent experiences that I might not have had as a man. Poems about these experiences are difficult to consider. Are they too confessional, too raw? Sometimes, some of them, but they can also be amazingly powerful witness poems. Certainly my poems that have their inception in sexual abuse, even as they are creating a persona (because all memory is creative), have been difficult to write, to publish and to read aloud. But I think they are important in that they contribute to a particular body of literature, and they can sometimes help other women who have been similarly traumatized to find and recognize their voice(s).
The focus of my book Jaguar Rain (Brick Books, 2006)(http://www.brickbooks.ca/BL-Conn.htm) as the brilliant naturalist, explorer and botanical illustrator Margaret Mee (http://huntbot.andrew.cmu.edu/HIBD/Departments/Art/Mee.shtml) She was inspirational in every way—scientifically, artistically—she was courageous, a leader in her artistic field, she spend long days, weeks, months living with the people, flora and fauna of the Amazon. Also, she was a fine writer. She fed nearly all the hungers I had at the time (roughly 2000-2004, while I worked on the manuscript).
Some of the poems in Botero’s Beautiful Horses (Brick Books, forthcoming 2009) have as their inception the lives, paintings and writings of the striking Mexican surrealist painters Remedios Varo (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remedios_Varo) and Leonora Carrington (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonora_Carrington) They both endured very difficult times getting from Spain to Mexico in the 1940’s. Their work led me to explore a wide array of surrealist painters, photographers and writers who arrived in Mexico during this time period.
3 - 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 usually carry a notebook (while traveling, visiting museums, at concerts, hiking), and anything that catches my eye or ear or antennae, can begin a poem.
I do both short pieces and longer projects. I am generally working on a project or two that I have envisioned as a series of linked, or connected poems. But I always leave a door open for the odd encounter, or association that might spring up, unrelated to the current project, insisting on being heard and written down.
4 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process?
I find it very stimulating to listen to poetry read aloud and I love to read aloud. So it can very much influence the poems that I am writing and re-writing or my subconscious is subtlety turning over, like earth. There is nothing quite like reading in front of an audience to help fine-tune a poem for me. If I find both my and the audience’s attention waning I recognize that the poem isn’t yet as good as it can become. It forces me to work harder, pruning and reconsidering.
5 - 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?
I have learned poetry by reading poets much better than I, and by writing, rather than by taking creative writing classes or reading poetic theory. I don’t have an especially theoretical kind of brain—my strengths are more associative, psychic, intuitive, sensory, as well as logical and intellectual. I’m not especially drawn to theory, either in poetry or in science.
I don’t feel that I’m trying to answer questions by writing poetry. I’m interested in communicating feelings and imagery, my poetry is not cerebral or intellectual, at least not to me. I’m fascinated by some aspects of language theory, but I‘m not especially drawn to try to write them or to find or make a place for them in my own body of writing.
6 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
It’s an essential step for me. My husband, Carl Schlichting, is an excellent editor for me, one of those amazing pieces of luck in our marriage that was completely unexpected. I have only had two manuscript editors, Michael Harris (http://quebecbooks.qwf.org/authors/view/118) (Vehicule Press http://www.vehiculepress.com/), and currently Stan Dragland http://12or20questions.blogspot.com/2007/10/12-or-20-questions-with-stan-dragland.html (Brick Books). I learned a tremendous amount about craft from both Michael and Stan and feel lucky to have them in my creative life. I feel that an outside editor – a good one, who recognizes what I am striving for—can really enhance a manuscript.
7 - After having published more than a couple of titles over the years, do you find the process of book-making harder or easier?
I think that quite often my subconscious links poems on my behalf. I like longer projects. When I was younger I wasn’t capable of sustaining longer pieces, linked and connected. I don’t think it’s easier but it’s always outstandingly pleasurable. It may be harder in the sense that I throw many more poems out now that I used to—a normal evolutionary process—because I am intent on becoming a better and better poet.
8 - When was the last time you ate a pear?
In a Henri Cole poem, Jealousy, I ate the image, “Where is the comfort of pears on a window ledge?” in January, 2008.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Write and read poetry (outstanding poetry, better than your own) daily. Edit, re-edit, put a poem away for a few weeks, often longer, to proved the emotional distance to “see” it differently, from other angles.
10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
I usually write and read poetry in the evenings during the week, and try to spend all of Saturday or Sunday writing. Sometimes both. Most week-days days I drive to Albany, and work intensely on mosquito genetics with the postdocs, visiting scientists, graduate students and research technicians in my lab. I am really an academic, because the science I do is more basic than immediately applicable. When I travel (mostly related to science, but not always) I write a lot, on planes, in cars, on trains, that’s a special transition time when I feel looser and often associative ideas, fragments, phrases come more readily.
11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I rarely get stalled, which may in part be because I write poems, as opposed to fiction. But if I’m casting about (it is like fishing sometimes, I especially like the white water bits) I read my notebooks, I read or reread authors who I anticipate will inspire me, including books of art; I buy a new book of poetry; I walk in the woods; I go to an art gallery; I listen to Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan and other singer-songwriters whose lyrics astound me. I find it more acceptable to feel that I am feeding my creativity by doing these activities than I used to. I am able to sense when my subconscious is storing and associating things even though they are not yet available to my writing mind.
12 - How does your most recent book compare to your previous work? How does it feel different?
Each one is unique, and it’s hard to compare each to each, but I’ll just say that Botero’s Beautiful Horses has a wider range and scope than Jaguar Rain (Brick Books, 2006), which was focused on the life and art of the Amazonian naturalist and explorer Margaret Mee. Botero’s Beautiful Horses encompasses the archaeology and mythology of Mexico, surrealist artists in Mexico, and a different aspect of the Amazon (my experiences rather than through the filter of Margaret Mee). There are also a few poems written from a scientific perspective, one re-imagining the language of mathematics, another partly about Darwin versus Lamarck, one written on Mars, another in Montreal in winter.
13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
All of the above influence my writing, to different degrees, and of course, this has varied over time. I imagine each of the four, one colour each, as waves on a graph over time (my life as the x-axis). Each of the four fluctuates, and often they cross-over each other and in the process, sometimes make new colours. At the moment, nature and visual art are currently the most influencial. Science – biology in particular—is so much a piece of my daily life that it’s harder for me to determine the exact influences it has on my writing. Occasionally, my poetic interest drives an aspect of my science. For example, I have often used frogs as my persona’s spirit animal (e.g., The Fifth Inhabitant of Mexico [http://www.janconn.com/]), and have read a fair amount about their natural history and biology. I was recently asked to write a News and Comments article (1000 words) for the British journal Heredity on a review of global frog phylogeography. I doubt that I would have considered undertaking the article if I didn’t have this personal interest in frogs, connected to my poetry since The Fabulous Disguise of Ourselves (Vehicule Press, 1986).
There are some singer-songwriters whose work has been as important to my creative process as many poets. Some examples include Tori Amos, Javier Bergia, Ruben Blades, Bruce Cockburn, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Richard Summerbell, and Neil Young, to name a few.
14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
It’s a very long list, and has changed a lot over time. These are some of the poets who’ve had the most influence on my writing (as opposed to others whom I love to read because they are very different from my voice): Elizabeth Bishop, Ken Babstock, Roo Borson, George Bowering [see his 12 or 20 questions here], Anne Carson, Marilyn Chin, Henri Cole, Louise Glück, Jorie Graham, Robert Hass, Zbigniew Herbert, Selima Hill, Jim Harrison, Frederico García Lorca, Robert Lowell, Don McKay, W.S. Merwin, Jane Miller, Susan Mitchell, Frank O’Hara, Michael Ondaatje, Sharon Olds, Mary Oliver, Robin Robertson, Sharon Thesen [see her 12 or 20 questions here], John Thompson, Tomas Tranströmer, C.D. Wright, Charles Wright, and Adam Zagajewski.
15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Travel to Turkey and eastern Europe. I travel often, but I tend to go south more than anywhere else. I feel that certain personal horizons would be expanded by experiencing more diverse architecture, art, people, and their customs.
16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be?
When I was an undergraduate at Concordia I wavered between chemistry and biology for a few years. I now think I’m not quite analytical enough for chemistry to have been the correct choice, and I’m so addicted to biology that it’s hard for me to imagine a more satisfying combination than poetry and biology. I might have liked to have been a singer-songwriter, but, alas, as Bron Wallace bemoans in some of her fine poems, I am not much of a tune-carrier, as my early piano teachers in Asbestos were more than willing to point out. And I didn’t like to practice much; it bored me.
17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I’m a ferocious, voracious reader; it also could be related to character, as Mavis Gallant astutely observed in a recent interview with Stéphan Bureau (mine is especially suited to poetry, perhaps); my father sending home evocative postcards from his travels to India, Australia, the Philippines, South Africa, Colombia, Argentina, and elswhere always filled with observations of local sights and sounds; and living in Vancouver with my brother, David Conn, who is also a writer, at a crucial age, after I graduated from Concordia, my mother died, and I began graduate studies in entomology at Simon Fraser University. I felt compelled to communicate creatively from an early age, and poetry is very portable.
18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
This has to be answered in the plural. Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, an outstanding novel; David Raeburn’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (I had also recently seen the French painter Poussin’s Landscape show at the Met in New York and the combination is very stimulating); Robert Bringhurst’s brilliant Tree of Meaning; and Will Grohmann’s magnificently scholarly and detailed Paul Klee.
I have become extremely sensitive to either overt violence or even hints of it in films so my range of films these days is pretty limited. With this as a caveat, I found Edith Piaf’s La Vie en Rose heartbreaking.
19 - What are you currently working on?
A new poetry manuscript comprised of several poems that have been inspired by Paul Klee, and several poems about Mexico, Spain and Los Angeles, where I have traveled during 2007-2008. It’s still sort of in the embryonic stage.
Also, I am one of a renga group (there are four of us, following Japanese tradition), which we mostly do by e-mail. It’s challenging and immensely fun.
4 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process?
I find it very stimulating to listen to poetry read aloud and I love to read aloud. So it can very much influence the poems that I am writing and re-writing or my subconscious is subtlety turning over, like earth. There is nothing quite like reading in front of an audience to help fine-tune a poem for me. If I find both my and the audience’s attention waning I recognize that the poem isn’t yet as good as it can become. It forces me to work harder, pruning and reconsidering.
5 - 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?
I have learned poetry by reading poets much better than I, and by writing, rather than by taking creative writing classes or reading poetic theory. I don’t have an especially theoretical kind of brain—my strengths are more associative, psychic, intuitive, sensory, as well as logical and intellectual. I’m not especially drawn to theory, either in poetry or in science.
I don’t feel that I’m trying to answer questions by writing poetry. I’m interested in communicating feelings and imagery, my poetry is not cerebral or intellectual, at least not to me. I’m fascinated by some aspects of language theory, but I‘m not especially drawn to try to write them or to find or make a place for them in my own body of writing.
6 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
It’s an essential step for me. My husband, Carl Schlichting, is an excellent editor for me, one of those amazing pieces of luck in our marriage that was completely unexpected. I have only had two manuscript editors, Michael Harris (http://quebecbooks.qwf.org/authors/view/118) (Vehicule Press http://www.vehiculepress.com/), and currently Stan Dragland http://12or20questions.blogspot.com/2007/10/12-or-20-questions-with-stan-dragland.html (Brick Books). I learned a tremendous amount about craft from both Michael and Stan and feel lucky to have them in my creative life. I feel that an outside editor – a good one, who recognizes what I am striving for—can really enhance a manuscript.
7 - After having published more than a couple of titles over the years, do you find the process of book-making harder or easier?
I think that quite often my subconscious links poems on my behalf. I like longer projects. When I was younger I wasn’t capable of sustaining longer pieces, linked and connected. I don’t think it’s easier but it’s always outstandingly pleasurable. It may be harder in the sense that I throw many more poems out now that I used to—a normal evolutionary process—because I am intent on becoming a better and better poet.
8 - When was the last time you ate a pear?
In a Henri Cole poem, Jealousy, I ate the image, “Where is the comfort of pears on a window ledge?” in January, 2008.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Write and read poetry (outstanding poetry, better than your own) daily. Edit, re-edit, put a poem away for a few weeks, often longer, to proved the emotional distance to “see” it differently, from other angles.
10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
I usually write and read poetry in the evenings during the week, and try to spend all of Saturday or Sunday writing. Sometimes both. Most week-days days I drive to Albany, and work intensely on mosquito genetics with the postdocs, visiting scientists, graduate students and research technicians in my lab. I am really an academic, because the science I do is more basic than immediately applicable. When I travel (mostly related to science, but not always) I write a lot, on planes, in cars, on trains, that’s a special transition time when I feel looser and often associative ideas, fragments, phrases come more readily.
11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I rarely get stalled, which may in part be because I write poems, as opposed to fiction. But if I’m casting about (it is like fishing sometimes, I especially like the white water bits) I read my notebooks, I read or reread authors who I anticipate will inspire me, including books of art; I buy a new book of poetry; I walk in the woods; I go to an art gallery; I listen to Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan and other singer-songwriters whose lyrics astound me. I find it more acceptable to feel that I am feeding my creativity by doing these activities than I used to. I am able to sense when my subconscious is storing and associating things even though they are not yet available to my writing mind.
12 - How does your most recent book compare to your previous work? How does it feel different?
Each one is unique, and it’s hard to compare each to each, but I’ll just say that Botero’s Beautiful Horses has a wider range and scope than Jaguar Rain (Brick Books, 2006), which was focused on the life and art of the Amazonian naturalist and explorer Margaret Mee. Botero’s Beautiful Horses encompasses the archaeology and mythology of Mexico, surrealist artists in Mexico, and a different aspect of the Amazon (my experiences rather than through the filter of Margaret Mee). There are also a few poems written from a scientific perspective, one re-imagining the language of mathematics, another partly about Darwin versus Lamarck, one written on Mars, another in Montreal in winter.
13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
All of the above influence my writing, to different degrees, and of course, this has varied over time. I imagine each of the four, one colour each, as waves on a graph over time (my life as the x-axis). Each of the four fluctuates, and often they cross-over each other and in the process, sometimes make new colours. At the moment, nature and visual art are currently the most influencial. Science – biology in particular—is so much a piece of my daily life that it’s harder for me to determine the exact influences it has on my writing. Occasionally, my poetic interest drives an aspect of my science. For example, I have often used frogs as my persona’s spirit animal (e.g., The Fifth Inhabitant of Mexico [http://www.janconn.com/]), and have read a fair amount about their natural history and biology. I was recently asked to write a News and Comments article (1000 words) for the British journal Heredity on a review of global frog phylogeography. I doubt that I would have considered undertaking the article if I didn’t have this personal interest in frogs, connected to my poetry since The Fabulous Disguise of Ourselves (Vehicule Press, 1986).
There are some singer-songwriters whose work has been as important to my creative process as many poets. Some examples include Tori Amos, Javier Bergia, Ruben Blades, Bruce Cockburn, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Richard Summerbell, and Neil Young, to name a few.
14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
It’s a very long list, and has changed a lot over time. These are some of the poets who’ve had the most influence on my writing (as opposed to others whom I love to read because they are very different from my voice): Elizabeth Bishop, Ken Babstock, Roo Borson, George Bowering [see his 12 or 20 questions here], Anne Carson, Marilyn Chin, Henri Cole, Louise Glück, Jorie Graham, Robert Hass, Zbigniew Herbert, Selima Hill, Jim Harrison, Frederico García Lorca, Robert Lowell, Don McKay, W.S. Merwin, Jane Miller, Susan Mitchell, Frank O’Hara, Michael Ondaatje, Sharon Olds, Mary Oliver, Robin Robertson, Sharon Thesen [see her 12 or 20 questions here], John Thompson, Tomas Tranströmer, C.D. Wright, Charles Wright, and Adam Zagajewski.
15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Travel to Turkey and eastern Europe. I travel often, but I tend to go south more than anywhere else. I feel that certain personal horizons would be expanded by experiencing more diverse architecture, art, people, and their customs.
16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be?
When I was an undergraduate at Concordia I wavered between chemistry and biology for a few years. I now think I’m not quite analytical enough for chemistry to have been the correct choice, and I’m so addicted to biology that it’s hard for me to imagine a more satisfying combination than poetry and biology. I might have liked to have been a singer-songwriter, but, alas, as Bron Wallace bemoans in some of her fine poems, I am not much of a tune-carrier, as my early piano teachers in Asbestos were more than willing to point out. And I didn’t like to practice much; it bored me.
17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I’m a ferocious, voracious reader; it also could be related to character, as Mavis Gallant astutely observed in a recent interview with Stéphan Bureau (mine is especially suited to poetry, perhaps); my father sending home evocative postcards from his travels to India, Australia, the Philippines, South Africa, Colombia, Argentina, and elswhere always filled with observations of local sights and sounds; and living in Vancouver with my brother, David Conn, who is also a writer, at a crucial age, after I graduated from Concordia, my mother died, and I began graduate studies in entomology at Simon Fraser University. I felt compelled to communicate creatively from an early age, and poetry is very portable.
18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
This has to be answered in the plural. Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, an outstanding novel; David Raeburn’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (I had also recently seen the French painter Poussin’s Landscape show at the Met in New York and the combination is very stimulating); Robert Bringhurst’s brilliant Tree of Meaning; and Will Grohmann’s magnificently scholarly and detailed Paul Klee.
I have become extremely sensitive to either overt violence or even hints of it in films so my range of films these days is pretty limited. With this as a caveat, I found Edith Piaf’s La Vie en Rose heartbreaking.
19 - What are you currently working on?
A new poetry manuscript comprised of several poems that have been inspired by Paul Klee, and several poems about Mexico, Spain and Los Angeles, where I have traveled during 2007-2008. It’s still sort of in the embryonic stage.
Also, I am one of a renga group (there are four of us, following Japanese tradition), which we mostly do by e-mail. It’s challenging and immensely fun.
Monday, May 12, 2008
Re: Reading the Postmodern; The Canadian Literature Symposium, May 9-11, 2008, University of Ottawa
Over this past weekend I was in Ottawa at the Re: Reading the Postmodern Conference at the University of Ottawa, organized by Professor Robert Stacey. How does one continue to talk about postmodernism, especially Canadian postmodernism? The conference included a heavyweight list of names including Fred Wah, Robert Kroetsch, Pauline Butling and Susan Rudy, Andy Weaver, Christian Bök, Gregory Betts, Stephen Cain, Christine Stewart, Jason Wiens, Dennis Cooley, Lindy Ledohowski (who has just moved to Ottawa for a 2 year post-doc at U of O), Louis Cabri, Karis Shearer and Russell Morton Brown. How do we continue to talk about postmodernism, and whatever it is that might come after? What even is it we should call what might come after, or perhaps already has? A number of the papers walked around it, talked around it, talked all the way through it, and even directly responded to the question around such; how do we still talk about a thing that isn’t the same as what it was twenty years ago?
A number of ideas and suggestions were brought forth, including "digital native," "outpost literature," "neo-postmodernism," that "fractals are the dna of form," and the idea of "imagining the better story," as well as the fact that publishing in Canada is far more corporate than it was twenty years ago, so how does the experimental writing in this country have any chance at all? Still, there was simply too much to take in and have already processed by this early a time; here are some notes on at least a few of the papers:
Thursday, May 8; The Mercury Lounge
The first night was a reading of Ottawa poets at The Mercury Lounge organized by Max Middle, with readings by many of the usual suspects, including myself, Pearl Pirie, Sandra Ridley, Amanda Earl, Marcus McCann, Roland Prevost, Monty Reid, Gregory Betts (the one non-local on the list) and jwcurry. There are a couple of people who have suggested that the readings, whether this one or the one on the Saturday night (Monty's strange and rambling pre-amble that became his whole performance was a particular Friday night high...), were the best parts of the conference, and I think I agree. There's something wonderful about having a whole slew of quality readers and writers come into the city and be able to hear what the locals have been up to over the past few years. Check out bywords or ottawater if you want to know more about what these and others have been doing in Ottawa.
Friday, May 9; the conference, & the Avant-Garde Bar
I have to say, I was very taken by American MA student Erica Fischer from the University of West Florida; she had the "fortunate" luck of being the very first speaker at the conference, talking on "The Fallacy of Canadian Postmodernism: The Absence of National identity in the Works of Douglas Coupland" which was very interesting. How can you not love a paper on a Canadian (so called, for the accident of birth, I suppose) writer by an American critic? How can you not love a paper by someone so obviously taken by Coupland and his work? (She referred to him at one point as "Mr. Coupland.") And no matter how well someone might do, there is always that extra something, I think, for whoever it is who has to go first. One of my favourite papers of the conference had to be by Calgary's Jason Wiens, writing on George Bowering's A Short Sad Book (1977), which even managed to be referenced a couple of times over the weekend, despite the fact, as Wiens discussed, the book was almost completely ignored when it came out, and almost completely since. There's no way you can do such a work justice without being smart, wickedly clever and even outright funny, and Wiens managed to do all of that, as well as be one of the few who actually kept to the limits of the twenty minute time-frame. I know that Talonbooks, the original publisher of the novel, is reissuing Bowering's Kerrisdale Elegies (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 1986) this fall; is it worth reissuing this book as well?
Given that many of the papers were dealing with Linda Hutcheon's work The Canadian Postmodern (1989), which even Russell Morton Brown later argued in a question-and-answer session wasn’t originally meant to be a be-all, end-all study but was instead a collection of disparate pieces collected into a single body, it was entirely appropriate that she came through to give the keynote address on Friday. Her talk "The Glories of Hindsight" included conversation about how there were certain things, as she wrote in the 1980s, that simply didn’t exist that are now essential to the postmodern lexicon and consideration, including interactive video games, graphic novels and the internet. How, she argued, could she have known? Still, it was great that she mentioned Chester Brown's Louis Riel (2003) and even Maus and Maus II, but if you're going to talk about the mainstream "adult" graphic novel and it's beginning in North America, how can you not talk about Alan Moore's The Watchmen (1987) and still expect to be taken seriously?
During his reading/visual presentation, Fred Wah talked about how his new book of collaborations with visual artists, Sentenced to Light (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2008), is "a book that works off the sentence." I thought it interesting that, through two different collaborations in the same collection (including one I was able to watch him perform a few years back, when it was originally produced as part of the Powell Street Festival in Vancouver), Wah referenced Zocalo (1977), both as place (where one of the poems was written) and as the title of a Daphne Marlatt "travel narrative" he had recently become reacquainted with (Dennis Cooley had quite an interesting paper on same). How is it a text can stick in the mind? Sometimes, how can one not? One poem he read that wasn’t part of the collaboration was from his book Music at the Heart of Thinking (Red Deer AB: Red Deer College Press, 1987):
How do I boil down an entire day of papers into a few short paragraphs? Christian Bök gave a paper that gave hell to various of those that came before him, including Linda Hutcheon, Frank Davey and Robert Kroetsch, arguing that Hutcheon's real failure in her text was talking about the fringe elements of a literature, and then refusing to talk about the best examples, the actual writers and writing that existed furthest on that fringe.
At the end of the conference, when Frank Davey complained that there wasn’t anyone, probably, who even thought of presenting papers on Steve McCaffery (he listed some others) at the conference, he managed to forget that Gregory Betts spoke for a while on McCaffery during his presentation of visual/concrete, including a neat little handout of bill bissett, bpNichol and Judith Copithorne works; is it worth having someone collect some kind of Judith Copithorne selected/collected in a trade volume? According to jwcurry later on, the only two people who have been publishing her work for years have been himself and Daniel f. Bradley. What about the rest of publishing?
Andy Weaver was another who gave one of the best papers of the entire weekend, talking about the sublime and Darren Wershler-Henry's the tapeworm foundry (Toronto ON: House of Anansi, 2000), and about how the only real poem is in the idea of what the piece could be, and the piece itself only the explanation of that original, nearly uncapturable, idea. And Christine Stewart, now at the University of Alberta, is simply brilliant; her piece was "Participatory Discrepancies: a Spinozist Reading of Catriona Strang's Low Fancy." You should see what she did in the recent anthology of Canadian Experimental Women's Writing published by Nate Dorward, or in the Lisa Robertson issue of The Chicago Review.
Susan Rudy and Pauline Butling, who were responsible for that recent book of interviews with Canadian poets, Poets Talk [see my review of such here], gave a collaborative keynote address on what/why postmodernism now. What I found interesting was that Butling was probably one of the only people to even reference such writers as Jeff Derksen, Lisa Robertson, Rita Wong (talking very much on the new book, Forage) and Erin Moure. Still, they both talked about how much better the conference could have been if Moure and/or Robertson had been there to participate in the conversation. Why weren’t either of them invited?
Sunday, May 11; the conference, & what came after
What happens at conference stays at conference. Is that entirely true? I am disappointed that Misao Dean (University of Victoria) wasn’t able to show up to present her "George Bowering and Peonies," but I wasn’t up for a 9am session anyway, so my guilt and disappointment simply turned into disappointment. Another highlight during the conference was Stephen Cain and his piece, "Feeling Ugly About the Postmodern Condition: Two Novels by Lynn Crosbie and Daniel Jones." In his paper, Cain argued for a post-1985 new wave of darker, Ontario-specific postmodern writing. It seems almost rare that either of these two writers are given any proper critical consideration, but it does happen every so often; he talked about how, after Paul's Case (1997), the overwhelmingly ugly response to her novel made Crosbie turn to more mainstream fiction. How does something like this happen? This is a novel that caused Crosbie to have a restraining order against a Toronto Star columnist, and, when she read at a PEN Canada benefit, a significant portion of the audience walked out. How does this happen in Canada? Why do we treat these small essential works so poorly, unless they're written by someone from an earlier generation? Cain talked about the ugly through the fact that both texts (Jones' novel Obsessions) were extremely dark, and Toronto of the 1980s/1990s was extremely darker than what had come before, both city and provincially for the City of Toronto, through the first Gulf War, and through works by the baby boomers overshadowing those of their younger equivalents. These were writers, he argued, that knew their work wasn’t going to get any attention, no matter what they were doing.
At the end, it was Davey and Kroetsch who gave their own "conclusions" (as it were) to the conference, with Kroetsch's "Boundary 2 and The Canadian Postmodern" and Davey's "Misreadings & Non-readings of The Canadian Postmodern." There were a number of questions he posed, including the cheeky suggestion that Canadian Postmodernism started in the year 2000 with Christian Bök and Darren Wershler-Henry, or that there isn’t even such a thing as Canadian postmodernism. Or too, that the Canadian postmodernism came out of and is best exampled in poetry, but Linda Hutcheon's book dealt predominantly with fiction. How do we reconcile that, if at all?
And, as Kroetsch noted, citing the fact that his line was quoted and requited over the weekend, when he suggested that Canada went straight from Victorian to Postmodern, that Dennis Cooley had tried to convince him for hours that Canada had a modernist period, but in the end, he just couldn’t say it.
What comes after;
God knows. There will be a chapbook edited by Max Middle that I'm producing sometime before the end of the month with poetry (supposedly, I'm told) by all the writers who performed during the conference weekend in Ottawa. Send me a note if you want to be reminded of such when it appears.
One thing that Robert Stacey was extremely impressed by was the fact that there were over thirty people registered for the conference that weren’t presenting papers and weren’t academics but simply writers from the community, including myself, Amanda Earl, Pearl Pirie, Sandra Ridley, Emily Falvey and numerous others. You should even see what some of these folk have been blogging about from said conference, including Amanda, Pearl, Charles Earl and John W. Macdonald. Isn't this part of what we seem to do best, in Ottawa?
Over this past weekend I was in Ottawa at the Re: Reading the Postmodern Conference at the University of Ottawa, organized by Professor Robert Stacey. How does one continue to talk about postmodernism, especially Canadian postmodernism? The conference included a heavyweight list of names including Fred Wah, Robert Kroetsch, Pauline Butling and Susan Rudy, Andy Weaver, Christian Bök, Gregory Betts, Stephen Cain, Christine Stewart, Jason Wiens, Dennis Cooley, Lindy Ledohowski (who has just moved to Ottawa for a 2 year post-doc at U of O), Louis Cabri, Karis Shearer and Russell Morton Brown. How do we continue to talk about postmodernism, and whatever it is that might come after? What even is it we should call what might come after, or perhaps already has? A number of the papers walked around it, talked around it, talked all the way through it, and even directly responded to the question around such; how do we still talk about a thing that isn’t the same as what it was twenty years ago?
A number of ideas and suggestions were brought forth, including "digital native," "outpost literature," "neo-postmodernism," that "fractals are the dna of form," and the idea of "imagining the better story," as well as the fact that publishing in Canada is far more corporate than it was twenty years ago, so how does the experimental writing in this country have any chance at all? Still, there was simply too much to take in and have already processed by this early a time; here are some notes on at least a few of the papers:
Thursday, May 8; The Mercury Lounge
The first night was a reading of Ottawa poets at The Mercury Lounge organized by Max Middle, with readings by many of the usual suspects, including myself, Pearl Pirie, Sandra Ridley, Amanda Earl, Marcus McCann, Roland Prevost, Monty Reid, Gregory Betts (the one non-local on the list) and jwcurry. There are a couple of people who have suggested that the readings, whether this one or the one on the Saturday night (Monty's strange and rambling pre-amble that became his whole performance was a particular Friday night high...), were the best parts of the conference, and I think I agree. There's something wonderful about having a whole slew of quality readers and writers come into the city and be able to hear what the locals have been up to over the past few years. Check out bywords or ottawater if you want to know more about what these and others have been doing in Ottawa.
Friday, May 9; the conference, & the Avant-Garde Bar
I have to say, I was very taken by American MA student Erica Fischer from the University of West Florida; she had the "fortunate" luck of being the very first speaker at the conference, talking on "The Fallacy of Canadian Postmodernism: The Absence of National identity in the Works of Douglas Coupland" which was very interesting. How can you not love a paper on a Canadian (so called, for the accident of birth, I suppose) writer by an American critic? How can you not love a paper by someone so obviously taken by Coupland and his work? (She referred to him at one point as "Mr. Coupland.") And no matter how well someone might do, there is always that extra something, I think, for whoever it is who has to go first. One of my favourite papers of the conference had to be by Calgary's Jason Wiens, writing on George Bowering's A Short Sad Book (1977), which even managed to be referenced a couple of times over the weekend, despite the fact, as Wiens discussed, the book was almost completely ignored when it came out, and almost completely since. There's no way you can do such a work justice without being smart, wickedly clever and even outright funny, and Wiens managed to do all of that, as well as be one of the few who actually kept to the limits of the twenty minute time-frame. I know that Talonbooks, the original publisher of the novel, is reissuing Bowering's Kerrisdale Elegies (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 1986) this fall; is it worth reissuing this book as well?
Given that many of the papers were dealing with Linda Hutcheon's work The Canadian Postmodern (1989), which even Russell Morton Brown later argued in a question-and-answer session wasn’t originally meant to be a be-all, end-all study but was instead a collection of disparate pieces collected into a single body, it was entirely appropriate that she came through to give the keynote address on Friday. Her talk "The Glories of Hindsight" included conversation about how there were certain things, as she wrote in the 1980s, that simply didn’t exist that are now essential to the postmodern lexicon and consideration, including interactive video games, graphic novels and the internet. How, she argued, could she have known? Still, it was great that she mentioned Chester Brown's Louis Riel (2003) and even Maus and Maus II, but if you're going to talk about the mainstream "adult" graphic novel and it's beginning in North America, how can you not talk about Alan Moore's The Watchmen (1987) and still expect to be taken seriously?
During his reading/visual presentation, Fred Wah talked about how his new book of collaborations with visual artists, Sentenced to Light (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2008), is "a book that works off the sentence." I thought it interesting that, through two different collaborations in the same collection (including one I was able to watch him perform a few years back, when it was originally produced as part of the Powell Street Festival in Vancouver), Wah referenced Zocalo (1977), both as place (where one of the poems was written) and as the title of a Daphne Marlatt "travel narrative" he had recently become reacquainted with (Dennis Cooley had quite an interesting paper on same). How is it a text can stick in the mind? Sometimes, how can one not? One poem he read that wasn’t part of the collaboration was from his book Music at the Heart of Thinking (Red Deer AB: Red Deer College Press, 1987):
Music at the Heart of Thinking 6Saturday, May 10; the conference, & The Atomic Rooster
SENTENCE THE TRUE MORPHOLOGY OR SHAPE OF THE mind including a complete thought forever little ridges little rhythms scoping out the total picture as a kind of automatic designing device or checklist anyone I've found in true thought goes for all solution to the end concatenates every component within the lines within the picture as a cry to represent going to it with the definite fascination of a game where the number of possibilities increases progressively with each additional bump Plato thought
How do I boil down an entire day of papers into a few short paragraphs? Christian Bök gave a paper that gave hell to various of those that came before him, including Linda Hutcheon, Frank Davey and Robert Kroetsch, arguing that Hutcheon's real failure in her text was talking about the fringe elements of a literature, and then refusing to talk about the best examples, the actual writers and writing that existed furthest on that fringe.
At the end of the conference, when Frank Davey complained that there wasn’t anyone, probably, who even thought of presenting papers on Steve McCaffery (he listed some others) at the conference, he managed to forget that Gregory Betts spoke for a while on McCaffery during his presentation of visual/concrete, including a neat little handout of bill bissett, bpNichol and Judith Copithorne works; is it worth having someone collect some kind of Judith Copithorne selected/collected in a trade volume? According to jwcurry later on, the only two people who have been publishing her work for years have been himself and Daniel f. Bradley. What about the rest of publishing?
Andy Weaver was another who gave one of the best papers of the entire weekend, talking about the sublime and Darren Wershler-Henry's the tapeworm foundry (Toronto ON: House of Anansi, 2000), and about how the only real poem is in the idea of what the piece could be, and the piece itself only the explanation of that original, nearly uncapturable, idea. And Christine Stewart, now at the University of Alberta, is simply brilliant; her piece was "Participatory Discrepancies: a Spinozist Reading of Catriona Strang's Low Fancy." You should see what she did in the recent anthology of Canadian Experimental Women's Writing published by Nate Dorward, or in the Lisa Robertson issue of The Chicago Review.
Susan Rudy and Pauline Butling, who were responsible for that recent book of interviews with Canadian poets, Poets Talk [see my review of such here], gave a collaborative keynote address on what/why postmodernism now. What I found interesting was that Butling was probably one of the only people to even reference such writers as Jeff Derksen, Lisa Robertson, Rita Wong (talking very much on the new book, Forage) and Erin Moure. Still, they both talked about how much better the conference could have been if Moure and/or Robertson had been there to participate in the conversation. Why weren’t either of them invited?
What does Finland haveThe reading that night was massive, magnificent and one of the finest I've been to in a long time, with performances by Christian Bök, Gregory Betts, Wanda Campbell, Dennis Cooley, Christine Stewart, Frank Davey, Louis Cabri, Robert Kroetsch and The Max Middle Sound Project. Where else does an author like Kroetsch, reading from The Snowbird Poems [see my note on such here] get not only one standing ovation but two? And these readings, by the by, were recorded, so there is someone out there who has a copy of this somewhere. Would it be Max? Would it be Robert Stacey? And the more Max Middle performs (with his cohort, fiction writer John Lavery), the better he gets.
that I don’t have?
Soft power over borders
absorb boredom, the future
had domes -- we offer you drones.
Nature
what have you done
for me?
-- Jeff Derksen, "The Vestiges (Or, Creative Destruction)" (39). West Coast Line
40.3 (2006): 32-40.
Sunday, May 11; the conference, & what came after
What happens at conference stays at conference. Is that entirely true? I am disappointed that Misao Dean (University of Victoria) wasn’t able to show up to present her "George Bowering and Peonies," but I wasn’t up for a 9am session anyway, so my guilt and disappointment simply turned into disappointment. Another highlight during the conference was Stephen Cain and his piece, "Feeling Ugly About the Postmodern Condition: Two Novels by Lynn Crosbie and Daniel Jones." In his paper, Cain argued for a post-1985 new wave of darker, Ontario-specific postmodern writing. It seems almost rare that either of these two writers are given any proper critical consideration, but it does happen every so often; he talked about how, after Paul's Case (1997), the overwhelmingly ugly response to her novel made Crosbie turn to more mainstream fiction. How does something like this happen? This is a novel that caused Crosbie to have a restraining order against a Toronto Star columnist, and, when she read at a PEN Canada benefit, a significant portion of the audience walked out. How does this happen in Canada? Why do we treat these small essential works so poorly, unless they're written by someone from an earlier generation? Cain talked about the ugly through the fact that both texts (Jones' novel Obsessions) were extremely dark, and Toronto of the 1980s/1990s was extremely darker than what had come before, both city and provincially for the City of Toronto, through the first Gulf War, and through works by the baby boomers overshadowing those of their younger equivalents. These were writers, he argued, that knew their work wasn’t going to get any attention, no matter what they were doing.
At the end, it was Davey and Kroetsch who gave their own "conclusions" (as it were) to the conference, with Kroetsch's "Boundary 2 and The Canadian Postmodern" and Davey's "Misreadings & Non-readings of The Canadian Postmodern." There were a number of questions he posed, including the cheeky suggestion that Canadian Postmodernism started in the year 2000 with Christian Bök and Darren Wershler-Henry, or that there isn’t even such a thing as Canadian postmodernism. Or too, that the Canadian postmodernism came out of and is best exampled in poetry, but Linda Hutcheon's book dealt predominantly with fiction. How do we reconcile that, if at all?
And, as Kroetsch noted, citing the fact that his line was quoted and requited over the weekend, when he suggested that Canada went straight from Victorian to Postmodern, that Dennis Cooley had tried to convince him for hours that Canada had a modernist period, but in the end, he just couldn’t say it.
What comes after;
God knows. There will be a chapbook edited by Max Middle that I'm producing sometime before the end of the month with poetry (supposedly, I'm told) by all the writers who performed during the conference weekend in Ottawa. Send me a note if you want to be reminded of such when it appears.
One thing that Robert Stacey was extremely impressed by was the fact that there were over thirty people registered for the conference that weren’t presenting papers and weren’t academics but simply writers from the community, including myself, Amanda Earl, Pearl Pirie, Sandra Ridley, Emily Falvey and numerous others. You should even see what some of these folk have been blogging about from said conference, including Amanda, Pearl, Charles Earl and John W. Macdonald. Isn't this part of what we seem to do best, in Ottawa?
Wednesday, May 07, 2008
Since May 1st, I've been posting poems on Ariel Gordon's May Day Poems blog, along with a number of other Canadian writers. Lately, through reading Sarah Manguso, and thinking of other poets such as Juliana Spahr [see her 12 or 20 questions here] and Lisa Jarnot [see her 12 or 20 questions here] I've read over the past couple of years, I've been thinking on the sentence, wanting to work lines without relying as heavily on the line break; the straight line that isn't necessarily straight. Here's what I posted to Gordon's May Day today, part of an ongoing larger group of pieces.
alexander graham bell
there are laws of thermodynamics
I have invariably broken.
he turned on the light. he invented
the first phone.
he turned on the flicker of what.
for the rest of his life, silence bound him as golden.
I pull leaves off your knees.
will we ever go back to that sandpaper church,
you asked, when your camera caught up
in its digital senses.
I am holding a phone book.
I am holding a phone.
from my office a view
that looks only indoors. I pull & I pull
but the blinds will not close.
you are the architect
of my unmaking, she signs.
so kiss me, he calls,
tens of miles from home.
alexander graham bell
there are laws of thermodynamics
I have invariably broken.
he turned on the light. he invented
the first phone.
he turned on the flicker of what.
for the rest of his life, silence bound him as golden.
I pull leaves off your knees.
will we ever go back to that sandpaper church,
you asked, when your camera caught up
in its digital senses.
I am holding a phone book.
I am holding a phone.
from my office a view
that looks only indoors. I pull & I pull
but the blinds will not close.
you are the architect
of my unmaking, she signs.
so kiss me, he calls,
tens of miles from home.
Tuesday, May 06, 2008
a brief note on the poems of Sarah Manguso
Poem of Comfort in Which All ThingsA few months ago, I read this post by American poet and blogger Rachel Loden that quoted the most brilliant lines by American poet Sarah Manguso, currently a fellow at the American Academy in Rome. Manguso is a poet I previously hadn’t heard anything of or by; but those few lines were enough, just those bare lines, to make me want to pick up everything she’s published so far. With another book arriving soon in the mail (I could only find three of her four), I’ve been going through her first collection, The Captain Lands in Paradise (Farmington Maine: Alice James Books, 2002), as well as her newly-arrived second, Siste Viator (New York NY: Four Way Books, 2006). There is just something about how she uses the deceptively-straight line, managing to twist and quirk all sorts of movement inside, around and through what otherwise appears to push full on ahead.
Are the Same
Let’s go to Greece
where every island is a different color
and look at the ruins that predict their own shapes,
and the dogs that bark in them.
Now you are naming each building
and I’m carrying you inside a building,
your judgments following behind us like a history.
Keats lies in some different ruins,
those more of baths than of sofas,
and pieces of his hair decay above ground in fancy libraries.
Chances are you will not see a single ghost in your lifetime
but many objects that might be mistaken for ghosts.
Every country in the world has invented ghosts,
and how they find us. This poem is new.
This poem is for you. (The Captain Lands in Paradise)
Beautiful ThingsHer first collection includes short, sharp and much tighter pieces than her second, and include poems that achieve that rare punch in a few bare words, despite the fact that her second, a bit looser in form than the first, seems more a single unit of composition. It makes me wonder if the poems in her second collection, Siste Viator, written much closer together, and more with the idea of “book.”
Sometimes I think I understand the way things work
and then I find out that on Neptune it rains diamonds.
On this world you can get out of work early, unclog the drain,
hear music. Any of the above should prove the existence
of God or at least some kind of beautifying engine
but in Germany when they couldn’t figure out
how to tranquilize the polar bear and he was standing
in the park, the cage door broken, they shot him dead.
Nine hundred pounds—that’s a lot of dead bear.
Neptune’s pretty close to immortal,
as we understand the word, and I wouldn’t like to be
that planet. But if I had to I would take it,
the decades of punishing rain, and the fires
on neighboring planets I would watch,
thankful I was never touched by them,
and that the diamonds were mine. (The Captain Lands in Paradise)
KITTY IN THE SNOWEither way, Manguso manages some of the best lines I’ve seen anywhere by anyone, including:
Meanwhile I fuck this sculpture
In my mind until it melts, then stop.
Mmm, cold.
At the party I talk to everyone’s honey
And sip poison and then go home,
Get shitfaced, and get it on with myself.
I’m so good, I give it to myself every bad way I know.
I whisper in my ear as I come:
Sarah Manguso, you’re a damn fine lover.
Maybe someday we can be together, too. (Siste Viator)
For I am about to ride far beyondIf for no other reason than these lines, you have to read her work. Right now.
the low prairie of beginnings and endings. (The Captain Lands in Paradise)
It is impossible not to drown a little. (The Captain Lands in Paradise)
I didn’t fall in love. I fell through it: (Siste Viator)
Monday, May 05, 2008
12 or 20 questions: with Barbara Nickel
Barbara Nickel’s second collection of poetry, Domain (House of Anansi), was listed in Quill & Quire’s Best Books of 2007. Her previous collection of poetry, The Gladys Elegies, won the Pat Lowther Memorial Award. Her work has appeared in numerous literary magazines and anthologies, including Notre Dame Review, Prairie Schooner, The Malahat Review, and The New Canon: An Anthology of Canadian Poetry. A previous winner of The Malahat Review Long Poem Prize, she was also a CBC Literary Award finalist in 2004. Also an award-winning author of books for children, she lives and writes in Yarrow, B.C.
How did your first book change your life?
My first book was an historical children’s novel, and its publication didn’t change my enthusiasm or my ambitions – my life had already changed drastically during the writing of that novel, in the MFA program in Creative Writing at UBC – but I suppose the book was a confidence boost, something I could hold in my hand and read to an audience of kids; it somehow allowed me to say, “I am a writer.”
How long have you lived in Yarrow, and how does geography, if at all, impact on your writing? Does race or gender make any impact on your work?
I’ve only lived in Yarrow for about four years, and it hasn’t really impacted on my work, although it may play a large role in a “future” novel project (which has been simmering on the backburner for about 15 years). Interestingly, even though I lived in Vancouver for about ten years – worked there, seriously started writing there, etc. – the actual place has hardly affected my writing. Rural Saskatchewan, on the other hand, where I was born and raised and lived in for my first twenty years, has hugely impacted on my writing, poetry especially, but also the setting of one of my children’s novels. I lived in Newfoundland for two years as well, and that landscape had quite an influence on some of the poems in my latest book of poetry.
Gender definitely makes an impact on my work. The first book (and the first published poem) was from the POV of the prodigious wunderkind Nannerl Mozart, Wolfgang’s sister, whom I hadn’t heard about even through four years of an undergraduate degree in music. So I followed her around the 18th century courts of Europe, and then decided on J.S. Bach’s daughter Catharina Bach for my next kid’s novel. She’s less than a footnote in history – in all of the literature about J.S. Bach and his family, there’s this quote, from the great composer himself – “My eldest daughter sings not badly.” So I ran with it and turned her into a singer. Then there is the sonnet sequence about the New York society twins, Gladys and Marion, in my poetry book The Gladys Elegies, and the Catherine the Great series in Domain…I could go on and on!
Where does a poem or piece 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?
It depends on the project, but usually it takes a long time for the “book” to make itself known. Once that “conception” has occurred, a long simmering time – sometimes years – happens where I’m “collecting” images and ideas toward the project. In fiction, there comes a time when I sit down with all of that material and “begin” pre-writing, then writing. In poetry, poems are written along the way, and almost always find their way into the project at hand. It’s hard to explain, but for example with Domain, I knew the titles of about twenty poems that needed to be written – I just had to find the time to get them down. The last third of it was written in about 5 months – but some of those poems had been simmering for about ten years.
Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process?
In poetry in particular, readings are an integral part of the completion process for me. Because I can sit at my desk for hours…days…years…saying the lines out loud and trying to get the music right, because the music of the words often leads the way and helps me to find what I want to say, a natural result is the reading of this “music” out loud to an audience.
But it doesn’t always happen that simply or easily. I find certain poems lend themselves to readings better than others, and the poems – usually longer ones – left behind are neglected on the oral/aural stage. Of course, hopefully these are out there being read somewhere, but I miss that “out loud” connection with an audience. Also – sometimes – I find I’m not connecting with an audience during a reading, and this thing I’ve laboured over for so long feels…somehow…useless. Hard to explain.
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?
Theoretical concerns and questions are never front and centre in my work. That doesn’t mean they aren’t there. But I think they emerge subtly and mysteriously and gradually and over a long period of time from the material as I work with it; they never generate the work. In much of my work, both in content and form, I might be examining the balance between the fluid and the fixed, between boundaries (a sonnet, a house, a family, a role, a town, a past, a religion) as both confining and freeing structures, and exploring how one can be both confined in and released from those structures. I don’t think of a set of “current questions,” but rather every writer’s work centering around his/her own unique questions.
Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Sometimes difficult. Always essential. One experience with an editor at Banff, working on The Gladys Elegies completely changed how I thought about and wrote poetry. What this editor said about my work wasn’t easy, at first, to hear. But that critique moved me forward invaluably, and has stayed with me to this day. I’ve had the good fortune to work with excellent editors. And of course there has always been the equally invaluable feedback from friends, colleagues, peers. It’s quite mind-blowing, when you stop to think about it – the kind of commitment this entails.
After having published more than a couple of titles over the years, do you find the process of book-making harder or easier?
Harder, maybe. Because I think my standards are higher. I expect more, and so agonize longer about getting started, and am more critical along the way, and expect more of the book once it’s done in terms of how well it sells and awards, etc. In other words, in the beginning it was enough just to have a book published. Now the bar is raised.
When was the last time you ate a pear?
It’s been such a long time, I really can’t recall!
What is the best piece of advice you’ve heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
From my mother when I was thirteen and struggling over an editorial for the school newspaper – “Write as if no one is ever going to read it!”
How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?
It’s difficult in terms of focus on a project, and the time it takes. For example, when Domain was released, reviews, etc. commented on the fact that it took ten years between my first and second collections. But what they didn’t note was that I’d published two children’s books (a novel and a book of poetry) as well as a play in between. It’s hard to shift gears mid-day and have two or more book projects going simultaneously.
The appeal is that work in one genre can transfer to another -- i.e. I believe my fiction is strengthened because of my focus on image and metaphor and the rhythm of language transferred from my work in poetry.
What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
I have young children, so my regular writing routine is really determined by the childcare schedule, which is a sort of 8-2/three-four times/week schedule. What happens during this time is determined by the current project, so if I’m madly trying to complete my poetry book, as I was during the fall of 2006, the time is spent “warming up” by reading whatever’s on the go (various poems or essays, depends on project), and then getting down to the writing. In fiction, the whole block of time might be spent in research or just brainstorming. I have an “office” (librarian friend’s house) in Yarrow where I go to get away from phone/messy home office/e-mail/internet/my kids’ voices. It’s great, because it really forces me to spend the whole time writing (except to work on months-delayed interviews needing completion!); I bring my lunch and don’t budge from the writing room. I used to like writing late at night – still do sometimes, although with kids that seems to be happening less and less. But I like the late-night quiet and the solitude and the feeling that somehow you’re getting extra time for free. Sometimes I have to stay up all night just to keep a deadline; I set deadlines for myself (contests, readings, whatever) as a way of getting stuff done, and try to take them seriously.
When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Always other writers. There’s never any lack of inspiration in work that’s been done. And there’s always so much to read; it’s hard to know where to start sometimes. Whether the reading gets me unstalled or not, it’s still well worth my time.
How does your most recent book compare to your previous work? How does it feel different?
I assume you mean with my two adult books of poetry – between The Gladys Elegies and Domain? The Gladys Elegies feels more casual and accessible to me – includes prose poems, much more narrative work. It feels more specific, too, in terms of focus on the stories, the history of my family and background. Domain feels more cryptic to me – I didn’t try to make it that way – but possibly because most of the work is formal (built on the sonnet crown, etc) it feels that more of the poems, in fact the book as a whole is an emotional/musical puzzle to unlock over many readings rather than a collection of specific narrative expressions.
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?
Nature is definitely a huge influence on my work. I’ve never quite thought about it like this before, but I think if I looked back over my poems, a large percentage would be built on images I’ve collected over the years while out in nature. This might be because when I’m out in it – i.e. on a hiking trip out in the mountains, etc. I’m in a state that’s outside of myself and it’s easier to make the connections I need to make poems. Perhaps this is what Robert Hass described in one essay as “listening and making.”
Music has also been a huge influence. As a violinist, when I first started to write sonnets, it felt like coming home. The metre and the rhyme gave me parameters to work within that felt familiar, like a variation on a discipline I’d been practicing for years. And as I’ve said many times, the music of the poem often leads the way, helps me to uncover what it is I want to say. Richard Hugo’s essay “The Triggering Town” from his book of the same name says it well, I think – in it he explores the question, “What comes first in a poem, the music or the truth?” For me it’s always the music. And then I’ve written poems after musical compositions, as in “The Rosary Sonatas” sequence from The Gladys Elegies, which I’d love to put out someday as a chapbook.
Visual art has also influenced my work – on occasion I’ve used various works as taking off points for poems, although I haven’t worked with this nearly as in depth as, say, someone like Stephanie Bolster; I’ve never written an entire sequence after visual works.
I have been inspired by science as well – it’s very important for me to connect up with these other realms – I think it might keep the work from becoming too inward looking, too obsessed with itself.
What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
This is an almost impossible question to answer, because there are so many!
But to take a stab at it, recognizing that many will be left out…by genre…for poetry, Bishop, Heaney (poetry and prose), Auden, Lowell, Rilke, Eliot, Plath, Melissa Green (if only she would come out with another book!), Selima Hill, Gjertrud Schnackenberg, Margaret Avison, Don Coles, Jan Zwicky, Donne, Dickinson, to name a few.
In children’s literature – L.M. Montgomery, Katherine Paterson, Maurice Sendak, E.L Konigsburg, Sarah Ellis, Julie Johnston, Madeleine L’Engle, Louis Sachar’s Holes, Jean Little…the list goes on and on!
In “adult” fiction – Flannery O’ Connor, Alice Munro, Iris Murdoch, Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion, Lisa Moore, Austen, Tolstoy…
Writings important to my life outside of my work? Hard to separate my life and my work – they’re pretty much all jumbled up together – but I should say The Bible and the writings of Mother Teresa, L’Engle’s non-fiction, and a book given to me years ago…Brenda Ueland’s If You Want to Write.
What would you like to do that you haven’t yet done?
I assume you mean in the realm of writing! An “adult” novel that’s been on the backburner and the front burner at various times during the last 15 years – that’s the main “not done” project that definitely has to find completion over the next few years. I’d like to do a lot more adult fiction. I have some ideas for more children’s/YA novels and picture books. More poetry books, of course. I’ve written a play, professionally produced, that I’d like to work on more somewhere down the road. And there’s a creative non-fiction project – a collection of travel essays that I’d like to see realized someday. Ah…never a shortage of would-be projects!
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 always wanted to be a concert violinist. That’s of course unrealistic, but definitely I’d like to put more time into music – in terms of practicing, performing, playing with a professional orchestra, devoting more time to teaching (right now I only have a small teaching studio, I’m trying to put the focus of my time into writing). Or an actor – during my undergraduate degree – a Shakespeare overview course – we produced an adaptation of The Tempest; I was Ariel and it was a fabulously excellent experience.
What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I think if I hadn’t sort of stumbled upon the MFA Program at UBC, things might have been different. Up to that point I’d done some writing; had even published some magazine features (I’d taken an undergraduate course) and produced a chapbook of stories and essays, etc. (still at that point hadn’t written much poetry). But I didn’t realize what was involved. And something about the environment at UBC – that immersion in the writing life – made me give myself over. I knew then that writing was something I had to do, that nothing would be right until I could realize my ideas by writing them.
What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I finished Atonement a few months ago and did think it was very fine. In so many war books, the war is the triggering event that changes people’s lives. In this book, this huge momentous private event occurred years before the war, but kept reverberating through the war and after – in this way the private and political became entwined – you kept seeing (hearing?) echoes of one in the other. I thought that was a brilliant strategy for a novel.
I keep going back to Match Point, that Woody Allen film set in London. I know of others who’ve hated it, but I love the pacing of it, how it starts off pretty much on the surface and then just delves deeper and deeper into the protagonist’s agony. And, despite what others say, I think his “living the lie” at the end is his hell – you know at the end he’ll be paying out his punishment every day that he wakes up as a “free man” beside his wife, every time he looks at his child. A wonderfully rendered paradox there at the end.
What are you currently working on?
I am very excited about a picture book project. I think the picture book is a very difficult form to get right – you have to have this perfect balance of the said and the unsaid, the said and the seen. You have to have just the right story, just the right voice. The project is a picture book in verse (loosely rhyming aaaa bbbb etc. quatrains) about the winds of the world. I’m very excited about how this book is crossing boundaries in more than one sense. And I’m writing poetry but not in a way that I’ve done it before.
And I’m working on a poem about lavender-pruning and slavery. Not quite sure where that one will end up!
12 or 20 questions archive
My first book was an historical children’s novel, and its publication didn’t change my enthusiasm or my ambitions – my life had already changed drastically during the writing of that novel, in the MFA program in Creative Writing at UBC – but I suppose the book was a confidence boost, something I could hold in my hand and read to an audience of kids; it somehow allowed me to say, “I am a writer.”
How long have you lived in Yarrow, and how does geography, if at all, impact on your writing? Does race or gender make any impact on your work?
I’ve only lived in Yarrow for about four years, and it hasn’t really impacted on my work, although it may play a large role in a “future” novel project (which has been simmering on the backburner for about 15 years). Interestingly, even though I lived in Vancouver for about ten years – worked there, seriously started writing there, etc. – the actual place has hardly affected my writing. Rural Saskatchewan, on the other hand, where I was born and raised and lived in for my first twenty years, has hugely impacted on my writing, poetry especially, but also the setting of one of my children’s novels. I lived in Newfoundland for two years as well, and that landscape had quite an influence on some of the poems in my latest book of poetry.
Gender definitely makes an impact on my work. The first book (and the first published poem) was from the POV of the prodigious wunderkind Nannerl Mozart, Wolfgang’s sister, whom I hadn’t heard about even through four years of an undergraduate degree in music. So I followed her around the 18th century courts of Europe, and then decided on J.S. Bach’s daughter Catharina Bach for my next kid’s novel. She’s less than a footnote in history – in all of the literature about J.S. Bach and his family, there’s this quote, from the great composer himself – “My eldest daughter sings not badly.” So I ran with it and turned her into a singer. Then there is the sonnet sequence about the New York society twins, Gladys and Marion, in my poetry book The Gladys Elegies, and the Catherine the Great series in Domain…I could go on and on!
Where does a poem or piece 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?
It depends on the project, but usually it takes a long time for the “book” to make itself known. Once that “conception” has occurred, a long simmering time – sometimes years – happens where I’m “collecting” images and ideas toward the project. In fiction, there comes a time when I sit down with all of that material and “begin” pre-writing, then writing. In poetry, poems are written along the way, and almost always find their way into the project at hand. It’s hard to explain, but for example with Domain, I knew the titles of about twenty poems that needed to be written – I just had to find the time to get them down. The last third of it was written in about 5 months – but some of those poems had been simmering for about ten years.
Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process?
In poetry in particular, readings are an integral part of the completion process for me. Because I can sit at my desk for hours…days…years…saying the lines out loud and trying to get the music right, because the music of the words often leads the way and helps me to find what I want to say, a natural result is the reading of this “music” out loud to an audience.
But it doesn’t always happen that simply or easily. I find certain poems lend themselves to readings better than others, and the poems – usually longer ones – left behind are neglected on the oral/aural stage. Of course, hopefully these are out there being read somewhere, but I miss that “out loud” connection with an audience. Also – sometimes – I find I’m not connecting with an audience during a reading, and this thing I’ve laboured over for so long feels…somehow…useless. Hard to explain.
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?
Theoretical concerns and questions are never front and centre in my work. That doesn’t mean they aren’t there. But I think they emerge subtly and mysteriously and gradually and over a long period of time from the material as I work with it; they never generate the work. In much of my work, both in content and form, I might be examining the balance between the fluid and the fixed, between boundaries (a sonnet, a house, a family, a role, a town, a past, a religion) as both confining and freeing structures, and exploring how one can be both confined in and released from those structures. I don’t think of a set of “current questions,” but rather every writer’s work centering around his/her own unique questions.
Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Sometimes difficult. Always essential. One experience with an editor at Banff, working on The Gladys Elegies completely changed how I thought about and wrote poetry. What this editor said about my work wasn’t easy, at first, to hear. But that critique moved me forward invaluably, and has stayed with me to this day. I’ve had the good fortune to work with excellent editors. And of course there has always been the equally invaluable feedback from friends, colleagues, peers. It’s quite mind-blowing, when you stop to think about it – the kind of commitment this entails.
After having published more than a couple of titles over the years, do you find the process of book-making harder or easier?
Harder, maybe. Because I think my standards are higher. I expect more, and so agonize longer about getting started, and am more critical along the way, and expect more of the book once it’s done in terms of how well it sells and awards, etc. In other words, in the beginning it was enough just to have a book published. Now the bar is raised.
When was the last time you ate a pear?
It’s been such a long time, I really can’t recall!
What is the best piece of advice you’ve heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
From my mother when I was thirteen and struggling over an editorial for the school newspaper – “Write as if no one is ever going to read it!”
How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?
It’s difficult in terms of focus on a project, and the time it takes. For example, when Domain was released, reviews, etc. commented on the fact that it took ten years between my first and second collections. But what they didn’t note was that I’d published two children’s books (a novel and a book of poetry) as well as a play in between. It’s hard to shift gears mid-day and have two or more book projects going simultaneously.
The appeal is that work in one genre can transfer to another -- i.e. I believe my fiction is strengthened because of my focus on image and metaphor and the rhythm of language transferred from my work in poetry.
What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
I have young children, so my regular writing routine is really determined by the childcare schedule, which is a sort of 8-2/three-four times/week schedule. What happens during this time is determined by the current project, so if I’m madly trying to complete my poetry book, as I was during the fall of 2006, the time is spent “warming up” by reading whatever’s on the go (various poems or essays, depends on project), and then getting down to the writing. In fiction, the whole block of time might be spent in research or just brainstorming. I have an “office” (librarian friend’s house) in Yarrow where I go to get away from phone/messy home office/e-mail/internet/my kids’ voices. It’s great, because it really forces me to spend the whole time writing (except to work on months-delayed interviews needing completion!); I bring my lunch and don’t budge from the writing room. I used to like writing late at night – still do sometimes, although with kids that seems to be happening less and less. But I like the late-night quiet and the solitude and the feeling that somehow you’re getting extra time for free. Sometimes I have to stay up all night just to keep a deadline; I set deadlines for myself (contests, readings, whatever) as a way of getting stuff done, and try to take them seriously.
When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Always other writers. There’s never any lack of inspiration in work that’s been done. And there’s always so much to read; it’s hard to know where to start sometimes. Whether the reading gets me unstalled or not, it’s still well worth my time.
How does your most recent book compare to your previous work? How does it feel different?
I assume you mean with my two adult books of poetry – between The Gladys Elegies and Domain? The Gladys Elegies feels more casual and accessible to me – includes prose poems, much more narrative work. It feels more specific, too, in terms of focus on the stories, the history of my family and background. Domain feels more cryptic to me – I didn’t try to make it that way – but possibly because most of the work is formal (built on the sonnet crown, etc) it feels that more of the poems, in fact the book as a whole is an emotional/musical puzzle to unlock over many readings rather than a collection of specific narrative expressions.
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?
Nature is definitely a huge influence on my work. I’ve never quite thought about it like this before, but I think if I looked back over my poems, a large percentage would be built on images I’ve collected over the years while out in nature. This might be because when I’m out in it – i.e. on a hiking trip out in the mountains, etc. I’m in a state that’s outside of myself and it’s easier to make the connections I need to make poems. Perhaps this is what Robert Hass described in one essay as “listening and making.”
Music has also been a huge influence. As a violinist, when I first started to write sonnets, it felt like coming home. The metre and the rhyme gave me parameters to work within that felt familiar, like a variation on a discipline I’d been practicing for years. And as I’ve said many times, the music of the poem often leads the way, helps me to uncover what it is I want to say. Richard Hugo’s essay “The Triggering Town” from his book of the same name says it well, I think – in it he explores the question, “What comes first in a poem, the music or the truth?” For me it’s always the music. And then I’ve written poems after musical compositions, as in “The Rosary Sonatas” sequence from The Gladys Elegies, which I’d love to put out someday as a chapbook.
Visual art has also influenced my work – on occasion I’ve used various works as taking off points for poems, although I haven’t worked with this nearly as in depth as, say, someone like Stephanie Bolster; I’ve never written an entire sequence after visual works.
I have been inspired by science as well – it’s very important for me to connect up with these other realms – I think it might keep the work from becoming too inward looking, too obsessed with itself.
What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
This is an almost impossible question to answer, because there are so many!
But to take a stab at it, recognizing that many will be left out…by genre…for poetry, Bishop, Heaney (poetry and prose), Auden, Lowell, Rilke, Eliot, Plath, Melissa Green (if only she would come out with another book!), Selima Hill, Gjertrud Schnackenberg, Margaret Avison, Don Coles, Jan Zwicky, Donne, Dickinson, to name a few.
In children’s literature – L.M. Montgomery, Katherine Paterson, Maurice Sendak, E.L Konigsburg, Sarah Ellis, Julie Johnston, Madeleine L’Engle, Louis Sachar’s Holes, Jean Little…the list goes on and on!
In “adult” fiction – Flannery O’ Connor, Alice Munro, Iris Murdoch, Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion, Lisa Moore, Austen, Tolstoy…
Writings important to my life outside of my work? Hard to separate my life and my work – they’re pretty much all jumbled up together – but I should say The Bible and the writings of Mother Teresa, L’Engle’s non-fiction, and a book given to me years ago…Brenda Ueland’s If You Want to Write.
What would you like to do that you haven’t yet done?
I assume you mean in the realm of writing! An “adult” novel that’s been on the backburner and the front burner at various times during the last 15 years – that’s the main “not done” project that definitely has to find completion over the next few years. I’d like to do a lot more adult fiction. I have some ideas for more children’s/YA novels and picture books. More poetry books, of course. I’ve written a play, professionally produced, that I’d like to work on more somewhere down the road. And there’s a creative non-fiction project – a collection of travel essays that I’d like to see realized someday. Ah…never a shortage of would-be projects!
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 always wanted to be a concert violinist. That’s of course unrealistic, but definitely I’d like to put more time into music – in terms of practicing, performing, playing with a professional orchestra, devoting more time to teaching (right now I only have a small teaching studio, I’m trying to put the focus of my time into writing). Or an actor – during my undergraduate degree – a Shakespeare overview course – we produced an adaptation of The Tempest; I was Ariel and it was a fabulously excellent experience.
What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I think if I hadn’t sort of stumbled upon the MFA Program at UBC, things might have been different. Up to that point I’d done some writing; had even published some magazine features (I’d taken an undergraduate course) and produced a chapbook of stories and essays, etc. (still at that point hadn’t written much poetry). But I didn’t realize what was involved. And something about the environment at UBC – that immersion in the writing life – made me give myself over. I knew then that writing was something I had to do, that nothing would be right until I could realize my ideas by writing them.
What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I finished Atonement a few months ago and did think it was very fine. In so many war books, the war is the triggering event that changes people’s lives. In this book, this huge momentous private event occurred years before the war, but kept reverberating through the war and after – in this way the private and political became entwined – you kept seeing (hearing?) echoes of one in the other. I thought that was a brilliant strategy for a novel.
I keep going back to Match Point, that Woody Allen film set in London. I know of others who’ve hated it, but I love the pacing of it, how it starts off pretty much on the surface and then just delves deeper and deeper into the protagonist’s agony. And, despite what others say, I think his “living the lie” at the end is his hell – you know at the end he’ll be paying out his punishment every day that he wakes up as a “free man” beside his wife, every time he looks at his child. A wonderfully rendered paradox there at the end.
What are you currently working on?
I am very excited about a picture book project. I think the picture book is a very difficult form to get right – you have to have this perfect balance of the said and the unsaid, the said and the seen. You have to have just the right story, just the right voice. The project is a picture book in verse (loosely rhyming aaaa bbbb etc. quatrains) about the winds of the world. I’m very excited about how this book is crossing boundaries in more than one sense. And I’m writing poetry but not in a way that I’ve done it before.
And I’m working on a poem about lavender-pruning and slavery. Not quite sure where that one will end up!
12 or 20 questions archive
Friday, May 02, 2008
12 or 20 questions: with Ron Silliman
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[photo credit: Jeff Hurwitz]
Ron Silliman has written and edited 30 books to date, including the anthology In the American Tree. Since 1979, Silliman has been writing a poem entitled The Alphabet. Volumes published thus far from that project have included ABC, Demo to Ink, Jones, Lit, Manifest, N/O, Paradise, â, Toner, What and Xing. Silliman is a 2002 Fellow of the Pennsylvania Arts Council and received a Pew Fellowship in the Arts in 1998. His blog has had over 1.6 million visits as of May 1 2008. He lives in Chester County, Pennsylvania, with his wife and two sons, and works as a market analyst in the computer industry.
Silliman's Blog
http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/
Home Page at the Electronic Poetry Center:
http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/silliman/
Home Page at the University of Illinois' Modern American Poets' site:
http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/s_z/silliman/silliman.htm
Ron Silliman Archive at the University of California, San Diego:
http://orpheus.ucsd.edu/speccoll/testing/html/mss0075a.html
Ron Silliman Page at the Pew Fellowship for the Arts:
http://www.pewarts.org/98/Silliman/index.html
1 - How did your first book change your life?
It worked in two ways. First, publishing Crow (Ithaca House, 1971) cured me of the dreamy notion that my first book would change my life. Second, and far more important, it helped to put me in touch with like-minded poets my own age. I met both Bob Perelman & Ray DiPalma as a direct result of that book, poets who have become lifelong friends. And Ray published my second book fairly soon thereafter.
2 - How long have you lived in Pennsylvania, and how does geography, if at all, impact on your writing? Does race or gender make any impact on your work?
I accepted a job with Technology Service Solutions, a joint venture of IBM and Kodak, in May 1995, and in theory moved here June 1st. Actually, I spent much of the previous month staying with Bob Perelman & Francie Shaw, who live in Philadelphia proper, while I looked around for a short-term rental for the family.
Moving anywhere is generative for my writing, simply because I see new things, notice new phrasings. The move to Pennsylvania from the Bay Area was good for our family in that the cost of living is so much more rational here – or was 13 years ago. Where I had an 1100 square-foot home a half-block from the needle exchange program in Berkeley, I was able to get a four-bedroom house on four-tenths of an acre in the best school district in the state, really at no more money. Ironically, perhaps, my net worth on paper would be much higher if I still lived in that 1100 square-foot house by the needle exchange program.
Race & gender are always active in my writing, in that they're topics that I think about a lot. There are differences especially with regards to racial issues between the Bay Area and here. The black political community is far more deeply established in Philadelphia than in the Bay Area, there is a sensitivity to the history of slavery you never find in California.
3 - 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?
Well, I've been working on the same poem now since 1974, so I begin with a lot of information. Ultimately, I tend to be driven with something like an itch toward something I want to do, either something I've never done before, or some variation on something I have played with in the past. Figuring out how I'm going to write this can take a lot of time. I keep a set of about 20 unused notebooks, ranging from simple ones that I was given at tech conferences to leather-bound journals that cost up to $100, and once I think a particular work might relate well to that journal, I start taking notes.
4 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process?
Yes, but very indirectly. Since it can take me a decade to finish a given project, I'm almost always reading from older work. Often, however, that will give me some new insights on what I'm working on at the moment. I must say that audience reaction isn't necessarily a big part of this – the practice readings I do before reading in public are at least as important to me, if not more so.
5 - 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?
I'm thinking theoretically all the time, but none of my poems are proofs of a given position. I don't think I'm nearly so focused on answering questions as I am in posing them.
I think right now there is a huge transformation occurring between the number of publishing poets, which is rising dramatically, and the reading audience for poetry, which is growing much more slowly. I think it means that every young poet has to think very differently about what constitutes a career, what counts as success, how to sustain one's work against the depredations of the economy, all those very practical problems.
6 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
It totally depends on the editor. Some I've had have been utterly essential to my work, especially my critical writing. I must say I've made very few changes in my poetry as the result of working with an editor – less than 50 text changes in my entire life.
7 - After having published more than a couple of titles over the years, do you find the process of book-making harder or easier?
After my fourth book, Ketjak, appeared in 1978, I became something of a brand in American post-avant poetics, so that since then it has been far easier. When Alabama publishes The Alphabet later this year, I will have all of my mature work in print in the U.S. That's almost unheard for a poet my age, at least without a collected edition, so I'm very aware of how fortunate I am.
8 - When was the last time you ate a pear?
About two weeks ago. The first of the new year.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Two things that are implicit in Pound's writing, especially his letters. One is that the history of poetry is the history of change in poetry, and that it is change that matters most. The other is that the greatest work outside of the writing itself is basically social, putting this person in touch with somebody likeminded, whether you do it in person or via some channel like a blog.
10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical writing/reviewing)? What do you see as the appeal?
They're very different in my mind, so I do move back & forth with some ease. But a good rule of thumb is that I can't write much poetry after I've done any critical writing that day.
11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
I have no typical process for writing my poems – it totally depends on them. But I do have something of a typical process for my critical writing, my blog, etc. I rise at 5 (or perhaps 7 on weekends) and work until, say, eight. This would include writing, posting the day's note, reading online newspapers (I read several), answering email. I try to sketch out what next week's blog notes will be on weekend mornings. And I try to stay a few notes ahead if at all possible.
12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Since I'm always working on multiple projects (currently on five different sections of Universe), I tend to find that being stalled on one does not equate with being stalled on them all, so I simply switch notebooks and work on another project for awhile.
13 - How does your most recent book compare to your previous work? How does it feel different?
My most recent book is The Age of Huts (compleat) from the University of California Press. It's the first book for which I've ever received an advance – modest tho it was – and the first from a major university press. It collects the Age of Huts cycle that begins my long poem and puts them together for the very first time. The poems included there were all written in the 1970s. I must say I feel that some of these texts are very present to me. They don't feel like "old" works in the slightest.
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 started Ketjak, a work whose very title specifies a musical form, the same week that I first heard the West Coast premier of Steve Reich's Drumming at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. I think about many of the arts a lot – I literally just curated a gallery exhibition of the paintings of Cynthia Miller for the CUE Art Foundation in New York. Her work and her uses of imagery, more how she places them on the canvas than what they are (tho she and I both like bird imagery), gives me a lot to think about in terms of how I build structures in my own writing. I've always done this and it feels completely natural to me.
15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
This would be a huge list. The poets with whom I am co-writing The Grand Piano, a collective autobiography of San Francisco language poetry of the 1970s, are undoubtedly the closest to me. Rae Armantrout and Barrett Watten have both been deep influences for decades, and still are. But there are others quite apart from language writing altogether – one would be Rachel Blau DuPlessis. Her work on the longpoem Drafts is the project that feels closest to my own poetry in terms of the challenges she poses for herself. I could read that work forever and still not reach all that's there.
16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Travel. I've only been to Europe twice, and never to Asia, Africa or South America. Not being an academic is a serious disadvantage in terms of the conference circuit.
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?
At one point, when I was in high school, I thought I might be a lawyer. Later, when I was doing community organizing, people tried to get me to go to law school. I had one of the regents of the Hastings College of Law tell me he would guarantee my acceptance. But then I would have had to have been a lawyer. I don't think I could have done it without the same level of commitment I've reserved for poetry, so ultimately I shied away from it.
18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
Language was "in play," as they say, when I was very little. My grandmother had a deep chronic depression that showed up in a series of psychotic episodes in her life. When she had these "spells" (as my family called them in the 1950s), her language would change dramatically. She would start sentences, all with great urgency, but not complete them. Then later the same day, sometimes hours later, she would be able to get to all the predicates and my younger brother & I would hear all of that as well. We learned very early how to put these together, how to hear her. On top of this, my grandfather had a significant hearing loss, so my brother & I learned that we could talk "secretly" in front of him so long as we stayed in some squeaky pitch. He was afraid to get a hearing aide because he thought his employer would try to get rid of him if he was "disabled." Finally, during my grandmother's "spells," we would hire this woman, a German war bride whose husband was a janitor at UC Berkeley, to help clean the house and look after my brother and I. Gertrude Cabral was actually the woman who first taught me to read, simple things from the children's books she used with her own kids. Except that they were in German! Then when she stopped working for us, I didn't read German again until I got to college. But by the time I was in first grade, I knew that language was a very strange dimension. And by fifth grade, I knew I was a writer.
19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I've just read some 150 books for the Poetry Society of America's William Carlos Williams Award and come across many great books there, just under 20 in fact. But I'll point to the winner, Aram Saroyan for his Complete Minimal Poems. Those are poems from the 1960s that have stood up very well over the thirty-some years since they were first written.
Last great film? I just saw Gone Baby Gone on DVD and was surprised at how well done it was, in terms of writing, acting, directing, cinemaphotography, the whole ball of wax.
20 - What are you currently working on?
Five sections of Universe. Proofreading The Alphabet, which is over 1,000 pages long. Starting to think about a manuscript of unrejected works that pre-date Ketjak and The Age of Huts. Wondering about a second volume of essays. Those will probably the major projects of the next several years.
12 or 20 questions archive
[photo credit: Jeff Hurwitz]Ron Silliman has written and edited 30 books to date, including the anthology In the American Tree. Since 1979, Silliman has been writing a poem entitled The Alphabet. Volumes published thus far from that project have included ABC, Demo to Ink, Jones, Lit, Manifest, N/O, Paradise, â, Toner, What and Xing. Silliman is a 2002 Fellow of the Pennsylvania Arts Council and received a Pew Fellowship in the Arts in 1998. His blog has had over 1.6 million visits as of May 1 2008. He lives in Chester County, Pennsylvania, with his wife and two sons, and works as a market analyst in the computer industry.
Silliman's Blog
http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/
Home Page at the Electronic Poetry Center:
http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/silliman/
Home Page at the University of Illinois' Modern American Poets' site:
http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/s_z/silliman/silliman.htm
Ron Silliman Archive at the University of California, San Diego:
http://orpheus.ucsd.edu/speccoll/testing/html/mss0075a.html
Ron Silliman Page at the Pew Fellowship for the Arts:
http://www.pewarts.org/98/Silliman/index.html
1 - How did your first book change your life?
It worked in two ways. First, publishing Crow (Ithaca House, 1971) cured me of the dreamy notion that my first book would change my life. Second, and far more important, it helped to put me in touch with like-minded poets my own age. I met both Bob Perelman & Ray DiPalma as a direct result of that book, poets who have become lifelong friends. And Ray published my second book fairly soon thereafter.
2 - How long have you lived in Pennsylvania, and how does geography, if at all, impact on your writing? Does race or gender make any impact on your work?
I accepted a job with Technology Service Solutions, a joint venture of IBM and Kodak, in May 1995, and in theory moved here June 1st. Actually, I spent much of the previous month staying with Bob Perelman & Francie Shaw, who live in Philadelphia proper, while I looked around for a short-term rental for the family.
Moving anywhere is generative for my writing, simply because I see new things, notice new phrasings. The move to Pennsylvania from the Bay Area was good for our family in that the cost of living is so much more rational here – or was 13 years ago. Where I had an 1100 square-foot home a half-block from the needle exchange program in Berkeley, I was able to get a four-bedroom house on four-tenths of an acre in the best school district in the state, really at no more money. Ironically, perhaps, my net worth on paper would be much higher if I still lived in that 1100 square-foot house by the needle exchange program.
Race & gender are always active in my writing, in that they're topics that I think about a lot. There are differences especially with regards to racial issues between the Bay Area and here. The black political community is far more deeply established in Philadelphia than in the Bay Area, there is a sensitivity to the history of slavery you never find in California.
3 - 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?
Well, I've been working on the same poem now since 1974, so I begin with a lot of information. Ultimately, I tend to be driven with something like an itch toward something I want to do, either something I've never done before, or some variation on something I have played with in the past. Figuring out how I'm going to write this can take a lot of time. I keep a set of about 20 unused notebooks, ranging from simple ones that I was given at tech conferences to leather-bound journals that cost up to $100, and once I think a particular work might relate well to that journal, I start taking notes.
4 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process?
Yes, but very indirectly. Since it can take me a decade to finish a given project, I'm almost always reading from older work. Often, however, that will give me some new insights on what I'm working on at the moment. I must say that audience reaction isn't necessarily a big part of this – the practice readings I do before reading in public are at least as important to me, if not more so.
5 - 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?
I'm thinking theoretically all the time, but none of my poems are proofs of a given position. I don't think I'm nearly so focused on answering questions as I am in posing them.
I think right now there is a huge transformation occurring between the number of publishing poets, which is rising dramatically, and the reading audience for poetry, which is growing much more slowly. I think it means that every young poet has to think very differently about what constitutes a career, what counts as success, how to sustain one's work against the depredations of the economy, all those very practical problems.
6 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
It totally depends on the editor. Some I've had have been utterly essential to my work, especially my critical writing. I must say I've made very few changes in my poetry as the result of working with an editor – less than 50 text changes in my entire life.
7 - After having published more than a couple of titles over the years, do you find the process of book-making harder or easier?
After my fourth book, Ketjak, appeared in 1978, I became something of a brand in American post-avant poetics, so that since then it has been far easier. When Alabama publishes The Alphabet later this year, I will have all of my mature work in print in the U.S. That's almost unheard for a poet my age, at least without a collected edition, so I'm very aware of how fortunate I am.
8 - When was the last time you ate a pear?
About two weeks ago. The first of the new year.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Two things that are implicit in Pound's writing, especially his letters. One is that the history of poetry is the history of change in poetry, and that it is change that matters most. The other is that the greatest work outside of the writing itself is basically social, putting this person in touch with somebody likeminded, whether you do it in person or via some channel like a blog.
10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical writing/reviewing)? What do you see as the appeal?
They're very different in my mind, so I do move back & forth with some ease. But a good rule of thumb is that I can't write much poetry after I've done any critical writing that day.
11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
I have no typical process for writing my poems – it totally depends on them. But I do have something of a typical process for my critical writing, my blog, etc. I rise at 5 (or perhaps 7 on weekends) and work until, say, eight. This would include writing, posting the day's note, reading online newspapers (I read several), answering email. I try to sketch out what next week's blog notes will be on weekend mornings. And I try to stay a few notes ahead if at all possible.
12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Since I'm always working on multiple projects (currently on five different sections of Universe), I tend to find that being stalled on one does not equate with being stalled on them all, so I simply switch notebooks and work on another project for awhile.
13 - How does your most recent book compare to your previous work? How does it feel different?
My most recent book is The Age of Huts (compleat) from the University of California Press. It's the first book for which I've ever received an advance – modest tho it was – and the first from a major university press. It collects the Age of Huts cycle that begins my long poem and puts them together for the very first time. The poems included there were all written in the 1970s. I must say I feel that some of these texts are very present to me. They don't feel like "old" works in the slightest.
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 started Ketjak, a work whose very title specifies a musical form, the same week that I first heard the West Coast premier of Steve Reich's Drumming at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. I think about many of the arts a lot – I literally just curated a gallery exhibition of the paintings of Cynthia Miller for the CUE Art Foundation in New York. Her work and her uses of imagery, more how she places them on the canvas than what they are (tho she and I both like bird imagery), gives me a lot to think about in terms of how I build structures in my own writing. I've always done this and it feels completely natural to me.
15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
This would be a huge list. The poets with whom I am co-writing The Grand Piano, a collective autobiography of San Francisco language poetry of the 1970s, are undoubtedly the closest to me. Rae Armantrout and Barrett Watten have both been deep influences for decades, and still are. But there are others quite apart from language writing altogether – one would be Rachel Blau DuPlessis. Her work on the longpoem Drafts is the project that feels closest to my own poetry in terms of the challenges she poses for herself. I could read that work forever and still not reach all that's there.
16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Travel. I've only been to Europe twice, and never to Asia, Africa or South America. Not being an academic is a serious disadvantage in terms of the conference circuit.
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?
At one point, when I was in high school, I thought I might be a lawyer. Later, when I was doing community organizing, people tried to get me to go to law school. I had one of the regents of the Hastings College of Law tell me he would guarantee my acceptance. But then I would have had to have been a lawyer. I don't think I could have done it without the same level of commitment I've reserved for poetry, so ultimately I shied away from it.
18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
Language was "in play," as they say, when I was very little. My grandmother had a deep chronic depression that showed up in a series of psychotic episodes in her life. When she had these "spells" (as my family called them in the 1950s), her language would change dramatically. She would start sentences, all with great urgency, but not complete them. Then later the same day, sometimes hours later, she would be able to get to all the predicates and my younger brother & I would hear all of that as well. We learned very early how to put these together, how to hear her. On top of this, my grandfather had a significant hearing loss, so my brother & I learned that we could talk "secretly" in front of him so long as we stayed in some squeaky pitch. He was afraid to get a hearing aide because he thought his employer would try to get rid of him if he was "disabled." Finally, during my grandmother's "spells," we would hire this woman, a German war bride whose husband was a janitor at UC Berkeley, to help clean the house and look after my brother and I. Gertrude Cabral was actually the woman who first taught me to read, simple things from the children's books she used with her own kids. Except that they were in German! Then when she stopped working for us, I didn't read German again until I got to college. But by the time I was in first grade, I knew that language was a very strange dimension. And by fifth grade, I knew I was a writer.
19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I've just read some 150 books for the Poetry Society of America's William Carlos Williams Award and come across many great books there, just under 20 in fact. But I'll point to the winner, Aram Saroyan for his Complete Minimal Poems. Those are poems from the 1960s that have stood up very well over the thirty-some years since they were first written.
Last great film? I just saw Gone Baby Gone on DVD and was surprised at how well done it was, in terms of writing, acting, directing, cinemaphotography, the whole ball of wax.
20 - What are you currently working on?
Five sections of Universe. Proofreading The Alphabet, which is over 1,000 pages long. Starting to think about a manuscript of unrejected works that pre-date Ketjak and The Age of Huts. Wondering about a second volume of essays. Those will probably the major projects of the next several years.
12 or 20 questions archive
Thursday, May 01, 2008
emm + m. (mayday)
Here's a photo my lovely friend emm gryner took of me (you can see her in the background; look at me doing my University of Alberta promo + everything!) in her dressing room after opening for Josh Ritter at U of Alberta's Myer Horowitz Theatre way back on February 28th [you can find the photo on her website here]. Did you see how close the 2008 Poet Laureate of the Blogosphere stuff was? Amazing, really. Even though I didn't win, I was honoured to be nominated, and deeply touched and humbled by all the efforts of others to get my numbers up; thanks to everyone who voted! I guess this means I should start reading Tony Brown's blog... Otherwise, today begins the final month of my Alberta stay (mostly). Today also marks Winnipeg poet Ariel Gordon's fourth annual May Day Poems project, including my first post on same. It will be happening all month...
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